Chewin in the Chung

This just in from AJ: Atlantis Island Found in Tampa Bay. AJ sent me the article text in an E-mail, and I Googled it to find a link to post. It showed up in Yahoo Financial News.

Atlantis...Financial news... You figure it out.

But this is a great topic, because it gives me a chance to mock two of my favorite targets- People who believe in things like Atlantis, and Tampa.

We'll skip the fact that Harbor Island is an artificial island created by dredging Tampa Bay and dumping heaps of muck into a big pile. Let's go straight to the implications of Atlantis being in Tampa:

Plato mentions Atlantis in two dialogues- Timaeus and Critias. In Timeas, the character of Criteas says that Atlantis was a great and wonderful empire. Looking at the modern day inhabitants of Tampa, we can only conclude that the empire in question arose through drug smuggling, the distribution of pornography, or by inviting citizens of other empires to visit and then robbing them. More interesting is Criteas' claim that the Atlanteans attacked ancient Greece. This means that these precursors to modern Tampans, the mighty Atlanteans (or should we just say Tamplanteans), built a fleet, sailed across the Atlantic ocean, and made war upon the ancient Hellenes. How they accomplished this without jetskis and 300HP powerboats is a mystery, since Tampans today demonstrate all the native marine skills of blind coal miners. Furthermore, if the Tamplanteans wanted to attack the Greeks, Tarpon Springs is a 45 minute drive away. You can't turn a war elephant around in Tarpon Springs without knocking over half a dozen Greeks.

Well, having failed to subdue the Greeks, we will just hope that the warriors representing modern day Atlantis can conquer the barbarian descendents of Xanadu this Sunday. (Everyone knows that Xanadu was located in San Diego, right?)