Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
Do you end up swimming or do they let you live and make you scrub out the sewage system from the inside?
As I recall they just make you wish you were dead, rather than actually kill you.
But the experience never leaves you. And you don’t lean on the lifelines.
Lex,
When did that sillyness come about? That was one of the few pleasures we had to look out over the waves when we had a chance. They never used to care about leaning on the lifelines.
As long as I’ve been about, Richard. I got hollered at as a mid, then once again as a lieutenant junior grade and I guess I learned my lesson at last.
Never lean on a lifeline. When there’s a bosun’s mate around
… or sit on a bit, chock, VLS launcher, et al. While your at it, don’t go topside in weather, at night, or with the girls they put on Destroyers these days… day OR night. That is unless she’s the XO duly pointing out the inability of the DCPO’s in setting Dog Zebra.
I was a QM during my prior active duty life before becoming an HM in the reserves. Like the Bosun’s, the QM’s have their own weather decks to maintain. Doing so, you quickly learn the various weaknesses of those railings, especially as they’re all made of fiberglass these days.
I’d lean on them occasionally, but never in a manner that placed any real weight or force on them.
Thanks to the swaydo-anonymity of the intertubes, I can say that that fella is posing like a girl.
I hope that my next-door neighbor is not reading this, he being a Colombian and, unlike the short biddable Mexicans who mow the lawns here, right protective of his honor. And maybe proactive about it, too.
Just sayin…