Mission

Yeah, I second that. In fact, I would say the involvement and relationships vastly outweighs any benefit you're going to get just by being a member. It's the same with any organization really. Couple WIIFM with You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours. (It's human nature.)

That is definitely not going to help. (I thought you were coming up with a new topic for this forum.)

Following your original link leads to a page of belt buckles followed by 1,278 additional pages of stuff. I tried a search for fobs on the Costume Institute search and it said there were 38 results but only showed two, neither of which seemed to be what you were talking about. (Both looked like watch fobs to me.) My suggestions is that if you want to see what ladies wore on riding habits, check out some of the period pics Captain Sterling posts. It seems to me I have seen riding habits in there. [Edit] Oh, wait, my bad. I just saw your comment on the page numbers... Here's a direct link to 27. They kind of look like something a lady would have to me. They're certainly not watch chains.

Chrispy, I would never yank your fob. (Trust me.)

That was supposed to be humor. It's a pretty sorry attempt, but it was based on the phrase "fob off" which I think is funny. So I'll just sit here and giggle to myself every time I read it.

Funny, I really don't find it addictive. It's fun, but not "Gotta have more!" You know what was addictive? The Pretender. The first season was awesome. They went a little bit overboard with the Center and all the secrets and family ties between characters and similar mythos crap, but it really hooked me. I even bought that one. (I still haven't watched the last episode. I hate being left in the air on a cliff-hanger.)

It's an insult. As in, "You slack-jawed, ignominious fob!" or "Fob off, you fobbing fobster!" Actually, I think a fob, at least in common parlance is a little decorative thing you attach to something. Like that shiny silver emblem cut out of metal featuring a girl of anatomically absurd Barbie™ proportions sitting sideways that you can attach to your key ring or the little leather thing that attaches to your coat's zipper pull so that it can come apart when you pull on it to many times. Those are fobs. Oh, it's also a watch chain.

It's part of my charm. (It's called rejuvenating, not necromancing!)

Ah, a timely topic. I found it a bit differently (although essentially the same and even more amusing): "Then haling away S.W. we came abreast with Cape Horn the 14th Day of February, where we chusing of Valentines, and discoursing of the Intrigues of Women, there arose a prodigious Storm, which did continue till the last day of the Month, driving us into the lat. of 60 deg. and 30 min. South, which is further than ever any Ship hat sailed before South; so that we concluded the discoursing of Women at Sea was very unlucky, and occasioned the Storm." (Crowley, p. 6-7) Interesting that the holiday was even thought to be observed shipboard.

I looked for a generic topic on battle prep and couldn't find one, so I thought I'd just create a catch all topic. At present, I am reading Abraham Crowley's journal Crowley's Voyage Round the Globe as included in William Hacke's A collection of original voyages (1699). Crowley served with Dampier and Lionel Wafer under Bartholomew Sharp. Here, he is talking about a Dutch East Indiaman preparing for battle when the spot the ship Crowley is on. I thought the description was sort of neat. "Most of the Men were got on shoar, but seeing a strong Ship standing in toward the Road, they instantly repaired all on board, clapping a pring upon the Cable, heaved her broad-side to us, strook out her Ports slow, and presently running out her lower tier of Guns, was ready to receive us; who, by this time, being got something too near him, and seeing so many Guns and Men [later learned to be 400 Men and 50 guns], whereas we had no more than 8 guns and 52 Men, we thought it more advisable to bear away before the Wind, the Hollander at the same time sending 10 shot after us, but all in vain, for we got presently to Sea again." (Crowley, p. 3) I do wonder what a pring is.

I write this success newsletter every month and I always include quotes related to the topic I write about. This whole discussion sorta' kinda' reminds me of some favorites... "Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained." –Marie Curie "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours." - Ayn Rand "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." -Calvin Coolidge "Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable." -Helen Adams Keller "People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." - George Bernard Shaw "Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." –Mark Twain "Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting." - Katherine Hepburn

Got the gibbet! It appears to be the same as the last one, it was double boxed, which is always nice and it was a little bit cheaper than the last one. $175 shipped. Anybody else want to make one? Hmmm? Here's a Bucky skeleton you can get on eBay...according to the title it's a PIRATE SPECIAL! :angry:

So was that the story line? The BI Buccaneers sneaked up on you guys and blasted you? I was firing cannon on the fort wall and didn't see it.

