2014: The whole damned thing

In addition to the many deaths of giants in the arts, 2014 produced a plethora of events that just cried out for commentary, both serious and silly. And I did my best to oblige.

Have you forgotten already? Well, let me refresh your memory.

In February the Winter Olympic Games were held in Sochi, Russia. Because NBC-Comcast’s coverage of these events is so consistently crappy, I never really got beyond fast-forwarding through the opening ceremonies. I was a little disappointed that Putin didn’t show up topless in a little pink skating skirt, but as far as I’m concerned most of the entertainment took place before the dignitaries showed up. Because there was world-class competitive tweeting going on from all the reporters who found the facilities less than, uh, bronze medal quality.

“C’mon, guyz…”

Almost immediately after the closing ceremonies, Russia upped its international bullying game, so discovering that several European countries were unable to, uh, get it up in the air space violation defense arena was, well, eye-opening. Yes, children, apparently air force ground crews and pilots get overtime, and even Switzerland thinks twice about that time-and-a-half expenditure.

All this might have been rendered moot if the Viking Armageddon had shown up on schedule. But no, noooo—Ragnarök came and went, with no ripping of the celestial fabric or Norse gods rumbling like Jets and Sharks. I was so disappointed—I actually got my Absolut together and then had no place to go.

This has definitely put me off Armageddon—not one of the apocalyptic predictions seems able to pull it off, so you guys have lost me as a customer forever.

It wasn’t all whacky; 2014 was the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings and the Battle of the Bulge, seminal events in tightening the noose around Hitler’s empire from the west. The ranks of men who slogged onto the Normandy beaches in June and stood their ground in the frozen Ardennes in December have thinned to just a very few now, so it’s good that we continue to render them the respect due. This time around we saw some amazing then-and-now photos of D-Day, and revisited the announcement Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower had prepared in the event that the landings failed. It was unlike anything we’ve seen in the past 40 years of political, military and corporate “leaders” weaseling out of high crimes and misdemeanors.

We observed the 70^th anniversary of the July Conspiracy—the attempt by principled Wehrmacht officers to overthrow the Nazis and establish a rational government that could negotiate with the Allies. For some reason this event didn’t make a big splash in the news media; I can’t recall what was going on, maybe the birth of the Kardashian-West baby.

We also commemorated the 100^th anniversary of the start of that other global conflagration of the first half of the 20^th Century. Since World War I is the focus of my historical studies, I’ve had a few things to say about it, and that’ll continue for the next four years.

Europeans marked the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, which led to a cascade of political maneuvers by the major powers of Europe, and set the stage for more than four years of industrialized slaughter. When you read about it all now, your first inclination is to wonder what the hell those leaders were all smoking; but then you look at congresses and parliaments around the world today and you just shrug.

(Case in point: in June Serbians unveiled a statue to the Bosnian Serb assassin, who is still revered as a national hero. Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey pretty much took a pass on this; and Russia was too busy reliving the Stalin years in the Crimea to bring up WWI.)

And last week we commemorated that strange and unique occurrence on the Western Front of 100 years ago: the Christmas Truce. As ephemeral as a flash mob without mobile phones, the events of the 24^th and 25^th of December 1914 flicker down to us, like the light of a single candle in a room engulfed in darkness.

Some of the remembrances have been powerfully evocative. Two in particular came out of the United Kingdom: the Lights Out campaign on 4 August, and the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, and the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey commented, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” So on 4 August this year, private homes, corporations and public buildings went dark throughout the United Kingdom, with only a few candles or lanterns providing light. It was an extraordinary depiction of the darkness that engulfed civilization one hundred years ago. (Sadly, it’s not clear to me at all that we’ve ever quite emerged from that black place.)

The art installation, “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” was an equally powerful image—nearly 900,000 ceramic poppies planted on and around the Tower of London, each unique crimson flower representing the life of a British or Commonwealth soldier lost in the First World War, swelling in their masses to an ocean of blood. Individual sorrow, national catastrophe.

And British losses were on the smallish side, when compared with those of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. If you planted a poppy for every one of the lives in all those armies that were torn away between 1914 and 1918, you’d take over all of London and probably half the Home Counties.

(As a side note, I posted a photo of the installation and one of the people I know on Facebook—a mathematics professor, who apparently isn’t much interested in anything not involving a digit—archly inquired if it was all about Rapunzel. No.)

