Category: Talk Like A Pirate Day

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Things got so bad, he ran away and joined the circus.
For his first three months, George did nothing but shovel animal poop.
Then, when a baby elephant was born with huge ears, George got an idea.
“I will teach it to fly!” he said. “Then, I can stop shoveling animal poop and be famous!”
“For the last time, no,” said the ringmaster. “This is as dumb as your flying baby giraffe, flying baby bear, and flying baby lion ideas!”
George ran away and joined his old pirate ship.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
So, while attacking a merchant ship off the coast of Bangalla, he fell overboard.
Pygmies dragged him ashore and nursed him back to health.
“Do you swear an oath to vanquish piracy and slavery?” asked the pygmies.
“Sure,” said George. “Yeah, okay.”
They showed him a cave and gave him some purple pajamas and a black mask.
They didn’t fit so well, and when George tried to put on the mask, he clumsily fell out of the cave.
And that’s how George became “The Ghost Who Falls A Lot.”

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
The captain thought that George’s problem was a matter of procedure and discipline.
He made George clock in and clock out for his shift and write detailed reports about what he did while on the clock.
George wasn’t good at reading and writing, so the reports were incomprehensible.
George ended up having to explain what he tried to write, which took even longer.
Giving George no time to do his actual pirate job.
“It’s all in the metrics,” said George, scribbling up another meaningless, illegible report for the day.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In spite of George’s lack of expertise in piracy, piracy is a rare skill in the labor market.
So, even a pirate that’s not very good can command a decent living doing it.
In an era of full employment, George’s prospects became even brighter.
When the captain complained about George’s mistakes or incompetence, he had to consider how hard it would be to replace George.
So, he shrugs and fishes George back out of the water.
“Try not to fall overboard again, please,” says the captain.
“Aye aye, sir.”

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He spent too much time lying on the deck while poodles romped all around him.
The captain of the ship thought that this was a waste of time, but the captain’s mother was the ship’s chef, and she liked to adopt and raise poodles.
Any time he’d get mad about it with George, his mother would show up and say how much the poodles loved the attention.
When provisions got down to hardtack and water, the poodles vanished.
While the captain’s mother wept, George begrudgingly went back to work.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When it started to rain during a sea battle, he threw up his hands and shouted “TIME OUT!”
Men on both sides of the conflict lowered their swords, and George ordered the decks to be covered with a tarp.
For three hours, the men sat around, sipped their tea, and a few did belly-slides on the wet tarp.
“Do you think we’ll need to postpone?” said George to the other captain.
Five minutes later, the sun came out, and they rolled back the tarp to begin fighting once more.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He heard that the great pirate Blackbeard put gunpowder in his rum, so he thought that if he put gunpowder in his rum, that would make him great, too.
George snuck into the ship’s powder hold and grabbed a bag of powder.
The problem was, he’d grabbed a bag of saltpeter that hadn’t yet been mixed with sulfur and charcoal.
When George poured it into his rum, well, let’s just say that George wasn’t very good at something else.
“No wonder why Blackbeard doesn’t have any kids,” said George.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Which is why he would get excited when the captain would take the whole crew to an off-site team-building fun day.
“No plundering and pillaging!” cheered George. “Yay!”
The last time, they went to a bowling center, which also had pool tables, darts, and other activities.
The problem was, the pirates with peglegs couldn’t bowl because of the shoes, the pirates with hook hands couldn’t shoot pool, and the pirates with eyepatches couldn’t throw darts.
Tempers flared, fights broke out, and they ended up plundering and pillaging the place.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He also wasn’t a very good poet.
He’d write his poetry, put on a beret, and sneak into coffeehouses and dives to read them.
People would smoke their joints, sip their cappuccinos, and snap their fingers.
Nobody would judge. Everyone got the same snaps.
So, George didn’t know he wasn’t a very good poet, and he had no incentive to improve.
Nobody took him under their wing to teach him about good poetry.
And he got so full of himself, he didn’t listen to anybody else’s work to learn.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
That didn’t matter much to Werner Herzog, the famous documentary filmmaker.
He followed George around with a camera, capturing the life of a typical pirate at sea.
Or, in George’s case, in the sea, as he had a habit of tripping and falling overboard.
When the ship encountered a cargo vessel, ripe for plunder, the only two men who weren’t fighting were Werner and George.
“Just sharpening my cutlass,” said George, drawing his sword against a whetstone over and over, looking over the rail nervously at the battle’s progress.