Talk Like A Pirate Day happens in New Orleans

Typical New Orleans tourists having fun.

Believe it or not (and Dave Barry always starts that way), Talk Like a Pirate Day was not conceived in New Orleans, although it is the perfect place for it, particularly in Pirate's Alley running next to St. Louis Cathedral or Lafitte's Blacksmith Bar on Bourbon Street, one of my more questionable college haunts. The internationally celebrated day, widely promoted in 2002 by Miami Herald columnist and humorist Dave Barry, might also take place in Cincinnati or Duluth, although I strongly doubt it.
      So, Sunday, Sept. 19, the Quarter was crawling with wenches displaying overflowing bodices and scruffy looking characters wearing black eye patches.
      Although I did stop one handsome couple, asking them to pose for this picture, I did not linger to find out what festivities they planned to engage in, especially since those could be swashbuckling and possibly dangerous. They might be after booty, but not the first kind we generally think about in this decade. 
      Wikipedia explains it thus: International Talk Like a Pirate Day (ITLAPD) is a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), of Albany, Ore., who proclaimed 19th September each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate. 
      For example, an observer of this holiday would greet friends not with "Hello," but with "Ahoy, matey!" The holiday, and its observance, springs from a romanticized view of the Golden Age of Piracy. It is considered a holiday by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.


Here's Dave's memorable column, which explains the logic behind this unusual holiday.