Pirate Party

My roommate's mom bought her this balloon for her birthday. Given the recent nautical incidents in the news, I find this particularly tasteless. Why not celebrate people who violently take hostages with a PARTY? Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

It's difficult to be a fan of contemporary pirates. They lack all of the quirkiness of pirates of yore while maintaining the treachery. As far as I can tell, none of today's pirates have peg legs, eye patches, parrot-topped shoulders, or planks to walk off of. I prefer my villains flamboyant; if the Somalian pirates donned some garish garb, all of their raping and pillaging would be forgiven.

The media is all over pirate attacks like it was with shark attacks a couple years ago. At least I always knew sharks could legitimately pose a threat to human life: I still can't help but chuckle each time a pirate story hits the media because it's a bit surreal. I've always considered pirates to be fictional predators from literature and film, or at the very least, a thing of the past. It sure puts all of those Johnny Depp movies in perspective.

Truthfully, all of this pirate business frightens me. Not the pirates themselves, per say, as people have only a 40% chance of being kidnapped by a pirate in their lifetimes. What concerns me is that perhaps other scary entities that I thought were relegated to the movies might actually exist and try to kill me. Like zombies - it's fun to make zombie references or go to zombie-themed parties, but while we're all yucking it up at their expense, they might be laying in wait to attack and eat our brains. Then there's vampires, werewolves, ninjas... so many deadly creatures that I've never thought were real. But if I can go 20+ years without realizing that pirates actually existed, who's to say that vampires aren't going to be featured in the news in the near future?

Brace yourselves, friends. Pirates are only the beginning.