®udy!
Rudy Giuliani has taken a tip from Harlan Ellison and trademarked his name. The Daily News doesn’t make it clear if he’s just slapped a ™ after it, or ponied up the money for a full ®, but I think it’s a mistake to assume as Steve Benen does that this is just about Giuliani’s consulting business. The Trademark Dilution Act became law in October, and it allows an injunction against infringing actions “by reason of dilution by tarnishment, the person against whom the injunction is sought willfully intended to harm the reputation of the famous mark.” Speak ill of Rudy® (or Rudy™), and you’ll be shut down. —Oh, sure, there’s an exemption carved out for “all forms of news reporting and news commentary,” but who the hell knows what that is, anymore?
Is that a 75mm recoilless rifle on your Vespa, or are you happy to see me?
Which is, yes, a Vespa scooter fitted with a 75mm recoilless rifle.
After World War II, there was little money for defense spending while the nations of Europe rebuilt their industry and society. When there was some cash to spend, one had to be creative to stretch it as far as possible. The French probably accomplished the most astounding example of that with the ACMA Troupes Aeról Portées Mle. 56. Deployed with their airborne forces, this was essentially a militarized Vespa scooter outfitted with a 75mm recoilless rifle. Five parachutes would carry the two-man gun crew, weapon, ammunition, and two scooters safely to earth, and the men would load the weapon on one scooter and the ammo on the other, then ride away. More impressively, the recoilless rifle could be fired effectively on the move by the best of the gun crews. Total cost? About $500 for the scooter and the recoilless rifle was war surplus. Were they successful military machines? Well, the French Army deployed about 800 armed scooters in wars conducted in both Algeria and Indochina.
This, for whatever reason, reminded me of this old thread over at Vince Baker’s joint—specifically, this comment:
ROCKING WITH JFC FULLER
There are three things you can do in a fight:
- HURT THE OTHER GUY – how hard can you hit the other guy with your rock/RPG/railgun?
- PROTECT YOURSELF – how hard are you to hit, and how hard a hit can you take?
- MOVE AROUND – how fast can you move, over whatever ground?
The core dilemma: Anything you do to make yourself better at one of these things makes you worse at one or both of the others.
That applies on all scales:
- ”As long as I stay in this ditch, they can’t shoot me! But I can’t shoot back, unless I stand up—which makes it easier for them to shoot me, too—and I can’t move except back and forth in the ditch—unless I get out and run—which makes it easier for them to shoot me and I’ll be moving too fast too aim.”
- ”Men, form a square! Excellent, now Napoleon’s cavalry cannot hope to overrun us. But with men facing all four directions instead of in a line, we can’t concentrate our musket fire against any one target, and if we wanted to march anywhere, we would really move faster in column formation.”
- ”This new tank has impenetrable armor! But that means no engine we can put in it will move it very fast. And if we want to put a bigger gun in it, it’ll be even slower, unless we get rid of some armor….”
- ”Our clan has always been safe in the mountains! If those filthy lowlanders try to attack, we just slaughter them like sheep in the narrow passes! Of course, if we try to attack the lowlanders, they just slaughter us coming out the other end of the passes. And even in a year with little snow, we can barely move warriors from one village to another.”
See how the same iron triangle of tradeoffs repeats itself? The only way out of the dilemma—sometimes!—is higher technology, but even then, once you get the more powerful engine for your tank (or whatever), you just move from your old trade-space to a new, slightly better trade-space.
I suppose because the Mle. 56 is a remarkably unexpected method of squaring this particular iron triangle. But also because I like to imagine the Ilk of Jonah being chased by squads of the dam’ things. —I am, at base, a petty, petty man.
Anyway: into the commonplace book it goes.
The trick is how to find it.
