Summer madness

Well, I think the Wall Street Journal has lost its editorial mind; this opinion piece likens the box-office hero of the summer to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Evidently Bush is a superhero in everything but the cape & rubber suit (which is an image I fervently hope to erase from my cortex).

This Klavan character goes on to whinge about those liberal meanies who don’t get that we’re on a crusade against the infidels. Or that everything Bush does is ordained by God (as opposed to Cheney, KBR & Standard Oil). Because, like Batman, he’s a True Believer.

Well, as my box-office hero was wont to remark, “Everybody has to believe in something…I believe I’ll have another drink.”

Stick that in your teetotal leotard, W.

Something to look forward to

Interesting story in yesterday’s WSJ about The Greatest Generation taking up “cane fighting”, AKA “cane fu”.

Just reading the opening grafs I flashed back to one summer when I was taking a course in writing healthcare materials for low literacy levels. It was held at a small (somewhat stark) college near Portland, Maine, which was also hosting a high school football camp and some Elder Hostel activities.

All three groups shared the cafeteria facilities for breakfast and lunch. (Come dinner time I bolted to nearby boîtes for seafood and white wine.) Now, the beefed up tackles and halfbacks were boisterous, but generally well-behaved.

But God help you if you got between one of the Elder Hostiles and his bran flakes. They had no compunction whatsoever about shoving you out of the way.

I shudder to think what that experience would be like if they’d known about this form of exercise.

For the record, I do not own a cane. However I do possess a blackthorn walking stick, given me by a gentleman caller on the occasion of my graduation from college. He’s a Sherlockian, and the stick is similar to that carried by Dr. James Mortimer in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Being a stick there’s no hook, but that is one solid piece of hardwood, and I assure you that were I to crack someone’s head he’d be well and truly bopped.

Just sayin’...

Yo, ho, ho

Eric Felten, who has pretty much the best job on the Wall Street Journal, gets paid to write about booze. Wine is taken care of by another column (husband/wife team of Dorothy L. Gaiter and John Brecher); Felten concentrates on cocktails and spirits.

It’s not just mixology. In addition to one or more recipes for a drink, Felten delves into history, putting specific beverages or alcohols into a sociological context. By the time he’s done with most columns, you feel almost morally obliged to go out and try the libation du jour.

This week he takes on rum, specifically white rum. After a brief anecdote about George Washington, Felten dives into a taste comparison of nine different white rums. This includes three “boutique rums” from Martinique.

(Historical note of my own: at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the victorious British could have chosen Martinique and other sugar-producing islands in the West Indies as spoils of war. Sugar at the time was a tremendous cash crop—slam-dunk buckets o’ cash in the treasury coffers. For some unknowable reason, the Brits instead chose Canada. Lots of real estate, but nothing in the way of mercantile wealth to compare with Martinique.)

His comments are passing strange: “Mild, but saved from blandness by a nice hint of black pepper.” “Burnt, almost acrid scent. Predominantly vegetal flavors.” I’m not really sure what these mean.

But here’s the thing that caught my particular attention: his recipe of the week is for something called “Ti Punch”. Equal parts of white rum and simple syrup (essentially sugar water), with a single slice of lime.

Don’t know about you, but the enamel is peeling off my teeth just thinking about that one.

12 July 2008 UPDATE:

In yesterday's WSJ, Felten published this correction:

"A superfluous keystroke last week rendered the recipe for Ti Punch undrinkable. The recipe should have read ½ oz of sugar cane syrup, not the 1½ oz that was printed in the paper. If you tried it, and spat the treacly mess out in disgust, try it again, this time with ½ oz sugar syrup to 1½ oz white rum, a slice of lime and some ice. My apologies for having wasted any of your rum."

So it wasn't just me...

Red, white & blues

A friend of mine helps to raise my blood pressure every week by sending me links to Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal. Throughout these past months she has been consistent in her constant carping about the Democratic presidential campaigns. It’s like a nightmarish endless loop, with no Escape key.

