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The LLama Butchers

June 02, 2008

Now is a good time

for the combat drop in Aliens set to the "JAG" theme

Posted by: LMC at 06:47 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

"Whatever You Do, Don't Mention The War!" ***

Over the weekend, the Mothe was lamenting the paucity of positive nooz coverage of the war in Iraq. Well this should make her happy: Even Pravda on the Potomac is now admitting we might just win the durn thing:

The Iraqi Upturn

Don't look now, but the U.S.-backed government and army may be winning the war.

THERE'S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks -- which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington's attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have "never been closer to defeat than they are now."
Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained "special groups" that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is -- of course -- too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments -- and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the "this-war-is-lost" caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Gen. David H. Petraeus signaled one adjustment in recent testimony to Congress, saying that he would probably recommend troop reductions in the fall going beyond the ongoing pullback of the five "surge" brigades deployed last year. Gen. Petraeus pointed out that attacks in Iraq hit a four-year low in mid-May and that Iraqi forces were finally taking the lead in combat and on multiple fronts at once -- something that was inconceivable a year ago. As a result the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki now has "unparalleled" public support, as Gen. Petraeus put it, and U.S. casualties are dropping sharply. Eighteen American soldiers died in May, the lowest total of the war and an 86 percent drop from the 126 who died in May 2007.
If the positive trends continue, proponents of withdrawing most U.S. troops, such as Mr. Obama, might be able to responsibly carry out further pullouts next year. Still, the likely Democratic nominee needs a plan for Iraq based on sustaining an improving situation, rather than abandoning a failed enterprise. That will mean tying withdrawals to the evolution of the Iraqi army and government, rather than an arbitrary timetable; Iraq's 2009 elections will be crucial. It also should mean providing enough troops and air power to continue backing up Iraqi army operations such as those in Basra and Sadr City. When Mr. Obama floated his strategy for Iraq last year, the United States appeared doomed to defeat. Now he needs a plan for success.

Yips! to Ace.

*** Spot the quote.

UPDATE: Oh, I can't resist. (It was a bit of a gimme anyway...)

Posted by: Robert at 03:19 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gratuitous Earwig Posting

Driving out to Shrine Mont and back this weekend, we listened mostly to a CD of Schoolhouse Rock tunes. The result is that I've had several of them running through my head ever since. Because I'm such a generous guy, I'll pass along one of them to you:

Show of hands, please, for all of you who actually used these ditties to remember your grammar rules. (I certainly did.)

UPDATE: Oh, and for those of you wondering, we had a very nice time at Shrine Mont as we always do, and yes, Steve-O, I refrained from abusing Peter Lee's hospitality. And for the Catholic lurkers out there, I would note that Fr. Richardson at Our Lady of the Shenandoah just up the road served up one meeeaaan homily on "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven," a passage from the Gospel that has always given me the absolute willies.

Posted by: Robert at 08:49 AM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Breaking News

Well, we had a little drama around Orgle Manor on Friday afternoon: The eldest Llama-ette, slipping and falling on the sports court at St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method, managed to fracture her wrist and had to be whisked off to the emergency room.

"But, Tom," regular readers are no doubt saying to yourselves, "Didn't she do that already a few months ago?"

No, that was her next youngest sister. Who of course became the latest expert on such medical matters when the eldest came home encasted. I've broken up many squabbles among the Llama-ettes, but this is the first time I've ever had to stop a spat over comparative wrist injuries.

The eldest is off to the orthopedist today to have a closer look taken at her wrist. Apparently, the fracture is quite small, but the E.R. folks thought it wise to put a cast on it to keep it from getting aggrivated by another shock.

I had expected the gel to play the martyr. However, after it was explained to her that her cast would certainly prevent her from going to diving practice for a couple weeks and would probably keep her out of the pool altogether for a while, she suddenly displayed the fortitude of that Roman who held his own hand in the fire in front of Lars Porsena just to show him a thing or two. In fact, she was downright indignant in her insistence this morning that nothing is wrong and that she doesn't need a cast anymore.

UPDATE: Good news. The doc was able to fit out the gel with a waterproof cast. Not only that, but she made it to diving practice this afternoon and was able to tough it out.

Posted by: Robert at 08:27 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 01, 2008

LMC blog quality control note

For some reason, the comment sections of several recent posts have been loaded with gibberish which includes links and all sorts of references to strange, unnatural, and often anatomically impossible things--forcing yours truly to clear out comments with a blowtorch. Just my luck, I am minding the store and rifling through the LLama fridge while Robbo is away, Gary is doing something productive, Steve-O is observing light blogging rules, and some nuts decide they are going to boost our traffic with porn references.

