The costs of Somali piracy are rising fast. The Sunday Times spoke to  a young pirate in a costume  aboard the Sirius Star supertanker, hijacked eight days ago over 400 miles out in the ocean off Kenya. He is demanding a $17m ransom for the ship, which is carrying $100m worth of oil.Another pirate cutthroat with scruples, he said that the two British seamen among the 25 crew being held hostage were unharmed.

“The British are okay and we don’t have any problems ” said Muhammad Dashishle, 24. “All the people we captured with the ship are okay.”

The risk of a violent clash remains, however. An Islamic extremist group has threatened to seize the ship and Dashishle said the hijackers would fight any attack. “We have plenty of men to defeat them,” he said.

As incidents of piracy proliferate and ransom demands soar, politicians and shipping lines around the world are growing more and more alarmed – and trade is being disrupted.

Will this give more interest in the jack sparrow pirate costume this christmas?
We jsut goit word that the makers are considering releasing a new pirates movie with Russell Brand the UK stand-up comic recently fired from the BBC, to oplatgy the part of Jack Sparrow’s brother

Flashback to your youth in a world of heavy beats, leisure suits and leotards, Fu Manchus and wide ties. Or a chance to sample the disco scene your were born too late for.

And for at least one guy, it’s just a chance to be Evel Knievel.

It’s the World’s Largest Disco, which will be held the Saturday after Thanksgiving in the Buffalo Convention Center, a combination of reunion, dance, trip back in time and costume party that draws 7,000 people.

People love the 70s because everything was so cheesy –the hair, the music, the clothes, and it’s just cooler to have fun with cheesy things no matter how old you may be.”

Cheesy is a great word for the evening, when ’70s threads of every kind, with few natural fibers among them, are dusted off and donned for the disco.

“It’s a memorable evening of reminiscence and fantasy and fun combined,” says Danielle Loukataris, owner of Divine Finds, the vintage clothing shop that rents and sells authentic garb that’s paraded on the dance floors that night.

“The fact that you have to come fashion-ready makes it even more fun,” says Loukataris. “You love the music, you love the people, you see all your friends who’ve been out of town.”

IN 1967 when costume-make Philip Morris got a strange phone call from a man asking for a gorilla costume. “We had been advertising our costumes in several trade mags, so was used to getting unusual phone calls, but this was slightly different,” said Morris.

“The man on the phone, wanted to buy a gorilla suit and asked if it looked like an authentic gorilla,” said Morris, a Kalamazoo Central graduate. “I told him that it was very similar to a Hollywood gorilla, but he said he wanted something that looked more like a Neanderthal. What he wanted was Bigfoot.”

Intrigued, Morris asked Patterson what the costume was for. “He said the costume was for a prank, but I thought that was pretty odd because these were expensive suits,” said Morris. “Our customers were movie studios and famous magicians, the suits cost $450 back then. That is like over $1,000 today. I thought it was odd to spend so much on a prank, but I sent him the costume.”

2 weeks after sending out the costume, Morris received another call. “He asked me to send him some extra fur and asked how to hide the zipper in the back and how to make the person in the costume look bigger,” Morris said. “I told him to brush the fur over the zipper and use hair spray to hold it, and then buy football shoulder pads for the arms to give the impression of being taller..”

Two months later, Patterson was all over the news with a video he “captured” of Bigfoot while hunting in northern California. “I was watching TV when I saw Patterson and his film on the news,” Morris said. “I called my wife from the other room and said, `Look it’s our gorilla costume.”’