Talk Like A Pirate Day

According to the Geek Holidays Calendar today, September 19, was International “Talk Like A Pirate” day.

This holiday springs from a romanticized view of the Golden Age of Piracy. The Wikipedia-page tells us also something more on the origin of the idea:

According to Summers, the day is the only holiday to come into being as a result of a sports injury. He has stated that during a racquetball game between Summers and Baur, one of them reacted to the pain with an outburst of “Aaarrr!”, and the idea was born. That game took place on June 6, 1995, but out of respect for the observance of D-Day, they chose Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, as it would be easy for him to remember.

So I tried today to act like a pirate, but I needed some quick lessons.

1. Growl – and scowl often. Pirates don’t use a cultured, elegant, smooth vocalization – they mutter and growl.
2. Use pirate lingo. Sounding like a pirate isn’t as hard as it seems! There are lots of resources for picking up pirate “lingo,” so make use of them (some common terms listed below) in addition to trying to affect a vocal sound. Avoid using modern epithets (swear words). It’s much more colorful (and kid-friendly) to use “pirate slang” for those naughty words.
3. Gesture with your hands frequently. Don’t forget that pirates do most of their talking on the deck of a ship – out on the ocean, where wind, waves, and bird calls make it tough to hear. Gesturing often gives you a sense of “being there.”
4. Run words together. Saying, “The boys and I were out for a lovely day on the water today” sounds like something you’d overhear at a yacht club, not out on the bounding main! Instead, try, “Me’n'these here scurvy scallywags drug our sorry keesters out t’th’ship’n'had us a grand great adventuaaarrr! We almost had t’keelhaul Mad Connie f’r gettin inter th’ grog behind our backs!” Use contractions whenever possible. Be sure to punctuate often with “Arrrr!”
5.
Never use “you” or “you’re” – ever. Instead, use the piratical form, “yer” or “ya” for all forms of address to others. “Yer a scurvy bilge rat, ya pompous gasbag” or “Here’s yer dinner, ya mangy cockroach.” Note that you should always endeavor to call the addressee by some insulting name, usually involving an animal.
6. Embellish at will. A pirate is larger than life, and his or her speech should always reflect this. Don’t just say, “We saw a whale off the starboard bow today.” Say, “Me’n'th’ crew seen a great grand sea beastie, th’ mother of all whales, aye!”
7. Refer to yourself as “me” at all times, never “I” It is not piratically correct to say, “I have a cold.” It is far better as a pirate to declare, “Got me a case o’th’sniffles, ‘ass rye!”
8. More importantly, substitute “me” for “my” For example, don’t say, “Look at my new sword,” say “Lookit me new sword!.” Also substitute “meself” for “myself” as in “Got meself a right fine ship!”
9. Mutter unintelligibly unless yelling. Being a pirate usually meant being liquored up to some degree – a lot of time, pirates were pretty mush-mouthed. In the step preceding, the term “‘ass rye” actually translates to “that’s right.” Get it?
10. Be as loud as humanly possible. Pirates are not shy violets – stand tall, me hearties, and be counted!
11. Procure one dead stuffed parrot and sew feet to right shoulder of 2nd hand store jacket. This will put you in the mood to adhere to the above mentioned rules and guarantee an abundance of “yers and arghs”.

The next step was to expand my vocabulary: I found one at the Dutch “Talk Like A Pirate” Day-website.
Unfortunately it took some practice, so before I got the hang of it, the day was over.
Arrr! I’ll have to wait another year.

September 28 is “Ask A Stupid Question Day”. That will be even more difficult for me.

Benefits of Red Wine

8 Straight Benefits of Red Wine – Dumb Little Man:

This link suggests your health benefits by drinking red wine. That’s good, because I like to drink a glass or two daily. However, the article doesn’t mention the benefits of Resveratrol, a strong anti-aging agent. But…to get enough Resveratrol you should drink several hundreds of glasses red wine, which is, of course absurd.

You can also get resveratrol from grape juice. Also it is said that red wine now contains only about one-tenth the amount of reservatrol as was formerly the case, because of the use of pesticides.

However, wines or grape juice, if you believe the claims about the influence of resveratrol on longevity, you probably should take resveratrol supplements.

Pills on the mar­ket are labelled as con­tain­ing from less than 5 mg to as
much as 250 mg of res­ver­a­trol in its ac­tive form. Even that is around
one-sixth what an aver­age-weight per­son would have to take dai­ly to get
doses com­pa­ra­ble to those used in mouse life-extension stud­ies. But many
users are sat­is­fied with tak­ing smaller amounts in or­der to play it safe
and save mon­ey.

One brand of pills hawked on the In­ter­net as con­tain­ing “youth-pro­longing” mo­le­cules has a cu­ri­ous dis­tinc­tion. More information..

The most interesting articles on Resveratrol and red wine are at the Science and Reason Blog by Charles Daney.

• Resveratrol ( 20070924), and
• Sirtuin proteins (20071116)

I’ll read them while drinking a glass filled with a beautiful red wine. Celebrating life and hoping it will last forever.

Musicians unlock mystery melody in chapel

Thomas Mitchell, a 75-year-old musician and ex-Royal Air Force code breaker, and his son, composer and pianist Stuart, recently unlocked a 600 year old mystery that had been encoded into the walls of the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland – the chapel where the last part of Dan Brown’s 2003 novel “The Da Vinci Code” is set.

The 213 boxes contain a selection of patterns that are now interpreted as a musical score, by studying them as so called Chladni Patterns or Cymatics.

Matching these patterns with musical notes corresponding to the same frequencies produced a tune which is called the Rosslyn Motet. Now the recovered melody was paired with traditional lyrics (translated into Latin) and recorded.
You can hear the result in this video (also linked from the musicians’ website).

Click here for the original Reuters article and here for a Sunday Mail article.