I've been in that section of the ship Geo. The decks were positively wavy.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Well since Fazor mentioned Shark Week on the discovery channel thought I would post an installment about obnoxious aquatic creatures.

The way I see it, if I can tell stories of interest than draw people here so they can see the advertisments then I'm paying Mr. Cain and Mr. Plait back for all the good information I learn here.

(Hang on a second guys, I some how hurt my back picking up the coffee pot! And I mean hurts so bad I an't catch my breathe!)

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

so is this the luckiest man in the world?


he gets sucked into the intake of the fighter as the pilot throttles the engine.

how is he lucky? HE LIVED!!?? wtf


http://video.aol.com/video-detail/ma...ake/3685136496

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Disclaimer: I have no theories, I am not smart enough to come up with theories. I only have a hypothesis. So anything I may write, statement or otherwise is just a hypothesis based on what I observe...

The difference between a correlation and a causation... Everyone who drinks water dies... Water makes things wet...

Okay I'm back.

Some sort of spasm it seems. Never had anything quit like it. Made me huck. Weird.

Anyway, a true story just to creep Fazor out.

Tips On Beach Combing Diego Garcia or; We Lose More Contractors That Way.

An island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A stopover point for newbies and personnel awaiting assignment to ships deployed to the Middle East prior to all the bases we have nowadays. Other things occur there, but that is outside the scope of this discussion.

This is an interesting variation of the predator trap. For those who's paleontology needs a little brush up a predator trap is a situation like the La Brea tarpits for example. A mammoth gets trapped in the tar and draws in saber-toothed cats and other scavengers, who in turn get trapped, and in greater numbers. Here the lure is fish trapped in tide pools.

Now I know people who were both in Diego for weeks awaiting pick-up and those assigned there for lengthy stays. I myself spent a lot of time looking at it from a slowly circling carrier. All told some weeks in fact. It's bright, its sunny and aside from the utterly monsterous coconut crabs and your fellow sailors there were few problems with most terrestrial life. Besides the odd coconut strike. Flat as a pancake too. With an extensive reef system.

When the tide goes out on some beachs you can walk out several hundred yards and look at an extensive set of tide pools with an absolute wealth of marine life in them. One draw back to that is large green moray eels responding to your shadow passing over they tide pool by jumping clear out of it. I've experianced that in the Philipines.

Completely scares the bejabbers out of you. Even after you think you're expecting it, as once they get going, they usually don't stop right away. Like evil 30 pound jack in the boxes, with teeth. On the other hand green moray fresh from the sea is utterly succulent.

Now I'm told off one very nice beach at low tide one can walk out nearly a mile and, at the far edge look down into the void. A sheer drop off of several hundred meters depth. This area is sheltered so there is minimal wave ativity. Even out to the edge.

Often contractors, Philipinos in particular I was told, would be overjoyed at the bounty of this extensive tidal flat and would venture out with fish spear, cooler and hibatchi for the beach.

Never to be seen again.

Something not obvious, and would have caught me as well, had I been exposed to it, as this warning didn't come until years later.

Due to the porous nature of the coral reef both curious naturalist and tidepool hunter alike fail to realize the true state of the tide. Your brain is watching out of the corner of your eye for the creep up the beach that announces the in-coming tide, but that's just it, its doing that, up the BEACH! A mile away. YOU are standing on a flat porous reef! The first hint of hinkeyness is when everything gets wet at once. If you start at the far edge the water will be 3 feet deep by the time you walk about a half a mile, if you are just moseying, what's to worry right?

Remember the previously mentioned void?

When the water get three feet deep, hammerheads emerge from the that void to hunt the tide flats. Now you are a half mile from shore, in three foot and deepening water and large predators are zoning in on your legs because the faster you go the more you attrach them.

Like a very bad dream made real. Equipped with real big fish coming to really bite your legs.

The man telling me this was a deep diver. He often had to go look for these guys on the presumption of simple drowning. First thing was to walk the reef near where their beach stuff was set up.

You find that fish spear, then you shortly find bits of cloths and in one case a flipflop with a tooth in it, and go "Oh man!".

Yep, must be simple drowning and scavenging.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

There's the BD stories we all love (even if it is about killer sharks). Most of the shows that I caught were about white sharks. The rest were about tigers. The good news is that Florida's gulf-coast, one of my favorite spots, does not get many white sharks. The bad news is that they do have a lot of hammer-heads, and that the later are much more agressive than the former.

I think it's because they're angry that they evolved such stupid looking heads.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

Oh Fazor, you funny you. Hehehe that was funny.

Thanks BigDon for updating this classical thread.
I can just see the guy trying to outrun a great white in a meter deep water, a really sad way to meet your maker.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

Interesting that Discovery did Shark Week last week

Mythbusters tested if disturbance attracted sharks. It did. So I gotta imagine that your guy running for shore would attract every hungry shark in the area.

