HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN THE NAVY?
"All me bloomin' life, sir! Me mother was a mermaid, me father was King Neptune. I was born on the crest of a wave and rocked in the cradle of the deep. Seaweed and barnacles are me clothes. Every tooth in me head is a marlinspike. The hair on me head is hemp. Every bone in me body is a spar. And when I spits, I spits tar! I's hard, I is. I am. I are!"

WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY "SIR"?
"Sir, 'Sir' is a subservient word surviving from the surly days in old Serbia, when certain serfs, too ignorant to remember their lord's names, yet too servile to blaspheme them, circumvented the situation by surrogating the subservient word, sir, by which I now belatedly address a certain senior cirroped, who correctly surmised that I was syrupy enough to say sir after every word I said, sir."


HOW'S THE COW?
"Sir, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk. The lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the (approximate number of glasses of milk remaining in the cartons)th degree!"

WHY DID YOU GUESS?
"Sir, since I have neither diligently labored nor brought forth pale & glimmering beads of perspiration upon my blanched & pallid brow, I find myself in this inexcusable position of complete & utter ignorance which I now attempt to elucidate. Having but meager knowledge of the question concerned & acting on the erroneous assumption that my lettered interrogator might not recognize the rank inaccuracy of my attempt, acting more on civilian's intuition than on midshipman's erudition, and seizing blindly the abstruse possibility that my futile rumblings might prove correct - I guessed, sir!"

WHY IS THERE NO EXCUSE?
"Sir, since I have no bombastic baccalaureate with which to create the basic augmentation of the phybitiphor, I must rely on the cooperation of the cerebrum and the medulla oblongata which compose the basis of intellectual perception. When sufficient adrenaline is not provided to cause a gagulation, then the cerebellum is placed in an inert state which brings about my position from which there is no excuse, sir!"

WHAT'S UP?
"Fidelity is up and Obedience is down on our bayonet buckles."


WHY DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?
"Sir, my cranium, consisting of Vermont marble, volcanic lava, and African ivory, covered with a thick layer of case hardened steel, forms an impenetrable barrier to all that seeks to impress itself upon the ashen tissues of my brain, hence the effulgent & ostentatiously effervescent, just directed and reiterated for my comprehension, have failed."

WHAT TIME IS IT?
"Sir, I am greatly embarrassed and deeply humiliated that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control, the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of my chronometer are in such in accord with the

(Continued on page 22)