Her primary target has been Hillary Clinton—God forbid that a week should pass without Noonan flaunting her mean-spirited, bloody-minded streak, blowing poison darts at Clinton. Now, of course, she’s retooling for Obama.

So when my friend sent me today’s piece, his comment was, “Not the usual column.”

Well, not “usual” in the sense that she’s not grousing about a Democrat. That is rather a nice change.

On the other hand, her chosen “hero” is definitely a Republican—not surprising she couldn’t find anyone among the D-Day survivors who didn’t serve in the Reagan administration worthy enough to focus on. Those years were her high-water mark & it’s been hard for her to adjust to the post-Ronnie world ever since.

But frankly, her “opinion” is nothing out of the ordinary with respect to Omaha Beach. She’s about 576,344th in line to laud the boys of Omaha & use them as examples of Americans at their best. Her encomium is well within the range of “usual”, & pretty far down the scale of insightful or elegiac.

What, then, is really the point?

Oh, right—that she gets it. The point is, as always, her.

& that is indeed “usual”.

Sign of THEM times...

Okay, I appear to be in a somewhat facetious mood, but here’s another forward I got this week.

This doesn’t happen very often, but words just fail me.

Sign of the times

I came across this in one of my listservs. The part I like is that a bit of the scalloping along the edge had to be scraped off to accommodate the code.

Now, if the product manager had provided proper functional requirements, that wouldn’t have happened…

Biz-speak 2.0

Last month the BBC ran an online story about biz-speak. It really hit home; I think there’s a wide-spread nausea caused by the kind of bastardization of English in the name of business trendiness. The language that is graced by the works of Churchill, Fitzgerald—even, God help me, Hemingway—now suffers from the 50 phrases inventoried by the BBC, as well as innumerable others.

I’m sure your teeth will ache in sympathy as you go through the list. But you know I’m not going to let it go without commentary.

This catalog doesn’t include one of my pain points (which phrase is one of my pain points: one’s customers never seem to have business problems; you must discover their pain points): proactive. Being “proactive” is meant to denote someone who isn’t reactive; it describes someone who takes initiative.

Folks, the opposite of reactive is active. Why dress it up with an extraneous syllable?

There’s also a phrase I’ve heard that just brings the weirdest pictures to mind: “open the kimono”. It means (I think) to give someone (typically a customer or partner) a look into the inner workings of an organization or a project. I’ve only ever heard it in the context of sales & business development, where it does seem to carry that meaning. But—why “kimono”? Why not “bespoke tailored Egyptian cotton shirt with French cuffs”? Or “bathrobe”?

I suppose "trench coat" is out because of that whole flasher imagery. But it’s probably more apt than the kimono.

Another word du jour that is spreading like flu in January is “viral”. Your marketing campaign ain’t worth spit if it’s not viral. Meaning it’s turbo-charged by word-of-mouth; or, more specifically, word-of-blog. Interesting that the reference is to something that’s generally considered a scourge: the root word “virus” comes from the Latin for poison or toxin. In the world outside of business, viruses include influenza, diarrhea, Ebola, herpes &, of course, HIV. How did the adjective associated with diseases that even in the 21^st Century have no cures morph into high praise for business practices?

The most recent to appear in my experience is “socialize”, as in the usage of a former manager: “Socialize this new requirement with Development; make sure they get on board.” This subverts an intransitive verb into a transitive one, which just gets up my grammatical nose. It also brings to mind images of one throwing a party with cocktails & canapés, celebrating the new requirement as guest of honor.

More importantly, to the manager, it meant that his staff had the unpleasant task of informing colleagues of the various directives that will trespass on their functional authority, while he remained above the fray.

I suspect he used the phrase “plausible deniability” to senior management in the event that a specific ukase collapsed under its own weight.

