Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher – known to generations of naval historians as “Jacky” Fisher – was one of the most consequential men of a consequential era.

Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot “Jacky” Fisher

Fisher served in one of the most technologically transformational eras in history.  He started his service in the Royal Navy during the Crimean War, on a sail-driven wooden ship of the line armed with muzzle-loading cannon.  Over the next 40 years, he led in the tactical and technical developments that turned the British (and, by extension, American)  navies from wind-driven wooden fleets to steam-powered steel ones.

He helped develop the torpedo for use in Royal Navy ships:

An early British “Whitehead” torpedo

In 1906, he was instrumental in the construction of the first modern battleship, HMS Dreadnought, which defined the basic outlines of the battleship from that day in 1906 until after the Gulf War.

HMS Dreadnought. While the ship itself was obsolescent by the beginning of the First World War, it was the model for the “battleship” as the world came to know it throughout the 20th Century.

And then, thinking that speed was more important than armor, he developed a new class of warship, the “Battlecruiser”, with the firepower of a battleship but the armor and speed of a (faster, much more lightly-armored) cruiser, intended to be faster than anything that could kill it and stronger than anything that could run with it.

HMS Lion, one of Fisher’s battle cruisers

Fisher, and the battlecruisers’ crews, discovered to their immense chagrin that while outrunning a battleship was one thing, it didn’t allow the battlecruiser to outrun the battleships’ shells.  On one day in 1916, at the Battle of Jutland, three of Fisher’s battlecruisers exploded, victims partly of too-thin armor (an intentional part of the design, to keep the ships relatively light and fast) and unstable British cannon propellant (which was not intentional, and also led to the destruction of many other British ships during the war); the Invincible, Indefatigable and Queen Mary all blew up like fireworks, leaving about 30 survivors among combined crews of over 3,200 men.

HMS Invincible explodes at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. There were six survivors out of a crew of 1,029.

And HMS Hood continued the streak; the greatest battle cruiser ever built, the epitome of Fisher’s theory and redesigned to reflect the lessons at Jutland, the Hood was in its day the fastest and most powerful battleship in the world, the very symbol of British naval might in the twenties and thirties:

And on 1941, as it chased and caught the German battleship Bismarck somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, the German ship’s gunfire blew up the Hood, killing all but three of its crew of 1,200.

Hood exploding, photographed from the deck of the German cruiser “Prinz Eugen”, which was escorting “Bismarck”.

However, the dozens of other fullly-armored battleships of both the British and German navies, the vast majority of which were descendants of Dreadnought, survived to serve as the templates for every battleship in the world built between 1906 and the end of World War 2.

USS Wisconsin, in its Cold War configuration. Although it was 50% longer and four times the weight  of Dreadnought, and faster than any of Fisher’s “battle cruisers” with none of the vulnerabilities, it was recognizably descended from Fisher’s ideas.

But today?  With the last of the battleships (The USS Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin) retired and serving as museum ships, it may be that Jacky Fisher’s most well-known, if not most significant or enduring, contribution to the world may be that in 1917, in a letter to Winston Churchill, he was the first person ever recorded using the abbreviation “OMG” as a shortcut to writing “Oh, My God”. 

A couple of girls who think Jacky Fisher is a member of N*SYNC

The lesson?  You never know what it is that you’ll be leaving to posterity.

It’s not the size of the gaffe that counts, it’s the motion of the back-pedaling

Joe Biden isn’t known for subtext – just text.

While the national media has treated Biden as something between a 21st Century Spiro Agnew and that crazy uncle who overstays his welcome during the holidays, Republicans have (dare I say?) celebrated Joe’s Bidenisms as occasional forays into the truth.  If Barack Obama represents the modern Democratic Party’s super ego, Biden represents it’s id – the innate instinctive impulses and primary processes.

All of which makes Joe’s latest bombast not terribly surprising:

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

Biden made the comments at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, where he kicked off a two-day campaign tour of southern and southwestern Virginia. He spoke before what appeared to be a racially varied audience of 900 people, and one prominent Republican suggested that his language could be interpreted as racially divisive.