Posted by: LMC at 05:11 PM | Comments (25) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 31, 2008

Happy Birthday to Brooke Shields

who is 43 today, according to the local fish-wrapper. I do not think she has ever really lived up to her billing but she is aging gracefully and seems to have steady work. (Disclosure--I am partial to brunettes.)

Unlike most of the Hollywood crowd, Brooke has a college education (Princeton B.A., French literature) and I give her style points for the way she handled the crackup with Andre Agassi. She has has not, to my knowledge, ever indulged in any of the three sure signs of a starlet whose career is on the skids. (Regular readers will know what I mean.)

Brooke Shields celebrity profile

Posted by: LMC at 04:53 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

BSG-Lucy Lawless to be "unboxed"

The teaser for next week's episode has Cylon Number Three making a comeback:

Flixster - Share Movies

Gabrielle cannot be far behind ---

Flixster - Share Movies

Posted by: LMC at 07:39 AM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 30, 2008

Draw your own conclusions

Obama's message to "Caucus4Priorities" last year.

H/T to Limbaugh who featured this in the first hour of today's programming.

Posted by: LMC at 11:59 AM | Comments (303) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just Settin' On The Porch Weekend

This evening Robbo and family will be heading off for the annual trip to Shrine Mont, the Episcopal Diocese of Virginny retreat out in the Shenandoah Valley. It's a very relaxing place where one can turn the kiddies loose to do pretty much whatever (most of it involving the large pond on the grounds) while oneself basically sits about with an adult beverage in hand and gossips.

All the parishes in the diocese are assigned specific weekends at Shrine Mont for their annual retreats. RFEC always goes the weekend after Memorial Day. And it always rains. (Forecast for tomorrow? True to form, cloudy with a 70% chance of showers and thunderstorms.)

No doubt you're saying, "But Tom - why are you going to an Episcopal retreat?" Well, for the family, of course. And because I happen to like the place. And this year, my Catholic sponsor - whose wife also attends RFEC - has been persuaded by my ecumenical example to come on out with his family, too. I reckon that the two of us can sit around and complain about the lack of fish on tonight's menu.

UPDATE: Just because it's Friday -

Posted by: Robert at 11:31 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gratuitous Llama Lliterary Praise

Buy this book right now:

Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward.

Now I'll confess that the author had me from his initial remarks about the Ptolemaic Universe and the Music of the Spheres, the latter of which concepts I especially believe in, but this is turning out to be a seriously seriously good study of the Chronicles of Narnia (or the Narniad, as it is often called). Many scholars have tried to find a pattern linking all of the Narniad books together - references to the life, death and resurrection of Christ, allegories on the Cardinal Virtues or the Deadly Sins, and so on. But while there are certainly many elements of these throughout the Narniad, trying to piece all of them together uniformly under any one design just doesn't work out.

Ward's theory is that Lewis built the Narniad in a different way, namely by basing both the poiema (that is, the "feel") as well as the logos (that is, the actual story) on the elements and attributes associated in the Medieval mind with each of the seven planets of the pre-Coperinican system (that is, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Ward supports his theory with many, many references to Lewis's other works (both fictional and non-fictional), to his literary antecedents (particularly his favorites Spencer and Dante) and, of course, to the Bible.

For example, Ward posits that The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe represents the "Jupiter" of the Narniad, associated as it is with themes of kingliness. Here's what Lewis himself had to say about Jupiter:

Jupiter, the King, produces in the earth, rather disappointingly, tin; this shining metal said different things to the imagination before the canning industry came in. The character he produces in men would now be very imperfectly expressed by the word 'jovial,' and is not very easy to grasp; it is no longer, like the saturnine character, one of our archetypes. We may say it is Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive, yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous. When this planet dominates we may expect halcyon days and prosperity. In Dante, wise and just princes to to his sphere when they die. He is the best planet, and is called the Greater Fortune, Fortuna Major.

- From The Discarded Image, Chapter 5.

(Personally, I prefer the adjective "Jovian" to "jovial" - the latter, in my mind, has become too closely associated with mere jollity and merriment, and lacks the power and majesty associated with the true kingliness of Jupiter that Lewis is talking about.)

