Avast, ye swabs! Time to talk like a pirate – and more

Avast, ye swabs! Time to talk like a pirate – and more

Modern-day pirates don’t wear tricorn hats and eyepatches anymore. They wear three-piece suits and manage hedge funds on Wall Street.

Still, who among us hasn’t dreamed of sailing the Caribbean with Capt. Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl? That may be unlikely, but on Sept. 19, you can, at least, celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

It’s a completely made-up holiday by a couple of guys from Oregon. But it caught fire when Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry celebrated it, and then the jokesters at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster adopted it, and the rest is the stuff of pirate lore.

Here’s some essential pirate trivia you can use to impress your friends and annoy your frenemies:

Hate to disappoint, but the buccaneer Jose´ Gaspar, for whom Tampa’s annual Gasparilla Pirate Fest is named, is utterly fictitious.

But pirates did roam the Florida coast. Sir Francis Drake captured and destroyed St. Augustine, America’s oldest city, in 1586. Other pirates plundered the northeast Florida settlement, including Blackbeard and Jean Lafitte.

J.C. Bruce

Speaking of Lafitte, he sided with the United States during the War of 1812 and was instrumental in our victory over the Red Coats in the Battle of New Orleans.

Florida’s Gulf Coast was a favorite pirate hideout with all its rivers, bays, swamps and other secluded places. But, no, Jose´ Gaspar was not among them.

Speaking of waterborne events, Sept. 20 is the anniversary of Fonzie water skiing over a shark in a 1977 “Happy Days” episode. Leather jacketed Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli— played by Henry Winkler—skied up a ramp and over a caged shark, a stunt so weird the phrase “jumping the shark” has become synonymous with creative collapse.

By day, he’s billionaire Bruce Wayne. By night, he’s Batman, the Caped Crusader, the World’s Greatest Detective. What’s his superpower? He doesn’t have one. But he’s got attitude, as only an orphan who witnessed his parents’ murders can. And he’s got the cash to work out his demons. You can celebrate the 85th anniversary of his launch into the comics on Sept. 21, Batman Day.

Three essential Batman facts:

The name Bruce Wayne is a mashup of two historical figures: My ancestral Scottish namesake, Robert the Bruce, and Mad Anthony Wayne, a Revolutionary War hero.

When the mob stole Gotham City’s Christmas decorations in 1978, Batman tracked them down to their lair in—where else? —Florida. Could this be where the Florida Man memes began?

Technically, Superman works for Batman. That’s because Bruce Wayne bought “The Daily Planet,” the struggling Metropolis newspaper where Clark Kent is a mild-mannered reporter.

Sept. 22 is the first day of fall, the Autumnal Equinox, when we have equal hours of day and night. Looking ahead: Daylight Saving Time will end Nov. 3.

Sept. 22 is also White Chocolate Day. Essential to know: If you’ve heard that white chocolate doesn’t actually contain chocolate, that’s not so. By FDA standards, it must contain at least 20 percent cocoa butter. But it doesn’t have the cocoa powder and other bits that give real chocolate its brown color.

The Boss turns 75 on Sept. 23. That’s right, the immortal Bruce Springsteen was born on this day in Freehold, N.J., in 1949.

For all you grammer freeks Sept. 24 is National Punctuation Day; a time to recall that writing good requires the proper use of commas, apostrophes, colons and semicolons. And for goodness’ sake don’t forget to use periods or else you may fall pray to run-on sentences and that can be very annoying and lead to poor communication that you definitely don’t want to do…

On Sept. 25, 1513, explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa proclaimed he had “discovered” the Pacific Ocean and claimed it and all its lands for Spain. Never mind the “undiscovered” people who already lived there, including everyone in Asia, half the world’s population at the time.

Sept. 25 also marks the anniversary of the first multi-page newspaper published in America in 1690: “Public Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick.” This happened in Boston where the British colonial governor decided it was annoying and shut it down. It would be another 14 years before another newspaper would be published. And that’s why freedom of the press was a cornerstone of The Bill of Rights after the Revolution. ¦

J.C. Bruce is a journalist and author of The Strange Files series of mysteries. He holds dual citizenship in the United States of America and Florida. You can write him at EssentialNews@jcbruce.com . Visit his website EssentialNews.media for more spellbinding facts that will make you the smartest person in the room—or the Zoom.

The post Avast, ye swabs! Time to talk like a pirate – and more first appeared on Bonita Springs Florida Weekly .