then how could they have made this documentary?? Think about it, mmaaannnn!

Its hard to change a name when you're established, but you're right. Their humor has become more sophisticated, but that growth is betrayed by their name.
A dude in my freshman dorm got "Sweet" tattooed to his back, just like in the movie. Freshman year was a parade of shitty poorly thoughtout tattoos. I'm a freakin' sailor, yet I still don't have any. You know those trendy swallow tattoos? Each one is meant to represent 5,000 nautical miles traveled by ship. I've earned about 4 of them, but freakin' hipsters wear them without the hard work and pain I've been through. They never went through boot camp. They never spent long sleep deprived weeks trapped on a ship. They never felt the terror that strikes you when the general emergency comes on and a main space fire is announced. Nope, they just strolled into a tattoo parlor and said, "Give me some sailor tattoos."

Yeah.. I've been noticing less and less of them now.. I still feel kinda bad because I was on a date with a girl who had two of them on her clavicle and I asked if she'd ever been a sailor, and she didn't know what I was talking about, but she liked "Sailor Jerry Stuff." I should've looked at her shoes as well, since she was wearing Ed Hardy Chucks. The reason I felt bad is I wouldn't have known that either except that I lived upstairs from a tattoo/barbershop/pizza place and got to be really good friends with the owner (technically he was my landlord too) and we'd get drunk and he'd teach me how to use a tattoo gun, which he later gave to me when he retired.

So I've got some home-made tattoos, but they're all triangular coordinates or little pictures I drew myself. Other lines of work do this too: if you work in a kitchen, you might have a cutting knife on your arm, or a diagram of a pig or a cow. They're cool and all but I'd get called out immediately if I had one since I can't cook for shit. In fact, my work history would involve pretty shitty ideas for tattoos, like cash registers, vinyl records and film stock, all three of which I've bled on and over, but nothing worth writing home about.

Many Coast Guard cooks I know have the knife tattoos. The vinyl and film tats seem pretty cool. If I did get a tattoo I might get one of drum machine.

Speaking of which, hey IZ, did you ever get your Orcs tattoo?

And Cena, I thought the swallow tats had something to do with the amount of time you'd spent in the barrel?

Time in the barrel?

I haven't yet.. I gave away my tattoo gun (and most of my stuff) a little while ago, was working too much, got my foot broken, and now I work 6 days a week and sundays are always booked.. it's been a really weird year. But I haven't forgotten.

Yeah, you never heard about the barrel? We had a bunch of SeaBees on post, and used to tell them that story all the time.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081220221930AAw yryj

Maybe your CO quietly got rid of the tradition before you got to your cutter, but it's 100% true, it happens.

Also, the barrel might be a Navy thing and not a Coastie thing. Does happen! Such true.

Yeah.. I had forgotten that The Onion did this same article (more-or-less) in their book Our Dumb History. Or maybe it was Rambo. Anyway it's highly unoriginal but the sportscasters having fun with it is kinda funny.