Mister, Take Us To The Show

Meet "Joe."

"Joe" is just about the luckiest son of a bitch on the face of the planet. He's a regular guy, just like you and me. He's not connected, he's not in-the-know, he's not pulling cash out of his ass on a whim.

He's just... "Joe."

And yet this man, alone and armed with a camera phone and a Super Bowl ticket stub on a lanyard, managed to have any sports fan's soggy dream day come true: Without even really conning anyone at all, this guy was on the front line (FT) of the biggest party New York has seen since "America's Asshat Mayor" threw one for the Bronx Bombers.

And he's got some pretty convincing pictures and video to prove it, too.

Step by step, and without a net, this guy managed to pull off some pretty impressive stuff. The key to it all was the fact that the Giants' win - Not only a Super Bowl title, but the David-like halting of the Goliath Patriots' quest for perfection - created a super euphoria that gripped that town like nobody's business. While security was, indeed, tight, the avenues he took were crafty, as they'd actually provide the least resistance.

Now, mind you, this guy didn't plan on doing this at all. He just sort of lucked into it.

His first dose of WIN was putting his ticket stub on the lanyard. This is actually his key move, as it opened the flood gates of opportunity to him in the first place. Given the euphoria, and the fact that any real Giants fan - press or civvy or whatever, except cops - was wearing whatever Blue and White they could find (including what had to have been quite a few jerseys, especially Manning), no one in the press section's entryways made much effort to check credentials. The lanyard, coupled with the ticket (which had logos out the ying, no doubt), probably looked enough like a press pass to allow him to slip in.

Once there, the Cascade Effect took over. His next batch of WIN was in the form of deciding to stick with the owners' group instead of giving in to his desire to catch the players' bus. Because the owners' group was so freakin' huge, and most were probably wearing jerseys and other team colors, he fit right in. The lanyard again saved him because, since he was in such close proximity to the owner himself, security barely gave him a glance.

Are you gonna hassle the boss during his big victory party? Hell no! You want to party, not get fired and end up motherfucking the whole deal, right? Right! So, you hurry up and wave the boss' party through. Duh.

Score for "Joe." This bought him a free ride directly to Giants Stadium, and his ticket into the coveted players' areas.

With all the right moves made so far, and the big decisions conquered successfully, Karma had to be flowing through our friend "Joe," giving him concious knowledge of his WIN, and he decided to roll with the flow. Our friend ended up in the tunnel with Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin, who was carrying the Vince Lombardi Trophy with him. The picture of Coughlin alone is worth getting into the tunnel, but Karma kept pushing "Joe" onward - nay, WINward - and our dear friend ended up getting some spiff video as he trotted out onto the field.

But it doesn't stop there. That bit of WIN allowed him to nuzzle right up to the front of the stage, where he shot some wild clips of different parts of Giants team speeches, and took some killer pics as well. After regaining access to the locker room by way of Super Bowl hero David Tyree and family, the adventure peaked as he came away with some killer memories.

But the swag, that's what we all like to hear about, right? What'd he get for his unprecedented, unassisted run through the ultimate victory celebration's red carpet? All told: Eli signed both his ticket stub and his jersey, the whole team signed his hat, a City Hall access pass signed by Michael Strahan, and Gibril Wilson's signed game sweatshirt. Not to mention the digital proof of it all thanks to his cell phone.

I Has Them

Inspired by Caturday and the calendar hanging above the computer desk, my own motivational image featuring penguins, with a little help from Mick Foley.

Clawed: Caturday Rides Again

Obviously, to my shock and amazement, the Giants actually won the Super Bowl, so in the excitement that followed, I neglected to fix my prior Caturday failure. It's becoming a trend, isn't it. Oh well. At any rate, here's today's Caturday goodness, brought to you as always by Fark and the kitteh-owning population therein. Today's story is about Scottish Kitteh Guidelines (FT), an actual government produced (i.e. taxpayer funded) guide to the basics of cat care. OooooK. If the Scots actually need this kind of thing, that doesn't say much for any hope their kittehs have. Scary stuff.













Caturday: It's good for you.

I've Seen The Needle

And boy, it has to hurt, big time.

