A Restless Conscience

Hard Day at Work

They’re Here

What do we do if THEY arrive and demand to be taken to our leader —  and somebody takes them to see Pedo Joe? I know, he’ll want to take a shower with them…

Bullet Points:

** Wolves and rabbits don’t sit down in a meeting and decide what’s for lunch.

** (Quotes from Soldier) “Do you know how much it costs to breed you, you big moron? To train you? To feed you? What good is this man now? He’s got no depth perception! All he can do is walk point and take the first hit!”

“Brave. It means that even when you’re scared you control your emotions. You make the fear really small and tiny.”

Plot: Sergeant Todd is a veteran and a member of an elite army unit on the planet Earth. He’s defeated by a new race of genetically manipulated soldiers and he finds himself abandoned on a dirty planet, where he interacts with a group of survivors. The peaceful existence is interrupted by the arrival of a troop that has to eliminate the colony. Todd organizes the heroic defense.

** Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of RADAR, was caught speeding with a RADAR gun and reportedly said, “‘My God if I’d known what they were going to do with it, I’d have never have invented it!”  (BBC.com)

** Robert F. Kennedy Podcast RFK is a democrat spoiler who wants debates. The DNC, aware of Pedo Joe’s painful senility says no.

Identify the Aircraft

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T-Shirt of the Day

Somebody Dropped Acid…

Cooking and Eating

HMS Victory carried supplies for six months at sea, though any opportunity for resupply was taken.

This included:

• 300 tons of fresh water (353 litres per man, or 2 litres per day)
• 50 tons of beer (59 litres per man, or 0.33 litres per day)
• 30 tons of salted beef and pork (35 kg per man, or 0.2 kg per day)
• 45 tons of ship’s biscuit (53 kg per man or 0.3 kg per day)
• 15 tons of dried peas (18 kg per man or 0.1 kg per day)

In total, about 450 tons of food and drink was carried in the ship’s hold.

In addition, perishable food such as fresh fruit and vegetables, cheese and butter, and even live animals (cows and chickens) would be loaded on board if possible whenever the ship was in port, as well as topping up the non-perishable supplies.

Using period-appropriate measurements, a seaman would be given 4 lb of salt beef, 2 lb of salt pork, 2 pints of peas, 3 pints of oatmeal, 6 oz of butter and 12 oz of cheese per week, plus 1 lb of bread and 1 gallon of beer per day. (Those ration quantities assume re-supply more often than six months.)

Note that contrary to popular belief, rum was not served regularly in the Royal Navy in Nelson’s day. It was offered as a substitute for when beer was not available — which generally meant on ships in service in the Caribbean. Similarly, ships in the Mediterranean served wine rather than beer.

The ship’s cook was ranked as a petty officer with a warrant. The position was often given to an elderly veteran with a disability or service injury, allowing him to continue to work and draw a salary. He was assisted by at least one and often two or three cook’s mates. Most of the time the mates would do the work while the cook supervised them, but the job of actually serving food to the crew was done by the cook himself because he was personally responsible for making sure that everybody got the correct share of food they were entitled to.

Food was cooked in the ship’s galley on the middle deck. This was a huge metal device (‘Brodie’s Patent Galley’) vaguely reminiscent of two upright pianos pushed together back to back. It contained two separate built-in kettles (capacity 1137 litres) for boiling food, two ovens for baking, two spits for roasting, and a copper kettle for distilling seawater into fresh water. (The latter only produced 9 litres a day, which was reserved for the sickbay). The stove was heated by firewood or coal, and an iron chimney led up through the decks to the outside. The galley was set on heat-resistant tiles covering the area of the deck around it.

The galley on board HMS Victory

Three or four full-time cooks in a fully-equipped industrial kitchen should have no problem cooking for 850 people a day, especially since the food was not exactly gourmet cuisine, and everyone was served the same thing on any given day. (Except the officers — they were entitled to eat the same rations as the men, but they could also use their own money to buy better-quality food and bring it on board.)

On the Victory, there were tables hinged to the walls and suspended from the ceiling on the lower and middle gun decks, between the guns, which could be pulled down to eat on or raised up out of the way at other times. Each table seated an average of eight people; each such group was referred to as a ‘mess’, and the people there were ‘messmates’. Sailors were free to choose their own messmates at the start of a voyage, but changing mess once you had assigned yourself to one required the permission of an officer.

A mess table

On either a daily or a weekly basis (different ships did it differently), one sailor from each mess would be nominated as the ‘mess cook’. In the morning he would go to the ship’s storeroom and collect the daily rations for his messmates. He would then go to the galley and give the food that needed to be cooked to the cook’s mates; each mess’s food would be marked with a metal tag.

The main meal of the day was at noon, and an hour was allowed for it. Another hour starting at 16:00 was assigned to the evening meal. A skeleton crew would keep the ship functioning while everyone else went to eat, then have their own food later.

The mess cook would go to the galley and collect the cooked food for his mess, bring it to them, and serve it out. Halfway through the meal, he was also responsible for going up on deck to collect his mess’s alcohol ration (half was served at each mealtime) and again, sharing it out. As a perk, he was allowed to keep any that was left over after everyone’s cup had been filled. (Though heaven help him if some of the beer had unaccountably gone missing in transit and he wasn’t able to give his messmates their expected share!)

Finally, at the end of the meal, the mess cook was also responsible for cleaning and putting away the eating utensils.