George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
These days, it’s all about branding. Social media presence.
George dominated the Pirate scene online, with millions of followers on Twitter and Instagram.
His YouTube videos were all over Facebook.
Maybe that’s why he wasn’t a very good pirate.
While all the other pirates looted and pillaged, George snapped selfies and rocked the #pirate hashtag.
Once, he swung his selfie stick instead of his cutlass, and he broke his smartphone.
“At least you’re finally looting,” said the captain as he watched George steal a replacement and swap sim cards.
Author: R.
George tells tales
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
While his shipmates were fending off a deadly sea monster, George was at the childrens’ hospital, entertaining patients with pirate stories.
The kids loved it when George showed up and told his stories.
His shipmates, not so much.
Sea monsters are even more dangerous when you fight them shorthanded, and as clumsy as George was, he could have been useful as a decoy or bait.
In the middle of a story, George’s phone rang.
He flicked it to vibrate mode.
“Sorry about that,” said George. “Now where was I?”
George the tenant
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He also wasn’t a very good tenant at Miss Mapleton’s Boarding House.
Every morning, George used up all the hot water.
The sink’s drain was always clogged with his beard stubble.
Thank goodness Mr. Grant in seven was a plumber.
He also left the seat up. And never, ever flushed.
Miss Mapleton was always warning George that if he kept this up, she’d throw him out.
But she never did.
Because as bad as a tenant George was, at least he paid his rent in full, and on time.
Weekly Challenge #916 – Stolen
LIZZIE
“Nothing but a crappy painting. A bunch of odd flowers on a dark blue background,” she said. The neighbor advised her to have an expert look at it. “Preposterous!” She knew her art. So, she tossed it in the dumpster. When it was dark, the neighbor grabbed it. He wasn’t stealing it! He had it appraised and… it was worth a million bucks! He bought a new house and a new car and told everyone he had won the lottery, just in case. Oh, and he still drives by the old house to check the neighborhood dumpster for crappy artwork.
RICHARD
Stolen!
I’ve been a victim of identity theft.
Some lowlife criminal is pretending to be me. They go through my trash at night, and somehow they’ve stolen my credit card details and the passwords to my social media.
To be honest, I’m not that bothered about it.
In fact, I’ve been leaving personal information for them to discover for quite some time now.
My credit has been maxxed out for years, my social reputation is at an all-time low, everyone’s chasing me for money.
Now, I just blame the scammers.
I’m perfectly happy to let them take on my failings!
LIZZIE
Stolen
We’re now knee deep in November and no further forward with the case. A case so clueless it doesn’t even have a catchy name yet, just an awful lot of missing women.
Inside is brighter than outside, the mood lower than the cloud on the moors. Oddly, it feels like the sun coming out when after discovering another body we realise he’s taken a necklace from this girl too.
It’s not much is it? But it’s something, another piece in the puzzle and progress of sorts. Our man takes souvenirs. We just need to find him and his treasure chest.
SERENDIPIDY
Sixteen years they kept me chained in the cellar.
My youth, stolen, thanks to their evil deeds.
They’re dead now, by my hand, and nobody holds me responsible. They had it coming, they say, deserved everything they got.
I’m happy to let them believe that.
But the truth of the matter is that they never locked me in the cellar at all. I made it all up – a story to justify my actions, and everybody believed me.
My youth wasn’t stolen at all. I had a great time growing up, I just hated my parents.
So, I stole their lives.
TOM
All the Presidents Kids
He always knew the election was stolen. That other dick had been a better dick by rigging the total in the city. I was child the time that happen. I was a very young man the second time, but a well place young man. I was on loan to Joe Woods group was a single propose. To route the calls from down state. IT was simple hack that surely would be fixed in the next election but not that night. The numbers came in late the so the Chicago machine could offset total, Nixon take the state, wins the election.
NORVAL JOE
Sabrina pulled out her phone and called her grandmother. “Hi Granny…”
She held the phone away from her ear and Billbert could hear the old woman shouting.