“Jeff Conaway!” I said to myself, stumbling over the name in maybe a Gawker Stalker or something, pegging him by the reference to his Christianity. Now that I have his name, I can go to imdb and scroll down his credits and trust that the name of the show will be self-evident. —I’d forgotten the name of the show, see, and everyone who was in it except the star who was the guy from Grease and later Taxi whose name I could never remember. (Though for whatever reason the whole born-again thing stuck with me.) I don’t even remember the show itself that well, just that it was funny when I was fifteen, and I cared enough about it to hurry back to the hotel room after a swim meet so I could coax the bunny ears into pulling down a relatively snow-free CBS signal. Then they killed it. —And now I learn that most of the episodes were directed by Bill Bixby. Wizards and Warriors. Damn. Everything’s pretty much in this intertubes thing somewhere, isn’t it? (Except, y’know, the actual episodes.)
One state, two state, red state, blue state.
Amanda Fritz makes a pretty good case for Oregon going red in 2008.
Esoteric middlebrow.
“Wild Dance,” Ruslana Lyzhichko; “Illartia (PDX edit),” SpineFolder; “An instrumental work, called ‘pleasant,’ 4th mode,” Hristodoulos Halaris; “Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth),” the Residents; “Summer Vacation,” 林原めぐみ; “Within a Room Somewhere,” Sixpence None the Richer; “ALWAYS,” 田村直美; “Enchanted,” Delirium; “Hebeena Hebeena,” Farid el Atrache; “On droit fin[e] Amor; La biauté,” Anonymous 4.
After the late, great unpleasantness.
I am a Southerner, for all that I’m expatriate—born in Alabama, raised in Virginia and the Carolinas and Kentucky, I graduated high school in John Hughes land and attended a famously liberal arts college on the North Coast of Ohio. Since then, I’ve lived my life in New York and Boston and the Pioneer Valley and Portland, Oregon, and I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a stretch south of the Mason Dixon. (And those stretches are sometimes awfully few and far between.) —But I cook up hoppin’ john for New Year’s, every year (though, apostasic, I make it without the fatback). I taught my Jersey girl how to eat grits and I make my biscuits from scratch. (Food? Don’t laugh. Look to the roots of your own tongue.) —I’m haunted by the smell of magnolia blossoms, plucked and left in a drinking glass on the mantelpiece. (They smell lemony, the same way apples do.) Long pine needles crushed underfoot, dry, not wet and silvery grey; evergreens burnt brown by the sun. I always forget until I see it from the window of the plane, how red the dirt is, scraped up, laid shockingly bare in circles of development scars that will always ring Charlotte: how wrong it looks, how raw. It’s not the color the earth is supposed to be. It’s alien; I’m home.
For a couple of weeks, at most. And then.
(“You will find no other place, no other shores,” says C.P. Cavafy. “This city will possess you, and you’ll wander the same streets. In these same neighborhoods you’ll grow old; in these same houses you’ll turn grey.”)
—If you aren’t Southern, I don’t know that I can explain the little thrill I felt when I saw the motto for the Levine Museum of the New South: “Telling the story—1865 to tomorrow.” Shock is hardly the word. Frisson even seems too strong. It’s a stifled giggle; a flash of a grin, at something you’d’ve done yourself, but never would have thought to do. It hardly seems worth mentioning, but—well, maybe the About Us page will bring it into focus for the Yankees among us?
What is the New South?
The New South means people, places and a period of time — from 1865 to today. Levine Museum of the New South is an interactive history museum that provides the nation with the most comprehensive interpretation of post-Civil War southern society featuring men, women and children, black and white, rich and poor, long-time residents and newcomers who have shaped the South since the Civil War.
New South Quick Facts
- A Time—The New South is the period of time from 1865, following the Civil War, to the present.
- A Place—The New South includes areas of the Southeast U.S. that began to grow and flourish after 1865.
- An Idea—The New South represents new ways of thinking about economic, political and cultural life in the South.
- Reinvention—The New South encompasses the spirit of re-invention. The end of slavery forced the South to reinvent its economy and society.
- People—The New South continuously reinvents itself as newcomers, natives, immigrants, visitors and residents change the composition and direction of the region.
