A summer day in France

One hundred years ago today the British Army impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more infantrymen at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation. 

The assault had been planned for months, conceived in part as a means to offer relief for the French at Verdun, a meatgrinder if ever there was one. It was preceded by a week-long artillery barrage; seven days of heavy guns spewing shells that were meant to have destroyed the bulk of the German frontline soldiers, and to have terrorized the survivors.

It failed.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess at châteaux several miles behind the lines.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a decent crop of corn changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. The hard-baked summer ground turned to rivers of mud in autumn rain, and then to frozen wasteland in winter as the casualties mounted by an order of magnitude. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and; wounded.

At Beaumont-Hamel, the Newfoundland Regiment was almost completely wiped out, a catastrophic loss to the province. Even today, as Canadians celebrate Canada Day, to Newfoundlanders, it's Memorial Day.

The province bought 75 acres at the site and preserve it as a memorial to their loss.

Time-travelers from today visiting the trenches and looking up from their mobile devices (on account of no signal) might be astonished to learn that even after the appalling statistics from the Somme and Verdun, the war would continue for 28 more months before the combatant nations finally called a halt to the carnage.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire, and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past hundred years.

Gospel

You know how I feel about promoted tweets, a feeling that (as I’ve reported) is shared by a good portion of the Twitterverse. And given the kind of trolling that annoying people on social media opens you to, I really wonder why some organizations make the decision to pay $0.50 to $2.00 per engagement transaction (favorite, retweet, reply). Especially when most of those replies are nothing but snarking-before-blocking.

For example, this one came into my timeline a while ago:

And just before I hit block, I looked at the replies, most of which heartened me no end. E.g.:

And (my special favorite):

Taking the average price per engagement of $1.35 (which I found, of course, on a blog site), the cost to this organization to shove their product into the faces of people who clearly are not even their ancillary target market was in the range of $2500 (for the likes and retweets, which may well be from their friends and family members). Then they paid another $50 or so for the replies (at time of my viewing).

I suppose that knowing the advertiser had to pay for the trolling is just icing on the cake of what are often the funniest Tweets out there.

Vox populi, vox Twitterati

You might have noticed a good deal of flapdoodle going on about last week’s referendum in the UK to enucleate itself from the European Union, the infamously named Brexit. It was in all the papers. And all the newscasts. And all the social media.

It was accompanied by vast amounts of hysteria, promoted by both the Remain and Leave sides. The former predicted an amorphous but nonetheless inevitable Armageddon if the voters opted to leave, and the latter painted an apocalyptic picture of [white] Britons awash in vast millions of benefits-swilling immigrants and idiotic over-regulation from a remote and Wog-infested bureaucracy in Brussels that does nothing except suck up British pounds at a rate even higher than the immigrants, if the electorate voted to stay.

Viewing this at a distance I actually wondered if the politicians on both sides had possibly got some bad beer, and were suffering from ergotism. And let me just point out that, yes, I get it: it's annoying as hell to be told by a committee of Spaniards and Slovenians that your artisanal pickles must be in a brine comprising a certain percentage of salt. Yippee! You've cocked a snook at the Slovenians. But only if you're expecting your sales to be restricted to the UK. If you want to sell your pickles to anyone in the EU, your brine is still going to have to conform to their standards. Plus: tariffs.

At any rate, the voting public chose 52%-48% to exit the EU last Thursday, with leavers heavily in the rural and over-45 crowd and stayers in the urban and millennial set. (The exception to the age bracket would be ex-pats who’ve retired to Spain. They really, really wanted Britain to remain because: retired in Spain. But those who’d lived out of the country for more than 15 years didn’t get a say. They were incensed and didn’t see the irony at all.)

And here's a disheartening statistic: it's estimated that the 18 to 24-year-old set couldn't even be arsed to, you know, vote. They reckon that only 36% of eligible millennials actually cast a ballot. Shame on you. I can't even—men and women through the centuries have fought and died to establish and maintain the principles of democracy and you sit this out? Spaniards and Slovenians who have living memory of dictatorships must just be agog. Shame on you.

