I can affirm the "non-smokers got extra duty" assertion. In addition to the extra barracks work, when we were out on long marches, the Drill Sergeants would call for a stop, and shout "Smoke 'em if you got 'em, everyone else, POLICE CALL!" Police call generally meant patrolling the immediate area picking up small articles of trash so we didn't leave anything behind for "the enemy" to find -- said trash consisting mostly of old cigarette butts.

I'll also affirm that as an atheist, I got extra duty while others were in church, was occasionally harassed, and a few times, felt extremely pressured by others higher in the chain of command to convert to some form of evangelical christianity. Never thought to sue over it, though.

Finally, in my basic, they had several drill instructors for our company, and we only occasionally had the one who did final inspection and lights out wake us in the morning. Most of the time they rotated schedules. And they did, in fact, bring a cooler of beer to their office more than once, in large part, I think, to tease us.

I'm so sick of the Wilhelm. It seems even more trite, annoying and unimaginative every time I hear it.

And Ben Burtt shouldn't get credit for popularizing it; it was already a popular bit of stock sound. It's just that he took it to all new levels of obsessive stupidity without care whether he was damaging the art he inserted it into.

Shoes or pants?

There is an answer. It depends on where they placed the "Chuck Taylor All Star" badge.

Pudifoot, I doubt you're a *professional* juggler.

The simple cascade is by no means the only juggling pattern.

While a nine ball shower is a stretch of the imagination for anyone I've every heard of (and may well be impossible), an arc of balls is normal for juggling in the shower pattern. There's obviously room for artistic license as well, so I'd suggest just being happy that the art is being represented in culture at all.

For some reason, a crude representation of the shower is what's usually captured in illustrations rather than the more common cascade.

I voted astronaut, in part because he actually looks like he might be juggling the balls, but I don't really like any of these. In the right low gravity environment, a nine ball shower could be attainable rather casually, hence the smug look. ;)

The others, the positions of the hands and balls don't look related in any way.

This isn't a big deal. Not only for the reasons mentioned above, the price of scrap metals has gone through the roof and continues to rise. As time goes on, the incentive to recycle them will overtake their value as a spare parts yard. Then no more metal graveyard.

Count on seeing this kind of story for overtipped waitresses 100 times for every time you see such a story about an overtipped waiter.

It'd be a hundred times cooler if he didn't try to make it into a "film". It's not a film, it's just some shots of a random dweeb on a snowmobile on the water. And it doesn't need a soundtrack, either.

Lame. I thought you said it'd get better?

This is just an invention of a few phrases in a new sign language, memorization and recitation. Just because various phrases, words and letters are written on the hands doesn't make it any better.

Just about any one of Rachel de Azevedo Coleman's various songs in PBS's children's series "Signing Time" is far more impressive.

col mcgillveray has deduced why I miss celery jello... other than the fact that I liked the flavor.