August 9th is the anniversary of the battle of Thermopylae

If you want a quick and dirty understanding of the battle of Thermopylae (wiki), the movie The 300 (or the comic version on which the movie was based) will do in a pinch, and the History Channel videos posted below do a pretty good job.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,

mors et fugacem persequitur virum.

nec parcit imbellis iuventae

poplitibus timidove tergo.

~ Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace, 65-27 B.C.) (Carmina, III, ii, 13)

(To die for the fatherland is a sweet and admirable thing.*

Death is at the heels even of the runaway, nor spares the haunches and back of the coward and malingerer.)

Go tell the Spartans, thou, that passeth by, that here, according to their laws, we lie.

~ Simonides of Ceos (556-458 B.C.) (epitaph for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae)

Leonidas at Thermopylae, by Jacques-Louis David, 1814.

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Thermopylae is a pass in east central Greece between the cliffs of Mount Oeta and the Malic Gulf, and in ancient times, it was a principal entrance into southern Greece from the north.

It was there that the Greeks confronted the third Persian expedition of the Persian Wars - an army of as many as a half-million men under Xerxes. When they found that their position had been turned, however, the Greeks retreated precipitously - all except for a 300-strong Spartan contingent under their king, Leonidas, and 700 Theban allies. (The latter are often overlooked in references to the battle.)

The pass of Thermopylae today - the road to 
the far right is built on land reclaimed from the sea

Leonidas and his men fought a delaying action in the narrowest part of the pass until they were overcome by the Persians and slaughtered to a man. In book VII of his The Persian Wars, the Greek historian Herodotus (484? - 425? B.C.) wrote,

"...they defended themselves to the last, such as still had swords using them, and the others resisting with their hands and teeth; until the barbarians, who had in part pulled down the wall and attacked them in front, also had gone round and now encircled them on every side, overwhelmed and buried the remnant left beneath showers of missile weapons."

Thermopylae has ever since been celebrated in song and story as one of the legendary battles of western history, although George William Curtis (1824-1892) places it in a larger context:

"Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they cannot conquer."

Here's a rather well-done documentary.

* N.B. Two contrary views:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

~ Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) ("Dulce et Decorum Est")

I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.

When I felt the bullet enter my heart

I wished I'd stayed home and gone to jail

For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,

Instead of running away and joining the army.

Rather a thousand times the county jail

Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,

And this granite pedestal

Bearing the words, "Pro Patria."

What do they mean, anyway?

~ Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) (Spoon River Anthology, "Knowlt Hoheimer")

This whole discussion reminds me of the Patton quote, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

Weird anti-drug PSAs

My personal favorite of these anti-drug PSAs is The Chicken Club - here's the youtube info:

This is a legitimate anti-drug music video (from the 80''s) conceived and created to let youngsters know that if they were confronted with the temptation to do drugs they could say "no" with confidence. Even if the person propositioning the child called them a "chicken" (as a last ditch effort to persuade the kid to change their mind) the youth could fire back with the completely unexpected answer, "That's right, I am a chicken and it's OK because there is this sweet music video that told me that it's cool to be a chicken. So your taunts, jeers and name calling will not make me change my mind, in fact they only strengthen my resolve. I'm not only a chicken...I'm in the Chicken Club!"

I would really like one of these Surfing Monkey Banks, please - story below the video:

Dangerous Minds had a post about the Surfing Monkey PSA in 2012 and heard from the creator, Greg Collins:

I’m one of the creators of that surfing monkey spot you threw up on Dangerous Minds this afternoon. Thanks for doing that.

Apparently you can buy these now.

That spot actually dates back to 1999. A buddy of mine and his wife totally smoked out one night. The next morning, they woke up on the sofa, their ribs and stomach muscles were hurting. They didn’t remember much of anything, other than laughing their asses off.

About a week later, a UPS guy knocked on their door, bearing some boxes from QVC. While they were all gassed out, they bought a Star Trek collector’s plate, a Chi-Wash-Wa home car washing system and a Michael Jordan in-flight pewter statuette. All in all, about $400. That must’ve been some great weed.

When they told me the story, I thought that’d make an awesome commercial, but all of that was too much to put into a :30 spot. We needed to drill it down to one item for simplicity and comedy’s sake. My buddy Greg hit on the idea of something really ridiculous like a surfing monkey coin bank. We shot the spot for like $300 and sold it through to the Partnership For A Drug-Free America. It ran in 1999-2000, and, to this day, remains one of their most beloved and recalled commercials.