The immediate result was a loss in the value of the GB pound and a drop in the markets. (Including the ones my 401(k) is in; thanks, Brits. But what the hell; I'll just take the $12.49 left and drop it in a Mason jar. Don't worry about me.) Prime Minister David Cameron and a bunch of other politicians of both major parties have also tendered their resignations, but I don’t consider that as catastrophic, on account of they’re pols, and their replacements can hardly be any worse, even if they’re no better. Except for Nigel Farage; he’s as bad as you can get. 

Cameron used the metaphor of needing a different captain to move the ship of state forward. Evidently he woke up on Friday and discovered that the ship he'd launched with such high expectations was the Titanic, so of course he wanted to hand off the helm.

It's neither British nor nautical, but here's another image that comes to mind when thinking of Cameron:

As an aside, I never thought I'd hear myself saying this about a banker, but Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, appears to be the only one in British leadership circles to actually have thought concretely about Leave contingencies. If it weren't for him outlining the Bank's plan for safeguarding the economy, the entire world would be swirling the drain. The man definitely earned his bonus for the year.

(A lot of the blame for this situation must be laid at Cameron’s door, because he set up the referendum as a campaign promise a couple of years ago and then found himself painted into the corner of having to actually, you know, call it. He’s now trying to delay moving the process forward, I suppose in hopes that a deus ex machina will appear and fix everything. But the leaders of EU member nations appear to be in agreement on one thing: that sooner is better than later when it comes to easing the turmoil Britain has caused. They’re very politely informing the UK that, since it’s served notice of intent to divorce, it really ought to move its clobber out of the marital house. They’re even holding open the door so it doesn’t hit the British butt on the way out.)

What also happened, rather to my surprise, was a great wave of dismay from a number of people who’d voted to leave, along with a huge spike in Google queries on “What’s the EU?” The sentiments gathered by the media are variants of:

“Wait—what?”

“I never thought my vote would count!”

“Nooo, I was just voting to protest [insert despicable institution name here].”

All of them basically saying that, whatever their intent in ticking the Leave box, they certainly never expected there to be negative consequences, especially the kind of thing that might affect their economic status as individuals or a country.

Additionally, they are oddly pissed off that Scotland, which less than two years ago, held a splitting-up referendum of its own and only chose to remain in the United Kingdom in part because of the membership-in-EU guarantees given them, is now making noises about revisiting the possibility of breaking up the band. Like you couldn’t see that coming? Really?

There has also been an equally surprising surge in demands for a do-over: the folks who are unhappy about the negative consequences (whether they voted to leave or remain) are circulating petitions for a new referendum—same as the one last week, only they just get to vote differently. I don’t know who’s going to ‘splain it to them that democracy doesn’t work that way. (Actually, nothing outside of grade-school sports really works that way, that I can think of.)

Iacta alea est, guys. You chose the door; you have to take whatever prize is behind it. Yes, the referendum was advisory, not a mandate, but how on earth could Parliament override the voice of the people without rightfully being called dictatorial? And anyway, if they'd had a spine they'd never have allowed things to get this far.

Anyhow, the reason I’m even writing about this is because my pal Twitter rose to the occasion, and over the weekend there was a trend on #BrexitIn5Words. I present to you a sampling.

This one references one of the pillars of the Leave campaign: that if the UK pulled out of EU, the money that previously went into the sinkhole in Brussels could instead be invested in the NHS, which is truly in parlous state. (And which, BTW, benefits from immigrants who work in every layer of healthcare from surgeons to hospital cleaners.) On Friday—and I am not making this up—the Leave leaders disavowed having ever tossed around that prospect. Quelle surprise.

I’ll confess that it can be amusing to watch politicians in the same party basically try to cannibalize one another.

A view from our side of the Pond, in case anyone here wants to get complacent and smug.

Pretty much nails it.

Since I don’t watch GoT, I’m not sure what this means, but I’m guessing it’s not complimentary, and not just about unfortunate hair.

Because you knew that sooner or later it was going to be Obama’s fault.

While Darth Putin is a parody account, I’m betting the comment is not far from the truth.