This was the 50^th anniversary of the release of Zulu, the picture that gave us an impossibly young and posh Michael Caine, as well as possibly the best battle sequence ever filmed. The occasion was marked by releasing a digitally remastered, wide-screen version, attended by (among others), Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Buthelezi was a long-time colleague of Nelson Mandela in the fight against Apartheid, as well as the great-grandson of the Zulu leader Cetshwayo, whom he portrayed in the movie.

And if you have still not seen it, I once again urge you to do so immediately.

The UK did have its, oh, alternative moments, though. It seems that the House of Windsor is getting close to overdraft and economies need to be made. Or else the British taxpayer needs to pony up to bail HM out. I did propose a solution to this fine mess, but no one’s had the courtesy to reply. So far.

Then there was that whole tempest in a tartan—Scotland’s attempt to bugger off from the rest of the component parts of the United Kingdom. There were substantial amounts of bloviation on both sides, but in the end the Scots (down to age 16—special voting privileges for this election, because we all know what rational decisions teenagers make) voted to remain in the dysfunctional but still nominally United Kingdom of greater or lesser Britain and the six northern counties of Ireland.

After spending many months examining the remains of Richard III, which were found a couple of years ago under a parking lot in Leicester, British scientists this year finally announced that the last Yorkist king indeed “died brutally during battle.” Apparently it was the 11 wounds by knife, sword and battle axe that provided the clues.

However, HM still won’t let Richard be buried in Westminster Abbey (dunno if it’s anything to do with those budget woes or just bloody-mindedness), so he’s going on display in Leicester, to the great delight of the local pols and Chamber of Commerce.

Britain does not have a lock on folly, of course. Although they certainly are playing in the major leagues. Why, right here in the USA, we had an unelected Senator outed as being a plagiarist (having cribbed most of his 14-page thesis/paper that won him a Master of Strategic Studies degree from the Army War College), and trying to spin the story every which way but up. Apparently John Walsh and his spinpersons didn’t have any secondary resources to plagiarize in aid of this effort; the degree has since been revoked and Walsh did not run for actual election in Montana last month.

This episode certainly makes me wonder what other military and political leaders got their degrees in international or strategic studies via the academic equivalent of a Cracker Jack box, but perhaps I’m trying to overthink this.

Then there was the whole “some of my best friends are female” thing, epitomized by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella attempting verbal suicide at a women-in-tech gathering, and the UN planning a conference on gender equality…without any women being invited. Nadella was a keynote speaker at the Grace Hopper Conference—pretty much the premiere event for women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)—when he confidently assured the hundreds of women in the audience that they didn’t need to bother asking for raises or promotions because “that’s good karma.”

It’s like the guy didn’t know that Twitter exists.

At that same conference, several tech company CEOs were engaging in a panel discussion about being “male allies” to women in tech. At which they decreed there should be no Q&A session.

It’s like these guys didn’t know that Twitter exists.

(They did circle the wagons and set up an impromptu Q&A session later on. But still.)

The animal kingdom also had its share of notable events this year. On the dark side, administrators at the Copenhagen Zoo shot a bolt through the head of a healthy four-year-old giraffe named Marius, and then dismembered his corpse and fed it to the lions in front of an audience of children as a teaching moment. Marius’ genetic structure was of no interest to the zoo, so it was off with his head.

Only, just five weeks later, the same zoo put down four of the aforementioned lions because it was determined that they, too, were surplus to requirements. No word on whether the four big cats were used as chow for some other creatures. Someone please remind me who’s the superior being in this equation?

Then there was possibly my favorite story of the entire year—about Fedya the performing crocodile and the Russian circus accountant. This was a world-class story if for no other reason than the original report ran, “a dangerous reptile sustained injuries after being squashed by a portly circus accountant.” This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, folks.

Plus—I got to Ask the Questions. I love to Ask the Questions.

This year we also found out about a category of working cats that doesn’t involve badly spelled Internet memes. Yes, give it up for Distillery Cats, who give their all so that the rest of us can drink the water of life.

Although evidently some of us are falling down on the job and letting our respective nation(s) down. Because France and Uruguay are out-drinking the US in several categories of spirits. And the UK, which seems just wrong.

C’mon, guyz…

Well, as I mentioned way up about 2,000 words ago, it’s been quite the blog-year this time around. There was the big organic manure hoo-ha, while back in the UK they swung between Dull Men and shopping chaos on Black Friday. I still don’t know what the hell they were thinking when they imported that.