Ward, by the way, is an Anglican priest and, so far as I can tell, appears to be proof that not all of them have gone insane. Here is a small snippet of what he has to say about Lewis, this theme of Kingliness and Christianity in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe:

[..I]t was Lewis's belief that 'the world of Christianity', no less than the world of fairy-tale, 'makes the heart and imagination royalist.' Lewis accepted the scriptural understanding of Christ as 'the King of kings' (Rev. 17:14; 19:16) and was of the view, with Hooker, that 'the universe itself is a constitutional monarchy.' If he had lived to learn of Philip Pullman's 'republic of heaven' he would not have regarded it as a satisfactory alternative to the traditional monarchical conception of the divine dwelling-place; he would have thought it an imaginative solecism because it is anthropocentric. A 'republic of heaven,' presumably with its own elected President, would be a Feuerbachian example of religion as projection, the creation of God in the citizens' own image.
Christianity makes the imagination royalist, in Lewis's view, because human kins (that is, good kings - things are defined by their perfection) are a reflection at the creaturely level of an aspect of divine nature which naturally attracts respect. 'Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served: deny it food and it will gobble poison.' By the nature of their office, elected prime ministers and presidents could not elicit honour in the same manner as kings, Lewis thought, because their status is temporarily meritocratic, not innate or confirmed by religious sanction. However politically desirable a republic might be, it remains unable to compete imaginatively with monarchy because monarchy in principle more completely mirrors the nature of divine authority. One of the great imaginative advantages of the genre of fairy-tale or romance is to allow for the presentation of such a principle. In fairy-tale the author can leave behind the shallows of the 'realistic' novel, and it free to show the reader something better than mundane norms. What might it be like if human kings really did exhibit perfect kingship? The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe attempts an answer.

Incidentally, I finally and succinctly realized when reading this passage why I have always been a royalist at heart.

I'm only now making my way through the chapter on Jupiter and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and have yet to reach Ward's application of his thesis to the other six books, so I don't know how it will hold up, or indeed whether I even believe it (although I find it perfectly plausible so far). But the combination of subject matter and scholarship is making this a truly wonderful book. As I say, go buy it. Now.

And speaking of buying, reading this book is going to cause me to buy a whoooole lot of other books by Lewis himself, including, finally, all three of his space trilogy. I've read Perilandra before, but never Out of the Silent Planet or That Hideous Strength. For all that Ward talks about them, I almost feel I have no real choice in the matter now.

On the musickal front, I'm also going to have to buy a performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets. Most of its movements are quite tedious to me. However, I think that Holst captures very well that air of Jovian jollity discussed above, and I've had that particular dance running through my head for the last couple days now. (I also like his treatment of Mars and his driving remorselessness. I'll be interested to see if and how that matches up with Ward's discussion of Mars, Lewis and Prince Caspian.)

UPDATE: BTW, here's Dr. Ward's website if you want to visit for more details.

Posted by: Robert at 08:43 AM | Comments (25) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Die Fledermaus - Update

Last evening, as I finished reading a chapter of By the Shores of Silver Lake (the chapter on the black ponies, if anyone is interested) to the eight year old, I looked up to discover that a bat was flying about in the little dressing room off the master bedroom of Orgle Manor while the cats look'd at each other with a wild surmise - silent, by the dressing room door.

Sigh.

The room -an architectural oddity - is about five by twelve with a pair of skylights plus a pair of windows. The bat was swooping back and forth between the two skylights, evidently puzzled by what it had got itself into. Skooshing the cats away, I went into the room, opened both the windows, grabbed the lid of the wicker laundry hamper as a shield and, after several fruitless attempts, finally persuaded the little chap to exit stage left via one of the windows.

This is two bats in the house in just over a week, which leads me to believe that the first one didn't just blunder in, but that they are nesting somewhere (probably up under the roof). Oh, well - it sure beats the infestation of hornets in the backyard last summer. Nonetheless, I suppose I had better call somebody to deal with it.

The eight year old watched my bat-corralling activities with every sign of delight. The very first thing I said to her when it was gone was, "Please don't tell your mother about this," my motive being simply to preserve the Missus from unnecessary stress. And of course, the very first thing the gel did when she got the chance was - - tell her mother about this.

Double sigh.

Truthiness is all well and good in itself, but it's evident that we're going to have to work on the gentle art of discretion at some point, too. Or to quote from the lyrics to the old Mad About You theme, "Tell me all your secrets and I'll tell you most of mine."

