Because I am Endlessly Entertained by Myself:

Here is an email that I recently sent to a friend of mine:

So I don’t know if you heard, but there was another Somali pirate episode this past few days. It is not funny at all and is actually quite tragic, but you can google it for yourself. My question is: when did pirates become so violent and awful?

The history of pirates is obviously a long and proud one. Used to be that it was perfectly respected profession. Young boys and girls would grow up and dream of wearing some nice striped pants and owning a parrot. Used to be – I have read journal articles about this – that pirate-ing was the most singingest profession, so happy were they to sail on the seven seas and visit foreign lamds, that they would all just sing uncontrollably all the time. Such joy! This was the basis for the musical “The Pirates of Penzance”. True story.

But oh, what hard times have befallen the proud profession of piracy! When any riff raff with a boat can set out on the ocean and loot and pillage innocent fellow sailors. What a blight! It is said that the Somoli pirates don’t even sing sea shanties, aren’t even vaguely familiar with “The Pirates of Penzance” and have never even heard of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland (oddly, every single one of them interviewed in a recent Christian Science Monitor article was familiar with Johnny Depp, but only becaue they thought that he placed the character Beetlejuice in the Tim Burton film “Beetlejuice”. The reporter’s assistant who corrected them, telling them that it was actually Michael Keaton, was promptly executed).

That is really all that I have to say on this topic. So tragic a thing what has become of the pirate heritage. For shame, truly.

Always,
j.





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