The fallout fell on equally predictable lines.  The Romney camp tweeted that the comments were “outrageous” and reporters spent the afternoon filing bylines with stories repeating the VP’s gaffe.  If anything didn’t go according to script, it was the Democrat response – refusing to acknowledge any error in judgement and actually doubling down on the comment.  Biden’s attempt at “clarifying” his words still repeated the claim that Romney/Ryan would “shackle” the middle class.

Are Biden’s comments “outrageous”?  No, not by comparison to the media’s attempt to quasi-defend them by providing the sort of context that often seems to be missing from similar Republican errors.  Soledad O’Brien led off Anderson Cooper’s 360 by looping numerous Republican officials using the term “unshackle” (ergo, Biden was justified).  Politico decried the “death of the high-minded campaign” and despite having only one negative Romney example (in which he hit Biden for a 2007 comment about coal killing more Americans than terrorists), the website placed cover page photos of both contenders, suggesting that both camps have equally contributed to the debasing of the campaign.

Such defenders of context were no where to be found just days ago when Mitt Romney’s factual ad hitting Obama’s new welfare policies had politicos and pundits seeing racial politics.  Dan Milbank even unleashed a column that Romney’s ad “incites bigotry.”  Perhaps a conservative commentator will rush to pen a piece that explains how Biden’s comments were an attempt at “dog whistle” politics to African-American voters that not only will get published in a major newspaper but go by unchallenged by the Praetorian Guard of the Old Media.  But I wouldn’t suggest anyone hold their breath.

The issue shouldn’t be whether or not Joe Biden said something racial but that its become an acceptable part of the political discourse to accuse your opponents of putting voters in a form of bondage that doesn’t involve a safe word.  Such a mangled attempt to turn a phrase may pass for the talking heads at MSNBC or on whatever ham radio frequency that Air America continues broadcasting from, but without negative consequences, politicians will continue to feel free to double down on the harshest language possible.

Note to self:  When updating my WordPress theme, always check the actual blog before leaving for the office.

My header image – which I’ve run on this blog since 2003 – got eaten by the update.  I didn’t notice it until I got to work, where I can’t actually blog (this update is being written from a smart phone, btw).

I’ll fix things – or maybe gin together a new banner, who knows? – later on today.  Just in case anyone was wondering, I mean.

Remember ten and fifteen years ago?  When people were wondering if Microsoft would eventually control the entire online world?

Back when the left was pondering siccing the government’s anti-trust machinery onto them (even more than they did)?  And the conservative among us urged caution, because the market would inexorably level the field if it were allowed to?

We, as usual, seem to have been proven right again.

I was at the Car-Craft Summer Nationals over the weekend, doing what has evolved into one of my favorite live broadcasts of the NARN broadcast year.

There were a lot of fun cars.  If you grew up in North Dakota in the seventies and eighties, the Nova was the semi-official state muscle car:

It was light, overpowered, and fairly inexpensive – three things that appealed to North Dakota gearheads.

(North Dakota gearheads were famous for one modification that, near as I can tell, was pretty local (although I’m sure it was more widespread and less local than I realize); they’d wash out the windshield washer tank, run the hose back to the cup holder on the driveshaft hump between the front seats, and fill it with Southern Comfort or Brass Monkey or some other, er, “durable” spirit.  Want a bump?  Hit the washer – provided you had a cup in the cup holder…)

Ditto the Chevelle;  one of my friends in high school had one of these.  I used to dream about one of ’em…:

But for me, the sentimental fave was this one; a black ’73 Malibu. This was my first car.

Well, no – not this exact car.  Mine was a northern Minnesota farm car I bought my junior year of college for $125 and a case of beer.  It was black, sort of – it had so much salt damage that the driver’s side door panel flapped in the breeze like a bird’s wing when you got over 60 miles per hour.  A chunk of the floor on the driver’s side was corroded away.

But it had a 350, and it flew.   It was the car that brought me to the Twin Cities – and I used to drive home to visit keeping it around 70ish in MInnesota, and around 85 in ND.  I could make it from the 694 River Bridge to the Jamestown exit – 335 miles – in around four and a half hours on the road (not counting the fuel stop I had to make in Fergus Falls; it wouldn’t get to Fargo on one tank).

