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Now, oftroy, I am intentionally starting a new thread rather than heading out on a wild tangent on milum's Orca thread. This is a new direction for me. Here goes:
Reading about the Orca called the Ocra on the whale thread made me remember Ocracoke. Ocracoke is where Blackbeard--the infamous pirate who had twists of burning hemp woven into his beard during attacks to make him look like a fiend--met his end. From what I read about Blackbeard, seems he took several hits before finally going down. He was full of rum.
Anyway, Ocra doesn't have anything to do with okra, but it sounds native American. Does anyone know? (The idea of Coke and okra sounds horrid, but I suppose a highly seasoned gumbo would be washed down well with Coke.)
Best regards,
WW
PS: oftroy, this question doesn't seem thread worthy, but I'm aiming to mend my tangential ways.
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Dear WW: Ocracoke in Florida is rated as one of the 25 best beaches in US.
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Wrong Ocracoke, wwh. The one where Blackbeard met his end was an island off the Outer Banks, N.C.. Never heard of Ocracoke in Florida!
WW
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"Blackbeard met his end off Ocracoke to a British Lieutenant
named Maynard, who was sent by the then Governor Spotswood of
Virginia. Blackbeard lost his head. Lieutenant Maynard sailed
about from port to port with the head stuck on the bowsprit of his
ship, showing off his trophy. Some say Blackbeard still makes an appearence, at least in part, in the sound where
the incident took place known as "Teaches Hole". "
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Teaches Hole--then it's near Ocracoke! I'd read about that head on the bowsprit, too. And Blackbeard was supposed to have had lots and lots and lots of wives! What a character!
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Pooh-Bah
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I thought it was Bluebeard that had the wives. Blackbeard too? Must be something about beards - makes you harder to identify maybe, so you get away with bigamy - or was he a serial polygamist?
dxb
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I don't recall the exact number of wives Blackbeard had, but it was at least nine. However, I never read of Blackbeard's having a room (or was it a closet in Bluebeard's case?) locked away that was forbidden for each wife to take a peek into. I think Blackbeard's method for ridding himself of a wife was just to sail away.
Jolly Roger regards,
WordintheWind
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Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach, and he actually came from a decent family bfore embarking on his pirating career. After his death (and it did take several blows to finally finish him) the British victors impaled his head on their bowsprit, and tradition has it that his skull wound up as a punch bowl in a Williamsburg, VA, tavern.
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W'oN...
That Blackbeard's skull as a punchbowl story is a new one to me. Amazing. Who would want to drink punch out of a skull--grisly concept! His ship was the Queen Anne's Revenge. You wrote that Teach's skull was put on the bowsprit of the British ship and wwh wrote that it was put on the bowsprit of Blackbeard's ship. Wonder which one of you is correct here? I don't know--just have read that it was placed on a bowsprit. Modern sensibility would never allow for such a practice.
But back to skulls: Lord Byron kept a human skull. I wonder what other odd stories are out there about skulls? The Blackbeard skull as a punchbowl is the oddest I've ever read about!
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old hand
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Who would want to drink punch
out of a skull--grisly concept!Where do you think the Nordic toast, "skol" comes from? Well, OK, so they didn't drink punch, so I guess you've got a point, WW! 
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My apology to you, wwh, for reading your sentence too hastily. So, Maynard put the head on his own bowsprit. That's clear now, I see. Sorry for lackadaisical reading.
Geoff: Does skol really come from skull, or are you pulling our legs?
An interesting note on pirates: They used to vote before carrying out missions, such as they were. If I pirate had been disobedient, they'd even vote whether or not to leave him on an island. There were famous female pirates, too, but I've forgotten all their names. If you go googling about, you can find various designs of skull and crossbones, some of which were truly bloody-curdling. I can just imagine how innocents felt when seeing those ghastly flags (or whatever they're properly called) come over the horizon..... Shiver me timbers!
WW
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another interesting note about pirates, is a point of view. NYC (and many of the coves and inlets that exist in the area) were home to pirates. in an independant free spirited way, many ships and captains tried to avoid the port exsise taxes.. and would try to under cut the 'legally' registered english ships --the only ones permitted to run rum in american (pre independance america) waters.
