The other day on my Google home page, right next to a recipe for tangerine sorbet, I saw a news article that gave me a "wait a second... " moment. I have those often, a moment of curiosity mixed with skepticism that inevitably results in me clicking on just about anything I come across. I was giddy when I read the title of the article: "Pirates hijack oil supertanker off east Africa."
Amazing. My childhood dream was to become a pirate, really any kind of romanticized criminal-type person but for the sake of this example, a pirate. In this day and age with the wonders of science giving us gifts like GPS and Google Maps, I thought that being a pirate was one of those careers that you just couldn't do anymore. If I had known being a pirate wasn't an obsolete profession then I wouldn't have gone to a liberal arts school, I'd have gone to the University of Buccaneer State or whatever it's called. Clearly there is a school out there somewhere (probably floating on the seven seas) because the supertanker that was hijacked was "three times the size of an aircraft carrier" in the kind of move that would make Captain Jack Sparrow himself absolutely green with envy.
This high-seas tom-foolery has apparently been going on for some time. The Sirius Star (the hijacked supertanker) had a crew that was being paid double so that they would brave the pirate threat. I realize that I live in what most people would call a "fantasy world," but since when are pirates a threat? I saw the 2003 documentary Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and they were generally unthreatening people. At least that's how it came off to me, they seemed really friendly and warm. But since the crew of the Sirius Star was being paid twice as much as they usually get when the ship was stolen, that means at least someone doesn't have the same idea of pirates that I do, that or the crew found a way to get double their hours like I did at the pizza shop I was working at a couple summers ago.
In a not very astonishing turn of events, the supertanker carrying $100 Million in crude oil was bought back for the paltry ransom of $3 Million in what I can only assume was to be left in the trunk of a car down by the docks in the form of small, non-sequential unmarked bills in a black duffel bag. After all, if pirates are sailing around the ocean stealing ships three times the size of aircraft carriers and successfully ransoming them off, then everything in real life must happen like it does in the movies.
Reading about these movie script shenanigans off the coast of Africa got me thinking of something else that shouldn't exist anymore, but for whatever reason is still around. Allow me to explain: a couple nights ago I was listening to AM talk radio (it's not something I do all the time) and the topic was "Selling Organs." These aren't the kind of organs that the church is involved with, these are the kind from inside of people. I thought that it probably existed in some form or another, but I hoped at least the black-market organ trade didn't exist here in America. The caller insisted that it did and not only was there a niche for black-market organs in America, but it was thriving! Thriving to the point of a need for regulation.
In a truly astonishing turn of events, the caller went on to compare the buying and selling of stolen kidneys to the buying and selling of marijuana. The host thought this was a good comparison! Allow that to sink in, allow it to sink in slowly. It was a seemingly innocent comparison using the argument that people will do whatever they want to do/need to do anyways, so why not just tax it? But buying a stolen liver is a far cry from buying an illegal plant, I was amazed that this was the first connection the caller made in his head. With this type of thinking, I'm the kind of person that wouldn't think twice about buying a dime bag of kidney off some guy I met at the gas station.
I think about pirates and the black-market and I think of cartoons or Hollywood, I don't think of Saudi executives paying off pirates or the guy down the street being a major player in a world where an organ can be a commodity. I'm starting to think that the new coffee maker I got is going to choke me one of these days because it's actually a Decepticon. That would be bad, but worst bit of fiction that could turn to fact for me would be zombies. I live right next to a cemetery and I'm just glad that there's no lab full of scientists nearby ... that I know of.
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