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WEEK 46 2004
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Saturday 13
November
2004
Saturday - a beautiful day, which I have
avoided experiencing. Because the cold/flu thing is still somewhat with
me and breathing our crisp cool fall air results in a
coughing/sneezing fit. The sky is blue. The leaves are turning.
And I am stuck inside working, or watching bad teevee.
I saw this on the internet, at a law professors blog, Ann Althouse. I
didn't click on the link there, I prefer, rather, to let my imagination run
riot.
We watched 'Patch Adams' last night, and 'Waking Ned Devine'. Both good movies.
Patch Adams was played by Robin Williams, and was funny but maybe a bit preachy here
and there. It may have been sort of a bridge film for Williams, from
comedy to serious (Sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger's
Kindegarden Cop
effort, but in reverse). Patch is a medical school student who,
although brilliant, ignores the rules and clashes with his
traditionalist dean. He uses humor to 'get close' to his patients and
triumphs in the end.
Ned Devine who lives
alone and without family in a small Irish village, wins the lottery,
seven million pounds, signs his ticket, but dies before cashing it. His
fellow villagers eventually decide to con the lottery officials and get
the money. It's funny, but left some ends untied: what will
the old priest say when he comes back? Will no one in all of Ireland
notice when the entire village becomes rich?
Friday 12 November
2004
Friday - it's
officially Friday and cat blogging time. Phoebe headlined last, so here is Riley, helping me out
with a geometrical endeavor. I'd put the page down on the floor so as
to take a camera shot of it, for emailing, and....
I see my father is having fun with his web cam tonight. Reflections upon reflections...
Thursday 11
November 2004
Thursday
- Veterans Day, once Armistice Day.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae (1872-1918)
Some tables of the numbers that fought - and died or survived - in various conflicts can be found here at the Veterans Affairs Department. [via Glittering Eye].
Two links to my own pages:
It's odd. Although I did not know before I picked it up this weekend,
Hanson's book talks about Okinawa; and he starts the book by talking
about another California boy - his great-uncle, Victor David Hanson,
who perished there. Of course my father was there with Johnnie Frye, so
this strikes a chord.
In an eerie parallel to the trench warfare in those Flanders fields,
Hanson quotes from E.B. Sledges on what the men endured on Okinawa:
The mud was knee deep in places,
probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet
around every corpse maggots crawled around in the muck, and then were
washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn't a tree or bush
left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely
that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down upon us as
evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shellfire; flooded
craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out
tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment - utter desolation...
We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war...
In the mud and driving
rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men
struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed
we had been flung into hell's own cesspool.
Someone said once: Worse than fighting and dying is to come to a state
when nothing is worth fighting for, and nothing worth dying for.
And so today we honor them. And will Never Break Faith.
Wednesday
10 November 2004
Wednesday - I've been encouraging my sister to start blogging. It isn't that hard, she could start on Blogger or LiveJournal or any one of a number of places with easy access and great templates (better than this place).
It turns out that the Fox news report of yesterday was a attack of some
kind on the Mexican embassy - and that I know someone who lives across
the street from it. She writes that (understandably) the road was
closed and traffic snarled for hours...
Election Humor: Did Evil Wizards steal the election for Bush?
Some people think so. (Wiccan fun from LiveJournal.)
Tuesday 9 November
2004
Tuesday - the 'cartogram' has now made it to the mainstream blogs; Instapundit, Geek Press and Andrew Sullivan, everyone is covering it now. Hah! I was there yesterday - and they have yet to notice the resemblance to a giant chicken!
Having said that, it's actually a fairly useless thing. A diagram should be informative, almost self explanatory. This isn't. Edward Tufte wouldn't care for it, I think.
I can't remember where I first saw a reference the cartogram, unfortunately, or I'd link to that blog.
Just overheard on Fox in the background: "...police are questioning the suspect, but after a shot to the head he isn't saying much..." I guess not.
One of my favorite scenes in a movie was on last night. The roguish
"Rick O'Connell", played by Brendan Fraser, knows the location of the
lost city of Hamunaptra in 1999's The Mummy
- but is about to die. The love-interest-to-be, "Evelyn", played
by Rachel Weisz, wants to save him because he knows this location; but
although Rick has already been hung and is strangling she takes her time dickering with the prison commander, so as to get a good deal for his release! My kind of woman - but one I that would never take too much for granted (what if she couldn't get a good deal?).
The Fellowship of the Ring
was on tv last night as well. Now, I like the movie a lot - it's one of
the dozen or so movies I've actually bought, but I've always thought
that the acting was mostly, well, sub par. But I was struck by the part
of Boromir this time. When allowed, the actor who played Boromir (Sean
Bean, according to IMDB) actually did a decent job of showing the
internal debate and struggle that the ring inspired. Particularly when
contrasted to Elijah Woods overly soulful and wooden depiction of Frodo's internal torments.
What I liked: the portrayal of the sense of futility and impending doom
for Minas Tirith. A lot of people seem to miss the point that in the
novel Minas Tirith is at the end of her rope - after ages of plagues,
of constant wars, of betrayals within and without. Think Britain before
the United States entered World War II, only worse. Doom is coming and Boromir knows that Minas Tirith's best won't be good enough. And that is how the ring gets to him.