NY, which was founded a trading (not religious) colony, was always keen for a bargain.. and lots of people were interested in cut rate rum.. no questions asked.. and the rum runners were seen as shrewd business men!
but rum running was illegal, and once you started working the wrong side of the law, every legal 'british' ship was your enemy.. should you encounter one, you could let yourself be taken in, lose the ship, and all the profits, or blow the british ship out of the water, steal her cargo, and not leave anyone around to tell what happened.. so it was a small step from being a rum runner to being a cut throat pirate. back home in NY, on land, it was very hard to procecute.. and many a pirate had a fancy NY house!
(NY pirating continued, and continues.. look at Merrill Lynch, and the stock market..what is being pirated, how has changed, but shading goings on are a real part of the NY business scene)
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>>tradition has it that his skull wound up as a punch bowl in a Williamsburg, VA, tavern.
I don't know how that could be. Wouldn't the punch kinda flow out through the eye sockets. Waste of perfectly good punch I say!!
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Ocracoke is one of my favorite places in the world. It's an island about 15 miles long (a wide sand spit actually) that you reach from the north via a 45-minute (free) ferry ride from Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. The ferry to the south is a larger one which costs $10 or so for a car and passengers.
The island is uninhabited except for a small town at the south end that surrounds Silver Creek, which is a very beautiful little harbor no more than 250 yards across, with a mouth that's not more than a hundred feet wide. No idea of the depth, but probably no more than 15 to 20 feet.
There's a Coast Guard station and a lighthouse there, and a fairly lively tourist business during the summer.
I spent a couple of weeks there in July of '76 and you could walk nude on the beaches north of the village all day and not see anyone else except a few other free spirits similarly clad. Didn't want to do that too close to town though, because the Dare County sheriff's people had a bad habit of arresting those miscreants and parading them through the center of town wearing nothing but a pair of handcuffs (behind the back of course!) I asked the deputy why they did this, and he replied they didn't want these perverts to destroy the evidence of their crime by putting on clothes.
Ocracoke's name is the subject of some debate, with the most interesting being the belief that Teach was told that he would be executed when the cock crowed in the AM, so he spent the early moring calling out, "Oh, crow, Cock." Personally I beleive that's more than likely a crock, and that it's an aboriginal word or name.
After I met Peggy on line we hied ourselves off to Ocracoke Island for a vacation in mid-March. NOT a good time to go unless you want to spend all of your time under a large number of quilts. But that's another story.
I think Jackie's there or near there even as I write.
TEd
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Ypou have to plug the eye sockets with your thumbs!
I generally use my skulls to serve craniumberry juice. Most of my guests end up with red thumbs.
TEd
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Most of my guests end up with red thumbs.
Sounds like they're drinking a lot of that cranberry concoction [craniumberry--omigosh!] in order to dye their thumbs red! Is this a form, perchance, of Seabreeze in a Skull????
Blasted regards,
WordWoozy
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you can also check out the Archie McFee web site (its a real commercial web site, so i'm not making a link.) it sell some interesting stuff.. like jello mold in the shape of a human brain. you make any red jello, add on or two drops of blue food coloring (it's not quite purple, but a drabber red) and some cream, sour cream, or milk to mixture for part of the liquid. (1.5 cup water, .5 cups cream) it makes a drab solid colored pink. (not quite grey, but like a brain suffused with blood) Mold in brain shaped mold, unmold and garnish with, gummy worms, or gummy bugs.. it looks great on a bed of meringue, (line a bowl with tin foil, then with a layer of meringue, bake in slow oven till set and crisp, but not browned.. remove from bowl, break into peices (looks broken pieces of skull bone..)
my son's birthday was close to halloween.. so we had weird parties.. i also have a recipe for chocolate and ginger cookies, (sort of log shaped) served in a bed of grapenuts.. (think about it.. oh, gross!)
meringue also was good for making tomb stones, to put on beds of chocolate pudding, (also garnished with gummy worms. and bugs.. ) kids really liked these gross foods..
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What does meringue mean, by the way, in French? In English it means: whipping up egg whites till stiff, beating in sugar, placing on top of some substance to bake, and baking till golden brown with little sugar prespiration spots of amber. Talk about one word covering a lot of directions!
And, of troy, how does one go about forming meringue tombstones? This sounds like something interesting...
