Misson

No I flew from Mexico last year. It's where my family had Thanksgiving. (My sister is living there courtesy of GM.) This year is something completely different. Some notes to those interested in this deal... they require half up front and the other half 60 days in advance (which is pretty stern stuff from my experience, but their pricing is very good IMO.) There is a $45 non-refundable reservation fee and a $100 cancellation fee if you cancel 60 days in advance. They also require you to put a $500 deposit which is charged to your credit card and returned within 15 days of leaving if you left the place in nice shape. Just so everyone thinking about doing this is aware...

Good suggestion! I found these to be very helpful over the phone. I've booked a single condo by the Fort for myself. (Subject to change, I suspect - my flight schedule may be curiously complex - possibly even moreso than flying from Mexico.)

Why? Every life is something of a miracle. It's termination is just the closing of that particular miracle. All good stories have a beginning and an end and this is neither happy nor sad, it just is. Life ends up being tragic by the above quoted definition which seems to me like an awful way to view the world. "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -William Shakespeare

I'll bet. Just in case anyone's forgotten: (We just can't get enough of that picture now, can we?) Jim, you will never see me arguing for the methods of olde. The more I read about them, the more horrific they sound. (Who here has heard of a seton? *Shudder*) Still, it makes great fodder for presentations. People love to be horrified, as my haunted house experience has taught.

I also have acquired some cupping jars and an authentic fleam (both for bleeding). I've got my eye on some other items as well.

"because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee" Which makes it no clearer for me. It's focused in the wrong direction. We are all scheduled for an end date, so worrying about that is pointless. Seeing others die and spending our current moments in upset over that is also pointless. In remembering people who were important to me, it seems more productive to focus the actuality of what they did rather than being upset over non-possible possibilities of what they didn't (or can't). Yes, someone close to me has died. Thinking rationally on it, however, I see it as a learning experience for me on letting go - which we all must do...repeatedly. Wasting time thinking about what I missed turned out to be a useless and harrowing exercise, so I discard it. This is my disagreement with the original sentiment. (John Donne was a poet. For the life of me, I don't understand the point of poetry, as I've said before. It's whole purpose ultimately ends up being to obscure meaning. But I digress...)

blo·vi·ate intr.v. Slang - To discourse at length in a pompous or boastful manner I came across this somewhere recently and it just struck me as being a funny word. It sounds like this: bloh-vee-eyt. That just sounds funny to me. Sort of like bovine. (I believe it was in an article on a politician.)

I just scored a vintage portable apothecary scale on eBay. (It's a bit after period, but I compared it to period scales and it's close to correct.) I am gonna be soooo ready this year. Yup. I've got my eye on a box scarifier that is period, too... I really, really want to build a medicine chest. I do, I do, I do...

It is? I for one am always glad to see people succeed (in whatever way they define success - money can be one indicator of such.) It's just that I'm not very concerned that someone who has little impact on my life has shuffled their mortal coil. (In many societies and belief systems, this is cause for celebration.) Bess, I would miss you more than Heath. For the record, I would also be more concerned to hear of the passing of Patrick's or Duchess' cat(s). These things affect me (or at least people I know and like) and Heath...well, he just don't. To me, he's just this guy, see...I think the only movie I've seen with him in it were The Patriot (which was decent) and The Brothers Grimm (which wasn't). I also don't understand the meaning of "Every man's death diminishes me." I've turned it over in my wee small noggin in several different ways and it doesn't make sense to me. Death is just part of life. Feel free to explain what I'm missing here, as I like to be corrected when I am wrong. As ol' Doc Seuss put it: " Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." (Er, it=life, not death. That would just be morbid.)

I saw an editorial cartoon to that effect. It showed three soldiers' gravesites which were talking (either metaphorically or metaphysically) about how sad it was that Ledger had died. (I personally don't quite get it either, Patrick. I never knew him. I'm afraid I'd be more upset if my cat died.) But blackjohn's right - it's a good topic for people to emote about in here. Not to mention a chance to dissect movies. I like that.

See, that's just lazy on the part of Hollywood writers. Bleh. As good as the last Bond flick was, that was the one fly in the ointment for me. How could the events in that film possibly mesh with, say, Dr. No? (They can't. Lazy.) I wish they would have started the Bond films in the 50s like they were talking about at one point. That would have been cool IMO. Then everything would mesh. (Then they could have made Diamonds are Forever the way it should have been made - like the book.)

