Johnny Blaze....Arghhhh!

September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day.  There actually is an official website, here, where you can read more--much more, believe me--about this day.

Oh, the indignity!

This is the furred, four-legged cat son of of our daughter.  They have named him "Johnny Blaze," although, of course, his actual name is known only to him.

This would be a good time to observe that conventional wisdom has pirates typically saying "Arghhhh", but when you think about it, who really  knows how pirates actually talked? Surely there are no sound bites from the 1700s.

I propose that early on in the "talkie" era, when motion pictures were first accompanied with sound, that a film was made in which a pirate first said "Arghhhh," and that became the model for pirate speech thereafter to this very day.

You're welcome to the PhD candidate to whom I just gave his dissertation thesis.

Pirate Radio

(Image credit here)

Several days ago, the bride convinced me to watch Pirate Radio, starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  She had seen it one day last week while off work for a bad cold and sore throat.

I was kinda skeptical, since I knew it'd been out about a year and hadn't seemed to kick any butt at the box office.  But she was enthusiastic, so I figured, why not?

IT WAS GREAT!  If you like classic rock from the 1960s, watch it.  Now.  The soundtrack is phenomenal. 

HBO has it On Demand for free until about 10 January. 

We love us some Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  He first came to our attention several years ago, playing Brandt in The Big Lebowski.  That movie will be the subject of an upcoming post, a great film for which Jeff Bridges should have gotten Best Actor and John Goodman should have gotten Best Supporting Actor. 

But the Academy doesn't much like the word f**k, evidently.

Back to Pirate Radio...from Film.com:

In Britain 1966 recently expelled student, Carl has been sent by his mother to find some direction in life by visiting his godfather, Quentin. However, Quentin is the boss of Radio Rock, a pirate radio station in the middle of the North Sea, populated by an eclectic crew of rock-and-roll deejays. Life on the North Sea is eventful. Carl discovers the opposite sex and who his real father is. Meanwhile, pirate stations have come to the attention of government minister Dormand, who is out for the blood of these lawbreakers. In an era when the stuffy corridors of power stifle anything approaching youthful exuberance, Dormand seizes the chance to score a political goal, and The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act is passed in an effort to outlaw the pirates and to remove their ghastly influence from the land once and for all. What results is a literal storm on the high seas. With Radio Rock in peril, its devoted fans rally together and stage an epic Dunkirk-style hundred-boat rescue to save their deejay heroes. Some things may come to an end, but rock and roll never dies.