To say that you are about the South, but dismiss the antebellum—not to forget, because who can forget, not even to repudiate it, but to wave it off as no longer important to the South you want to look at, here and now— Don’t throw out the cotton and the rice, the pastel dresses and grey uniforms, the stars and bars and whips and chains. Those things are all still very much alive and kicking. But cut out the thing that props them up, the hollow rites, the archly wounded pride; blithely (if a little self-consciously) announce you’re leaving the Civil War well enough alone, to all the many other hands that want it; you will turn your attention to everything else, and watch it all fall into some saner perspective—1865 to tomorrow—
(“How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?” says C.P. Cavafy. “Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”)
The Levine Museum of the New South is currently hosting an exhibit called “Families of Abraham.” Eight photographers spent over a year with 11 families in the Charlotte area—Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families—recording their holidays and everydays, putting the photos together to demonstrate that when you set aside the different words we’ve each plucked from the same shambolic Book and just look at the people, going about their lives, well, under the chadors and yarmulkes and double-knit blazers we’re all, y’know, the same. Basically.
Which is why, given the way things currently are, what with the Pragers and the Goodes and the Qutbs, this show is important. —But it’s not why it’s important to me.
That’s a photo (by my mother, which is why the show is important to me, yes, but), a photo of Basheer Khatoon with her great-grandson, Raahil, taken in the home she shares with her son, a Charlotte cardiologist.
My South—the South in my head, the South I came from—doesn’t have a Basheer Khatoon. But there she indisputably is. Alien—and yet, from all the years I’ve spent since and elsewhere, heimlich. The world has come to the South; the South—my South—is becoming part of the world.
No matter where we go, there we are; we find no other place, no other shore. We wander the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods. —But those streets change.
Why you all so kip?
I mean, really: how many people can ego-surf on Urban Dictionary?
Chillin’ with Frank & Ernest.
Congratulations, by the way, to R. Stevens, as Diesel Sweeties adds the daily newspaper to its burgeoning media empire.
Scena Penultima—
LA STATUA:
Pentiti, scellerato!
DON GIOVANNI:
No, vecchio infatuato!
LA STATUA:
Pentiti!
DON GIOVANNI:
No!
LA STATUA:
Sì!
DON GIOVANNI:
No!
LA STATUA:
Ah! tempo più non v’è!
(Fuoco da diverse parti, il Commendatore sparisce, e s’apre una voragine.)
DON GIOVANNI:
Da qual tremore insolito
Sento assalir gli spiriti!
Dond’escono quei vortici
Di foco pien d’orror?
CORO di DIAVOLI (di sotterra, con voci cupe):
Tutto a tue colpe è poco!
Vieni, c’è un mal peggior!
DON GIOVANNI:
Chi l’anima mi lacera?
Chi m’agita le viscere?
Che strazio, ohimé, che smania!
Che inferno, che terror!
Magisteria.
Let Chris Clarke tell you a story about the struggle between Vishnu and YHWH.
What we're fighting for,
or, The Triumph of Faith over Works.
A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.
2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No—really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It’s like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart—a chip here, a chunk there.
That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The “mistakes” were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible—from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.
The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I’m certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam.
—Riverbend, “End of Another Year”
So why did the president wait so long to rid himself of this meddlesome general? Well, politics is politics, remember. “Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.”
The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option.
We’ve all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.
Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn’t believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That’s the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” saith the Lord.
In some otherwise excellent comments on the clusterfucked execution of Saddam Hussein, Josh Marshall said something that gave me pause:
Vengeance isn’t justice. Vengeance is part of justice. But only a part.
I agree that when you’ve been wronged, it can be very, very hard to separate your need for justice from your need for vengeance. This is why judges should always and forever bend toward the asymptote of impartiality, and why “victims’ rights” drives are rarely a good idea.
