By John Geluardi
Don’t forget Friday, Sept. 19 is Talk Like A Pirate Day, which is just a shade less geekier than Talk Like A Jedi Day. The tradition started inauspiciously in 1996 when two overweight non-pirates were trying to shed a few pounds on the racquetball court. For some reason, the two began to encourage one another by using pirate slang. They eventually rechristened themselves John “Ol Chumbucket” Baur and Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers and have written two pirate books, “Pirattitude”, and “The Pirate Life; Unleashing Your Inner Buccaneer.” Yikes!
But just because the two guys who started Talk Like a Pirate Day are overweight and dedicated one of their books to their mothers, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy yourself for the day. In fact we at the SF Weekly suggest you don’t just talk like a pirate, but embrace the entire pirate ethos. You should drink lots of rum and start a mutiny at work. If your boss doesn’t like it… make him/her walk the plank… or, give ‘em a good keelhauling or something like that.
Or you could shanghai a band of blaggards and sea dogs to take over one of those motorized cable cars. Then with everybody waving cutlasses from an improvised poop deck, you could scare beer truck drivers into pulling over so your band of brigands can pillage some booty from them.
Then, once your crew is good and liquored up, you can aim the prow of the fake cable car in the direction of a cheap strip joint where the old salts can hurl pirate-like pickup lines at some poor career stripper who has heard them all a thousand times before. Lines like “I'd love to drop anchor in your lagoon,” or “how'd you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?” and the all time favorite “that’s some treasure chest you’ve got there.”
Ahoy!
