With Plunderathon right around the corne, I can't help but notice the similarities to my first Plunderathon, the 148th.

Aye, it was a sad year fer Pirate kind, 1991. The top musical "artists" that year included "Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch," "Vanilla Ice," "Color Me Badd" and other keelhaul-worthy landlubbers that were not so much born as they were scraped off the boot of some herpetic lawyer after a hard day's work at the goat-shaggery.

This music was bad. This music was awful. This music was so bloody craptacular that it caused tumors in lab mice. Remember the first Gulf war? Marky Mark's fault. Completely. And the recession of the early 1990s was entirely the fault of hearing "Boyz II Men" on MTV (fortunately, We Pirates raided MTV headquarters a few months later and burned their cache of douchebag music. Unfortunately the Pirates were overzealous and burned ALL the music, which is why to this day MTV plays nothing but ads, reality TV shows and 300-minute montages of girls with white lipstick screaming "woo!" over and over again).

Pirates who were sober enough to hear this music blaring from the speakers of passing Ford Probes and Geo Trackers immediately stuck their muskets in their mouths and pulled the trigger (fortunately, few Pirates were that sober, but we did lose three grocery store clerks and one cabin boy). And that is when "Dave The Somewhat Less Pleasant, assistant historical cabin boy (third class)" was shanghaied into Piracy.

I was a normal civilian once, it is true. As I was walking home from Church one day, getting ready to change clothing so I could go volunteer to read books to orphaned baby seals at the developmentally disabled wing of the local zoo's charity unit, I saw an old lady trying to cross the street. As I had recently broken my glasses helping a kitten out of a tree, I had to squint really hard to make out the outline of this lady, but since I could tell she had long hair and a very elaborate hat I knew she was a lady. Because she was stooped over and weaving unsteadily, I knew she was old. I extended my hand and offered to guide her across the street.

She seemed to be having a very difficult time of it, as she kept veering off course and screaming foreign-sounding words at the cars (I assumed it was French or something). Being a staunch patriot and member in good standing of the local youth militia, I felt it was my duty to help this visitor to our city.

I put my bible (all three copies that I was carrying) in my backpack and walked over. The old lady's perfume was very strange to me, but I figured it was just foreign. Probably French. Or Spanish. It smelled like those rum-flavored candies you see in the grocery store, only without the chocolate or cherries.

"Dear Lady," I said. "You are obviously having trouble, may I help you? Are you trying to get across the street to the museum's new 'Comparative Literature and its effect on Legal Theory of the 20th Century' exhibit? It is sponsored by the Society of Yuppies Who Know the Entire Starting Lineup of the 1968 Mets. It is really swell, golly."

That's all I remember until waking up four days later, tied to a chair with five broken bones and seven missing teeth, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by foul smells and drunken sailors.

As the years passed, I was promoted several times, as those above me gave in to the wounds recieved in combat, wounds recieved in brothels and generally failing livers. As an assistant historical cabin boy (second class), I was given the task of sharpening the monkey-droppings we used as pencils back in those days before computers. When I made assistant historical cabin boy (first class), they untied my left leg so that I may hop around the archive room fetching monkey droppings. Then I was transfered to the galley for a short while, until they decided that I was too stringy to eat (having subsisted on a diet of nothing but monkey droppings for the last several months), so I was sent back to the archives.

When I arrived at the archives, I found the Chief Historian dead in a pool of his own blood, with the Assistant Historian standing over him, holding her blood-drenched cutlass in one hand and her vitcim's wallet in the other hand. Both the historical cabin boys were naked and strapped to the floor, the assistant historical cabin boys were all cowering in the corner attempting to stem the flow of blood from their various wounds using monkey droppings as a poultice, and there were three broken rum bottles on the floor.

This is exactly the same way the archives looked every other time I had been there, aside from the broken rum bottles. The crewmember that was carrying me back to the archives (as I was still strapped to a chair with only one leg free) ran for help, and the Assistant Historian was siezed, promoted to Chief, and then executed for the crime of spilling rum. As the historical cabin boys were tied up and the assistant cabin boys were all ill from monkey dropping bacteria, I was promoted to Chief Historian, my other leg was untied and I was shoved back into the archives while the door was bolted behind me. I remain there to this day.

They feed me through a tube.

It smells like pee.

Please rescue me.

-Dave The Horrible
Chief Historian and Owner of a Strange Cat

more:

Pirates go underground!

Poop-flinging Monkey saves the day!

Where did our (current) historian come from?

Where is the Pirate Captain?

Flagship named in honor of Militia Commander?!?

Bare Asses of the Isle of Sauvie

Photos and blogs from the most recent Plunderathon!