Misson

I recommend checking in with a local marine shop. When I was building the velociraptor prop (http://www.markck.com/images/props/PROPS_raptor.htm), I decided to make him fiberglass so he could remain outside (you have you lawn statuary, I have mine). The local marine ship knew all about fiberglass repair, sold me everything I needed and were very helpful, giving me loads of advice. I'm sure they'd be even better suited to advising you on boat repair.

I got The Winston Effect: The Art & History of Stan Winston Studio last week and set everything else aside to delve into this one. Excellent! It's everything the POTC:AWE Behind the Scenes" book should have been. No gushing prose, but the good/bad/ugly of Winston's career with an explanation of the lessons he's learned along the way. Loads of pics of their work, behind the scenes photos and great shots of his make-up, animatronics and puppetry work. Good stuff.

Phonetic symbols are still limited to the language in which we're speaking, so I don't think they'd help much. Besides the phonetics would change with the dialect, wouldn't it? Say, who the heck decided to spell phonetics that way? I mean, really!

Huh. That's the first one I've seen.

I received yet another unsolicited positive review of this movie. This one seemed to revolve mostly around the young actress lead. Something Fox. (Michael J. Fox's middle initial is actually 'A.' but he changed it because he didn't want teen magazines going on and on about Michael "a fox!" (You must be old enough to remember Family Ties in prime time to even grasp the idea that Michael J. Fox would be considered a fox.) Poor actress in Transformers...or maybe that's what she wants.

recherché (adj.) 1. Uncommon; rare. 2. Exquisite; choice. 3. Overrefined; forced. 4. Pretentious; overblown Misson's persistence in switching user IDs to maintain Dread Pirate status is quite recherché. (You decide which meaning is implied.)

I found this poll running on my mail site (of all places) and thought I'd throw it up here, apropos of nothing. Note: I am showing the poll exactly as I found it - pirates was not included. (So I am not including it either - otherwise I know how it'd come out... )

I know something remarkably like Old English. Since I doubt the spoken language was ever formally recorded during its actual lifetime and the written language varied from the spoken (as it frequently does today), I can claim I wrote in the spoken version. Actually, when you decide to write in any dialect, you have a decision to make. You can write it so that it is as true to the actual annunciation of the words as possible, thus being absolutely accurate. Or you can write it in such a way that people can actually read and understand it, yet still manage to get the general flavor of the thing. Correct or comprehensible? Your choice. (The same argument could be made for re-enacting, if you think about it some.) I was writing a character who was Scottish in a fiction thread over at TheForce.net and I got so into making it correct that I couldn't figure out just what the heck I had said a week ago when I reviewed it. (I started keeping a dictionary for the character when it occurred to me that if I couldn't figure out out after I had written, most everyone else had given up long ago.) You know, I think I am still a mod over at the other pirate site. Last time I checked I was. Amazing...

I just stumbled across this stuff yesterday. Where was it when I was assembling my pirate-themed living room? The design is pretty neat on a lot of this stuff and isn't totally character-dependent. I found this site with a nice assortment of stuff, although I am not familiar with the site and don't necessarily recommend it or anything like that. It's just got a nice summary page of all this stuff. (It might even be an actual Disney site for all I know.) Hey, for those of you who are interested in getting this stuff, I received an email that says the Disney site is having a pretty neat promotion. 10% off purchases up to $75, 20% off purchases over $75 and 25% off purchases over $100 for this weekend only. From the email: Looks like the electronics aren't included... Oh, well. (Geez, I sound like ad copy. )

Oh, now this one is clever! I might even have clicked on it had they not made a couple of key mistakes I know to watch out for. The first thing I saw that raised my hackles was "Family member has sent you a postcard." Bad grammer. Often a sign of SPAM. Second was the term "Family member" itself. I have learned never to trust something that isn't addressed to you by name and, in this case, from an individual by name. The third was that the email address is a peoplepc.com addy. Most firms doing stuff like this would have xxxx@vintagecards.com or some such. The fourth was that the addres was a long (very long) string of numbers with no short cut URL name. Taken alone, that's not quite enough to completely dismiss it, but it's suspicious. I would have expected www.vintagecardios.com/card=xxyyzz or some such. Still...pretty clever. High marks to them for this one. "Okay, alright, important safety tip, thanks Egon."

