Re: Gasket / Flange Question and Urban Legends

I enjoyed your legends and thought I'd add to them. I was in active duty in the Navy as a Machinist Mate (operator in Engine room). We had the usual searches for a bucket of Steam but we also had more ship type searches. They include Relative Bearing Grease - that could be anywhere on the ship. There also was 50 feet of shore line. One that requires explaining is a BT Punch. The Navy called fireroom operators "BT's" or Boiler Technicians. So looking in the Fireroom for a BT punch got the unsuspecting person a punch like he did not expect. There were an awefull lot of pranks on board the ship some were clearly over the limit of "fun". One that was more tame and repeated was putting Prussian blue on the earpiece of one phone while calling the intended target from the other phone. Lastly one of our more interesting plant related tricks was Apple Jack. On a shore shutdown period the engine room was mostly all shut down, some industrious guys found a bunch of ingrediants like apple juice,raisons and sugar. They put the stuff in a small cleaned out ameroyal tank (24 Gals). We really forgot about the stuff till we were starting up to go on a cruise. So not to let the stuff go to waste, we started drinking it. Amazingly it tasted very good. The problem came along when one of the younger guys couldn't handle it to well. We got him to bed and we managed getting out to sea with out the Officers finding out. And a lot of us felt pretty good going out to sea that time !

Pete Burns

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Received on Sat Nov 09 10:43:00 2002