Avast Ye!

I just finished writing a magnificent and long post full of links and other fun information, and then my computer froze and I lost it all.

"Fuck!" I hollered.

"What?" said my roommate, annoyed.

"I just lost my post."

He said nothing. He understood.

Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the international holiday in which thousands of people around the world talk like pirates. If ye be one o' them land-lubbin bilge rats who have no idea how to begin to talk like a pirate, the Talk Like a Pirate homepage has a helpful glossary to keep you from gettin' run through. You can even learn how to talk like a pirate in German (Bei meinem Hacken, meine Papagei ist tot!"), and the site is structured like a haggadah, which made me wonder if there might have been a large Jewish pirate population. If my Google search is any indication, there were none. I welcome anyone who can tell me otherwise (to be fair, I don't think pirates were ever particularly religious...although voodoo).

Random Correspondence from Poland
A few months ago, a Polish artist named Paul Katon e-mailed me randomly to ask me if I knew anyone who could help promote his documentary I Am Not a Pygmy (here is a link to a press release about it). I wrote him back and explained that I was just a poor artist with no connections to anyone, but that I wished him luck. We corresponded briefly and shared stories and thoughts about our respective arts, and then the correspondence petered off and I more or less forgot about it. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to find another letter from him in my inbox, and this time I was able to suggest to him that I could post a link to his homepage on my blog and he could post a link to my blog on his. His site is neat; it contains links to his various photo galleries, as well as a link to a short film of his, called "Heaven in My Mind." Based on our correspondence and his Web site, I think Paul is a pretty nice guy and a really talented artist. The link to his homepage is in the "Links to Other Artists" section of my sidebar here.

When I told my roommate about randomly receiving a letter from Poland, he said, "Does this happen to you a lot?" Yes, it does. I don't know why, but for some reason I get an inordinately large quantity of e-mail from people who aren't spammers, but who just decided to contact me for one reason or another. Some of them have gone on to become good friends of mine, enriching my life, even though I have never seen them in person. Others engage my mind and my imagination with letters that contain phrases like:

I'll add some spiced insanity to this conversation. The Bedouin say that down in Oman there is a mountain with caves in it where dragons live. They say that you could play a flute which will inebriate {SP?} the lizard and he will crawl out of his den. A few men have been known to ride on the backs of the beast but this is all nonsense isn't it?

I don't know why this happens to me so much (sometimes I suspect that I'm a hub for people, a sort of conduit through which people meet each other), but I hope to God it never stops happening. It's made my life very interesting.

Finally, my roommate showed me these:
Woot! is a place that sells one thing every day (I should say one type of thing, because they actually sell many of them...I mention this because it took a very long and complicated conversation for Ian and me to figure that out). And for those people who really love coffee and really love computers, and can't bear to be away from the latter long enough to get a cup of the former, someone invented the Caffeine Machine. As Calvin (the cartoon six-year-old, not the theologian) once said , I'm sure this just goes to show something...I'm just not sure what.

This post has been fraught with peril since I started it. So I'm going to stop before I lose it again. Yarr...