Word on the Street

If you need any convincing that the whole stock market concept is whacked, I give you Goldman Sachs.

They reported higher-than expected quarterly earnings by basically lowering analysts’ expectations, so that—even though they did worse than last year at this time—the champagne corks have been popping all up & down Wall Street.

Evidently, selling your investment clients stocks that only make a profit for Sachs, & referring to those clients as Muppets, has been good for business. At least it’s less bad for business than had been anticipated.

Also, firing 3000 employees and cutting the cost of their salaries helped.

Discovery home

Some truly stunning video of the space shuttle Discovery taking a turn around the D.C. mall yesterday on the way to its final landing at Dulles Airport:

I have to say that I actually clapped while watching this. There’s something special about the entire shuttle program, And this graceful pass through the heart of the nation’s capital seems a fitting send-off.

Trials on the York Peninsula

It was 150 years ago this week that the Army of the Potomac was jockeying with the Army of Northern Virginia, in the midst of what would be called the Peninsula Campaign. It was an attempt by General George B. McClellan to “surprise” the Confederates by a flanking attack: going up the York Peninsula to Richmond instead of a frontal movement from Washington, D.C., to the Confederate capital.

There’s a long, seriously shaggy history to this—following the debacle for Federal forces at the first battle of Manassas, McClellan was brought in to, well, to shape up the troops. Think Patton after Kasserine Pass. And he did a good job, getting the men to drill and train, and imbuing them with a sense of being soldiers.

But from Fall 1861 on, Lincoln and the Radical Republicans (with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton taking point) were increasingly agitated that McClellan didn’t seem to want to do anything more with the army than drill and march.

(In a lot of ways he reminds me of Bernard Montgomery—who was happy to commit troops, especially Americans, to battle, but then just couldn’t follow through. I’m thinking Caen and Falaise Gap, here. McClellan was always drilling; Monty always “tidying-up”.)

Eventually he devised the Peninsula strategy—transport the Army of the Potomac to Fort Monroe and move it up the land between the York and James Rivers, take Richmond and end the war.

It was a good idea. Except for a couple of things. One of the was the Army of Northern Virginia; another the terrain of the Peninsula, which was quite marshy. (I remember one description by a Union officer of watching a mule disappear up to its ears. “It was a small mule, but still…”)

Finally, there was McClellan himself. He consistently overestimated the numbers of the opposing troops and did everything in his power to avoid engaging them. If you read any of the correspondence between him and Lincoln & Stanton—it’s all demands for more divisions and dire predictions of catastrophe of Biblical proportions if he didn’t get more men.

(And it won’t do to underestimate the machinations of the Radicals, who, while they did wish for victory, weren’t wild about McClellan being the instrument of it. He’d managed to piss them off pretty thoroughly and yet never understood the consequences of that.)

In short, in my estimation, McClellan could have been given command of the Red Army back in its heyday, but still would have claimed he was facing the People’s Republic of China and moaned that he still needed another six divisions.

Plus, he was getting his intelligence from Allan Pinkerton, who consistently fed his paranoia by providing estimates of Confederate strength that were more than double the reality. So he did indeed think he was facing the PRC.

At any rate, the campaign ran from March through May. Every time McClellan advanced he just couldn’t manage to commit fully. Eventually it petered out and the Army of the Potomac was recalled to defend D.C., which was being menaced.

Perhaps the significant event was the replacement of the wounded Joseph E. Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia by Robert E. Lee.

Down to the sea in black tie...continues

Ah, courtesy of The Pundit's Apprentice, I've received evidence that the Men's Titanic Society is indeed still in existence, and celebrated its annual commemoration as customary on Saturday.

I'm happy to hear this, although I must say that T. Rees Shapiro is nowhere near the writer Ken Ringle was. So I still refer you to his story of 16 years ago.

Down to the sea in black tie

It’s been pretty much all-Titanic, all the time in the media this past week. You can’t flick the cable remote without coming across docus and dramas—they’re re-sinking it, saving it, exploring it, selling it, freeze-drying it and pan-frying it.

There are Titanic museums popping up, and I expect there are many, many Titanic parties and Titanic-menu dinners at restaurants all over; no doubt with titanic price tags. There are even two official Titanic memorial cruises, although why you would want to pay top dollar get into a boat and go to sea emulating a ship known only for the spectacularly systemic failure that prevented it even completing its maiden voyage I really don’t know.

I’ll confess that I’ve never been able to slog through the 1997 feature film—the parts I’ve seen are really laughably heavy-handed; I’m just not a fan of soap opera. Although I grant you that the costumes were pretty top-notch.

