I was just reading an article on Canada's Brig.Gen Menard in Afghanistan facing a court martial over hanky panky with a lower ranking forces member and came across the line "Military regulations prohibits soldiers, even married military couples, from having sexual relations while on deployment".
What? Really? Man. That is harsh. Good thing I never joined the Canadian Military! I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to have sexual relations (we talking Bill Clinton's definition?) at the workplace with my spouse, but hey,after a day's work, when one is off the payroll, what business does anyone's employer have in trying to control that particular aspect of one's life? Who's to say that a married couple can't co-habitate when deployed to the same theater? This doesn't happen in the US or Canadian Navies apparently, they split them up, but in the army, it seems to happen and the couples are not allowed to touch each other, or acknowledge that they are even married. I find certain military and para military organizations have way too much control over your life. It appears they can uproot you whenever they want and ship you halfway across the globe and if you don't like it you can quit. Controlling your sex life is just a whole other level. Work should have no place in your damned bedroom. I've heard military people say that it would not be fair across the board for certain members to have date nights while others are stuck far away from their spouses for months at a time but I think that is petty. I'm sure military couples have lots of drawbacks they have to deal with and they should take the good with the bad. We're not talking on a Submarine here, if it's not in your face and other people don't like it they should learn to live and let live.
To be fair, there are probably a good many reasons to split couples up in time of war. God forbid that a spouse get injured in combat in front of their partner and the other individual is not able to grieve and has to keep right on working, all the while absorbed in the loss of a loved one, but it's nothing that isn't happening all over the world as I type this, with bands of guerrilla fighters in dictatorships who are going through much worse things than we can possibly imagine.
The ancient Greeks used to have groups of soldiers who were all sexual partners (
the Sacred band of Thebes). They were apparently very bad-ass and if one of them was killed the partner fought savagely to avenge that death. Interesting if you think about it. During the second World War the US appeared to group soldiers together from the same neighborhood, in the thinking that you would band together quicker with people you knew, and had a genuine like for, as opposed to Vietnam, where groups of strangers wouldn't even bother to learn your name unless you could last at least 30 days first..
The US military has recently lifted the no sex thing while in a combat zone in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe the Canadian military will follow suite. It kind of reminds me of when I was a teenager and I had a friend who worked at McDonalds and they told me of the "No Dating" rule they had there. Staff were not supposed to "hook up" and I guess they fired one or both of you in that case.
It's pretty hard to control human nature. That's millions of years of evolution they're going against..
I attended the Ottawa leg of the Jimi Hendrix Experience tour last week at the NAC. The two guitarists that got me there were Eric Johnson and Steve Vai respectively but I was pleasantly surprised with the other guys playing on the night. "Burnin" Vernor Reid was there. Remember him from "Living Color"? They had that hit "Cult of Personality" back in the 80's? I never liked him much. I found his lightning fast solos to be nothing more than him tremolo-picking 124 and 134 fingering patterns up and down all six strings in areas on the neck sort of relative to the key of the song. He doesn't really worry too much about being "in the key of anything".. Still, his bass player was great and the singer has a great voice. He reminded me of "Re-run from the TV sitcom "What's happening" though. (this is not a good thing).
Eric Johnson came out and did some obscure Hendrix tunes. His sound was awesome as always and his clean sound on the ballad he did killed. I wonder if he drove up to Ottawa (I hear he doesn't like to fly). Eric's not as animated as the other guitarist on the ticket but he lives and breathes Hendrix and I don't think anyone else on the evening got it as right as he did. 
