Category: Talk Like A Pirate Day

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.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He spent most of his day sitting in a deck chair, petting the ship’s cat while looking out at the ocean.
The ship’s cat was supposed to catch and eat the mice and rats in the hold, but it preferred to lay in George’s lap and sleep.
Every now and then, George would swab the deck.
The cat would curl up in George’s deck chair and nap.
After George finished swabbing the deck, George would pick up the cat, sit in his chair, and pet the cat some more.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Instead of fighting and looting and pillaging, he’d rub his eyes for a while, and then marvel at the strange colors and patterns that danced before his eyes.
“If you keep doing that, you’ll go blind,” said the captain.
“That’s what my mother said about other things,” said George. “And my eyesight is fine.”
Pretty soon, the entire crew were rubbing their eyes, and watching the strange colors and patterns dance around.
Well, except for the captain. Someone had to steer the ship and watch for vessels to raid.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When the captain asked him about Net Neutrality, George looked at the netting in the cargo hold and wondered what was so neutered about it.
“It just holds things in place when the seas are rough, right?” said George. “I’m not sure why so many people are so up in arms about this stuff.”
He tugged on the netting a bit to make sure that the cargo was secure, and he smiled proudly.
The captain made a note not to ask George about complicated social and political issues anymore.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
His grip wasn’t very strong, so he was always dropping his cutlass during swordfights.
And when he fired his pistols, the recoil would kick them up and out of his hands.
He tried to tape his sword and pistols to his hands, but that messed up his aim and made it hard to reload the pistols.
The captain gave George a boomerang.
George threw it, and it circled around and hit George in the back of the head, knocking him out.
“Good,” said the captain. “He’s such a complainer.”