Not the tattoo so much as the fact that this guy got it in anticipation of TFP's Perfect 19-0 season (FT). Only trouble is, the Patriots didn't go 19-0. Them New York (Football) Giants kinda ruined that and saw to it that TFPs had one big fat number 1 in their L column for 2007-8.

Everyone, say it with me: Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Elsewhere, did you ever wonder what happened to all the stuff they printed up in case the losing team won? Well, there are going to be kids in third world countries this week who will be ever-so greatful that TFPs didn't win the Super Bowl (FT).

My guess is that there was a TON more Patriots stuff printed up than there was Giants stuff, since everyone expected them to win. Oh well, while the Patriots earned themselves a big fat FAIL, they did manage to clothe a small chunk of the Christian Children's Fund crowd at the same time, so it's not a total loss...

For those not familiar with the story, there's a reason why I (and many other bloggers and journalists alike) call the New York Giants the "New York (Football) Giants." Way back in the day, the modern San Fransisco Giants once played in New York, and both teams were extant at the time. So, folks just said either New York-Baseball Giants or -Football Giants.

The Yahoo! Enigma: One User's Take

Disclaimer: I fucking hate Micro$oft (from here on out, M$). I'm not the biggest fan of Yahoo! for reasons I'll get into here in a bit. And as far as Google goes, right now, they're my heroes. So, this article is going to sound a bit biased. My hatred for M$ is like walking and breathing: something I won't unlearn until the day I die, so I don't think I'll ever be able to portray them in a positive light.

That is, unless the company pulls a Red Dwarf 180 and suddenly throws open the doors to its source code so the real geeks can fix the fucking thing. Of course, that's about as likely to happen as it is likely that the Biblical Book of Revelations is more a prophetic vision than a really bad hashish dream.

Anywho, so yeah. Recently, M$ made a play for Yahoo!, offering up ~$45B in a bid to take the two largest portals on the Internet and make them into one huge, heaping pile of suck. Let's take a look at some of the consequences of such a merger:

• M$N and Yahoo! Messengers: First of all, anything from M$ is almost required to be either buggy, a resource hog, annoying and awkward to use, or any combination of the three, so already you can all guess that I don't even touch it. Yahoo!'s Messenger and chat systems can't seem to filter out spam bot traffic no matter how hard they try. Their Captcha Chat verification process? Reduced the spam bots by about 0%, while increasing user frustration nearly 10¹⁰⁰%. There's also the still-festering sore that is boot codes, and Yahoo!'s seeming refusal to even try to plug such simple DoS holes. A blending of these two seriously-broken clients has already happened, as they now allow cross-client messaging and other select features. But to take the two, blend everything all together, and you have the potential for a while new level of user meltdown.
• Flickr: Poor Flickr. Once a haven of image posting ease, now owned by Yahoo!. Yahoo! still has yet to fully intergrate Flickr's features into its site, as is evident by the still broken image capabilities in Yahoo! Profiles. M$ would love to get their hands on it to make it a part of the steaming bowl of liquid feces that is M$N, but probably more so the fact that they'd be able to change the photo licensing scheme. Flickr allows users to post photos under various Creative Commons licenses; CopyLeft, one thing M$ certainly doesn't jibe with, would risk losing a major bastion of creativity as M$ would almost certainly impose some sort of scheme to get their name all over our pictures. It's M$ that serves up Corbis images as well, so there's that to consider, too.
  
• M$N Spaces and Yahoo! 360/Geocities: Let's face it, neither of these could even try to hold a candle to Facebook and MySpace. Yahoo!'s 360 services is big and clunky and limited, and I don't even care to try M$N's offering. I've viewed a few dozen Spaces pages, and boy, do they usher in a whole new level of blah. Since Spaces can also double as a sort of website space, there's also Geocities to consider. Once upon a time, I had a Geocities page, long-since defunct due to neglect. But that was before Yahoo! took it over and (as corporations often do) made it suck. With the number of free space providers these days, coupled with the younger generation's decision to stick more with just blogs and social networking pages anymore, Geocities has become something of a Web 1.0 relic. An M$/Yahoo! merger would likely see the fork put into it once and for all...
• The Big Issue - FreEMail, Search and Portals: The core issues here are merging the two search engines and portals. M$ maintains that it would create one clear #2 to Google's search dominance (more on this later). In reality, though, it's not much to speak of search-wise. I'm a Google user (obviously), and when it comes to finding what I need, the simple answer is right up in the top right of my browser window. As far as portals are concerned, though, merging M$N and Yahoo! would create a serious imbalance in the Portal world. While Google has a decent number of good portals, most of it is devoted to user services (GMail, Blogger, Google Maps, etc.). And while GMail is hella awesome, there's little doubt that a merger of HoTMaiL and Yahoo! Mail would create a new beast that even Google would be hard-pressed to match.