But the posts closest to my heart this year were about my friend Dick—his Excellent European Adventure, his safe return to Virginia without need of an extraction operation, his uncovering of a true saint for our times, and his solo turn at the Washington Christmas Revels (the production was about the Irish and Irish Americans, but he sang “Deck the Halls” in Welsh, so I’m a little confused).

And my fond hope is that 2015 will be the year I receive a draft of his memoirs, because this was just one single year in a fascinating life, and I do not want to wait around while some publisher squirrels around.

If I do, I’ll certainly let you know.

The passing year

Oh, what a year 2014 was—quite the blogging rollercoaster, really. so many comentworthy events, so little time…

Well, first of all, 2014 saw so many deaths in the arts, leaving massive gaps in the talent pool for those of us to whom they brought such enjoyment.

(Oh—there was one different death of note this year, nowhere near the arts. Or even the humanities. Inveterate sectarian-hate monger Ian Paisley finally is face-to-face with his maker, and I hope she gives him what-for. Paisley sadly lived much too long and has left a legacy of inhumanity that will doubtless carry on for years. But I’ve got him out of the way.)

Among those lost: the extraordinarily gifted Robin Williams, comedic pioneer Joan Rivers, caustically brilliant Elaine Stritch and all-round genius Sid Caesar.

Shirley Temple Black, the child star who made hundreds of thousands of Americans forget how dreary life was during the Great Depression, and whose box office bankability saved 20^th Century-Fox Studios from bankruptcy—she’s gone, too. As is poet, writer, activist Maya Angelou and P.D. James, acclaimed writer of psychologically dense detective novels.

Lauren Bacall, one of the sultriest women to ever saunter across a screen, died aged 89. But no one who ever saw her on the silver screen—when it was truly silver—or heard her husky voice is ever going to get her out of his/her cortex.

Pete Seeger was pretty much an institution—so much more than a performer. If you go anywhere near the Hudson River without protective gear, you can thank Seeger. And if you listen to any pop music from the last half of the 20^th Century, chances are it was influenced somehow by Seeger.

If you’re not a fan of NPR, you may not know Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Tappet Brothers. Their call-in car repair advice show ran for decades, and was beloved by hundreds of thousands; maybe millions. Every one of us felt like we’d lost a family member when it was announced that Tom (who was either Click or Clack; I never quite figured that out) died last month. Thankfully, a lot of stations are rerunning their shows, because they were never really about the cars.

I deeply felt the loss of two Brits—Bob Hoskins and Richard Attenborough. Both were spectacularly good actors, delivering an amazing range of characters, from sociopaths to Santa Claus and storybook pirate. Attenborough was also a brilliant director—think Gandhi, Shadowlands and A Chorus Line. But Hoskins famously held his own against a cast of ‘toons, which has to be the ultimate test of an actor.

I did not post here about the death of James Garner, primarily because I said what I had to say in a Facebook post: “Yeah, yeah, yeah—Maverick, Rockford, blah, blah, blah. For me Garner will always be Hendley the Scrounger in The Great Escape” (which also starred Attenborough). And the seminal Yank sequence for me was the Fourth of July celebration:

(It occurs to me that David McCallum and John Leyton might the last featured players in that scene still alive. Bronson, McQueen, Pleasence, Coburn, Garner, Attenborough, James Donald, Gordon Jackson, Jud Taylor and Angus Lennie are all gone now.)

Two more I’ll miss are Warren Clarke and Eli Wallach. Clarke will forever be associated in my mind with the TV series based on Reginald Hill’s detective novels; there is but one Andy Dalziel, and Clarke is he. And Wallach—again, what a range of characters he gave us.

The good thing about such giants crossing the bar is that they were almost all quite advanced in years. Williams definitely died too soon, but he and the rest had extraordinary careers lasting decades, and they gave us all laughter, tears and food for thought. It’s a good legacy.

Gratitude Monday--virtual friends

Well, blow me—last Gratitude Monday of the year. Already.

And I don’t even know what to talk about, because 2014 has been so full of things for which I’m thankful.

Well, okay—I’m going to go with being deeply grateful for the several friends I’ve made this year via the interwebs. A couple through social media, another few from being on mutual friends’ email lists.

They’ve expanded both my horizons and my comfort zone, which is a distinctly Good Thing. They’ve made me laugh, occasionally pissed me off and in general been sounding boards and equalizers.

