Achenblog

By W.C. Swanson (aka Curmudgeon)

'Morning, Boodle. Getting hotter and hotter here in D.C.

For those of us who happen to be traveling in Italy (you know who you are), it's worth mentioning that today is Caprotinia, aka the feasts of Juno Caprotina, which is an ancient Roman festival celebrating, well, female slaves. The legend isn't quite clear, but it appears there was a large assembly going on when a big storm blew into town and everyone fled. After the storm cleared, Romulus, the founder of Rome, was missing. So the female slaves celebrated, I guess.

Maybe it loses something in translation, I dunno. Joel, stay out of Rome today.

You will, however, be quite pleased with today's first item in...

Today in George-Washington-Type-as-Well-as-Bodice-Ripper History: July 9, 2009

1755: Some 1,300 British troops and colonial militiamen under Gen. Edward Braddock suffer a devastating defeat by French and Native American forces near Fort Duquesne (now, basically, Pittsburgh, Pa.). Known as the Battle of Monongahela, it is practically a Who's Who of great Americans. After Braddock was wounded, 23-year-old volunteer George Washington, having no authority to do so, took over command and managed to extricate the column from the battle. Among the other survivors were the great pioneer Daniel Boone, Daniel Morgan (perhaps the finest fighting tactician of the Revolutionary War), Charles Scott (later GW's intelligence chief and governor of Kentucky), Thomas Gage (later GW's opponent in the Siege of Boston), and William Crawford, a fellow surveyor who crossed the Delaware with GW and was captured and burned at the stake by Indians near the end of the Revolutionary War.

By W.C. Swanson (aka Curmudgeon)

Good Morning, Boodle.

Getting warmer today, approaching "proper" July weather. Before we proceed further into the day, we've some business to attend to:

July 8, 2009: Today in Mounties-Always-Get-Their-Man History

1497: Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sets sail aboard the São Gabriel on the first European voyage to India. He'll have to get around Africa to do it. He takes three other ships and a total of 170 men. He made it to Calicut and back, with half the ships and only 60 men. Some years later, in 1958, the Brooklyn-born 17th Count Vasco da Gama was a guest on What's My Line? His occupation: pool table sales and repairman.

1680: The first confirmed tornado in America kills a servant at Cambridge, Mass.

1758: Some 16,000 British soldiers and Colonial militia fail to capture "impregnable" Fort Carillion at the south end of Lake Champlain, N.Y., during the French and Indian War. The French had spent three years building the fort and its commander, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, only needed 4,000 defenders to hold off the British. The Brits came back a year later and scared off a French garrison simply by occupying the high ground above the fort; so much for impregnability when "Boo!" will do the job. When the Brits marched in, they renamed it Fort Ticonderoga. Montcalm got his later at Quebec, though he was a pretty good general.

By W.C. Swanson (aka Curmudgeon)

[Your blogger is in Rome and finally clamped onto the Internets...Sorry this is a bit late in the day....]

1456: Joan of Arc, 19, born in the village of Domrémy, is acquitted of charges of heresy after a re-trial by the Vatican. Unfortunately for Miss A, she'd been burned at the stake 25 years before. Her case was brought to the attention of Pope Callixtus III at the request of Inquisitor-General Jean Brehal and Joan's mother, Isabelle Romée. Callixtus had the case re-tried in an ecclesiastical court and on its recommendation, Callixtus decided she was innocent of the charges and declared her a martyr.

For the new trial, a panel of theologians called 115 witnesses, and ultimately decided the case was baseless. And the charges against Joan? She was accused in part of violating Deuteronomy 22:5, the prohibition against cross-dressing -- of which, ironically, she was quite guilty. ("The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so [are] abomination unto the Lord thy God.") The appeals court, however, decided (correctly) that the original trial court had ignored several doctrinal exceptions to the cross-dressing rule: Women were in fact allowed to wear men's clothing if they were doing men's work, if it helped to preserve chastity and prevent rape, etc.

She got her name, incidentally, from her father, Jack Black. (Well, Jacques d'Arc, the Domrémy tax collector.)

1863: The first military draft begins during the Civil War; exemptions cost $100.