Blackbeard would be turning in his grave to think his demise had led to discussion of meringue tombstones and gummi worms!
Oh, Dr. Billlllllllllllllllllll!!! I know you're out there!! What does meringue mean?
R.I.P regards,
WordWraith
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meringue is the same in French WW. Best known for covering on lemon pie (drooling profusely as she write this - yummmm)
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according to my dictionary, it means exactly what you said, egg whites, beaten stiff, with sugar, and baked.
there are several kinds of meringue, basicaly, soft, medium and hard. soft meringue has less sugar, and is often browned..(lemon meringue pie) but hard meringue (four egg whites, 1lb of 10 X sugar) is called royal frosting.. even with out baking it dries (quickly!) to a hard, candy like shell) a medium meringue is stiffer, and can be put into a pastry tube, and piped into shapes (it is stiff enough to hold any shape.) bake it at 200 to 250 degrees (f) for about 1 hour.. it will still be white (very, very, light beige white) it will be crisp, and dry.. this kind of meringue is used to make pastry shells, (or molded in a rounded bowl, it makes a good sourse for skull bones.)
if you want to know about italian meringue, or nougat, we'll have to move to the "words from German thread" or PM's since this is becoming a food thread all to fast!
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thanks Belmarduke, but I'm wondering whether meringue breaks down into interesting components of meaning.
I prefer meringue on pineapple pie!! And chocolate!
WW
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"More often than not, however, the dates of first record for foreign words borrowed into
English serve to confirm and support the etymology given by the previous editions of the
Dictionary. Take the word meringue, for instance. Despite extensive searches for earlier
examples of the word in English, our first record still comes from the 1706 edition of
Phillips's New World of Words, where it is identified as a word of French origin. The
Second Edition of the OED accordingly gives an etymology from French meringue, but can
find no evidence for its use in French before 1739. Thanks to TLF, we can now trace the
French word back to a cookbook of 1691, nearly twenty years before the first attestation in
English. The further etymology of the word remains as obscure to us as it was to Murray's
team, but we can at least supply a chronology to confirm that the word (and presumably the
confection) came to us from the French."
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veteran
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A Charlestonian friend of ours, a real feminist, named her boat Anne Bonny, probably the most famous female pirate. Google will give you info on her.
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In reply to:
Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach
And Bluebeard's real name was Gilles de Rais, friend of Joan of Arc's turned serial killer of children. If you want to know more google his name. It is not pleasant reading.
Bingley
Bingley
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I prefer meringue on pineapple pie!! And chocolate!Chocolate, on pineapple pie???? 
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female piratesAhoy, BobY! So right you are, matey! Anne Bonny and her even better known compatriot, Mary Read, actually wound up on the same pirate ship disguised as men (sailors and seamen of the day, even pirates, would have no women aboard ship...bad luck, pure and simple!) But in those days people didn't see other people nekked much, so the gender masquerade was not too difficult (even into the 19th century they found women disuised as men among the battlefield dead during the Civil war (US), but that's a whole nother story). You see, I've been telling these piratey tales as a children's storyteller for several years now, so I could fill the board ("no, don't!"...I hear ya!  ) So suffice it to say the womanly pirates are sure worth lookin' up for their exploits. Anne Bonny was a mere adolescent, so she had another life comin' after piratin'. Mary Read wasn't as fortunate. Both ladies held the day on their final battle with a British man-o-war as the men cowered in the hold. In fact, Mary became so incensed with their lack of bravery that she fired wrathfully into the hold, killing and wounding several of her pirate mates. But just before the hangin' of her beloved Capt. Calico Jack Rackam, Anne Bonny said to him, "Well, Jack, you know how I care for ya...but if ya had come up and fought like a man, you wouldn't have to be hanged like a dog!" Wimmin (sigh)...you can't live with 'em, and...well... BTW...another intriguing, and fierce, lady pirate from an earlier era was Grace O'Malley, an Irish pirate who preyed the coast of of Europe in the 1500s. Also known as Granuaile, and The Pirate Queen of Connacht, she was so mean that legend has it that after her own son fell overboard from a small skiff and tried to climb back on she cut off his hands and let him drown, 'cause she was disgraced that an O'Malley had lost his sea-legs and stumbled overboard. 
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