[Poopdeck] Poopdeck 57 or thereabouts

John Ol' Chumbucket Baur chumbucket at talklikeapirate.com
Mon Sep 15 07:07:51 PDT 2008


The Poopdeck

Official Newsletter of International Talk Like a Pirate Day
Ol' Chumbucket, editor. Published when the fancy strikes!
Issue No. 57, or thereabouts –  Sept. 15, 2008

www.talklikeapirate.com

All the piratey news that's fit to – well, not print, but send as e-mail
---------------------------------------

Four Days Until International Talk Like a Pirate Day!!

** Celebrating in L.A. – And Everywhere Else
** Pirate Guys In Philly And All Over the Airwaves
** Ol' Chumbucket's Book Club
         "Empire of Blue Water"
         "Silver"
         "How To Talk Pirate"


** Celebrate in L.A. – and Everywhere Else!

We hope you're making plans for celebrating in true piratey style!

If you're near Los Angeles, get out to Studio City where Ye Olde Tattoo 
Shop is again planning another massive pirate party. Talderoy (our 
friend Clay) and Scarlett Harlot (Cap'n Slappy's one-day wife in New 
Orleans) are throwing a bash sponsored by Pirate Magazine, among 
others, that will include live pirate music, merchants, sword fightin' 
jugglin', fire eatin' and lots more such activities as appeal to us 
pirate folks. The fun begins at noon and runs 'til midnight. Oh, and it 
bein' a tattoo parlor, there's a special on sea rover inkings – $40 for 
pirate designs. That's where Slappy and I got inked last year, and we 
wear them with pride! And Rory Flynn, daughter of the inimitable 
swashbuckler Erroll Flynn, will be on hand to sign copies of her book 
about her dad. Can't beat that!

While the whole thing is a riot as only pirates can riot, maybe the 
most fun we had last year was standin' out on Ventura Boulevard waving 
at the passing motorists, many of whom dropped their cell phones, 
mouths agape, then smiled and shouted "Aarrr!" back to us.

The address is Studio City Tattoo, 11032 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA.

And there are plenty more parties like that all over the country – all 
over the world! From Missouri to Maui, from New York to New Orleans. 
Here's a note we got Saturday from Stuttgart.

"The most evil and drunk of all pirates shall be awaiting ye at 
O'Reilly's Irish Pub in the Reuchlinstrasse 17-19. Are you man (or 
wench) enough for this? Do you have the brass monkeys to face our 
broadside? ... Doc "Bloody Fingers" Stanley and Pirate John "Fingerless 
and fumbling yet still strangely popular with the wenches" will be 
awaiting you ... The only place to be on International Talk Like a 
Pirate Day in Stuttgart is O'Reilly's Irish Pub. Visit us for more 
information at www.oreillys.de. ... "The Hook" Mann

Visit our Calendaarrr! of Events at 
http://talklikeapirate.com/tlapd08.html.

----------------------

** Pirate Guys in Philly And All Over the Airwaves

As I've told ye, we've got a busy schedule of events this weekend in 
Philadelphia, the 2008 world headquarters for International Talk Like a 
Pirate Day. But not so busy that we didn't add something. We just 
couldn't pass up the invitation to visit the tall ship Gazela at Penn's 
Landing. They're having a big pirate party themselves, beginning at 6 
p.m. on the 19th.Sadly, 6 p.m. is when we begin our performance at the 
Franklin Institute, and since the museum is payin' to ship us to Philly 
the least we can do (and we always do the least we can do) is show up. 
So we'll miss the Gazela festivities (although by the same token, 
they'll miss ours, and I like to think that's worth something.) But 
we'll be there in the late afternoon to tour the ship, take some photos 
and generally misbehave. Then the crew is whisking us back to the 
Franklin, where we'll generally misbehave to the delight (we fervently 
hope) of the audiece.)

We're also building a fearsome schedule of radio interviews to do in 
the coming week, a broadside of buccaneer bloviators that would make 
lesser men turn green and run fer the exits. But Slappy and I can 
handle it, and you'll hear us on the airwaves in Los Angelses (KROQ, 
the Kevin & Bean show), Indianapolis, Saskatchewan (I'm not kidding, 
Saskatchewan,) Edinburgh, and New Zealand, among other places.

--------------------------------

** Ol' Chumbucket's Book Club

As promised, here's my look at three buccaneer books you might want to 
add to yer collection. Assumin', of course, that you've already 
purchased OUR book, "The Pirate Life: Unleashing Your Inner Buccaneer." 
If you haven't, get yerself down to the bookstore (or order online 
through our Website) right this very minute! It's right funny, if we do 
say so ourselves, and makes a perfect Talk Like a Pirate Day gift for 
all your friends.

Anyway, here's three more:

* "Empire of Blue Water," by Steven Talty.
This may be the best book on pirates I've ever read (not counting ours, 
of course.) It's certainly one of the top two or three. Fascinating 
history that reads like the best swashbuckling novel. It's the story of 
Henry Morgan, who came to the Caribbean as a young man eager for fame 
and fortune. He became the key player in the war between the Spanish 
Empire and England, and his bloody exploits across the sea – from 
Maracaibo to Panama City – are great reading. Talty also creates a 
combined figure, a typical member of Morgan's crew, to help the reader 
understand the life and motivations of the average buccaneer.