1865: Lincoln assassins Mary Surratt, Lewis Paine, David Herold and George Atzerodt are hanged at what are now the tennis courts at Fort McNair, in Washington, DC. Surratt's boarding house is now the Wok and Roll Chinese/Japanese restaurant in DC's Chinatown, and her tavern is now a museum in the suburb of Clinton, MD. Little known fact: her cousin once removed was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

1928: "The greatest thing since sliced bread" is invented when it is sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company, Chillicothe, MO. It quickly replaced the earlier claim, "the greatest thing since bread was wrapped." True.

1947: Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office at Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico, responds to a call from the local Sheriff's Department and drives out to the ranch of William "Mac" Brazel 30 miles out of town, where he recovers pieces of...something...which is said to be debris from a high altitude weather balloon. Or maybe it was a "flying disc" or "saucer," a.k.a. a UFO. Or maybe not. At any rate, this becomes the famous "Roswell Incident," one of the Big Three UFO incidents of all time. Were there alien bodies (stored, variously, at either Area 51 or Wright-Patterson AFB) discovered? You're reporter has put in a phone call to Scully and Mulder; stand by for their reply.

Happy Birthday:

1906: Satchel Paige (d. 1982), one of the greatest black baseball players of all time (and one of the oldest rookies ever to play in the majors, at age 50).

1907: Robert A. Heinlein (d. 1988), one of the "Big Three" of science fiction (with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), author of 32 novels, 59 short stories, and 16 collections; 5 more books and 4 collections were published posthumously. He won four "Hugo" awards contemporaneously, and three more "retro-Hugos" later on. In his final years was a dead ringer for John Locke in "Lost"; see this if you don't believe me. He also coined the adage, TANSTAAFL, an acronym for "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

1933: David McCullough, the great historian and "popularizer" (NOT a dirty word in my book).

1940: Ringo Starr, replacement drummer. [Hey, c'mon, NOT NICE...]

RIP:

1890: Henri Nestlé (b. 1814), founder of Nestlé S.A., the world's largest food company. And as anyone can tell you N-E-S-T-L-E-S spells chocolate. In the Black Forest Swabian district of Germany, the name Nestlé means "little bird's nest." Go ahead, fascinate your friends with that one. And he changed his name from Heinrich Nestle to Henri Nestlé to sound like a Swiss. He invented the two products that women love above every other thing on earth: milk chocolate and
infant formula. That the Nobel Prize was never given to this man is simply shocking. An outrage.

1930: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (b. 1859), noted biographer and historian of the great English detective Sherlock Holmes.

Today is Saba Saba Day in Tanzania (once upon a time known as Tanganyika and Zanzibar to us old timers, which we learned when people studied geography and before everybody started *&%$#^% renaming everything), celebrating the founding of TANU, the Tanganyika African National Union political party. Saba saba means "seven seven" (7/7, get it?) in Swahili. Always thought "Zanzibar" was such a cool, exotic word -- and then they went and abolished the place.

In all candor, the Tiber is not the most impressive river in the world. It's just two notches up from Hogtown Creek! But great bridges.

You know that saying about "All Roads Lead to Rome"? A total lie. On the way from the airport into town, I kept seeing signs for a place I never heard of called Firenze. Probably some hellhole.

Technically, this is an Irish Pub (and is that an American sports channel in the background?) so there are major when-in-Rome violations taking place. But it was a great place for a beverage and a quick scan of the IHT.

Guy carved in stone is saying: No, please, not another historic church!!!

Little-known factoid: Bernini's business cards said "Specializing in Feet."

It can't have been easy, the last four decades, knowing that the first sentence of your obituary would include the phrase "architect of the Vietnam War."

Here's the start of Paul Hendrickson's classic 3-part series on Robert McNamara:

The word "Vietnam" never flutters into the room, not in the first visit, anyway. But like Banquo's ghost on Macbeth's stage, it seems to hover just beyond the automatic click of Robert McNamara's door. Once, he seems as if he is going to say it, comes right up to the lip of the word, then skitters off. This was the sentence: "It makes me goddam furious when people say I went over to the World Bank to do penance for . . . Defense." There was only a half-beat delay, and maybe this was the word he had intended all along.