Yeah, pretty much.

And, in the end, no matter how you voted, for whatever reason, or however pissed off you are now, you really have to pull up your socks and make the best of it. If only to get Twitter off your back.

Okay, one more thing. My contribution to #BrexitIn5Words: You're drunk, Britain. Go home.

Good dog!

Well, alrighty then: those madcap folks at Google parent company Alphabet’s subsidiary Boston Dynamics have given us a robotic dog that can clean your house and bring you a beer.

You may recall the robot dogs marketed by Sony back at the turn of the century. The Aibo had an AI component that enabled it to learn at least as well as your average Labrador puppy. The company discontinued the “breed” about ten years ago, and stopped product support and repairs in 2014.

Boston Dynamic’s SpotMini is smaller than its elder brothers, and while not as cute as Aibo, it’s not without a certain charm. Perhaps it’s the hand-puppet maw of the arm that performs various tasks. You’ll want to watch this video all the way to the end, even beyond the copyright notice.

No idea what the cost might be. But one question you might want to ask is: is it housebroken, or will it leave little batteries all over the place?

Gratitude Monday: Almost accurate

I got a surprise Friday morning—aside from that Brexit thing, which was unpleasantly gobsmacking in its shortsightedness. Friends had tickets for a performance by Second City at the Kennedy Center for that night’s performance. One of the had to work; did I want to go see it?

Well, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of improv, but opportunities like that don’t ordinarily drop out of the sky. So I said sure. It made for kind of a long day, since I get into work extra early during periods when the Metro’s Blue Line is buggered. But it was great catching up with my friend, and the performance, “Second City’s Almost Accurate Guide to America”, turned out to be exceptionally funny.

Well—I was a teensy bit surprised that the political skewering vastly favored the liberal viewpoint, but perhaps conservatives don’t go to the Kennedy Center? (The other performance was Kinky Boots; I’m guessing that the butts in those seats weren’t Republican ones, either.) Or perhaps they dislike improv more than I do?

I’m also not sure that the fiberglass wig worn by the guy playing Trump isn’t a fire hazard. But the fiberglass wig worn by the real guy playing Trump looks like a fire hazard, and he gets all kinds of gigs, so that may not be an issue with OSHA.

But as it turns out, the improv bits were minimal, and not at all painful to me. And, as I said, it was very, very funny, with one interlude that captured the battlefield experience of America’s wars for the past 50 years. That was not at all funny, because it was so accurate.

I also loved the consciousness-raising of Dolly Madison.

So today I’m grateful for a lovely evening to finish out the week, a very nice surprise, and friends who roped me into it.

What a gas

In discussing promoted tweets, which are the SoMe iteration of display advertising, I have to say that sometimes I just wonder what large corporations and their expensive ad agencies were thinking.

Or smoking.

For example:

And now for a word...

There’s no escaping the promoted tweet these days, so on my way to blocking everyone who sticks one of their annoying ads into my timeline, I occasionally check to see what kind of responses they’re eliciting.

So when I saw this one asking people for “feedback”, I knew that the response probably wouldn’t be useful for concept validation:

And I have to say that it was pretty funny to me to see this promo:

Because the first thing I did was block the account.

Moving on

As long as we’re on the topic of obscenely-priced real estate, let’s step back momentarily to the Valley They Call Silicon.

When I gave notice last November to the property manager of the condo I’d been renting, she contacted the owner, who said that she was planning to continue to rent out the place. I thought it was a bit strange, as the owner had moved to Boston, and in the five years I’d been living there, prices in the condo complex had nearly doubled. You’d think she’d want to be shed of it.

(When I moved in in 2011, two bedroom units were going for around $400,000-$450,000; by 2016 they were fetching upwards of $800,000.)

Well, just for ducks, a couple of months ago I looked up the address and blow me if it hadn’t been sold after all. For $795,000. Which is kind of a steal for the area, given its proximity to Apple’s new headquarters. My landlady and her husband bought the condo in 2007 for $575,000 ($100,000 more than the previous purchase price in 2004), so they only made a couple hundred thousand on it.