And once you've moved on from the madness of reefer, here's LSD, A Case Study (turn down the sound - there's a very loud screaming hot dog):

via Flavorwire, where you can find more.

If the Trump Assassination Attempt were a movie script.

 From Joseph Mallozzi on X.

Thanks for the script.  Overall, the plotting feels contrived and, at times, defies logic, so we’re going to require a fairly extensive rewrite for the second draft.

Our biggest issue with the script is the characterization of the Secret Service who come across as so inept that it defies credulity.  Specifics to follow.

Could we put the building that the shooter climbs onto OUTSIDE a proper security zone instead of the current Pac Man configuration that only excludes his position?

The Secret Service Director character seems to lack the intelligence one would expect from someone in their position.   Please have her come up with something more plausible than the “too slopey!" excuse for why no armed agents were stationed on the rooftop.  Let’s work a little harder to create a more clever explanation for the egregious lapse in professional conduct, one that our audience could buy into.  Maybe the shooter incapacitated the agents inside the building through non-lethal means, say a knock-out gas or drugs in their water supply.  This could also explain how the shooter could have carried the ladder over, propped it up to the building, and climbed up without being noticed  by law enforcement.

Speaking of the ladder, can we make it a lightweight retractable model instead of the 20 foot heavy version he is currently lugging around in the script?  Or, better yet, could it already be there?  Maybe the security personnel were planning to use it to climb onto the roof later or repairs were being effected to the roof earlier that morning.

Could we come up with an alternative explanation for why the Secret Service is curtailed rather than the current “He had to share with the President’s wife”?

I’m bumping on the idea of the Secret Servie outsourcing the protection of a Presidential candidate to a local police detachment of 12 officers.  Can we double that number?

Can we lose the scene where the shooter passes through the security screening hours before the shooting with a rangefinder and is clocked by the Secret Service  but nobody does anything about it?  It makes them look incompetent.

Also lose the beat where the shooter’s family contacts law enforcement to warn them that their son has gone missing with an AR-15 three hours before the assassination attempt.

Can we not have the shooter spotted on the rooftop by the attendees?  While I appreciate your attempt to ramp up the tension, having 30 minutes pass between the moment people point him out to when he finally takes the shot really feels like a stretch.  Instead of all these people spotting him and shouting at authorities to no avail, how about making it a lone child instead?  Say a three year old loses their balloon and watches it drift skywards, past the rooftop, where he sees the man on the roof.  He turns to his mother and says: “Mommy, there’s a man on the roof!”  But when his mother looks, there is no one there as the shooter has ducked down and the roof fully obscures him.  His mother, of course, dismisses her son's comment as the product of a child's imagination.

Still bumping on why the sniper takes so long to shoot if he has spotted the threat (20 minutes earlier! Come on.).  As a trained professional, he would have never allowed the shooter to get those shots off.  The explanation that he was awaiting the green light from his superiors is a huge buy.  I’d suggest some sort of communication breakdown but even that doesn’t really feel right.  Let’s think on it.

The fact that the Secret Service allows the Presidential candidate onto the stage after an alert about the shooter goes out on an “all tactical channel" is a huge plot hole.

The shooter character feels cliche.  Single young white male, bullied through high school, elects to act out by…trying to assassinate the Presidential frontrunner?  Why?  Let’s dig into his motivation a little more, come up with something that doesn’t rely on the tired “crazy loner” trope.  Also, I have to admit to laughing out loud with the reveal that he is a registered Republican, an unintentionally hilarious twist that, I’m afraid, feels a little perfunctory and is not going to fool the audience.  Having a record of him donating to a progressive committe just muddles the backstory here.  The explosives in the car and bomb-making materials at his home also feel a little on the nose.  Finally, could we get this guy SOME sort of internet presence?  After all, he’s 20-years-old, not some octagenerian Luddite.  Maybe an unremarkable instagram account or occasional post on reddit. If you want to lean into the “crazed conservative” angle, maybe give him an account on the X platform and have him retweet Mitt Romney or Adam Kinzinger.

Having the media break a story, days later, of a plot by Iran to kill the Presidential frontrunner is confusing, unncessary, and, when you think about it, actually makes the Secret Service look even worse because you’re effectively saying they were expecting an attack, heightened the security detail, and were STILL caught with their pants down.  Suggest swapping out Iran for Russia in keeping with the current trend.

The DHS Secretary feels like your typical cartoon villain.  Is there a way to humanize him a little?  Maybe give him a funny dog?  One of those Chinese Cresteds would be great!

The t.v. host that hints at the possibility the assassination was staged is great goofy comic relief!  Just be careful not to make her too over-the-top delusional/loopy.  A little goes a long way here.