And when it finally conked out, I dreamed about keeping it, and learning how to fix up and hot-rod cars, and doing something like what you see above.

But I was 23 and making $6 an hour at Hubbard Broadcasting and needed money, so I sold it for $50 to a guy who wrecked it a week later and ran away when the police came.

If there’s a car heaven, my old Monte Carlo is there, and looks a lot like this.

1. Airport Security

2. Beachwear:

Today – up until 11:59PM tonight – is the big final push for the 2012 edition of the “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate?” Poll.

This poll – a biennial tradition since 2010 – takes a snapshot barometer of Minnesota Liberals (and those willing to speak on their behalf) and the current objects of their frothing, demented ire.

Leave your votes in descending order of ire – in other words, the first person on your list is the most-hated, the next one is right behind, and so on.  You can leave as many as you want, although the “sweet spot” is ten votes (beyond that you get steeply diminishing returns in the weighting of your vote).

Leave them here in the comment section, or send ’em to the email address “Feedbackinthedark@Yahoo.com” – and if you could put the word “Poll” in the subject line, that’d be just fabulous.

Tomorrow, we’ll start the two-day-long award ceremony!

Which conservatives do Minnesota lefties hate the most?

Your chance to vote in the “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate, 2012” poll runs today through Monday (at 11:59PM)!

Leave your top ten (or however many) nominations, in descending order of how badly the left hates them, in the comment section – or, if you prefer, send them to “Feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”.

The poll is shaping up even bigger than 2010 – with some major shifts in the rankings.

Make sure to make your voice heard!

Another day and a half left to vote in the “Who Do MN Liberals Hate” poll.

Give us your top ten Minnesota conservatives that liberals hate, in descending order of hatred.

Results later this week!

UPDATE:  Chalk it up to the heat, but it occurred to me; I ran one of the most important contests in the SITD schedule during one of the worst traffic weeks of the year.

So I’m extending voting through 11:59PM, Monday, July 9, with results to be released starting Tuesday, July 10 and the finals on July 11.

God Bless America!

I have a Windows laptop, a LInux desktop, and – over the last year or so – a couple of Apple devices (one of the upsides of being a contractor and being able to deduct business expenses).

Macs are more expensive than they’re worth than Windows and Linux machines, and their users have developed – notwithstanding that I own some – a reputation as free-spending epicures.

And after working in electronic commerce at a few points in my career, I think I’m most surprised to find that every e-commerce website isn’t bumping up the “prestige” of Mac users’ search results  – showing them the higher-priced books, downloads and hotel rooms higher up in their preferred search results.

Which is, by the way, what Orbitz is doing.  Not jacking up the prices – as the local TV anchors were saying this morning – but showing them the more expensive results first.

Note to self;  plan next vacation from my Linux box.

After a too-long hiatus, I’m back with Hot Gear Friday.

This series – allowing for a few of Johnny Roosh’s swerves into motorcycles, cars and nose-hair trimmers. and mine into audio gear – has always been about two things that made America great; guns and guitars. .

And as I noted a few years ago in this series, capitalism – the vigorous growth of the music mass-retail industry – has led to great things in the world of the guitar; “cheap” guitars used to be shoddy dreck back in the 1970s; today, even a $150 Fender Squire or Epiphone Les Paul knockoff is a work of at least modest quality.

Of course, guitars are a subject whose moral and emotional resonance isn’t wrapped up in layers of partisan social and political myth.

America – real America, not the America of Heather Martens and Wes Skoglund and Ellen Anderson and Mark Dayton and Alida Messinger – is a land of shooters.  It’s an America that takes its Second Amendment seriously.

Of course, that other America – the one that believes government is a lullaby, there to waft them off to sleep at night, comfortable in the notion that their benefactor is there to protect them – has another take on things.  And in the 30-year-stretch from the late sixties to the mid-nineties, they did their level best to not only make it difficult to own firearms, but to try to turn Americans, on an emotional and moral level, against them.