(BTW, in the Homer Nods category, in my last post about bats in the house I told an anecdote (since removed) about the Mother-in-Law, bats and moving houses which, I have since been informed, I completely fouled up. In fact, there was no connection between the latter two. Sorry about the misinformation - my bad.)

Posted by: Robert at 07:46 AM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 29, 2008

Gratuitous Domestic Observation

I'm rayther glad to see this. In an op-ed at OpinionJournal.com reviewing Hara Estroff Marano's new book on the evils of over-parenting, A Nation of Wimps, Tony Woodlief cautions against "bring[ing] a bazooka to a skeet shoot":

Unfortunately, it's not just the parents aiming their elementary-school kids at Harvard and Stanford who draw Ms. Marano's fire. It's parents who don't send their children off to sleepaway summer camps. It's those nutty home-schoolers. It's women professionals who choose to be stay-at-home moms while their children are young and parents who prefer not to hand their infants over to a daycare center. It's cellphones, and globalization and American individualism.
Ms. Marano is fond of referring to "how things used to be," but she seems to idealize a sliver of American parenting history, one that started shortly after Gloria Steinem declared stay-at-home mothers valueless and ended before millions of women decided that Ms. Steinem and her crowd were saps. In the how-things-used-to-be category, it is helpful for us to remember that Teddy Roosevelt, the quintessential American anti-wimp -- he once killed a mountain lion with a knife -- grew up enjoying a close relationship with his parents, including extended family vacations (no summer camp!), home schooling (call the teachers' union!) and close contact even after he left for college (cut the cord, Mrs. Roosevelt!). TR's own children suffered similar "overparenting," yet they went on to be war heroes and successful citizens. American history teems with similar examples.
While some parents nowadays do intervene too quickly to solve their children's problems, their eagerness doesn't mean that, say, teens who rely on their parents for advice are necessarily overparented. Some stay-at-home moms have trouble letting their children explore the world, but many encourage it. My highly educated wife home-schools our four boys, for example, because she can accomplish in three hours what public schools need six to do poorly. Such efficiency gives our sons an extra three hours each day to build forts, go down to the creek in our backyard or give music recitals at a nursing home in town.
So Ms. Marano's criticism of those who don't suit her limited model of parenting goes too far.

Unfortunately, this is a fairly easy trap to fall into when bashing hot-house parenting. Certainly doesn't mean that the bashing isn't warranted, because it certainly is, but we should be careful about falling into antidotal stereotypes as well.

This is not to say that I wouldn't find Marano's book interesting. And indeed, as Woodlief notes, she lays her finger on what I believe to be the real problem:

But she scores a lot of points along the way. She notes that, even as parents obsessively strap bike helmets on their kids' heads and squirt antiseptic gels on their hands, the adults themselves cavalierly break up families with divorce and tolerate the rampant sexualization of prepubescent girls. In short, we're focusing on the wrong risks. Ms. Marano champions instead that delightfully old-school trait known as grit. Let children take risks, she insists. Let them learn from failure. Let them experience all the childhood freedoms and disappointments that are common in the lives of our nation's heroes. The college-admissions consultants can wait.

Emphasis mine. I think this is absolutely spot-on and is the truest statement of the absurdity of modern day parental culture.

Interestingly, it happens that one of the boys in the eldest Llama-ette's class was ragging her the other day about all the movies (mostly PG-13 and R action/adventure stuff) he's seen but that she hasn't. I won't go into detail, but suffice to say that this boy is terribly over-indulged by way of compensation for his parents' split. The Llama-ette told him that the reason she hadn't seen them was because her Dad wouldn't let her. The boy said something like, "Wow! Your dad must be insane! How can you live with someone that crazy?"

The gel became positively enraged, and was still trembling with fury when she told me about it that evening. But here's the kicker: she was furious not because of all the movies she'd missed out on, but because the boy had the audacity to insult me.

I was touched. To. The. Core. And as I am absolutely convinced that the single best protection a girl has against the pitfalls of the world is a strong relationship with her father, I was gratified by the feeling that, yes, I must be doing something right.

Posted by: Robert at 09:25 AM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Happy Oak Apple Day!

Yes, today is not only the birthday of Charles II in 1630, it is also the anniversary of his return to London and the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 after Cromwell's rat-bastard "protectorate" collapsed on itself. The "oak apple" refers to the episode in which Charles hid in the Royal Oak at Boscobel House in order to escape Roundhead patrols after his loss of the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

Aaaaand, here's a piece of trivia which I did not know: Virginia is known as the "Old Dominion". Apparently, this name was given by Charles himself because the colony remained staunchly Royalist during the Cromwellian Dark Times.

