Scupper me wi' a handspike and Damme for a Portingale pimp!
If you know me, you know that I like me some pirates--always have, since I was a little kid. And though I've come to learn that the actual facts bear very little resemblance to my beloved fiction (thank you kindly Under the Black Flag), I still think that the fictions are important to anyone with utopian ideals and a healthy disrespect for authority. Heck, a lot of the facts have those elements on view (see Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias--Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes. If you can find a copy, that is).
Be that all as it may, piracy is, of course, alive and well, in all of the old places like the Caribbean, but mostly in Southeast Asia and its environs. These new guys are a fascinating combination of old school (small boats, colorful headscarves, bad teeth) and new technology (automatic weapons, laptop computers, cel phones) and they are some SCARY ASS sons of bitches.
To illustrate--I came across these photos while searching for a nice picture of Edward Teach for my computer wallpaper. You do not want to run into these guys on your 40-foot yacht, and ye may lay to that, cully:
Wi' a curse!
The funny thing is, that despite their fierce appearance, it seems that their usual m.o. is to take your craft as a prize, take all your money, jewelry, what have you, force you to crew the boat for a while and prey on others, then set you adrift in a little boat when they've reached some sort of goal for the voyage. So you might actually escape with your life. Unless, of course, you hold out on them. One pictures the scene in The Black Pirate in which the captive swallows the diamond ring. Brutal.
2 Comments:
As someone who suffers from occasional hemorrhoid flare-ups, I don't think I could swallow a diamond ring.
Did I share too much?
Fictional pirates and cowboys tend to be so far removed from the real thing, but then again, so are fictional secret agents, soldiers, robots, presidents, doctors, police officers, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.
The only thing fiction always gets right are aliens. They're all blood-thirsty locusts out to leech our natural resources to fuel their armada of battleships.
That's a big 10-4. And don't forget those lousy, stinking Greys--harvesting our organs, mutilating our cattle, administering anal probes (one Grey anal probe, and you'll be a-beggin' for a bowl of diamond rings and a spoon, Arlo). They think they're so hot, with their deteriorating advanced technology and atrophied digestive systems.
And those stoopid Men In Black (and I'm not talking about nice old T.L. Jones and the Fresh Prince--I mean the REAL M.I.B.'s), throwing their weight around. Makes me so mad...
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