Remember the broken air conditioner? Well, the Russian A/C guy who came to fix it put the fear of God into me about maintenance, and so I’ve had new parts on order ever since. Only, when the new parts came in, the Russian A/C guy came back, and the new parts didn’t fit, so he (no kidding) vaccuummed out the A/C, shrugged, and said "When it breaks, call us back and we’ll replace." He also told me a story about how he used to be a merchant marine in Russia, and how when they saw pirates, they would call ‘someone with a helicopter,’ and the helicopter would come and shoot the pirates with guns. So, that was interesting. This was in reference to those Somali pirates with the tanks and grenade launchers who want millions of dollars in ransom money. This led me to the New York Times coverage of that incident, and that led me to this quote:
“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, said in a telephone interview. “So we stopped it.”
I don’t know why, but it’s so entertaining to me that the pirates have an actual spokesman. Wow! A pirate spokesman, coming to you on SATELLITE PHONE FROM THE BRIDGE OF THE SHIP. Um, did they call the New York Times? Did someone at the New York Times call them? Does someone at the New York Times have "Somali Pirate Spokesman" programmed into their cellphone? Because that would be awesome.
Seriously though– Somalia is really messed up. My dad was stationed there in the late eighties/ early nineties, and it’s even worse there now than when he was there. I’m sorry to say that even if those pirates got their $20 million ransom for that ship, it probably wouldn’t help their country get back on its feet because they really lack any sort of stable government or infrastructure– which I guess it what led them to become pirates in the first place. It’s a Pirate Catch-22, y’all!