Pirate News

It's a good time for pirates. Not as good as back when they were actually sailing the Spanish Main, but still pretty good.

For one thing, take the NFL. I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but the Super Bowl is this Sunday, and it's Tampa Bay vs. Oakland. The Oakland Raiders have as their logo a guy with an eyepatch and two cutlasses behind him. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have a more straightforward red Jolly Roger, with a skull and two crossed cutlasses. Both teams have pirate mascots. Pirates! That means the Super Bowl is going to feature hot pirate-on-pirate action! If the NFL has any sense (and I'm not saying they do) the halftime show will feature the pirate ship battle from Las Vegas.

Pirates, incidentally, make great team nicknames. They're mean and cool at the same time. I'm from San Diego where the primary teams were the Chargers and the Padres. Nobody's sure what a "Charger" was supposed to be, so they've got a lightning bolt as some sort of electrical reference. That's sad, but not as sad as the Padres, who attempt to strike fear into the hearts of their opponents by claiming to be monks. Their logo used to be a fat, bald monk in brown monk robes. Ooh! Scary! The worse team name ever was the Cleveland Infants. Infants! Naming a team isn't that complicated, is it? Giants are intimidating. Infants are not. In fact, in 1890 (the one year the Infants were in business, presumably because they got embarassed about the whole thing), there was another baseball team in Cleveland called the Spiders. Spiders are even smaller than Infants, but at least they're icky.

There's also a new pirate movie coming. It's been awhile since we had one, especially if you don't count Treasure Planet. The way I see it, pirates are already in danger of being silly (did you know they used to have fashion shows on deck? Really!) and once they're space pirates in a Disney movie, you might as well give up. On the other hand, the movie I'm all excited about is Pirates of the Caribbean, which is obviously also from Disney. For some reason, they're following that Country Bear Jamboree movie with this and a Haunted Mansion production. I guess somebody came up with a rule that they can't have theme park rides that don't have movies attached. I keep expecting them to make a Splash Mountain movie to cover up the fact that the Splash Mountain ride is really based on Song of the South, which they're not going to be releasing on video any time soon. Maybe they can make a mountain-themed movie to cover Splash, Space, and Big Thunder Mountain. And also the Matterhorn. That sounds like a pretty weird movie.

I seem to have gotten a little distracted. My point is that I don't know anything about the Pirates of the Caribbean movie other than the fact that it's got Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom in it. And they play pirates. And that should be plenty of fun, if you ask me. I already like them, and it's my theory that everything's better when you add pirates. Or monkeys. And yet, I can't convince anyone that Cutthroat Island, a pirate movie with a monkey is a good movie. Maybe it needed more monkeys. Or pirates.