Neat.

Posted by: Robert at 08:44 AM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Random Commuter Observation

Remember how people used to leave the the price tag and vehicle invoice pasted to the windows of the cars they had just bought? I dunno about other parts of the country, but in my neck of the woods they don't seem to do that any more.

Gives one juuuuust a bit of hope.

Posted by: Robert at 07:53 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 28, 2008

Obamessiah And The Sermon On Foss Hill

I had not paid much attention to the fact that He Who Thinks He Walks On Water wound up (owing to the brain tumor of Teddy Kennedy) delivering this year's commencement address at my old alma mater of the Glorious People's Soviet of Middletown, CT. Over at NRO, Jim Manzi gives this take:

I don�t have a visceral reaction to Barack Obama one way or the other, but I sure found his commencement address at Wesleyan to be pretty off-putting. He smugly put himself forward as an exemplar of the well-lived life, and proceeded from this to the more politically significant solipsism of imagining how much better America would be if it were filled with people who were a lot more like Barack Obama.
After some throat-clearing, Obama gets into the meat of the speech by offering himself as a role model for the graduating seniors:

But during my first two years of college, perhaps because the values my mother had taught me �hard work, honesty, empathy � had resurfaced after a long hibernation. . . .

I wrote letters to every organization in the country I could think of. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago offered me a job to come work as a community organizer in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plant closings. My mother and grandparents wanted me to go to law school. My friends were applying to jobs on Wall Street. Meanwhile, this organization offered me $12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.

And I said yes.

The single sentence paragraph at the end of this section has got to be my favorite part of the speech, though Obama modestly allowing that his evident virtues of hard work, honesty, and empathy are due to his mother is a close second.
What�s funny about his sacrifice is that when Obama took this job, $14,000 was about the average salary for somebody getting out of college. Of course, Obama wasn�t just a run-of-the-mill college graduate; he was an Ivy-Leaguer, who graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. A corporate career would almost certainly have been more lucrative � for a while. Last year, his family income was about $4,200,000. I don�t have the data, but I bet that compares reasonably favorably with the average household income of 1983 Columbia political science and 1991 Harvard Law School graduates. Nonetheless, Obama did sacrifice some of his expected credential-based wage premium for a number of years.
I�m pretty far from being a John McCain booster, but does Obama not get that he�s running against a guy who spent the directly analogous years of his life in a fetid jungle prison being hung upside down and beaten with sticks until his bones broke?
And I said yes. Cry me a river, pal.

Go read the rest, as Jim has much more on Obamessiah's application of his little life lessons to everyone in the country.

Back in the day when I was a soon-to-be newly-minted alum sitting out on the field behing Olin Library in 105 degree heat and a red nylon robe, our commencement speaker was Bill Cosby (one of his daughters was in my class). Cosby stood up at the podium, looked us up and down, and said (as near as I can recollect):

"Class of 1987........Big. Freakin'. Deal."

His general theme was that we ought to get over ourselves - that life was not all protest rallies and political idealism and the pursuit of Nirvana, but instead was the ordinary grind of ensuring that one had a roof over the heads of oneself and one's family and enough food in the fridge for same and thank God we lived in a system that allowed one to do so. In short: you're a bunch of dumbass college kids - grow up, get a job, work hard, take care of your loved ones.

Cosby's theme did not, perhaps, fire the stoodents' imagination quite the way one might like, and I recall that the class president - a fellah from South Africa elected due to the fact that anti-Apartheidism was en vogue at the time - felt it necessary to shape his own address as a kind of rebuttal to Cosby's words of wisdom.

Feh.

All these years later, when I compare HWTHWOW's earnest self-promotion with Cosby's humorous but sensible life lessons, I'm still very much inclined to go with the Cos. After all, he is the man who came up with Chocolate Cake:

Yips! from Gary:
Campaign slogan of the day:

Posted by: Robert at 09:04 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

When, Senator?

Ouch, this a pretty durn good ad:

Because if he DOES go, he'll both look like a fool and suffer the outrage of the nutroots. Either way, he loses on this one.