The story winds to London and Madrid, but stays centered in the 
Caribbean, where the action takes place. And what action! Raids, 
pilfering, plundering, torture, kidnapping! There's treasure and 
carousing and dirty deeds, all the stuff that warms a freebooter's 
heart. Talty is able to place the action in the context of the 
political and economic currents of the time, so that when you're 
finished, you'll understand how and why the buccaneers won, and why 
their victory made it impossible for them to continue. The forces that 
unleashed them, now victorious, couldn't countenance their continued 
depredations. The earthquake that flattened Port Royal puts the final 
catastrophic exclamation point on their history, and Talty tells the 
tale chillingly. But it was the buccaneers' success that brought about 
their downfall. This, I believe, is the textbook definition of irony.

"Empire of Blue Water" is a must read for anyone who fancies pirates 
and wants to know their true story. It's a great book, and earns five 
tankards o' grog on a scale of five.

* "Silver," a novel by Edward Chupack
The subtitle of this book clues you in – "My Own Tale as Written By Me 
with a Goodly Amount of Murder." It's the long-awaited memoir of Long 
John Silver, a fictional pirate so masterfully created by Robert Louis 
Stevenson and powerfully portrayed on screen by Robert Newton that he's 
more real to us than many actual pirates.

In "Silver," Chupack has created an alternate story to Stevenson's 
masterpiece. Readers should not waste time trying to match up the 
events in this book with those in "Treasure Island," it's a different 
story. Many of the names and a handful of the events are sort of the 
same, but Chupack's story takes a different tack. He's letting Silver 
tell his own tale, and you can certainly enjoy this without feeling 
you're betraying the Stevenson classic. So don't worry that this Silver 
hurts his leg, but never loses it. It's a different story, mate, and a 
fun one, although dark and dangerous.

In this version, an aging Silver has been captured and is being brought 
back to England for hanging. Imprisoned in his cabin, he's setting down 
his story, taunting his captor with clues about a fabulous treasure the 
two of them had pursued for decades. Starting with his early life as a 
beggar and thief on the streets of Bristol, Silver frankly accounts the 
murders, betrayals and other black deeds that marked his career. Mind 
you, he's not trying to justify or excuse his actions, and this is 
probably not a book for the wee ones. He's just telling you what 
happened and what kind of person he is.

And, like any good pirate story, there's a treasure at the heart of 
this tale. Chupack strews clues throughout the story, the clues that 
Silver and his cronies – friend and foe alike, have been following 
since they first found that Bible with the bloody inscription. And to 
his captor he dangles some bait – Silver has amassed his own amazing 
fortune, hidden away somewhere in the world, and he's left clues to its 
whereabouts in the manuscript, clues the reader is welcome to try to 
unravel.

The book's title may be "Silver" but it's a tale told in black deeds 
and red blood. And it's a fine read for a stormy night at sea when the 
ship lies at anchor with the wind roaring,, the boards and rigging 
creaking and waves slapping the oaken hull.

Four tankards of grog on a scale of five.

--------------------

* "How To Talk Pirate," by Geordie Teller
Geordie Teller brings us a new take on something that you know is right 
up our alley – Pirate talk. Our first book ("Well Blow Me Down" which 
became "Pirattude!") started as a pirate lexicon and sort of got out of 
hand. Teller's book is far more comprehensive than ours, while not 
being nearly as funny. Another difference is that in our book we say 
right up front not to trust anything we say because we made it all up 
and any time we were right it was by accident. Teller waits until the 
end of the book to allow as how, while he hasn't actually made stuff 
up, he has played sort of fast and loose from time to time. But he's 
not as forthcoming with where he did that, which casts a shadow on all 
of it. You can use the book for fun on Talk Like a Pirate Day, but I 
wouldn't for any kind of serious purpose – from literary to acdemic.

This is not a problem for guys like us, because we have no serious 
literary or academic pretensions and we doubt most of you do either. As 
Geordie points out, his book is called "How to Speak Pirate," not "How 
Pirates Really Talked" and he's after –and has caught – the fun of 
stereotypical pirate patois. This is a fine book for folks who want to 
parade their pirate persona with appropriate panache applied to his 
personal palaver. It's of much less value to serious linguists or 
historians, but what would they be doing acting like pirates anyway? 
They're supposed to be in the library, sipping sherry and arguing about 
whether "Aarrr" has three Rs or four.

This book falls somewhere in between George Choudras' comprehensive 
"The Pirate Primer," the complete and best-researched book on pirate 
patois I've ever seen, and Terry Bremerton's "The Pirate Dictionary," 
which is a good book but is so incompetently produced, with typos on 
almost every page, that it's really hard to take seriously. If you want 
some serious scholarship on how pirates in literature and film talked, 
go with Choudras's book. If you want some light reading to prime you 
for the upcoming holiday, Geordie Teller's "How to Talk Pirate" might 
be just the thing you need.

(And, it goes without saying, whichever group you fall in, you 
definitely want to buy our two books, "Pirattitude!" and "The Pirate 
Life: Unleashing Your Inner Buccaneer." Already have copies of both? 
Let me suggest you don't have ENOUGH copies of both.)

I'd give "How To Talk Pirate," tree tankards of rum.

------------

And that's all for now. Knock the rust off yer cutlass, the sand outta 
yer flintlock and shoo the goony bird out of yer tricorn hat! It's 
almost Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys! Be ready!

Ol' Chumbucket




More information about the Poopdeck mailing list