Update! Tickets on sale now!

If you'll be in the Los Angeles area this June, and if you enjoy Golden Age detective stories, then the Hollywood Fringe Festival will be offering a special treat just for you: Kill A Better Mousetrap. This one-act comedy (with a legal twist!) by actor/writer Scott Ratner will be playing every Saturday that month.

As far as I've been able to tell through clever googling in my favorite search engine, the renowned and much beloved Pirate Resignation Letter was written by Chris Castle and delivered to James Bear (deceased), former managing partner of Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear, LLP.

After using the letter, Castle shared it with his friend, user "Otter Von Pop" of the (now defunct) BirdSunEye.com forum, and that user posted it on 17 October 2003 both as a forum post and as a Word doc attachment.

Later that morning, Chris Castle, posting as "The Bartender" confirmed the story and reported on the (first ever!) recipient's humorless (or brilliantly funny!) reply.

Harvested from the past and hosted right here on Popehat is that original forum thread:

Original Pirate Resignation Letter Thread

Enjoy this bit of net.history! And if you have anything to add about the people or circumstances, please share what you know in the comments.

Marian Call has gone post-apocalyptic:

The exceptional Language Log — which Patrick, not unreasonably, likes to call the best blog ever — has a post chock-full of both thought and humor about whether it's nice for native English speakers to make fun of hilarious mistranslations into English, and why such mistakes happen even in formal contexts, when some sort of proofreading might reasonably be expected. In case you're a shallow fellow like me and don't care, it also has a selection of the best of such mistranslations. Knock yourself out.

At least that's what I'm guessing based on how they're flipping out at being the subject of mediocre satire in Mad Magazine.

Congrats to Elizabeth Barron and Circuit City for hitting upon the one thing that would lead to more than twelve people reading the shitty parody. I particularly like the directive to destroy the magazines and throw them away, which conjures images of Circuit City drones jumping up and down on a stack of magazines before shoveling them off of the loading dock.

Via McSweeney's, an extremely profane and extremely hilarious (to those who love the show) example of what playgroup would sound like if it were held in Deadwood.

I always assumed this was an urban legend, but Snopes assures me that it is not: James Brown's wife Adrienne Brown, through her attorney Allen W. Johnson, attempted to raise a defense of diplomatic immunity to a DUI charge on the grounds that her husband's nickname "the Ambassador of Soul" had been referenced, and thus accepted, by a member of Congress.

Politics are like real-time strategy games. They involve a careful gathering of resources and split-second decisions of their use. Ideally, the combination of tactical strategy and a more urgent pace than turn based would produce a typical match like speed chess; exhibiting fast pace, intense thinking, and tactical strategy. In reality though, the games comprise of memorized build orders and a game pace so fast nearly all strategy is thrown out the window. The only people who triumph are those losers who play for hours and hours on end; memorizing hotkeys while their vocabulary atrophies into Three Letter Acronyms. Does that sound familiar?

We've just had a historic primary season, or so I'm told. And you, dear reader, are probably sitting there in front of your computer, empty beer bottles strewn about, thinking, 'Now what the hell just happened? And where are my pants?'

Well hang on, I'm about to explain it to you, using the hyper-violent RTS Dawn of War, by Relic entertainment. By the way, your pants are behind the toilet. Go put them on before reading this; no one should have to see that shit.

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Ken Layne, one of the early big political bloggers, now writes mainly for Wonkette. But he has a pretty sweet side gig.

1. Get a writing space at a website known for its vast population of idiots, pervs, goons, morphodites, and slackjawed yokels. Say … Democratic Underground, or Free Republic, or Something Awful, or best of all, America Online.

2. Go out of one's way to insult said idiots, pervs, goons, morphodites, and slackjawed yokels, by telling them, truthfully, exactly what one thinks of them, and why each and every one of them deserves to be called an idiot, perv, goon, morphodite, or slackjawed yokel.

3. Turn on comments from the readers.

4. Profit!

I'd do it for free, but I wouldn't do it as well.

Cracked is not exactly bullish on the legal system today.

Really, I laughed so hard at least once per page that one of my associates came in to make sure I was all right. She thought I was crying.

Via BoingBoing, the collection is right here.

Just a couple of favorites:

This one, written in 2004, was lost with a prior iteration of Popehat; I was inspired to dig it up from another site when I noticed someone following a now-dead link from Kotaku to find it. It concerns "Saga of Ryzom," a MMORPG (that is, for non-gamers, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game, like World of Warcraft) that went off-line for good early this year. Here it is, after the jump:

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Cracked, normally a staunch advocate of uncouth behavior, has an instructive article on manners — specifically, seven innocent gestures that can get you killed overseas.

In Russia, even numbers of flowers are only ever given at funerals, and such a gift is seen as inviting death, which you obviously don't want to do unless you're banging a goth chick

These would have been helpful in my misspent youth. In France, I had to learn myself that my speaking French was considered rude.

Modern academics teach us that any text can be deconstructed. Why not church signs? Blogger Joel is one step ahead of you, offering critical analysis of signs at Crummy Church Signs. He also does funny caption contests. And I learned there that God is like Alka-Seltzer!

(Spotted someplace — I don't remember where….)

Via Andrew Sullivan. Some are very funny.