And yet on other days, he brings up Vietnam voluntarily. The word and the place seem to seep out then like dark ink. "Obviously we made mistakes," he says, that high sawing sound back in his voice. "I mean, it didn't turn out like we planned." He is clicking a ball-point on the desk top.

From another Hendrickson story in 1988:

Mostly, though, he just pushed it all from him like rotten food. Old friends and associates and even those in his family knew it was best to keep away from the subject. He was like a man with the strangest moat around him.

The Portuguese have an expression for this: In the house of someone who has been hanged, one is not inclined to speak of rope.

And this, later in the piece, is especially damning:

Here is a chilling and little-known statistic on that: At the time Robert McNamara seems most likely to have lost his faith in the military aspect of the war, in the late fall of 1965, after the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the official U.S. casualty figures stood at 1,335 dead and 6,131 wounded. That is a total of 7,466. Almost two years later, in early October 1967 -- which was approximately the time when LBJ began actively setting out to remove McNamara from the Pentagon, now convinced his once-awesome defense secretary had gone "dovish" on him -- the casualty figures had hit 100,269. Which is to say that nearly 93,000 people were wounded or met their death or were reported missing in the period of the defense secretary's disbelief.

There it was, the essential contradiction of a public man's life, cold and glinting on the legal page, acknowledged now by the man himself: that he had ceased believing in the military efficacy of a war that he had stayed on to prosecute anyway. And his countrymen never knew it, at least not for a long time.

Apparently it's a national holiday -- the much-beloved Third of July. This means that instead of working hard we must all commit ourselves to playing hard, frantically relaxing, going out of our way to have more fun than is humanly possible, culminating in a crab feast in which our hands are shredded as we attempt to extract tiny morsels of meat from creatures not designed to be eaten.

Already this morning I hit the Billy Goat Trail with great gusto. Musta hiked 1, maybe 1.25, who knows even 1.375 miles -- a heroic distance. The machete turned out to be unnecessary due to the path having been blazed at this point roughly as wide as the Beltway. Seriously you could move a house on that trail and still have passing room on the right and left simultaneously.

We are now officially slipping into vacation mode. I'm preparing for the Italy trip by boning up on my Spanish. As you know I've found that if you speak Spanish in Italy with sufficient arm gestures and sound effects you can usually survive.

I heard an awful rumor that you can't just wander into a restaurant in Rome and eat, that you need reservations like months in advance or something. Is that true even of Olive Garden? Pizzaria Uno? i can't wait to see how big the portions are at the Maggiano's of Rome.

I also heard a disturbing report that many of the most popular tourist sites in Rome are in ruins. Story of my life, always late the game.

The huge question is whether I will have all the right adapters and surge protectors and stuff like that over there, so that when I plug in my laptop it doesn't explode. I hope they have the Wee Fee as they say in France. I'll try not to write anything that insults the entire country and makes me a pariah. Because that would be wrong.

[More to come]

We have long known that the U.S. went to war with Iraq under a false premise -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The standard narrative has always focused on GWB's cowboy motivations for pushing for the war and selling it to the American public. Now we read that Saddam wanted the world to believe he had WMDs because he feared looking weak in the eyes of Iran. Thus his refusal to permit weapons inspectors to snoop around was not (as Bush argued) because he was hiding weapons, but because he was not hiding weapons and didn't want his military emasculation exposed. This would all seem farcical in retrospect were it not so thoroughly slathered in tragedy.

--

Mark Sanford has to resign. And why shouldn't he? Does he believe that he owes it to South Carolinians to stay on the job? Yeah, he's really devoted to the people of his state -- on those occasions when he's not (wink wink) hiking the Appalachian Trail. The strong suspicion here is that Sanford wants to keep his job so that he has a place to go other than home, where he's a pariah. (Why not just fly back to Argentina? The perfect ending to the love story. Sell the movie rights!)

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A quick follow-up to yesterday's item on what we do and don't do here in the news business.

We've become rather platform-obsessed. The ideal reporter is described as one who can tweet while podcasting. If you're coming out of J-school, please tell us you are so wired into the new technologies that you have bluetooth implanted in your teeth. But here's a talent that I find refreshing: Writing well. Show me you can put together a compelling sentence. If you can somehow mix intelligent ideas with vivid prose, fortified with original research, polished to a shine, I'll follow you to any platform you care to occupy. I'd even read your book!

