This might just be the coolest thing ever:

From the A.P.

'Pirates armed with grenade launchers and machine guns tried to hijack a luxury cruise liner off the east African coast Saturday, but the ship outran them, officials said.

Two boats full of pirates approached the Seabourn Spirit about 100 miles off the Somali coast and opened fire while the heavily armed bandits tried to get onboard, said Bruce Good, spokesman for the Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp. The ship escaped by shifting to high speed and changing course.

"These are very well-organized pirates," said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program. "Somalia's coastline is the most dangerous place in the region in terms of maritime security."

The attackers never got close enough to board the Spirit, but one member of the 161-person crew was injured by shrapnel, cruise line president Deborah Natansohn said. . . ."Our suspicion at this time is that the motive was theft," Good said, adding that the crew had been trained for "various scenarios, including people trying to get on the ship that you don't want on the ship."'

No word yet on the fate of the Belafonte.

Seriously, I would give my a chest of doubloons to have seen the slack, pasty faces of the cruise-goers as rocket propelled grenades fired by swarthy boat people wooshed over their heads. Science has proven that, while Americans are essentially two-legged cattle, cruise-going Americans are the most bovine of all. The only way to graze your way through five all-you-can-eat buffets in a fourteen hour period is to have four stomachs. Just thinking about a herd of them looking over the guardrail, chewing at mouthfuls of cud, staring at a boatload of slavering water bandits brandishing automatic weapons, some of them no doubt recording it on their camcorders and cell phones, is too delicious for words. The entire point of the cruise ship experience is to expose lard-assed First Worlders to the exotic sights and sounds of the Third World. The only problem is that a combined metric ton of fanny-bepacked suburbanite waddling through the village square pretty much invites the one thing that these adventurers certainly aren't seeking: actual contact with the inhabitants of said Third World, outside of a souvenir shop/scuba guide capacity. Cruise travel keeps the dirty natives at bay, managing every aspect of the excursion to maintain a cordon sanitaire around the precious, dough-filled wayfarers. When that pirate boat (not quite a ship) made it's steady but futile way towards the towering mass of first world machinery, it was the closest that a lot of these blubberpots are ever going to come to the raw desperation of the majority of the earth. These pirates, had they gotten on board, would have torn through their pampered lives like tissue paper. Entrails strung across the lido deck and hollowed-out skulls filled with Mai Tai. Instead, sadly, they'll just go home with a great story for the neighbors: much better than those folks a few years ago who contracted a virus on a cruise ship and spent two weeks shitting out their intesines.