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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 10, 2019 14:19:25 GMT -8
I liked Frank Gorshin as a kid. Some fifty years ago, I remember him in an interview with, I believe, Mike Douglas, when Douglas observed Gorshin's hands were covered with freckles. Douglas said that such hands were often thought to be a sign of an old soul. As I recall, Gorshin had heard that before and then mentioned that his hands had always been like that, and as a child his friends had called him "Old man hands" or something like that.
I don't know why that made an impression on me, but it did. These days, my hands are covered with freckles and the like, but I am actually an old man.
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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 10, 2019 14:28:03 GMT -8
We must keep in mind that it is hard to speak about nations, large groups, etc, in specifics. Generalizations are necessary.
On the other hand, one cannot make generalizations when talking about an individual. Specifics are needed.
To try and avoid specious generalizations, one should try to look at statistics, when possible, and when not, look at as many sources as possible. Of course, one should utilize one's personal experience as well.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 10, 2019 14:42:36 GMT -8
Generalizations are useful and necessary as long as they're accurate and don't become stereotypes. One way to avoid the latter is the First Rule of Generalizations: There are always exceptions. (Incidentally, the Second Rule of Generalizations is: The First Rule is itself a generalization.)
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Post by timothylane on Nov 10, 2019 14:57:07 GMT -8
I know Gorshin best as the Riddler (Edward Nygma) on Batman (John Astin played the role when Gorshin wasn't available). His high-pitched laugh was based on Richard Widmark's in Kiss of Death as he murdered a wheelchair-bound woman by throwing her down a flight of stairs. He considered it the perfect evocation of evil. I suppose a good impressionist can imitate a lot of people.
He also played a crook in the Ernie Kovacs caper movie Sail a Crooked Ship. His idea is to stage a bank robbery in Boston, then hightail it back to NYC on a reconditioned Liberty ship, which he modestly names after himself. Things don't work out quite as he anticipates.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 11, 2019 8:06:38 GMT -8
Is there any higher authority on the matter than Mr. Spock?
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 11, 2019 9:26:30 GMT -8
I suppose I have to admit that the theme of that episode is essentially correct even though I thought it was a mediocre episode.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 11, 2019 9:32:14 GMT -8
The syllogism of Fauxcahontas
1) I have high cheekbones 2) Therefore I am a Native American 3) Therefore I am a victim 4) Therefore you ought to vote Democrat
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Post by timothylane on Nov 11, 2019 10:51:17 GMT -8
Well, Spock was trying to drive Norman crazy to break down the robots. It worked, too.
I agree with your overall view of "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield". This can happen when an episode is driven too strongly by an agenda. I would still have to say my favorite Gorshin role would have to be the bank robber in Sail a Crooked Ship. (The Riddler overused that manic laugh. Then, too, I've never seen the original movie as far as I can recall.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 11, 2019 20:16:16 GMT -8
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 15, 2019 8:53:31 GMT -8
I’ve started reading Last Full Measure which is the 3rd in the original trilogy that starts with Gods & Generals. The introduction is superb. Anyone who wants an extremely condensed summation of the Civil War should read this. I’m only 4% into it but Jeff Shaara seems to be on a roll and sounding good. I happened to mention to one of my nephews that I had recently read a book on the Civil War battles in Tennessee which is where he grew up. He wasn’t born there. He was born where I live and moved to Tennessee when he was about 3 or so. No Tennessee twang in this yute. He told me he could show me all the sites, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, etc. I doubt I’ll go but he’ll be in Tennessee until the end of January. If I make any decisions, I’ll alert the crowd here. Maybe Mr. Kung and/or Artler would want to meet there. We could always do a FaceTime feed to Timothy. There are a ton of sites around Tennessee and Georgia. Here’s a website with a list. One could visit the Shiloh battlefield as well in southwestern Tennessee. I’m not sure what part of the state he’s staying in. If near Shiloh, it would be a long drive to Chattanooga and vice versa. It’s a wide state.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 15, 2019 9:05:36 GMT -8
There's also the Stone's River battlefield (and Fort Rosecrans) in Murfreesboro, southeast of Nashville by about 30 miles. Elizabeth toured that as well as Shiloh and Chickamauga (though not Chattanooga -- we only had so much time). Fort Donelson is on the Cumberland northwest of Nashville (near Clarksville), but I never visited it and thus can't describe it.
There are many other sites in the area, of course. Elizabeth and I visited parts of the Corinth battlefield but never the whole thing. That's in northeastern Mississippi, about 20 miles from Shiloh. There's Fort Negley in Nashville, which we did tour, and at least something for the Franklin and Nashville battlefields.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 15, 2019 9:48:55 GMT -8
Too many battlefields, too little time. Tennessee is chock full of them. I guess to keep it doable I'd concentrate on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain and maybe some of the surrounding sites in Georgia.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 15, 2019 10:22:55 GMT -8
Shaara packs a lot of interesting notions into the beginning of this novel.
After a summary of the three principals of the book (Lee, Grant, and Chamberlain), the novel moves to the retreat of Lee from Gettysburg. He picks it up just as they are about to cross the Potomac. They can’t believe their luck that Meade hasn’t pursued them.