"Mock skirmishes and military displays staged before audiences seem to have been quite popular in the C17th. On one such occasion in 1635 the London Trained Bands successfully demonstrated their prowess in front of the King, but things went horribly wrong when mingling with the public afterwards. Someone lit up a pipe near the gunpowder store and a stray spark caused an explosion that left a dozen dead and over fifty injured! This obviously didn't put anyone off though as in 1638 a stylised battle between Christians and Moors, entitled Mars hys triumph, was staged in London. Later, in 1645, Parliamentarian troops chose Blackheath on which to restage one of their recent victories, although still actively at war with surviving Royalist forces. "Fetes, pageants and entertainments (often with a historical theme) were staged in villages and great country houses throughout Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An early example took place in 1821, when the Duke of Buckingham staged mock Napoleonic naval battles on his lake at Wotton House for the amusement of family and friends, using boats and firing real cannon balls! These are occasionally dug up on the bank of the lake even today. The Duke of Newcastle later did much the same at Clumber Park, using a third scale frigate (eventually sunk by accident by boisterous children!). Victorian aristocrats would sometimes hold parties and dress up in costume and antique armour - for example, in 1840 Lord Glasgow organised a full medieval style joust at Kelburn Castle in Scotland." (From: http://www.eventplan.co.uk/history_of_reenactment.htm )

That boy will have serious psychological repercussions from this..."And then...my mom posted photos of me naked in a pirate hat on the internet!" I just came across this one. It's one of my favorites:

Well, Hollywood started featuring pirates in movies as early as 1908. I suspect if you'd presented the modern idea of re-enacting to someone from that time period they would look at you sort of funny. Then again, young boys have been "playing" at re-enacting what their fathers and heroes did since time began. The stir that books like A General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates created in the early 18th century show that there was a lot of interest in the subject and it certainly danced in the imagination of many people. Casting about the 'net suggests that there is evidence of battle re-enactments as far back as the 16th century. Perhaps you should do a thesis on it. As for enacting fictional archaeological adventures...while it sounds sort of cool, it also sounds expensive. And there's the bother of finding all those caves and tombs and stuff to raid. RPGs may be a better route. (I once proposed building a bunch of movable walls and props to enact AD&D adventures. Then the pocketbook issue arose. So I just build haunted house rooms instead - similar but different.)

Ok, here is a link to pirates for ya'. (From the Detroit Free Press review by Terry Lawson) "While it may not have the panache of the original "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Transformers" is just as much of an unexpected summer surprise. Not only is it full of way-cool machinery, epic robot fights and mind-dazzling effects, it also has more than its quotient of actual wit and fun." I notice he doesn't mention POTC 2 or 3. He says further on... "So here it is: Cool cars, giant robots from outer space, computer game mayhem and hot chicks -- everything 12-year-old-boys love in one movie. But it's the glee with which Bay and his army of technicians celebrate all of the above that transforms "Transformers" into something beyond an advertisement for the Hasbro toys on which the film was based." While Michael Bay can do some interesting stuff with action movies, I dunno. It sounds too much like a kid's movie to me. I'd rather see Ratatouille if I were going to shell out my hard-earned sou. Pixar trumps Bay in my book. (Or, better yet, save the sou and wait for both of them to come out on DVD and rent 'em from NetFlix.)

Sure, try one and see if you like it. Be aware that Shell Scott is definitely comedy with a hard-boiled edge - but it's not truly noir, it's humor. Shell is as goofy as they come.

Hey Honour, have you ever read the Shell Scott novels by Richard S. Prather? I think they're hilarious. Shell Scott is a would-be hard-boiled detective who gets into all kinds of bizarre situations. The books are goofy as all get out. With your grounding in noir detective novels, you'd probably find the humor all the more fun. Prather's Gat Heat is one of my favorite books in the series.

I thought so. Here is a sample of the text. Note that I was trying to post as a 6 or 7 year old kid might - thus the lack of correct capitalization and punctuation. This is a much later post than when I first created this user ID. In the beginning of his forum life, I intentionally misspelled large and commonly misspelled words to make it more realistic. Since I posted this particular bit on a private board, essentially for the enjoyment of one or two people, I didn't do as much of that to make it more readable. ( This really is a bit more readable! Honest!) BTW, this is circa 2000 - thus the old toy references. (I apologize in advance to those of you who actually read this. lol: )

You know, I have picked up and set down Master and Commander twice since posting that. I'm probably a third of the way through it. It's one of those books that's rich in detail - meaning it also moves quite slowly. It reminds me a bit of Ian Fleming's style of writing. There's good stuff in there, but it's buried under an absolute pile of old fashioned reporting-style text. If you glory in details, this is a book for you.