I’m really glad I’ve come to know them—I hope the feeling is mutual. And I hope to meet a few more in the New Year.

Joyful noise

For Boxing Day (or Saint Stephen’s Day, whichever’s your preference), I’m giving you another flash mob. Another “Hallelujah” flash mob. But this one’s just a little different:

They’re singing a capella, which ups the game considerably. Unless you count the really rad percussion, which just makes you want to get up and dance.

(Yes, it's somewhat truncated, and I don't get what the deal is with the risking arrest; but I really like the drums.)

At any rate, this is as close as I’m getting to a mall of any stripe this weekend.

Meanwhile, Bach at the Mall...

Here’s a different kind of flash mob for the holidays—an interesting mixture of the formal and informal, with the US Air Force Band at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Well, they say it’s the band, but there are strings. And singers. Which don’t ordinarily present as band components.

(And I can’t help flashing on Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run, playing his cello in a marching band, so I had to overcome that image as I was watching this flash mob unfold.)

But perhaps they do things differently in the Air Force.

(I will also confess to wondering whether the USAF and/or the Smithsonian have received complaints at using tax-supported personnel and facilities to perform a religious piece—a long one. You know—wanting equal time for something Kwanzaa or Islamic or a Festivus dance. But that would be for another post.)

For now, just crank up the volume and enjoy.

Merry Christmas.

When No Man's Land was filled with song

It was the first year of a war that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks. And surely long over by Christmas—with victorious armies whooping it up in [Paris] [Berlin] [Saint Petersburg] [Vienna] [Belgrade], depending on which side was doing the talking.

Four and a half months into the war, and there had already been the unbelievable (but entirely foreseeable) slaughter resulting from frontal infantry charges against massed machine guns. Armies on all fronts, but particularly across Northern France, had dug into the earth in unsettled misery while their commanders considered how they might continue doing the same thing again and again, but expect different results.

At this point, December 1914, the British Army was still largely a force of volunteers (Britain didn’t implement conscription until 1916), so the men on the Western Front were basically civilians in ill-fitting and filthy uniforms. The French, Germans and Belgians—well, they all had a long-standing compulsory service and reserve system, but they still had masses of men who’d been called back to service from regular jobs.

Tens of thousands of men literally entrenched along a front hundreds of miles long, dug into the ground that alternated between sloshy and frozen mud, many in forward lines that were 50 to 100 meters apart from one another. (Their commanders were kilometers behind the lines, ensconced in châteaux and well provisioned.) The holidays approaching as some distant, unreachable dream, whatever the tradition.

On Christmas Eve the front was blanketed in snow, which made the men on both sides even more homesick, if also colder. There’s something about the notion of snow for Christmas that just turns people into jelly.

And that’s when something extraordinary occurred, completely spontaneously and what we today would call “grass-roots”. Christmas Eve is when Germans traditionally have their big Christmas celebration with a festive meal and der Weinachtsmann delivering gifts. So not so surprising that many Germans along the line began to sing Christmas carols. But they also put up Christmas trees, with improvised decorations and—much riskier—lanterns or candles to illuminate them in the night.

Well, men from across No Man’s Land joined in on some of the carols, and popped their heads hesitantly up to view the Christmas trees. In some sectors there was firing, but in others the singing and illuminations led to shouted conversations, and eventually to men climbing out from the trenches to exchange cigarettes and chocolate, cookies and charcuterie. This happened between the Germans and Belgians, Brits and Frenchmen—not everywhere, but little pockets of conviviality.

It continued the following morning—the singing was backed up by unit bands, soldiers shared photos of family and friends, there may have been a few football matches.

And both sides collected their dead, who’d lain on the field for days or weeks, for burial.

Well, as you can imagine, those commanders off in their châteaux, replete with cognac and Christmas pudding, turned apoplectic when they heard of trucelike shenanigans in the trenches. In truth—you can’t really fight a war if your poor bloody infantry are fraternizing with their PBI counterparts on the other side and comparing notes about who’s got the most idiotic officers.

Word came down hard and swift that any further failure to blast the hell out of the enemy would be severely punished, and things settled back into gruesome misery…for nearly four more years. In December 1915, orders were in place preventing any reoccurrence; so it’s evident that the generals actually could learn from battlefield events. Just not that whole bit about flinging whole divisions of infantry against entrenched machine guns.