It works both ways, this idea of missed opportunities. Lee regrets the catastrophic mistake of Ewell’s failure to take Cemetery Hill. That and the friendly-fire death of Jackson at perhaps the high-water mark of Chancellorsville were extraordinary losses.
Lee understands acutely that even though losing 1/4 of his men in Gettysburg is disabling, just as catastrophic, if not more so, is that he’s fast running out of good and experienced officers.
He understands that the Union has some similar problems, especially with their generals. But the Union advantage is that they are getting better and more focused as they go on.
The rationale for the invasion of the north is written thusly:
How strange that Ewell apparently didn’t get that message. Whether or not a defeat (and a bad one) by the Union forces at Gettysburg would have caused Lincoln to throw his hands up and accept the North/South divide is doubtful. But it is strange once again that the South (Lee and Davis, at least) had a strategy but that it wasn’t fulfilled by the commanders in the field.
One of the strangest aspects is Lee’s religious attitudes. He really (at least as written in this book) is perplexed that God did not give him victory at Gettysburg. He is honestly, genuinely perplexed. If I was sitting down over a cup of tee with General Lee, I would remind him that the Bible is full of stories about sins being punished by God through military defeat. I mean, Robert — can I call you ‘Robert’? — you are engaged in enslaving people, often in violent circumstances. Certainly the circumstances are inhumane and degrading. If God is keeping a scorecard — this is the God who is famous for freeing the slaves in Egypt from bondage — why in hell do you think he’s going to guarantee your success? It seems to me, chances are he would be working against it.
Ironic still is that Lee stated he couldn’t fight against his own people. Fair enough. But in the opening of the novel we are given a description of the vast wasteland that parts of Virginia have become. I suppose like Bush said about capitalism, Lee had to abandon the well-being of Virginia in order to save it.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 15, 2019 10:28:38 GMT -8
This is the problem Elizabeth and I had on our trips. On the big San Antonio trip, we could have used a few extra days. There was so much to see in so many places. That was the one on which we visited Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga -- as well as the Fort Worth Zoo, the Dallas and Tennessee Aquaria, the state capitols in Little Rock and Baton Rouge, numerous art museums, the Nimitz Museum, the Alamo, San Jacinto monument, and the space centers in Houston and Huntsville.
And the whole trip was a visit to LoneStarCon in San Antonio. Nor have I covered everything we visited. (For example, we overnighted in Jackson, Tennessee next to the Casey Jones Museum.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 15, 2019 10:40:27 GMT -8
That naive (to me) rationale by Lee and Davis to invade the north is reflected by Shaara’s brief accounts of the expectations of The First Battle of Bull Run. Many elites from the north thought they would watch it from the sidelines as a form of picnic entertainment. Just one great battle, and the South would surely be subdued.
Shaara also notes that after Gettysburg, it was sinking into the heads of the generals on both sides that a Napoleonic form of warfare was (or should be) in the past. Shovels would become much more of a weapon as troops dug in.
It’s interesting how one-track-minded this class of West Point graduates (on both sides) was about tactics. No matter how many times frontal assaults didn’t work, they still tried them. And I’m going to assume there were still more than a few after Gettysburg. It really did seem to be a case of noting being able to teach an old dog new tricks.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 15, 2019 10:41:44 GMT -8
Holy smokes. What a fine historical site-seeing and zoological trip you two had.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 15, 2019 10:45:24 GMT -8
Well, that's a bit unfair. Meade did pursue, though most of the contact was with cavalry until the end, when Lee had to rebuild his bridge over the rising Potomac. That gave Meade time to bring up his whole force (which had suffered at least 25%) losses to face Lee (who had suffered about 33% losses). As befits an Army engineer, Lee erected strong defenses in case Meade attacked, which is one reason Meade was hesitant to do so. (He was finally about to do so when Lee crossed the Potomac.)
Yes, Lee's leadership losses were indeed heavy. The whole point of Lee's Lieutenants is the struggle for good command in the Army of Northern Virginia, going back to its beginning. Nor was he the only one to see it. Freeman mentions a foreign visitor asking a Confederate friend, after noting recent command losses (such as Jackson), "Don't you see your system feeds on itself? Your men do wonders, but each time at a cost you can't afford."
Lee would have seen the devastation of northeastern Virginia as an inevitable consequence of a war that he opposed. He knew it was going to be long and bad (as did Davis). But he still preferred to be on the side of his friends and relatives. Even if he had accepted Lincoln's offer of command, would his nephew and 2 sons have sided with the Union? That certainly didn't work for Philip St. George Cooke, whose son (John R. Cooke) and son-in-law (J. E. B. Stuart) became Confederate generals. Cooke commanded the Union cavalry under McClellan at the same time Stuart commanded Lee's cavalry. I don't suppose they ever had to fight personally, at least. It's not like the "Father who has killed his son" and "Son who has killed his father" that Shakespeare included (I think in Henry the Sixth Part III).
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Post by timothylane on Nov 15, 2019 10:53:56 GMT -8
We also saw some art museums in the DFW area. And at that, there was at least one more we wanted to see.
