Comme dit le proverbe, " vous pouvez mettre du rouge à lèvres à un cochon, cela reste un cochon".

"eMilitary.org - USA
... News Service, March 20, 2006) – A Soldier deployed in Iraq discovered the beauty of digital photography and dominated the 2005 All-Army Photography Contest. ..."
I think it is a safe bet that many people in the US military do not have a highly developed sense of irony.

I found an interesting etymology in a book I am reading now.(The Company . A short history of a revolutionary idea.) The english word "company" comes from the Italien word compagnia. This word is a compound of two latin words (cum and panis) meaning " breaking bread together". "Given that the punishment for bankruptcy could be imprisionment or even servitude , it was vital that all the members of the organization should trust each other absolutely." The company was a sort of family. If this was really true, it is safe to say that some things have really changed over time.

Here is some interesting history I came across the other day in The Financial Times. "When two American bicycle repairmen claimed to have built the world's first aircraft in 1903, they were dismissed as cranks. Newspapers refused to send reporters or photographers to witness any of their flights. More than two years later, Scientific American magazine was still insisting that the story was a hoax. By that time the Wright brothers had completed a half- hour flight covering 24 miles."

PROUD DEMOCRACY MARCHES RELENTLESSLY ON!

As Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times explained, "Squeezing off a few rounds of automatic weapons fire here in Baghdad is the equivalent of honking your horn in America."

Bowing

I will never learn how to bow. Say what you want to. Call me a cultural imperialist. Call me an "ugly American." After almost a decade living in Japan I have not learned how to bow and I have no intention to do so in the future either. In Japan bowing is not simply a matter of lowering your head and looking serious. There are many different kinds of bows that are "appropriate" for different kinds of people. Your long time colleague would not expect you to bow deeply to him. However, if you should chance to run into Emperor Akihito, nothing but a highly stylized ,prolonged deep bow would be appropriate. To me bowing is part of the tip of that huge and cold iceberg that some call "the system" . I don't like bowing and I don't like being bowed to. When you enter a department store here right after it opens, all the clerks will bow to you as you pass by. At my condo, they have a uniformed man who bows to people who leave the building between 7:30 am and 8:30 am. For a whole hour the man does nothing but bow to people and say "Good morning." When I am being bowed to I feel ill at ease and I never know quite how to respond. In a crowded train station bowing can be one real nuisance. When you have a group of 10 people bowing to each other repeatedly in front of the stairs that lead to the platform where your train is going to depart from in 10 seconds........ Bowing can at times be downright dangerous. A threat to public safety. At least 24 Tokyoites have fractured their skulls while bowing.......

Sundown signs.

I finally heard a happy story about the infamous "sundown signs."(These were those god awful racist signs that marred many an American town before the 1960s. They said such things as "whites only within city limits after dark". People were lynched for not paying attention to these signs.) It happened during World War 2, when Aptheker, a white Jewish Communist from New York, commanded a group of black soldiers stationed at an army base near Pollock, La. , a town with a nasty sundown sign. As part of their training, the soldiers were required to complete a 40 km march. Aptheker and a black sergeant decided to march through Pollock- at midnight. "It was all arranged by the men," Aptheker recalled. "As we approached Pollock around midnight.......we all began singing "John Brown's Body" at the top of our voices- a hundred black men with rifles and one crazy whiteman in front with a pistol."