A Plea for Pieces of Eight

Your Souvenir Guide has a mash note tonight for the doubloon-stamping machine that used to reside in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square. A snippet:

. . . for the first and last time, I will address the Disney decision-makers who will never, ever lay eyes on this bl-g: Please bring back the coin-stamping machine formerly located at Pieces of Eight. (And if it’s there now, please keep it there.) Oh, I’m sure that you have your reasons for having removed the machine, reasons that seem valid to you: I imagine that it’s fairly expensive to maintain and stock the machine, and considering how skittish you’ve become about stitching nicknames on souvenir hats, I’m sure that you don’t want today’s teenage gangsta goths imprinting your souvenirs with four-letter words, gang slogans and Fall Out Boy lyrics.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t remotely care about any of that. Yours is a billion-dollar concern and you can afford to eat a few thousand bucks a year. If you you have the wherewithal to make three Pirates of the Craibbean movies, you can build a second doubloon-stamping machine to sit in for the broken one. And if you’re worried about teenaged kids putting blue words on their coins, get this: The coin on my keychain has bore a prodigious number of filthy words for nearly twenty years now, and as near as I can tell, it has created no great rift in the public decency. It’s a pirate coin; what do you want? Pirates say naughty words, ye cowardly cacklefruits. An’ no sea rat e’er palmed a coin that weren’t already dirty.

Naughty pirates? Amen to that.