In the News...

Every morming when I get to work I spend the first half hour or so eating my breakfast and reading through a few of my regular blogs, sites, etc. There have been some pretty odd and seemingly harmless things lately that have made the local news here, like cows running loose in parks, or off-duty firemen found drunk in parks wearing blonde wigs and bikinis. Weird yes, but newsworthy? I guess?!?

Anyway, this morning, after getting the latest on our bikini-clad fireman, who is apparently ashamed and is a actually a very normal family guy (you dont say?), I stumbled upon (or maybe "ran aground" is a better way to put it) a story on Greece. I'm Greek, so naturally we like to read about our people when they make the news. We haven't had much good press since the days of stone tablets. The headline read something like "Greek Cruise Ship Sinks". Hard to make anything positive out of that.

I'm sure everyone's seen it by now, this Greek (actually Cypriot) cruise ship ran into some volcanic reef and over the course of the next 15 hours, sank into the bay off the coast of Santorini. I'm surprised the Americans haven't tried to blame Al-Qaeda for that yet. Fortunately no one was killed, although a French father and daughter are still missing. I'm hoping they're just shopping or something.

Most of the time when there is news about Greece it's either something like, 'oh they broke ground on a new McDonald's and had to stop all construction due to the inadvertent discovery of an ancient reliquary or something'. FYI, good luck digging anyplace in Greece and not finding something a thousand years old! Other times it'll just be something vaguely Greek, like Pete Sampras winning Wimbledon, or George Michael jerking off in a bathroom, or something worse, like a review of a new Yanni album.

The Olympics made for good news, 3 years ago granted, but since Greece has sort of been resting on their laurels for the last couple Millenia, it was nice to get the eyes of the world focused there (for something positive) other than fabulous beaches, amazing olive oil and lecherous men. For 2 whole weeks! That was totally worth the billions of Euros.

Anyway, I was saddened to see that a ship sank in Greece. I mean, this was no Titanic. The ship looked old and like it could have gone down with the next smash of a champagne bottle to the bow! The media'll spin it as some shoddy workmanship, or some lazy Greek crewman was drinking ouzo and cajoling with his mates breaking plates, when...'gamoto! xtipisame petra! grigora, fige!' (fuck! we hit a rock! Let's get out of here!). But I think I know what really happened.

Not that I'm some sort of conspiracy theorist or nutjob skeptic, but I do love my TV shows about UFOs, supernatural phenomena and lost civilizations. See where I'm going with this? Atlantis anyone? Come on, it could totally be that they hit some unknown entrance to Atlantis! Little known fact, but some scientists believe that Atlantis was not actually a continent in the Atlantic ocean, but an island between Santorini and Delos that sank during an earthquake and volcanic eruption.

So, in conclusion, I would guess that the ship ran aground on some poor bastard's submarine palace and that the Greeks will soon be hearing from some pissed off Atalantisan lawyers, suing for vandalism, littering and invasion of privacy. There goes the 2 weeks worth of profits from the Olympics! Take that Minister of Tourism!