I do have to admit that the revelation shadowy individuals shorted millions of shares of the Presidential frontrunner’s company to, presumably, cash in on his expected demise was very interesting as it adds another layer of intrigue, hinting at that broader, more insidious conspiracy you’ve already layered in.  Would be great to hint at their comeuppance, the significant financial loss they incurred when their plans fells through.

That’s it for now.  Looking forward to seeing how you address these notes in the rewrite!

July 14 is Bastille Day

If you're here for Jonah Goldberg's classic article on the subject, here you go: The French are Revolting.

Arise children of the fatherland

The day of glory has arrived

Against us tyranny's

Bloody standard is raised

Listen to the sound in the fields

The howling of these fearsome soldiers

They are coming into our midst

To cut the throats of your sons and consorts

To arms citizens Form your battalions

March, march

Let impure blood

Water our furrows

~ Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836) ("La Marseillaise", first verse translated into English. Six more follow, all more or less equally bloodthirsty. *

The Storming of the Bastille by Jean-Pierre Houël

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals - apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. 

~ Mark Twain (1835-1910) (Anderson, ed., Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, Vol. 2, Notebook 18)

Old France , weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal.

~ Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) (War Memoirs, Vol. 3, Ch. 7)

The Bastille was later demolished - the Place de la Bastille

 sits where the fortress once stood

July 14th is Bastille Day (wiki), which commemorates the storming of the ancient royal prison of that name in Paris on 14 July 1789, an event which marked the beginning of the French Revolution. That storming was, of course, more symbolic than substantial - as Jonah Goldberg points out in his classic Bastille Day column, it consisted of "the capture of an almost entirely empty prison, the cold-blooded murder of six unarmed soldiers, and the execution of one French governor already captured by the mob". On that day the Bastille held only seven inmates: four forgers, two madmen, and a young rake who had displeased his father. All were freed.

The Marseillais volunteers departing, sculpted on the Arc de Triomphe

Formally known as the Bastille Saint-Antoine, the fortress was built during the Hundred Years’ War to defend the eastern approaches of Paris from English attacks. It Consisted of eight 100-foot high towers, all linked together by equally tall walls, surrounded by 80 foot wide moat. By 1789 the Bastille was actually little used and was scheduled to be demolished, part of the reason why there were so few prisoners there that day.

*La Marseillaise, France's stirring national anthem, was written in Strasbourg on 25 April 1792 by French captain Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle and originally titled the "Marching Song of the Army of the Rhine." It gained instant popularity as a rallying song and gained its latter-day name from being first sung in the streets of Paris by newly arrived troops from Marseilles. The remaining verses are available at Wikipedia. 

La Marseillaise was banned in both Vichy and German-occupied France during World War II, and also during the 19th-century French Empire under Napoleon III because of its revolutionary sentiments.  

Has there every been a more stirring rendition than the one at Rick's "Café Americaine" in Casablanca?

Related post: French King Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793. Here's Allan Sherman (because if you're of a certain age it's inevitable to think of Allan Sherman when you hear La Marseillaise:

One of my favorite Father's Day stories (NSFW- language)

This is from Justin Halpern, author of Sh*t My Dad Says, and is funny and weirdly touching. NSFW.

You Take What You Need From Your Father

Father’s Day has never been a big deal at my house. My dad hates celebrations. He goes through the motions for Christmas because it means a lot to my mom. He’ll put up with Easter because it means he gets to eat ham. “You can pretty much get to do whatever you want if you give me ham,” he’s said many times in my life. But Father’s Day is technically his holiday, and therefore he feels he has the right to squash it in our house. 

“Anyone can fucking procreate, and most eventually do. I refuse to celebrate a statistical probability,” he announced on Father’s Day when I was seventeen.

I was about to graduate from high school, and my relationship with my dad during the last year had been rocky. Everything we did seemed to annoy one another. I dealt with the friction by avoiding being in the house while he was there, and he dealt with it by repeating the phrase, “You mind? I’m watching the fucking Nature Channel.” 

So when he told me on the morning of Father’s Day that year that he would not partake in a celebration, frankly, I was fine with it. But my mother was not. That night I sat on my bed reading a brochure from San Diego State University, where I was heading in the fall, when the door to my room opened and my father entered.

“Sorry to interrupt whatever it is you’re doing,” he said.

“I’m just looking at some of the classes they have at State,” I said. 

“Oh yeah? Like what?” 

“You want to know?” 