But for one brief, magical period of a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, companies and battalions laid aside their weapons and celebrated with one another like families gathered together.

Let your heart be light

I don’t suppose there’s been a war in the past two thousand or so years in which all sides didn’t assure themselves that it would be over by Christmas. (And victoriously. For all sides.)

But since I’ve been thinking specifically about the events in the Ardennes of 70 years ago, I’m going to give you a couple of Christmas songs that evoke the hopes and desires of at least the Americans—those at the front and those at home. Hearing them always makes me think of those dark, bleak and fearful days.

The first dates from a year before the Battle of the Bulge, but speaks directly to the deepest yearning for home and familiar things of a citizen soldier serving on foreign soil in alien conditions. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” paints an idealized picture of what the holidays represent. It sounds a little kitschy these days, but it must have cut deep into the hearts of everyone who’d been displaced by the war.

Apparently the song’s writer couldn’t sell it to music publishers until he sang it to Bing Crosby on the golf course. Crosby liked it, and back in those days, if Crosby wanted to make a record, he did. It was a substantial hit for him in both 1943 and 1944.

Josh Groban has got a lot of mileage out of his update—voted greatest holiday recording of all time in a recent poll by readers of the San José Mercury-News. He beat out Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song”, which I’d have thought unstoppable. It’s nice, of course, although I think it just a tad manipulative weaving in messages from serving soldiers and their families. (But, in fairness, I think a little Groban goes a long way, so when I hear him I need to guard against insulin shock.)

But since I’m thinking WWII, I’ll give you Crosby’s original.

The second song I’ll share featured in the film Meet Me in Saint Louis, which I classify as one of the best Christmas movies ever, even though it’s not strictly a Christmas movie. MMiSL was released in November 1944, and I’m thinking that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” must have resonated with everyone who really had thought that, after the Normandy landings and the drive across France, the war surely would have been over by Christmas.

Instead, there was the confusion and fear engendered by the news of the totally surprising German offensive and the inability of Allied commanders to mount a solid defense, much less a counterattack as long as the weather prevented air operations.

The family in MMiSL are faced with a sudden and massive disruption, which is deeply upsetting to them all, but especially to the youngest (played by Margaret O’Brien). “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” gives us Judy Garland trying to find a way to persuade her sister and herself that, if this Christmas is less than stellar, they can rely on their memories of the wonderful ones of the past and their hopes of more for the future to get them through it.

Which, of course, is what Americans here and abroad were having to do.

There were some bumps along the road to getting “Have Yourself” on the screen—the initial lyrics were exceedingly dark, and had to be rewritten. But what emerged on the screen was wistful and tender; I think it’s one of the best modern Christmas songs. (Beats the daylights out of “White Christmas”, war or no war.)

I’ve never been a fan of Garland’s voice, so I’m giving you Frank Sinatra. There's no one better than Sinatra for phrasing.

It was 70 years ago today that the thick clouds broke, and the Allies were able to fill the skies over the Ardennes with bombers as well as with cargo planes to resupply the Americans holding out against the massive German attack. I’d like to think that these two songs were running through the heads of the men in Europe and their families back home.

And that they are as warm and comforting for you as they are to me.

Calendar girls. And boys

If you’re still looking for a present for that challenging recipient on your list, consider this unique possibility. Yes, it’s a calendar; but what a calendar.

Residents in a retirement home in Essen, Germany, made a calendar featuring photos of them recreating iconic film scenes.

Think about it: your gran and gramps as Rose and Jack in Titanic.

 

Or Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers.

Or Tony and Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever.

Really, this thing is such a hoot.

But wait—there’s more.

Retirees from communities in several US states also decided to let it all hang out and created a calendar of their own, again based on iconic films and pop culture moments.

So here we have:

Charlie’s Angels:

(Do not mess with them. Just don’t.)

Cleopatra:

(I'd peel her a grape.)

Grease:

(They might have pulled some of those clothes from the back of their closets.)

From all appearances it looks like these folks were having a blast. And extra super points to the gran who channeled Ursula Andress in Dr. No.

You go, girl!

Light matters

On this Gratitude Monday before Christmas, I’m really grateful for the people who go a little cuckoo in the holiday lights/yard decoration department.

No, I’m not talking about the ones who spend tens of thousands of dollars to have professional light-decorators come in or any of that nonsense. I mean the folks who put up their grazing deer and inflated snowmen in their yards and run strings of lights along the eaves of their houses.

