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Among the indignities a hapless new recruit must endure during the transition from civilian to Marine is the memorization of a set of General Orders. There are currently 11 of the them, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn they date from the time of Tun Tavern, as they basically reflect one of the earliest and certainly longest ongoing missions of the Corps: guard duty.
It was common, throughout the period of boot training, for a senior person (i.e., anyone not a recruit) to suddenly turn to you and ask a question similar to the one in the title of this post, to which the (specific) proper answer was:
Sir! The Eighth General Order is: 'To give the alarm in case of fire or disorder.' Sir!
Note the first and last syllables in that answer. Though it's an awkward way of expressing oneself and made little sense at the time, that was the rule. (You thought, perhaps, the DI in Full Metal Jacket was kidding, eh?)
In any event, some ghostly apparition in a dusty corner of my mind just snapped that question at me, and I was glad I could answer it. I'm glad to have gotten that little nightmare out of the way.
I don't think I've been obsessed with the subject of sleep, and the lack thereof, since I was in the Marines. There, with the exception of a few balmy weeks spent at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, California, I felt I was always running a deficit in the shuteye department.
In short, a little like I've been feeling lately.
* * * I made plans to drive down to the shore Wednesday after returning from work, but those were scuttled by my shifting my sleep schedule to accommodate Wednesday night's dinner. I was intent on heading for the beach yesterday, but somehow got involved in reading David Weber and Eric Flint's 1633, which was a lot heavier read than Flint's original 1632 (which is available for free at the Baen Free Library).
Before I knew it, it was too late to be outward bound for the shore. Fortunately, it was not too late to drop by the local Hollywood Video to return Bad Company, which was due back by midnight last night. Despite there being a number of films I would have loved to rent, I can't see spending $4 a pop to rent movies (even if I do get to keep them for 5 days), so I managed to exit the store without renting anything new.
That reminds me - don't ask me why - of an interesting item that was reported on Slashdot recently, on how the spread of instant messaging is killing bad movies (e.g., Hulk) faster than ever before. It turns out that the multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns that were able to maintain a clunker's momentum at least through the first weekend don't stand up to the nearly instantaneous word-of-mouth of messages zipping from cell phone to cell phone, sometimes (noted the linked article) from inside the theater where the movie is being shown.
Call me a cynic, but I am sure that the Finest Minds in Movie Marketing are probably trying to figure out a way to avoid such debacles (without actually addressing the issue of improving the quality of movies), i.e., by muzzling moviegoers.
Also via Slashdot, an item in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that the Tampa, Florida police department has scrapped the facial-recognition software installed in June 2001 in the Ybor City area because the software had yielded no positive identifications and no arrests. The article notes that similar software is still in use in Pinellas County, Florida and Virginia Beach, Virginia, although no software-related arrests have ever occurred.
The article notes that both the Tampa and Virginia police thought the software worked fine in controlled testing. I wonder how long it will be before a city government - when faced with the choice of scrapping such a system or going further in providing its police department with "the tools it needs" - decides to require citizens to pause from time to time in their quotidian routines and gaze for a few seconds, quietly, into what might effectively be called scanning checkpoints?
Cheers...
It was common, throughout the period of boot training, for a senior person (i.e., anyone not a recruit) to suddenly turn to you and ask a question similar to the one in the title of this post, to which the (specific) proper answer was:
Sir! The Eighth General Order is: 'To give the alarm in case of fire or disorder.' Sir!
Note the first and last syllables in that answer. Though it's an awkward way of expressing oneself and made little sense at the time, that was the rule. (You thought, perhaps, the DI in Full Metal Jacket was kidding, eh?)
In any event, some ghostly apparition in a dusty corner of my mind just snapped that question at me, and I was glad I could answer it. I'm glad to have gotten that little nightmare out of the way.
I don't think I've been obsessed with the subject of sleep, and the lack thereof, since I was in the Marines. There, with the exception of a few balmy weeks spent at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, California, I felt I was always running a deficit in the shuteye department.
In short, a little like I've been feeling lately.
Before I knew it, it was too late to be outward bound for the shore. Fortunately, it was not too late to drop by the local Hollywood Video to return Bad Company, which was due back by midnight last night. Despite there being a number of films I would have loved to rent, I can't see spending $4 a pop to rent movies (even if I do get to keep them for 5 days), so I managed to exit the store without renting anything new.
That reminds me - don't ask me why - of an interesting item that was reported on Slashdot recently, on how the spread of instant messaging is killing bad movies (e.g., Hulk) faster than ever before. It turns out that the multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns that were able to maintain a clunker's momentum at least through the first weekend don't stand up to the nearly instantaneous word-of-mouth of messages zipping from cell phone to cell phone, sometimes (noted the linked article) from inside the theater where the movie is being shown.
Call me a cynic, but I am sure that the Finest Minds in Movie Marketing are probably trying to figure out a way to avoid such debacles (without actually addressing the issue of improving the quality of movies), i.e., by muzzling moviegoers.
Also via Slashdot, an item in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that the Tampa, Florida police department has scrapped the facial-recognition software installed in June 2001 in the Ybor City area because the software had yielded no positive identifications and no arrests. The article notes that similar software is still in use in Pinellas County, Florida and Virginia Beach, Virginia, although no software-related arrests have ever occurred.
The article notes that both the Tampa and Virginia police thought the software worked fine in controlled testing. I wonder how long it will be before a city government - when faced with the choice of scrapping such a system or going further in providing its police department with "the tools it needs" - decides to require citizens to pause from time to time in their quotidian routines and gaze for a few seconds, quietly, into what might effectively be called scanning checkpoints?
Cheers...
