Have Pirates peaked?

I'm a little ambivalent about tomorrow's celebration of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. There are a few reasons, some personal, most not. Here are my thoughts:

1) Right off the top, I confess that I am still a little hurt by the utter failure of Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day (June 2). I know I made many errors in the concept -- the Bowery Boys and Slip himself, the late Leo Gorcey, are hardly remembered anymore. Plus, even for those who remember the many Bowery Boys movies fondly, talking like Slip Mahoney is not simple. Slip's hard-knocks New York accent is easy enough to imitate, but his constant stream of malapropisms is difficult to replicate off the cuff. Malapropisms are hard! You have be to clever to sound that dumb. As I wrote before, any fool can go ARRR and Avast ye, but it's tricky to come up with lines like "You're not holding me here as an accomplishment to the crime because I never accomplished anything in my life, so what's the charge?" I blame myself for thinking we were up to the challenge.

2) The failure of Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day (January 24) to catch on should have taught me that the "Talk Like" holiday concept is not infinitely expandable. I don't even hear much about International Talk Like William Shatner Day (March 22) anymore.

3) And I don't think that Talk Like a Pirate Day is even what it used to be. The founders don't update the Webpage very often. Krispy Kreme used to give out free doughnuts on the big day, but there's no mention of it on the company site now. Dunkin' Donuts hasn't done anything for it, I believe, in five years. The day's biggest supporter, humor writer Dave Barry, has been missing for weeks, dealing with a serious family medical issue. (Maybe he'll make an appearance tomorrow.) Childhood Cancer Support in Australia does use the day as a fund-raising opportunity, so I hope for their sake it is not disappearing.

I don't know if any offices are doing employee fun events based on the day, but in the current sensitivity-to-the-point-of-explosion atmosphere, it would seem reckless to celebrate anything relating to a people known for intemperance, violence, thievery, and sexual incontinence. Hey, I'm glad I'm not working in an office anymore!

4) Finally, are pirates what they had been? The main tent pole for the pirate popularity is the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. The first movie came out in 2003, and they've been getting stupider ever since. While there was a lot of smarts in the first film, it got progressive sacrificed for looks and set-pieces as it went. I bailed after #3. They've all made money, but no one knows if there will be a #6 at this point. It may be stuck in Development Hell. If it actually is made, it may be dumber than the dumbest Bowery Boys movie -- so dumb that it will cause a explosion of stupid that will make the Kraken look like a Chiweenie puppy, taking all the fun of piracy with it.

Plus, the Pittsburgh Pirates are in fourth place in the NL Central as of this morning.

So all this is rather distressing. But, of course, I will be ready tomorrow all the same.

What the hey -- Dunkin' Donuts might change its mind and hand out doughnuts. Doughnuts ahoy!

Where in the world are the Bowery Boys?

As we get even closer to Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day on June 2, the tension mounts... the streets of New York are a-sizzle with excitement!

The Wikipedia entry on the Bowery Boys (of which Slip Mahoney was the one true king) noted that the BBs' many film plots followed those of Abbott and Costello---when Bud and Lou did a Western, the Boys did a Western; when A&C did a haunted house, the Boys did a haunted house, and so on. I enjoyed Abbott and Costello films, but hey---they made only 36 movies; the Bowery Boys made 48. How many easy comedy ideas were floating around in that era? B movies were not nor expected to be dynamos of originality.

Anyway, the Bowery Boys got around a lot in those pictures, although they always played the same characters---unlike Abbott and Costello, who played different characters (who were exactly like Bud and Lou). Sometimes it required taking storytelling liberties. For example, in Bowery Buckaroos, the characters were transported to the Old West by virtue of the story being a dream of Sach's. In a later film (Hold that Hypnotist), a hypnotist uses past-life regression hypnosis to send the Boys on an adventure in piracy. (Note that Slip was out of the series by then, so there's no crossover between Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day and International Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

Most of the Bowery Boys films were typical New York-based crime stories (although fantasy elements were featured in several of them), but the Bowery Boys often hit the road, especially in later films. If this should come up in conversation on the big day, you might mention that Slip and the gang had many adventures outside the confines of the city:

Let's Go Navy! -- the Boys enlist in the Navy to find thieves that rob a charity and spend a year at sea
Loose in London -- the Boys go to London when Sach gets an inheritance
Paris Playboys -- the Boys go to Paris to find a missing professor
Jungle Gents -- the Boys go to Africa to find diamonds
Bowery to Bagdad  -- a genie transports Slip and Sach to Baghdad
Dig That Uranium -- the Boys go to the western U.S. to find uranium
Crashing Las Vegas -- the Boys win a trip to Vegas

They go to the mountains in Spook Chasers, but by then Slip was gone, so for our purposes we're leaving it off the list. Talk to us if there's ever a Talk Like Duke Covelske Day.

