Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day

Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

(x-post, obv)

Posted on Sun, Oct. 05, 2003
DAVE BARRY/HUMOR
So what's their hang-up?
CASSATT & BROOKINS

I've been writing columns for a long time now, two or three centuries at least. I've written on topics that touched a nerve among you readers -- the moronic-TV-commercials nerve, the loud-cell-phone-talkers nerve, and of course the low-flow-toilet nerve. I even touched -- and I regret this deeply -- the Barry Manilow nerve.

But I've never touched a nerve like the one I touched when I wrote about telemarketers. To review: In August, I wrote a column about the National Do Not Call Registry, which allows you to go to an Internet site (www.donotcall.gov) and register your phone number. The plan is that most telemarketers would then be prohibited from calling you.

The Do Not Call Registry is wildly popular with the human public. More than 50 million households have signed up. This displeases the telemarketing industry, which believes it has a constitutional right to call people who do not want to be called. Several telemarketing groups have filed lawsuits to block the registry.

So in my August column, I printed the toll-free telephone number of one of these groups, the American Teleservices Association. My thinking was: Hey, if the ATA feels its members have a constitutional right to call you, then surely the ATA feels that you have an equally constitutional right to call the ATA.

Well.

It turned out that a lot of you were eager to call up the telemarketing industry. Thousands and thousands of you called the ATA. I found out about this when I saw an article in a direct-marketing newspaper, the DM News, which quoted the executive director of the ATA, Tim Searcy. Here's an excerpt from the article:

''The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him,'' Searcy said. ``. . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages.''

That's correct: The ATA received NO WARNING that it was going to get unwanted calls! Not only that, but these unwanted calls were an INCONVENIENCE for the ATA, and WASTED THE ATA'S TIME!

I just hope nobody interrupted the ATA's dinner.

Anyway, you can imagine how I felt. I would have called the ATA myself to express my feelings, but the ATA finally had to disconnect its phone number.

Really.

I myself received approximately seven billion phone calls, letters and e-mails on this topic. About 99 percent came from consumers who are wildly enthusiastic about the idea of calling telemarketers. Many of these consumers wanted me to publish more telemarketers' numbers, including residential numbers. As one e-mailer put it: ``I think we should call them at home and try to sell them the idea of not calling people at home.''

The other 1 percent of the response came from people in the telemarketing industry, who pointed out that I am evil vermin scum, and -- even worse -- a member of the news media. Their main arguments are that (a) telemarketers are hardworking people, and (b) if they're not allowed to call people who don't want to be called, telemarketing jobs could be lost, and the U.S. economy would suffer. Tim Searcy of the ATA was quoted in The Los Angeles Times as saying that the impact of the Do Not Call Registry would be (I did not make this quote up) ''like an asteroid hitting the earth.'' Yes. An asteroid!

As I write these words, lawyers and politicians and lobbyists and judges are swarming all over the telemarketing issue, so I don't know what the legal status of the Do Not Call registry will be when you read this column. But it appears that the telemarketers plan to continue their efforts to save the planet by fighting for the right to call people who do not want to be called.

I realize that this makes many of you angry. I realize that many of you would like to, once again, let the telemarketers know how you feel. And I am, frankly, tempted to reveal to you here that the American Teleservices Association (www.ataconnect.org/) seems to have a phone line working (at least for now) at 317-816-9336.

But would it be right to reveal this? I mean, yes, you could call the ATA again. But the ATA surely doesn't WANT you to call again. It's inconvenient! And to insist on calling somebody who doesnt want to be called, even if you have the legal right to call, well, that's just plain rude.

So I am taking the high road.

(Clearly the person with the short end of the stick was the guy who had to clear out all those phone messages sent to the ATA, and him I've got sympathy for.)

You can read what the telemarketers association has to say about Dave's article here.

They call him malicious. I call him My Hero.

arrrrrrr

Avast ye scurvy dawg.

dudes isn't it like still two months away ?

Snakes on a plane!

^^^this

arrrrrrrrrrr &c.

"i knew this would be a custos thread"

Avast, me hearties!

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day to ye.

Have ye heard the scum thar bilge rat John McCain's been slingin' at me matey Barack? Bad news, 'tis. But a band o' pirates ken surely blow the man down. Come 'n' raise a cup o' grog this Sunday at "MoveOn for Obama" parties and we'll call every MoveOn lubber in t' swing states an' tell 'em how t' help Obama this fortnight. Aye?

John invited you to join the Facebook group "Pirate Party of the United Kingdom (PPUK)".

To see more details and confirm this group invitation, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?group.php&gid=102577189324&mid=ebfd5eG233349fG2d55c46G6

Thanks,
Pirate Party of the United Kingdom (PPUK)

defriend

otm

this thread makes me want to bump the free-floating loathing for the Dave Eggers movie thread.

you know my views on this, lj.

i do believe they are fairly similar to mine, e.