I love the sales pitch in the listing:

“Stunning penthouse condo w/ soaring ceilings & lots of natural light! Remodeled kitchen w/ Staron Tempest counters, ample cabinets, stainless steel appliances including a wine fridge. Spacious living room w/ high ceiling, wood burning fireplace and glass doors to the sunny patio. Separate dining area w/ laminate flooring. Spacious master w/ high ceiling & large closet w/ mirrored doors. Huge master bath w/ shower over tub w/ glass door & dual sinks w/ spacious vanity. Second bedroom w/ plush carpeting & walk in closet. Upstairs loft perfect for home office or family room area w/ high ceiling. Second full bath with stall shower & glass door. Full size washer/dryer and laundry area. 2 detached single car garages w/ storage. Convenient location near shopping, commute locations & restaurants.”

I love the way a third-floor walk-up is described as a penthouse. The dining area isn’t so much “separate” as it is “on the path between the entryway and the door to the master bedroom”. And the walk-in closet in the second bedroom is the most useless thing I’ve ever seen. It’s “walk-in” in the sense that you can open the door and step in, but it’s a wedge-shaped space that makes hanging anything with any expectation of finding it again kind of a non-starter.

I understand why they have it there, and why they label it a closet: in order to call a space a “bedroom”, it has to have a window and a closet. But seriously…

Yes, there’s a wood-burning fireplace. But who’s going to schlep logs up to the third floor? On the five days in the year when it’s not a Spare the Air day in the Bay Area? (I did, however, make a lot of use of the marble fireplace surround to plan projects with yellow stickies, which I could see in perspective and move around as necessary.)

I also don’t understand the attraction of cathedral ceilings, expensive to heat and cool without being able to, you know, live in the area. They also make it impossible to change the batteries in the smoke detectors that legally have to be set at the highest point. (The property manager had to hire maintenance workers to do that, because the job requires an extension ladder, which necessitates two people. She wasn't happy about that, but when I signed the lease I told them I wasn't doing anything that required a ladder.) And the loft was more unlivable space, on account of it being utterly stifling in the summer, and affording no privacy from the main room. So—the appearance of value without the substance.

As for the “two detached single-car garages”, unless one of your cars is the size of a Mini, only one of them is usable for parking your vehicles due to the placement of the garages and the design of the turn space. (I used the second garage for storage.) And because you technically have the mandatory assigned parking spaces in those garages, you cannot use any of the visitor spots in the parking lot. (Parking violations are rigorously dealt with.) And there’s no street parking for a couple of blocks in either direction. So you’re stuffed.

It also lists “HOA Amenities: Community Pool, Sauna/Spa/Hot Tub”, although prospective buyers would find out pretty fast that there’s no sauna. But in addition to the mortgage they’re on the hook for HOA fees of $421/month.

On the plus side, the flat is indeed bright, and I miss that side-by-size refrigerator and the full-size dishwasher. (Although the new owners are probably realizing that the latter is a little temperamental in terms of when it wants to work.) I also miss having up-to-date wiring, with AFCIs in bathrooms and kitchen, and a circuit breaker box that’s not illegally blocked by a refrigerator that was obviously designed for people who don’t need access to food.

I note that the unit was staged for the sale, and I bet the guys hauling all those tables, chairs, beds and sofa up the two flights of stairs bitched with every step. And repeated it when they hauled it all back down.

I reckon the new owners have discovered the joys of traffic noises, and of living half a block from the fire station in one direction and El Camino Real in the other. And of the construction of a five-story Hampton Inn across the street. And the really crabby guy who lives just below them, and the guy on the ground floor who sits outside to smoke his cigars.

But still—it was a great place to live for me, and I hope it is for them, too.

Property values

One of the things I liked about walking around the Valley They Call Silicon was monitoring real estate prices. You’d see a For Sale sign go up, note the million-dollar price tag, and then the next day (or, generally at most, the next couple of days) you’d see the triumphant SOLD placard.

Almost always the purchase price would be more than the asking price.

Almost never did you see the dreaded “Price Reduced” addition. That inevitably denoted a complete pesthole like this one.