How are they after you let them ripen a little?

Yep! I even put my spoon down to finish reading his post.

It's because one eye is reading the laws in one county (yes, you can eat the humans) and the other eye is reading the laws in the next county (humans are non-edible).

You're darn-tootin' they get upset!

Miami's Biscayne Bay is (according to one experienced local) the world's largest breeding ground for hammerhead sharks. True! Interestingly, despite seeing them quite often, none appeared agressive, just curious.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Mine: "Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that."

Heinlein's: "Staying young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." "Freedom begins when you tell Ms. Grundy to go fly a kite."

Hammerheads stop feeding at certain points in their reproductive cycle. The main cause of the confusion.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Okay, I'm going to put my head to the keyboard and bang out another long sea story. See you guys in a couple hours.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

I'm looking forward to it

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WANTED:

Schroedinger's Cat

Dead And Alive

The Most Hauntingly Beautiful Scenes From My Navy Days.

In no particular order of beauty or chronology.

"A" School, NAS Memphis 1979; Millington, Tenn.

The class rooms were separated from the barracks by a parade ground, then a series of blocks gone fallow with empty building foundations and then a long lawn with paved paths so people could march to the class rooms in companies and columns.

If for some reason you were late, God help you if you were seen "strolling" by yourself across the large open area to class. If you were alone for any reason your butt double timed it. It took at least four of you not to have to run. (Finally! The coffee is ready!)

We would form up into companies on the parade ground by classroom and then march off to class. Now what was great was marching to cadence. But as this was where they also trained the Marine Aviation techs, (Sorry, the only Marines I actively dislike. Why later.) the Marines usually made our cadences redundant. Especially when no less than three of the Marine instructors competed in the Corps wide cadence competition regularly.

Since these men were all doing that yodelly, boingy sounding Marine cadence flawlessly we didn't often need to sound cadence. As a matter of fact, since we didn't some thought we couldn't and asked the instructor marching if we could. The instructor replied the only reason he didn't was he didn't know any cadences.

And at that moment "Baby Doll" Miller piped up. Baby Doll Miller got stuck with that name because:

A: She was Five foot nothing with an honest to God hour glass figure, with light brown hair.

B: In formation, when she first showed up, one of the female instructors got in her face, Drill Instructor style, because the Instructor thought Miller was violating make-up regulations. Miller had naturally rosey cheeks that looked like too much blush. As the instructor put it, "You look like a goddam Cupie Doll!" The Instructor backed off, but the name stuck.

19 year old Airman Miller also had had weekly voice lessons since she was seven.

My God. Miller cut loose on that crisp clear morning and even the Marines shut up to listen. That fact alone dumb founded all the Navy Instructors. By the third day EVERYBODY wanted to know who the hell she was. She was the only Sailor who ever got the Marines to concede the cadence.

I told you that story to tell you this one.

I was done with school and awaiting transfer. It was my last duty day in NAS Memphis and I had pulled the 4 to 8 AM duty. I was on the third flour of a building built in WWII so it had that combo smell of polish and dry rot some military buildings get. I was leaning on a floor buffer looking out the window. The parade ground was situated so that the barracks were to my left and the classrooms were to my right. Sun was coming up in front of me and there was a lot of ground mist or fog, but mostly around structures and not very high.

The formations were already assembled and three of them were just stepping off in columns of six and snaking their way to the street when I heard Baby Doll's voice carry over the distance to me. As long as I remain me I'll always remember that moment. I thought so then. I seem to be right.

80 miles off the coast of California. 1980, 1 AM early fall.

An illusion that was utterly haunting. I'm surprized nobodies photograghed it.

A cold clear night, a full Moon so bright it looks like polished silver and a thick dense fog bank that stops at eighty feet up. But you are on a flightdeck that is eightyfive feet up. Almost all the birds are still on the beach or in the hanger bay.

It looks like you are standing on a five and a half acre steel flying carpet. Like Jabba's flying pleasure barge on steroids or SHIELD headquarters in the old comic books. If you've ever flown over cloud top at night you know what it looks like. The illusion is so complete you can get vertigo going near the deck edge. The fog goes out as far as you can see and is brightly lit by the Moon.

I saw this four or five times and enjoyed it tremendously each time. Unique moments include seeing a destroyer's mast appear out of the fog like a lit submarine periscope and go on by and once the conditions and speed allowed the formation of two slow motion vortices off the fantail that followed us for hours. Like the ones that form off aircraft's wing tips. Left a persistant weird track behind us.

Transiting north through the Solomons Towards The Gilberts. Daytime, Summer of 1982

According to the Capt we were transitting through places no US carrier had gone since WWII. I got to see a tremendous amount of unihabited volcanic islands seemingly close aboard as they had no "shallows" around them. This was an illusion of scale though.

