Thanks lady

Thanks for the memories.

You made 13 right fun.

Dream Dinner Guest

One of the "get to know you" questions Travis and I have passed back and forth a couple times now is "If you could pick anyone in the world to have over for dinner, who would it be?"


Limiting it to mortals presently alive - lots of folks have come to mind - historians, musicians, commentators,  heroes - maybe the occasional statesman... but in the long view of things, I think it's the geeks that really have groundbreaking unique stories of their own - and who end up passing the most to posterity.

Case in point - Peter Thiel.


This guy keeps coming on my radar, and each time I'm more impressed. I mean...lots of folks once they'd founded a bajillion-dollar business might call it good.

Not him. No -founding a new school paper, getting all lawyery, and then helping start paypal weren't enough. Angeling all kinds of web companies wasn't enough.


This guy doesn't think for next month or next year - he's aiming to help humanity decades if not centuries out - spaceships! biotech! Floating cities!







He not only can think big, not only goes out and does it - he encourages other people to go out and make the world awesome-er.


Twenty under Twenty

(wow -  read the bios of some of those kids. Oh my good God. At best, you'll feel like Ceasar to Alexander's bust, I promise. :p)
 
Anyhow - I'm sure I wouldn't agree with him on everything - but what a mind!
This is a guy  I would love to have over for dinner.


(pssst - Hey Peter? Whatcha doing next fall? Wanna go caribou huntin'? I know folks that know folks... and an awesome cook. :p )

Morning Visitors

The cavaliers are at it again, doing touch-and-goes at Elmendorf. The way their flight path is running, the house is getting buzzed at just a few hundred feet AGL by Raptors.

These guys are AWESOME. :)

(And an extra thanks to all y'all keepin' 'em in the sky. You know who you are. :) )

"... except for all the others."

This story was just too fun not to share.

I'd *like* to think it weren't true, but um... yeah. :p

THE WAY CROCKETT BEAT HUNTSMAN.

Adam Huntsman opposed Crockett in his two last canvasses for Congress. In the first he failed, but succeeded in the second, and it is thought would have triumphed in the former, but for the following trick of Crockett's: They stopped one night on their rounds at a well-to-do farmer's, who was a great Jackson man, and of course for Huntsman, though he did not admire his rakish propensities. Crockett and Peg-leg, as Huntsman was called, in consequence of having a wooden leg, were put in the same room to sleep. The house was of the ordinary country kind of that day — two log-cabins, with a passage between, and a porch extending the whole length in the rear, with shed-rooms at each end, in one of which the two candidates were placed, while the farmer's daughter occupied the other. After all had retired Huntsman went to sleep and Crockett to planning. An idea occurred to him which he carried out in this way. Getting up quietly, he opened the door, taking a chair, and walking stealthily across to the young lady's room, made an apparent effort to force her door, which awoke the girl, who uttered a scream, when Crockett, hastily catching the chair by the back, and placing his foot on the lower round, using it as a leg, hurried back to his room, dropped the chair, hopped into bed and went to hard snoring. The next moment the farmer rushed in, and was about to kill Huntsman, whose protestations of innocence he paid no attention to. "Oh you can't fool me," he exclaimed, " I know you too well, and heard that darned old peg leg of your'n too plain." The consequence was that the farmer, with numbers of others, changed their votes, and Crockett was triumphantly elected. Huntsman would never have ventured to stand another canvass had not Crockett considered the joke too good to keep.

James Davis History of Memphis

(The next story on in that book's even better, though a tad long to relate here. Worth the couple minutes it'll take though. :) )

The red shirts weren't enough of a giveaway?

I've been re-listening to Dan Carlin's "Death Throes of the Republic" series (again, highly recommended) and just finished the bit on the Punic Wars.

Ick.

But anyhow - the things you find on Google Image Search - the account's suspended, but still in cache is this little gem - Apparently someone decided to name their toy Enterprise the U.S.S. Cannae.

I think that's a ship I'd pretty much never want to set foot on.


(Unless it's a really backhanded Mr. Rasczak reference, which is just incredibly geeky enough it almost comes right around back to cool. :) )

This modern age....

Gosh it feels weird to be looking at the incoming link stats and finding you've had a visitor by way of a friend-unmet who's recently passed on.

Bless you, William. I'm sorry we never had the chance to meet in person.

Also - this internet thing is weird.

A Little Something for Keith

While listening to lectures a few weeks back, I accidently ran across Horrible Histories on youTube.
So *incredibly* fun.

