Tag Archives: pirates

A Sailor’s Life for Me! (Classic Rant Repost)

24 Jul

July 24, 2012

This one goes all the way back to 2006. And you know what? Nothing has changed since then.

from September 23, 2006

I’ve always been drawn to the sea. Even as a child, I had sea-water in my veins. This caused a big problem when I was born. I required a series of very dangerous transfusions to replace all that sea-water with actual blood. But I digress.

My family has a strong naval heritage. While Admiral Bradford Jacobson (1898-1953) may be the most prominent member of the Jacobson naval fraternity, he was by no means the first. The first documented sailor Jacobson was Bryce Jacobson, from Scotland in the 15th century. Trust me- it was not easy being a Scottish Jew. Haggis is not kosher, and that’s all anybody ate around there- haggis omelets for breakfast. Haggis on rye for lunch. Haggis fermented into a sort of rum for dinner. It was a real drag. Great-grandpa Bryce enlisted in the navy with the intent of jumping ship in a kosher country. Not finding one, he stayed on board for the next twenty years and eventually died of scurvy.

I have always had an affinity for the ocean. In my room at work I have nautical prints hung and at home a portrait of Lord Nelson hangs above my bed. I learned to swim in the Long Island Sound and the radioactive glow did little to diminish my love of the open water. As a youth, I first went fishing for fluke and then advanced to blues and, later, marlin, by age ten. So it has been a long, deliberate process which has brought me to this decision: I want to be a pirate.

That’s right. A pirate.

“Arrr me mateys! Avast there!” See? I have all the lingo down. Pirates do exist. In Indonesian and Asian waters there exists today a serious problem with piracy that costs the oil industry millions of dollars each year. That is not what I mean. I want to be an eye-patch wearing, stripped shirt sporting, walk-the-plank dude. Why not? Pirates don’t punch in at nine, go home at five. They’re pirates 24/7. Wake up, hang someone from the yardarm. Breakfast, then forty lashes for the cook. Lunch, then spot a Spanish galleon of the port bow, unfurl all sails, prepare the cannons. Dinner, then a cutlass duel and a drink till dawn. Plenty of lusty wenches, lots of treasure to bury, nothing but the open waves and the smell of freedom in the air. No boss to report to. Someone has beef with you, shoot them in the back. Go where you want, do what you want, take what you want. You can be as obnoxious as you want to and offend anyone you want.

Pirates remain the last group that is not politically correct. To be a pirate is to BE someone. To be respected. Walk tall, oh men of the ocean! For you are the last true free men. And that is what I aspire to be.

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Doctor Who and The Video Pirates

22 Jul

July 22, 2011

I love pirates! Love ’em! I have always wanted to be a pirate. Man, who wouldn’t? My family has a rich naval tradition and even to this day I still feel the allure of the open water. If I didn’t get violently seasick I may actually step on a boat once in a while.

But there are many different kinds of pirates. They don’t all have to take off in ships and try to capture cargo. I think it may be more feasible for me to become a pirate broadcaster.

I am not talking about broadcasting music from an old warehouse. There is too much of that nonsense where I live. Drive through some parts of Brooklyn and tool around the dial and you’ll find that, depending on where you love, there are anywhere from 1 to 19 different pirate stations blasting Jamaican music with the bass and echo pumped up to 15 like those guys in the Red Stripe commercials, just a lot less fun. The FCC makes a half-hearted attempt to shut them down but they are not that easy to find and they just pop up somewhere else. The fines for these things rarely seem to get paid and no one really gets in trouble. The only victim? Me. I can’t drive down the Belt Parkway listening to my iPod without island drums leaking through. At some spots on my ride the pirate audio is three times louder than the regular stuff it overrides.

What I would really like to be, and this is the sort of thing that the FCC is serious about and can land you in some hot water, is a pirate TV broadcaster.

Check this out:

That is from Chicago and it is interrupting a pretty good episode of Doctor Who. It is one of the more infamous cases of television piracy. What was it about? What was the point? Who cares, it’s funny!

From wikipedia, which I wish would get taken over by pirates. Then they’d have an excuse:

The first occurrence of the signal intrusion took place during WGN-TV (channel 9)’s live telecast of its primetime newscast, The Nine O’Clock News. During Chicago Bears highlights in the sports report, the station’s signal was interrupted for about half a minute by a video of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, standing in front of a swaying sheet of corrugated metal, which imitated the background effect in the Max Headroom TV and movie appearances. There was no audio, only a buzzing noise. The hijack was stopped after engineers at WGN switched the modulation of their studio link to the John Hancock Center transmitter.

The incident left sports anchor Dan Roan flustered, saying, “Well, if you’re wondering what happened, so am I.”

Later that night, around 11:15 p.m., during a broadcast of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock, PBS station WTTW (channel 11)’s signal was hijacked using the same video that was broadcast during the WGN-TV hijack, this time with distorted audio.The person in the Max Headroom mask appeared, as before, this time saying, “That does it. He’s a freakin’ nerd,” before laughing and jeering, “Yeah, I think I’m better than Chuck Swirsky. Freakin’ liberal.”

The unidentified man continued to utter random phrases, including New Coke’s advertising slogan “Catch the Wave” while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time), then tossing the can down, and making an obscene gesture with a rubber extension over his middle finger (the gesture was cut off at the bottom of the screen due to the close-up of the camera) then retrieving the Pepsi can, and saying “Your love is fading,” before removing the rubber extension, then began humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo, and stating that he had “made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds” (the call letters WGN are an abbreviation for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” in reference to the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune). He then held up a glove, said “my brother is wearing the other one,” and put the glove on. He then took the glove off, adding that it was “dirty.”

The picture suddenly cut over to a shot of the man’s lower torso. His buttocks were exposed, and he was holding the now-removed mask up to the camera while being spanked with a flyswatter by an unidentified accomplice wearing a dress, as the man exclaimed They’re coming to get me!”. The transmission then blacked out and cut off, and the hijack was over after about 90 seconds.

WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the then-Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker. According to station spokesman Anders Yocom, technicians monitoring the transmission “attempted to take corrective measures, but couldn’t.” “By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over,” he told the Chicago Tribune. WTTW was able to find copies of the hijacker’s telecast with the help of Doctor Who fans who had been taping the show.

Believe it or not, this is a very, very rare occurrence. In fact, there seem to be only three events in the US. This is taken very seriously. Fines range from $100,000 to $250,000 and up to 10 years in jail so kids, don’t try this at home.

Below is the first try on WGN, with the anchor’s reaction.

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