We have already reached Peak Funk.

This is why people's lack of urgency about finding alternative funk sources is so distressing.

I blame the political gridlock in our nation's capital, caused by partisan politics.

Yes, I've linked that before, but it's on point, dammit.

Upon Gerald Ford's passing, Bérubé remembers our last president from the days of 30¢ per gallon funk:

Watching the memorials for Ford last week, I found myself strangely moved by their evocation of a time before rank partisanship and outrageous nut-flexin' overtook Washington, when Republicans and Democrats could work together as friends and white people welcomed Black Power accompanied by serious musicianship--before Democrats poisoned the well by forcing Republicans to drive people like Ford and Rockefeller from positions of power in the GOP, before the R&B charts got so nasty and confrontational and full of songs that are hard to sing.

Over here we're enjoying a day off in celebration of Pentecost. If you want oddly abstract. It's pissing down, as is traditional.

When I was in high school band, we marched in the Memorial Day parade down to the cemetery every year. Then when I was out of high school, I got to watch the parade every year (Memorial Day coinciding with visits home) as various little sisters marched by and local Republican congressmen handed out little flags.

That's enough patriotism for me for a while.

I've ever known anybody who went on to die in combat.

Nor have I, despite having known a lot of soldiers. It's not surprising. World War II was the last war in which the US participated where there were a significant number of casualties as a proportion of our population, and even then it was not a big percentage (off the top of my head, I would guess a percentage or two).

Never had many rituals, but reading Ulysses every Bloomsday and Wilfred Owen every Memorial Day were two committments I tried to keep.

I have read Owen a little differently in the last year or two, maybe a little more critically or with an increased sorrow. Beyond amor patria and parades, remembering Achilles & Patroclus, it seems like his compassion for soldiers as individual persons is another source of war & death. His own, for instance.

It's so hard, and I can't seem to find the right words for this feeling, words that aren't hurtful.

It was all much more abstract for me before a guy I knew in high school came back from Iraq with his face rearranged.

Closest I come is Andy Olmsted, from Obsidian Wings. I didn't know him well, but we talked in comments and emailed a couple of times. Good guy to argue with.

(I linked to one of his Obsidian Wings posts when he started posting there, announcing him as a new blogcrush -- I can't remember what the post was, but something that struck me as unusually reasonable and decent for someone with basically right of center politics. Hilzoy pointed out my post in the ObWi comments, and I thought Andy was a little reserved in response. A while later, in another conversation, it developed that my pseud is not as obviously feminine as I believe it to me, and he'd had my gender wrong. In retrospect, his reaction (entirely polite, just a little stiff) to my post announcing a blogcrush, cracked me completely up. After he'd gotten my gender right, he was much friendlier.)

But a really good guy to argue with. I was terribly sad when I heard he was killed in Iraq -- I still get a little wrecked over the ObWi sidebar sometimes.

(And I'm taking an internet break in a building lobby with free wireless before I go into work. The financial district is scary empty on Memorial Day. It's like McManus's War has already happened. The only other people in this usually crowded lobby are two middle-aged maintenance guys relaxing and trying to download something on an Eee.)

The financial district is scary empty on Memorial Day.

It's like this on the weekends, too. Not many people here except tourists. But rest assured that you are not the only person in the office in the Financial District today.

I usually do get a small dose of reality as I usually see my father (a WWII vet who 63 years ago today would have been doing something unpleasant as part of the Battle of Okinawa). I did a small write up here on his WWII experience and that of my father-in-law's family (they managed to get out of Vienna, but he had a brother who was eventually killed by sniper fire on Leyte).

If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives Prussia, -- my ambition and those names will be content; for they will have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders. Owen, Preface

I remember discussing the italicized phrase with Andrew, thinking Owen meant more than the nation across the trenches. Bismarckism, war colleges & the professionalization of the military, the Prussian Education System which I think Dewey's Progressive Education was intended to counter. Prussia won in America.

If you think connecting Owen & Dewey, education & war, is ridiculous, part of Owen's short private life was spent teaching in Berlitz Language Schools

apo, do you use Songbird to browse music blogs? I can't remember if it was here or elsewhere that I first learned of it but my meager fiddling with it has convinced me it's pretty nifty.

Never looked at it before. Hm.

reading Ulysses every Bloomsday

Lacking your speed, I content myself with listening to a Gino Vannelli record every June 16th.

