Three-Toed Sloth

Piracy and Peer Production

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I bring you:

• Odd Ends gives us The Dead Men's Song: being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its Author Young Ewing Allison, Together with a Browse Through Other Gems of His and Recollections of Older Days, by Champion Ingraham Hitchcock, and the combination of lyrics and music for a certain Piratical Ballad. But when I say "Odd Ends", I really mean "Barbara Tozier and the whole cooperative peer-production crew at Distributed Proofreaders". (Which site is itself posting in a most pirate-like fashion today.) — I like a good anarchist utopia as much as the next guy raised on The Dispossessed and Mutual Aid, but it seems to me that Distributed Proofreaders is a much better prefiguration of that hope than the actual pirates, and those who pretend otherwise are silly.
• George MacDonald Fraser's The Pyrates, which I actually think is funnier than the Flashman books. (However, the cover of the American edition does it no justice, for which you need the UK cover.)
• Gary Farber blogging about Jewish pirates, including the notorious Jean Lafitte.
• The Dread Pirate bin Laden, an argument for treating, under international law, as "common enemies of mankind", a category established long ago for pirates.
• The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's detailed correlation of global temperature and the number of pirates, a piece of climatology at least as sound as anything funded by Exxon.

Coincidentally, the campus movie club just screened the latest Disney pirate movie; at least I think that was what they were showing, since their poster showed a strong influence, in its iconography, of a similarly-titled but not quite so work-safe production.

Linkage