Naval Academy’s ‘South Pacific’ is a secret
January 24th, 2012 | Naval Academy Navy The Pacific World War II | Posted by Jenn Rafael
The Naval Academy Glee Club is putting on Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific," but apparently isn't allowed to say so. // Amazon.com
Next month, Naval Academy midshipmen will perform possibly the most nautical musical ever to hit Broadway — but you wouldn’t know it by reading the school’s announcement of tickets for the winter musical.
It’s South Pacific, but “licensing restrictions prohibit releasing the name of the production in this announcement.”
The story is set on a South Pacific island during World War II, featuring two love stories threatened by prejudice and war. Nellie, a spunky nurse from Arkansas, falls in love with a French planter, while Lt. Joe Cable finds himself denying his love for an island native.
The songs are familiar: “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” and “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger Than Springtime” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.”
“The performance will be a fully realized Rodgers and Hammerstein production, complete with dancing, costumes, and a live pit orchestra made up of midshipmen musicians,” according to the news release.
The show will be performed Feb. 24, 25, and 26 and March 2, 3, and 4 in Mahan Hall. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets go on sale Jan. 24 and can be purchased online, by calling the Music and Theatre Box Office at 410-293-8497 or at the door.
How do the academies measure up?
August 1st, 2011 | Coast Guard Coast Guard Academy Naval Academy | Posted by Jill Laster
The Naval and Coast Guard academies — as you might expect — aren’t the first colleges to consider when you’re looking for a party school.
But alongside ranking high as a “stone-cold sober” school in this year’s Princeton Review rankings, the two academies got high marks for accessible professors, low marijuana use and “running like butter” (meaning administration works well).
On the not-so-good end: The Naval Academy ranked seventh for “least happy students” of the 376 U.S. schools included in this year’s rankings and 14th for “dorms like dungeons.” The Coast Guard Academy placed similarly, ranking fourth for “least happy students” and fifth for “dorms like dungeons.”
Here’s a full list of categories in which each of the four service academies ranked highly:
Naval Academy
Most Accessible Professors — #4
Don’t Inhale (marijuana usage reported low) — #6
Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution — #6
Stone-Cold Sober Schools — #6
Least Happy Students — #7
Dorms Like Dungeons (dorms get low ratings) — #14
Everyone Plays Intramural Sports — #16
School Runs Like Butter (administration gets high marks) — #20
Coast Guard Academy
Don’t Inhale (marijuana usage reported low) — #2
Most Accessible Professors — #2
College Town Not So Great — #3
Least Happy Students — #4
Stone-Cold Sober Schools — #4
Dorms Like Dungeons (dorms get low ratings) — #5
Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution — #8
School Runs Like Butter (administration gets high marks) — #8
This is a Library? (college library gets low marks) — #16
Got Milk? (beer usage reported low) — #17
Scotch & Soda, Hold the Scotch (hard liquor usage reported low) — #17
Most Conservative Students (lean right politically) — #18
West Point
Best Classroom Experience — #1
Most Accessible Professors — #1
Best Athletic Facilities — #3
Best Health Services — #3
Everyone Plays Intramural Sports — #4
Stone-Cold Sober Schools — #5
Most Politically Active Students — #6
Don’t Inhale (marijuana usage reported low) — #7
Students Study the Most (report highest # of study hrs per day) — #7
Best College Library — #8
Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution — #9
Most Conservative Students (lean right politically) — #13
College Town Not So Great — #14
Most Religious Students — #15
Class Discussions Encouraged — #16
School Runs Like Butter (administration gets high marks) — #18
Scotch & Soda, Hold the Scotch (hard liquor usage reported low) — #19
Air Force Academy
Don’t Inhale (marijuana usage reported low) — #1
Got Milk? (beer usage reported low) — #4
Most Accessible Professors — #5
Most Conservative Students (lean right politically) — #5
Scotch & Soda, Hold the Scotch (hard liquor usage reported low) — #5
Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution — #7
School Runs Like Butter (administration gets high marks) — #9
Stone-Cold Sober Schools — #13
Least Happy Students — #15
Most Politically Active Students — #19
Mids win top honors at sub race
July 11th, 2011 | Naval Academy Navy Submarines | Posted by Sam Fellman
A Naval Academy team earned top honors at the 11th International Submarine Race, held in late June in Maryland. // James Contreras, U.S. Navy
Naval Academy midshipmen captured top honors at the 11th International Submarine Race, held in late June, with their entry, S.S.H. 11 Mighty Mid.