Excluding people like Olmstead, who I only knew of, the closest I come to combat fatalities are the several people my father knew who died in Vietnam.

Never looked at it before.

I don't read your posts either!

Thanks, apo. This rainy Memorial Day was in need of funkification.

The only relatives I know who saw combat were my mother's father, who was on the torpedoed Covington, my uncle, who was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and one BIL, a naval airman whose combat history I know nothing about and don't care to (Panama, I suspect). My other grandfather was a naval officer and my father was in the Army Reserve, but there's no martial tradition in our family anymore.

I'm one of those Millennials you guys hate so much (check me out on MySpace and shit!), so my experience of war has been pretty abstract as well. Whenever I go back home to Seattle, though, I run into buddies that are shipping out or have just been shipped back. My favorite is the biggest fratboy I know, Mark, who now literally carries a rocket launcher around Iraqi cities, blowing up buildings. He often does this stoned, making me think one of these years Memorial Day is gonna get real relevant all of a sudden.

My pops was a Sea Bee in WWII (see flickr pool). All my uncles were in the war as well -- mostly Navy, except for Uncles John and Tommy who were Army, I think. All lived to tell the tale, even John who stormed beaches in Normandie, etc.
One of my college boyfriends was a naval officer who floated around doing something in Gulf War I.

back home to Seattle

I knew I liked you.

I admit, I don't give a shit about Memorial Day--probably the result of growing up with 60s hippy parents. Though I think it's also the way America celebrates it--somehow the poppy thing in Canadia and the UK seems more apropos than Big Big Sales!!! (That said, my plan for the day is to go shopping for a teacher class present, so.)

It is ok to just scoop the moldy sections out of things like whipped cream and cream cheese, right?

25 is a valid definition of funky.

I mean, mold doesn't really hurt you, right? And it doesn't indicate a ruinous infection of the whole product, right?

mmm blue cheese is good.

27: I know it's okay in the case of hard cheeses, but I'm skeptical it's okay in the cases of soft cheese, if only because when they mold, they usually seem to be accompanied by spoilage throughout.

hmmm. whipped topping, though? it's so inorganic-y, it seems unlikely that things like spoilage spread quickly, right?

Go for it, Sybil. If it doesn't look or smell otherwise spoiled underneath, it's fine.

Perfect. All I needed was one yay-sayer.

Hey, these guys hate boomers the most, Danish millenial dude.

I just got back from a wholesome family weekend. The beloved grandnephew, age 3 1/2, caught 5 sunfish. The women of the family talked about remodeling, probably just to torture me. The Tex-Mex nephew in law and I went to the local bar which turned out to be a college sports bar full of angelic-looking slutty blondes. San Antonio won. I saw a total of two mosquitoes, but the Tex-Mex dude thought that was a swarm. Niece: "If we're going outside I'm putting on my jeans, because I don't want to get mosquito bites all the way up".

One niece, an accountant, daughter of the sociopath, has signed on with a brokerage which is cleaning up on the mess left by the housing bubble. Plagues don't bother undertakers, and it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

a layer of mould protects whatever it is -- jam, cheese -- from further deeper spoilage

My son found some stinky cheese in his refrigerator and gave it to me because I like that kind of thing. I liked it fine, but it turns out that havarti isn't supposed to be stinky.

they ate the honey they found in king tut's tomb and no one came to any harm -- if it has enough sugar in it it can never go off

this is known as the iron law of the taint of pharaoh's curse

Maybe the mold will turn to penicillin and make you healthier.

Heard two people refer to today as the Yankee holiday and saw one jeep flying a huge stars and bars. Didn't expect that, despite having lived sort of in the south for a few years. Is this common elsewhere?

Although the overwhelming majority of my family was killed during WWII, and those that survived still bear the scars, war has always been pretty abstract for me, too. The current war, though, became far more concrete two springs ago. My Civil War class is pretty large -- usually capped at around 120 students or so -- and so it was only at the end of the quarter as I looked at final grades that I noted one of my student's names: xxxx S/heehan. This was at the height of C/indy S/heehan's struggles. But I still hadn't realized that the S/heehan family lived right down the road. Anyway, this student was her daughter, the sister of the S/heehan boy whose death in Iraq prompted C/indy's activism. For some reason, I found it terribly painful and even a bit embarrassing that I had been teaching this young woman about war. She always sat in the center of the third row and looked me right in the eye while I lectured. I can't imagine what she was thinking that whole time.

