"Happy New Year"

Happy New Year Boys & Girls & all the Scallywags in between! Here are a few New Year Deck Log Entries from years gone by for you to enjoy …

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"Believe It or Not"

It sounds like one for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, but it’s true. In late 1942, British, Canadian and U. S. Navy ship designers collaborated to build an “aircraft carrier” made of ice cubes to combat the German submarine threat in the North Atlantic. The ice was to be kept solid by refrigeration machinery installed in the ship’s hull and was to be made from a combination of water and wood pulp called “pykrete.” The chief advantage of an icy ship was a predicted ability to withstand torpedo attack-it being estimated that a “tin fish” exploding against its frozen hull would dig only a three-foot crater. Although the full-sized carrier was never built, a prototype named Habbakuk was constructed in Canada. The model was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide and 20 feet deep. In December 1943, however, the plan was put on ice (so to speak) because the U-boat threat was considerably less than at the plan’s conception. Unlike the wooden guns you mentioned though, our sources indicate that Habbakuk would have been functional in antisubmarine warfare.

-ED.

“All Hands, December, 76”

"Getting In to Heaven"

Three servicemen died on Christmas Eve and were met by Saint Peter at the pearly gates.

"In honor of this holy season," Saint Peter said, "You must each possess something that symbolizes Christmas to get into heaven."

The first man, an Army Private, fumbled through his pockets and pulled out a lighter. He flicked it on. "It represents a candle," he said. "You may pass through the pearly gates," Saint Peter said.

The second man, a Marine, reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He shook them and said, "They're bells." Saint Peter said, "You may pass through the pearly gates."

The third man, a drunken Sailor, started searching desperately beneath his thirteen button blues and finally pulled out a pair of women's panties ...

St. Peter, astonished, looked at the sailor with a raised eyebrow and asked, "And just what do those symbolize?"

The Sailor replied, "They're Carol's!"

"Twelfth Day in Subic Christmas"

From our very own Owyn “Preacher” Bradford … Merry Hanukkah Quanzanian Christmas you Heathen Scallywags … and may King Neptune himself grant you a Great New Year!!! 

On the twelfth day of Subic sea daddy gave to me …

Twelve boots a-puking

Eleven bankas begging

Ten monkeys grilling

Nine wallets snatching

Eight Mojos pouring

Seven plates of lumpia

Six Magoos icing

Fiiiiive botterply nipes

Four barfines paying

Three pandesals

Two muddy streets

And a long line down in sick bay!

“The Difference Between a Snafu, a $h!tshow, and a Clusterf#ck”

Us veterans know a thing or two about snafus, shitshows and clusterfucks. I found this article by Corinne Purtill from “Quartz at Work” that you all might find interesting. I hope you enjoy it …

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck.

Clusterfucks hold a special place in public life, one distinct from the complications, crises, and catastrophes that mar our personal and professional existences. The F-Word, former Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower’s comprehensive history of the term, defines a clusterfuck as “a bungled or confused undertaking or situation.” Stanford business professor Bob Sutton goes further, describing clusterfucks as “those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew of illusion, impatience, and incompetence that afflicts too many decision-makers, especially those in powerful, confident, and prestigious groups.”

The term dates at least as far back as the Vietnam War, as military slang for doomed decisions resulting from the toxic combination of too many high-ranking officers and too little on-the-ground information. (The “cluster” part of the word allegedly refers to officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia.)

“I have a weird obsession with clusterfucks,” Sutton tells Quartz At Work. He and Stanford Graduate School of Business colleague Huggy Rao took on the topic directly in their 2014 book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, though publishers demanded that the softer substitute “clusterfug” appear in the final text. (This was not Sutton’s choice: His other books include The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide.)

To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:

A fuck-up. “A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition.

A SNAFU. While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable; one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy) probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.

 A shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced it than its outcome.

The three main contributors to clusterfucks:

Sutton and Rao analyzed countless cases of scaling and expansion, both successful ones and those that ended in disaster. In reviewing the most spectacular failures, they identified three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck.

They were:

Illusion. A clusterfuck starts with the decision maker’s belief that a goal is much easier to attain than it actually is. The expectation that two car companies with different languages and different cultures would merge together flawlessly, as the architects of the doomed Daimler-Chrysler merger apparently believed? Clusterfuck. The Bush Administration’s estimate that the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq would take no more than a few months and $60 billion? A clusterfuck prelude of tragic proportions.

Impatience. A misguided idea alone does not produce a clusterfuck. The idea also needs a champion determined to shove it along, usually over the objections of more-knowledgeable underlings. Sergey Brin’s reported insistence (paywall) on introducing Google Glass to the public against its engineers’ wishes turned a potentially groundbreaking piece of technology into a stupid-looking joke.

Incompetence. When errors of information and timing meet blatantly stupid decisions by people who should know better, disaster tends to ensue. Bear Stearns wasn’t the sole cause of the global financial crisis, of course, but former CEO Jimmy Cayne’s decision to spend 10 days of the 2007 subprime mortgage loan meltdown playing at a bridge tournament without phone or email access contributed to the firm’s collapse—and to the worldwide disaster that followed.