Posted by: Gary at 02:05 PM | Comments (22) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gratuitous Seven Years' War Posting

Washington Militia.jpg

Today is the anniversary of the Jumonville Affair in 1754, in which young Lt. Col. George Washington of the Virginia Militia led an attack of about 40 men against a party of 35 Frenchmen under the command of Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, at what became known as Jumonville Glen near present-day Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The clash was the first (and perhaps inevitable) shot of the struggle between the French and British for control of the Ohio Valley, which spread not only into a contest for domination of North American, but provoked worldwide war as well.

Depending on who you believe, either the French fired first or else Washington and his men ambushed them as they slept. Either way, the battle was over in 15 minutes, with an utter defeat of the French. Jumonville was wounded in the battle and taken prisoner, but was later murdered by a Seneca ally of Washington. The French blamed Washington himself for Jumonville's death, and sent a retaliatory force under his half-brother to attack the British force. They encircled and trapped the Brits at Fort Necessity and on July 4, 1754, forced Washington to surrender the garrison there. Washington himself was made to sign a "confession" in French (which he didn't understand) that he had "assassinated" Jumonville.

Horace Walpole, British diplomat, was to describe the battle as "a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America [that] set the world on fire." Washington himself was to say of it, "I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me there is something charming in the sound."

Regular readers will know that I've long been fascinated by American Colonial history and have maintained that it is absolutely impossible to comprehend the Revolution without knowing something about that history. (Sample rants can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.) Unfortunately, it is a branch of knowledge almost entirely ignored these days - especially in schools - and the complexity of issues and attitudes that led to that fateful day on Lexington Green twenty-one years after the opening shots at Jumonville (a complexity, I would add, that goes back even further than 1754) is virtually unknown. This inevitably leads to the casting of the Revolution itself in comic-book terms (Colonies: Good. King: Bad.) In my crankier moments, I think this dumbing down is quite deliberate.

UPDATE: Our pal GroovyVic sends along this pic of a statue of Washington in British uniform, apparently the only one of its kind:

Posted by: Robert at 10:02 AM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Rumors to the contrary....

I had been observing Sadie's first rule of the light blogging club: don't talk about the light blogging club. But I've been getting an increasing stream of emails wondering "WTF?" so I thought I would break radio silence for a sec and let everyone know I'm in fine fettle.

I just checked the logs, and I've been AWOL from the LLamas since early March (my last real post was during McSkeevey-gate, which seems like three centuries ago). My blog sabbatical was partially unplanned: basically, the end of the semester was busting my stones with an inordinate amount of close detail work that I needed to focus in on. While that is done, I've settled in to my real world writing projects for the summer. This was the part that was planned: I needed to take a break from blogging for a bit as the "Steve-O intrepid blogger" persona was draining the juice out of my real world writing. I have a number of big projects I'm trying to finish off and they require a level of writing focus that the short staccato bursts of blogging tend to undermine. I come up for promotion next spring, so now's the time to settle in and focus.

So my thanks to Robbo and the team for holding up my end for now, and sorry for leaving you guys hanging for awhile.

One last thing: I saw Indiana Jones and the Search for the Missing Social Security Check last night. First reaction: meh. Second reaction: ugggh. There were about ten cool minutes (a glimpse of the Ark, the scene where they're talking about WW2), but other than that, I thought the whole thing was rather souless. Worse, they had no idea how to end the thing. And the thought of Indy as an Associate Dean---probably the worst job a professional can have in academia---was downright depressing. About the only Speilberg/Lucas early movie not referenced or nodded to was Jaws, and it would have been nice if a giant white shark ate them in the Amazon when they had a chance.

CGI---great on the small screen, still souless on the big screen.

Posted by: Steve-O at 09:31 AM | Comments (25) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Rumors to the contrary....

So my thanks to Robbo and the team for holding up my end for now, and sorry for leaving you guys hanging for awhile.

CGI---great on the small screen, still souless on the big screen.

Posted by: Steve-O at 09:31 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Happy Birthday, Billy Pitt!

Billy Pitt.jpg

William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of Britain from 1783 to 1781 and again from 1804 to his death in 1806, was born this day in 1759 in the village of Hayes, Kent.

Pitt has always been one of my political heroes. Nominally a Tory but a pragmatic independant (he championed, among other things, the abolition of slavery and Catholic emancipation), he held the line during the turbulant times caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, fending off the Jacobin plottings of that rat-bastard Charles James Fox and then later joining Britain to the Third Coalition against that Napoleon. (He is said to have died in part as a result of the news of Napoleon's crushing defeat of the Coaltion at the Battle of Austerlitz.)

Posted by: Robert at 09:25 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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