STRAIGHT DOPE

Sweet essence of vacation! Inter semester leave for the fall becomes a certainly today. Leave begins at the end of the last final exam on September 21, and ends on or about October 1. We hope it's "about" the 1st, since return on that day would mean only one weekend free, and not much time for westward, he.

"Exceptions" Will Be Voluntary

There will be about ten voluntary exceptions to the above ruling. Ten men from the first and second quartiles (final grades) will be invited to request special assignments for temporary additional duty for the leave period. These men will be given the opportunity to study, under orders, some special problem in Navy disbursing or supply at some Naval activity on the Eastern seaboard.

They will be "under their own steam," so to speak, gathering information for their written reports which will be used in future courses. Contacts will have been made for the men, and their duties will be limited to securing the information relative to their problems. Government quarters will not be provided, and travel allowances and "per diem" go with the jobs. Assignments will be for the whole leave period, but their time will be their own. In spite of vacation lures, we suspect volunteers will outnumber billets.

Due to a few misplaced italics, some misunderstanding resulted from last Friday's note on residence privileges for next semester. Married men will positively live off the station, and single men may also be permitted to do so.

Calistheics, the universal re-conditioner, becomes a part of our lives beginning today. Under supervision of two chief athletic specialists, Companies 1 and 2 will exercise on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Company 3 Monday and Friday at 1105, and Company 4 at 9845 on the same days. Uniform for calisthenics will be crew shirts and shorts or sweat pants.

A bonquet of editorial stinkwoods to columnist Bill Cunningham of the Boston Herald, another frustrated sports writer suddenly turned Advisor and Chastiser to the world in general and the people who fight the war in particular.

His latest "contribution" to the war effort is last Friday's hammy play on words, whereby he indirectly refers to Naval Supply Officers as "those cellophaned commissioned male WAVES," harping on an isolated story be heard from somebody who heard it from somebody else. It reminds us of that cheap jibe at the morality of the WAVES delivered by another sheddy "newsman," which served only to make the WACS and WAVES recruiting job that much tougher.

Our only answer to guys like Cunningham is the old favorite, "Okay, Mac, what's your story?" Personality, we've never seen any startlingly constructive ideas in all of Bill's arm-chair criticisms of the Field Administrator, and other war activities. From one who heard him speak publicly we understand that at the conclusion of his talk, less than 100 men remained from an audience of 1300, out of "respect" for a verbose and rather crude tongue.

We remind "columnist" Cunningham of that old Chicago proverb" "Man who criticize chef should first learn to boil water."