Yes, it's a kid show. Shut up. :p






My favorites so far are this'n, the Celtic "Boast Battle," the English Civil War bit, aaaaaand.... oh yeah.
The dude in the Cleopatra song playing Ceasar just *rocks* the whole smugly hot bit. Nice. :)

Whole Again

Today I met with Friend Paul and had a wonderful chat over coffee. Being Veteran's Day, the conversation veered into his time on the water, then swung through (of course) Roman history and ended up in Alaskan oil policy. Fun!


The ostensible reason for the meetup though was that he was returning a piece of leather Tough Chick Mel had borrowed after her first Appleseed so she could practice with her new rifle. Now that her own stuff has come in the mail, I got mine back.

After putting the groceries away, I put it back in its rightful place. And I have to say, it felt *really* good to have everything together again. Baby just doesn't feel right without that ol'  piece of cowhide hangin' off her.:)

Baby was a birthday present some years ago, but for the last several years has been living with my dear brother M.. Once I started planning some more out-there walks up here - not to mention started getting midnight knocks again - he loaned her back to me so I'd have *some* respectable boomstick in the house.

She's one of those family posessions that doesn't really feel like *mine* though so much as something to get passed down to a son or daughter or niece or nephew someday. But in the meantime, having the modern iteration of Dan'l Boone's Ol' Betsy around is kinda cool.

(And ain't that Gadsden patch awesome? Dear Friend TJIC and I found it at North Bridge in Concord. I couldn't think of a more appropriate place to put it. :) )

But the scars remain

Friend Peter has got some just striking pictures from Over There.
Likewise Friend Paul some rememberences from his time on the line.

So thanks all of y'all who took up the spear. You done earned your day.

Thanks grampa!

That said I'd like to offer an extra thanks for you Korea and Viet Nam guys especially. The one forgotten, the other slandered - y'all shouldn't have had to wait over a generation for your welcome home.

You done good.
And I have to say - of all my elders, it's been the Viet Nam guys who've been my favorite. When we were stupid kids, you stuck by us to the end. Thank you.

Making Do

Yay! In packing up the house, I finally ran across the USB cable for my camera. Which means over the next few days you'll get some of the bits and pieces for the last month or so of life.

First off, here's what I worked on tonight when I got sick of looking at a computer - homemade buttons!

I stuck a piece of firewood in my kitchen drawer as an impromptu shaving horse, and planed out the end to just over button-thickness. Then I sawed off a chunk, and took to carving two button-shaped discs.

Wrapped them in scrap fabric, sewed them down, and voila! Old-timey buttons!

Truth be told, now that I've tried it I think I'll stick with ties - I just think they're prettier - and a lot easier to those of us that'd rather sew than carve! But more on that in a day or so. :)


PS - the view from work just before signing off and going home -

Radical Means

Oh, Woodsrunner Keith is on a roll today!


He's got two posts on Lexington and Concord, both with different video interpretations of the event. The History Channel one is decidedly meh, but the scene from the dramatization April Morning is pretty close to recorded events, and very nicely done.

As an aside - one of the things that still troubles me about visiting Battle Road is that it is not just suburbia now - it was suburbia then.


In the movie  The Patriot Mel Gibson's character explains his vote against armed rebellion by saying "mark my words: this war will be fought not on the frontier or on some distant battlefield. But amongst us, among our homes. Our children will learn it with their own eyes. And the innocent will die with the rest of us."

Fictional as the movie was, that reality was dreadfully true. And it was never more true than in Lexington, in Concord - but most especially Menotomy, modern-day Arlington.

For a moment, imagine with me that you are standing on the main street of your hometown.

.. Now imagine an armored column rolling down that road. Everything else around is just like it always has been - there's the gas station you always visit, there's the bank,  there's the Starbucks.... excepting that this time - today - a patrol of US Marines just ran inside the coffee shop and shot two men having a drink.

The same uniform you may have stood shoulder to shoulder with a decade ago - maybe wore not long ago - you now see on the back of the men shooting your neighbors.

... And your neighbors are fighting to, screaming and firing out their windows and from their porches.


I've tried time and again while standing on that road to imagine that day - seeing my nation's army and my own neighbors slaughtering each other, right in the middle of downtown in front of God and everybody.

I still can't quite manage it - and for that I think I'm grateful.

But that is what was April 19, 1775.



=====

Keith also shares a pretty infamous scene from the John Adams miniseries (highly recommended by the way)

Since it's an issue that comes up fairly often in conversation about the event, I'll echo my comment here -

The real John Malcom was indeed tarred and feathered - but because he beat a boy in the street with his cane.

Which ain't to say Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty were angels - I daresay I'd have been fed up with them myself if I were a 1775 Bostonian.

