Slinging...manure

Yes, okay, I sometimes shop at Whole Foods. Shoot me, if you want; as long as it’s a clean kill…

However, you find very interesting things there.

Earlier this summer, for example, there was this pile of, you know, manure in front of the entrance to the produce section. No, no—it was in bags, but look:

Well, you know it got me asking questions.

Such as: if Bob has a best manure, does that also mean he has some that’s just, you know, marginally good? What would that be like? How would you tell the difference?

What about Bob’s worst manure?

I posted the picture on Facebook, and immediately there were more questions.

LQ: “Yeah, but is it vegan?”

Well, I certainly hope so, because…Whole Foods. If it turned out that their manure had hormones or antibiotics in it, quelle scandale!

But wait—there’s more.

JB: “Organic? Fair trade? Steroid free? Sustainably raised? Free range?”

Yep—all legitimate queries when it comes to Whole Foods bullshit.

Someone posited that it probably costs $19.99 a bag, so I went back to the store to check on that. Interestingly, there were no price signs on the manure, and the two guys working that area didn’t know, although they thought it was “maybe $15-16, something like that.”

Moreover, the guy in customer service not only had no idea, but apparently he could not look it up in a computer: he called the produce guys, who gave him the same “$15-$16” estimate. They said they were making signs right then.

Well, a few days later I went back again, and this time there were prices:

They called it compost, but it was the manure. And of course they sourced it, so you shouldn’t mistake this for Bob’s Best from, say, Fresno or Pacoima. Or, horrors, Des Moines. And—massive relief all around—it is organic I suppose $6.99 is not outrageous, but it’s been a while since I’ve needed to amend soil.

One more thing—“Free-Range Manure” would make a great rock band name.

Laughingstock

You know, just when you think you have reached the absolute pinnacle of male politicians shoving their trotters into their snouts with respect to “women’s place”, you discover that you’re only at the base camp, and you have another 1300 meters to go.

But then you realize that social media are hauling out their boots, slacklines and carabiners to get to the summit and bitchslap the medieval moron who’s mouthing off.

This week that would be Turkish deputy prime minister Bülent Arinç, who on Monday announced that women should be banned from laughing in public. Virtuous women, he said, do not do that.

(He also thinks they shouldn’t be using mobile phones because they’re only gossiping with one another. As opposed to the important stuff men talk about on the run, like Monday-morning quarterbacking, the tits on that girl in marketing and—in the case of Turks—how much money can they extort from the EU before they actually have to deliver on things like human rights.)

Well, obviously, where Arinç lives in the 7^th Century, they have not yet invented Twitter or Instagram, and they don’t understand the concept of “viral”. I’m trying to think of what the Virtuous-Woman equivalent of shitstorm would be, because that’s what happened over the past few days. Women have been posting pictures of themselves laughing like there’s a global pandemic of the tickles—first Turkish women, then women all over. The hashtags are #kahkaha (“laughter” in Turkish”), #direnkahkaha (“resist laughter”) and #direnkadin (“resist woman”).

Here’s the thing—even if I didn’t know why these photos were showing up, I’d still be retweeting them, because every single one of these women just makes you want to join in the laughter. They are beautiful, and joyful, and inviting.

Don’t believe me? How about

  

Or

Or

 

Or

Or

Or

Listen—there are hundreds out there. Search on one of the hashtags. You’ll feel better, whatever your status when you started.

And you go, girls!.

The Crater

By July of 1864, the Union and Confederate armies had settled into stagnant lines around the railhead of Petersburg, about 30 miles south of Richmond. In an attempt to break the stalemate, a plan was developed to tunnel under the Army of Northern Virginia, detonate a mine and exploit the resulting hole in the line and confusion among the defenders. The idea was that a break-through would enable them to pour enough troops through to drive on to Petersburg. And taking Petersburg would cut Richmond’s lines of communications.

Well, that was the idea, although George G. Meade, CG of the Army of the Potomac, and Ulysses Grant, general-in-chief, didn’t rate it much. The miners, from the 4^th Pennsylvania began digging the shaft in late June, but they were operating under the handicaps of improvised supports and tools.

