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Wednesday, April 14, 2004 |
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Those dirty lousy stinking filthy commie bastards ......
snuck up on us and got a picture of the USS Lopsided Poopdeck!
Fooled you guys though because we changed the number on the island from 65 to 68 so you had the wrong ship.
I was on the "Big E" that day in November of 1985 when we scraped the underwater mountain off Baha and really did become the Lopsided Poopdeck for awhile.
I was sitting in my noisy fan room office when I felt something unusual rather than heard it. About a minute later I noticed we were starting to list to port. What was unusual was that we were not in a turn so there should have been no list.
About a minute after that all hell broke loose. They began to sound General Quarters. No big deal ....we did GQ drills all the time. The difference this time was when it came time to say "This is a drill, this is a drill" there was a pregnant pause as if the poor sailor making the announcement was asking one last time ... "Is this for real sir?"
I thought I would sail out my years at sea and never hear those words "This is not a drill, this is not a drill!" It was like a dream. After a few moments in a daze I realized I was supposed to do something. I headed for the hatch and then remembered that this was my GQ station and sat back down. I had a TV in my office so I switched to the flight deck camera and people were running everywhere. There was an obvious radical list to port and we were coming to a stop. I saw lots of deck people lined up along the port catwalk looking over the side.
There was lots of chatter on the comm channels. One that caught my attention was the Chief from engineering saying "Sir!...we have lots of water coming out of places that are not suppose to have water in them! I can just imagine what was going through the minds up on the bridge. We're sinking and we don't even know why! I'm sure a lot of Naval careers were passing before a lot of eyes up on that bridge.
We came to a stop and the list did not get any worse and then the reports began to come in saying that the reason for the list was a lot of void spaces on the port side were now full of water. At least now we could start to flood starboard voids and correct the list.
One of the rumors that started was that we must have hit a sub. A chopper was sent out behind us to look for any signs of a hit. Divers were sent over the port side and a few minutes later came back with the word that we had a very long gash down the side about 30 feet below water line with chunks of rock sticking in places. At least we could relax about hitting a sub unless the Russians had a steel shortage and were building them out of rock.
Excitement began to build amongst the crew that we would not be leaving on our scheduled cruise. Little did we know that they would pull the ship out of the water at Hunters Point in record time and have us good as new well before cruise date.
As is always the case in the Navy the buck stops at the Captains desk and he was relieved of his command, sent back to Washington and later made an Admiral.
8:23:14 PM 
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Now I know what I am! I'm a Retrosexual!
"Real men of the world, stand up, scratch your butt, belch, and yell "ENOUGH!" I hereby announce the start of a new offensive in the culture Wars, the Retrosexual movement. " [Castle Argghhh]
4:30:06 PM
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For Smokers
"I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.
"I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking....
"And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking."
-- Mark Twain
[Illustrated Ideas]
4:19:52 PM
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Whats the problem?
Pay your bills with checks that don't bounce and you will be back on the air. I though you had unlimited funding from the rich Donks. Did you think this was another government handout and that it was something owed to you? I'm sure the stations did not sign a contract saying they were required to carry you even if you did not pay the bills. Welcome to the real world.
12:53:20 PM
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Eisner's Alamo
So what could possibly cause the movie to flop? Well, as Danegerus uncovered, it appears to be a piece of politically correct garbage.
For example, according to this film, Davy Crockett was a "frightened wanderer" who wanted to escape "over the wall" in the dark of night, but felt paralyzed and trapped by his own underserved heroic reputation.
The film also has Davy Crockett captured, bound, and executed on his knees, after the battle was over, even though the historical evidence shows that he was killed fighting, in the thick of combat, during the battle. This primary historical evidence includes the testimony of Sergeant Felix Nunez, a Mexican soldier who stormed the Alamo; Captain Rafael Soldana, another Mexican soldier who attacked the Alamo; Santa Anna's cook, Ben; Travis' slave, Joe; an African-American who survived the Alamo battle; and Susannah Dickinson, the only adult Anglo survivor of the Alamo battle and wife of one of the slain Alamo defenders.
The movie makers ignored these witnesses that corroborated Crockett's heroic death in combat and based his capture and execution in the film on a suspect portion of Jose Enrique De La Pena's supposed diary/memoir which handwriting expert Charles Hamilton proved was forged by John Laflin, a.k.a. John Lafitte, a prominent American forger of papers on American pirates and frontier heroes. [Free Will]
10:03:24 AM
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Large Scale Urban Redevelopment
But hurling big virtual rocks at the planet is admittedly kind of fun. And in this case it's at least more scientifically meaningful than the average video game. I started by dropping a 9.3-mile-wide (15-kilometer) asteroid -- the estimated size of the suspected dinosaur killer -- on San Francisco.
The Bay Area doesn't do so well.
9:22:35 AM
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One Cheer for Kerry
In today's Washington Post, John Kerry weighs in with an article titled "A Strategy for Iraq." Our cheer is for this passage:
While we may have differed on how we went to war, Americans of all political persuasions are united in our determination to succeed. The extremists attacking our forces should know they will not succeed in dividing America, or in sapping American resolve, or in forcing the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops. Our country is committed to help the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society. No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission.
We'll increase it to two cheers if Kerry criticizes by name the domestic extremists who are trying to divide America, sap American resolve and force the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops--most notably Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.
Not everyone is persuaded of Kerry's resolve. A United Press International dispatch from Baghdad quotes Ahmed, a pseudonymous member of the Army of Mohammad, a Fallujah-based Sunni group:
"God willing Bush will fall down by the hands of Fallujah," he says, combining military and political rhetoric. "If John Kerry wins the election and withdraws the Americans troops from Iraq, and maybe just leaves a few in bases, then we will not fight. But Bush we will always fight."
And while Kerry's statement of determination is welcome, his "strategy" shows that he remains out of touch with reality. Its linchpin: "Moving forward, the administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq's transition to a new constitution and government."
No dice, says Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a statement today: "For the foreseeable future, insecurity is going to be a major constraint for us and so I cannot say right now that I'm going to be sending in a large UN team." [WSJ]
9:08:04 AM
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Between Eva Braun and the 911
"For many of us, there's a kind of black hole between Hitler and Eva's last stand in the bunker and the Porsche 911. Somehow, Germany - without taking a lot of room in history books - went from war, to partition, via the Airlift, to world economic leadership.
That's not quite the case. Let me offer up a few tidbits, so that you'll understand how hard things were - and how much had to be done - between June 5, 1945 and, say 1950." [Winds of Change.NET]
12:33:15 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Lopsided Poopdeck.
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