Yes, there were a lot of frontal attacks after that, the worst probably being Third Cold Harbor. That's where someone found a diary on one of the bodies with a last entry reading "June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed." In fact, the habit of entrenching made it difficult to avoid frontal assaults, though they did at least try. Many campaigns started as a search for a flank. But then, that's what both Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were, and arguably Gettysburg. Strategically they sought to bypass the fortified lines, but eventually they faced the enemy and some sort of frontal attack(s) resulted. The same things would continue to happen until the end.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 15, 2019 11:34:27 GMT -8
That may be. But from the perspective of this book, Lee thought he got lucky. Perhaps the book could have gone into more detail. The retreat from Gettysburg is handled to some extent in one of the other books I’ve read by Shaara.
The book mentions that Lee’s army suffered about 25% casualties.
That’s an interesting observation by the foreign visitor.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 18, 2019 11:25:00 GMT -8
I’m 32% into The Last Full Measure. I think it’s a good follow-up to The Smoke at Dawn just in terms of order-of-battle. Tennessee is now reclaimed for the Union and Grant has been given a third star. He now outranks Stanton and Halleck which, I’m sure, is going to prove quite useful. To his great surprise, Meade has not been let go. Grant meets Lincoln for the first time in a reception at the White House. The cocktail crowd (as Lincoln acknowledges) is quite tired of him. But they give Grant a standing ovation and more. As Lincoln notes, he has given these people hope. The Battle of the Wilderness has concluded and we will pick things up next at Spotsylvania. I love that name. Contained within the former battle (via the novel) is Grant’s declaration to his subordinates to quit worrying about what Lee might do to them and think about what they’re going to do to Lee. Grant brings a complete transformation of the goal. The goal in the east had always been to take Richmond. Basically Grant said that even if they did so, it would just tie down a whole bunch of Federal troops and Lee would still be on the loose. Grant’s purpose is to destroy Lee’s army. He knows that this, and this alone, will bring down the Confederacy. Thus if you look at the attrition on both sides during the Battle of the Wilderness, it looks like a push for the Union, at best. Probably Lee and everyone in the Union army as well, expects Grant to scamper back across the river, head north, and retool and rethink. Grant, of course, has other ideas. He is completely aware that he can afford the losses but that Lee can’t. It’s a cruel numbers game but certainly a fair observer might note the cruel and pointless game being played by the Union generals up until then. Had they taken on Grant’s tactics, they might have avoided many of these costly battles. I had learned this in one of the earlier Shaara books, but this one goes into a bit more detail about the friendship between Pete and Sam. Longstreet and Grant had been fast friends. And I think they likely still considered themselves to be. We get a little bit into Lee’s personal life. It’s sad for him and his family that they had to give up their grand mansion in Arlington. He’s away from home most of the time (which isn’t anything new for a soldier). His wife is suffering from arthritis and can barely move. This is not a happy marriage. Lee cuts short his visit home for the holidays and returns to the more comfortable confines of his army. But not before visiting Davis in his home. Davis has turned his home into his administrative center, sometimes not leaving the place for days. He is trying to micro-manage the Confederacy and this is not working well. Bragg’s failures still loom large. Along with Ewell’s failure to take the high ground at Gettysburgh, the South is full of regretful moments like this despite many of Lee’s victories. Davis’ narrow-minded micro-management apparently isn’t helping things. Worst still, they can get no material help from the European countries. Imagine if the South had heeded Cleburne very early and freed slaves to fight. European sensibilities may have been assuaged enough to do what was necessary to break the Union blockade and allow the cotton to flow. When they did allow this as a desperation measure near the end, it was too little too late. By the way, I watched “Glory” on The Roku Channel this weekend. I’m sure I’ve seen bits and pieces of this before, but I don’t remember if I’d see it all the way through. It’s pretty good although I find it hard to accept Matthew Broderick in the role as Col. Shaw. Something doesn’t work about that. But Denzel Washington is good as the angry-black-person. And he has a good point when he asks Shaw “What’s in it for us if we win?” Shaw answers him succinctly by telling him there won’t be much in it for him if they lose. Morgan Freeman is okay, but still seems uncomfortable in the role. He tries to be super-honorable. And does have some good scenes. But he still seems like an actor just acting (whereas Denzel is 100% believable). Best of all though is Jihmi Kennedy as Pvt. Jupiter Sharts. Sharts is a simple man. Many of these blacks are uneducated. Some are even runaway slaves. Whereas Denzil plays “the anger n-word,” Kennedy plays a genuinely sympathetic character. He’s simple but willing. Andre Braugher, in stark contrast, is excellent playing the cultured, educated, and sophisticated black, Cpl. Thomas Searles. The movie is (from what I can see) refreshingly free of stereotypes. These black men were not all one thing. They had a complex background as well, fighting for reasons that sometimes aligned with the white folk and sometimes did not. And like just about every other soldier on both sides, they were caught up in something bigger than themselves. I think it mentioned in this movie that this was a war created by the politicians on both sides. It's hard to disagree with that.
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