Mighty Mid, a two-man fiberglass sub built by the academy team, sported waving fins that can be powered by pedaling, which they adapted from use on some kayaks. Mighty Mid hit 6.1 knots underwater on the 100-meter course at the David Taylor Model Basin in West Bethesda, Md., besting a Canadian team who had previously held the title and record for non-propeller subs.
“It felt great, just to represent the Navy,” Midshipman 2nd Class Cheng Han Tay, a member of Team Mighty Mid, told the official blog DoD Live. “And also we took the record back from the Canadian team, we took it back for the U.S. Naval Academy and for the U.S. So everyone’s happy about that.”
Some of the propeller-driven subs were faster, but not my much. The fastest, built by Florida Atlantic University, clocked in at 6.814 knots.
“It’s a non-propeller sub that’s competing with propeller-driven submarines, which is just unheard of for this competition,” Midshipman 2nd Class Mike Pollard told Dod Live. “There’s not been a single non-propeller submarine that’s come this close.”
Twenty-nine teams competed at the sub race, coming from places as far as France and Oman. Mighty Mid won the Spirit of the Race award and top honors for overall performance, bringing home a trophy and $1,000.
You can check out the 5-minute DoD Live video – complete with Jacques Cousteau-esque underwater shots – here.
Early stumbles didn’t sink admiral’s career
June 15th, 2011 | Admirals Humor Naval Academy Officers | Posted by Sam Fellman
Adm. Mike Mullen recounted his early career missteps to laughs on the Late Show with David Letterman. // Defense Department
If your career seems rocky, consider this one: He was nearly booted from college, graduated in the bottom third of his class, and only a few years into his naval career, he struck a buoy with his ship.
That lackluster start belongs to Adm. Mike Mullen, now the military’s top officer.
Mullen recounted his early stumbles as a midshipman and junior officer to laughs and applause on the Late Show with David Letterman on June 13.
In his first month as a senior at the Naval Academy, Mullen said he racked up 115 demerits; only 35 more and he would be expelled, he noted.
“Wait a minute: and now you’re the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” Letterman replied, to applause. “I mean, does anybody look at your records?”
For his part, Mullen said it took 11 years to recover from hitting a buoy while he commanded a gasoline tanker and attributed his eventual success to finding good mentors and not giving up.
A partial transcript is below, edited for brevity.
David Letterman: What kind of student were you at Annapolis?
Mike Mullen: Ah, not that good.
DL: I don’t know anything about it other than their system of demerits in Annapolis and I guess all military academies, maybe schools generally. What do you have to do to get a demerit?
MM: Well, there are actually a lot of things that you could do and actually I got my fair share of demerits.
DL: You remember the high number of your visit there?
MM: Well in the last year that I was there, my senior year, you could only get 150 and if you get a 150 demerits you get kicked out. And I managed to get 115 within the first month.
DL: Wait a minute: and now you’re the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? I mean, does anybody look at your records? How does this happen? [applause] What was the problem?
MM: Actually when I got there, having no idea, I just met really great people and one of the reasons that I’m in the military today is because I’ve been around great people for coming up on 47 years, truly extraordinary. And some of us like to have a good time. So I just had a good time early in my senior year and didn’t do much the rest of the year.
DL: That’s interesting, isn’t it? Where did you graduate in the class?
MM: In the bottom third.
DL: Wow. [applause] The audience applauding underachievement.
DL: So now [you’re] chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How did you get the job and what do you do there?
MM: I stayed in the Navy originally because I had the honor of commanding a ship early in my career. I was in my mid-20s.
DL: What was the ship?
MM: A gasoline tanker, really from Vietnam and World War II, a 100 sailors, deployed to the Mediterranean and the responsibility was great and actually getting exposed to the world was really great. And enjoyed that and wanted to command.