This pic is awesome:

I have an exercise I created for one of my trainings (Do You Want More?) that can help you to research your mind regarding your "purpose." You'll find it in .PDF here. It's a pretty simple exercise, but it may help you to identify trends that hint at possible future directions. On the flip side, recognize that the grass is always greener. I remember hearing a story about a woman who attended a piano concert by an amazing pianist. At a party afterward, she approached the pianist and said, "I'd give anything to be able to play like you." The pianist replied, "No you wouldn't." The woman was taken aback and the pianist explained how he practiced every day for 4 to 6 hours (or something like that) and he had been playing and practicing the piano since he was a child. Indeed, the woman wouldn't give anything after all. I think we often see someone else doing something we consider amazing, but fail to consider all the hours of work that go into being able to do whatever it is we're watching. The more effortless and fascinating something looks, the more likely I've found it to be that the details are often tedious and painstaking to complete. (Be careful what you wish for.) In one of my trainings, I tell people not to bother worrying about what people will think of them in the future or even now for the most part. There are only a limited number of things you can do to control your reputation. Because your reputation isn't a unified thing - it's something located in each individual who has an experience of you. You don't have one reputation, you have thousands or more - your reputation is located in each person who has an idea about you and they're all completely different. If one of those people decides to sit down and write a book about you, that may form something of a unified picture, but even then...everyone who reads it will form an opinion. Instead, you just have to be honest about who you are and try not to spend a lot of time worrying about or (worse) trying to craft an image. (There are many who will disagree with me on that point and that's fine with me.) As for the death thing, I have used that as an exercise in trainings as well. It's an oldie but a goodie. "Imagine you'll be dead in 6 months. What do you want to do between now and then?" Naturally, the result of this exercise is to tell people. "These are the things you should be doing now."

Someone asked me via PM whether my PiP Web page was done yet which gives me a chance to whinge. The answer is: no. I was working on the main pages yesterday. I have three of probably 10 finished. I find I can do about two or three pages a day - they take between two and three hours a piece depending on how complex they are. There are also several of the extra pages yet to do. I wasn't able to get to the rest of the Callahan photos until today, so now I have to sift through them to find the pics I want for the third battle and some stuff on Sunday. I have about 27 extra (or Easter Egg) pages at present and I want to put together 3 or 4 more. The challenge of this process is the design and layout. Particularly in regard to photos which often require editing (yes, I do edit photos for various reasons - usually to remove unwanted elements or make the pic fit better in the space I have for it). There is also the process of determining sizes and cutting them to showcase elements I want, placing them, writing captions and then often re-writing the journal text so that everything fits correctly. I realize that reading about the details of my web page construction is about as interesting as watching cheese rot, but I just want to explain that it's more than just throwing text and photos on a web page. So please be patient. As I said somewhere else, it won't be done before the end of this month. I'll let everyone know when it's done, I promise.

I think a good tankard has a dent or twenty in it. (Unless it's wood.) Every dent tells a story...

Stynky stole mine! Well, that's actually not true. He just said he did and then he sent me a whole bunch of other people's tankards. Bastidge! Here's mine: Glass bottomed, so I don't get pressed. I bought it off a little old pirate who filled it with rum for me for $20. (Stynky's pissed because he wanted to steal it and I caught him.)

I updated my desktop at work with Nicole Adreyko's photo from PiP. There's nothing like a Key West sunset...

