There's something quite heartening, even inspiring, about a bunch of rag-tag unemployed Somali fishermen playing Robin Hood And His Merry Men off the east coast of Africa.

It didn't happen without cause.

First, these fishermen had to watch impotently while the Americans and  Ethiopians destroyed their (working) government because it worshipped the wrong god.

Then, enormous foreign factory boats illegally scooped up most of their fish.

Finally - irony of ironies - other foreigners dumped nuclear waste on their beaches and in their waters, thus poisoning whatever was still crawling or swimming.

One has to ask, therefore, if it isn't entirely logical that these same unemployed fishermen then look around for other work so they can feed their families, and notice all those big, fat foreign ships cruising past their villages like ancient Spanish galleons piled high with the treasure of the first world? And setting up a toll system just like the fabled outlaws of Sherwood Forest, to hold some of those big, fat, foreign galleons until appropriate ransom is paid?

It's called stealing from the rich to give to the poor and has a fairly honourable provenance.

And isn't there a certain poetic justice in the Sheriff of Nottingham threatening and sniping and huffing and puffing because the outlaws of Somalia just aren't playing by his rules and he doesn't have the faintest idea how to handle such outrageous behaviour?


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

You’re a normal, mature, sophisticated horny male preparing for a week in the sun in the Caribbean and, of course, you’re after women. So you prepare — much as Alexander the Great successfully prepared to conquer the known world.

Let me be blunt — I don't have to prepare. I can get laid in the Caribbean or anywhere else any time I want. But unless you’re George Clooney or Brad Pitt, you can't. So you have to strategize. You’ve only got seven days and if the seven days are to be worth the price, they have to include getting laid.

I sympathize and understand perfectly. So here’s my advice (with apologies to any sisters who think I’m giving too much away.)

PREPARATION:
1.  Invest in medium bronzer and start applying it all over a few days before departure. The stuff won’t protect you from the sun but it will make you look a lot less pale and wan when you stride manfully onto that first beach that first morning. Students of getting laid are unanimous that pale and wan is not the look favoured by the better class of bikini.

2.  Buy a hard-cover Mongolian-language book, take its dust cover off and wrap it around your own book. This is so you can scowl, mutter “no spik Inglis” and concentrate on your book if the person sitting next to you on the plane or bus shows signs of wanting to be your new best friend forever. (If the person sitting next to you speaks Mongolian, of course, you have a problem.) This strategy should be abandoned immediately if the person sitting next to you turns out to be a beautiful woman, but I'm told this never happens in real life.

3. Buy some fashionable, reasonably expensive beach and bar wear, including a swim suit that isn't polyester tartan and doesn't droop down past your knees when wet.

4. Stock up on condoms and your favourite Cialis/Viagra/Levitra or whatever.

5. Check the resort out on the Internet to find out if there will be special evenings which need special clothing (bare as you dare night, whore and pimp night etc. etc.)

THE JOURNEY:
6.   Arrive at the airport with enough time to charm the ground hostess into assigning you "a seat-in-an-exit-row-as-far-forward-as-possible". You want an exit seat because you get considerably more leg room than any other passenger. (Of course, people on exit seats have to help other passengers escape “in the unlikely event of an emergency” but those who study these things say the chance of your actually having to help your fellow passengers escape from a burning or sinking plane is even more remote than your chance of finding a beautiful woman sitting next to you.) You want as far forward as possible because that gets you off the plane fast, leaving enough time to check in with the man under the umbrella in the parking lot before your bus leaves for the resort.

7.  There is at least one man in every parking lot in every Caribbean airport — except possibly in Cuba — who sells ice-cold beer and marijuana. At Montego Bay, Jamaica, he has a little metal cart with a Red Stripe umbrella on top and excellent ganja down below. Ganja will be vital bait in your pussy-hunt so by all means bargain but pay the man what he asks if you have to.

