Nothing is worse than having a nice post all ready when the lightning hits and the power shuts off for a second. The servers are on backup power, but not my workstation. So, I’m just going to throw out a few random things and hope power doesn’t dump again.

This is the kind of boat any pirate would like. Not because it is beached, but because of what you can see while standing on the deck. Very nice… Where is that boat located again? Hello, Travelocity?

There’s a post on RWN about the Columbine killers. Its a chat between John Hawkins and Andrew Ian Dodge about what caused the killers to flip out and lose it. Andrew is saying that while the killers deserve to be dead, burning in hell, what they did was 100% wrong, he can at least see that them being bullied relentlessly can cause someone to go whacko. He was not approving of what they did in the least. However, hardly anyone in the comments section could figure that out. Some of the comments were approving of bullying as something to “build character.” Others said they were bullied and lived through it. That was the stupidest comment ever. If I lived through a car accident, that doesn’t mean that those that were killed did something wrong. Or, the ever present, fight back and the bullies will respect you. Either that, or more than likely they’ll kick your ass even harder.
Anyways, the biggest comments were that fighting back with guns were “out of proportion” to the killers being bullied. OK, then does that mean that two years ago we should have flown a few airliners into Mecca and Riyadh and called it even? Nice, proportional response.
Anyways, my biggest gripe about the whole damn thing is that so few of the posters could take a logical look at the argument being presented by Lagwolf (Andrew’s handle) and instead reacted so completely emotionally. I’m sorry, I thought the right wing was supposed to be logical, and not as likely to be swayed by the “Its for the children” arguments.

Anyways, been reading The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd that came in yesterday. It really is amazing that a book that has this much detail is not fiction. Such vivid visuals. This reads like the author followed around Cap’n Kidd with a film crew. Here’s the Amazon review:

From Publishers Weekly
Entertaining, richly detailed and authoritatively narrated, Zacks’s account of the life of legendary seaman William Kidd delivers a first-rate story. Though Kidd, better known as Captain Kidd, was inextricably bound with piracy and has popularly gone down as a marauding buccaneer himself, Zacks (An Underground Education) argues that he was actually a mercenary backed by the English government and several New World investors to track down pirates and reclaim their stolen wares. The book is cogent and replete with supporting evidence without the heavy-handed feel of some scholarly work. What really sets the book apart is Zacks’s gift as researcher and storyteller. He highlights the role of an undeniable pirate, Robert Culliford, in Kidd’s tale and pits the two men against each other from the outset, constructing his book as an intriguing duel. Aside from the tightly constructed plot, Zacks also wonderfully evokes the social and political life of the 17th century at land and at sea, and he takes turns at debunking and validating pirate folklore: while it appears the dead giveaway of a skull and crossbones made it a rare flag choice, Zacks contends that pirates did often wear extravagant clothing and were as drunk, cursing, hungry, horny… and violent as myth would have them. Augmented by such details and driven by a conflict between Kidd and Culliford that keeps the pages flying, Zacks’s book is a treasure, indeed.

A fine pirate like myself recommends this one for an entertaining read before you sack and loot the next port…

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