George plays baseball

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When he wasn’t pirating, he was playing amateur baseball.
He’d been hoping to be discovered by a scout, but the scouts all knew he was just as bad a baseball player as he was a pirate.
The rare times he managed to get to first base, he’d try to steal second, and get caught.
So, after the game, he’d steal second, third, home, first, the pitcher’s rubber, and pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down.
He never played professionally. Instead, he umpired.
The bribes he collected were quite generous.

George Titters

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Every time someone said “booty” he’d giggle.
“What’s so damn funny?” yelled the captain.
“He said booty,” said George, trying not to laugh.
“What are you, three?” said the captain. “Now go swab the poopdeck.”
George laughed out loud and earned a night in the brig.
George made an audio tape with those words, and he ran it in a loop while he slept.
But he listened to it way too loud, temporarily deafening him for a month.
At least he stopped laughing at the words booty and poopdeck.

George raises a baby

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He once kidnapped a baby from a wealthy couple and held it for ransom.
While the parents negotiated with George, he had to change diapers, do midnight feedings, buy clothes, help with homework, and do everything else necessary in raising a child.
The negotiations took twenty-two years, ending when the kid graduated college.
“It was cheaper to let you raise him and then pay the ransom,” his parents said.
Their grown son, raised to be a pirate, made his parents walk the plank.
“That’s my boy!” said George proudly.

George knows Spanish

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Pirates need a variety of skills to survive on the seas, and George’s skillset could best be described as “fake it till you make it.”
“Sure, I know Spanish,” said George, crossing the gangplank to the galleon they’d just captured.
He looked over the manifest and pointed out what to take and what to dump.
“Keep pants on your head and watch turtles!” George shouted at the captured crew, as they watched crates of gold go overboard while George had barrels of preserved corpses hauled out of the hold.

George and the Medic

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He was a decent medic, though, so even if he couldn’t fight well, it was after the fight that George shone.
He’d tear strips of cloth to use as bandages, heating the edge of a knife to burn wounds shut.
“We wouldn’t need a medic if we had you fighting alongside us,” said the captain.
Which George tried to take to heart, and he fought as well as he could.
Until the captain was wounded. “Medic!” shouted the captain.
George sheathed his sword and picked up a medical bag.

George and the Turing Test

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Just like the Turing test, where judges try to determine whether they are chatting with the human or computer, the Blackbeard test challenges judges to determine whether they are chatting with a human or a pirate.
Scientists stuffed George into a box, and he passed notes through a slot.
George did his best to be convincing, but at the end of the experiment, the judges thought that the box with the computer in it was a real pirate.
The captain hired the computer and left George in the box.

George is not a real pirate

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Whenever he was in Orlando, Florida, he would take a trip to Disney World and get hired as a cast member.
“The robot pirates break down a lot, so we put rubber masks on humans who pretend to be robots.”
The rubber masks were hot, and after six hours, George began to hallucinate.
He sang and waved his sword and then dropped his pants and took a dump in the ride’s waterway.
The video went viral on YouTube, and George went back to being a not very good pirate.

George and the devices

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He has a habit of buying all kinds of electronic devices.
The ones you see advertised on late-night cable television, or the backs of magazines.
They were cheap, flimsy, and broke easily.
George put the broken devices in a box, and he would wind the chords and tie them with rubber bands.
Not that he ever bothered to get them repaired.
Or remember which cord went which device.
He just bought another cheap and flimsy device to replace it.
Which would break, and he’d toss it in the box.

George fixes the ship

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He was pretty handy at repairs, though, considering all the experience he had with shipwrecks and battle damage.
George would go around the ship, fixing beams and boards, hammering nails, and plugging leaks.
Then he’d sew up the holes in the sails, and replace any frayed ropes in the rigging.
When George was done, he’d go back into the diving bell and call the captain to be raised to the surface.
“Okay, everything’s fixed,” said George. “Now how are we going to bring it back up to the surface?”

George the lifeguard

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When he wasn’t being a pirate, he volunteered as a lifeguard at the local beach.
“I know there’s no pay, but if I rescue someone, can I ransom them for a reward?” asked George.
“Sure, whatever,” said the county commissioner. “As long as they don’t drown.”
George racked up an impressive safety record at the beach.
There were some complaints about the whole ransom thing.
“All I did was threaten cut off a finger or two,” said George. “And maybe cut off part of an ear. But nobody drowned.”