Well, okay—some of them are a little OTT, but I think those represent year-on-year accumulation of the Grinch, Mickey, Yoda and Muppets. And Christmas is definitely the season where you get a free pass from the aesthetics police.

Here are some of my favorites from this year from here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

You may recall my surprise at finding Target selling a Christmas Pig, wondering who might find them worthy of purchase. Well, I found out: someone in Palo Alto:

But if you look closely, you’ll discover that this pig has already been partying pretty hard; he’s lost one of his ears. Oh, dear.

Then there’s the ever popular Christmas pink flamingo:

Not far from me, there are several houses on a street that have their lights flashing in synch with a local FM radio station. I don’t know that I find all that flash all that attractive, but one yard had a tree that cycled through several color iterations, and I quite liked that:

Well, you get the drift.

On another of my walking routes, I got a kick out of this snowman listing a bit. Maybe he was at the same party as the Palo Alto pig.

Snowflakes are apparently trending this year. I found strings of them in both LED and regular lights

Well, you can see that there’s a lot to keep someone like me amused, and I’m grateful for that.

I’m also grateful that—so far—no one’s called the cops on me as I prowl their neighborhoods, taking photos like I’m casing the joint.

All things bright & beautiful

Not sure whether Wired does these roundups of the week’s weirdest animal encounters on a, you know, weekly basis. If they do, I’m not sure why I’ve not come across them before this, but I’m totally glad I’ve found this one. Because…I just know that you cannot make this stuff up.

I mean—a “free-ranging monkey” (is that like free-range chickens?) “terrorizing” the suburbs of Marseille? Because it fell in with a bad lot of human monkeys who (wait for it) fed it the simian equivalent of junk food, chocolates. Le petit singe had to be Tased and is presumably currently in detox, with rehab to follow. Then: the appearances on the talk-show circuit.

New Jersey looms large in this weird in the wild. Well, as you’d expect, I suppose, because…New Jersey. Pink geese, rampaging rams; you gotta love it. Plus, the woman who will not believe the obvious explanation for her unicorn sighting goes a long way to explain the outcome of last month’s elections.

Kudos to the Amherst students who look upon their visiting moose as an opportunity to rethink their school mascot. I hope they give the new representative the obvious name of Bullwinkle. They could then take on a new persona in keeping with that celebrity’s own academic institution.

As for the orangutans at the Paignton Zoo in England: if I opened a Christmas package only to find Brussels sprouts, I’d wrap myself in burlap, too.

Any port in a storm

The other night I had a girls’ night out with a couple of friends and we exchanged our Christmas gifts. One of the prize ones for me was a paper menorah.

Look, I love any festival that involves light in the darkness, and I don’t understand why I have not acquired a menorah across the years, but Amy and Natalie made that right. It was even better because I unwrapped it exactly three minutes before Hanukkah officially started.

Plus Amy and Natalie knew how to put it together. I was basically useless.

Anyhow, we “lighted” the shamash and the first night’s candle, and then we went out for the traditional Persian meal.

We spent the rest of the evening driving around the Valley They Call Silicon, looking at holiday light displays.

Well, the next day I was cleaning up the menorah detritus, and had a good look at the package. First of all, I hadn’t realized it’s called “Port-a-Menorah”; but there it is.

But what I really got a kick out of was the blurb on the back:

Specifically, the product comparison matrix between the traditional menorah and the Port-a-Menorah:

It seems that one of the benefits of this version is that it’s “not a fire hazard.”

But only, apparently, if you don’t set it on fire.

I totally love these Port-a-Menorah people.

What was that flash?

Y’all know what a sucker I am for a flash mob. There’s something about the ephemeral nature of masses of individuals stepping out of a crowd, putting on a bang-up performance of one piece and then melting back into the environment. You truly have to be in the moment to catch it.

The people who started it all for me are the Random Acts of Culture lot and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. You’ll possibly recall their stupendous “Hallelujah Chorus” at the old Wanamaker’s mother ship in Philadelphia.

Well, the one I’m sharing with you today is in an Ikea, which turns out to be a terrific setting for the Papageno-Papagena duet from The Magic Flute.

Seriously—that birdlike popping up from amongst the housewares and faux foliage. Priceless.

Catastrophic failure

Right—time for some holiday glitz. And cats. Can’t have Christmas without tree-related catastrophes.

