The Poopdeck

The Pirate Guys, with some special guests, will perform at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 19, at the Russell Tripp Performing Arts Center at Linn-Benton Community College in our hometown – Albany, Oregon.

The show will be a fund-raiser for Albany Helping Hands, an agency that provides shelter and services for the homeless in the mid-valley. Since pirates are always just one shipwreck away from being homeless, it’s our pleasure to take part. Admission is a suggested donation of $10 at the door, with all proceeds going to Helping Hands.

We’ll be doing our usual mix of pirate prattle, songs and silliness for the all-ages audience. We’re looking forward to the chance to get on stage in front of a hometown crowd and having some fun with them. And to raise money for a very good cause. For those of our readers who are within driving distance of Oregon’s mid-valley, we hope to see ya there!

The saga continues!

It’s been more than a month now since we started “A Pirates Tale” on our blog, and we’re having fun with it. Whether anyone else is is purely a matter of conjecture.

The story is, as Cap'n Slappy says, a "swashchuckler," rather than a swashbuckler. There are, we trust,. more than a few laughs in the tale of the Festering Boil and its crew of pirates, chasing the evil Lady Fanny around the globe.

The thing started as an exercise, a little something to get us writing each morning. It’s turned into much more, and Slappy would agree we’ve learned a lot from it. We said at the beginning we would never discuss where the story is going, but just write what the other guy handed us each day. And readers can probably tell that, as the plot lurched back and forth like a drunken sailor on shore leave. But we’ve learned (for the most part) how to say “yes” to whatever plot twists and bizarre ideas the other comes up with, and keep the story moving. Now if we could just learn to write a little shorter.

To find the story, go to our main page and scroll down to the blog link, which you'll find just above the picture of Dave Barry.

Sometime in the next few weeks we’ll be posting a “the story so far” file online so people who want to catch up with how this started can do so easily. In the meantime, the only way is to click on the blog, then click on the “January archive” link on the left of the page. Scroll all the way to the bottom of that and start reading.

And don’t be afraid to comment! Our blog is set up like most – readers can post comments on each daily entry. Let us know if you have ideas on where you’d like to see the story go, characters you want to go away, or just to talk about it generally. We’ve had only a little feedback so far, and it’s all been positive. If you think we’re a couple of morons wasting your time, we’d like to hear that. We won’t necessarily do anything different, but we’d still like to hear it.

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There’s 213 days left until Talk Like a Pirate Day!! Start making yer plans fer the day now, and let us know about ‘em when ye do. We’ll be posting them on the Web site, as always.

--Ol' Chumbucket, editor