US Aircraft Carrier CVN-77 should have been another Lexington

As the long-awaited Queen Elizabeth Class of Royal Navy aircraft carriers slowly take shape, with their names steeped in tradition (both names were given to WWII battleships), I have found that the last of the Nimitz Class super-carriers of the US Navy, The USS George HW Bush (CVN-77) was originally touted to have been named USS Lexington, according to US Senate papers.

CVN-77 at Sea

According to Senate concurrent resolution 84 (106th congress, 2nd session), submitted by Democratic Senators John Warner KBE (VA) and Daniel Inouye (HI), veterans of the Korean war and WWII,

respectively, on Feb 24th 2000, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier CVN-77, then building, should be named "Lexington" since:

• "the name bestowed upon aircraft carrier CVN-77 should embody the American spirit and provide a lasting symbol of the American commitment to freedom"
• "for the citizens of the United States, the name``Lexington'' has been synonymous with defense of freedom from the very first battle of the War of the American Revolution and is taught to American schoolchildren as the place of the ``shot heard round the world'', at which our forebears mustered the courage to gain inde-pendence" 
• "the name ``Lexington'' has been associated with naval aviation from its origins in the 1920s, when President Harding bestowed the name ``Lexington'' on the second aircraft carrier in United States history ... that vessel, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-2), also known as the ``Fighting Lady'', saw active service from 1927 until lost in 1942 during the historic Battle of the Coral Sea"
• "immediately after that loss, President Franklin D.Roosevelt saw fit to bestow the name ``Lexington'' on a successor aircraft carrier in order to carry on the fighting spirit to preserve freedom"
• Whereas that successor aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16), joined the fleet in 1943 and earned 11 battle stars during the Pacific campaigns of World War II as she helped carry the fight to the enemy"
• "U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16) continued her service to the United States after World War II, conducting nu-merous deployments during the Cold War and completing her 48 years of service as a training aircraft carrier for student aviators"
• "upon the completion of her service and in keeping with the traditions of the Navy, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16) was stricken from the Navy Vessel Register on November 30, 1991"

The senators continued:
"the aircraft carrier CVN-77 should be named the U.S.S. Lexington:
(1) in order to honor the men and women who served in the Armed Forces of the United States during World War II, and the incalculable number of United States citizens on the home front during that war, who mobilized in the name of freedom, and who are today respectfully referred to as the ``Greatest Generation' and
(2) as a special tribute to the 16,000,000 veterans of the Armed Forces who served on land, sea, and air during World War II, of whom less than 6,000,000 remain alive today, and serve as a lasting symbol of commitment to freedom as they pass on and proudly take their place in history."

In the event, the Navy saw fit to continue the modern trend for naming ships in honour of still-living individuals, in this case WWII carrier aviator and later President George H.W. Bush, rather than after famous and pivotal moments in their history.

This is a shame in my opinion, since it would seem to turn away from tradition, so long the proud backbone of navies world-wide.  At least they're building another "Enterprise".

More on this discussion can be found here: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/march/whats-in-a-name/article_print

Relocation - Part 2

I'm feeling quite gloomy about the move to the Fens today.

As part of our impending relocation to Cambridge we are updating our 1929-built house to better reflect contemporary tastes, which means basically halving the number of internal walls and putting in a cool kitchen.

We had the designer guy from "Betta Living" around last night and he was here for FOUR hours, and it wasn't like we hadn't already decided what we wanted down to the last drawer.  It was exhausting, and it made the move that much more real, which left me with a nasty sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

That's been happening a lot lately, being assailed by unwelcome thoughts about how finite our time here now is.  I was especially struck by it when my son goes to cricket.  He's become quite a regular pick for the Marple CC junior team and one of the coaches was talking about his "future at the club" the other week, which almost had me in tears.  People keep telling me we'll find new Cricket clubs, dance schools etc. at the other end but that's missing the point.  The hopes and dreams I had for my kids now lie in a future that will no longer take place, like another country that it's no longer possible to visit.

Maybe I should just man up and stop feeling sorry for myself but this move is going to be very tough for my kids.

Modern Workplace - we are nothing but abstractions

Going to work is crap.

I hate it.

I have no idea how to do my job properly, it stresses me out and given the choice I'd stay in bed all day watching DVD's and eating biscuits.

And I'm sure I'm not alone.

Going to work has always been crap.  It's like being forced to eat shit.