Now—as to the BBC’s list:

I think #19 is legit, but only if you spell it “git”. “From the git-go” has been in long-standing standard use in the south & west of the US. Someone in Gucci loafers transliterated a perfectly acceptable frontier/down-home expression.

The comment on #23 cracks me up: “I can't help but think insecure business people use such phrases to cover up their inability for proper articulation.” The submitter doesn’t appear to be so articulate as to be entitled to denigrate the expressions of others. Plus, the misuse isn’t so much a failure to articulate as it is a basic lack of a disciplined thinking process. People blather to fill the space, hoping that some of their gush will cover the point or points they thought they intended to make…

Now, I’m guilty of #24. But lately I’d settle for getting my ducks all on a single pond. (I remember the first time I heard the expression—working for a tech company in Durham, NC. I had to ask what it meant, because I didn’t understand why it would be important to anyone to have ducks in a row. &, while I’m at it, would getting ducks in a row be similar to herding cats?)

The submitter of #30 claims the UK as the originator & sole exponent of “at the end of the day”. I beg to differ: back more than ten years ago our VP of Product Marketing used to sprinkle his exhortations with that phrase. & he got his MBA from the University of Texas. (Some of us had a pool going to guess when one of the more passionate sycophants in the department would start using that phrase in her speech.)

As for #31, the “110%” crowd are complete pikers. Ms. Suck-up (mentioned in the comment on #30) went on record as being behind Mr. Longhorn “a thousand percent”. & you have to hear the nasal tone on the drawn-out thousand to get the full effect.

I picked up #32 while working in telecoms. I knew I’d been assimilated into the collective when I heard myself berating a friend by saying, “You’re dropping data. & not just bits; you’re dropping entire data streams.”

In my defense, it was only that one time, & I’ve been clean for 11 years now.

Feel free to add your own pet peeves. It won’t stop your colleagues from continuing to use them, but you’ll feel better for it.

Remembering...the Great War

At this writing we’re in that twilight period between 28 June and 1 July that weighs down on me as a few of the most cataclysmic days in history. That’s because the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was shot by Bosnian nationalists (badly equipped but thoroughly propagandized by the early-20^th Century Serbian equivalent of the CIA) on 28 June 1914. And 1 July marks the 92^nd anniversary of the opening of the Battle of the Somme—when the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties on that first day (of a battle that would run through November) in a completely futile attack ordered by generals who never got close to the actual front lines.

World War I is an interesting phenomenon in American cultural memory: it pretty much doesn’t exist. It’s been overwritten on our data bases by World War II, by Vietnam and by the Middle East adventures of the Bush family in the past two decades.

For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off this particular war. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the 20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal obligations) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to storm the camps of the veterans of that war.

This historical amnesia was brought home to me by a friend a few years ago: an educated man, BS, double masters’ degrees in education and computer science, and a dissertation short of a Ph.D. all from William & Mary. But when I mentioned that conflict as the 1914-1918 war, he got this puzzled look on his face, like I’d got my facts wrong. Then his face cleared and he reassured himself, “Oh, that’s right—the war started before we got into it.”

Well, duh…

What interests me is that we’ve collectively obscured the fact that we’re still suffering the aftershocks of what was known at the time as the Great War. (People came to understand the magnitude of it; they didn’t realize they would have to start numbering them.) The war was one of those turning points in history—civilization was marching in one direction, empires clashed and humankind took a 90-degree turn.

World War I reverberated throughout the 20^th Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the presumptive ruling youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued from 1939-1945 (again, the Euros were involved for two years before we entered; actually, if you want to count the Japanese aggression in mainland Asia, which was also made easier by the obvious reluctance of the major powers to draw a line in the sand of any quadrant, then that war dates from 1932).