So, that's really three strikes against M$, and all in core issues. The rest is just suck upon suck, so it's easy to ignore. Now, here are some potential consequences of what Fark yesterday dubbed "Yahoogle," (FT) and to be fair, I'll attack Google's major problem/roadblock first:

• Search: Let's face it: Google Rules Search. Hell, to "google" is actually a verb in the English language now. You don't search for something online, you Google it. Friend asks for a phone number or some such stupid public info and you want to encourage them to be self-sufficient? Tell them to Google it. Need directions? Google it. Google it. Google it. A Yahoogle merger would indeed create a search titan, one that M$ and their piece-of-years-old-dog-shit M$N Search would piss their collective pants in envy over. And while it would give Google quite the monopoly over search, there's no way you could even come close to calling them The Next Micro$oft (FT). That's just bullshit, and here come the reasons why...
• Portals: An acquisition of Yahoo! by Google wouldn't give them much of an edge in portals, since M$N is well-established (despite its suckitude), Google itself isn't intensely portal-driven, and there are a few other portals still out there with market share. In all reality, Yahoogle could actually create competition for M$, something that Billy Boy and the flakes in Redmond obviously have a history of disliking and trying (and often failing) to quash. So, no monopoly for Google here.
  
• FreEMail: Yahoogle Mail would be a nightmare for M$, since it would take Yahoo's crappy yet heavily used system and (hopefully) crossfade it gently into GMail's hawesome fold, thereby creating an instant army of people suddenly completely happy with their email service. GMail's spam filters are awesome, the interface is nice and clean, and let's face it: folding Yahoo! Mail into it, creating a mostly GMail-driven system, would be a serious improvement. Ask anyone with a Yahoo! account, they'll tell you what kind of hell it is. The only problems this would create? Well, bumping all them Yahoo! Mail users up to the space already available to GMail users would be quite the feat. On the good side, Google has the resources available to them, so it's possible. It would also force M$ to make some serious improvements to HoTMaiL, that's what. Innovation through competition: who knew, right? That's not a problem... For Google, but M$... Yeah, problem.
  
• Residual Stuff: The remaining chunks of Yahoo pose no serious threat to M$, even if folded into a Yahoogle banner. 360 and Geocities have already proven themselves to be both useless and sad, with the latter also having the distinction of being a senior citizen in Internet years. Google might be able to breathe new life into the former free hosting giant, blending it together somehow with Blogger and iGoogle, but it would also have to bump up the space limit for each user. With Geocities' still rather large user base, that'd be quite the bump. Again, Google most likely would have the resources to make that rollout a reality. But as for 360, no, even Google couldn't save that pile of junk. They'd be better off developing iGoogle into a mix of personal portal page and social networking page and axing the 360 arm all together.

There's even been talk of Yapple (FT), a move by still-extant upstart Apple to shield Yahoo! from The Borg (M$). Merger? Unlikely, since Apple is still behind the "different platform all together" wall that is BSD. Besides, it'd be like a liberal hippie marrying a prudish neo-conservative and concieving a child while they're both hopped up on PCP. Scary.

Yahoo employees themselves aren't too happy about the merger idea, calling it "the frosting on a double-layer suck cake." (FT)

BoingBoing has a link to a release from GoogleBlog, including the following nugget of joy:

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions -- and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

As for me? I say split it. Let Google take the good stuff, minus Search, and M$ can deal with the rest of the mess. Let the mergers finish, technologies intergrate, and see what kind of bastard children we get from the three parents. I use a combination of Yahoo! and Google services, so Yahoogle would pretty much be my all-encompassing happy Internet tool if it happened the right way.

Until then, though, I think I might actually kind of enjoy sitting back and watching this bus fly off the highway. Who knows, might get rather interesting in the near future...

