Irving Berlin spoke – indeed it was one of the rare occasions on which he himself sang – for generations of GIs when he wrote Oh how I hate to get up in the morning, but his drastic remedy – Some day I’m going to murder the bugler – won’t work much longer, because the march of the microchip means that the Last Post has sounded for yet another time-honoured tradition: Berlin also castigated that other pup, the one that wakes the bugler up, but now the US Army finds that enthusiastic buglers are a thing of the past, no-one wants to get up in the morning any more, and it is advertising for automatic bugle-call system with microprocessor-based programmable timer, to provide amplified bugle calls and voice transmission throughout the entire post.