Doesn't that sort of ruin the continuity of the movies? The current strain of BM is supposed to precede the 90's movies.

Hmm. Yes...I would have said the coffin was a bit of overkill, but the skull "feet" made me reconsider. Still, not sure what I would do with that one...it's not really "pirate", so it wouldn't truly go in the pirate room and it's certainly not Key West, Delorean, Eagle or Engineering related. I have two undeveloped theme rooms to decide yet, but I'm leaning towards trains and Australia, so it wouldn't fit there, either. A fine piece with no home in my home. (I like the skull watch. Not only is it cool, it's cool with a potential GaOP pedigree.)

Cool. Someone please go buy that for me. It goes with my character. Actually, blackjohn, it is period (or close enough) and that was what amazed me. They liked cool skull stuff even then. (While I appreciate people who are absolutely intent on being period, I also appreciate "close enough." Truth be told, if you didn't buy something with a certification of date on it, I can't see where you're being truly period correct. And if you have done that, I can't see where you're being sensible. So call me a heathen - the sort of heathen who gets stuff that's close enough - I'd be happy to have a watch like that.)

That's period!?!? It's beautiful. Oh, if only I had more money than sense...or a rich benefactor...*sigh*

Thank you. I can take credit for photo selection, however I cannot take any credit whatsoever for the pictures themselves. They were all taken by several other site members who allowed me to use them. See the Epilogue page for photo credits.

Firefox is giving me trouble with the links at the top and bottom of the page. Are any other Firefox users noticing this? IE works great for me, but I think IE accepts some sloppy coding that Firefox won't (stupid FrontPage...)

I don't know where this might belong, so I'll put it here. I recently wrote a multi-page sort of "book"-esque thing about PiP 2007 and put it on my website. When I did this, I noticed that I now had several scattered pages concerning pyracy on my website and that, yes, there were the definite elements of a complete new page. So I mined some old posts of mine (from another pirate forum website) and slapped together some new pages and created a pirate jump page for my website. You can see it here. There's some scholarly sorts of stuff and a bunch of more or less fun stuff (like the PiP thing and my much beloved 1000 Word Do-It-Yourself Pirate Report). Note particularly the cool graphic mess I created for the titles on pages that didn't have titles. It's either a clever mixing of images I scavenged off the web or a photo of the bottom of someone's fish tank. (Look! The treasure chest opens and closes and releases bubbles! Whee!) Oh, yes, eventually, I'll have a million pages of notes on barber-surgery allowing me to create another series of pages which I will possibly call The Barber Surgeon's Sea Primer. It will be in a sort of book form like the PiP stuff. That could happen as soon as two months from now or as late as six years from now. (I keep finding interesting new resources to read.) Ok, self-promotional function: OFF.

I'm pretty sure they did ban it, at least at one point. Yet you can still rent houses for a week somehow. There's always a way around legal tangles. $5 a day for parking is pretty good if you plan to drive over and stick around. And the point about people going from the park is also well noted. Parking in the park is free and as re-enactors, we can get passes in and out. Plus, if they have the Shuttle again this year, that is another really handy way to get back and forth between downtown Old Town. (That was really cool. I actually didn't use it because I had a bike, but it put you right in front of the Rum Barrel. They had this really good Roasted Corn and Crab Chowder that I highly recommend.)

Very nice work. I've stayed at the Banyan and it is very nice - and overpriced about 30 -40% above what you can get if you hunt a bit and don't mind walking. You also get the added benefit of sometimes trying to be sold a timeshare from my experience. (The Banyan is actually a timeshare, but they rent out units when timeshare owners ask them to.) This last time I stayed at the Douglas House which I do not particularly recommend. The location is ok, but the walls are paper thin and I really don't care to hear the neighbors discussing their plans, arguing about their plans and making up after arguing about their plans in the bedroom. Plus it's sort of overpriced. I still say renting a house is the best bet. Truman Annex is closer than anything else you will get to PiP - it's right in between Fort Zachary Taylor and the diagonal line you could draw to the party side of Duvall street in Old Town. Oh, and paying extra to be in close walking distance of downtown Key West is definitely worth your extra pennies any time you stay there from my experience. Key West is a truly sucky place to drive, mostly because of the cost of and difficulty in finding adequate parking. A car can be a real albatross. Even the hotels sometimes charge you extra for parking. I've stayed in what is euphemistically called "New Town" which is on the East end of the island and it's too far to walk to anywhere you will most likely want to go, other than the big box supermarket, Sears Town and the MoPed shop you'll start looking for to get you to Old Town faster than walking.