However, in the modern workplace, going to work is like being forced to eat shit but also being forced to call it chocolate, because in an effort to avoid the appearance that you're nothing but random meat to them, your employers now seek to restrict the very thoughts you have in your head.

Example?  Two years ago I was unlawfully dismissed by my employer for being unable to do my job as it stood,  due to a disability, in direct contravention of the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005.  But I was repeatedly bollocked by HR for saying I'd been fired or sacked.  I wasn't being sacked,. I was being "re-deployed", to the DWP benefits office as it turned out.  But it was considered supremely important that at no time did I think that the employer didn't have my best interests at heart.

Even when they're dumping on you from a great height, be it unlawful dismissal, unpaid "promotions", enforced relocation or "re-structuring" in such a way that ten people who have worked together for years as a team suddenly have to fight over nine jobs, you mustn't think you're being treated unfairly, let alone say it.

For a long time I thought it was just a litigation thing.  But then I realised.

We are all just meat.

Underpaid, unvalued, anonymous, expendable meat.

And meat is always better if it goes to the abattoir willingly or unknowingly.

Animal names for tanks

I was reading a book about German armoured vehicles of the WWII era and was struck by the rather whimsical use of animal names, especially cats and insects.  Some, like the Panther and Tiger tanks are well known but some others are more obscure and I shall list them here.  I have not bothered with umlauts, I hope you will forgive me.

For example, other tanks (experimental or unbuilt, by and large) included the Lowe (Lion) heavy tank, the Maus (mouse) super-heavy tank, the Leopard light tank (not to be confused with the contemporary German main battle tank of the same name) and the Wanze (bug) one-man tank.  There were numerous self-propelled guns including the Wespe (wasp), Grille (cricket), Heuschrecke (grasshopper), Elefant, Hornisse/Nashorn (hornet/rhino), Hummel (bumble bee) and Brummbar (grizzly bear).

There was an experimental amphibious vehicle called the Ente (duck), miscellaneous recon/APC vehicles like the Luchs (lynx), Maultier (mule), Puma, Katzchen (kitten), Falke (falcon), Schildkrote (turtle), UHU (eagle owl) and anti-tank or anti-aircraft vehicles like Marder (marten), Gepard (cheetah, again, not to be confused with...) and Coelian (a legendary monster, referring to a converted Panther tank).

Anti-aircraft guns in particular were often given eccentric or dramatically lyrical names:  converted tanks carrying AA guns were known as Mobelwagen (removal vans), while more adavanced AA vehicles became Wirbelwind (whirlwind), Ostwind (east wind) and Kugelblitz (ball lightning).

My absolute favourite name was for a prototype heavy tank destroyer called Sturer Emil, stubborn Emil.

By comparison, the allies in WWII often (but not always) used rather prosaic names if they went beyond simple model numbers at all.   British tanks usually have "C" names like Covenanter, Crusader, Comet, Cromwell, Churchill, and the more modern Centurion, Conqueror, Chieftain and Challenger, although informality and eccentricity did creep in occasionally, tanks converted to APC's were called Kangaroos, Valentine tanks were so named because their design was initiated on 14th February, M7 Priest SP guns were so called because of their pulpit-like machine gun mount, an unofficial ecclesiastical naming system being established which led to later SP guns like Bishop, Sexton and Abbot.  American vehicles were named, unofficially at first and often by export customers, after famous soldiers (mostly generals), Lee, Grant, Stuart, Chaffee, Sherman, Pershing, a tradition continued to this day (Walker, Ridgeway, Patton, Abrams, Bradley, Stryker) and taken up by other countries, e.g. the French LeClerc.

Tanks and armoured vehicles are bad things that are designed to kill people, plain and simple, but some that conceived them had poetry in their souls.

Relocation...part 1

I started this blog out of curiosity but with no clear purpose in mind.  I have hardly ever posted to it.  But now it has a purpose, to document what might just be the darkest hours of my life.

AstraZeneca (those motherfuckers) announced that they're relocating their Alderley Edge R&D operation to Cambridgeshire in 2015, and the BEST CASE is that we'll have to uproot and trek down to East Anglia.

The enormity of this has finally hit me when I was forced to consider how many things, large and small, will have to be sorted out to allow this to happen. I finally sat down and thought about the minutiae that add up to a life and how every single tiny piece has to be uprooted and moved, I finally started to realise what will be lost in the process.

