Actually, I think his words were ‘Arrrr, they be fine - matey! Pass the grog and raise the mizzenmast!’…but can you really trust a pirate? I mean, can you ?

All the 24 crewmembers on board the Chinese fishing ship, which has been hijacked by pirates off southern Somalia, are “fine”, a pirate leader told a radio station in the Somali capital Mogadishu Friday.The pirate leader, who did not identify himself, told Shabelle radio that his group abducted the Chinese ship some 48 km off the coast of southern Somali port city of Kismanyu, 500 km south of Mogadishu, late Thursday afternoon.

He claimed that they seized the vessel because it was fishing in Somali territorial waters and said the crew would be “put before the law and punished accordingly”.

Today’s totally creepy Asian ghost story comes from the Phillipines. It is about people getting drunk and seeing a scary floating lady (hmmm…maybe the alcohol had something to do with it?) but the story is nice and shivery all the same.  Sorry for the pic; Martha Stewart/Good Housekeeping Halloween decorations aren’t usually my thing but the picture was a good size.

The Story

Actually this story happened to my mom. It was during the 60’s, when she was still sleeping with her brothers and sisters in one house. They have inherited a big house from my grandfather (he was a doctor), so having a couple of her cousins sleeping over is not a problem. Their house was built near a river with a wooden bridge over it (you’ll know what the wooden bridge is about later on my story).

Here’s where her story begins. All of them came home late from a party (back in the 60’s parties were great and being invited to one means you are popular), they were all tired and decided to call it a night and went to their own rooms. My mom was staying with 2 of her sisters in one room. Her bed was located right beside a big window that’s made out of wood and would just open from the middle then the shatters will just slide from side to side. That night, due to excessive drinking, my mom woke up because she needs to go to the bathroom. So she went and went back to bed. When she was about to doze off, she could feel something or someone was watching her. She opened her eyes and she saw a lady with long black hair outside their window, she was also wearing a black dress and her eyes were red. The lady was staring at her with a creepy grin on her face. My mom couldn’t move. The scary part of it was my mom’s room was located at the second floor; in short the lady was floating. She tried to call her sisters but they could not hear her. She felt so scared and just covered her self with her quilt. After a few minutes, she tried to check if the lady was gone but when she peeped out of her quilt, the lady was still there, staring and grinning at her. She just decided to just hide herself under quilt and eventually she had fallen asleep.

The next day, everybody went down for breakfast. My mom did too, even though she was tired due to what happened that night. She did not try to tell everybody because they would just think that she was dreaming. Then a guy cousin of her came out looking as if he hadn’t slept all night and just freaked out on them saying that he saw a lady outside their window (the boy’s bedroom was located on the first floor). Then he described what he saw, my mom realized that he was describing the same lady she saw outside her window. So she decided to tell them on what happened to her that night. Most of them were skeptical.

Later that week, my mom was just about to get in their house when she saw a big commotion beside the wooden bridge. There were a lot of people looking over with the police too. She saw that her cousin was one of the spectators. When he saw her, he just ran to her and said that somebody found a sack with a dead girl inside. Later in the news, they post a picture of the girl and it was the lady my mom and uncle saw. They did believe them now.

Here at Yellow Menace we’ve been pretty vocal over the years about our shared passion for all things zombie. Indeed, whenever I get together with Mazinga at Gen Con one of the things we do is grab a table and set up a game of Zombies!!!, the fantastic tabletop zombie apocalypse game by Twilight Creations. Co-incidentally, Twilight Creations is headquartered right across the river from us in Northern Kentucky, so we also make a point of stopping by the TC booth to say howdy and nab whatever Zombies!!! expansions they put out.

Anyway. to make a long story short, I was enthused today to read that Zombies!!! is due out on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network next year. Zombies!!! is very much the horror equivalent of Go - easy to learn, hard to master…and the constant back-and-forth struggle to save yourself and simultaneously screw the other players should make for some amazing online gameplay.

Hats off to Todd and the rest of the crew at Twilight Creations  - we can’t wait to get our hands on the finished product!

….and, fuuuuck that. I have serious acrophobia problems. Like - can’t climb ladders acrophobia problems. There’s no way I’m getting in an elevator that rockets you 20,000+ miles off the ground. Nuh uh. No. Fucking. Way.

Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables — or flat ribbons — will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.

In the carriages, the scientists behind the idea told The Times, could be any number of cargoes. A space elevator could carry people, huge solar-powered generators or even casks of radioactive waste. The point is that breaking free of Earth’s gravity will no longer require so much energy — perhaps 100 times less than launching the space shuttle.

“Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space,” Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, said.

Anyone but me, pal…