[more to come]

This is an exciting day at the Post because there are all these amazing structural changes in the editing and copy-flow process that I would explain in detail were I to have even the vaguest understanding of them.

There have been lots of meetings and memos. Entire departments have vanished. Where Financial used to be there's now a Taco Bell. Fact: They've told us that, in anticipation of a major architectural renovation of the newsroom, we should pack our belongings in boxes and take anything truly valuable to our homes. Um, sure. Like I believe that. Whatever happened to the decency of giving a worker a simple pink slip?

What's this all mean? I am the last to know. But probably the governing concept behind all these changes is "More Cowbell."

It is also an actual fact that there's a new thing called the Universal Desk. I don't know if the Universal Desk exists as a real object or merely as a Virtual Universal Desk. But obviously this is good for me, personally, as it would strongly suggest that the company has decided that its future depends on more articles about things like black holes, gamma-ray bursts and the Milky Way's possible collision with the Andromeda Galaxy. Unless there's some subtlety to the phrase "Universal Desk" that I'm missing.

Journalism is obviously in flux. In such moments, it's important to remember what we do well and what we don't do well.

Housekeeping: I'm going to Italy next week and don't know how much I can and will be blogging. It's vacation, and thus the default position is that I won't post anything. Of course, that's the default position much of the time even when I'm working. Has there ever been a blogger with such an astounding capacity for silence? It's my singular gift. The stuff I didn't write yesterday was genius, trust me.

Anyway, there may be a few things popping up on blog in the next hours and days as I try to clear off my desk. We're all moving desks while they reconfigure the newsroom to make it more 21st Century. I'll be throwing some stuff away, and throwing some other stuff on the blog. Possibly at random. [Reader: "Why did he just post a blank taxi receipt?"]

Now, it does seem that I should write more about Michael Jackson, since apparently the Anderson Coopers of the world are still on MJ 24/7, and that might indicate that some people out there are still interested. I find that my interest in a big story evaporates pretty quickly. But I do want to point you to Von Drehle's excellent piece in Time on the young Michael Jackson.

I'd forgotten that Michael Jackson had a signature move called the Robot.

You can see some more examples of it in this montage on YouTube, the first at about 1:03 of the video:

[more to come...]

Now, finally, I know how I'll be remembered. I know how my name will pop up on Google 17.0 (debuting 2150 A.D.).

See, we had this reunion in Hogtown. It was my high school's 75th anniversary, and we had a little variety show and a gala and, most importantly, late night gabfests by the hotel pool. As with all reunions there's ritualistic sharing of biographical and reproductive details, but at some level people don't even need to talk -- just showing your face is enough. You had me at hello, etc.

We've reached the point where the past is surpassing the future as the dominant increment of our lives. We adjust by tending to our memories as if they were hothouse flowers. We all have our war stories. Jeepers, we survived Hogtown in the 1970s. (Disco was our 'Nam.)

We're about one reunion away from the full efflorescence of replacement-joint conversations. You know you're a good friend when you remember not only the names of your old friend's kids, but also which knee is new.

Because this was an all-school reunion, lots of accomplished alums showed up and received plaques for managing to make something of themselves. But everyone combined was only fractionally as famous as one alum in particular -- Rodney Mullen. As you surely know, Rodney is the greatest skateboarder ever. He's also a totally cool dude. "Authentic" is the word that instantly comes to mind. Like, after the reunion, he was going to go skating through the wee hours of the night. He was going to hit the schoolyards of Hogtown, looking for excellent pavement and picnic tables (for jumps). The point is, he really lives the life.

The guy does stuff on a board that defies physics. He can levitate! He can make the board flip up in the air and remove a speck of food from between his teeth -- stuff like that.

And here's the key data point: He's the younger brother of my classmate Sara, on whom I had a monster crush circa 1974, necessitating marathon phone sessions (at that point I was not sufficiently mature to be in the same room with the love object, but I could talk a blue streak).

So this is how I'll be remembered -- as a minor footnote in the Wikipedia entry for Rodney Mullen.

And that's cool with me.