As regards parasites, the surgeon did mostly nothing. There was no connection between insects and disease by the doctors of the time. So they appear to have been regarded as a necessarily evil (on ships and in towns and everywhere else during period). “It is difficult for us, nurslings of a soft age, to put ourselves in the old sailor-man’s place; to picture the life and turn of mind and thought of these unlettered fighters, starving or subsisting for weeks together on rotten meat and rum, flogged with a rope’s end at a tyrant captain’s whim, sore and bloated with scurvy and syphilis, scabrous with lice and the itch. The natural recourse of such men’s minds was drink, for that made merry men of poor tortured beasts.” (Eloesser, Leo, “Pirate and Buccaneer Doctors”, Annals of medical history, p. 52) “It may seem strange to us that for centuries lice and fleas were regarded as ‘just one of those things’: their elimination as a domestic pest was not finally achieved until better washing facilities became part and parcel of daily life. Apart from their nuisance value, lice were, and still are, carriers of the dreaded typhus, about which more will be said later on.” (Thrower, William Rayner, Life at Sea in the Age of Sail, p. 83) “…and every evening after we left work we was shut up in this dark stinking hole [in a Portofarino Castle], in which we were terrified with chinches (some call them bugs), which bit us and made our flesh come out in bunches, and lice we had in abundance; so lousy we were that the lice made a prey of us…. We were several nations of us together, and all lousy, and hardly time to kill them. When we had but a little time in the day, off went our clothes and to killing of lice, so that we were seldom idle; for the Turks’ opinion was that when we were idle we would be contriving how to make our escape: so by keeping us always employed would prevent the danger.” ” (Coxere, Edward, A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World in the Years 1708 to 1711, p. 89) In fact, quacks took great advantage of this discomfort to make a quick buck: "In several issues of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette in 1731 there appeared an advertisement inserted by Franklin’s own mother-in-law, the Widow Read, who at the time was living at the home of her recently-married daughter and son-in-law: …the Widow READ, removed from the upper End of Highstreet to the New Printing Office near the Market, continued to make and sell her well-known Ointment for the ITCH, with which she has cured abundance of People in and about this City for many Years past. It is always effectual for that purpose, and never fails to perform the Cure speedily. It also kills or drives away all Sorts of Lice in once or twice using. It has no offensive Smell, but rather a pleasant one; and may be used without the least Apprehension of Danger, even to a sucking Infant, being perfectly innocent and safe. Price as a Gallypot containing an Ounce; which is sufficient to remove the most inveterate Itch, and render the Skin clear and smooth… The exact composition of the Widow Read’s ointment is not now known, but it is virtually certain that the contents of her gallypots- and the most successful anti-scabies salves sold by the other quacks of the time- depended on their effectiveness of a high sulfur content." (Williams, Guy, The Age of Agony, p. 197-8)

Um. . . who's belt am I wearing? While working on my web page and sorting through the hundreds of photos I copied, I found the answer to this one. (Children, shield your eyes.) (Photo Credit: Lily Alexander) The two questions that come to my mind are: 1) Why did Jessi feel the need to give you her belt? and 2) How did she ever get it back?

“The most common Simples with us in England are Comfry, Bugle, Ladies-mantle, Agrimony, Saniaclæ, Pauls-betony, Fluellen, Perwinkle, Mugwort, Plantane, Horse-tail, Adders-tongue, Avens, Cinquefoil, Wild-tansie, Vervine, Ground-ivy, Golden-rod, Herb-trinity, Centory, St. Johns-wort, Snake-weed, Knot-grass, Mouse-ear, Yarrow, Scordium, Strawberry leaves and roots, Tormentil, Bistort, Valerian, Red roses &c. Some of these are made choice of to be boiled in Water, or White wine, with an addition of Honey: of which sort you have sufficient examples in the Decoctum traumaticum of the Pharmacop. Lond. Their principal use is in Wounds of the Thorax and Abdomen: yet they are frequently prescribed in all great Wounds. Sometimes also, if the Disease run out to a length, we add Guaiacum, Sarsa, and Scorbutical Medicines. There are likewise Powders made of Crab’s-eyes, Coral, Nutmeg. &c. and Electuraries of some of the forewaid Roots and Herbs beaten up with these Powders.” (Wiseman, p. 347)