Goin' Wherever It Leads

Fuck.

Them.

Patriots.

Thank you, New York Football Giants, the Super Bowl XLII Champions! Feels like a dream, really, to know that TFP are, indeed, mortal, and they will forever be the team that almost - ALMOST - went perfect.

Hope they trademarked 18-1...

To everyone in Boston and the surrounding areas: IT'S THE CEEEERSE OF THE MOONINIIIITES, FUCKAAAHS! Suck on that Chowder a one time. Flip out on a bunch of Lite Brites, will you? Well, No Super Bowl For You.

I've always had a soft spot for the underdog. Even though they were the favorites going into Super Bowl XL, the Steelers started the playoffs as the sixth seeded team, rattling off a spectacular run to the Lombardi Trophy. Tonight, though, the Giants were indeed underdogs, and holy shit, did I call it or what:

Plaxico Burress for the win.

Grades for this game: New York (Football) Giants - HAWSOME; New England Patriots - BIG FUCKING FAIL!!!

Carl is gonna have a FIELD DAY with this one...

Ventura Blvd.

Thumbs up. Way up.

Tom Petty et al said fuck that medly shit, and gave us straight rock and roll. Good deal. All the classics you'd expect (can't do Mary Jane, it's the damned Super Bowl for pity's sake), and hopefully, Running Down a Dream will get Eli, Plax, Michael and the boys fired up for some TFP domination in the second half.

I still bleed Black and Gold, but tonight, Blue and White ain't all bad. Besides, I am a Penn State fan, after all...

GO GIANTS!

No Perfect Season For You. Not Yours.

NO U CN'T HAZ Z LUMBRDY TROFEE.

Mary Jane's Last Dance (during a halftime show)

Halftime.

And holy shit, we have a game.

Looks like Them Fuckin' Patriots (TFPs) are human after all. Brady went down, twice, to Eli's once. Both Brady and Eli fumbled. And somehow, Michael Strahan and the Big Blue's defense has managed to keep TFPs in check for most of the half. Scoring came early, and then it became a dogfight.

On the bright side of things, I do have former Steeler Plaxico Burress to cheer for, but he hasn't really had any breakout plays yet. He's a playmaker, let there be no doubt.

Hopefully, halftime won't have any wardrobe malfunctions. With Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on stage, if that happened, I'd be Running Down a Bottle of Eye Bleach...

BRADY GOES DOWN X2!!!eleventyone!!1

Fuck Yeah.

Yes, I'm watching the Super Bowl. Yes, I'm blogging during the Super Bowl (lame). Yes, I forgot to put up yesterday's Caturday post, I'll fix that later (probably to drown my sorrows). And yes, in lieu of my Steelers being in the big game, I have two things to say:

FUCK THEM PATRIOTS.

GO NEW YORK (FOOTBALL) GIANTS!!!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Big Freakin' Game, over here...

... And Bradshaw (rock) adds a nice run as I ride out...

Smartass

Who hasn't seen A Christmas Story (IMDb)? If you haven't, woe be unto you, because you're missing out on a classic. Why mention it on Groundhog Day, you ask? Well, I submit to you one Derreck Lowe, good friend of mine and blogger-who-doesn't-blog-much:

Right? Right. Now, compare to A Christmas Story's Flick, played by Scott Schwartz:

Come ON! It's right there! While Derreck is a bit too young to be Schwartz's twin, it's pretty damned close, isn't it? And given Schwartz's career change, I'm willing to bet Derreck wouldn't have minded being mistaken for the former kid star.

My point? None, really. Just some Saturday Morning fun while we await today's Caturday Thread to emerge over on Fark, and give it some time to fill up...

Get Off My Lawn

Wow. It has been forever since I've culled any content to talk about from BoingBoing. I don't know why, really. For the past two years, BB just hasn't been the major destination it once was for me. I still visit it on occasion (obviously), but I dunno. I think there might be an underlying snark vibe going on there that kinda puts me off...

At any rate, BB links to a list from Beloit College's Department of Public Affairs on the Mindset List for the Class of 2011, or those four-year college graduates born in 1990, quite the year for those of us who have memories of it (aka the "old folks.").