One in particular stands out.

It was a cinder cone that was very steep and had absolutely no beach. Wave action had under cut it completely all the way around at the water line. No real vegetation except scattered bushes that seemed to be the size of large manzanitas. Pretty much an overall grey.

Now the only birds we had flying were the Hawkeyes, two groups of two Tomcats from our squadron and the manditory helo watch you have whenever birds are flying. Then alert fives, ten's and fifteen's were actually on deck and manned for some reason that escapes me now. Might have been Bears. The Tupolov kind. Worse than grizzlies believe it or not.

Well, as we were passing this island I saw two of our birds fly over to it, getting smaller and smaller and this started to provide scale. Those "bushs" would have had canopies fifty to a hundred feet or so across and were probably copses.

And here is the part I will always remember.

The two tomcats flew over the caldera and then went into a horizontal tail chase. Circling like this they descended all the way into the crater just as we were coming around the far side of the island and there on the far side there was a deep triangular cut in that side of the volcano that revealed the interior. I saw that it was heavily vegetated, I counted no less than five waterfalls and I could see both Tomcats circling almost out of sight and then ascending and flying off.

Epilogue:

That evening when I was relieved of standing the Alert Five and was down in maintenance control leaning on the counter turning in some paperwork I saw one of the aircrews, also turning in their paperwork, still in their flight gear with mask marks on their faces and asked them, "Sirs, was that you guys I saw flying into the volcano this afternoon? Great bit of flying!"

And I saw one of thems face light up and smile and say, "Yeah! We were looking because some of this hidden places are inhabited! Looks like Swiss Family Robinson's's tree house in some of these places! That one wasn't inhabited but a bunch we checked were." What I didn't notice was that the other aircrewman had stiffened up with that "Oh crap!" look.

The pilot and I chatted away like monkeys for a few seconds until this calm voice behind me said, "Really? I distinctly remember saying this morning that the soft deck was 5000 feet." And the third in command, Cdr. Powers was behind me turning in paperwork as well. A damn good officer he was. The enlisted loved him to a man.

Well, he took the time to tell me I was dismissed before continuing. With another calm, "Oh, pull the door shut behind you." I was ten feet away before it got LOUD! I walked back to my shop feeling like a man going to his firing squad. I felt like a puckermark for a week.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

What do you know, I have another one in me.

What I had against Airdale Marines

I had wanted to wait until after I had posted a couple of positive Marine stories, (or at least funny ones) so as not to give a false impression I disrespected them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Almost all other Marines I've ever met were cool professionals even when "stuff" was up and had hit the fan.

Two of my father's brothers were badass WWII Pacific Theatre Marines, the other one fought the Germans in the Army. He survived North Africa on to the end and then had a fatal heart attack two months after VE day. Seems to have married a French woman and had twin daughters I never met.

My Uncle Don had twin daughters as well. He was the one who went from E5 to company commander due to five days of attrition at Iwo Jima. An automatic weapons company of veteran elite Thompson gunners. (redundant, I know) He said anybody who had trouble with the Thompson didn't know what the hell they were doing with it. They gave him a battlefield commision and a Bronze Star for getting his men off the beach and yet another Purple Heart (he caught twelve rounds from a light machinegun and lived) for that action. He did the hit parade of Pacific campaigns. One of my favorite Uncles.

Dad said he remembered his mother fainting whenever that big black car pulled up and the chaplain and post master got out as she had three sons in combat arms and this wasn't the first time. They also notify your folks if you were wounded but that walk from the road to the front door to find out which it was was just too intense for her. As this was farm country I can imagine it was like that scene from Saving Private Ryan. Only over and over again. They were all three wounded in action at least once.

Anyway, the airdale Marines.

Now their problem was we had been at peace so long that other Marines blew them guff all the time. Maybe it's different now what with the ongoing conflicts but at the time they hadn't saved a fellow Marines life since the end of the Viet Nam war. They were often called "pseudo-Marines" by their infantry peers and compared to the Air Force.

The result was a case of monsterous over-compensation. Every freaking one I've met. In company strength down to the individual O. This didn't stop at the enlisted level, this went all the way up to at least the mid-level officer corp.

Allow me to elaborate.

Their junior officer corp were the only officers of any service I've ever seen get so stuck up and full of themselves that they forget that the doctor attemping to dress down their O-2 butt for overdisciplining a couple of their men is an O-5.

Ever seen that done? A junior officer forgeting that the doc is an officer and blowing him some major disrespect?

The light in the Doctor/Commander's eyes (Army equivalent to a Lt Colonel) goes from angry to this weird demonic glow. You can actually feel the warmth drain from the sunlight. E3 and below lose the ability to move, no saving throw.