THE CAMPAIGN:
8. Once at the resort, bribe everyone in sight, particularly if it’s a no-tips sort of place. Bartenders, waiters, maids, dive masters, sailing instructors, tennis pros, entertainment managers etc. do their best work when stimulated by unexpected windfalls of US dollar and their best work could easily include introducing you to likely prey. Heavy tipping also gets you to the front of the line when ordering two banana daiquiris at the over-crowded bar after midnight. (This is no time for foolish patriotism — US dollars are the coin of the Caribbean realm.)

9. Stake out your hunting ground very, very carefully. Unless it’s an adult-only resort (about which more later) stay clear of the pool. The pool is where respectable families with children cluster because they believe their children are less likely to drown in the pool than the ocean. And the best bikinis don't hang out with respectable families with children. Don’t let the sight of some of the cellulite flesh on display put you off your hunt. Your average Caribbean all-inclusive resort (with the honourable exception of the Club Meds) is not peopled by noted beauties.

10. Avoid very young women even though they are legal prey and often look quite splendid in very small bikinis. You will have nothing in common with females, however enticing they look in very small bikinis, who say “like” and “you know” and “know what I mean” and “whatever” two or three times a sentence, a habit which can drive your average mature, sophisticated male right out of his banana. Leave them to the louts who wear their caps backwards, play beach volleyball at noon, believe it a mark of manhood to get hammered before the sun sets and vomit a lot.

11. Your best bikinis can usually be found sunning alone on the least crowded part of the beach. There are  two reasons for this female solitude. One is that she’s convinced herself that she’s only here to rest up, recuperate, recharge the batteries and get far away, if only for a week, from some man who so obviously doesn’t deserve her. Or, for that matter, away from all men who so obviously don’t deserve her. The other reason is that no woman ever born (except me*) is truly satisfied with her body. She’s certain that her breasts are too small or too droopy, her bottom too big, her thighs too fat or, just as likely, all the above. So she’s decided to nurse her glaringly obvious imperfections in virtuous isolation. You meantime, a mature, sophisticated male with no intention of remaining either virtuous or in isolation for a moment longer than absolutely necessary, will have no problem seeing her as a vision of unsurpassed loveliness, a veritable goddess unmatched in all of womanhood in all the world. Or, at least, suitable prey. It is, therefore, your job — indeed, your duty as a gentleman — to rescue her from her solitude and doubt.

So how do you rescue this shy maiden and be rewarded with appropriately grateful action? If I get enough responses, I’ll be happy to provide the answer.

*To tell the honest truth, I think my breasts are too big, out of proportion to my waist. But no-one else seems to care.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

There's a scandal in New Zealand rugby league circles because players like to gangbang with groupies? How very quaint!

As I describe in my book, here in Canada partying with hockey players has long been a rite of passage for teenage girls.

The players roared into town in their team buses and groups of us girls hung out around their hotels looking eager until one of them asked if we’d like to party. We said yes, they said Ok, and smuggled us into one of their rooms.

The players called us Puck Bunnies when they were being polite and Dirty Girls, sometimes to our faces, when they weren't. Depended mostly on whether they were about to screw us or had already screwed us. That’s the level of respect they had.

Hockey players aren’t romantic. I remember one night three of us groupies slipped into their hotel through a back door and ended up in a room with nine guys. They gave us beers in plastic cups, pulled our clothes off, lined us up next to each other on the bed and screwed us. They wouldn't let us leave until just before curfew or the last guy couldn't get it up any more. Whichever came first. Didn't even ask our names.

Most hockey players are crude and uneducated, sort of slightly more sophisticated Don Cherrys.  I soon realized that apart from their hard bodies and fame — which gave us boasting rights with girlfriends — there was nothing to recommend them.

In fact, you haven’t lived until you wake up with half a dozen snoring hockey goons who don’t shower regularly and you look over at the night table and see six sets of false teeth grinning at you from water glasses.

Maybe this is what athletes really mean when they say they play as a team. Like Alexandre Dumas's truly sexy musketeers — one for all, all for one.