Seriously—I’ve experienced one or two of these situations, and all I can say is: if you’re putting up a tree in a pwned environment, stock up on spirits. You’ll need every drop.

In the bleak midwinter

The Ardennes is a tricky place—thickly forested with dense brush among the trees. You can’t imagine getting an infantry company through the area, much less a fully-mechanized army, with armor and artillery. But that’s exactly what the Germans did in May, 1940, surprising the daylights out of the French and British, who’d assumed the region essentially defended itself.

The Allies never recovered, and within six weeks, the British had retreated across the Channel, and the French had signed an armistice with the Germans.

In December 1944, the Ardennes again was lightly defended, mostly by American troops, many of whom were brand-new replacements—not combat veterans. Following the debacle at Arnhem in September, Allied dreams of the war being over by Christmas had shattered, but they at least thought they’d get something of a respite, so this sector was not considered at-risk. It was hard enough just staying warm in one of the coldest winters on record, and mostly without winter gear—not even gloves.

A lot of units that had been fighting across France since June had been pulled back from the front lines and the men given leave. Despite being aware that German forces were massing in the area of Aachen, Allied leaders were counting on the perfectly ghastly weather to provide their primary defense against attack. On 16 December, the British popinjay-in-chief Montgomery reported with his usual ex cathedra assurance, “The enemy’s situation is such that he cannot stage major offensive operations.”

But on 16 December (the day Montgomery also put in for Christmas leave to go to England) the Germans poured 200,000 men, including two Panzer armies spearheaded by 1^st SS Panzer Division into the Ardennes, directly at the American line. The overall troops were mixed, including tough veterans and scrapings of the very old and the very young from the Volkssturm. (Many of the numbers were leached from the armies facing the Soviets, thus substantially weakening the defenses in the east.)

Nonetheless, they had the advantage of total surprise (due to the failure of Allied intelligence to correctly interpret what data they did receive, which was less than usual because the Germans maintained strict radio silence), as well as that of facing largely inexperienced American replacements, thinly dispersed across the sector. And then there was the weather, with solid cloud cover rendering aerial reconnaissance impossible.

Plus—Panzers and SS divisions are never anything to be shrugged off.

When I consider the Ardennes campaign (which became known as the Battle of the Bulge because of the salient the Germans drove through the American line), what always stops me is how cold it was for those soldiers. I’m from Los Angeles; I know nothing from cold. Even after living in some seriously cold places, being in freezing weather has always been a matter of going from one warm place to another; not spending hours and days out in blowing snow, much less worrying about enemy infiltration.

I find horrifying the thought of huddling in shallow foxholes or makeshift shelters, being colder than you could ever imagine being and wondering if you’re completely alone in that frozen world, if you’ve been somehow forgotten in the Larger Execution of the War; no hot food, no radio, no TV, no video games, no electric blanket; nothing but snow, ice, mist and misery…

The coldest winter in years, with freezing fog making the world around them invisible. What a nightmare it must have been—to be in a foxhole, already scrabbling for warmth (not even gloves, remember?), just you and a couple of buddies, and suddenly you’re aswarm with assault troops you can’t see until they’re right on you.

Here’s the thing about this battle: while Allied commanders were emerging from their lousy intelligence-induced fugue, trying to assess the true nature of the attack and how to counter it, it was those weary, frightened, half-frozen untested infantrymen, in their twos and fives, who with rifle and grenade refused to give way. In the worst possible circumstances, they held their positions just long enough to scupper Hitler’s grand strategy.

Cut off from resupply, they fired and tossed until they had nothing left, which was just long enough for the generals to settle their whizzing contests and focus on the task at hand. Before Patton or even the 82^nd and 101^st could get there. They held off whatever was thrown at them until the weather broke on the 23^rd and more than 2000 fighter sorties were launched, as well as air drops of food, weapons and ammunition.

In their shivering and hungry twos and sixes and squads and platoons, they delayed tank brigades and shock troops just long enough to totally wreck the plan and leave Hitler’s ability to wage war on either front vastly diminished. He could replace neither the men nor the matériel he’d spent so profligately trying to dislodge those infantrymen.

As you’re preparing for your holiday festivities, perhaps going from one warm place to another, spare a thought to those men who stood their ground, their frozen, isolated ground, with nothing but small arms and grit, to hold off Hitler’s last best hope in the bleak mid-winter 70 years ago.

(Photos from Time-Life.)