Dinky DIY's Guide to Pirates

Fifteen men of the whole ship's list

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Dead and bedamned and the rest gone whist!

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

The skipper lay with his nob in gore

Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore And the scullion he was stabbed four times four

And there they lay, and the soggy skies Dripped down in up-staring eyes

In murk sunset and foul sunrise

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Good gracious who doesn’t get the bejeebies when they read that? Who doesn’t get a chill as their blood turns sea shanty salted? Ahh, who doesn’t wish to be a pirate?

Lurking ninjas, begone.

I met one the other day. She was grand. Shy was her name, but she was a walking comic strip of tats, so I doubt that it was an apt one... perhaps parody... piratey parody.

This be her.

There's been a lot of piratical happenings of late and I want my DIYers to be well informed land lubbers so here is Dinky DIY's Guide to Pirates;

Modern Day Buccaneers So you have the show stealing Somali pirates who terrorize the coast of west Africa these days and while probably no less terrifying than the classical pirates, I’d take a guess and say they were a bit light on the Shiver me Timbersness and heavy on the machine gunness. But apparently they still have a way with the ladies, as one modern day pirate told Time "Even now, pirates are marrying the most beautiful ladies, with nonstop dancing at weddings that go a couple of days." Good to see they be merry making with there pieces of eight. But then, wait a sec... The Huffington Post's John Hari says there's a bit more to this story .

Talk the Talk or Walk the Plank Australia doesn’t really do pirates, we are more a bushranging people (which is a whole other, and rather superior, artform) but we do participate in the official Talk Like A Pirate Day. September 19^th people, pencil it in. Information is here on yaaarrr.com “To err is human, but to arrr is pirate!” That just cracks me up.

DIY Guide to Pirate Speak:

• Only speak in the present tense. So it is "I be" "they be" as opposed to "I am" or "they are."
• Double up your adjectives. Don't say never, say "No nay ne'er!"* (see rule 4)
• Drop all "g's". Like "fightin'", "sailin'" smellin'".
• Drop your "v's" for advanced Pirate Speak. "ne'er", "o'er" and ye be ha'in' people strainin' to understand ye.

More here and here .

Swashbuckling Swedes In Sweden, they actually have a political party called The Pirate Party, which only earlier this month won 7.1 per cent of votes, taking one of Sweden's 18 seats in the European parliament. Founded in 2006 it owes its popularity to controversial laws adopted in Sweden that criminalise filesharing and authorise monitoring of emails. Membership shot up notably after a Stockholm court on April 17 sentenced four Swedes to a year in jail for running one of the world's biggest filesharing sites, The Pirate Bay. Methinks there’s still a bit of Viking boiling in their blood.

Mutiny on the Bounty Our pacific neighbours don’t really have much to report on the pirate front, but they do have a damn good tale of Mutiny... which is almost just as good.

Today Pitcairn Island bears that embarrassing stench of something not-quite-right buried under piles of shit-flinging and blame shifting. Kiddy rape will do that . But before the Pitcairners dirty laundrey was aired, they did have quite a romantic air about them. The descendants of mutinous sailors on the run from the law, they have their own Creole language spoken today, a mix of Tahitian and 18^th Century English which includes such gold expressions as, “We hypocrited ‘em.” Fletcher Christian, the mastermind, with his tiny band of rogues and Tahitian wives stumbled upon the island while seeking a hideout from a British Navy, who were after them for their efforts in heisting the good ship Bounty. The population exploded and many of the islanders were moved to settled on the bigger Norfolk Island nearby, bringing their cultural troubles with them. Mark Twain perhaps best summed up the root of the island people’s problems in his fiction from the 1903’s The Great Revolution in Pitcairn ,

“You speak of that young woman as your cousin; a while ago you called her your aunt.”

“Well, she is my aunt, and my cousin, too,” came the reply. “And also my step-sister, my niece, my fourth cousin, my thirty-third cousin, my forty-second cousin, my great-aunt, my grandmother, my widowed sister-in-law—and next week she will be my wife.”

Feisty Femmes You might have heard of the terrifying likes of lasses like stark mad Carribean pirate Anne Bonny but according to the good book Wikipedia, Australia has a grand dame of diabolical digressions! So, there we have Charlotte Badger originally of Worcestershire, England and sentenced to Australia for nicking a silk hanky... which was apparently to help out her hungry family. I fail to see how the hanky would have helped but anyhoo... Charlotte and her galpal Catherine Hegarty were on a ship with their boyfriends after serving their miserable sentences in Aussieland, convinced the blokes to mutiny and took off for NZ. So you see, kids, this is why you shouldn't copy Wikipedia for school assignments, use the references at the bottom of the article instead, otherwise you take the risk of announcing to the world Australia has its own female pirate when in fact, we clearly don't, the Kiwis do.

Johnny Come Lately It was widely reported that Johnny Depp was making the folks at Disney nervous on set during the his experimental redering of Jack Sparrow, who he says was based on Keith Richards. But arrrr, he surely championed the swoonmaking swashbuckler.

Ahhhh... I mean ARghhHHhhhrrrrrr!