For a good, long time, gun controllers had the upper hand.  They passed laws, more or less at will for many years, that not only chipped away at the right to keep and bear arms – but also at the social implications of doing so

One of their first acts, over forty years ago, was to try to price guns out of the reach of lower-income Americans.  Laws about “Saturday Night Specials” – handguns that were both inexpensive and “cheap”, in every sense of the term, but were designed to be affordable to people who didn’t have a whooole lot of money to spend – were entirely designed by the Democrats to drive poor Americans, especially  black ones, out of the firearms market.

And, unlike most liberal policies, it worked.  Between the escalating price of legal firearms and the fact that so many of them wound up warehoused into cities that were the most hostile to fireamrs, it’s America’s law-abiding low-income poor who are most aggressively disarmed (and, “unexpectedly”, who live in the areas most in need of the law-abiding gun owner).

But like the Second Amendment movement itself, capitalism wasn’t done yet.

———-

Brands like Colt, Kimber, Kahr, Beretta, Smith and Wesson, Glock, Heckler and Koch, and Schweizerische Industrielle Gesellschaft – known to most as “SIG” – weren’t covered by the Saturday Night Special ban.  They – especially H&K, SIG and Kimber – had a long-earned reputation for painstaking craftsmanship in building firearms, which were renowned for impeccable quality.  And you paid for that quality; pieces like the H&K (the USP was “Jack Bauer’s” on-screen pistol in the last six seasons of “24”), SIG (whose P226 is the sidearm of the Navy SEALs) and Kimber (whose custom-made Colt M1911 adaptations outfit not a few elite shooters themselves) would usually be bargains if they got below $1,000.

But in the nineties, as Bill Clinton’s administration briefly tried to ratchet up gun control laws, American gun owners reacted by buying firearms in numbers that seemed, at the time, immense.  9/11 accelerated the buying spree.  And both of those surges were pikers compared to the buying binge that erupted when Barack Obama – who’d been funded in his earlier endeavors by a various anti-gun organizations, and whose sympathies were clearly pro-Orc – took office.

And during the first of these binges, some of Europe’s great gun companies saw the opportunity in the US Market, and started opting to do some of their manufacturing here.

That’s right – gun nuts are causing jobs to be imported to the US.  You’re welcome.

In 1992, SIG/Sauer – a Swiss/German company, to get around Switzerland’s strict weapons export laws – built a factory in Exeter, New Hampshire to serve the booming US market for his premium handguns (Glock and Heckler und Koch also set up shop in the US).

And this new, immense capacity, combined with the SIG tradition of engineering excellence, has led to one of the great manifestations of Adam Smith in recent years; the SIG P250.

Designed to cut into Glock’s stronghold, the affordable high-quality point and shoot semiautomatic, the P250 adds a few slick features of its own. The whole piece – the steel slide with the SIG-standard port-lug-locking barrel, the high-impact polymer grip frame, designed for .45ACP, 9mm Luger, .40 S&W and .357 SIG calibers and coming in three different size combinations from subcompact to full-sized – is wrapped around a common, modular, stainless steel trigger assembly. The owner can swap a 9mm Compact up to .45 Full Size by changing out the slide/barrel, grips and magazines, for much, much less than the cost of a full separate piece. The shooter can thus customize a 250 very quickly and easily.

It’s aimed, naturally, at the same market the Glock serves; it’s double-action only, with a shrouded conventional hammer instead of the Glock’s striker.

But Glock-y though it’s market may be, after a few thousand rounds in a dog’s breakfast of different loadings (in my piece, a 9mm Compact) in the past few months, I have yet to have a stoppage. Which is very, very SIG-gy.

And the best, Adam-Smithiest, Milton-Friedmaniest, coolest thing of all? This piece of hot, flaming, lead-spewing Swiss gear runs in the low $400’s. And if you watch for specials – as I did – you can get it for under $400.

God Bless Switzerland America!

Compare and contrast.

The state bird of Minnesota is the mosquito (gyuck gyuck, ya workin’ hard or hardly workin’? Oh, ja, I’m on my way up to da cabin, gooo Vikes, I think Governor Carlson is good at reachin’ across dat dere aisle, ja?).