DL: How old were you as a captain?
MM: The first time I commanded a ship I was 26.
DL: 26. Wow. I didn’t even have a driver’s license when I was 26. Is that typical of ship captains, they tend to be in their mid-20s?
MM: Well, some of them. For young lieutenants and those — you’re encouraged to do this by some and you’re encouraged to not do it by others because you take a real chance in your career and actually at the end of that two years, my career was in pretty bad shape.
DL: Really?
MM: Yes.
DL: For reasons that what, were out of your control?
MM: Well I received on what I would call an A-to-F scale an evaluation that was in the F category and it took me – for an incident I had when I accidentally collided with a buoy in the channel, which is not a good – Where is this going, Dave?
DL: Wow. Wow.
MM: But it took me, so it took me about 11 years to actually recover from that and get my next command and a couple after that. But no aspirations to ever get to this level.
DL: Well I guess, in all aspects of the military, but certainly in terms of leadership, it is fraught. It’s a minefield. I mean the mistakes are all there for a man or a woman to make.
MM: One of the things that I’ve learned is more from those mistakes than I have from those successes. It was a measure of getting up after those mistakes and actually having mentors who saw something in me that might bode well for the future and let me continue.
DL: Did you ever think consider, well, geez, maybe because of how I did at Annapolis and running into the pier in San Diego or whatever it was, maybe I really am not going to get my sea legs under me here?
MM: Actually, never gave it a second thought.
50 years ago, a Navy pioneer
May 5th, 2011 | Admirals NASA Naval Academy Naval aviation Naval aviation centennial Photos Space travel | Posted by Bill McMichael
A tip of the hat to the Navy and its Facebook notifications for the reminder that today marked the 50th anniversary of an event frozen in the minds of many Americans of a (ahem!) certain age: the day Navy Cmdr. Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space. His feat captivated the nation, and won back some American pride bruised by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beating him into space by 23 days.
The Naval Academy grad and jet test pilot had in 1959 become one of the original Mercury astronauts — the guys with the “Right Stuff,” as Tom Wolfe framed it — and on the morning of May 5, 1961, Shepard, squeezed inside the Freedom 7 space capsule and propelled by a Redstone booster, rocketed 116.5 miles into outer space.
Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard, Jr. sits in his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule, ready for launch. // Photo courtesy of NASA
According to NASA, Shepard said, “That little race between Gagarin and me was really, really close.” After several delays and more than four hours in the capsule, Shepard was ready to go, and he famously urged mission controllers to “fix your little problem and light this candle.”
Shepard’s flight only lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds.
Shepard’s career as an astronaut wasn’t over. An ear problem that grounded him in 1964 was surgically repaired five years later and in February 1971, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission to the moon. He retired as a rear admiral in 1974.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration today honored Shepard, who died in 1998 at the age of 74, during a ceremony at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where Freedom 7 was launched 50 years earlier.
The U.S. Postal Service also issued a new stamp May 4 honoring Shepard’s 1961 achievement.
There’s a nice video that captures the story at http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/shepard50/
Intestinal bug crashes swim meet at USNA
March 8th, 2011 | Humor Naval Academy Navy Swimming | Posted by Sam Fellman
A virus sickened 100 swimmers at the Naval Academy pool over the weekend. // Matt Wengler via Flickr
Something crashed a swim meet at the Naval Academy’s pool.
More than 800 swimmers, ages 8 to 17, gathered there over the weekend for the Maryland Swimming Championship meet, held at Lejeune Hall on the academy’s campus when an intestinal bug struck, reports The Annapolis Capital.
The pool soon became a sick ward, with enough swimmers vomiting that the meet had to be stopped for 15 minutes so the deck could be swabbed. One parent at the meet told The Annapolis Capital that she saw a swimmer hit the end of his lane, throw up, then flip and continue the race.
“It was crazy,” the parent, Carole Parker, told the Capital.
Dr. Lucy Wilson of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is trying to determine what sort of gastrointestinal pathogen it was, which produced nausea, fevers, and diarrhea in more than 100 participants. She said the most likely culprit for spreading the disease was the crowded poolside area, not the water.