But we’re even now feeling the effects of that catastrophe. It was an imperial war, fought for gains of empire. Russian, Turkish, British, German; even the French republic was concerned with flexing imperial muscles. The nearly farcical assassination (only succeeding after a series of Keystone Kops-like attempts by the Bosnian-Serbian team) of the Austrian archduke led directly to the collapse of the Russian government and the Communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and 70+ years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous reparations from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that victory.

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade.

The treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire, with Britain and France slavering to pick up pieces of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those policies are still reverberating. Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

The British empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war. And France—well, a steady retreat as well.

For the United States it marked our emergence as a major player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there was no turning back.

Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society, however; although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months. That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded that all your people step up to the plate for a total war, it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and  send them back to the kitchen or the rear of the bus forevermore.

The 19^th Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in 1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward came in 1948 when Harry S. Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981, ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.

Truman had been an artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.

The Washington Post ran two stories on Memorial Day about the last known US veteran of the AEF, Frank Buckles, 107, of Charlestown, West Virginia. One, written by a professor at UVA, opened with Buckles being wheeled around the derelict World War I memorial in DC.

It’s an apt metaphor for our national denial of that war. But, really, we neglect it and its lessons at our own peril. In the words of Santayana, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Witness our current mire in the Mid-East, and consider how things might have been different had our leaders remembered the First World War and learnt from it.

Another brick in the wall

So, a story in today’s Washington Post documents the last hurrah of legally sanctioned drinking on public transport in London. Seems one of the newly-elected mayor’s first acts was to ban what many Londoners view as a God-given right: drinking to excess in public places. The story was actually about Londoners using the ban—in effect as of today—as an excuse for one last movable binge.

The action was organized by a guy on Facebook, quoted as intoning, “This has hit a nerve. People are asking about civil liberties…A part of British culture is about drinking.”

I find this interesting for several reasons.

First, invoking the shibboleth of “civil liberties” is kind of funny in a nation where there are more closed circuit TV cameras spying on the citizenry in any given city than public toilets & where the courts have recently discussed eliminating that pesky concept of jury trial in an effort to cut the costs of justice. Seems those sorts of thing don’t send shivers down the backs Her Majesty’s subjects; but tell them they need to stop chugging gin straight from the bottle on the Bakerloo line & they’re howling about their rights being trampled.

Second, the response to what they’re implying is a diktat isn’t to protest in a town council meeting or bombard Boris Johnson (the mayor in question) with emails. No, it’s to show up on the Tube with bottles & cans in hand & a determination to drink steadily until the midnight hour.

Way to exercise your civic responsibilities, folks!

Another point of amusement: the head of the union that represents London transport workers predictably weighed in with a whine about how nervy Johnson was to enact the ban without consulting the workers. Seems they’ll “now have to ask people to throw away their drinks.”

Yeah—you knew that one was coming: God help anyone expecting the Transport & General Workers Union to have to do actual, you know, work. I’ve been on more than one Tube train that pulled to a halt at a station & just sat there because it was time for one driver’s tea break & the replacement driver hadn’t shown up. Coming from Los Angeles, where public transportation was kind of a myth, hearing the announcement that, “We’re looking for a driver” just doesn’t instill confidence that, despite being the first subway system in the world, they have all the kinks worked out.

I also wonder where the drunks are expected to toss their tinnies. London Underground’s policy is to have no trash receptacles at the station platforms, the idea being that bins attract, you know, rubbish; & people will just chuck their candy wrappers & newspapers in the direction of the basket but not bother to make sure they get inside. My prediction is that there’ll be a lot more refuse on platforms & tracks.

Moreover, I’m rather amused at this whole fracas about the booze entitlement, because Brits take such a superior stance with respect to Americans’ attitudes toward alcohol. We, it seems, don’t really know how to handle it; either we abstain or we go on benders.

Maybe so, although I have to say that there’ve been no stories about presidential offspring like the ones about Tony Blair’s son Euan or Prince Harry being caught in public as drunk as skunks (or whatever the UK equivalent would be). & I never saw the term “falling down drunk” in action until a company Christmas party, when one of the VPs was in that condition.