I also have to say that I didn't care for the portrayal of the people
and soldiers of Minas Tirith in the final movie. The effect is that of
a bunch of rural greek peasants, rather than the noblest and greatest
people of Middle Earth. Tolkien has them as tall, noble, brave, hardened by ages of conflict into reserved but deadly
warriors. In the movies final battle the director has them running about like characters in a keystone cops movie.
No, actually, I don't have a life. How did you know?
Monday
8 November 2004
Monday - it's sprinkling a bit. Not much, but every little bit helps. Some snow in the mountains.
This is interesting: the front page of 42 world newspapers, every day. Cool.
There's an election map floating around out there, where the scale of
the map is adjusted by population. We've all seen the Red/Blue election map, and its successor the Purple map;
this view modifies the map even more, scaling individual counties by their
population. So help me: it molds the USA, mathematically, into the shape of a giant chicken.
I suppose it could be sort of an ink blot test for different
personality types. My type? The kind that sees ink blot tests in
cartography.
I wish it was an
Eagle or something instead.
Hanson on Shiloh.
He makes the case that the battle itself wasn't all that important,
that even had the Confederates managed to seriously assault the final
line on the first day they would have had to deal with all the Union
reinforcements coming in, and were unlikely to have succeeded. But for
many officers present it made/broke their careers and affected the future
of the war and the country.
On the Union side
The fact that the Rebs had managed to bring 40,000 troops to within
rifle shot of the Union army meant that losing the battle on the Union
side would have cost Sherman and Grant their commands.
( By the way, I'm not that big of a Civil War buff, but it seems that
poor picketing and scouting was almost the norm in the early days of the war - lots
of surprises, but it was a very political war for generals, and there
is no doubt it would have ruined both men). In any case, it was a blood bath
for both sides, 25,000 dead, but Sherman boldly and conspicuously
lead his men in a slow deliberate retreat that drew the praise of
all, and rescued his reputation. Grant, of course, was Grant, solid as
a rock. Unfortunately Grant's request to General Lew Wallace for relief were vague.
Though just across the
river, only six miles away with an army of reserves, Wallace, guessing wrong about the route, took all day
to come up to
Grant. Grant never quite forgave him (publicly anyway, and it's
possible that it just wasn't politically feasible for Grant later) and
Wallace's career
as a military man was never the same. Wallace went on later to write
'Ben Hur', the most popular fiction book ever written up to that time.
Many of the characters in Ben Hur are supposedly drawn on those present
at Shiloh, and the basic plot, of an innocent man wrongly accused is an
analogy to how he felt about Shiloh.
The next day the reinforced Union army forced the Confederate's to retreat.
Sherman's lesson from the
horrible carnage at Shiloh was that a war of mobility, with the destruction of the
enemies will and ability to fight would be paramount to avoiding such
carnage in the future, hence his famous 'March through Georgia'.
Grant's lesson was that no matter how terrible the battle it was
possible to recoup
and fight again, and that the Union could win any almost battle in the
end, given advantages of more soldiers and more resources. Grant,
of course, went on to become President after the war.
Clearly Hanson is drawing a parallel with the American attitudes and lessons to war at Okinawa, 80 years later.
On the Confederate Side
Johnston's bringing his army that close to the Union lines was
remarkable. Unfortunately he had poor control and communication with
his sub-generals and the initially successful surprise attack bogged
down. One of the places it bogged down was an orchard later nick-named
'the Hornet's Nest'. There some union forces, in a pocket, repulsed
attack after attack. Rather than simply surrounding them and leaving a
force to hold them while chasing the routed Union, Johnston - the confederates supreme commander on the
battlefield - personally led on horseback an attack in which he was fatally
wounded. The gave rise to a sad theory, beloved in the South,
that if only that minnie ball had missed him, or that it had been
noticed before he'd lost too much blood, that he could have won the
battle and the war for the south. Had he lived, or died in an ugly
fashion, the mythos of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, the Lost Opportunity, might
never have arose.
Secondly, a hotheaded young officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest, detailed to picket a stream crossing behind the battle, took his men and deserting his post
joined the action and rallied the Confederates in hot and heavy
fighting. He was so impressive in action that none dared confront him
that night in camp, and the next day he was equally as gallant in the
guarding the Confederate's retreat. Indeed he and Sherman were involved
in a last rear-guard action where he miraculously escaped death.
His self confidence enormously bolstered, Forrest became one of the foremost raiders and leaders in the South, and went on to form the Klu Klux Klan after the war.
Ripples indeed.
Hanson has a web page, it turns out.
Sunday 7 November
2004
Sunday - watched Oakland beat
Carolina, so I owe Dad 25 cents. I hear that the Fortyniners got
pounded, again, but don't really want to know the actual score. The
game wasn't televised here - we get the d*** Raiders every week instead.
Interesting experience. I posted a comment to a blog the other day,
pointing out
that the poster's numbers actually pointed 180 degrees from what his
conclusion. Going back a couple of days later I noticed my comments
were gone. The entire post was
gone. And the comments were turned off for the
entire blog. Jeez.
Maybe it was something I said?
Hmmm, looks like "jeez" is in the spell checker, but not "blog".
Somehow I ended up at LiveJournal
today, while surfing the net. There are several people there, in
aerospace programs, or thinking about aerospace engineering careers. I
was torn - whether to leave them alone or scream "NO NO IT'S TOO LATE
FOR ME, BUT YOU CAN STILL SAVE YOURSELF!"
Mostly the site seemed to be teenagers, depressed over being dumped,
depressed over not going to the Prom, worrying about school, worry
about jobs. Heh. The good old days - weren't.