All three of these failings share a common root: people in power who don’t (or won’t) acknowledge the realities of their environment, and who don’t push themselves to confront what they don’t know. Nobody likes to spoil the heady euphoria of an exciting new project by discussing the possibility of failure. The problem is, if potentially bad outcomes aren’t addressed pre-launch, they are more likely to surface afterward, when the reckoning is public and expensive.

The antidote to clusterfuckery, Sutton argues, is a willingness to confront the possibility of failure and disappointment built into every new venture, and to plan accordingly.

He cites a favored decision-making tactic of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman (who in turn credits it to psychologist Gary Klein). Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is assigned to imagine a future in which the project is an unmitigated success. The other is to envision its worst-case scenario. Each group then writes a detailed story of the project’s success or failure, outlining the steps and decisions that led to each outcome. Imagining failure and thinking backwards to its causes helps groups identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current plans, and adjust accordingly.

“People make better decisions when they look into the future and they imagine that they already failed, and they tell a story about what happened,” Sutton says. With better planning, it won’t be a story that has to be bleeped out.

Cited:

Corinne Purtill. “ The Difference Between a Snafu, Shitshow and a Clusterfuck.” (Online) March 16, 2018.

https://qz.com/work/1225213/the-difference-between-a-snafu-a-shitshow-and-a-clusterfuck/?fbclid=IwAR2U9r5XlyqIbiDXAjF97oexVkys1XBxk_J8_jQKJEX7oPV3g7yMHcx5Cr4

"Daughter Dates A Swabbie"

Rather than lock his daughter in a tower until she's an old maid, to keep her away from some horny hormone-ravaged Sailor, the girl’s father told the young Swabbie …

“Son, I just want you to know that since before my daughter’s birth and my spark had ignited the fire in her mother’s belly, I’ve been training to kill you!”

"Sailors Being Sailors"

There’s something about being a sailor adrift around the world. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that Sailors have the cleanest bodies and the dirtiest mouths. I mean, the Navy’s ‘fight’ song is the only in the service in reference to alcohol …

… “Drink to the Foam” …

I hope you enjoy these pics of us Navy Swabbies carrying on and doing, well, what Sailors do!!!

Me Mammy was a Mermaid and me Fudder is King Neptune himself …

"Know the Difference"

To those of you who are nit-pickers about the meaning of words, I went to medical onboard ship once and told the Dick Doc he either had a lot of Guts or a lot of Balls to be a Pecker Checker. This is what the Doc had to say …

You know there is a medical distinction between Guts and Balls. Having Guts is arriving home late, after a night out with your shipmates being met by your wife with a broom and having the Guts to ask …

“Are you still cleaning, or are you flying somewhere?”

Having Balls is coming home late after a night out with your shipmates, smelling of perfume and beer, with lipstick on your collar and slapping your wife on the ass while having the “Balls” to say ...

“You’re next, chubby!”

Medically speaking, there is no difference in the outcome. Both can result in death …

"More Pin-Up Beauties"

Once again, another round of Pin-ups for your enjoyment. Pin-ups have been around since the 1890s, collected and hung in lockers, bulkheads and above many a rack in berthing compartments throughout the fleet! I hope you enjoy these beauties …

"Trimming The Fat"

I recently read an article in the Navy Times “Units Should Tap Sports Trainers for Fitness Assist.”  Of course the first thing that came to my mind was, “No Shit Sherlock!”  Just how long have there been Sports Trainers and we finally came up with this idea? I will say that unlike the Army or the Marine Corp, the Navy doesn’t require its sailors to run ten miles on the battlefield with 50lbs of field gear on their back, but you still gotta be able to fit through a scuttle and not look like 300lbs of bean curd bulging out of the uniform. 

It was only a few months ago an article came out slamming the Navy as the “Fattest of all the services.” Once again, “No Shit Sherlock!” A full morning of PT is not conducive to the Navy way of life unless you want to remain at work until 2100 every evening.  But then again, who am I to judge … and I certainly don’t want to put that on our shipmates.  You  just have to wonder where they come up with this stuff…

"Navy Supplies"

The Sailors on a supply ship are used to transporting goods to all the other ships in the fleet. This time however they'd been tasked with taking 300 boxes of penis shaped potatoes throughout the gulf and they all think it's a joke.

"We'll be a laughing stock" says the junior sailor.

"I'll never be able to live it down" says the Ensign.

"Let's tell the Captain that we've decided not to go" says the Suppo.

Headstrong they head to the Captains Stateroom to voice their displeasure and inform him of their decision.

The Captain hears them out but ultimately disagrees and informs them that they'll be going ahead with the shipment.

"But we've got you outvoted 3 to 1" the sailors cried in unison.

"You fools" said the Captain "you're all forgetting one thing!"

"What's that?" Exclaimed the sailors.

The Captain stood tall and addressed them powerfully.

"That this isn't a democracy..."

"It's a dick tater ship!"