Vengeance has no place in justice. Vengeance is temporary, short-sighted; the destructive flailing of the hurt who can’t see what they’re hitting. Justice is what you eventually build if you’re lucky enough to survive the ravages of vengeance. —You may feel I’m splitting a miniscule mote plucked from his eye, but this is important: a system of justice that gives any consideration to vengeance is a shameful system, one that mistakes means for ends, that sacrifices peace, justice, for the visceral satisfaction of righteous outrage. Righteous, perhaps; but outrageous nonetheless.
I mean, I know in my bones that impeachment isn’t enough for the various members of the Bush administration. Imprisonment will not bring back the hundreds of thousands of lives we’ve sacrificed for his petty vanity. —When he is turned out of office, I’d want him to tour the country, town by town, set up each morning in the square before the courthouse and allow passersby to sock him in the nose. Not quite inviting passersby to saw at the most famous neck in the realm—Secret Service agents could keep things from getting out of hand—but it would, perhaps, eventually add up in small dollops of vengeance to something you could measure on the awful balance sheet.
But the hundreds of thousands would still be dead, and our nation no closer to something we could claim was health, and the lines would become too long and unwieldy (even if we allowed consolation shots at the noses of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Snow, McCain, Lieberman, et bloody al). —So I agitate instead for hearings, and impeachment; justice, not vengeance.
They really are quite different.
I forget who asked, but in case it was you:
“My observation is that wetting the pencil allows you to get a darker line,” Dr. Howard said. “There’s a softening of the material, some absorption of moisture into pore spaces that makes a mix that will rub off more easily. If it were pure graphite, there would be no pores to let the moisture in.”
Hoppin’ John.
Honestly, the dish being as Southern as it is, I find it much easier to believe it’s an elision of pois pigeons rather than a Northumbrian “hopping” held in honor of St. John the Evangelist. Charming though the latter undoubtedly would be.
I did finish something in 2006, and we did not look about last night and say, anything’s got to be better than that. (Which only means we now have somewhere from which to fall.) —This year? This year, I’m going to start to crack. This year, I will sell something.
Hop in, John.
Moral equivalency.
Five things.
Jesus, John. Some of us have writing to procrastinate. Which, well. Um.
So okay. —Though I have to agree with fellow taggee Yglesias that this particular meme lacks a certain gimmicky je ne sais quois. One is tempted to cheat with overly specific items such as I have 14,774 songs in my iTunes library, or maddeningly vague items such as almost all the money I’ve made from writing is due to pornography, but I am at heart a decent creature, raised up right to color inside the lines.
- My mother comes from South Carolina aristocracy; my father from folks that seceded from the Confederacy. I was born in Alabama, and most of my formative years were spent in Virginia, Kentucky, and both Carolinas. Yet I can’t speak with a Southern accent to save my life.
- Though I score as an introvert on most Meyers-Briggs evaluations, I tend to be loud and effusive at parties. —Also, I acted a bit back in high school and college. Roles I have played include Dr. Jim Bayliss; Jeff Douglas; Sidney Lipton; Bridegroom; Harlan McKenna; Dr. Bazelon.
- I was once in possession of what might well have been the world’s longest appendix. Or so a surgeon assured me in 1986, after a longer-than-expected appendectomy. For all I know, the intervening years have swept that record under the rug. If you see me at a party, ask for the extended dance mix; this particular anecdote doesn’t survive translation to the written word.
- Though I can’t draw a lick, I’ve completed three 24-hour comics: “Getting to 24,” “The Star,” and “The Story I was Going to Tell on Halloween Night but Couldn’t.” Not that many people have done more than one, but I don’t know that any of us are necessarily proud of this achievement.
- Did you attend Oberlin College in 1987, along with Liz Phair and Michelle Malkin? Did you eat in Dascombe? Do you remember what was invariably the loudest table in the joint, loaded with SF-computer-gaming geeks cracking wise and bluing the air with awful puns? I was the salad bar guy, constantly neglecting his tubs of croutons and dressings to hover about that table for a taste of the action. Those jokes shaped the entire rest of my life.
Now for the tagging: Kevin Moore! Anne Moloney! Jeff Parker! Sara Ryan! Barry Deutsch! Pentamemes are go!
