Category: Well I thought it was funny!
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Infantry: Snake smells them, leaves area.
Airborne: Lands on and kills the snake.
Armor: Runs over snake, laughs, and looks for more snakes.
Aviation: Has Global Positioning Satellite coordinates to snake. Can’t find snake. Returns to base for refuel, crew rest and manicure.
Ranger: Plays with snake, then eats it.
Field Artillery: Kills snake with massive Time On Target barrage with three Forward Artillery Brigades in support. Kills several hundred civilians as unavoidable collateral damage. Mission is considered a success and all participants (i.e., cooks, mechanics and clerks) are awarded Silver Stars.
Special Forces: Makes contact with snake, ignores all State Department directives and Theater Commander Rules of Engagement by building rapport with snake and winning its heart and mind. Trains it to kill other snakes. Files enormous travel settlement upon return.
Combat Engineer: Studies snake. Prepares in-depth doctrinal thesis in obscure 5 series Field Manual about how to defeat snake using countermobility assets. Complains that maneuver forces don’t understand how to properly conduct doctrinal counter-snake ops.
Navy SEAL: Expends all ammunition and calls for naval gunfire support in failed attempt to kill snake. Snake bites SEAL and retreats to safety. Hollywood makes fantasy film in which SEALS kill Muslim extremist snakes.
Navy: Fires off 50 cruise missiles from various types of ships, kills snake and makes presentation to Senate Appropriations Committee on how Naval forces are the most cost-effective means of anti-snake force projection.
Marine: Kills snake by accident while looking for souvenirs. Local civilians demand removal of all US forces from Area of Operations.
Marine Recon: Follows snake, gets lost.
Combat Controllers: Guides snake elsewhere.
Para-Rescue Jumper: Wounds snake in initial encounter, then works feverishly to save snake’s life.
Quartermaster: (NOTICE: Your anti-snake equipment is on backorder.)
C-17 Transport pilot: Receives call for anti-snake equipment, delivers two weeks after due date.
F-15 pilot: Mis-identifies snake as enemy Mil-24 Hind helicopter and engages with missiles. Crew chief paints snake kill on aircraft.
F-16 pilot: Finds snake, drops two CBU-87 cluster bombs, and misses snake target, but get direct hit on Embassy 100 KM East of snake due to weather (Too Hot also Too Cold, Was Clear but too overcast, Too dry with Rain, Unlimited ceiling with low cloud cover etc.) Claims that purchasing multi-million dollar, high-tech snake-killing device will enable it in the future to kill all snakes and achieve a revolution in military affairs.
AH-64 Apache pilot: Unable to locate snake, snakes don’t show well on infra-red. Infrared only operable in desert AO’s without power lines or SAM’s.
UH-60 Blackhawk pilot: Finds snake on fourth pass after snake builds bonfire, pops smoke, lays out VS 17 to mark Landing Zone. Rotor wash blows snake into fire.
B-52 pilot: Pulls ARCLIGHT mission on snake, kills snake and every other living thing within two miles of target.
MinuteMan Missile crew: Lays in target coordinates to snake in 20seconds, but can’t receive authorization from National Command Authority to use nuclear weapons.
Intelligence officer: Snake? What snake? Only four of 35 indicators of snake activity are currently active. We assess the potential for snake activity as LOW.
Judge Advocate General (JAG): Snake declines to bite, citing grounds of professional courtesy.
Signal: Tries to communicate with snake…fail repeated attempts. Complains that the snake did not have the correct fill or did not know how to work equipment a child could operate. Signal Officer informs the commander that he could easily communicate with the snake using just his voice.
Commander insists that he NEEDS to video-conference with the snake, with real-time streaming positional and logistical data on the snake displayed on video screens to either side. Gives Signal Corps $5 Billion to make this happen. SigO abuses the 2 smart people in the corps to make it happen, while everybody else stands around, bitches, and takes credit.
In the end, General Dynamics and several sub-contractors make a few billion dollars, the 2 smart people get out and go to work for them, and the commander gets what he asked for only in fiber-optic based simulations. The snake is forgotten.
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From the film Tremors Grumpy
The space shuttle was a remarkably complicated machine.
Unsplash photo by Terence Burke.
