Remember when you were little and your grandparents told you all those quaint stories about banks failing, crops failing, and governments failing? That seemed like such a long time ago, until recently, when comparisons to the Great Depression suddenly seemed plausible. My grandparents always thought we had it too easy since we never had to live through a Great Depression. They sure would be proud of us now!
This takes me back too: a visitor to Yellowstone National Park was diagnosed with bubonic plague in August. Wyoming doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing one-third of its population the way Europe did in the 1300’s. But this is thought to be the sixth case of bubonic plague in Wyoming since 1978. A doctor with the Wyoming Department of Health suggests “avoiding areas where a large number of unexplained rodent deaths have been observed” to keep yourself healthy. That’s probably good advice for lots of reasons.
But now, follow me back to those romantic days of yesteryear, when the gentle ocean waves were frolicked upon by . . . pirates. Sometime last weekend pirates seized an oil tanker off the coast of Kenya, and it’s currently anchored off Somalia. This wasn’t a few scurvy dogs trying to steal some rum either. The ship, the Sirius Star, is a Saudi supertanker with $100 million of oil on board, and is the largest ship ever taken by pirates. Even Blackbeard himself never took a ship that large.
