Fleep/Headscratchers

Fleep

• This is an artifact of the Sequential Art medium, but why is it that numbers seem to be pronounced the same in Simbanese as in English? Specifically, I'm referring to "Fleep telading 10 gilba" - was "10" pronounced "ten," and how did Jimmy know that it meant the number? He's smart enough to know that something pronounced "ten" can mean lots of things, depending on the language.
  • Perhaps the Simbanese decided Arabic numerals were better than Simbanese numerals, so they borrowed them from English.
    • Still doesn't answer the issue of pronunciation, nor how he knew "ten" meant "10" when he heard it on the phone. If it was something he'd learned in the past two years, like the "how to trigger a bomb" thing, that would've been a major red flag, even bigger than that one - he would've been shown thinking "how do I know so much about this?"
      • The numbers were in the dictionary. Even though it's Russian the numerals would be shown.
• Why'd he call the American Embassy first? Doing so almost prevented him from calling the Russian Embassy. Why'd he even have to do it from inside? He could have called safely from anywhere else.
  • Got it backwards - he called the Russian Embassy first. Maybe he was having second thoughts, combined with suicidal desires.
  • Suicide Bomber, except he botched the suicide part
• If the island is called Simbia, why is the language "Simbanese"? Shouldn't it be "Simbian"? I'm from Australia, but I'm not Australanese.
  • Presumably the same reason people from China aren't called "Chinan". Names for nationalities aren't exactly very consistent. Also, the country could have been called "Simban" some time in the past, but is now archaic and "Simbia" is used instead, or vise versa.
• The first strip shows exactly one booth. Which is clearly labeled as "Phone". I call bullshit on the terrorism explanation. Maybe it was only due to the cancellation thing.
  • That's not the phone booth he's in, that's the phone booth he remembers going into. One of his most important breakthroughs is figuring out that that was years ago and he's lost his memories of everything since then. Besides, the word "Fleep" was shown in the third strip. Plus the concrete; the California booth, as he notes, wasn't even in a building.
• I'm confused by the math in the breathable air problem. Jimmy measures the booth and finds it to be roughly 108 cubic spans. His origami balloon tells him that he breathes at a rate of 1 cubic span / 5 seconds, and that he can breathe the same air up to 5 times before he gets seriously dizzy. So far, so good. This implies that he will breathe all the air in the booth once every 9 minutes (108 cubic spans * 5 second / cubic span = 540 seconds). And he can do that up to 5 times, so he has a grand total of 45 minutes. Wait, what? Then where does the 56 hour figure come from? I was confused by the emergency number problem, too, until I realized that the numbers need to be counted in a very specific way to yield 29 (you count all the 2 digit numbers in the 3 digit numbers and rule out 911, which he already tried), so maybe something similar happened here and I am missing some important aspect of the wording.