(At another company bash there was a rumor that the open bar would stop at 1900. My colleagues forestalled this potential disaster by literally having drinks in each fist. As they finished the one in their left hand, they started in on the other while getting another from the bar.

(As it happens, the bar stayed open until the last dog was down. Management weren't going to risk mob violence.)

So I’m not going to argue with the statement that drinking is part of British culture. When I lived in London, many’s the time I had to pick my way past empty pint glasses & beer bottles left in the vicinity of the three pubs that were on the two-block route to the post office. I could also always tell when the nearest pub closed—the noise level spiked until the lads & ladettes drifted off.

But in setting up why Johnson might have wanted to curtail the drinking, the Post really didn’t talk about any reasons except the desire to cut down on assaults that kind of cast a pall over the system. It doesn’t deal with the concomitant effects of overboozing: puking & peeing.

At no time did anyone—interviewees or interviewers—mention that, in addition to being belligerent after spending the evening drinking, Brits lose that vaunted reserve & pretty much rival frat boys on Homecoming night. On my trips to the post office? There was also the caked-on vomit & puddles I didn’t want to think about on the sidewalks.

(Actually, as I was leaving Royal Ascot one year, I passed a number of men & women relieving themselves barely far enough into the shrubbery that I couldn’t tell the color of their eyes. At least they weren’t shagging, though.)

One of the “protesters” yesterday started his binge at 1400 & planned to go until midnight. Presumably staying on the London Underground system that entire time. Let’s do the math on that one…

Trust me—an institution that is morally opposed to providing trash bins isn’t going to lay on the loos. At least making it illegal to continue drinking on subways & busses should help with that early morning stench that really grabs you with an iron hand as you’re heading in to work.

I’m not at all sanguine about how quickly this transformation will be actually implemented (I hope no one associated with the T5 debacle is working on this), I applaud the effort. Change is hard, & I do understand that if a policy was good enough for Victoria, we really should think it through thoroughly before messing with it.

But it’s a good start.

Now, about the National Health Service…

Memorial days

While we're on the subject of the last full measure of devotion, I give you small-town America at its finest: the burial of Specialist James M. Kiehl, KIA Iraq 23 March 2003.

(Lest you think it a hoax, it’s been vetted by Snopes.)

In summer of 1986 I was driving across the US with no particular goal except to get back to LA. I was in South Dakota and pulled off the highway to get breakfast. I found a café in downtown Somewhere Small, the kind of place where there are more grain silos than third graders. As I watched the waitresses pour coffee for the old guys in overalls and John Deere caps I wondered how the Vietnam war must have affected communities like these. All the press was about the PTSD vets in the cities and suburbs, the maladjustment, the drugs, the whole Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July thing.

But in towns like this, where the mix is as homogeneous as it gets in this country, where the biggest weekend excitement is high school football games, where any change to the dynamic puts everything out of balance, what sort of ripple effect would having your boy come home in a box cause?

(Not to mention having him come home messed up in ways inconceivable to the Friday-night football crowd.)

I wondered how many of the Somewhere Small football team had taken their first trip out of the county on buses headed for Fort Ord or Parris Island, and how many of those on the buses returned. If every man is “a piece of the continent, a part of the main”, then displacing even one bit, shifting it this way or that, alters everything. For all of us. It spreads out, reaching us all sooner or later.

And I wondered how those effects were still playing out there, more than ten years after the fall of Saigon. Which of those old guys was missing a son or grandson? Whom did the waitress mourn as she brewed more coffee?

I like to imagine my Somewhere Small town would have rendered the sort of honors as Comfort, Texas, did Spec. Kiehl.

Something to think about as you mark the official beginning of summer, spiff up your white shoes and break out the citronella candles. Just because you and I aren’t from Comfort doesn’t mean that Spec. Kiehl’s death hasn’t changed your world and mine.