News You Can Bruise

I wanted to call our pirate ship the S.S. Mutiny. Kevin disagreed. I pointed out that whenever we made a raid, it would be bounty on the Mutiny. Kevin was not as impressed by this as I felt he should have been.

When I think about modern piracy I think of the awful stuff, that makes you feel guilty about being interested in piracy: mafias and triads hijacking ships and "making the crew walk the plank" as Cryptonomicon put it. But the ICC CCS weekly piracy report only has a few penny-ante incidents a week, mostly pirates sneaking on board and stealing ship's stores.

If you read between the lines ("Coast near Aceh is particularly risky for hijackings") you see a glimpse of more dangerous incidents that don't get reported or don't show up on the weekly report they publish to gratify our weird voyeuristic tendencies. A while back I read a book called Dangerous Waters which painted a picture somewhere in between, of an East Asian pirate threat that was ever-present and chronic but not with many resources behind it, and easy to foil in most cases if you took safety precautions. Where does the truth lie?

I bring this up because there's a note on the piracy report page that I noticed when I went to fix its Automat feed by rewriting the scraper in Beautiful Soup 2.0:

After Tsunami there were no incidents of any kind in the Malacca Straits for two months. However, attacks have resumed since 28.02.2005. In the last four weeks there have been three serious attacks of Kidnapping the crew for ransom in Malacca straits. Heavily armed pirates have boarded ships and seized the master and one or two crew members and taken them ashore. Pirates have not stolen any property and sole aim has been to kidnap the crew.

Did the tsunami reboot the Indonesian piracy industry, giving them a chance to come up with more agressive and dangerous strategies? What's going on?

Going to the yearly CollabNet retreat, or as it's called this year, the CollabNet retrograde advance. It's likely no bruising of news will occur until Friday night. To top it all off, the company doing our team-building activity stole my and Kevin's team-building business idea and watered it down into a safe, liability-free activity.

We planned to take participants on board our walktheplank.net-branded ship as swabbies, show them how to handle a rope and a cutlass, then storm the nearest container ship. Those that survived would become more effective teammates and take home valuable merchandise, as well as peg legs and other picturesque injuries. They've watered it down to mere "pirate-themed challenges" such as the Cannonball Carry. Such is ever the reward of genius! And of genoise.

Sumana pointed me to this Salon article about people handing out religious tracts to trick-or-treaters. Says one tract magnate:

"A tract that has a ghoul on the cover might really speak to a kid who's been dabbling in those kinds of things, but we may not be able to sell that to the Christians. We stay away from the occult stuff and tend to use more innocuous costumes, like pirates."

Sumana is sad that pirates are considered innocuous, but I think this opens up new possibilities. "Arrr! I'll pillage in strict accordance with the teachings of the apostle Paul!" If I weren't so busy dabbling in ghouls, I'd work some religiousinspirational angle into the walktheplank.net business plan.

The life of a pirate is a difficult one. Decks must be swabbed, flags hoisted, throats slit, and scurvy dogs avasted. We at walktheplank.net are constantly pressured by the day-to-day drudgery of piracy's infrastructure, even as we mantain our busy schedule of consulting gigs and speaking engagements.

There are compensations. Piracy has become "hip" among the young Bay Area elite (source: some damn SFBG article or something). This means that occasionally a club will have a "pirate night" and our employees can go into town in their salt-encrusted clothes, without their peg legs and myna birds[0] attracting undue attention from the law.

There is also a certain amount of glamour associated with piracy, especially for those such as ourselves who practice piracy as it was done on the high seas of old. Sensitive dewy-eyed chicks who visit our ship are charmed by our gleaming cutlasses and our innovative yet traditional methods for sustainable pillaging (we are the only piracy corporation to still keelhaul in the traditional old-world manner).

But for those who must live the lifestyle rather than merely dabbling in it, a pirate's existence is a lonely morass of bad food, long hours, and daggers in the back. So on this Talk Like A Pirate Day, spare a moment to think of those brave souls who risk their lives to board ships in the dead of night and steal things.

[0] Due to concerns about the importation of endangered parrots, all ecologically conscious pirates carry myna birds instead.

One of the most pressing problems of modern piracy is where to hide the booty. Development and ecotourism mean that even the most isolated beaches will eventually attract visitors. Here's a simple burial technique using equipment any modern pirate ship should already have.

Put the booty into an empty shipping container you have lying around. While en route to your next raid, simply lower the shipping container into Davy Jones' locker and take a note of the GPS coordinates (do this at night to avoid your activity showing up on spy satellites). If your container won't sink, fill unused space with sand, silt, or any other dense material; you can use ballast water if your booty is gold or otherwise waterproof. Years later, you and your shipmates can retrace your steps, raise the barnacle-encrusted container, and claim your prize.

Unsolved problems: are shipping containers watertight enough? What about trawlers?

Arr! We be steamin' down the very mainstream!

Work on the piracy consultantcy gig continues apace. Kevin and I have devised a four-step process called ARRR that will enable your pirate organization to increase booty earnings through piracy best practices.

1. Acquire weaponry
2. Research your target
3. Raid your target
4. Regroup and divvy up the loot

Imagine striking fear into the hearts of your victims and rivals with "Avast, ye scurvy dogs! Prepare to be boarded in accordance with ARRR, an ISO 9000 certified process!"

If you'd like to find out more, I'll be speaking on ARRR at the forthcoming Congrés International de Piraterie. Or, for a ridiculously large honorarium, I will visit your organization and rehash those four painfully obvious bullet points at great length. It's all part of walktheplank.net's new metapiracy initiative.

Kevin's designed our pirate flag, which we call the Jolly WONTFIX. It's got a skull and a burrito crossed with a bottle of habanero sauce. This is, I think, the tragic result of not playing at pirates as a child.

Mencken once wrote "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." Kevin and I were sorely tempted yesterday, when a long freighter slid across the bay in view of our windows. There was talk of heading out on a schooner with cutlasses between our teeth, boarding the vessel and seizing its precious cargo of shipping containers. This plan was rendered unfeasible by the fact that our cutlasses would be useless against the guns no doubt on board, not to mention the fact that our conquered vessel would be cornered in the bay, easy pickings for the US Navy. We considered various alternate plans, including:

• Using the vessel as a base and booty storage facility for raids on Emeryville and other coastal cities. [Rejected by me, as we would then be not pirates but brigands]
• Taking the operation to the coast of Indonesia, the only place where piracy really has a chance in this day and age. [Rejected by Kevin, who feared summary execution if we got caught]
• Leasing a freighter and a motorboat, loading them up with modern weaponry and equipment, going with them back in time to the 1600s (the golden age of piracy), and pressing our technological advantages to become the most successful pirates in history. [Rejected by Kevin, being too impatient to wait for the development of time travel]

Frustration grew. How could we gain the thril of cutthroat piracy without undergoing any actual risk? That's when inspiration struck, and a business model was born. Instead of becoming pirates ourselves, we are leveraging our experience with collaborative software and becoming pirate consultants, developing enterprise class solutions for collaborative piracy. Our new company, walktheplank.net, will help pirates work together to pillage more effectively, and reduce time-to-loot.

How can Kevin and I be so cavalier about piracy, a vile crime and a scourge upon international trade? As always, I blame society. The culture in which I was raised referred to "piracy" as a relatively innocuous crime, something you committed by making a backup copy of a Lode Runner disk. How could I but equate the storming of ships and the seizing of cargo with such actions? Perhaps the next generation can be saved, but the experience has rendered me completely amoral.