It's surprisingly famous for a satire, though!

Well, I think it is because it has an aim and makes a valid point :)

Tbh I wouldn't be surprised to find that someone somewhere takes it seriously

You might be right Kit, people are sometimes really surprising.

So true.

I don't really understand how the pirate connection happened with it, though.

What pirate connection?

Well, I was reading the wiki entry on the Flying Spaghetti Monster / Pastafarianism, and there's a whole section on pirates.

Ah, I had to read up on that, I didn't know that bit.
Well, it's a satirical illustration of how things being correlated doesn't mean they have anything to do with each other. Like pirates vanishing and global temperatures increasing is correlated, but the temperatures are not actually rising because of the vanishing of pirates ;)
From what the wikipedia page says they included that because of some religious people claiming natural disasters appearing more frequently are caused by people being less religious.

I guess the whole thing is rather random, so I shouldn't try and find the logic behind that particular choice of symbolism.

It's fun, it's funny, why not.

I'm going to be a pirate for Halloween, speaking of pirates. I've been making little cloth treasure maps to give out. I just need to find some fun ribbons to tie them up with and decorate a "chest" to give them out from.