 The Captain is characterized in all of the following ways EXCEPT:
Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list. Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the Ajax in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. Ship's Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food. Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space. Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain. And it was Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
 acrimonious
 melodramatic  sardonic  exasperating  acrimonious