PiratePalooza.com Rum. Cleavage. Pubcrawls. YARRRR!

We’ve apparently been spotted by a couple of popular Decatur blogs this week and the Captain wants to clear up any confusion that may now exist about our relationship with the owners of the new Decatur pub called The Grange (which we’ve been playfully & piratically calling ‘The Mange’). We fully support The Grange and its owners, who have revived the empty shell of a building that we all love so much into a bustling Irish pub. The Comer family have put a lot of time and energy into their new business, which will have only been up and running for a couple of weeks as the Palooza drew near… and it’s going to take them more time to learn how the place runs (and time to develop a relationship with their customers) before they have a couple hundred rowdy pirates thrown at them right at the beginning of their young business’ life. There was never an ill-exchange of words and the owners have been eminently cordial about the entire matter. We would love to have the Palooza return at some point in the future to The Grange and encourage you to visit them for dinner and drink sometime. Please support The Grange and Comer family, I certainly know that I will.

Well, take a look around m’hearties, have you ever seen the old Palooza ‘site lookin’ so nice? Here be a brief re-capture of the events that led to what you be looking at now (try to follow along):

1. Captain Drew be right tired of his ragamuffin version of WordPress (which he shanghaied into working, against all the known laws of PHPing, WordPressing, and Bloggin’ as they be writ on the interknot) and was avowed to change the thing by the time the year Twenty Oh Eight fell wicked across his lap.
2. The Royal Court of Boffins at WordPressery released version “two pointe fyve” of their beastie and Captain Drew had lust in his loins for new things to touch
3. Everything else.*

So that be the full and complete “technical” explanation of what you be havin’ in front of you. If it don’t look right on your box of blinky lights it might indeed be my fault, but as I be a pirate (and a right bad one at that) you can take a long walk on a short…. ahh, a short haul of a long…. ummm…

Look mate, this rum’s not drinking itself. Buzz away.

Update: She be workin’ now!! As of this post the Flash-driven audio snippets (like the ones you’ll find in the post about the Booty Album) don’t be playing correctly from the Palooza web-type site, though you may in fact download the MP3 thingys and play them on your own music box to your heart’s content. I’ll instigate a solution as soon as I’ve finished doing something daring and dashing (as long as you consider postin’ wirelessly from the ship’s head “daring”…okay, must be dashing off now)….

* (Aye, I know this kind of skips through the mySquall backups, the FreeToPee downloads and uploads and all the ragged PHP cursing and CSS gnashing and Illustrator and Photoshoppe vanities… but do anybody really care about that stuff anyway?)

This past weekend the fine folks at Nathalie’s Fish House passed along a mug that was lost during this past September’s pubcrawl and I’d like to make sure that this little guy makes it back to the rightful owner. As luck would have it, there’s an inscription on the mug (cleverly omitted from the photo accompanying this article). If you can tell me what’s inscribed on the other side of this mug I’ll gladly return it to you directly (possibly at PiraTiki #2 if you can make it there). Captain Drew may be a pirate but he’s no thief and besides, the bloody thing leaks! Spread the word, let’s find this things owner!!!

PiratePalooza.com will be upgrading our servers this week. Go outside and get some sun while we’re away. You’re looking a little pallid.

The staff of PiratePalooza tries to respond to your questions, comments and fan mail whenever possible but Cap’n Drew is a busy scoundrel, especially around the time of the Palooza. If you have questions about one of the articles posted on this website the recommended method to obtaining an answer to your question is by posting a comment to that article, not through a direct message. Note that comments are found below the full text of each article and that if you have never posted a message to PiratePalooza in the past that your comment will be placed in holding until we’ve had a chance to make sure you’re not trying to sell diamond shaped blue pills or bosom enhancing cremes, ointments or salves, regardless of the Cap’n’s fascination with those wares.

