It’s been five days since the U.S. and its NATO allies began imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, and the American public has plenty of questions. What’s Obama’s end game here? Why weren’t congressional leaders consulted? And … what exactly does “Odyssey Dawn” mean?
The official name of the Libyan mission is actually a product of the military’s semi-randomized naming system, so it doesn’t mean much at all. But to more than a few commentators, it sounds nothing like the name of a military operation and much more like:
- “a Carnival cruise ship” – Stephen Colbert
- “a Yes album” – Jon Stewart
- “a stripper” – David Letterman
- a Stephenie Meyer novel – tweet from @Eric_Alt
- “a Tom Clancy novel” – Roger Ebert
- a Philip K Dick novel – Eli Lake
- “a Cabbage Patch kid” – tweet from @gatewaygroupie
- The name of one of Frank Zappa’s kids – Mark Thompson
- “a straight-to-video movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme” – Andy Borowitz
- “the name of a Seventies porn star, one of those spacier ones … I can almost hear it now, the voice of coming attractions announcing: ‘Odyssey Dawn in Harold Lime’s Hot Dog Girls II'” – James Wolcott