38: Memorial Day is the offspring of Decoration Day, which was a holiday created to honor the Union's Civil War dead. I'll be posting about it later in the week, if you care. Or, if you want a better sense of the history, you can read this book.

Ari, the mother of someone here taught Timothy McVeigh. Name-dropping is highly competitive here.

I taught Jeff Stryker everything he knows.

40: Huh. Interesting. Thank you. You write at EotAW, right?

43: What's "EotAW"?

I taught Jeff Stryker everything he knows.

Including how to sing?

Edge of the American West.

Jeff Stryker.

I thought you meant Ted Striker.

46: I was joking, and I assume Apo was doing the same.

I, on the other hand, was dead serious.

Hey, these guys hate boomers the most

Probably just that millenials haven't had nearly enough time to fuck thing up on the same scale that boomer have done.

I've got a couple mixes uploading to reciprocate Apo's largesse. Happy Memorial Day, Americans, if that's the appropriate sentiment.

The Cowboy Junkies first (amateur) album had a song by John Lee Hooker called "Decoration Day". I dn't see a subtext in the lyrics, but maybe an expert could.

Decoration Day

I listened to WPFW -- the DC Pacifica-affiliated radio station -- this morning and was fascinated to hear some show called either Jazz and Justice, or It's your turn to speak (something like that).

Various people phoned in to make simple statements along the lines of: "I'm a Vietnam vet, and it turns my stomach to watch GWB walk across the White House lawn waving and smiling when he's sending our boys and girls to die needlessly in Iraq. That's all I have to say." And: "I think that Hillary Clinton was calling for a hit on Obama. That's all I have to say." And: "My brother served a tour in Iraq, then refused to go back a second time, and he's just died of unrelated causes, and they refused to let him be buried in a veterans' cemetery. I think that's disgusting. That's all."

The dj intoned after each call something along the lines of 'Thank you brother/sister, for sharing your pain. This is your time to exercise your right to free speech. Our soldiers have fought for that right; don't let them down. And remember, don't turn into monsters. Never stop caring.'

Cue some jazz.

Oh, wow. It went on and on.

54: Wow, indeed.

Well, damn. Cue some more music: here and here is a happy, summery don't-mention-the-war mix:

Summerized

1. Stars - The Night Starts Here
2. British Sea Power - Waving Flags
3. Delorean - As Time Breaks Off
4. Tokyo Police Club - Cheer It On
5. Q and Not U - Wonderful People
6. The Breeders - Bang On
7. PotUSA - Lump
8. Art Brut - Formed a Band
9. Knife World - Sunbeam
10. The Go! Team - Bottlerocket
11. Plastic Little feat. Ghostface Killah - Crambodia
12. Gwen Stefani - Now That You Got It
13. Lily Allen - LDN
14. Jah Sun - Right to Live
15. DJ Rekha - Basement Bhangra Anthem
16. Shri - Mela
17. Grimy Styles - Smoking on the Deck
18. Grupo Fantasma - Mentiras
19. Pistolera - Mentirosos
20. Chiwoniso - Kurima
21. Miriam Makeba - Naants' Indod' Emnyama Verwoerd

And here and here is something a little bit harder-edged:

Can You Count, Suckers?

1. Barry de Vorzon - The Warriors Theme
2. One Be Lo - Headlines
3. Sadat X - Escape from New York
4. Ol' Dirty Bastard - Brooklyn Zoo
5. Gangstarr feat. M.O.P. - Half & Half
6. Ivan Ives feat. O.C. - Soul
7. Freddie Foxxx (a.k.a. Bumpy Knuckles) - Dreamcatcher
8. James Brown - It's a Man's Man's Man's World
9. Al Wilson - The Snake
10. Kush & Jah Bloodfiyah Angels - Thick Smoke
11. Domingo Siete - I Don't Know About That
12. Tricky - Hell is Round the Corner
13. Champion - No Heaven
14. Killa Kela - All Killa No Filla
15. Blue Oyster Cult - Veteran of the Psychic Wars
16. Duchess Says - Black Flag
17. The Muslims - Extinction
18. Tiger! Tiger! - So You Won't Deceive Me
19. Mission of Burma - Wounded World
20. Paul Diamond Blow - Freak Show
21. Droids Attack - Dope Smuggler
22. Black Sabbath - The Mob Rules
23. Towers of London - Fuck It Up

Thanks again to apo for another great funk mix; listening to it now and it's excellent.