“This I have seen often in some of the Dunkerkers at Sea, who drank extraordinarily, and were full of drink at the time of their Sea fights. I could scarce ever cure any of them without allowing them Wine; and thereby their Spirits were kept up, and I had the liberty to bleed them as I thought fit. When these kind of people eat as plentifully as they drink, they then upon a sudden change of Diet labour under a Crapula [ Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking], and are subject to Fainting, or have Colick, Dysuria, &c. and if the Wound happen in the Abdomen, it gives a suspicion (to those that are not well skilled in the Symptoms of Wounds) to think that it raiseth from the penetration of the Wound, where there is no such thing; and so by the perseverance in those Rules of the Patient suffers. It hath been a common Saying, A Hair of same Dog, and thought that Brandy-wine is a common relief of such. What then must become of such a one, __ after a hard drinking for many months together, if he chance in heat of drink to be wounded, and from that time his Chirurgeon condemn him to Ptisan for a week together, nay two days? Will he not faint and languish, and his Wounds become indigested and inflamed? You may laugh at my pleading for them: but I hope you will consider I am a Water-drinker the while.” (Wiseman, p. 346-7)

I would argue everyone's motives are always selfish. Even if doing something (or in this case, not doing it) just gives you a feeling of personal satisfaction or a feeling that you're serving God who will reward you in the afterlife or the greater good or whatever other rationalizing poison you choose - you're still basically doing it for yourself. A very wise man taught me that. (And my Social Psych book sort of backed it up. The officious explanation given by "science" is quivering and tentative, however. No sense in upsetting the cultural norm.) The only two apparently altruistic reasons I can think of for not having children off the top of my head is impact on the environment and over-population. Each is intrinsically selfish vis-a-vis the human race. Restraining one's self from contributing to the local pop. is an effort to insure that the human race will survive. (One which is intrinsically flawed because of its over-focus on a few factors to the exclusion of many, many others. Particularly technology - defined here as new ways of doing things. Predictions of the impending doom caused by over-population actually began in the mid 18th century. None of them have come anything close to being right.) Not "wrecking" the environment by saving it from too many folks tromping around and polluting is an effort to save the environment for humans. What constitutes "saving the environment" depends very much on your perspective. The earth has spent a lot more time being inhospitable to human life (by an estimated factor of more than a 1000 times) than hospitable to it. If we change it, making it inhospitable once again, the earth will survive just fine without us. In fact, if we do it right, I think the cockroaches will be most pleased. (Presuming, of course, that cockroaches can feel pleasure.) I would also argue that each are examples of doing things to feel good about yourself for saving the human race - the one that you apparently want to selfishly (from a societal perspective) remove your genes from. (Ironic, isn't it? ) But I digress; I never implied that having children was not selfish nor did I imply that other people deciding not to have them was or wasn't selfish. (Although I just took care of that one now, didn't I?) I said my motivations are selfish. I don't want children because they require time and money to properly nurture - two things which I would rather spend elsewhere. Plus you throw all your privacy out the window in one 9 month step and I do so love my privacy. So this makes my reasons for not wanting children selfish, just as I said. (And I'm good with that.) Lifespan and Social Psych would argue that most people have children because we are driven to maintain our species. (That's downright Darwinian at its core.) As for reasons given in surveys...I don't think most people really do know why they do most things. We have reasons we give ourselves when we ask for them, but that doesn't mean they're right. I suggest we have other, subconscious reasons that never see the light of day for the most part. (While I'm name-dropping, let me stick Freud in there for good measure.) However, just as most people who ask don't really get the "real" reason, I would suggest most people just don't ask. If you buy into Myers-Briggs typing, roughly half the population is introverted and half is extraverted. Most extraverts don't spend a lot of time questioning themselves on issues like this one from my experience. (And "more than 50% of the parents out there gave no thought to whether or not they should have kids..." How about that?) As for choice, everything is a choice including the decision (and it is a decision) not to choose. This "choice" means you have decided to go along with whatever is going on around you. Now where does that come from? Having children is a powerful social need and so it is reassured socially. Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) would argue that there are memes (basically powerful cultural dictates and ideas) that would encourage procreative behavior, even when it doesn't appear to make sense. From this perspective, society assumes a sort of personality of its own; one which needs the human race to continue. Thus the cultural signs and beliefs are structured to support the having of more children at any cost. So we get proof that having children is useful through cultural advertisements - being currently movies, TV and other media that deal with the subject of children, our parent's "advice", artwork dealing with children and child-bearing, religious, political, social and cultural institutions, and so forth. Some of the elements of the things listed suggests the opposite, but these are vastly outweighed by that which suggests that children are a boon to you and humanity. Which brings us right back to selfishness. Funny about that.