I simply couldn’t resist this eye-rolling headline from an article by Fox News:
U.S. Navy Unveils New Ship That Can Fight Pirates
Wow! How advanced we are! We’re actually going to have a boat that can fight pirates.
I believe Queen Elizabeth made a similar announcement in 1570.
Laughing too hard! Yes, I believe Her Majesty did, and his name was Francis Drake — oh wait! Drake was HER professional pirate.
Anyway, I’ve been wondering how long the nations were going to go on letting a bunch of sleezos on a scummy little vessel hold up a gigantic oil tanker before the tanker brought along some guns and blew the pirates out of the water. Ought to be a quick solution!
I was thinking the tankers should warn any vessel that gets within 2 miles of them that if they sailed another 10 yards closer, they would be bombed out of existence. Is this so hard?
it’s a scheme to scare off literate linguistic pirates…
🙂
Good point!
I am doing Pirates of Penzance at my theatre, so I am fighting pirates every Thurs!
Hard to believe that we’re hundreds of years from the hay day of pirateering and yet we still haven’t figured out how to fight them. We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t stop a bunch of uneducated men on a tiny ship with guns from getting on a ginormous cargo ship. WTH?
Well, actually, I don’t know if you’ve heard about the huge current event problem going on in Somalia, where pirates (not of the Errol Flynn version, but actual terrorists on water) are hijacking ships from every country and killing people? And because the US is fighting back, they are threatening to kill any US citizens they come in contact with?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/06/piracy.german.ship/index.html?iref=newssearch