Our old pal Ambrose Burnside, now a mere corps commander, had allocated a division of African-American troops, who were trained pretty well by the standards of the day for their part in the operation. However, on the day before the attack, Meade (who lacked confidence in black men’s combat capabilities) ordered Burnside to use white troops, who had had no training, and weren’t even given clear objectives and expectations by their commander. Who, as it turns out, was both drunk and way behind the lines when the battle commenced.

On 30 July, the mine was detonated after some initial problems, blowing a 200-foot crater in the Rebel line. (The materials for the explosives were as defective as everything else given the 4^th Pennsylvania.) Nearly 280 Confederate soldiers were killed in the initial explosion, and their comrades were rendered stupefied for some minutes.

But so were the attacking troops, who had no notion of what they were supposed to be doing, much less how they should be doing it. They actually rushed into the crater left by the explosion, thinking to take cover there. Instead they were the fish in a rain barrel, being decimated by Confederate fire. 

Only now did Burnside send in the black troops, but they were going into a meat grinder and they, too, were cut down. Many of them were bayoneted after surrendering; it was a dangerous business, being a black man in the Union Army.

The end result was 3800 Union casualties (including 504 dead) and 1500 Confederate (with 361 killed).

Oh—and no change in the lines around Petersburg. The two armies would face each other over the rest of the summer, fall, winter and early spring of 1865.

Which exit?

This story came around recently—about the motel in New Jersey where a body lay undiscovered and undisturbed for five years… Pretty gripping, really, and a testament to the power of Febreze.

Sadly, it’s a hoax, people. Although I admit that the New Jersey setting gave it quite the weight of verisimilitude.

Apparently I need to file Empire News along with The Onion when it comes to weird Internet stuff. The challenge, as always, is that even though these sites make up their “news”, I’m pretty sure that somewhere, somehow, everything they write about is in fact happening in some form or another.

Especially in New Jersey.

Danse macabre

One month after Bosnian Serbs murdered the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo, Austria got around to declaring war on Serbia, 100 years ago today.

As I’ve mentioned, there was this convoluted Gordian Knot of alliances and expectations from the major powers of Europe and Serbia, with no country looking past the nose of its own interests to consider in any meaningful way what the hell they were putting into motion.

(Kind of like what we’re seeing right now in a couple of hotspots in Europe and the Middle East.)

During this 30-day period there was a whole lot of diplomatic back-channel consultation between Austria-Hungary and Germany, and between Russia and Serbia and Russia and France, with the British kind of flapping about in the background hoping everyone would just calm down.

There were a couple of places where an individual country might have thrown enough cold water on another to possibly engender some reconsideration. Primarily if Britain had made it extremely clear to Germany that she would indeed go to war if there was a violation of Belgian sovereignty; or if Germany had made even the most cursory reality check to Austria’s war-making capabilities.

But those moments were lost, and on 28 July, 1914 the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia. Russia began partial mobilization (against Austria) the next day, but after Kaiser Wilhelm II warned his cousin Tsar Nicholas II that Germany wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing, Nicholas ordered general mobilization, to include facing Germany.

And there they were. The Germans began preparing to implement their strategy for a two-front war, which depended upon invading Belgium to give France a knock-out blow and…

Well, you know. No short, localized, profitable war could come out of that mess.

Gratitude Monday: I get by...

I checked my mail this morning and found a package of CDs sent by a friend in Virginia. Seeing it in my mailbox made me cry a little, because the gift was such a kindness and because it could not have come at a time when I could use a bit of that any more than I do at the moment.

I have not been looking forward to this week, for a lot of reasons, mostly to do with unpleasant tasks and uncomfortable realities that I cannot turn away from any longer. Oh—and enough fear and loathing to keep Hunter S. Thompson in pharmaceuticals for at least16 months.

The CDs are theme music from some classic western films, the Band of the Royal Irish Regiment and a Tannahill Weavers disc. The range should just about cover whatever crap I have to deal with this week, and if I factor in just the wee splash of single malt to look forward to on Friday I just might make it through the next few days.

As the man said, with a little help from my friends. For whom I am grateful every day.