“Ah, fuck it, not really. Listen, your mother thinks you’re going to go off to college and hate me and then we’re not going to be friends again until I’m dying and I got a wad of shit in my pants. That’s bullshit right?” 

“Ah – “ 

“So, look, I’m not an easy guy to get along with. I know that. But you know I would murder another human being for you if it came down to it. Murder. Fucking homicide. If it came down to it.” 

“Why would you need to do that for me?” I said. 

“I don’t know. Maybe you get mixed up in some gambling shit or you screw some guy’s wife or – don’t matter. Not my point. My point is: I may seem like an asshole, but I mean well. And I want to tell you a story,” he said, taking a seat on the foot of my bed before quickly jumping up.

“Your bed smells like shit. Where can I sit that doesn’t smell like shit?” 

I pointed to my desk chair, which was covered with dirty clothes. He brushed the clothes onto the ground and collapsed in the chair. 

“Just for your information, this chair also smells like shit. This isn’t a non-­‐shit-­‐smelling option. In case a girl comes over or something.” 

“What’s your story, Dad?” I snapped. 

“I ever tell you how I mangled my arm?” he asked, pointing to the large, white crescent-­‐shaped scar that practically circled his entire elbow.

“Yeah, lots of times. You were, like, ten and you were on the farm and you fell off a tobacco wagon, then the wagon rolled over it.” 

“Right. But I ever tell you what happened after the wagon rolled over it?”

“Maybe.” 

He leaned back in the chair. “I was laying on the ground, bones poking through my skin. Your Aunt Debbie is just going ape-­‐shit. They pop me in our car, and we drive forty-­‐five minutes to Lexington to the doctor’s. This is 1946 Kentucky, and my town was a shit stain on a map so we had to drive to the city. So the doc sees me, dresses the wounds best he can, and puts me up in the hospital bed. At this point I’m about to pass out on account of the pain.” 

“I almost had that happen once,” I interrupted. 

No you didn’t. So anyway, I’m lying in my hospital bed when your Grandpa gets there. And your Grandpa was a tough son of a bitch. He wasn’t like how you knew him; he softened up in his nineties. So Grandpa grabs the doc, and your Aunt Debbie and the two of them go outside my room. I can hear them talking, but they don’t know that. The doc tells your Grandpa that they think there’s a good chance that an infection has already taken hold in my arm. And Grandpa, in that scratchy voice he’s got, asks what that means. And the doc tells him it means they have some medicine they can give me that might kill the infection, but it might not, and if it doesn’t, I’ll die.” 

“You heard the doctor say that?” 

“Yep.” 

“What’d you do?”

“What do you mean? I had fucking bones coming out of my elbow. I didn’t do shit. So the doc tells Grandpa that there’s a 50/50 chance the medicine works. But then he says there’s another option. He tells Grandpa if they amputate my arm at the elbow, there’s a 100 percent chance that I’ll live.” 

“What did Grandpa say?” I asked, inching toward the edge of the bed. 

“He said, ‘Give him the medicine.’ And the doc says, ‘But there’s a 50 percent chance he’ll die.’ Then it’s quiet for a bit. Nobody making a fucking peep. Then I hear Grandpa clear his throat and say, ‘Then let him die. There ain’t no room in this world for a one-­‐armed farmer.”

My dad fell silent and leaned back in the chair, stretching his legs out.

My dad hadn’t told me many stories about his father at this point, and I wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the man. This was the first time I had gotten a glimpse.       

“Man, I’m really sorry, Dad.” 

“Sorry for what?” he asked, his face morphing into a look of confusion as he sat up straight in the chair. 

“Well, that’s, I don’t know, that’s really… messed up. I can’t believe Grandpa did that.” 

“What in the fuck are you talking about? The man saved my arm! They were going to cut off my arm and he saved it. That’s my point: Grandpa could be an asshole sometimes but when it came down to it he was there for me.” 

“That’s what you took from that?” 

“Hell yes. I don’t know what else you were expecting me to take. Imagine me with one goddamned arm. Be a fucking disaster. Anyway, just like Grandpa cared about me, I care about you and I don’t want you out there hating me, cause I don’t hate you. I love the shit out of you.” 

He stood up, ironing his pants’ front with his hands. 

“Jesus H. Christ, do something about the fucking smell in this room.” 

Fourteen years later, on this Father’s Day, despite his reluctance to celebrate the holiday, I’d like to thank my dad for everything he’s done for me and advise him: If a wagon ever crushes me, let’s not roll the dice. Cut off my arm, Dad. There’s more than enough room in this world for a one-­‐armed writer. 

~Justin Halpern June 2011