(I did see the end. Can I be the only person who wonders why Kate Winslet didn’t have enough breath/strength to yell for the rescuers, but did have enough to swim to another ice floe and then blow a whistle? What’s up with that?)

But still—this is the 100^th anniversary of the event, so I’ll mark it by returning to a story I read back in the last century by my favorite writer on the Washington Post. Ken Ringle reported on a gathering of the Men’s Titanic Society, a group of D.C-based TV (male) news producers who met annually to honor the men of the Titanic.

They dressed in black tie, ate oysters and foie gras, drank Bordeaux and toasted “those brave men”. Then they piled into limos to lay a wreath at the Titanic Memorial (4^th and P Streets, SW), which was erected in 1931 by “the women of America”, but languished in obscurity long since.

Ringle was exactly the writer to tell the story, so just follow the link to it and enjoy.

I can’t find anything about the society today, so I suppose it’s faded out. I’m sure there will be commemorative dinners around, but wonder if any will be as classy as this one.

For those in D.C., though—go to the memorial and drink a little tot. Just because you can.

Pas de Maru, Part 2

Since I’m looking at my taxes in these last days before the deadline, I’m feeling especially strongly that the world is futile, existence meaningless and things in general have a certain, well, je ne sais quoi.

In short, I’m feeling feline and French. So here’s something that encapsulates the essence of ennui:

Je m'excuse, mais...I'll just pour myself un verre and contemplate les jeux de Jerry Lewis.

Beats the hell out of taxes.

Rome fast & loose

I picked up Robert Hughes’ Rome, A Cultural, Visual, & Personal History, because of a book review I read in some publication.

Thank God I picked it up from the library for free, because it’s such a disjointed, tedious and really annoying effort, that I’d have felt cheated even finding it on Amazon at a discount.

First of all—what is up with writing more than 450 pages of text covering more than 3000 years of civic history…and not providing any maps? Not one freakin’ map to document the growth of the city over those millennia.

I had the same complaint about Alistair Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris. But at least Horne didn’t play fast and loose with the actual, you know, history.

And Hughes is just pathetic—as are his editors, apparently. He was principal art critic for Time for years; I'm just wondering where he got to be so sloppy?

My primary examples come early in his narrative as he’s talking about the late Republic and early Empire. He gets names and dates wrong in a big way, changes family relationships and the like.

He makes Tiberius the elder son of Augustus by Livia—which would come as a surprise to his actual father, Tiberius Claudius Nero. (It’s true that Augustus adopted Tiberius, but that’s not what Hughes is saying; he's talking about a blood relationship.)

He claims that Caligula, (r. 37-41 C.E.), built the Tullianum (Mamertine Prison), but then puts the executions of both Jugurtha and Vercingetorix there—stating the latter was beheaded in 46 C.E. The prison dates from the 7^th Century B.C.E. (so, 700 years Before Caligula Emerged), and Vercingetorix was strangled in 46 B.C.E.

(Hughes did get Jugurtha’s death by starvation right, though. And the date. Sort of a nice change.)

I’m not a classicist and yet those things just jump out, and make me wonder what other codswallop he was purveying over the historical periods I really don’t know.

Like “the French Revolution broke out in 1792.” Seriously? Hughes has never heard of Bastille Day?

And, finally—no citing of sources. He’s got a bibliography but apparently neither he nor his editors nor his publisher could be bothered to actually cite the source of his various facts.

Perhaps, given the inaccuracy of those facts, he was just spitballing for the full 450 pages. 

Pachyderm road rage

So, I received this via email last week: guy in the VW is evidently in a hurry & decides to pass the slow-moving elephant. &, as you might imagine, the pachyderm isn’t having it.

Yay, elephant!

But it occurs to me that the sort of guy who tries to pass an elephant on a dirt road in Africa is probably exactly the sort of guy who tries to put himself & two buddies through a self-serve car wash in a shopping cart.

I’m concerned that these people may reproduce. Or vote.

Beam me up

This bit of web weirdness came my way: “daguerreotypes” of Star Trek characters.

Well, of course. Why not?

But a couple of thoughts:

First: Kirk looks like he served in Winston Churchill’s regiment, the 4^th Queen’s Own Hussars:

Although he doesn’t seem to have any campaign medals.

(Okay, I don’t know from Victorian uniforms. But I can see the presence or absence of medals.)

Second—why only the original Star Trek?

Feline eggstravaganza

Since we’ve had Big Cats celebrating for Christmas, I thought there’d be a certain balance to showing them on a Big Cat Easter Egg Hunt. 

Some of the eggs look like they're stuffed with, well, eggs. Others--well, I'm thinking maybe some industrial-strength catnip.