The Boys wound up enlisting in the Navy, Marines, Army, and the Air Force in their adventures, which would make them unique in the armed forces history of the U.S. The Coast Guard is probably pretty sore about being left out again.

So as you can see, Slip Mahoney was not only a tough New York street kid, but he was also something of a world traveler. He could mangle words from several languages, too, which might make him describe himself as something of a polygoat.

Time to constipate the wonder of Slip Mahoney again.

Time to start gettin' exacerbated, because we're coming up on the Second Annual Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day. Yes, Slip Mahoney Leo Gorcey's master of the malapropism, the Solon of the solecism, the only real chief of the Bowery Boys, with his Noo Yawk accent and his casual cartoon violence, is cerebrated on June 2, the day of Gorcey's death in 1969.

Mahoney was a well-meaning street punk, surrounded by dummies, who was willing to do anything to help those in need. He also spoke like he'd swallowed a dictionary, threw it up, and then memorized the remains. Malapropism is difficult to do well, but Gorcey carried it off for decades. Any fool can go "Arr Arr" "I be keelhaulin' ye" "Keep a weather eye on me doubloons" etc. on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day requires some thought.

You wouldn't wanna go off half-crocked.

We'll work on our malaprops as the big day draw closer. Right now, to get ready for June 2, you need to get yourself a Mahoney hat. Almost any brimmed hat will do, if you can fold up the front.

Just ask your local melonery for somethin' to cover your melon.

So let's all commiserate on this for a while, and see how we can inveigh the best ways to Slip Mahoneyize ourselves. Or else Slip'll slap us in the teeth.

Hoist the Jolly Roger! Or at least the Cheerful Roger.

Arrr, matey! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so get out there and start arrin' and threatenin' and droppin' the possessive determiner for the personal object pronoun, me hearties. We found some salty seadogs to show you how to get your ensemble together:

"Aaaarrrrr."

A lot---maybe most---of what we love about pirates we get from the movies, and from our romanticism about their freebooting ways on the open sea.

The movies have always enjoyed showing a sympathetic view of pirates, although before CGI it was really hard and expensive to do sea movies. Further, the movies have had to tone down the violence, scuzziness, rapine, and general bullying of the pirates---not to mention their weirdness. George MacDonald Fraser (of Flashman fame) in his 1988 tour de force The Hollywood History of the World, wrote:

At first glance, Hollywood and pirates would seem to be made for each other, but in fact they are not.... there is the plain fact that pirates---the real pirates of history---the Blackbeards and Morgans and Kidds and Calico Jacks---are too bizarre, too larger-than-life, too unreal for even the cinema. That they were real is irrelevant; their truth is too strange for fiction, and pantomime and Peter Pan have turned the grim reality into a comic figure which usually defies attempts to fashion it for conventional drama, or even melodrama.

Since he wrote we've had Jack Sparrow and his salty brethren, but such cartoony pirates are hardly different from Captain Hook. Ah, but they all long for the freedom of the Seven Seas.

The open sea has long been a symbol of freedom, but we know that actually being on the open sea requires a lot of discipline. It's freaking dangerous out there. So merchant sailors and navies have always had a reputation for strict discipline. Ah, but pirates! They were like democracy on the high seas, right? With compacts and contracts and settling things like men when necessary.

Well, maybe not so much. The thing about lawlessness is that it usually gets filled with something, and it's not usually something friendly. But worse, the pirates were not living the life that's free; they were living the life of a parasite, sucking life from their victims. Without the suckers running honest sailing ships there could be no pirates.

The people who started this holiday are well aware of all this, and know that their day is not focused on historical pirates, but fictional and hysterical pirates, all in good fun. And I think you should don your piratey apparel and go celebrate. Have some grog, sign up with the Dread Pirate Cruller, get your pirate name (mine is "Monkey Mate" Bob Barbossa), and annoy the bilge out of your coworkers.

But think about this: Next year, let's gear up to celebrate a real American hero, not a bunch of jerk pirates like the ones who were the victims of America's first naval butt-whupping. I'm talking about a guy with as distinctive a speech pattern as any pirate, a guy who exemplifies pluck and fellowship, but one who only ever engages in cartoon violence. Yes, folks, remember: June 2, 2015 is the Second Annual Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day. Mark your calendars! (Sorry: YER calendars!)