PPUKe!

i would like a parrot that swears though, but not one that swears in a dumb pirate voice.

^^ me too

in a coarse antipodean brogue?

like the singer from Immortal.

oh wait this isn't part of the rich 'talk/act like a pirate' lineage at all

The world is changing. The Pirate Party understands that the law needs to change to match the realities of life in the 21st century.

We have 3 core policies:

• Reform copyright and patent law. We want to legalise non-commercial file sharing and reduce the excessive length of copyright protection, while ensuring that when creative works are sold, it's the artists who benefit, not monopoly rights holders. We want a patent system that doesn't stifle innovation or make life saving drugs so expensive that patients die.

• End the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people by Government and big businesses.

• Ensure that everyone has real freedom of speech and real freedom to enjoy and participate in our shared culture.

yaaaarrrrrrr

http://www.geocities.com/localcomedyconnections/youngones2.jpg

I already complained about the pirate a cappella group thing in a different thread.

lol lj, do you read my posts in a coarse antipodean brogue?

only if there is a metaphorical smoking gun and a slain squirrel_police

tsk

otherwise it's rosy English governess all the way

in 'dyson with death' you sound a lot like i thought you would.

one must bear in mind that at 17, one is not fully reconciled to one's maturity, and that one's voice may both deepen and fill out over the subsequent 5-year period

so, wait, that youtube clip doesn't have anything to do with vacuum cleaners?

i meant accent more than timbre. also i hope you don't think i'm snide about 'dwd' because i'm not, i find it cheerful. xp

didn't you watch it, sarahel? i thought you would like it.

beware to bandy with the dames
e'en though all may seem fun and games
for one false step, and how the coven maims...

^^ no, I didn't ... I was saving it for a special occasion. But that's because I thought it had to do with vacuum cleaners.

http://www.thenextwave.biz/tnw/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Dyson.jpg

indeed, the accent at least persists! i am glad you were cheered by the excesses of an imagination already entranced by the possibilities of embarrassment

sarahel it is partially about vacuum cleaners. i hope you have not lost interest.

are the vacuum cleaners as fashionable as the one depicted above?

for just over five minutes, the Dyson involved attains heights of chic never before even contemplated by a household appliance

does it dance?

lady

it plays the blues

trying to imagine how one can play a walking bass line with a vacuum cleaner.

you seem content to perch upon an eternal twig of mildly piqued curiosity

this approach has served me well in a lot of things.

Do you guys need yr own aja/dante board?

I mean, I occasionally wonder what would happen if I were to post potentially embarrassing anecdotes of my formative sexual experiences on ilx ... but I think I'm better off not doing so.

i always say as little as possible.

brevity is the soul of wit, after all.

they say estela has only posted 50 times to ilx - but each one of those posts has gone off and founded a new messageboard

I think The Phantom Tollbooth was my favorite kids book as a kid.

i keep wanting to ask you how many posts you've made so far but i don't want you to think i'm being pejorative, i like the way you've been posting so much.

me? a little over 3000.

lol

i was briefly fearful of the way sarahel was posting so much, but then realised that one must not project one's own guilt onto others, and also that kindred spirits are generally a good thing and should be encouraged

so yeah, keep up the good work!

3115.

the two unluckiest numbers in REVERSE

things just got satanic

5092 since nov 2002.

kinda doubt I'm gonna get sb'ed for that post, though.

no but satan and sarah are kinda similar-looking

anyhow, before estela's exemplary restraint and barely-perceptible austerity reduce me to excoriation, i shall seek a soft pillow.

yeah, that's exactly what my parents were thinking when they named me.

Louis - why are you still AWAKE?!

fuck ... don't tell me he and I are on the same screwed up sleep schedule?

Ian't it like 9 p.m. where you are sarahel? Past yr bedtime?

9pm now, but I'm regularly cursed with not being able to get to sleep until 4:30 am.

Well, this thread got confusing.

R

i was reminded by email today that this abomination is coming up.

Aaaaarrrrr!

Nooooooo!

CUSTOS CONGATULATIONS ON POSTING A DAVE BARRY COLUMN! you've brought it to a whole new level of the motherfucking game now!

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:47 (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^love this

this whole thing is custos in excelsis

Delighted to find out that Dave Barry looks exactly as I would expect

R.

(yes, same post as last year, but pirates always talk the same, don't they? so there)

http://http.cdnlayer.com/itke/blogs.dir/8/files/2008/01/pirate_keyboard.jpg

http://connecticutvacuumrepair.info/assets/images/Dyson.jpg

This is happening. People at my work are talking like pirates. I want to die.

http://i.imgur.com/J31Nt.gif

Someone pulled the "international talk like a pirate day" nonsense on me today, and I said that I'm only interested if they could talk like a Somali pirate. They gave me a dirty look and then I asked them what they had against Somalia.

Great way to kill this stupid meme dead.

(*have to thank Jon Ronson for the original idea though)

God, I hate this day.

Aye.

Arrrrrrr