To humans, dinosaurs seem to have a peculiar fascination, I am not sure why but they do; usually from a very early age and this fascination continues through adulthood. Or at least it does from MG's perspective, who has just brought three recently-published books at an exorbitant price from Amazon, which I would only buy on the Station's account! (I ask you; £21.99 -$33.74- for a paperback of less than 300 pages?) However my interest in dinosaurs, in particular therapod, feathered dinosaurs, is somewhat different; they seem to be my ancestors!
While much debate went on amongst palaeontologists during the seventies and eighties about not only the lineage of birds and whether it was top-down (living in trees and finding gliding was easier for moving from tree to tree) or whether it was bottom-up (leaping to catch prey), the finds from China in the nineties, the noughties and beyond have seemed to settle the issue; birds are the descendents of feathered, predatory therapods which include the tyrannosaurids and the 'raptors' such as velicoraptor and deinonychus. (The latter was the 'model' for those in 'Jurassic Park', velicoraptor was a much smaller animal.) Even the top-down versus the bottom-up theories now seem to have settled into a kind of equilibrium with the discovery that many birds, using their wings, although not in the usual 'rowing' motion for flight, are able to climb vertical or near-vertical slopes, ie tree trunks, which feathered dinosaurs, when young, may have used to escape ground-dwelling, larger predators, ie full-grown adults of the same species.
This, as you may have noticed from the title, is going to be a post about subjects which are not, directly, related but please bear with me; the avian mind is prone to such discontinuities. Well, at least mine is! Rummaging through the detritus of MG's email (about the books), I came across a reference to a web-site that I had not previously encountered. The University of Maryland has come up with a geology course which includes (module 104) one of the best introductory courses on dinosaurs for non-biologists that I have ever come across. It is also very good on cladistics which, to be honest, I have never really understood but do now a little better than heretofore.
And here comes the discontinuity; while searching along dinosaurian lines, I came upon the verb 'to frag'. At first I thought that it was a 'euphanism' much like 'feck' in Irish slang and 'frack' in 'Battlestar-Galatica-speak' is for 'fuck'. (While the BG instance is clearly a way of avoiding the censor on prime-time US television, I am not sure about the prevalence of 'feck' amongst the Irish before the advent of 'Father Ted' and 'Father Jack', whose catch phrase it was.) The word seemed to come into prevalence among the US military during the Vietnam war and I naturally assumed that it was a euphemism for 'fuck' as its use was apparently used in the context of officer/non-com relationships. So; 'turd-burgling' between officers and enlisted men, which I found surprising given the ubiquity of Vietnamese prostitutes around army bases and Saigon. But no. It seems 'frag' is not a euphemism for 'fuck' but an abbreviation of 'fragmentation' as in 'fragmentation grenade'. It seems that the GI's got so arsed off with their lieutenants and captains that they lobbed fragmentation grenades in their direction no fewer than (a reported) 730 times between 1967 and 1971.
As far as I can tell, there was one incident reported in World War I, a few instances in WWII, none during the Korean War and yet a steady, and rising, stream of annual attempts by GIs to voice their dissatisfaction with the way the war was going and, more importantly, their roles in it! And these incidents mostly did not happen in the field, where you could at least exercise 'the benefit of doubt'; they happened in the army's base camps!
Now, quite clearly, this was an 'army' in meltdown. If reports are to be believed, an army that was high on marijuana most of the time, committed atrocities against the civilian population which got the Nazis hung at Nuremberg and to cap it all, laying the icing so liberally onto the cake as to have (purportedly) over two hundred instances in a single year of 'fragging' officers! It is little wonder that the Americans invested in and turned to other potential methods to wage war (SDI, drones, 'radar-invisible' planes, smart-bombs etc) to avoid sending combat troops, especially draftees, into whatever war-zone their masters had deemed fit to enter (usually mistakenly). One would like to think that it merely reflected the desire on the part of the leaders (of whatever nation) to protect the lives of the the young men, and women, who make up the 'standing army'.
Me? I am more inclined to think that it was merely to avoid bad publicity. Journalists, for all their faults, can be relentless in their pursuit of 'a story', ie the truth.
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