I cant take credit for this, came from a mate, but too funny!
MOGADISHU. Somalia's pirates have announced that from now on ransoms need to be paid in pieces of eight or Spanish doubloons and delivered by a monkey in a bolero dragging the money in a sack. Meanwhile shipping companies say negotiations with the pirates are becoming increasingly time-consuming as the pirates' only response to ultimatums is "Arrrrhhh!"
The new demands were made at daybreak this morning by a Somali official who claims to be the Pirate King, although the US and Indian navy officials who received the demands said that the official did not look like a Pirate King as he had both his legs and the parrot on his shoulder appeared to be a rat with feathers glued to it.
They said he was also wearing only a grass skirt and a tiara reportedly stolen from a Chinese socialite.
According to the officials the Pirate King used the opportunity to say "Arrrhhh!" repeatedly, however in a break with tradition he also said, "Well shiver me timbers!"
They conceded that attempts to follow the Pirate King to his pirate lair had failed.
"Our main concern is for the hostages, who have been forced to watch pirate revelries, listen to pirate songs, and watch the pirates count their pirate booty," said Admiral Deepak Chopra of the Indian Navy.
However, he said, they had lost sight of the Pirate King's galleon after "sailing into a dense and otherworldly fog, in which we could see nothing but the cutlasses at our sides and hear naught but a distant laughter, as if a madman were luring us towards the very gates of Hell."
Meanwhile shipping companies have urged the Indian Navy to "move away from a romantic narrative approach to fighting piracy and towards using ballistic firearms".
According to a spokesman for Swedish shipping giant Smegma, providing future ransoms in antiquated Spanish coins was going to be far less difficult than handling delivery-monkeys.
"We stopped using monkeys to deliver ransoms to pirates decades ago for one simple reason: they're incredibly unreliable with money," said spokesman Jurg Gotterdammerung, alluding to the 1957 Suez Incident when a monkey named Mr Bojangles ran off with a suitcase containing $9 million in doubloons and spent it all on a small packet of nuts.
However Gotterdammerung said that the safety of the hostages was paramount, and if the pirates wanted a monkey to deliver the money, they would get a monkey.
"It's possible we can develop some sort of monkey-delivery system," he said. "Perhaps stapling the monkey to the money-sack and firing them both at the pirates from some sort of high-pressure air-hose."
Meanwhile Somali tourism officials say that piracy is hurting the region as a tourist destination.
"The graph was looking fantastic," said tour operator Ahmed Ahmed Al-Ahmed. "In the 1980s we had four foreign visitors. In the 1990s we had six, and since 2000 we had had seven."
But he said bookings had now slowed from one per year to "just a trickle".