I’m not talking about your belly button. The Navy CyberSpace Blog provides an anecdote about an anecdote that tries to make light of the word SHIT:
I said, “yes Sir, back in the days of wooden ships occasionally the cargo would be pressed cow manure stacked on pallets and placed in the hold. During the deployment the bilge would start to gain water and the hold would become very humid. The manure would start to decay and produce methane gas. When the Sailor would enter the space with a lantern the hold would explode. Once they realized the reason for these mysterious occurrences of fire they started to place banners on the sides of the pallets, (I demonstrated it graphically on the dry erase board) “Store High In Transit”. That Sir is the origin of the word, so feel free to express the word sh*t anytime you feel appropriate.” Everyone laughed and we got back to work.
The strange part of the story is how “The Admiral during one of his many questions said the word “Sh*t” which was followed by dead silence”. Dead silence? Why so uptight?
Anyway, this story illustrates humor as a key to authorization. The Admiral was allowed to use this word only after a humorous story has been provided.
Nice when “edge” bands do fun stuff for kids, although perhaps a harder group also would have woven in a subtle statement on the Banana Wars. Maybe when/if I see them live (they’re playing in my neighborhood in a couple weeks) I’ll ask if they had to self-censor to get on Nick, or if actually they don’t care about the connection. Seems like a Marley, Rancid, Clash, or even Police treatment of the topic would go so much deeper.
The latest in anti-pirate satellite imaging has led the UN to make some interesting conclusions about security programs, according to the Danger Room from Wired.com
There have been a total 84 reported pirate incidents in just the last three months, UNOSAT says. Half of them occurred in or around the shipping “corridor” sent up by the international community to protect commercial vessels. And that corridor didn’t seem to do much to deter the pirates; their rate of successful attacks dipped only slightly (37 percent, versus 42 percent) inside the protected area. What the corridor did do was concentrate the pirate strikes. “The mean distance between reported attacks has fallen from 30.5km… to 24.6km after,” UNOSAT says.
Perhaps this has been asked elsewhere and I haven’t noticed but, if the corridor is successfully concentrating attacks, should we now expect a navy to deploy heavily-armed decoy ships to trick the pirates and destroy them upon contact or start taking hostages? I’m just reading out of the old anti-pirate playbooks at this point, and wondering when history will repeat itself.
