Verse for the best

April is National Poetry Month. I did not know this.

And today is Poem in your Pocket Day. Which I also did not know. But I fully support the concept.

Really—no purchase necessary. Write, download, type, draw a poem on a piece of paper. Put it in your pocket. Then share with colleagues, friends, family, people in the supermarket checkout line, etc.

This is apparently a very Big Event in Charlottesville, Virginia. Which is to be expected from the home of Mr. Jefferson's Academic Institution. Go, Wahoos!

I realize I’m getting this to you on the day, but not to worry—it doesn’t take but a minute to recall, research, write or ask someone for a much-loved poem. You can even post one to your FaceBook page.

Anything that gets people talking or thinking about verse.

Here’s one of my very most all-time favorites, from e.e. cummings:

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn't believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

What’s yours?

It's a goose/gander thing

I was interested in Peggy Noonan’s latest philippic about how (American) society is going straight to hell, not passing GO and not collecting $200.

Don’t get me wrong—I agree that beating tourists, mass thievery and, frankly, any participation in prostitution is not a good thing. And posting videos about it is even worse.

As for that whole GSA thing—well, words fail me.

But what I find interesting is that Noonan is apparently not shocked, utterly shocked to find that Wal-Mart de México not only paid millions in bribes to do business with one of our biggest trading partners, but when the corporate HQ became aware of it they devoted all their effort to sweeping it under the serape.

How come Noonan hasn’t said there’s something wrong with that picture?

Or, for that matter—why isn’t she excoriating Bank of America, Goldman Sachs or any of the other corporate criminals whose actions have brought the world economy to its knees and ruined the lives of tens of millions?

If, as determined by the Supreme Court, corporations are people, shouldn’t they be held to some level of standards of character too?

Peg? Hello?

Magic Kingdom beans

Well, the wicked stepmothers, evil lions & wearers of puppy fur must be dancing in the Main Streets today, for they and all the Dark Side have triumphed at the Magic Kingdom.

Yes, Starbuck’s is invading the Disney ecosystem, starting with California Adventure in June. According to the Disney Parks blog the beachhead will be on Buena Vista Street, “a place that transports guests to 1920s Los Angeles, when Walt Disney arrived in California and a cup of coffee was the perfect way to jumpstart a busy day.”

Well, fine; but I’m guessing the 1920s cup of coffee was considerably different from what the Fiddler, Fifer and Practical Café (I swear I’m not making that name up) will serve. Not to mention that your venti triple-shot caramel macchiato will cost about 500 times more than the one penny price of a cup of joe 90 years ago.

But what I’m really wondering is: do the little princesses and midget Davy Crocketts really need one more source for a sugar high in that environment? Are they not already wound up tighter than a cheap watch (well, a cheap watch from the 1920s, when you had to wind one up) and ready to pitch wobblies at the least provocation? Do they really need "jumpstarting"?

No, I just cannot think that Mickey and Minnie are sleeping well these days.

Around town

Okay, here are a couple of things—unrelated (I think), except that they fall into the category of what-the-hell-are-these-people-thinking.

First, the past few times I’ve been driving around the Valley and heard the sirens of emergency vehicles, I’ve ascertained what direction they’re coming from and if they’re on the same street as I, headed in either direction (assuming it’s not a divided road), I put on my right indicator, pull over to the right and come to a stop. Like always.

Whereupon, like as not, some buffoon in a Lexus, BMW or SUV swerves around me and keeps on going—as though I were somehow behaving completely unexpectedly.

Is that make-way-for-fire-engines-ambulances-and-cops thing no longer the rule? It was in the California DMV regs when I took my test less than two years ago. Has it been repealed? Or is there an exemption for the Head Up But (HUB) driver?

The other thing I’ve noticed is people bringing bottled water into church services. What’s up with that? You can’t go 60 minutes without rehydrating? (And for the one today who came in late—you can’t go 50 minutes?)

What’s coming down the road—cups of latte and blueberry scones?

Signs of the times 3

As you may know, the real estate market in the Bay Area is…well, it’s insanely expensive if you’re looking to buy, although evidently prices have fallen in the past three years. But For Sale signs don’t stay up for long (mostly), unless—I suppose—the place is a total horror.

But here’s something I’ve never seen anywhere else: not just For Sale signs, but “Coming Soon” signs. To wit:

& another:

I’m not even sure what this means—the house is a total horror inside & they’re not actually showing it yet until it’s fumigated & painted? It’s part of an estate & the heirs can’t agree on an asking price? The stager is backed up? The photographs for the flyer aren’t ready?

Finally: has anyone seen this sort of thing in other states?

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.