The state bird of North Dakota for most of the past fifty years was the B52 Stratofortress, known to its crews and neighbors as the “BUFF” (Big Ugly Fat, er Felllow) or “BMF” (Big Motor Scooter).

And it was fifty years ago today that the last BUFF came off the assembly line.

It’s been the same pool of B52’s that’s been modified to meet every strategic whim – from high-level nuclear bomber,

A B52 on strategic deterrent duty in the seventies, with a pair of Hound Dog standoff nuclear missiles.

to counterinsurgency saturation-bomber over Vietnam…:

A B52D drops a load of bombs over Vietnam during "Operation Rolling Thunder"

to low-level nuclear bomber and missile launcher (as Soviet air defense made high-altitude bombing too risky)…

A B52H loaded with cruise missiles, on deterrent duty at Minot Air Force Base, May 15, 1985

, to high-level dropper of conventional precision-guided bombs

B52H over Afghanistan.

To…well, whatever is around the corner. The B52 is getting refitted for duty until at least 2040 – nearly 100 years from when its design requirements were issued. It’s hard to believe that it’s likely the B52 will have been in service for 100 years by the time the last one leaves service, at this rate. And it has to be one of the bigger bargains in the history of military procurement.

It’s Syttende Mai – the 107th anniversary of the day that Norway declared its independence after a bloody war of independence, throwing off the shackles of onerous, brutal Swedish rule.

Norwegian forces had fought a long-shot, underground war against the evil Swedes – a battle which may have been the model for the “Rebellion” in the movie Star Wars – ragtag rebels fighting the Swedes and their Finnish and Danish mercenaries, eventually coalescing into a movement that was able to virtually wipe out the Swedes and drive to the very gates of Stockholm, dragging the Swedish monarchy to the negotiation table, leading to the…

…the…

…oh, I can’t go on.  It’s really just the date the Norwegian constitution was ratified.  Norwegians celebrate the event with childrens parades and the sort of stuff Americans do for, well, Arbor Day.

Anyway – happy Syttende Mai!

Evolutionary news: scientists show facial hair makes guys look meaner:

…men (women, too) viewed bearded male faces as more threatening when the pictured males adopted an angry look.

Facial hair, the authors wrote “may intimidate rival males by increasing perceptions of the size of the jaw, overall length of the face, and by enhancing aggressive and threatening jaw-thrusting behaviors … . The current study is the first to show that the beard augments a threatening behavioral display as bearded men with angry facial expressions received significantly higher scores for aggressiveness compared with clean-shaven faces … . This suggests that the beard plays an important role in intermale signaling of threat and aggression.”

Do you feel lucky, punk?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

A friend wants a .22 revolver to teach a kid to shoot. Double action are scarce. Single-action cowboy replicas are plentiful. Autos are everywhere.

For an absolute novice, which is the best trainer?

And who’s got one to sell?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Good question.

And an important one.  Since it is the moral duty of every law-abiding American to be proficient with firearms, training the next generation is vital.

So what do you all suggest?

In other words, technology will eventually, inevitably act like an adolescent. I think.

Humans, like most animals, have an evolutionary proclivity toward fighting for scarce things – mates, resources, spaces at the bar, whatever.

And like most animals, humans are adapted to see those who are bigger, stronger and more capable of harming them.  Hence – according to UCLA researchers – people A  think men in photographs with guns in their hands look taller than men holding other objects:

To test this theory, researchers set up a series of experiments in which they had hundreds of participants look at photos of hands holding different objects: handguns, handsaws, power drills and caulking guns. (The hands matched one another in size and appearance.)

Participants were asked to look at the photos and estimate the size of the person holding each object and how muscular he was by choosing one of six body types.

In one round of the experiment involving 628 viewers, the researchers found that men whose hands held a .357-caliber handgun were thought to be almost 5 feet, 10 inches — more than 2 inches taller than men whose hands held a caulking gun.

Men with drills were also on the higher end of the height and strength scale — perhaps because of viewers’ estimates of the strength it would take to hold a drill — but they were still judged to be about half an inch shorter than the gun toters.

Next, they’ll study why women with guns are so much sexier than other women.