I listened to WPFW -- the DC Pacifica-affiliated radio station -- this morning and was fascinated to hear some show called either Jazz and Justice, or It's your turn to speak (something like that).

I sure do love you, DC.

1. Barry de Vorzon - The Warriors Theme

Does anyone ever talk about Walter Hill in terms of auteur theory? If not, is it because of Brewster's Millions?

57: Trespass probably didn't help either.

I really want to make rfts watch The Warriors now. No good will come of this, if my experience with making her watch Big Trouble in Little China is any guide.

Oh, I just watched The Warriors a month or so ago. Love those baseball gangsters. Funny to think that the first wave of yuppification was already rolling in to Brooklyn while that was being made.

59: Go for it, The Warriors is a far superior film. If it helps any, it's actually a remake of The Anabasis, no foolin'.

The Baseball Furies were awesome. Absurd, but awesome.

Warriors, come out to plaaaaay!

If it helps any, it's actually a remake of The Anabasis

I did know that!

It had BETTER be far superior to Big Trouble in Little China, or no fucking way.

OT: People with DC knowledge, what do you think of this area?

Huh, that's amazingly a dead area in my knowledge. I know up closer to the Howard stop, and towards Logan Circle, but super no idea about that far east on P.

Oh, rfts must watch The Warriors. The Anabasis I do not find suitable references to.

The Anabasis I do not find suitable references to.

Meaning you don't think the film contains references to it?

It appears to be calling itself Truxton Circle now. Gentrification in progress, it seems. http://snapshotsofalife.wordpress.com/

Oh my God that Delta Rhythm Section track is like mainlining awesome horns.

(But far from complete.) Looks like the bits of Shaw my friend Bob used to live in, a sort of mishmash combo of used car lots and abandoned houses and poor folks and places selling for exorbitant prices, with Metro stops not quite as in walking distance as one would ideally like.

67: No, I've just never heard of the film so I googled around a bit and checked imdb and got nothing. I didn't bend over backwards about it, though.

71: Ah. Anabasis.

Further to 71: Oh wait, are you saying that The Warriors is, like, a remake of the anabasis? The latter not being a film in its own right? Oh. Sorry!

Right, right, gotcha now.

"Remake" usually means remake of a previous film, you know. That's all I have to say.

My bad, my bad. "Adaptation."

65,68, 70: Thanks. That confirms my impression that that area is (as an ad says) still "up and coming". I've noticed a significant drop in rent on craigslist as places approach North Capitol St. I've been through the general area on buses a few times, and it definitely has an in progress look.

39: Here in Posh Deep Blue Suburb, the memory of Decoration Day is not dead, and "Memorial Day" still gets observed in grand style (parade, etc.). PDBS was a hotbed of abolitionism and Radical Republicanism back in the day, and the monument to the Union War dead occupies the most prominent spot in the town.

We still have the Memorial Day Parade here, and there are a number of G.A.R graves in the cemetery. Many of the first settlers were Union veterans, some of whom receved land grants, and the G.A.R was a factor in town into the Twentieth Century.

76: You're charming. Have I mentioned that truthout's new format is annoying, and I'm sad that I cannot adjust the font size?

Reminds me I haven't read truthout in a while. Hmmm, the new format doesn't seem that bad...

I'll live. Hey, they reproduce spackerman's pieces sometimes, which is nice to see. Good night!

78-79: I'm fond of vestigal heritage stuff in small(ish) towns. Around here, we have parades celebrating farming. People drive ancient tractors, intermixed with local marching bands, through downtown. And its not quaint; it's just lingering love for the agricultural sector. Have an avocado! Or an almond! Or some berries!

Hey, Slack, your mix doesn't suck.

Oh my God that Delta Rhythm Section track is like mainlining awesome horns.

It's from this. And ahem.

Does anyone ever talk about Walter Hill in terms of auteur theory?

I do. WH is more important than Milius, tho less than Schrader. The true successor to Peckinpaugh? Too many interesting movies to list, so here is his Wiki page

86 was me

84: I am guardedly pleased.

