Mission

This really needed to be in its own topic rather than hidden away in the PiP Update! thread. This forum is the perfect place to get folks to chime in - is Bawdy Be a member? I know she would have an insight. Most of my recollections are in the Surgeon's Journals, but I do recall that William was stalking around the beach on Wednesday in 2007 looking for a good place to set up the camps because it was the first year we were allowed to do that. Four people the year before had had a vision of a re-enactment camp while sitting around the campfire in 2006 - Silkie, William, Patrick and...Captain Jim? I also was told that Captain Jim wore bucket boots. Patrick has photos. B)

Yeah, I copied the ones I wanted, but I won't put them into the Surgeon's Journal. (I'm not exactly sure why, but I won't. I will, OTOH, put cartoons, movie images and comics in the Surgeon's Journal. Go fig.)

I actually did realize that the next day, but I forgot to go back and change it. Thanks for the reminder. I was working on Chapter 4 last night, but I have a final on Monday which is slowing things up. I promise it'll be finished eventually - hopefully before Christmas. I'll keep updating this and my Facebook fan page as I complete chapters.

The way I got the ones I wanted was to use the 'print screen' button on my keyboard to copy the entire screen when the photo I wanted was up. Then I used Edit>Paste in one of my photo editing programs. I had to trim the photo to get rid of the stuff that the screen capture caught outside of the photo, but it is still of decent quality. (It's a pain in the arse, but they often do that on purpose; they don't want you to steal their copyrighted images.)

Here are some photos taken by Mile Zero Magazine. You probably need permission to use them for anything.

I doubt it. You put them all in my luggage for the trip home.

I think that really sums the whole thing up. The two festivals give you the opportunity to engage in whatever sort of pirate fun appeals to you most. We tend to talk more about the Fort Taylor part here and it's nice to have another of the organizers of PiP chime in. Admiral Finbar, welcome to the pub! Admiral, meet Iron Jon. Iron Jon, meet the Admiral. If you two had met, I'll bet you'd have gotten along famously. (IJ is the great provider of provender.) (Now when is someone going to sit down and write that History of PiP book we're always talking about...? "Pirates in Paradise was born in the wilds of...Marathon? Islamorada? I always forget...")

Yeah, but I've had migranes and they're not funny. So I modified to be funny. (Actually this is the first I've heard of a reason. I thought you were just napping, waiting for your turn with Poppa.)

I am in the middle of a really interesting book called A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage and I came across a rather interesting description of the medicine Aqua Vitae. I always sort of knew that it was alcohol, but this explained the whole scenario quite well and I thought I'd share it with one and all. "Wine was widely used as a medicine, so it seemed only logical that concentrated and purified wine should have even greater healing powers. By the late thirteenth century, as universities and medical schools were flowering throughout Europe, distilled wine was being acclaimed in Latin medical treatises [note - almost all medical texts at that time were in Latin] as a miraculous new medicine, aqua vitae, or "water of life." One frim believer in the therapeutic power of distilled wine was Arnald of Villanova, a professor at the French medical school of Montpellier, who produced instructions for distilling wine around 1300. 'The true water of life will come over in precious drops, which, being rectified by three or four successive distillations, will afford the wonderful quintessence of wine,' he wrote. 'We call it aqua vitae, and this name is remarkably __ suitable since it is really a water of immortality. It prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.' Aqua vitae seemed supernatural, and in a sense it was, for distilled wine has a far higher alcohol content than any drink that can be produced by natural fermentation. Even the hardiest yeasts cannot tolerate an alcohol content greater than about 15 percent, which places a natural limit on the strength of fermented alcoholic drinks. Distillation allowed alchemists to circumvent this limit, which had prevailed since the discovery of fermentation years earlier. Arnald's pupil, Raymond Lully, declared aqua vitae 'an element newly revealed to men but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude.' ... Aqua vitae's proponents believed it could preserve youth; improve memory; treat diseases of the brain, nerves, and joints; revive the heart; calm toothache; cure blindness, speech defects, and paralysis; and even protect against the plague." (Standage, p. 98-9)

Thanks for the correction! I will fix it when I get home.

Here's Chapter 3! I guess I'll keep posting the chapters as I finish them. They take almost twice as long to do as I had expected, so I am way behind. PM me if you spot errors, as there are bound to be some. Enjoy!

Chapter 2 - sorry, but I missed a day. You know...Key West. Now I must go to the fort and gather more material.

Ok, I will link direct for Captain Jim. The first chapter is here.

Ok, it's begun! If you want to see it, you have to go through the Surgeon's Journal Facebook Fan page. You will find that here. I will be trying to update it with a new chapter at around noon each day. If the link doesn't work, just search for "Pirate Surgeon" on Facebook and you should be able to see it. Enjoy!

Oh, I don't care one way or the other about the Pirate Code; it's fine where it belongs. (Although source books and other such literature are never canon, so I wouldn't rely on that. The script writers almost never do.*) Ed and I used to be co-mods at another site where a surfeit of ill-researched folks (usually kids, as I recall) would come in looking for information about "the real pirates code." We patiently explained that it never really existed for awhile, then it got annoying, then it became a sort of running joke amongst the mods and regulars to lightly taunt such people. (Well, for some of the regulars, mercilessly taunt them.) *The exception I've seen being The Clone Wars, where they appear to take an avid interest in and make use of a lot of the published literature.

I was kinda' yanking your chain there. I know you cast some aspersions on some of the published articles (not just the stupid POTC code) long ago. If the search engine worked at PI, I'll bet I could find it... Hey, this kind of reminds me of something I came across a year or two ago in the (somewhat lurid) book Captured by Pirates edited from period accounts by John Richard Stephens. In Stephens book there's an excerpt from the book The Four Voyages of Capt. George Roberts...written by himself (1726). Captain Roberts accounts for his capture by Low's pirates, specifically mentioning several rules (perhaps articles) which are not in the Low's published articles. You can see the list of the ones I found in the text here. It sort of makes you wonder what we really know.

Twaddle is nonsense. Didn't you used to say there wasn't sufficient provenance for most of the sets of articles we had access to? Has this changed?

Priorities, John. Priorities. (Says the man who lives by himself and whose family will be out of town while he is in for TG.)

But...you do know.

I was thinking about Shay's parody songs last year and...well, a bad pun just sprang up in the muddled mass that is my mind: The Most Blunderbuss Time of the Year* I did not come up with any lyrics for it or anything. That exercise is left to the reader. *Sung to the tune of "We Wish You a Merry PiPmas natch.

"What's that," he asked, agog with curiosity.

Hey, mP, check this out. I just got this one (off eBay). Looks kinda familiar, doesn't he? All he needs is a long coat and a hat. I cannot place this character in the movies, though. I know he's somewhere in Jabba's palace, but that's about it.

I have to finish doing the template webpage for the Surgeon's Journal so half the work is done before I get there. Other than that, all I have to do is pack.

Hmm. While it does make the point, I'd be careful of using Mayflower Bastard as a historical account. From the comments on Amazon, it sounds more like it relies on some bits of historical account with large amounts of speculation thrown into the mix. From the Publisher's Weekly report on Amazon, "In the hands of a deft writer, the resulting fictionalization and speculation can work brilliantly, but this author is, at best, workmanlike." (Italics mine.)

It's mostly a bunch of twaddle. (I read that on some bonny adventure site somewhere. ) Myself, I prefer The Pirates' Code, which is universal and usually considered to be more like guidelines. (Remember answering that one every other week over at Pirate's Info?)