Bring me the head of Diego Garcia...and the Mayor of Addu Atoll too!

[Cap Mandrake]

Here is Specialist Rice at Aunt Edna's in Terre Haute.

[Cap Mandrake]

Lt. Cdr C H Austin (right). He ordered Electra to come about when the sub surfaced in order to bring her 5 inch gun to bear. He yelled, "Aim at the waterline boys! Kill the bastards!" and then he laughed demonically. In nfact, everyone had a grand time except Bob Fraschetti the loader on the 5 inch crew who suffered permanent hearing loss.

The CPO in charge of the officer's meals was renowned for his SOS. Lt. Cdr. Austin would often ask for seconds.

[Cap Mandrake]

The fun-loving lads of USS Electra.

http://www.usselectra.org/gallery_pers.html

[BBfanboy]

Oh, sure - give all the credit to the 5-inch gun crew. The 3-inchers always get the short end of the ... barrel, and get ribbed about the size of their weapon constantly [but at least they didn't have 1.1s]! [;)]

I wonder if Anthony Romano is the same Tony Romano who was a mob hit man in Queens in the fifties. I thought they called him "5 inch Romano" because of the size of his knife blade ... down?«















Legal Disclaimer - The above stuff was totally made up, and any resemblance to persons living or not so much is purely coincidental and anyway this is Cap Mandrake and Sprior's AAR so any libel is their fault!

[princep01]

BB that disclaimer makes it sound like you might be afraid A. Romano's relatives might come looking for you.  You know, you just might have made it a "Family" thing and all.

[Cap Mandrake]

This email received from a Ms. Antonia Romano:

My great uncle, Antonio Romano Sr., was a kind and gentle person. He was one of the highest producing salesman of the South Queens Romano and Prosciuto Import Company. He had no association with organized crime. Please inform Mr. BB that we have his IP address.

[BBfanboy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

This email received from a Ms. Antonia Romano:

My great uncle, Antonio Romano Sr., was a kind and gentle person. He was one of the highest producing salesman of the South Queens Romano and Prosciuto Import Company. He had no association with organized crime. Please inform Mr. BB that we have his IP address.

Oh Geez! Now I'm gonna be hacked one way or another ...[X(]

[sprior]

Some bits of London you don't get to see everyday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/galler ... 25&index=0

[Cap Mandrake]

Kandy House. Quite nice...but do you have a bidet?

[sprior]

do you have a bidet?

Is that one of those French foot-washers?

[Cap Mandrake]

No, it's a French drinking fountain.

[CaptDave]

Thanks for the post, Sprior! As an Anglophile whose trips to your country are temporarily suspended for fiscal reasons, I wish I could see these places for real.

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Kandy House. Quite nice...but do you have a bidet?

Pity really. They spent all that money on the ceilings and cannot furnish the place, save for one lousy chair. [:-] Honestly, Lord Admiral, I do wish you'd think these things out a bit in advance.

[sprior]

one lousy chair.

It's a very special chair. My thinking chair. Doesn't get used very often.

[sprior]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-yo ... e-19914593

Ironic that it's Killick that reports (use the 4th rotor if you have one).

Shades of On the Beach for those of us launching them...

[sprior]

I dunno, but the more I look into it the more the Cold War seems to leave relics. I've been around Scapa Flow and seen the remains of WWI and II and grew up on army bases with air raid shelters and funcioning sirens. Now some Royal Observer Corps, and indeed some Thor sites, are being preserved.

Heck, I was shown around a post office in Orkney that still had hand-wanked phones and sirens, just in case,

Arse, maybe I'm just getting old.

[Cap Mandrake]

Here is what is under the carpet at Kandy House

[BBfanboy]

Canada's largest contribution to the cold war was the radar DEW lines across the Arctic and mid-Canada. The idea was to give the US sufficient warning to launch their missiles - the Mutual Assurred Destruction strategy. MAD was the right acronym for it.
The big joke was that by the 1970's the only place we could get spare parts for the vacuum tube based radars was .... Russia. No one wanted to spend the money to update to transistor based radars and then harden the sites against EMP that would burn them out. BMEWS and satellite surveillance made the DEW line redundant, but their trash dumps remain an enduring Arctic legacy. [:(]

[Cap Mandrake]

I miss the Cold War. Sure, there was the constant threat of instant thermonuclear incineration and that bit but at least you knew where it was coming from.

[Argos]

All the unknown, unknowns can really get you down...

I note that Lt. Cdr C H Austin must have been known as a 1.1 gunner in the ranks (the necktie is a bit of a give away...)