Apo, ya bastard, I've been listening to stuff from those sites you linked all day. You might make a music freedownloader out of me yet.

85: Thanks pusherman.

88: I am guardedly drunk. And it's not even 8 pm!

mold doesn't really hurt you, right?

Didn't the kid in Into The Wild die from ingesting moldy seeds?

But this is probably too late for Sybil.

Nah, wild potato seeds, which are toxic if one doesn't get enough calories to flush it out.

91: Good work!

Nah, wild potato seeds, which are toxic if one doesn't get enough calories to flush it out.

No, that was apparently Krakauer's first hypothesis, which he revised in later editions of the book. McCandless hadn't picked the wrong seeds, but he'd let the right seeds get moldy, and the mold was of a kind that overwhelmed his system with alkaloids.

Not that Sybil should worry about this.

94: I am guardedly pleased.

95: Well that's what I get for buying the earlier edition on sale.

But it turns out that reading Unfogged plugs all the gaps in your knowledge.

96: Goddamn, it's like you're playing chess while the rest of us are playing checkers.

99: I'm a mantis master, baby.

86 - Schrader is obviously a fitfully brilliant writer, but based on my limited exposure, he's a hack as a director. Cat People and Hardcore were both shoddy compared to the great movies they remade adapted ripped off paid homage to.

Actually this mix is fucking awesome, Slack.

"Hack" is too strong, as Schrader's no Michael Bay, work with Bruckheimer notwithstanding.

102: My guard is dropping. I hope my head is tasty.

You and me both.

||
My sister the newly graduated engineer has a pink shirt from her school's chapter of SWE that says 'cutie &pi'.
|>

101:Try Blue Collar, Light Sleeper, or Mishima

Light of Day, Touch & Affliction aren't terrible either

The Cat People remake was trash, but I am not that impressed with the original. Like Curse of Cat People or 7th Victim better.

Talking about hacks, Sydney Pollack just died. I always associate Pollack in my mind with Lumet, very very unfavourably for Pollack.

Affliction is brilliant.

DS -- it looks like a possible breach of anonymity in the files you uploaded.

Just watched a Nightline that talked to three Iraq veterans, while pussyfooting around the connection between PTSD and the stone cold evil of that war. They were describing killing ten innocent people on a bus in one checkpoint incident...four kids. Yeah, that might traumatize you.

I'm sure the vets with PTSD understand the connection, but the reporters kind of aren't allowed to. Although they did give the facts, which is good.

I need to get a new home computer fast enough to download music...they don't allow that at work.

110: Brother, I've been breaching anonymity for several years now. I'll be disappointed if somebody hasn't figured out who I am by now.

Actually, probably there's a sense in which all wars are stone cold evil. That was Jesus' point.

I respect the vets, admire them in a sense, but I find celebrating the whole thing problematic and weirdly conflicted. One can pick up on certain unresolved tensions in the Memorial Day celebrations. Usually papered over by talking about the necessity of defending our liberty, etc.

People, Giorgo Moroder is the auteur these various directors are hitching their wagons to.

Also, I'm making a mix. Oh, you'll wait for it.

Although I will now have to remove the Miriam Makeba track from it because THANKS SLACK.

I claim South African Advantage.

probably there's a sense in which all wars are stone cold evil

Hmmm. What could that possibly be.

You kids and your fancy music and your fancy internets and your fancy 1s and 0s. In my day, all we had were wax cylinders and 1s. Fucking 0s changed everything.

My music / Memorial Day connection was walking my bike past the Memorial Day concert on the mall, and having the cops semi-harass me for having a bike in some kind of bizarre and inexplicable security zone while "I'M PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN / WHERE AT LEAST I KNOW I'M FREE" boomed out in the background.

119: Congratulations!

I had to work today, and by the end of the day a co-worker was ready to kill me for continuously saying "My buddies didn't die face down in the muck so I'd [thing X]", with thing X being whatever activity I happened to be doing at that moment.

She also told me I seemed very bitter today. Whoops.

Why *did* your buddies die face down in the muck, Stanley?

121: "My buddies didn't die face down in the muck so you could tell me how bitter I am! And for your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected 'prior restraint'!

I'm stayin'. I'm finishing my coffee."

" ... enjoyin' my coffee..."

DS understands me, B.

Way to dodge the question, Stanley. I've got my eye on you.

