The Weekender | February 28th - March 2nd

The Weekender

The Weekender is your guide and open thread for the weekend, presented by the fine folks at Viva The Matadors. Things to quote, read, look, watch, and listen to for the weekend. Let's do this.

Read about the last days of the infamous pirate known as Blackbeard. Look at frozen lighthouses in Michigan. Watch an independent film on six man football in the towns of Turkey and Crowell. Listen to tunes of Jamestown Revival.

Quote

-Anonymous Pirate, asked on the gallows if he repented. (via About):

"Yes, I do heartily repent. I repent I had not done more mischief; and that we did not cut the throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you aren't hanged as well as we."

Blackbeard:

"Let's jump on board, and cut them to pieces."

Read

This might be a little off the map, but it’s pretty cool, which is the last days of the pirate Blackbeard (via Smithsonian Magazine). I would add that I regularly check Smithsonian Magazine for good historical articles and so if you like this sort of thing, you should think about bookmarking or subscribing:

On the tiny sloop, a tall, slim man with a long black beard barked out an order. His helmsman threw the tiller hard to lee, men released ropes, and, sails briefly flapping, the strange vessel suddenly swung hard about, shooting by in the opposite direction.

Goupil’s skin may have turned cold. The sloop—the pirate sloop—swept down to the unarmed Toison d’Or. Minutes later the vessels’ wooden hulls came together with a moan. Pirates swarmed over the gunwales and onto the ship’s decks, seizing the crew, perhaps as human shields. The bearded man had fooled him. Now he found himself facing not one attacker but two.

Soon the bearded man was alongside again and his men discharged their cannons. Musket balls flew over Goupil’s head. There was nothing to be done. He turned Rose Emelye into the wind, drifted to a halt and surrendered his command.

Blackbeard, the notorious pirate, had captured two vessels more than twice the size of his own—a feat described here for the first time. He could not have known that these would be the last prizes of his career and that in just three months he and most of his crew would be dead.

Look

I feel like I need to get all of the cold weather photographs out of the way while it is still ridiculously cold, which may only be that way for a few more weeks. These are frozen lighthouses in Michigan in early January (via Flavorwire):

As you’ve undoubtedly read unless you’ve been under a rock (or in Florida) for the last few days, this week it’s going to be insanely cold across the US. Here in NYC it’ll be well below freezing tomorrow, but still a whole lot warmer than it’ll be in places like Minnesota and North Dakota, where it’s apparently going to be something like -50ºF. It’s a serious business, but if nothing else, winter landscapes provide stark and occasionally otherworldly beauty. As such, it seems like a good time to present these crazy photos of frozen lighthouses on Lake Michigan (which, incidentally, is steaming this morning.) They’re the work of photographers Thomas Zakowski and Tom Gill, and come courtesy of BoredPanda (note: Gill’s work also appeared on Huffington Post last year.)

Watch

This is one of the best things I’ve watched in a long time (via Victory Journal). Please take a few minutes to watch a fairly short documentary on 6-man football. It is West Texas and it is awesome.

The northwest Texas towns of Turkey and Crowell are separated by about 60 miles as the crow flies; they’re places you’re most likely to stumble upon only if taking a few wrong turns between Wichita Falls and Lubbock, or Amarillo. But in December of 2013, the two tiny towns became leading actors in the final acts of the University Interscholastic League’s six-man football season, breaking through to meet in the semi-finals of a 32-team playoff bracket. Developed in the 1930s to give smaller high schools an opportunity at top-level competition, six-man thrives in the rural districts of a few football-crazy states—nowhere more prevalently than in Texas. Filmmaker Nicholas Strini followed the strands of the Lone Star’s deep gridiron tradition to its incredible small-scale local versions, where the populations may be dwindling, but passions remain as grand as the horizon.

Listen

I’ve been working out to this and it’s not workout music. Not at all, but for some reason it works for me. It’s one of the top three things that I’ve listened to in 2014. I also realize that I may be behind the curve and these guys aren’t "new", but I’m slow like that.