Big Red, your adventures are legend and your latest escapade did not escape notice.
Dave Barry''s column ripped you off without credit. When he began spreading word of National Talk Like a Pirate Day, he was paying homage to you but without a tip of the hat your way! It was outrageous. But what can you expect from a humor columnist, whose bread is buttered with twisted takes on serious matters of honor, even that of cold-blooded merciless pirates.
The tiny Everglades port of Marathon well remembers the day you docked to hose the blood and gore from your decks and sweep the luncheonette waitress off her feet and below to your cabin, where god knows what awful demented sexual practices were carried out that left her reeling and grinning like her throat had been cut from ear to ear. Then you bought off the entire outraged populace and local constable with a crate of rum. Then the empty bottles were floated out to the Keys in a bobbing
line like Hansel and Gretel''s breadcrumbs in the dark forest. Dozens of other floating riff raff followed the alcholoic fumes and bottles to the beseiged dock and wreaked havoc when they discovered all the rum was gone and the only fair maiden already bespoiled.
Then, Big Red, then you rose to the ocassion and turned the situation around. The growling, drooling howling mob stood up on their hind feet and saluted as you hauled the skull and crossbones up the flagpole and threatened to keelhaul any miscreant that dared break the bonds of fealty you had established at this little isolated port.And yes, that was when you established the very first day on the shores of this nation when it was legally required that everyone speak like a pirate.
News of this event never appeared in national media because the only local reporter on the scene not only spoke like a pirate but wielded his cutlass like one too and quickly dispatched the Fox and CNN news crews when they parked their vans with satellite transmission gear in front of the only outhouse in the area, blocking the way for everyone. Once the news hounds were sent packing, their satellite gear torn from the trucks and fixed to the masts of your ship, you took over the airwaves and spewed forth the purest piratical harangue heard in those parts since the Spaniards lost their last treasure ship to a marauding crew of New England whalers that had been stranded on a cay and left to starve by their greed filled captain.
The NSA''s supercomputers picked up your broadcast and homed in on keywords that had not been heard for centuries but still triggered a national response that had been programmed long ago by a disgruntled coder longing for the open main. Resentful of those such as yourself that still sail and pillage freely, the coder had instructed the computer to launch a cruise missile attack on the source of the broadcast.
Only a short length of wire saved you, Big Red. Because you had to climb the mast to plug into the satellite dish and transmitter, the first cruise missle scooped you up and continued rocketing south to the coast of Venezuela while the other missiles laid waste to the dock, the luncheonette, even the outhouse and all its inhabitants.
You might have disappeared from everyone''s scope, Big Red, but when Venezuela erupted into mass strikes and mutinies, halting the flow of oil, your presence there could no longer be a secret.
How you made it make to your home port without detection is unknown. But the day you overran Marathon and then sparked open rebellion throughout all of Venzuela will live on in whispered tales at dank and dangerous waterfront taverns the whole world wide.
And here you offer a miserable reward of rum while you sit upon the greatest reserve of oil ever assembled by any one person in history.
Some day soon, when no oil is left anywhere else for all the SUVs in the land and all the three-decks-no-bottom cruisers on the sea, then every day will be national speak like a pirate day, and the name Big Red will be known in every corner of the land, even in tiny backwater counties without web sites.
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