115: *horrified realization* But, what am I doing? Don't remove the Makeba track! The more Miriam, the better!

117:I guess I ain't got the nerve of Lieutenant Commander Charles Madison, causing I really wanted to post this over yonder at the shrine.

Charlie: I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it's always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades ... we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio - an everyday soldier's death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.

Mrs. Barham: You're very hard on your mother. It seems a harmless enough pretense to me.

Charlie: No, Mrs. Barham. No, you see, now my other brother can't wait to reach enlistment age. That'll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She's under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave.

But they were all enjoying themselves too much.

127: too late! I needed to trim some stuff. I don't think you'll mind, when you hear it.

It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio - an everyday soldier's death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.

A thing of terrible beauty.

129: I'm trusting you, Ray Kurzweil.

Hey, DS, that PotUSA track is labeled "Lump" but sounds like "Peaches" to me. (Great mix---thanks!)

It's "Peaches," that's my 'puter outsmarting me. Cheers.

Nice, the DS mixes look great. Downloading.

I've been meaning to make a mix of all Dubstep and Grime, which I think I'll call London Calling. Unfortunately it's damn impossible to find the unmixed tracks, so this could be a while as I seek them all out.

Po-Mo I have all those. Does that help?

Why *did* your buddies die face down in the muck, Stanley?

It's like you don't even read, B. Stanley said his buddies *didn't* die face-down in the muck.

The English call it the click song, because they cannot say !ong!othwane.

My mother went with her mother to clear my grandfther's grave, hearing which, I remarked, "oh yeah, I guess Grandad technically counts as a veteran." He was in the navy for a year and a half but was spared being shipped to the Pacific theater because of the bomb. I think it was his father who'd been an LDS chaplain in WWI.

128, 130: Around here everyone knows who the veterans are, especially the combat veterans. The ones who came out of the war militaristic are the loudest, and the only organized ones. The others tend to be quieter. A certain number ended up with significant mental or physical problems. People tend to be solicitous of them as individuals, but without asking how and why they got that way.

That's what I see as the real mistake of small town people in looking at politics, never looking at the big picture but always thinking of people they know, and trying to understand the greater world in the terms of the small world they know, either by demonization (of terrorists and Communists) or by identification (with the godly George W. Bush).

Holy cow, if McConnell actually got knocked out this year, I might have to start believing in God (a god that takes his damn sweet time getting around to setting things straight, but still). Every time I see McConnell's smug, prissy, pursed-lip smirk, I just want to throw things at the screen.

was spared being shipped to the Pacific theater because of the bomb the end of the war as a result of a number of developments.

The role of the bomb is an ongoing and politically-charged debate. (There is some discussion of it in the comments of the link I posted in 14.) Your construction is understandably common among those who were directly affected (take it from the son of a guy who was hanging around on Okinawa waiting to drive his amphibious tank onto some beach in Japan when they were dropped), but the reality was much more convoluted.

140: i>prissy, pursed-lip smirk: homophobe.

Screw that HTML.

Codeaphobe.

144: Generationalist

You people will just wait another day for my mix.

Why I didn't have an ID3 tag editor before now I'll never know.

141: Many, many years ago now, we were standing in the office where the decision was made to drop the bomb. The tour group was about exactly half American tourists and half Japanese tourists. One of the older American men started in about what a good thing the bomb had been. A very uncomfortable moment.

141.---Oh, I'm aware of all that, or, at least, some of that. The family version is the simplified one, though.

I attended a memorial day parade yesterday between Mid-Sized Northeastern College Town and M-SNCT's Neighbor. A good time was had by all. The Veterans For Peace contingent was 50-people strong, and got a big ovation from the group just down the block from where I was sitting. I felt a little weird about sitting there with my hat on when the flags went by, but a whole bunch of other guys who presumably weren't atheist anarchists did not doff their hats either for the Marine color guard, so I figured I was pretty immune from criticism.

It's interesting to me that the rabid supporters of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have so little to say about the conventional fire-bombing of the civilian areas of Tokyo and, for that matter, Dresden. I wonder what they would make of Grave of the Fireflies (Miyazaki Hayao, 1988)? Maybe I should organize a screening down at the American Legion post and find out.

Or rather "Isao Takahata, 1988". Whatever, it's all Ghibli to me.