Top of the list, I have to find a job down there.  I'm 47 years old and not exactly transferable.  Sure I know a bit of Python and Java  and I'm working on my Perl but I seriously doubt Sanger or EBI would be interested.  I couldn't even get into Cambridge Uni as a student, when I would have been paying them to be there, so getting a job there is frankly unlikely.  My wife has suggested commuting to Manchester and living here in the week, returning to Cambridge at weekends, but I honestly can't see that working, not least financially.  Maybe if I could've stayed in London rather than moving to the North West and built my career there instead of in this provincial little hole I'd be in a better place about this.  That milk's spilt though, no point crying over it.

We will also have to tear the kids away from the schools, friends, clubs etc.  It's going to be heartbreaking.

We've become deeply embedded where we live, we have friends, hobbies, sports and other activities set up for the kids.  We own a house, have favourite places, our kids took their first steps here and said their first words.  I've never loved where we live but I guess I'd always assumed that we'd be here to see them take their first steps into the wider world, first loves, first triumphs, first failures.  That future has now ceased to exist and I think I might be mourning it.

Now our home is just a house again and it's all down to some corporate bastard's bottom line.  It's hard to get up in the morning because what's the point of going to work when I know I'll never finish what I've started in my job?

I feel robbed, sad, lost, scared.  I feel like I'm suffocating.

I feel like checking out.

Everything life widget...from irritant to obsession

I seem to be steadily accumulating an array of rechargeable battery-powered gadgets.  An ipod, a smartphone, a kindle, a laptop, and on and on.  And on.

This has created a whole new problem, since I suffer from depression and a borderline personality type, and its this:  batteries run down.

Sounds trivial, doesn't it?  But its gradually taking over my life.  As soon as any device comes off mains power, a little "charge-remaining" meter in my head starts cycling downward.  It's making me really quite unhappy.  Some of the other depressed people I know obsessively stockpile food, but I stockpile charge.  I can't stand to watch my family using the laptop on battery power.  I have to plug it in when they're not looking, its like a tic.  Don't they know that the bloody thing will run out of juice, maybe not right away, but eventually.  It's out there, like death, and I think that's the point.

Hoarding tins of beans or constantly charging or even collecting stamps, its just our attempt to hedge against mortality, to rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas put it, in my case quite literally.

Take me out the ball game: Baseball and the old fat Brit

One of the first things you notice when you look out the window of a plane flying over the USA is that the landscape often seems to be carpeted with baseball diamonds. Everywhere that has people has baseball. But what does a sports-phobic Brit know about this most popular and enduring of American pastimes?

Well, for one thing, like many of us I've seen it crop up in at least a dozen films and T.V. shows, and for another the modern English vernacular is peppered with baseball references: stepping up, hitting a home run, taking a rain check, getting to first base, throwing a curve ball, covering the bases, in the ballpark, I could go on and on.

It is amazingly accessible and deeply appealing to a nerd like your humble blogger. Its history and layers of complexity make for a fascinating and involving life-long hobby without ever needing to watch or play the game if you don't want to. I do like to watch the odd game but it's hard to get to see over here without a costly subscription to MLB.tv and in any case, I already have a favourite game (or games), the 2004 AL East Divisional Pennant clash between the Boston Redsox (go Sox!) and their arch-nemesis, the consistently talented New York Yankees (booooo!).

The way everyman underdogs the Redsox came back from 3 games to nothing down in the fourth of seven games to snatch the pennant at the death in the seventh game must surely have made for the most watchable baseball in recent years. I could no more root for the Yankees than I could support Manchester United, their nearest UK equivalents. No way. Winning all the time is just boring and feels like bad sportsmanship somehow. It somehow feels ingrained that following a team should not be EASY.

There are some parallels with British games like football (NOT SOCCER), for example when Sol Campbell moved from Tottenham Hotspur to their arch-rivals Arsenal he was villified. In a similar vein, when Redsox mainstay Johnny Damon followed in Babe Ruth's footsteps and moved to the Yankees as a free agent, Sox Nation were NOT happy. It will be interesting to see what happens when another 2004 pennant big player David Ortiz is lost to free agency this year, as rumours involving a similar move to the Yanks are already circulating.

Baseball is serious stuff, and indeed the US version of Nick Hornby's anthem to fanatical sports devotion, Fever Pitch, swapped baseball for football. However, at the remove of largely taking place on another continent, baseball appeals even to this fat old sport-hating Brit.