Nordic raids

I caught a kind of a range war on Twitter as it was whizzing past my feed, when one of the people I follow volunteered to be part of a Viking sperm bank. Ish.

So I clicked on the conversation and discovered a war of wits between Sweden and Denmark, with both combatants equally well armed.

You might have thought that the official Twitter accounts of two upright and responsible modern nations would limit themselves to touting tourism and engaging in the occasional damage control for pols going off the rails.

But take a look at Sweden’s account:

You know something’s up.

(Well, I do wonder how the moose masters a keyboard with hoofs, especially if it’s using a smartphone. But perhaps it just dictates its bons mots? After all, Bronx Zoo's Cobra manages pretty well without any appendages at all.)

At any rate, here are a couple of my favorite points in the exchange:

And the one that brought in the berserker I follow:

I definitely have to go to these countries. As long as they don’t make me eat lutefisk.

Riding the rails

The Metrorail system in the DC area is undergoing a year’s worth of repairs to its infrastructure, which they call SafeTrack. (On account of they’re hoping to get the tracks in good enough condition that they stop setting trains on fire and killing passengers.) This involves periodic cutting or choking of services along different lines, which they are unaccountably referring to as “surge” times. And no matter where, exactly, the break or single-tracking actually occurs, there’s a knock-on effect throughout the system.

The past two weeks there was no service between Eastern Market and Minnesota Avenue in the District, a stretch of track shared by three lines, Orange, Silver and Blue. Metro management therefore decided that they would only run Blue Line trains between Alexandria and Arlington National Cemetery, not into the District. That meant that the only rail option for residents of Alexandria and South Arlington was the Yellow Line. And Metro increased neither the number of trains they ran nor the number of cars per train, because: Metro.

(It also meant that if you wanted to get to Arlington National Cemetery, normally accomplished fairly easily on the BL, you had a rather convoluted journey. Unless you were coming from Alexandria or South Arlington, whatever line you started on you had to transfer to a YL train, get off at Pentagon, then get on a BL train and go one stop more.)

The surge this week involves complete closure of YL and BL service between Braddock Road in Alexandria and National Airport. (And next week they’ll shut down the lines between National Airport and Pentagon City.) Metro purports to have free shuttle buses taking passengers across that gap, but let me just suggest the image to you of a Chinese fire drill.

Once again, they are not running trains more frequently; they’ve just begged people to find alternatives to riding Metro. And the commute home yesterday was quite the slice. L’Enfant Plaza, the last transfer point in the District for Virginia-bound YL trains, looked a little like a war zone; apparently an earlier train had broken down, with the predictable knock-on chaos and sense of despair. This isn’t actual footage of the station, but it could be:

And you know it’s bad when your train driver gets on the PA system to tell the passengers, “Yes, things aren’t working as well as people thought they would. Yesterday I was driving a train that broke down, too.”

Possibly UNLAWFUL

Considering the commoditization of professional work in technical fields, with geography-challenged recruiters scurrying about in a numbers chase to fill positions in tech giants regardless of the requirements of the hiring company and the qualifications of the candidates (their one standard for success is filling the highest number of positions at the lowest possible hourly rate—to the worker), it should not surprise you that I’m still getting spam from bodyshops touting “great opportunity” for jobs I cannot do in parts of the country where I am not located.

What these emails very often lack (in addition to standard English usage) is—as per the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003—is a clearly-visible means of getting off their spam list. These guys are strictly playing a numbers game; they must think that—regardless of how often they send completely irrelevant “opportunities” to a candidate—sooner or later something will stick. That would be all they care about.

It’s like people who use dynamite to catch fish.

You come to expect that from the approximately 173,466 IT-recruitment companies in South Asia, but it’s very interesting when you get that from a company in the low three-digits of the Fortune 500 ranking. Viz.:

You’ll notice all the legal strictures on the victim to the effect that if you’re not the party to whom they are speaking, you must delete it from your email, shred any hard copy and erase your brain. Taking any other course is STRICTLY PROHIBITED and may even be UNLAWFUL.

No mention whatsoever of a way to unsubscribe from their PRIVILEGED, CONFIDENTIAL, possibly COPYRIGHTED and definitely UNWANTED email list. And I’ve consequently received many such solicitations from them.

Let me reiterate, this isn’t some Bangalore bodyshop, it’s a division of a company that claims $19 billion in 2015 global revenues and touts its position on the Ethisphere Institute’s “prestigious list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies”.

Apparently one of the world’s most ethical companies doesn’t give a toss about obeying Federal law.

Old Outlook

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not enchanted by Windows 10, or its Office365 iteration. I disliked it when I first experienced it and it has not improved in the intervening months.

One of its more annoying proclivities is forcibly pushing you into “optimizing” your experience—for example, every time I go to save a file it defaults to Microsoft’s cloud storage site, OneDrive. And for all it attempts to appear to have the coolness of a web app, it never freaking learns that I’m never going to save to OneDrive.

There’s also the “because we’re Microsoft” approach to mandatory updates, along with the periodic reboot of your PC. I really do not like software that makes the user continually adapt to it instead of the other way around.

As for the updates, here’s their idea of something worth calling your attention to when the machine reboots and you reopen the software:

I’d so much prefer to have an interface that clearly distinguishes email threads than a calendar in Persian.

Gratitude Monday: The air of independence

In this exceptionally ugly and moronic presidential election year, I feel like a fish out of water. Not in the sense of a cute plot device for a movie starring Tom Hanks, but in the sense that I am up to my gills in the toxic output of candidates and their followers all up and down the food chain, and I’m gasping for some air that’s actually capable of getting oxygen to my blood. So let’s focus on something good about America.

Know what I love about Independence Day?

Well, naturally I love revisiting the Declaration of Independence, that exquisitely beautiful document that sets out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

And I love the notion of the Founding Fathers weighing all their options and agreeing that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Well, damn—can’t see that happening in any political body around the world today. Can you? Certainly the onliest pledges our pols care about are the campaign contribution variety. And they no more possess honor of any stripe than they possess the ability to squirt cider out of their ears.

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally imagine is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, a lot of stuff has been happening in the past decade, in all three of the branches of government. And the evil that men do does indeed live after their terms in office or on the bench. But I have to believe that this is more of a cha-cha than a straightforward and inexorable march in any direction. Those Founding Fathers, man—they had soul.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals or the corporations; those were the days, huh?) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can.

And I’m grateful that we’ve made it this far, despite all the missteps along the way.

High-water mark of the Confederacy

The first day of the Somme, bloodiest day in British military history, commenced a mere 53 years after another watershed battle, the bloodiest in the history of the United States. July seems to attract cataclysms.

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of reasons.

For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for example.)

Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of people pause to think.

And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making that happen.

Well, except he was operating under a couple of handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from his performance at the first battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was a grievous loss.

The second drawback was that his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.

Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B. McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.

The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were there.

To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on 2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2^nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3^rd, resulting in utter carnage.

(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29^th Infantry Division took those steps.)

After three days of this, the armies faced each other in heavy rain on the 4^th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it) was able to return to Virginia and regroup.

Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. Not this time. At Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”

Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.

But the war would continue for another 22 months, with Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Gettysburg was the tipping point, 153 years ago today.