“Our expectation is that it won’t be the pool itself, but would be passed person-to-person,” she said. Her center is now collecting stool samples.
The apparent cause of the illness was not the Naval Academy pool or facilities, subsequently tested by Anne Arundel County Health Department and academy staff, academy spokewoman Deborah Goode said.
Maryland teen accused of stealing from USNA baseball team
November 12th, 2010 | Naval Academy Navy Sports | Posted by Sam Fellman
The eBay seller "qualityathleticgear" is accused of burglarizing the U.S. Naval Academy baseball team.
The loot, allegedly stolen in mid-September from the locker room and coach’s office at Bishop Stadium around Sept. 16, reads like a start-up kit for a minor league team: a radar gun, a projector and projector screen, a catcher’s helmet, sunglasses, dozens of gloves, spikes, wooden bats and a can of pine tar.
The alleged thief — whose eBay username was “qualityathleticgear” – was caught after he allegedly shipped some items to a winning bidders, who were really agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The story was first reported by the Baltimore Sun.
Reviews for qualityathleticgear’s eBay profile are mostly glowing. ”Great glove, Love the feel. HIGH QUALITY,” one buyer wrote. Another wrote, “Great projector! Thanks. “And the owner of a new right-handed Rawlings Pro Preferred first base glove wrote, “”Great seller A+++”
97.1%
Ensign Seeks Release from Subs on Religious Grounds
November 5th, 2010 | Naval Academy Navy nuclear weapons Officers Submarines | Posted by Sam Fellman
Would you push the button and launch a nuclear missile, if ordered to?
By the time Ensign Michael Izbicki was asked this question in a routine psychological screening at nuclear power school, he had had a religious awakening. He had read the book, Choosing Against War: A Christian View, and had embraced pacifistic Quaker beliefs after periods of intense study and reflection.
Izbicki — a 24-year-old Naval Academy graduate, who holds a master’s degree in computer science from John Hopkins University — answered no, he wouldn’t push the red button.
The Navy, however, rejected two of his requests for an honorable discourage as a conscientious objector. Izbicki, having passed nuke school, is now training to be a submariner at Naval Submarine School in Groton, Conn., while appealing not to be a submariner.
He lives in St. Francis House, a pacifist Christian community in New London, Conn. He rejected promotion to lieutenant junior grade “to reduce his connection to the Navy as much as possible,” and is willing to pay the Navy back for his eduction, according to a suit filed on his behalf.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a petition in federal court seeking Izbicki’s honorable discharge on Wednesday, a development first reported by The Hartford Courant.
The mids are back in town
August 24th, 2010 | Naval Academy | Posted by Phil Ewing
MC1 Chad Runge / Navy
Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Mike Miller welcomed the Brigade of Midshipmen on Monday for another meritorious year in Annapolis, although, in one respect, it’s is already looking like an uphill battle: Despite doing well in several unofficial preseason rakings, Navy will not start in this AP Top 25 this year. But as one commenter on our siblog After Action wrote, “It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish.”
Flying high in Annapolis
August 17th, 2010 | Naval Academy | Posted by Phil Ewing
"I never thought I'd say this, but -- I'd rather be doing calculus!" // MC1 Chad Runge / Navy
The Naval Academy was silent about its place on the Princeton Review’s unhappiest students rankings, but now it’s got a new list to crow about. U.S. News & World Report, America’s ground-breaking, risk-taking college-rankery (it discovered three tiny new schools for this year’s top spots: Harvard, Princeton, Yale) has included the Naval Academy in several of its new lists.
The academy was ranked 16th overall for “best liberal arts colleges,” fifth for “best undergraduate engineering” programs; fifth for “best aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical engineering” program; and fifth for “best electrical/electronic/communications” program.
“The Naval Academy is pleased that our educational program continues to be recognized among the top colleges in the country,” said Andrew Phillips, the Naval Academy’s academic dean and provost, in a statement. “While remaining focused on developing our students morally, mentally and physically to become ethical leaders of sailors and Marines, our world-class faculty and exceptional students work hard to balance the highly technical demands of a rigorous engineering education with the critical thinking, communication skills, and global awareness associated with a fine liberal arts education.”