As I say, a rite of passage. It was exciting and dangerous and would have horrified our parents if they'd known. But we grew up and out of it without any harm and went on to hunt the individual rather than the team.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

There’s a story on the Canadian Journalism Project correctly claiming that journalists dealing with government are becoming mere stenographers. http://jsource.ca/english_new/submitcomment.php?id=3834#commentform

Denise Rudnicki, former PR flack for a federal minister, says “this involves a sophisticated, government-wide, coordinated communications apparatus, well-resourced and professionally staffed, and designed to persuade people of the rightness of the government's position by marginalizing the views of opponents and by using the media to shape and manage public discussion of policy. Calling this effort 'spin' is like calling a tsunami a wave.”

She goes on to suggest "rather than exposing the efforts of government to manipulate the message, journalists should work to understand better how government communicates."

What's wrong with doing both?

What if we insist on telling the viewer, listener and reader EVERY time we come across an example of government spinning, particularly when it's using our tax dollars to distort facts and truth?

That's something journalists can do immediately, rather than wait for workshops (usually run by the least ethical and talented of us who've gone over to the dark side for dollars) on how business and government manipulate us so we lie to the people.

Journalists are the servants of the people. It ill behoves journalists to report anything but the truth -- as far as we can find it.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

The Congo has been a hell-hole for centuries. But don't ever blame the poor bloody Congolese.

Instead, blame the European slavers of 500 years ago who ripped millions of people out of that part of the African continent and shipped them off as slaves to the new world.

Then blame the Belgians whose king, Leopold ll, personally owned the Congo and murdered millions of Congolese in his ravenous quest for rubber, diamonds and gold.

Then blame Pope Nicholas V for a papal bull that, in effect, granted European monarchs the right to reduce "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery and whose church destroyed much of the tribal culture that sustained the Congolese people.

Then blame the hordes of savage capitalists from North America and Europe who reduced Congo to a basket case while they plundered -- and still plunder -- its riches.

Finally, blame us. We did and do almost nothing to try to save the wretched people of the Congo.

But don't ever blame the victims, the poor bloody Congolese.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

US President Barack Obama has declared May 7 as National Day of Prayer for his country so I guess he's not perfect after all.

A little background, if I may.

It was Thomas Jefferson who came up with the magnificent concept of "separation of church and state."

The First Amendment to the US Constitution took it further: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Very liberal and reasonably clear. There must be no state religion and religion itself must be free from state interference.

However, it stops half-way. Surely we've learned from the past eight years presided over by an American right-wing, born-again religious zealot (and a whole bunch of foreign, right-wing, born-again religious zealots) that freedom FROM religion is even more important that freedom OF religion.

All of which is why it saddens me that the otherwise splendid new president should have to (apparently, by law) sign a proclamation declaring a National Day of Prayer.

What horrifies me however, is that Obama felt it necessary to authorize his PR flack to announce that he, the president, prays every day. The flack said it twice. Twice!

Shades of those war criminals Nixon and Kissinger down on their bloody knees praying together on the eve of the disgraced president's resignation!


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

Canadian author Pierre Burton: "A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau: "Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts."

American economist John Maynard Keynes: "Canada is a place of infinite promise."

Time Magazine: "Canada is one of the planet's most comfortable, and caring, societies."

Canadian hockey player Paul Henderson: "Canadians don't have a very big political lever, we're nice guys."

French explorer Jacques Cartier: "I am rather inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain."

American gangster Al Capone: "I don't even know what street Canada is on."

American President Bill Clinton: "In a world darkened by ethnic conflicts that tear nations apart, Canada stands as a model of how people of different cultures can live and work together in peace, prosperity, and mutual respect."

American journalist Andrew H. Malcolm: "It's going to be a great country when they finish unpacking it."

Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall MacLuhan: "The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness."

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "There are no limits to the majestic future which lies before the mighty expanse of Canada with its virile, aspiring, cultured and generous-hearted people."

Canadian writer Alberto Manguel: "Until I came to Canada I never knew 'snow' was a four letter word."

American actor Marilyn Monroe: "When they said Canada, I thought it was up in the mountains somewhere."

Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland: "There are few, if any, Canadian men that have never spelled their names in a snow bank."

American comedian Robin Williams: "Canadian money is  called the loony. How can you take an economic crisis seriously?"

American President Barack Obama: "I love this country."


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)