Well, I was walking around the town of Vienna (Virginia) at the weekend and came across this rather sad sign:

Almost as though owner-agent Terry Douglas just couldn’t bear to put that notification that all her high hopes have been dashed.

Here’s the domicile in question, a palais de pretension (yes, I made that up that franglais expression) if ever I’ve seen one:

It turns out that, after four months on the market, Terry has lowered the price (“huge reduction”, according to the online listing) by $30,000. To $1,569,000.

Yeah, okay, it’s 6000 square feet. With hardwood floors. And really astonishingly ugly cabinetry in the 4.5 bathrooms and the kitchen.

But what I find interesting that the listing shows it as having been built in 2015, and the last sale of the property was 1 July 2014, at $620,000.

Which means that the last sale was of the house that formerly occupied the property, which was then demolished to make way for this ludicrous monstrosity. And, in fact, one of the online listings shows the previous structure, with a surprisingly frank description:

It’s definitely unprepossessing, but I’m not sure that the new house is all that much of an improvement. And apparently househunters agree with me.

Gratitude Monday: Corridors of power

By a stroke of great good fortune, last week I was able to walk a couple of miles through the corridors of the Pentagon, guided by someone who’s worked there for 20 years. For a military historian and an American, it was a very interesting experience. Prior to this, I’ve only seen it as I drove past.

It was one of those summer afternoons when both temperature and humidity are in the 80s; quintessential DC, so I arrived at the visitors entrance somewhat non compos. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that security would include stepping through a metal detector and having your bags scanned. Because it did, in spades.

(I was okay with showing the photo ID, but not wild about having to key in my SSN. Two separate times. I don’t know what foreign nationals have to do.)

Seriously, you peel down to the layer of clothes that keep you decent in public; everything else goes through this very sensitive scanner. I warned them that my bag contains a Swiss Army Knife, but since the blade is under the 2½” maximum, it was okay. Watch went in the bin, and my pedometer after one of the guards spotted it before I stepped through the metal detector; I forget I’m wearing it.

What was interesting was that the security person hand-searched the bag because there were two metal items she couldn’t identify, a silver pin and a metal-backed mirror.

As you can see, the items in question are small. But the security staff are thorough.

There are no pix of my visit because no photographs are allowed. Which is fine, although I really, really wanted to shoot one of the spokes that cut through the five rings because of the repeating pattern, almost cloister-like. But rules is rules, and it was just amazing being there at all.

Here are a couple of highlights of my visit: there’s a memorial chapel at the exact spot where Flight 11 struck the side of the building on September 11^th 2001. There is blast-proof glass that allows you to look out onto the memorial garden, a list of names of the victims and a memorial book.

The courtyard at the center of the Pentagon is about the size of a small city park, with lawn, picnic tables and trees, including very mature hollies and magnolias. In the relatively small enclosed space, with the heat and humidity and the magnolias beginning their seasonal bloom, the scent of the flowers just about filled the air. It was the strongest I’ve ever experienced, in all my years on the fringes of the South.

My friend took me up and down stairs, past the shrine of the Air Force Purple Water Fountain, a whole lot of agencies and directorates, displays dedicated to conflicts and commanders in our nation’s history, a wall of quilts, and a whole lot of other things. I put a good couple of miles on my pedometer that afternoon, and we didn’t cover but a part of the place.

Here’s something else I noticed: in addition to the scores of uniformed personnel and be-suited civilians, there were also many, many people carrying out the tasks that support whatever activities take place in that largest office building in the world. Maintenance staff, cleaners, folks transporting supplies and equipment, baristas, security personnel at the visitors’ entrance. I thought about the kind of clearance process they’d have to go through to get those jobs, and I wondered if the people who plan and direct combat operations around the world notice them, or think about how they smooth the way for their world-changing work.

Today I’m grateful I had the opportunity to see this amazing place at work. And I’m grateful to the people who suit up every day (whether it’s dungarees or dress blues) to go to work there.

And whenever I encounter the scent of magnolias, I’m going to think of this nexus of military might. That’s America for you.