he called Hardy "t" ?
>kismet?
>
>>I think you're right - it was Churchill. After I mentioned Wellington I think I just rolled on to Nelson - though it could be I got the buggery thing entangled with Nelson's last words <bg>
>>
>>>I thought that was Churchill. Or maybe more than one of them said it. The way I heard it, when Churchill was Secretary of the Navy in his young years he made some change to regulations. "But that's a tradition of the Royal Navy," he was told. "The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash," he said.
>>>
>>>>Yeah, to make conscription work you kind of have to adopt a training and discipline model that has gone out of fashion. Wellington used to refer to his troops as "the scum of the earth" - even after they defeated Napoleon. And Nelson, of course, said the British Navy was sustained by "rum, buggery, and the lash". (though come to think of it, if you dropped any ban on gays in the navy you might be able to put that on a recruiting poster on Fire Island <bg>)
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