The space shuttle was 4.48 million pounds of unfiltered awesome. This 122-foot hybrid space plane could boost more than 60,000 pounds into low Earth orbit. Sporting an aggregate thrust of 7.1 million pounds at liftoff, this mechanical marvel was, at the time of its introduction, the most complex contrivance ever built by man. I would assert that it was perhaps 3% as complicated as the human female, but it was nonetheless quite the rarefied piece of work.
My buddy Bob and I shared a fairly arboreal upbringing. Like me, Bob was a product of the Mississippi Delta. I endured mechanical engineering school with him back in the 1980’s. That guy was brilliant and had remarkably refined wit.
I headed off for the Army after graduation. Bob stuck around to get a master’s degree in materials science. After successfully defending his thesis, Bob took a job with Lockheed Martin and moved to Cape Canaveral to work on the space shuttle. Lots of folks talk about being a rocket scientist. Bob actually did something about it.
his gentleman came from Mississippi. Without him we’d all likely still
be slow dancing to Glen Miller tunes. You’re welcome for that.
Yes, We’re a Bit Sensitive…
A point of personal privilege concerning Mississippi — after living all over the world, I invested quite a lot of effort in getting back here.
To the tolerant, enlightened population of both esteemed coasts, Mississippi is the nation’s dimwitted inbred third cousin. Geopolitically, we are the family member who is forever getting locked away in the basement when company comes over. Much of the nation views us as a bit of an embarrassment. To the elites we are politically, culturally, and intellectually irrelevant. Nothing good could come out of such an unenlightened backwater dump.
Well, the world does have us to thank for Blue Suede Shoes, The Sound and the Fury, FedEx, Darth Vader’s dulcet baritone, and Kermit the Frog. Elvis Presley, William Faulkner, and Jim Henson were well-known favorite sons. Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey, and Faith Hill ably represent the fairer sex. Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Brett Favre, and at least a couple of Mannings were pretty decent football players. Ever heard of anybody having a heart or lung transplant? Dr. James Hardy performed the first ones in the early 1960’s at the medical school I attended in Jackson.
To my friends in such rarefied locales as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, I would like to offer a humble entreaty. Don’t presume that folks are dumber than are you simply because they didn’t grow up in some big ghastly city.
My alma mater of Ole Miss has produced 32 Rhodes Scholars. By comparison, Cornell has had 31, Georgetown 25, Johns Hopkins 21, and Rice 12. Georgia Tech and NYU made six apiece. Get over yourselves. Now, back to the space shuttle.
You Can Take the Boys Out of Second
Grade, But You’ll Never Take the Second
Grade Out of the Boys…
One fine day Bob and two compatriots were called upon to troubleshoot something onboard the space shuttle Atlantis. I have myself never darkened the door of a space shuttle. However, I’m told there are crawlspaces aplenty. Bob was in the lead traversing some tight space with his buddies close behind when disaster struck. With little preamble he proceeded to pass gas with exceptional vigor.
We act like farting is this horrible unforgivable thing. Everybody farts, even cheerleaders, movie stars, pastors, politicians, and supermodels. Trust me, I’m a doctor. We’re all honestly pretty nasty on the inside.
The other two engineers responded predictably. Taking a face full of flatulence under any circumstance is decidedly unpleasant. The same exercise while crammed into a tiny crawlspace all the more so. They coughed and moaned in a manner that bordered upon unseemly. They vehemently castigated Bob for his synergistic deficits in couth, self-control, and breeding. For his part, Bob later related that he found the whole sordid affair surprisingly affirming.
In his own words, “There I was, an unwashed redneck from Mississippi, and I just farted in the space shuttle. I’ve known a lot of smart people, and I’ve yet to meet anybody else who could reliably claim that they had ever farted in the space shuttle.”
Bob’s logic was indeed unassailable. If ever there was need for a metric to determine one’s degree of academic and intellectual success, I should think that designing and servicing spacecraft would be right up there at the top. Stupid people simply need not apply. As an only marginally-reconstructed unwashed redneck myself, I proudly claim kinship with my buddy Bob. The fact that his accomplishment also involved copious intestinal gas just seems to somehow lend an odor of irony to the assessment.