True confessions time. Back when I first got on the net, I joined a Star Wars AF collecting site that was like the Old West. The members attacked each other individually, in groups, in sub-groups and what have you. Sometimes it was quite vicious. God forbid you should have an opinion that someone didn't agree with! It would regularly happen that one faction would get so pissed of at another faction that they would leave the forum and start a new forum! (Over action figures. ) There was one in-absentia administrator who showed up every few weeks or so and never, ever did much more than issue small warnings. It was a riotous place to start my forum career (I want to say this was in 1996 or '97...the site had no graphics when I started. They took way too long to load back then.) Anyhow, to protect myself, I created three user IDs: MarkCK, Barstool and something else that I don't recall. The third one didn't last long. I went wayyyy out of my way to make them unique in opinion and attitude, but I maneuvered them around the forum like a chessmaster to very, very subtly protect each other (if you're not subtle and don't limit your interaction between alternate IDs, you greatly increase the risk of being discovered). This proved to be so much fun that I started creating really bizarre user IDs with personality tics that would annoy the most stalwart. One spoke entirely in Old English. (No, I don't know why I did that. It irritated the shite out of the other posters, though.) Another was a little kid named Timmy Spud who spoke entirely in irritating run-on sentences. (I think I saved some of his text to a file, but it's not on my laptop. If I find it on my desktop, I will post a sample.) I eventually left that forum because it was so unruly and argumentative that the focus was often lost. I joined TheForce.net where they had regular administrators. (And where I created several other user IDs. My favorite was one named "stupid.") I hung around a bit at the old, unruly site because I had some friends there. As it happened, a huge fight erupted between some of my friends and another sect of users a few months after I left and they formed a secret forum. They eventually invited me to join and when I revealed that I had had (I think it was seven) user IDs they were astounded. I had done such a good job differentiating them that even my friends didn't realize I had separate IDs. The moderator of the secret forum so liked Timmy Spud that he insisted I post as him occasionally. I sort of grew out of it as I began to realize that reasonably good moderation and administration existed outside my first unruly experience. Here I only have these three user IDs and they all appear as the same person - me. They all have the same look and feel. (Actually, jess, you may even recall Caraccioli from the other pirate board. You may also recall why I created him...Foxe spotted it immediately.) So, in answer to your question: I don't know how many people I have in my head. I create new ones when the need arises. (Which it hasn't lately. I am creating ideas for my house instead.) I do have this book I am writing (well, 'not writing' would be more accurate just now) and it's interesting how you have to shift your perspective to give the various characters depth. In fact, when I fail to do that, they all sound like weak carbon copies of each other.

Misson, or Captain Misson, is a fictional pirate from the pages of Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates. From Wiki: So now you've all had your history lesson for the day. You can read the whole account here. The introduction by Maximillian Novak is quite interesting IMO.

What?! I doubt that. Hollywood can't change it's spots that easily. Next you'll be saying that they embrace originality.

You've been mis-informed if you think you'll be surfing G-land in your lifetime. From http://pyracy.com/forums/index.php?showtop...pic=10404&st=0: "Let me get back to the rising sea level itself. We start with activist-inspired 20 foot rises in sea level. That is a wild prediction that has had to be tempered quite a bit since GW became more mainstream. (Although, as Mr. Inconvenient attests, still manages to rear its ugly head now and again.) By the 1980s, it had gone down to three feet. One group of GW scientists currently predicts the sea rise by 7 inches to 23 inches in the next 100 years. Quite a dramatic difference, eh?" (That last prediction is the current most agreed upon figure and it's based on current changes which are wildly unpredictable as the models that were used to generate these figures admit.)

I want to see a turtle with something cool painted on its shell.

I don't know about anyone else, but I couldn't find that one for ya'.

Well, here are some that do not fulfill Jill's request, but which I find sort of entertaining... And my favorite use of a cannon - as a mounting for a statue!