Some of the things on the list really stood out for me, given my perception of this particular generation, especially #55: MTV has never featured music videos. To that generation, the M has always been about "Material." Kinda makes Madonna's Material Girl oddly prophetic in a way.

See, I DO remember videos on MTV. Hell, I was nearly four years old when MTV launched on August 1st, 1981. I lived in a world without it at all, though I have little to no memory of that time, other than the arrival of my baby brother CJ that December. No different these days, really. Videos have been relegated to insomniac fare, amid the craptastic programming line-up that has polluted what was supposed to be Music Television since the first Real World.

They live in a world without true MTV.

Another one that was nifty for me was #41: The “Blue Man Group” has always been everywhere. I suppose it marks me as old that my first memory of BMG was when they were simply "The Blue Men," a performance art group that made news when they "Buried The 80s" in 1988 or '89. Struck me as odd, given the fact that the 80s still had a year and change to go, and that these guys were walking around painted blue. Years later, when they showed up in their current form, I was taken right back to that news report.

They've never seen a world without a cellphone smaller than a brick. To them, Distrubed did Land of Confusion (originally Genesis), Dope did Spin Me Round (Like a Record) (originally Dead or Alive), and "rapcore" has always been a genre of music.

As the spoiled brats known as the Class of 2011 graduate from High School this year and get slapped with the real world, I offer them this advice: It's a cold place, kids. It's not going to give you what you want, when you want it. Bundle up, add layers, and don't even think for a second that you're just going to "cruise through life." Your generation needs to learn how to not take things for granted. Only then will you be able to function in our modern society, fucked up though it may be...

01-31-07: The Day Boston Freaked Out, Big Time

Blog post not withstanding, I'd like to point out that today is also my mother's 60th birthday, and she doesn't look or act a day over 40. Seriously. I'm totally not kissing her ass right now, I mean it. My mom is a hell of an awesome person, and over the years she (and my dad, equally as awesome) has done a lot more for me than any mom should for their kid. I love you, Mom. Happy Birthday!

It was a harmless thing, really. More or less a primitive Lite Brite with magnets on the back. A simple, illuminated picture of a simple, foul-mouthed character from one hell of a hillarious cartoon show for grown-ups.

A marketing firm tasked with promoting a movie based on said cartoon hired two performance artists to hang a number of these Lite Brite knockoffs around the city of Boston, as they had done for a number of other major cities nationwide. Hundreds of these harmless devices hung in obtuse spots in these cities for two weeks, glowing warmly while they shot the finger at people passing them by.

And no one said a word until one Boston commuter, obviously drunk on the government-spawned paranoia about "tur'rests" and "enemies of freedom" and other things the Bush Administration wants you to be afraid of while it pilfers the taxpayers' money, had a fit of panic and called the Boston Police.

What happened next has been called laughable by most, embarrassing to those involved, and to this very day, still called a necessary reaction by the very people who overreacted in the first place. The Boston Mooninite Bomb Scare. It happened one year ago today (Fark Thread).

Yep, a little green dude flipping the bird nearly brought the City of Boston to a standstill, and showed the world just how badly the US Government has messed with the heads of its citizens.

But for some reason, it only happened in Boston. In several other cities around the country, dozens of similar devices had been hung as part of the geurrilla marketing campaign behind ATHF:MFFT. Out of the dozen or so cities involved, only Boston flipped its lid. Not even terror-prone New York City so much as flinched.

Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested, and when they gave their first post-incident press conference, they pulled a fast one on the media and kept the topic of conversation strictly to Hairstyles of the 70s. Hairstyles of the 70s! Genius! Of course, this didn't make BPD or Homeland Security very happy, but what were they going to do? They just spent millions in taxpayer money to assess and eliminate the threat of a few Lite Brites with vulgar little dudes on them.

The guys got off with community service, and Turner got a little free publicity for the movie out of it in the end. Boston, to this day, maintains that, if given the same situation to do over again, they'd do it just like they did the first time: Act completely irrational because they're terrified little children, afraid of the terrorism boogieman. They've allowed themselves to be told what's right and wrong by Good King Georgie, and as a result, they've made complete asses of themselves.

