What's So Special?

About the number “2”, I mean.  Why should marriage be limited to just 2 people? 

Now that the Supreme Court has broadened the definition of marriage to include gay couples, by what logic would they defend a limit to just 2 people?  Polygamy supporters are overjoyed by the two decisions this week, with good reason.

I fully expect to see not only legal polygamy in the U.S. within my lifetime, but also legalized inter-species marriages.  Why not marry your dog, horse, or goat?  Where in the Constitution can you construe something preventing that?

I'm not the only one wondering these things...

Oh, Well...

It might have been a wonderful trip, that vacation that Debbie and I were planning to take to the U.K. one of these fine days.  There are so many beautiful places there that I'd like to share with her.

But it looks like I may be banned from entering the U.K...

An Excellent Rant...

From a politician, about Obama.  An Irish politician:

Flying Pig Moment...

...wherein I agree with Barney Frank.

I never thought I'd write that sentence!

The subject is drug legalization.  He and I are on the same page. 

Scary, isn't it?

Memory Lane...

I remember this ad, which ran in one of the computer hobbyist magazines in the late '70s (probably Byte).  I remember thinking how amazingly inexpensive that system was.  Just a couple of years prior, I had purchased a used, broken Memorex 630 for $10,000.  I spent a month or so troubleshooting and fixing that thing, and ended up with a washing-machine sized 10 MB hard disk (5MB fixed, 5MB removable).  I had to build a computer to interface with it.

And IMSAI was selling a complete system with a miniature “Winchester” hard disk for just $6,000.  Cheap!

An Old Marine Gets a Job Interview...

Reader Larry E. passes along a little Marine humor:

Job Interview

Personnel Manager: "What is your greatest weakness ?"

Old Marine: "Honesty"

Personnel Manager: "I don't think honesty is a weakness !"

Old Marine: "I don't give a crap what you think"

There's one problem with this story: there's no way that old Marine said “crap”!

I've hired a few ex-Marines, and the interviews I had with some of them rank as both the most interesting and most entertaining I've ever had.  This reads as entirely plausible to me :)

Simple!

You know that sexual harassment/sexual assault scandal that's got the military falling all over themselves with politically correct (literally) initiatives, like banning all the Playboy magazines?  Well, it turns out the answer to the problem was amazingly simple!

The Air Force discovered this simple solution.  All they had to do was put teal-colored robes on their students, and like magic the problem disappears.  They're sure of it.

Via former Air Force member, reader, friend, former colleague, and Idaho real estate mogul Doug S., who comments: “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

As a former Navy enlisted man, I have a lot of trouble wrapping my brain around these changes, and also the idea of women serving on ships.  Now don't get me wrong, I'd have loved having women on the ship I served on – what I'm having trouble imagining is the women handling it.  The average age of the sailors on the USS Long Beach, in the '70s when I served on it, must have been around 24 or 25 – and all male, of course.  These young, testosterone-drenched men wandered about the ocean with no contact with women for up to months at a time (the USS Long Beach was nuclear-powered, and the brass loved to show off how long we could stay at sea). 

The ship was chock-a-block full of pornography; anything from lingerie photos to hard core 8mm movies (no streaming Internet video back then :).  Then when we finally did pull into a port somewhere – anywhere – the local version of “sailor town” was waiting for us.  On the surface, the sailor towns consisted of two things: sources of alcohol (in whatever form you preferred) and sources of sex (in whatever form you preferred).  Dig a little deeper, and you'd find sources of drugs (anything at all) and other illicit, er, entertainments. 

I once served on “hard hat” Shore Patrol (the Navy's military police) in Olongapo, Philippines for six months; it was just such a sailor town, perhaps the largest in the world at the time (this was during the Vietnam War, and Olongapo was just outside the gates of the Subic Bay Navy base, one of the largest bases in the world).  I can tell you from personal experience and observation that the vast majority of the thousands of sailors who visited Olongapo every night – officers and enlisted – had just two objectives for their visit: to get plastered and to get laid, not necessarily in that order.  And Olongapo was there with hundreds of bars and thousands of willing girls to help them meet those objectives – and to separate them from as many of those lovely U.S. dollars as they could.

So I wonder...

Has human nature somehow fundamentally changed since I was in my 20s, in the '70s?  Have young men evolved into some new, higher order of being, in which the desire for sex is not so...urgent?  What happens when one of the new “co-ed” ships hits port in a place like, say, Hong Kong?  Where once legions of rental girls lined up to hawk their attributes to the sailors, what's there now?  Soda and ice cream trucks?  Or are there rental boys for the female sailors? 

Inquiring minds want to know :)