They see us shout girleens, girleens! Decide they're coming down to sit by us in our hidey hole.

The Kistian group comprises the Ingush or Lamur, Karabulak, Chechenze, Tush or Mosok... The various Kistian idioms are spoken altogether by about 140,000 individuals. Formerly the Circassians numbered about 500,000, but large numbers of them have in recent times migrated to European Turkey.

It has often been written that pirates commonly killed their prisoners, usually by the picturesque method of making them ‘walk the plank.’ This is untrue. I have ransacked official records, reports of trials, and much other documentary evidence without being able to discover a single case of walking the plank. I do not mean merely that I have not found an authenticated case. In all the contemporary literature on pirates I could not find even an accusation or suggestion that the practice was ever used. The very expression seems to have been invented many years after the Age of Piracy.

We’re a hot mess, this bad-tempered country of ours. More than 40 percent of Republicans are slouching toward full-blown autocracy, favorably disposed, in one poll, toward a presidency unfettered by constitutional checks and balances.