Stop With The "Yeeaaargh" Already
Seattle has an affinity for pirates that Seattlest has always found a little confusing and exraordinarily dorky, and it goes beyond the SeaFair guys, but they're undoubtably the main culprits. Being the port city that it is, as well as housing more than its fair share of crusing-types, you'd think that Seattle would display a little awareness that piracy is alive and well in 2005. You don't see many floats parading through town glorifying ye olde magnitude 8.0 earthquake, do you? Complete with a paper mache version of a collapsed viaduct? Because it still scares the crap out of us. Piracy apparently falls directly into the middle-aged, hetero white guy's estimation of camp, however, regardless of the fact that they're still out there roaming the water near any sketchy political situation. Don't hold your breath for the SeaFair pirates to trade in their peg legs, beards and cutlasses for Somali fatigues and AK-47s, though.
Anyway, the story here is that pirates off the coast of Somalia (that's eastern Africa, btw) attempted to hijack a cruise ship recently. This is Seattle news either because we also have cruise ships here or because there was a Seattle woman on the boat at the time of the attack. (Or because of a certain editor's feelings towards fake pirates.) The pirates shot grenades at the cruise and gave chase in inflatables, but the innocent tourists/embodiments of Western excess/fat-walleted targets were able to outrun the attack and escape.