That said, it wasn't "for the price of tea" - the price actually went *down* with the tea acts. The sticking point was that it was a Crown monopoly, and a tax levied by a body we had no say in.

A decent modern analogy might be if the UN security council said you could only buy some ubiquitous product - say gasoline - from a supplier *they* designated, with funds from that supplier going back to them.

As you might imagine, that got more than a few people hot and bothered, even if they didn't all think bringing out the torches was a good idea.

Hrmm.. trapped between an overzealous mob and a self-serving crony-capitalist elite. Good thing that never happens anymore, eh?

Ave, Populares

The Founders reading inevitably led me back to Rome.

All roads do lead there eventually I guess - it's pretty much impossible to read our own Founders without being drawn back time and again. Gibbon's work of 1776, Joseph Addison's play Cato (beloved by G. Washington), the pseudonyms dotting the pages of the Federalist Papers.. it's in the air.

So I've been detouring into Classical history, and I have to say - once you start to catch the allusions of 18th (and 19th!) century writing a whole new world opens up. The texture of their world just fills out in an a startling way.

... and I've got to confess some of that fascination's started to rub off.

I've made some headway in the (translated I'm afraid) originals - Livy, Tacitus - I'm just starting Virgil's Aenid*. Add to that scads of secondary sources** ... it's a fascinating story.

And a sadly familiar one.

It's no surprise, really. You build a similar ratmaze of rewards and punishments in society, you should hardly be surprised if some of the same problems crop up.

And Lord is it familiar.

It's no new thing of course for the citizens of a republic to see kings and tyrants in every corner. Hardly new to split into factions and see the threat of a new Ceasar and cancelled elections whenever the other faction is in power. (In fact, I had this very conversation with a friend today, and he was certain GWB had been trying for a third round himself)

Caesar however was not of the Optimates.

Caesar was a Populares. It would be a little misleading to call him a Democrat in today's terms, but perhaps Andrew Jackson makes a decent comparison for the modern American mind - certainly Jackson was called so at the time. Military adventurer (arguably extra legally so!), and a self-styled champion of the common man - the poor and underprivileged. A man of the people, who would spank the elites and bring justice to the masses.

Or to be more blunt -  when the dictator came - when you do see a Republic crash down and a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Stalin rise to become the strongman - it's with the applause of "the people" - the democratical element of society. (As only makes sense really - as one of our own bewigged gentlemen observed, the aristocratical element have no reason to rock the boat.)

That is - when dictatorship has come, it's come generally from the Populares.

BUT.

That day came for a reason. The Optimates had overstepped reason and decency. They had abused their position. They had created an environment when a man could answer the call of his country, then come home to find in doing so he'd lost his land, becoming a tenant on his own fields. Where imported slaves did drive down the cost of labor to the point a free citizen was reduced to scraps.

And that I think is why reading over and over the last days of the Republic is so hard.

It inspires the most claustrophobic feeling - of being trapped between those who've abused their freedom and fellow citizens for self interest, and those who willingly hand power to a tyrant, killing mankind's liberty for over a thousand years.

Blood may indeed buy liberty.
But it will not keep it. That is the place of virtue.

=====================================
* Between that and the Illiad I see now where so much of the Dawn Treader story I loved as a kid came from. But the Aenid is dense as heck unless the Illiad's fresh in your mind, fair warning. For added texture, make certain you know some about Augustus and the Julii before wading in.

*mad props to Dan Carlin's Death Throes of the Republic by the way. Awesomely done!

Exceptionalism

My first exposure to Victor Davis Hanson was on a visit to The Porch.

Poking around the Incredibly Awesome Museum and Library that was Tam's place on the lake, just underneath the bookcase with the British pith helmet, I found this curious book. As I started poking through it, she looked up from the computer with something like -

"You know that book I was talking about writing?" Better Killing, Incorporated? That's a good stab at it."

Now, having recently finished Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, it looked like a good rejoinder. Since then I've come to really like VDH, and alongside David Hackett Fischer he's one of my favorite contemporary popular historical authors. Every now and again then I'll pull up a lecture on youTube while puttering about the house.

... which is where I found out a good ten years ago there was a time VDH and JD went head to head and  debated the point publicly. Hardly front page news anymore I guess, but it's still worth a listen I think.

It sounds to me like VDH totally destroys JD anytime they disagree. Well.. he would if JD didn't all but cede the better part of the ground in the first ten minutes. And for a real cringe-inducing moment - you get to hear a caller explain Hoplites and Thermopylae to VDH.


Back to packin' I reckon.








PS - how's the book comin' Tam? :)