Modern Day Pirates?

OK, I have abut had it. I have had it with CNN. I have had it with Yahoo! News. I have had it with Fox, MSN, the New York Times; I have had it with all of you. You guys have nothing better to talk about for the last week than this? You have been positing it all over the front page of every print piece you can get your hands on for over a week and it is the same photo, the same story. And the thing about it is, Mr. News, that you are using the wrong word.

Last week, in the middle of the ocean it seems, a boat was taken captive. It and it’s seamen (stop laughing) were held for a few days with what they say was no food or water (which I do not believe) by pirates. Yes, you heard me right. PIRATES are back. And I am not talking about the ones on the big screen who walk around drunk and sword fight all day, I am talking about real life, modern day pirates.

But are they truly pirates? I mean, I am only twenty-five (and can I get on a tangent here? When you see the words twenty-five how many times do you write 25 or twenty five? Both of those are wrong people. There is a hyphen when you write words like that. Say you want to write sixty-six. Or forty-three. There is a hyphen. And unless you are talking about an actual countable value (say you have 23 apples on the table) you write it out. Now, if you are going to write it out, the first time you mention a number, then you absolutely MUST write it out for the rest of the document to be grammatically correct. OK, I am done.) years old. But I know what a pirate is. A pirate is hairy, smells of rum and lack of sleep, and walks around stealing gold from people. They use cannons, not AK-47’s. They have peg legs (have you ever seen someone with an actual peg leg? It is gross.) and they have parrots on their shoulder. I have never met a true pirate, but that is what they look like. Of course, that is what they look like in books, movies, TV shows, and everywhere else you can think of a pirate making an appearance.

So these “pirates” have attacked this ship. Awesome; moving on. But on Easter Sunday they released the men that they had captured. Was that a gift for the holiday? I mean, all the pirates I know do not let their captures go. (Thank you for paying attention. I have never met a pirate.) They kill them. Time and time again I see pirates, on TV and on the big screen, killing everything they come across to just get to the next drop of Parrot Bay.

But anyway, instead of just talking of my personal experience with pirates, I will get back to the point of this. What constitutes a pirate? If it is not a peg leg and a smelly beard, then I must not know what a pirate really is. Have we all been lied to?