“No,” Sabrina said. “No one had stolen my phone. It’s a long story, but we’re in town and Billbert’s eyesight’s been stolen, and half his hearing.”
She put the phone back to her ear as her grandmother had stopped screaming.
“Yes. I know that’s a classic Black Knight’s move, but I can’t do anything about it. Can you come straighten him out?”
She put her phone away. “Grandma Buhmilda will be right here.”
PLANET Z
The Bleeb are an ancient race.
Once rulers of a massive empire, reduced to wanderers of the galaxy, searching for the remnants of their shattered homeworld.
Scanning… testing… analyzing chemical signatures…
Piece by piece, they reappropriate their planet.
Gathering asteroids, hurling the massive rocks through hyperspace channels.
Lifeless planets to shatter and sift.
It is when there is life that the moral question rises.
The Bleeb are honest brokers, and offer fair compensation.
Transport to new worlds. Terraforming technology, vast eons of knowledge to impart.
Some resist.
Just more to sift through when the Bleeb shatter their worlds to dust.
George on the movie set
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
This didn’t matter to the production assistant who was rounding up extras for the latest Disney pirate movie.
“Who wants twenty dollars a day?” he shouted. “And a hot lunch, too!”
George and his shipmates waved their cutlasses around, growling and scowling, doing whatever the director told them to do.
“CUT!” shouted the director, and he walked up to George. “This one’s playing Angry Birds on his phone.”
So, George was fired from the movie.
Which was a good thing. Everyone else got food poisoning from the catered lunch.
George the poet
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He wasn’t a very good poet either.
He tried to write a poem about pirates,
But nothing rhymes well with pirate.
Well, maybe admire it. And retire it.
“What about other languages?” said the captain. “Spanish for pirate is pirata. Lots of Spanish words rhyme with it.”
“I don’t know Spanish,” said George.
“In French, pirate is… pirate,” said the captain. “But I’m sure there’s lots of French words that rhyme with it.”
“I don’t know French, either,” said George.
Nobody told George that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme.
George the careful
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Other pirates would drink all night, and then wreck their rowboats on the way back to the ship.
George usually ended up as a designated rower, or he’d call an Uber rowboat, even though he never drank excessively like others did.
His shipmates mocked him for his cautiousness.
“You’re a pirate!” they shouted. “You’re supposed to be drunk and careless!”
George stuck to his routine, and he got back to the ship safely.
Just in time to throw life preservers out to his reckless shipmates, thrashing in the water.
George and the zoo
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
The captain quickly realized that George wasn’t very good at sailing, pillaging, and fighting.
So he made George the Morale Officer.
George spent his time making fresh lemonade for his mateys, asking them how they were feeling, and arranging activities such as Game Night.
A trip to the zoo, however, turned out disastrously.
The pirates ransacked the zoo, cooking and eating the various endangered animals housed there.
They woke up from their drunken stupors, locked in the gorilla cages.
George crossed out “Gorillas” from the sign and wrote “Pirates.”
George the online pariah
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When he answers pirate-related questions on Quora and Yahoo Answers, his posts are vague and confusing.
And people downvote him on Reddit all of the time.
The editors of WikiPedia routinely roll back his updates and changes.
And I’ve yet to see an instructional video of his on YouTube that hasn’t been a magnet for thumbs down and nasty comments.
George mostly stays offline these days, communicating with family through a email and a private Facebook profile.
He flings another bird in Angry Birds and watches the structures collapse.
George and Drake’s equation
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He wasted a lot of time on things like Fermi’s Paradox.
“If there’s intelligent life in the universe, where is it?” asked George.
He drew up Drake’s Equation on a chalkboard and played with the numbers.
His conclusions were grim.
“By my calculations, there should be absolutely no intelligent life in the universe.”
“That’s nice,” said the captain. “But if you haven’t noticed, we’re trying to take over a Spanish galleon. Mind picking up a cutlass and helping?”
George picked up his cutlass and lowered the “civilization survivability” variable.