I was standing at the bar at Keegans with Mr. D, Speed Gibson, Night Writer and some stranger I’d never met, a few weeks ago.

D said “Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger.”

We all groaned in agony.

Speed followed up: “Did you hear that NASA recently put a bunch of Holsteins into low earth orbit? They called it the herd shot ’round the world.”

There were face-palms all around – except for the stranger, who seemed to be getting a little agitated.

Not to be outdone, Night spoke up next: ”  Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication”

We all theatrically slapped at Night – except for the stranger, who visibly seethed with rage.

Terry Keegan walked up behind the bar.  “Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it, too.”

We all rubbed our foreheads in mock pain – except for the stranger, whose face turned red, with flecks of spittle forming around his lips.

It was my turn: “A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in
the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour,  the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. “But why?”  they asked, as they moved off. “Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”

Everyone theatrically held their stomachs in mock agony – except for the stranger.  The man – in his mid to late sixties, sallow, wearing a U of M sweater – took a step back, bellowed something nonsensical, and pulled a large knife from his back pocket.

I kicked him hard in the groin.  One of the others – D, Speed or Night, can’t remember which – took a snap-kick at the hand with the knife, which flew up in the air.  Keegan caught it, pommel-side down, like you’re supposed to catch flying knives.  We grabbed the man and held him for the police.

Which just goes to show you should never bring a knife to a pun fight.

Seen at random on my Twitter timeline, perhaps the least inviting plug for a photo link ever:

Oh so you have had INTESTINAL ISSUES, is the area seen in the attachment, red, irritated, wrinkled…

No, I did not click the picture.

So much of the technology we take for granted today started out as military research, then weaponry, and finally…

…guided mystery-meat delivery systems:

Taco-hungry Americans could order and pay for tacos on their smartphones, which would supply GPS coordinates to the drone. Once ordered, the tacos would be delivered as long as the customer remained in the ordering location.

I think that’s more likely after the food is delivered, if you catch my drift.

But I digress:

It exists in the Bay Area — in concept, at least. For now, the Tacocopter, which has existed since July 2011, has been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration, as would be any unmanned commercial drone. According to FAA regulations, “unmanned aerial vehicles” cannot currently be used for commercial purposes.

There are other minor problems with the project, such as its ability to navigate dangerous terrain or to keep the food it carries warm.

That hasn’t stopped the Tacocopter’s creators from dreaming big, though. They hope the Tacocopter website will serve as fodder for discussion of the future of food delivery — think of the implications for tailgating or outdoor barbecuing, for example.

Yet another example of senseless regulation stalling progress!

…but it’s not exactly good news.

Or, I suspect, especially valid research.

“So how DO they get cars out of the lake when they go through the ice?”

Well, whaddya know?

…or maybe it’s because I’ve been working in IT too long.

But almost every time I try to type the phrase “White Paper”, I end up typing “Shite Paper”.

I need to kick that error before it costs me.

Wolf cubs.

Courtesy DickPetrie.com

No, they’re not actually family pets.

Because I can, that’s why.

Discuss.

To: Arby’s Restaurants
From: Mitch Berg, rare customer
Re: Bad Mood

Dear Arby’s,

I don’t go to Arby’s much.  While you have the odd good item on  your menu – potato cakes are proof God not only exists but loves us – your restaurants are not usually the kind of place I go out of my way to get to.

But to the extent that it ever was, you’re rapidly blowing it with your current ad campaign, featuring “RB”, the annoying slacker who tags every spot by singing “It’s Good Mood Food”

It’s one of those notable ad campaigns that started bad – the line “we all look the same way nude” was not something I’d like to associate with fast food, ever – and got worse (the tortoise congo line and the “angry bank robber” bits)…

….reaching their nauseating nadir, the “Fisherman” spots. Which start out less obnoxiously (and more predictably) than most of the “RB” spots, it’s true – but that just lulls us into a false sense of hope.  The spots end with “RB” singing “I’m on boat…”, through autotune.

Annoying? No.  Justification for a rogue Iranian submariner declaring a unilateral campaign of no-quarter destruction against fishing craft? Yes.

That is all.