From time to time Captain Drew receives press kits from bands that be interested in playing at the PiratePalooza. While your old pirate pal Captain Drew is happy that so many talented people want to join our annual pillage, there is a sort of theme to our event, namely PIRATES. So: if you be a “progressive acoustic rock band from Colorado”, the “quintessential rockabilly experience from Atlantic City” or the “last word in contemporary gospel rap” you should consider the reaction you might receive from a ship full of drunken pirates BEFORE interrupting Captain Drew’s important rum-tasting business with an electronic message. Word UP.

Welcome to the third redesign of PiratePalooza.com, things just keep getting better around here! I’ve made this the page the default 404 page, so if you were looking for something that was here before try using the Arrrticle Search feature. For those of you who are familiar with the old site here’s a quick rundown of the changes:

• WordPress We’re now using WordPress v.2 and it’s running like a champ. This means that you’ll be able to sift through old posts by month and by category. You can even search for keywords like “boobs”! (note to self: more articles on boobs)
• Messageboard Removed The messageboard has been scuttled, it just wasn’t being used. The good news is that you can post comments to articles on this site. Note that your comments won’t show up immediately, they go into moderation first to let me weed out all the spam-spam-spam-spam. You know, I didn’t see any Vikings at the first Palooza Pubcrawl….
• Captain Blogs Captain Drew and Captain Mal now have their own blogs, found in the categories named after them.
• Strategic Garrrrrr Removal There’ll be a little less written pirate brogue on the news pages; turns out that a lot of people just can’t read that stuff. We’ve hired the renowned Prusso-Scotch translation firm Lasser, Lasser, McPharr and Tulwhinney to translate many of our pirates’ missives into standard English, but all isn’t lost… for better or worse, Captains Mal and Drew’s blogs are excluded from this clean-up.
• Pubcrawl Section There’s now a dedicated section with information about the annual Pubcrawl. Note that this section is outside of the WordPress posts and is not searchable.
• Links I’m rationing the number of links to other people’s websites in the sidebar. Feel free to submit your organization’s website but be aware that your link will be put in front of a group of angry, drunken pirates and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be accepted. Aren’t we right bastards?
• RSS Feeds That’s right, now you can dial us up in your newsreader. About dang time.
• Flickr As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve switched to Flickr and encourage all of you to do the same. This gives everyone a big sandbox to play in and will help foster the PiratePalooza fan club’s sense of community.

Every new website has to have a section or two that is badly planned, poorly executed and marginally filled. Right now that would be the Downloads section and the Store section. It’s not that I don’t have them thought out, it’s just that I’m verrrry busy~

So how do you guys like the new website?

Hey, what’s that weird flashy photo thing over in the sidebar? Why, it’s a Flickr badge! That’s right, I’m officially switching over to www.flickr.com for most all of our Pirate Palooza photographs from this point forward and encourage all of our pirate pals to do the same. Be sure to tag your photos with “piratepalooza” (no space between the words) so that we can search for each others’ photo posts on Flickr. Better yet, you can add comments to photos!

Update – June 19, 2012 – while we still use Flickr for organizing images, we no longer feature the Flickr widget in the sidebar

Good question. The answer is “Yes and No”.

Let’s do the “NO” first.
One of PiratePalooza’s many undocumented and quirksome rules is that you can only tell other pirates about the Palooza. DO NOT tip off the newspapers, disc-jockeys, television stations or bigtime Hollywood producers as they are all likely to be ninjas in disguise. Especially Dan Rather. DO NOT tell sorority girls or they’ll show up, drink all your rum and throw up on your deck. DO NOT talk to 60 Minutes or you run the very real chance of being cornered by Andy Rooney. Loose lips sink ships.

Now the “YES”.
Of course we’d like your help as we suspect there may still be a few pirates who haven’t heard about the Palooza. Feel free to link to us from your website, your blog, your LiveJournal or from the financial instruments governing the disposal of your estate. Keep an eye open (your good one) for postings in the category named “The Black Spot” as that’s where I’ll occasionally ad special web banners that you can use to link to us from your own website.

Raise the Mains’l lads, the winds are pickin’ up and blowin’ us hard toward the Palooza: the mothership has added PiratePalooza to their list of officially recognized events!