The first time I saw that happen it was a career killer. Won't go into details as this will give the whiners ammo. It was dealt with though. Butt heads believing their own press releases about how badass they were supposed to be. Get's you in trouble everytime. (It was the whole, "they needed extensive skin grafts afterwards" issue. Cheesed the doctors off.)

Now after I got out of A school I didn't see a lot more airdale marines, just heard stories that had me wondering what was wrong with them boys and would have left it at that except that one afternoon late in my career I had the readyroom watch and the skipper and some members of the senior staff came in with the skipper of a Marine squadron they were going to do excercises with.

As I was an E4 and often the enlisted ambassador of our squadron to the services of other countrys, I went up and introduced myself. I remember thinking "Wow, this guy looks just like John Glen!" How could you think anything mean about John Glen?

Right off the bat, that was my first mistake. Now what a lot of guys who were cross overs from the Army or Marines always told us was it was amazing how familiar we were with the senior officer staff, because every launch we spoke with them about their complex weapons system they were flying and as I told Peterscreek in another thread we were responsible for a LOT of different systems. So we talked to them a lot.

Now for comparison we had former Soldiers in our shop who spent 8 and 12 years in the Army respectively and never directly addressed anybody over the rank of O3. So maybe "Glen" thought I was forward or disrespectful. Anyway, one of the last things you want to do when giving a commanding officer a hand shake is give him a wishy-washy one.

That seemed to be mistake number two.

He started trying to crush my hand. For a second I thought he was just ackknowledging the firm handshake. He then kept it up looking me in the face expecting me to grimace and when I wouldn't he kept it up until he crushed two of my knuckles.

He and the other O's went back into the office with those uber cool three demensional maps.

I left my post and went down to maintenaince control. What some of you reading this might not know is within the different branchs of the military there are fraternities and societies. Often based on race and combat experience. Four of our maintenance control chiefs were members of a fraternity of enlisted combat Marines who all did two tours at least in the Third Marines before re-upping together for Naval aviation.

I went to them because sometimes you just have to pull the trigger. Nice as I was.

Maintenece control started to get really quiet as I relayed my tale of woe. By the time I was showing the Warrent officers my hand the only officer in the room, a total Maverick who went all the way to E8 through the warrent ranks THEN became a line officer, coughed, shuffled his paper work and left the room.

The meanist non-evil man alive was Warrent Officer Rosario. We called him "Rosie" but never to his face. He was a New York Puerto Rican who looked just like Officer Ron Harris from the old Barney Miller Show. A frat member. They told me not to worry about it. Told me to leave as he picked up the phone.

Now I'm not sure what happened or what the response was. All I know is that Monday our third in command came around to each of the different shops and quietly asked what the Marine had done. Just like that with no preamble. That scared me as I don't know to this day what happened to him. But it was enough to shock all the officers in our squadron into tiptoeing around us for a while.

Of course being a dumbass, I stood right up and said he broke my hand.

That got a loud, "What!?!" and I told him everything except going to maintenance control about it. As this happened right in front of him and he didn't see it he was a bit nonplussed and all that shocked silence was gone and he stormed out and straight to the the skipper. That was the last I heard of it directly.

So that's why I didn't like airdale marines.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Thank you, if I miss my deadlines I will tell my boss that I couldn't resist you oratory prowess.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

I learned early in my infantry days that no matter how (often misguidely) bad *** you thought you were, there were some people it just didn't pay to get mad at you. These include:

1. Cooks - they can do terrible things to your food intentionally (as opposed to the often terrible things they do to your food as a matter of routine).

2. Personnel - they can "lose" your pay records (pre-computer days) or suddenly find out that you've been reassigned to some less than desirable post.

3. Medical staff - they can decide that you need certain unpleasant medical procedures. In the case of pilots, they can find reasons to ground you.

4. Supply - if you keep getting the worn out crap issued to you, there is often a reason.

After I switched to the Air Force, I remember hearing a story that's probably an urban legend but it just might be true. Seems a hard-charging fighter pilot got promoted to squadron commander and he thought he was God's gift. He treated everyone in the unit like crap. The story goes that one day, just before he was getting ready to take off, his crew chief stopped him. After enduring the commander's tirade, the crew chief pointed out that someone had rigged his ejection seat in a way that it wouldn't fire. The commander got a quick lesson in just how dependent his life was on the very people he was treating like crap. Supposedly, it was a life changing event. Hard to know if the story is true or not, but it wouldn't be hard at all to perform the aviation equivalent of fragging if motivated.

Wow.
Thats a bit scary. How do you live with a knowledge that you contributed to the death of a fellow pilot (even if he was unsavory, "rigging" his equipment sure seems like someone has crossed the line). Spitting/adding laxatives in your food on the other hand seems relatively harmless.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler