Old Spice & old Nazis

Interesting news day.

If you’re big on 80s retro & romance novel covers, your pulse may go up to learn that Fabio is back. He’s the new face (& chest) of Old Spice.

I suppose it’s a lateral move for a man who last made bread by starring in commercials for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Meanwhile, the earthly remains of Rudolf Hess have been exhumed & his gravestone removed to stop neo-Nazis from using it as a focal point for rallies. He was cremated & his ashes scattered at sea.

It’s a strange old world we live in.

Manassas I

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the first battle of Manassas, the first major land engagement of the War Between the States.

In the summer of 1861, politicians and journalists were rabid about crushing the rebels; “On to Richmond!” was repeated frequently and fervently. Lincoln was under tremendous pressure to make a show of force and, of course, end the war at a single stroke. Forget “over by Christmas”; the expectation was pretty much “over by Independence Day”.

Keep in mind that the two enemy capital cities were about 100 miles apart. It’s like Miami being only 90 miles from Cuba, only with the armies being roughly the same and no Atlantic Ocean to act as a barrier. The perception on both sides was that if you took the other’s capital you’d basically win the war.

So on 21 July, Union forces under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell faced off against Confederates commanded by Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, about 30 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. (Yes, he’s known as P.G.T Beauregard; but I’ve got to get that full name in somewhere.)

Washington society were so certain that their troops would lick the Rebs that they drove out in carriages, ladies and gentlemen with picnic baskets and opera glasses, expecting an afternoon’s entertainment.

If you’ve never experienced a D.C. summer, you can’t imagine the kind of heat and humidity that struck the forces on both sides. Soldiers in those days wore wool uniforms & carried maybe 60 pounds of kit. On the march out towards the town of Manassas, many Union troops drank all their water just getting there.

The mostly inexperienced soldiers on both sides went back and forth, basically holding their own. At one point the Confederate line faltered & Brigadier General Barnard Bee urged his troops, “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Rally behind the Virginians!”

The Jackson he referred to was Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, a rather strange former instructor of philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute; his students called him “Tom Fool”. But that day his unit held.

(Although there is some thought that Bee was pissed off by the fact that Jackson was holding his position instead of moving forward to support him, and that what he actually said was, “There stands Jackson like a damned stone wall!” We’ll never know exactly because Bee was mortally wounded that day.)

Anyhow, as the afternoon wore on, Federal lines began to break, first in small units and then en masse. The soldiers threw away their rifles and equipment and began running to the rear. The society crowd was engulfed and had to fight for road space for their carriages against the retreating troops.

There was tremendous fear that the Confederates would chase everyone all the way back to D.C., but Beauregard wasn’t the pursuing kind of commander. The loss was a tremendous shock to people all over the North. And in both North and South, folks began to realize that the war was not going to be a short, victorious one.

McDowell was the scapegoat for the loss, although he’d been pressured heavily to go into battle with very green troops. He was replaced by Major General George B. McClellan, a commander who was much better at dressing up and drilling armies than using them in actual, you know, warfare. (Jackson, who was thereafter known as Stonewall, went on to wage a brilliant campaign against a variety of Union armies in the Shenandoah Valley. Beauregard was eventually replaced by General Robert E. Lee, of whom you may have heard.)

So we were seriously in for the long haul. A long, bloody, costly haul that we're still paying for.

And, in 13 months, the two armies would be back at Manassas.

News of the (Murdoch) world

You may have heard there’s a hoo-ha in Britain regarding Rupert Murdoch and the way his publications go about gathering (as opposed to manufacturing, which they also do well) information. Executives of News International are falling like old-growth timber under a Republican administration. They’re either being arrested or they’re “helping police with their inquiries.”

But the gendarmes themselves are not immune from the clear-cutting: two top cops in the Metropolitan Police have resigned under a cloud, as they say. (and both current and past Prime Ministers are backpedaling furiously trying to pretend they never heard of Murdoch or any of his minions, and never had them over to 10 Downing Street for cocktails and baksheesh.)

Murdoch and his son James, a senior satrap in the empire, haven’t been collared yet, but they did appear before a committee of Parliament yesterday afternoon, spinning like tops. But all the concentration was broken when some bloke in a plaid flannel shirt appeared and shoved a paper plate of foam in the Dark Lord’s face.

After Murdoch cleaned up, they resumed; but no one’s heart was in it. Better not to know the answers to the questions, anyhow.

What I’m wondering is: shouldn’t someone be investigating the Met’s ability to provide security for Parliament? How did this guy get through police checks—the shirt alone should have set off any number of alarm bells. Is anyone serious about this?

And how long will it be before TSA starts screening passengers for shaving cream foam?

Give me a bottle & a straw

Dunno about you, but this week is starting out to be really rough. And, what with moving house on Friday and realizing that I’m never going to get an actual, you know, answer out of anyone about anything at my current place of employment—well, the idea of retreating into the adult-world equivalent of a spiked watermelon is just really attractive right now.

Carpocalypse diem

As with pretty much everything to do with Los Angeles, Carmageddon was hyped to the max. Shutting down the 405 (’scuse me, Interstate 405) over the weekend to demolish the Mulholland Drive overpass was supposed to bring about The End of Civilization As We Know It.

You have to understand, the 405 is one of the arteries of LA traffic; and to Angelenos, traffic is life. It doesn’t occur to anyone in the county that you could do anything—grocery shop, go to school, consult your aromatherapist—without getting in your car. In the run-up to this weekend hundreds of thousands of people were doubling up on their Prozac, stocking the pantry with emergency rations of Grey Goose and kvetching that it was going to be the mother of all nightmares if they closed the 405.

I’m betting that local news teams have been fanning the pre-closure terror for weeks, predicting gridlock and offering a gazillion ways to cope. (Like, get your liposuctioned bum out of your BMW and take a freaking walk?) Jet Blue offered flights from Van Nuys to Long Beach for $5, although why anyone would want to go to either place I don’t know.


There was even the obligatory re-subtitling of Hitler ranting about Carmageddon:

Well, turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. The streets of Westwood, Inglewood, Brentwood, etc., did not run with blood, and  there were no reports of increased numbers of murders. (Bank robberies might have been down, though; no quick getaway.)

Same thing happened during the 1984 Olympics. There were dire predictions that the city would shut down on account of all the extra traffic—between the Olympians, the visitors and all the limos. But for once the city and county governments actually conceived and executed a cogent plan,and for two weeks, it was actually easier to get around town.

Of course, it went back to hell as soon as the Closing Ceremony wrapped.

As for Carmageddon, the contractor actually finished the work early, and traffic has resumed on the 405. I fully expect that hell followed immediately thereafter.