Pirates!

When life gets crappy or crazy, I go learn something. It's the best distraction if you can't do the usual things to get outta your head. This week for me, it's pirates.

Pirates were an early love for me. I read Treasure Island when I was first learning to read, and my older brothers' handmedown books had lots of pirate stories. Not much fact but lots of adventure. Only in the last few years was I intrigued enough to read some pirate biographies and they're better than fiction.

Maybe I oughta tell you how pirates even came up recently. One of the things I'm involved with is the Windham County Heat Fund. The Heat Fund raises money to buy people fuel energy in emergencies. You can read more about it here:
http://www.ibrattleboro.com/article.php?story=20101017133558403
People pitch in what they can and throw fundraisers if possible. It can get damn cold around here and being without heat kills. So we raise bucks, and this year I'm working on a "Talk Like a Pirate Day" fundraiser. In going to the original and international Talk Like a Pirate site for help and ideas, I started wondering how much of real women pirates' lives were recorded. Turns out there's a lot of pirate history out there. Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Grace O'Malley, Gunpowder Gertie, Princess Rusla of Norway, Artemesia, Pretty Peg, Madame Ching... my love of pirates was reborn. There's something about saying to hell with everything and living as you please that appeals to me.

There is a wealth of links to all kinds of piracy fun and knowledge at the TLAP website:
http://talklikeapirate.com/links.html#realrec

Make fast the guns, cut free the lines, get the black flag stowed away!