Tag: ek humor

Technical difficulties at Søapbløx.

Like Robinson Caruso (it’s primitive as can be), The Whale is kinda sorta based on a real life incident, the sinking of the Essex by a Sperm Whale.

Now if you think this dense symbolist tome is grim (and long and boring too), you may be grateful that Melville spared you the rest of the tale.  Far from “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”, in fact there were several survivors including Captain George Pollard Jr. who seems remarkably un-Ahab like to me.

In terms of length they drifted through the Pacific for three months (“Still no sight of land, how long is it?”  “That’s a rather personal question, sir.”) and, in desperation, ate the Captain’s cousin (“I’d rather eat Johnson, sir!”).

Well, it wasn’t the Royal Navy–

Dear Sir, I am glad to hear that your studio audience disapproves of the last skit as strongly as I. As a naval officer I abhor the implication that the Royal Navy is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we now have the problem relatively under control, and that it is the RAF who now suffer the largest casualties in this area.

Now you might think after an experience like that you’d be as reluctant as John Harrison (who got terribly sea sick during his trip to Lisbon testing the H1 and never sailed again) to return to whaling, but Captain Pollard got another command, the Two Brothers.

Which promptly sank off French Frigate Shoals near Hawaii.

After that crews were understandably reluctant to sail with him and he ended his life as a night watchman on Nantucket where he met Melville (who was a customs inspector, you can’t make any money writing) after the book’s publication.  It’s said they got along quite well.

While the Essex is as lost as the Pequod, marine archaeologists have recently found the wreck of the Two Brothers and there’s an interesting article in The New York Times about it.

No ‘Moby-Dick’: A Real Captain, Twice Doomed

By JESSE McKINLEY, The New York Times

Published: February 11, 2011

On Friday, in a discovery that might bring a measure of peace to Captain Pollard, who survived his second wreck (though his career did not), researchers announced that they have found the remains of the Two Brothers. The whaler went down exactly 188 years ago after hitting a reef at the French Frigate Shoals, a treacherous atoll about 600 miles northwest of here. The trove includes dozens of artifacts: harpoon tips, whaling lances and three intact anchors.

The discovery is believed to be the first of a Nantucket whaler, one of an armada of ships that set sail during the early 19th century when the small Massachusetts island was an international capital of whaling. It was a risky pursuit that led sailors halfway across the world – and sometimes to the bottom of the sea.

Take My Bulgarian Joke Book. Please.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, The New York Times

Published: October 27, 2010

GABROVO, Bulgaria – The sign leading into town, faded but still readable in Bulgarian, was as I remembered it. “Welcome and good riddance,” it said. Gabrovians, like Borscht Belt comedians or Delaware Republicans, pride themselves on their sense of humor. Before the Wall fell, this hard-luck but endearing city at the foot of the central Balkans was regarded as the Communist capital of humor.

Seriously.

…

Officials at the House of Humor and Satire, a relic of a vanished regime, on more or less the margins of Central Europe, talk wistfully about becoming a more popular destination once again, if only they could come up with the money and a good plan. If only. Across the former Communist world museums like the House have been repurposed as ironic attractions for tourists often too young to remember much if anything about the Soviet era. Funnily, the House of Humor and Satire isn’t one of these. It lacks irony.

Ahoy matey!

Wikipedia, which as we know can be trusted in all things (especially Colbert Elephants), tells us that in the modern era celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day started in 1995.  Those who accept Our Noodly Savior know that Pirates were the Original Apostles of Pastafarianism.  Unfortunately the Revealed Scripture (known as The Ramen Texts) is unavailable for modern study as it was consumed during a particularly long calm in the Doldrums.

Still it is accepted as an article of faith proven by the historical record that decline in Piracy is direcly correlated with Global Warming and many choose to spend this day in Worship at Church in addition to emulating the manners, customs, and language of their Pirate forbearers.  I myself have the good fortune to be 1/4 full blooded Pirate through my Viking ancestors (indeed Viking is a noun which means ‘Pirate’).

I generally celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day by telling the 3 Pirate Jokes.  There are only 3, all the others are just variations.  As Cap’n Slappy says:

Thar be only three pirate jokes in the world. The biggest one is the one that ends with someone usin’ “Arrr” in the punchline. Oh, sure, thar be plenty o’ these, but they’re all the same damn joke.

“What’s the pirate movie rated? – Arrr!” “What kind o’ socks does a pirate wear? – Arrrrgyle!” “What’s the problem with the way a pirate speaks? – Arrrrticulation!” …and so forth.

The second joke is the one wear the pirate walks into the bar with a ships wheel attached to the front o’ his trousers. The bartender asks, “What the hell is that ships wheel for?” The pirate says, “I don’t know, but it’s drivin’ me nuts!”

And finally. A little boy is trick or treatin’ on Halloween by himself. He is dressed as a pirate. At one house, a friendly man asks him, “Where are your buccaneers?” The little boy responds, “On either side o’ me ‘buccan’ head!”

And there ye have it. A symposium on pirate humor that’ll last ye a lifetime – so long as life is violent and short.

And singing some Pirate Carols, for which you can join me below the fold.

You know, sometimes you run across a 6 foot tall white pooka of a sentence-

You can read about his gibberish at that last Media Matters link, but here is what fascinates me strangely, precisely because of its ubiquity to the point of banality for anyone who has been paying even glancing attention at right wing thought or what passes for same as it pertains to race lately, an observatory group that includes myself, a fact that is in no small part what has kept me from posting much in recent days, because it is all so inexpressibly wearying, dreadful, insipid, hateful, and fucked up, is this especial snippet of squalor squirted by Mr. Lord, a specimen whose credentials include a gig as a former assistant political fluffer for Zombie Ronald Reagan and assorted dusty, unattractive Pennsylvanian electoral fossils, and who is currently non-gainfully employed as a right-wing-crazy welfare recipient, and whose contemporary written work reveals him as an all-around unpleasant opinion-pustule so virulent that he roundly deserves to be sent to Hell with the task of diagramming this sentence and explaining precisely why it is grammatically correct to a gang of glue-huffing eighth-grade Republican byblows whose parents never loved them and who are also stupid and ugly, or else just Tucker Carlson.

Color me impressed.

Look, to be as close to the bone as may be sliced, “conservatives” have detected in their typical brutally nonsensical thud-thud-hack-chomp-burp fashion that there is a certain power, a certain magic, a certain force to the capacity to call someone a “racist” and make it stick, and as they can dully discern that the “call you racist” Ring is a One Ring to Rule them All, rhetorically related to the “Support this Stupid War Or You Hate America Ring,” which they already collected from the slack-jowled Dwarf-Lord twerps in their fucking Halls of Stone or Connecticut, namely a beardless and quite smackable Joe Lieberman, they covets it, this racism-detecting precious, they covets it, yesss; and while nobody likes Gollum, he’s more presentable than Dan Riehl, but what’s the essential difference, I axe you?

Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years Doctor and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.