Ah...convenience. I'm imagining a grape vine cage and it would seem to me to be very flexible. That would be kind of cool in a way and a pain in another. Then again, it's just sitting atop my entertainment center. Having never worked in this realm, I don't really know much about it...but that hasn't stopped me so far in my other projects. (So far I've learned about bead-making, cabinet design, complex angle cutting, tile-laying, proper staining, wire-running, routing and a host of other activities that I'm probably forgetting. I'm considering stained-glass work and now this. Such fun.)

Is it just me or does Orlando slur his words or something? I first noticed it in Kingdom of Heaven and it seems particularly bad (maybe because I noticed it) in AWE. He did it in CotBP, too, though. Sometimes he's a tad hard to understand at times...just a tad.

Is that comment given with your Disney hat on?

I'm planning to use the original quote about Blackbeard's demand for a medicine chest (which is actually from The General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates) as one of two starting stories for my book on barber-surgery (the other is from Exquemelin's classic The Buccaneers of America). I am going to write an on-line book on the topic like the PiP 2007 "book" and put it on my website, complete with pictures. That's why I have been reading so much. I have this file of notes (anything interesting, I underline and later type into a Word file) is now at 66 pages. By the time I'm done with all the resources I have, The notes alone might make a good book...if a little disjointed. I've sort of come to the conclusion that there were two broad types of pirate surgeons. Maybe three. One is the quack who couldn't get a job with the BRN and wasn't trusted on land. This is a tad far-fetched as during this period, the need for surgeons on land was great. I've read that some of the surgeons in Caribbean ports were the worst around because they were basically surgeons from ships who were considered to be so bad that they were thrown off, despite the great need for them. (Getting treated in port was a good example of the cure being harsher than the disease.) But they still did all right because there was no alternative. (This gives credence to that bit about the surgeons in Captain Blood, actually. ) Anyhow, the BRN, going at least as far back as 1620, required ships to have surgeons and, if the ship was large, surgeon's mates. They paid for crap, so they mostly wound up with neophytes fresh out of school (frequently from Scotland - I forget the name of the school) serving as a surgeon's and surgeon's mates. They rarely served more than a journey or two to get experience and then went back and established offices on land. The second type, which I fancy Mission to be, was a legitimate surgeon on a ship (some merchants carried surgeons as well, although this was spotty during Period) who was captured by pirates and made to serve. They had a sort of 'professional prisoner' role. (Surgeons usually weren't required to sign the articles. I'm not completely clear what the benefit to the pirates was (perhaps the surgeon was in such a good position vis-a-vis his expertise that the pirates wanted to do whatever it took to keep him) but to the surgeon, it meant he could claim he was forced to serve and most courts would believe this - if he hadn't signed the articles. The Blackbeard example highlights the necessity of pirates to have adequate medical care. I have another story about a (non-pirate) crew that actually abandoned ship when they found out that the medical chest was almost empty. The third type (I haven't quite decided if this is legitimately different or not, but I'll include it here) is usually the second type of surgeon who became sympathetic to the pirates for whatever reason and joined them. Again, we have the "no signing of the articles" thing in there that would complicate identifying such people. I was reading about a surgeon, Thomas Dover, who eventually became a pirate captain. (He was part of the group that rescued Andrew Selkirk, the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe for you history tidbit fans). He actually sounds like the first type (a bit of quack - although it's hard to say given the fluid nature of treatment theories during Period) who was pretty sympathetic to the pirates all along. He certainly seems to be of dubious character. You can read all about him on-line here. Blah, blah, blah. That's your history lesson for today. I'm so far OT! Sorry, Bo! (See, you shouldn't get me started!)

You mean the assembled cage? If so, been there, done that. So far, I've found nothing. The closest I've found is $110 and it's only close, not nearly right. Plus, the one in the movie a hand-made look to it and I figure I should be able to emulate that. That changes a purchase into a creative adventure.