Ninja

So enough about pirates. As I was walking back to my desk this evening, I saw a guy dressed somewhat like a pirate calling out to some friends: "Remember, Sneak Like a Ninja Day is October 19!"

I was very amused.

Wasn't sure whether this was an official movement, so I Googled it. Couldn't find any references to it being a specific day, but I did find a bunch of other ninja-related items:

For example, there's an early reference to Sneak Like a Ninja Day (plus some entertaining banter) at Barbelith.

(Irrelevant aside: Barbelith is where I found the line "camels are ships of the [desert] ... bicycles are ... ummmm ... kayaks of the highway?")

And it turns out that some other group has designated December 5 as Day of the Ninja. Doesn't that sound like a bad horror movie?

They provide links to some French ninja photos. (I was going to say that ninja don't usually show cleavage, but what do I know about French ninja? And anyway, I suppose Elektra disproves my generalization.)

Also info on how to turn a T-shirt into a ninja mask.

And how to make origami shuriken.

Oh, okay, back to pirates for one last item: Ask a Ninja reviews Pirates 2. Most of the "Ask a Ninja" pieces I've seen haven't struck my funnybone, but I like a bit near the end of this one that goes something like this:

If you don't know Keira Knightley, she's kind of a slightly more mannish version of Orlando Bloom. [...] I don't know that there actually was a director, but I'm told--a name came up and it said Gore Verbinski. I'll tell you this much, it could have used a lot more gore and a lot less verbinski. [...] Ninjas of the Caribbean would be a great movie.

Clearly the third movie in that series would have to be Robots of the Caribbean.

I think I'd better go to bed before I get much punchier.

4 Responses to “Ninja”

  1. Rido

    Yup. I can confirm that NinjaDay happens on 5th December! Also known as Creep Like a Ninja Day etc etc. It’s only a couple of years old, but this year the Ninja trade union had such a backlash about the popularity of Pirate day that it *had* to be done.

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  2. Chiki

    Ninjaday.org is the site for Ninja Day info.

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  3. Jed

    In case any readers are confused, I should note that Wikipedia’s Day of the Ninja entry credits Ninja Burger (the site I linked to in my entry) with creating the Day of the Ninja holiday. The ninjaday.org site that Rido and Chiki linked to appears to have been created sometime in the past couple of days; it doesn’t have much content yet, and the link to it from Wikipedia was added today. The back-to-back comments on my entry here, both linking to the same site, seem mildly spammy to me, but I decided in this case I would leave them up and add an explanation.

    As for the name of the holiday, while “Day of the Ninja” and “Ninja Day” and “Creep Like a Ninja Day” are all fine names (and “Day of the Ninja” appears to be the original name), I gotta say that I prefer the name “Sneak Like a Ninja Day,” primarily because “sneak” rhymes with “speak,” and even though it’s “Talk Like a Pirate Day” rather than “Speak Like a Pirate Day,” I like the synonym-echo.

    I suppose “Stalk Like a Ninja Day” would be even better in that regard, but “Sneak” is less ambiguous.

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  4. Chiki

    We decided to have a ninja day in response to the pirate day and so registered the domain and started up the site. While googling we found there was already a ninja day and so moved ours to coincide with it (we had originally preferred 19th March).

    We welcome anyone who wants to join us make International Creep Like a Ninja day a success.

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