The comments book at Los Alamos is brilliant -- an ongoing, morally serious argument about the dropping of the bomb. Hundreds of comments left by visitors on either side, and it just keeps going.

The fire-bombings didn't just happen: careful planning and development were behind them. I read somewhere, Spector's Eagle Against The Sun, I think, that Japanese cities were carefully modeled, recreated really, in Utah I think it was, to test the most effective combination of incendiary to high-explosive in the bomb loads, and how to cluster them.

LeMay's contributions were tactical. He'd spent his career developing and practicing the high-precision daylight bombing that was being attempted on Japan when he arrived, so he might have been tempted to stick with it. But he was open to the studies of firebombing's potential, and realized that Japanese night-fighter resistance would be insignificant, and that low-level bombing would be far more effective. The B-29 was designed and optimized for high-altitude, so that this change of focus and tactics was counterintuitive and required considerable gumption.

The results were astounding. 14.9 sq. miles of Tokyo, and everybody and thing in them, obliterated in one night, March 9, 1945. The most devastating and deadly attack ever inflicted, by any means.

Both Making of The Atomic Bomb and (especially) House of War have good stuff about the evolution of American attitudes to strategic bombing.

Japanese cities were carefully modeled, recreated really, in Utah I think it was, to test the most effective combination of incendiary to high-explosive in the bomb loads, and how to cluster them

The Bat Bomb was cooler, though.

I was aware of the more notorious firebombings, but not of the controversy* surrounding the death toll at Dresden and the fact that today the commonly accepted death toll is on the order of 35- 40,000 until I read this post at WAAGNFNP on Firestorms.

As I discovered, it appears that it was more than just Vonnegut's eyewitness account that magnified Dresden in the popular imagination, Goebbels started the ball rolling, and the faux historian David Irving wrote a book which also promulgated the higher numbers.

*I do not mean to imply any lack of importance due to the grim calculus of body counts , I was just very surprised that there was any legitimate question about its magnitude at all.

155 was me.

As a kid we would visit my uncle's grave on Memorial Day. He was pilot during the Korean "police action" and his plane crashed on takeoff, so not exactly in combat. My mom was twelve, and idolized her older brother. She never said anything to me about it during my service, but she has since told me she could barely sleep. My family has been lucky in that most of the men in the older generations have seen combat, some very intense. Of my generation I am the only one.

My family has been lucky in that most of the men in the older generations have seen combat

Why is that lucky?

I read TLL to mean lucky to only have one combat death out of that large number.

Tweety, I mean lucky in that we are here to tell the tale. My mother's father was an ambulance driver in France in WWI and won the Croix de Guerre. Very Hemmingway, but holy shit. My father's father was at Okinawa. Both my mother's sister's husbands were pilots, one a B-17 and the other a dive bomber. My dad was stop lossed for the Cuban Missle Crisis. So, lucky.

Got it.

155: The firebombing of Hamburg ("Operation Gomorah") probably resulted in about as many civilian deaths as Dresden. The areas of the city that were hardest hit (around the docks and the adjacent working class residential neighborhoods) were not as photogenic as Dresden, so the historical memory is dimmer.

I also had no casualties in my family in the wars of teh 20th century. But one guy who was my friend in 8th and 9th grade, and one guy in my graduating class in high school (though not a friend), have been killed in Iraq so far.

"In short, these individuals may, at this late date, not be ready for the funk."

Hey apo you aren't a mac guy, right? I'm trying to find a good id3 editor so I can make my mixes pretty like yooooouuuuu but ain't havin' much luck.

Here you go, ST.

the historical memory is dimmer.

There is also when in the war it happened, and against how much resistance. Dresden's reputation is based partly on the impression of a Moloch-like allied war machine, unable to take stock of the radically changed realities and threats of the spring of '45, when compared with '43, when W. Europe was still occupied and the Germans were still deep in Russia, with the capacity to take the offensive at least locally.

Although not confined to this subject, and in fact mostly about the German mind, Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction is an amazing book on this subject.

Thanks, Ben.

Hey apo you aren't a mac guy, right?

I've been a Mac user since the mid-'80s. I use some generic shareware tag editor with a predictable name like ID3Editor or something, but couldn't say for sure 'til I get home from work. It's a little flaky, though, and sometimes drops the last letter off of the artist and title tags.

Oh I'd love to know what it is. That would be delicious.