Archive for May, 2010
Pirates of the Caribbean
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
The skull and crossbones flag wasn’t flying high with impunity like it used to but James considering himself lucky that at least the Red Cassandra wasn’t full of cannon balls in Davy Jones’ locker. The Royal Navies had put so many at the end of a rope. He didn’t like being out manned or out gunned.
The crew had finished repairing and caulking their hull after their last close call. Wind rustled through the palms on shore. The moon hung over its lonely reflection. One more quiet night in the hidden bay and then it was back to the shipping lanes to hunt. Easy prey was in such short supply.
Something whisked overhead, whistling like the mother of all cannon balls. Had the British found them, even here? No other cannonballs followed. James looked up in time to see a huge shooting star with fiery red tail streak across the sky and disappear over the trees. Fireworks? A thunderous crash came from beyond the trees followed by column of water.
“I seen it, Captain,” Billy cried from the crows nest. “A ship fell from the sky. And it was on fire!”
James ordered the Red Cassandra to the inlet on the other side of the island. In the shallows lodged between the sandbar and the reef was the wreck of the strangest ship he had ever seen. A sleek oval schooner with no sails. It was made of a glistening metal that looked like silver and gold.
James and Billy and some of the crew approached in the dingy.
“There’s no crew in here,” Billy said from inside the torn belly of the strange ship. “They must have abandoned. But wait, I think I found guns, Captain.”
James had an idea. He fired his rifle. The ball dinged harmlessly off the metal hull.
Then he ordered the crew to fire the Red Cassandra’s cannons. The cannonballs were easily repelled.
They spent the next weeks living on fresh fruit and fish and plating the Red Cassandra’s hull with the salvaged metal. They mounted the new guns in the cannon ports and the on the deck.
James mounted a strange device from the other ship’s bridge in front of the steering wheel. He wasn’t sure what it did but it seemed to be a map of the stars and that could prove useful. It cast the ship in a glow like artificial moonlight. He liked how ominous it made them look.
To the shipping lanes, Captain James ordered.
He raised the Jolly Roger. The men cheered. James smiled.
Let the Navy come, he thought. Looks the skull and cross bones will be flying high on these seas a while longer.
About These Urban Legends …
Monday, May 10th, 2010
As a public service, following please find some common misconceptions debunked.
1. Honey is not bee sperm. Honey is made entirely by female bees, only a minority of whom in a recent scientific study were found to be even very aroused while making it.
2. Cancer does not cure crabs. (The origins of this particular tall tale are obscure, but we speculate they may be astrological.)
3. Not only is Sarah Palin not the devil’s daughter, but as of recently the devil hasn’t even been taking her calls.
4. The World Health Organization, while it does involve doctors and is abbreviated WHO, has no official affiliation with Doctor Who. However, by coincidence it was run briefly by Tom Baker in 1983 after he won it in a poker game.
5. If you have sex 50,000 times, your brain does not automatically explode. However, in a recent poll of the small number of people who have actually tested this theory all respondents said they would have done it anyway.
6. No hot babes are searching the Web for you.
7. Area 51 in Southern Nevada does contain the corpse of an alien, but he is actually an illegal Mexican immigrant employed at the facility for a month and a half as a janitor before he was killed in an incident with one of the monsters that are kept there. The monster has a 1,400-year digestive cycle, so the corpse is still present on site, but there has been reluctance to retrieve it.
8. The world is not coming to an end in 2012. It is in fact coming to a beginning.