And hey, come to think of it, that exposed a serious tactical flaw in a major US city's terrorism defense and response plans: YOU JUMP AT THE DROP OF A HAT. You might want to fix that, Boston. Terrorists aren't just stupid, backwards Arabs ignorant of the modern world, you know...

'Cause My Head Is Like A Sieve

Let the chorus echo throughout all of mankind, because it's been said countless times by countless people over countless thousands of years of human civilization.

I fucking hate being sick.

For the past two or three days, my sinuses have been playing a sick joke on me. On the left side, it's like the Anduin was flowing from my brain. But on the right side, Arakkis, dry as a bone, but minus the worms and spice. Today is no better, either, because now both sides want to take turns doing each thing.

Human existence has its fun moments, doesn't it? Moments where life is so unbelievably uncomfortable that you have no choice but to stop, look at it, and chuckle a bit. The very sadness of the situation makes it quite humorous in itself.

And I noticed that. What does that say for me?

Today, I'm winning the battle with the furnace, without interference for once. When I came in this morning, the thing was on its last legs due to early morning neglect, so I basically had to start from scratch. 30 minutes later, though, I once again had hell and damnation going great guns, and it wasn't long after that that the coal piled on and began to cook quite nicely. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the coal we're using now is better quality, no-sir-ee-bob...

Kudos to Derreck on his recent stroke of good Karma. After what he's been through lately, he deserves a good upturn. Now, if only I could get an upturn of my own. Anyway, go read his blog, and leave comments. It might encourage him to write a bit more...

Apparently Lawyer Mama either glanced over my name-check yesterday on WWdN:IX and contained her jealously, or she totally missed it. Either way, she became the newest commenter here at my stupid blog. Two comments in a month isn't too bad for me, really, given the rarity that any show up at all. I know you're all out there reading, and I want you to know that it's OK to talk back if you'd like ^,^

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internets...

On A Dark Desert Highway

Praise be unto Darwin, who, in his stuffed monkey wisdom and grace, has blessed us this day with teh goodness and hawesome. Ahhh, man.

And there was much rejoicing (yay).

The Audio from Wil's performance is up and live on teh Intarwebs (which is a series of tubes), and there are several ways for you to get your hands on it. I won't type anymore so you can get to downloadin':

• Directly from Pulp Gamer, who was kind enough to record, encode and release it (41.1 MB 128K MP3)
• As a backup, Wil has posted a copy available on WWdN:IX itself (41.1 MB 128K MP3)
• A Rapidshare Link, provided by WWdN:IX Reader Patrick G
• And two torrents: One on The Pirate Bay from WWdN:IX Reader Michael S
• And the other on Mininova courtesy of yours truly, The Lost Prophyt

I reccomend the last route, since I'm seeding that puppy as we speak, and will continue to do so as long as I have the uptime. That might be a bit shaky right now, though, given the fact that, six feet in front of me and through not much more than brick and glass, there's one hell of a high wind session going on.

The usually sullen and rather rare creaking of the sign for the office below us is now a batshit crazy pendulum of constant "hit me with some WD40" noise, and looking out the window reveals lines swinging like a double dutch rope.

Good times in Central PA...

Update: My update color is never the same, but that's not the update. The update is thus: I hope Lawyer Mama doesn't get too jealous, but for my torrent effort, I got name-checked over on WWdN:IX. I'm still seeding, and we're up to four total seeders now, with just one peer as of 2:20pm my time. On the bright side, I've tossed up enough for two copies, so my part is done :D

Don't Be A Dick

Those were the words spoken by one Richard William Wheaton III during his keynote speech at last year's Penny Arcade Expo. And soon, they could be on a t-shirt near you. Beware, the Monkeys are about to reveal themselves to the world...

Yep, Wil's considering a whole new batch of Wil-branded geekwear. There are all sorts of nifty ideas in the entry's comments section, and I'm sure any number of them will end up being used. Having designed some popular shirts myself (for the Avenue), I of course support the notion of a design contest, suggested by several Monkeys.

(By the way, for those of you not "in-the-know," Monkeys are what WWdN/:IX readers refer to themselves as. Darwin be praised.)

While I highly doubt that tiny pirate hats will be on the merch menu, I can't help but post this picture from last year's International Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19th, me buccos!):

Don't be a dick, er ye can walk the plank! Arrrrr!