Christmas Day, 2021

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

~ T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

There was a time when I would struggle out of sleep on Christmas morning, desperate for caffeine amid jittering children impatient for loot.

Today? Nah. Just me and Little Cat, coffee and tuna pate' and soccer re-runs in the silent morning house. Why the hell was Qatar playing in the CONCACAF Cup semifinal? Fucker was in Eurasia last I checked. Fucking FIFA cash-grab, I suspect.

Finally the crew staggered in and the presents were distributed and everyone got down to the hard business of Christmas Day - napping (parents), gaming (The Boy), and something artistic (The Girl). The cats begged for food, prowled randomly, or napped, although Drachma did have a moment with his new catnip toy:

.

He had to sleep it off under the tree...

Late in the afternoon my Bride concluded that we needed a brisk walk, so we headed out into the gray, rainy, high-thirties evening, down to the little woodlot waste ground along the fringes of St. Johns to walk off excess Christmas Spirit.

And proceeded to immediately come across a dump of cut-up commercial weed.

"Oh Christmas weed, oh Christmas weed, how lovely are your branches..!"

Frankly it was miserable; cold, wet, with a nasty east wind that was just enough to chill any part of you that wasn't covered.

The Girl and I turned back just past the treeline in the distance of the photo above. The Bride kept on going just long enough to show us what weenies we were being, and I'm totally okay with that. That was a rotten ramble.

But we got home to the warmth and the glow of the lights, and the promise of the quiet evening to come.

Friday Jukebox: Christmas Eve Edition

Seeing as how I've exposed myself as a latte-sippin' effete lover of musical theatre, today's jukebox includes a couple of songs I love from a couple of musicals I adore.

The first is from Anais Mitchell's Hadestown, a darkly gorgeous retelling of the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice reimagined as a modern parable of love, death, fate and power.

At this moment Eurydice is facing a choice; struggle and hunger with her beloved, or a life of surety in Hadestown. The Fates ask her what she's going to do:

Wonderful song in a wonderful show that, if you're familiar with the story doesn't end...well.

The other is sung by this gal:

She's Anne of Cleves, the fourth of the "Six Wives of Henry VIII", and is currently part of the cast of the musical Six, about, well...go figure.

All the ex-wives are fun (for the purest entertainment you might give Anne Boleyn's "Don't Lose Your Head" a listen...) but Anne is the Queen of the Castle (woof!) as you might expect from the one woman who came off her head-on-collision with Hank the Eighth the better off for it.

So this Christmas Eve we can join her "Doin' my thing in my palace in Richmond!"

And as a weird example of the way my mind works, enjoying Six the musical took me from there to thinking about all of the ex-wives and their ex, and from there to the peculiar tale of the infamous jousting accident of 1536, which will be the subject of my next serious post.

But between now and then I'll be back with some Christmas crap.

End of an Era

Some eighty years ago the Battleship Era ended in a flurry of bombs and torpedoes that sank the two capital ships of the Royal Navy's Force Z.

Yes, aircraft had been involved in sinking the most capital of capital ships prior to December 10, 1941. But the circumstances allowed battleship fans to temporize. 

An aerial torpedo ensured the doom of Bismarck, but the actual sinking occurred during a surface gun action. Battleships were sunk by aircraft at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, but those were surprise attacks on unsuspecting moored warships.

There was no gray area on December 10. Aircraft found and sank two of the Royal Navy's heavy units, one, Prince of Wales, one of the newest and most powerful British battleships extant.

The "moral" I've always been told that this story taught was that in the 90 minutes it took the air attack to sink both Prince of Wales and Repulse the battleship era ended and any naval organization that pursued heavy gunpower rather than carrier airpower was foolishly incompetent. 

What's kind of intriguing about one "counterfactual" is that Force Z had come within five miles of an IJN task force consisting of "six cruisers" - I've been unable to discover which six these were, but at least one was Chōkai (鳥海), a Takao-class heavy cruiser.

Neither task force was using radar effectively. The Japanese because IJN radar technology was crippled throughout the Second World War, the British because Prince of Wales' radar had gone down earlier in the mission, supposedly through overheating in the tropical heat and humidity.

(Worth noting that in this the PoW lived up to her reputation as a "hard-luck ship"...)

Let's assume that at least three or four of the other "six cruisers" out that night were also heavies. The Japanese heavy cruisers were beasts, especially heavily armed with the big 24-inch torpedoes, and the IJN trained extensively in night gun and torpedo action as the encounters off Guadalcanal the following year proved.

 
Let's suppose that the two task forces had, instead, bumped into each other in the night.

The British weight of metal would probably have torn the Japanese cruisers apart, but the IJN night fighting and torpedo tactics might well have either sunk or badly damaged the British capital ships to the point where their sinking by aircraft the following morning could be written off the same way that the battleship aficionados wrote off Bismarck, Taranto, and Pearl Harbor.

The "end of the battleship era" might now be attributed to the naval and naval air actions off the Philippines in 1944.

No real point here other than to consider how things we take for received wisdom often turn on small, nearly insignificant events, like the failure of the British radar the night of December 9/10.

Thoughts?

Posse Stupidtatus

 So it turns out that sending U.S. soldiers to be ersatz Border Patrol was a pretty stupid idea.

"Leaders initiated more than 1,200 legal actions, including nonjudicial punishments, property loss investigations, Army Regulation 15-6 investigations and more. That’s nearly one legal action for every three soldiers. At least 16 soldiers from the mission were arrested or confined for charges including drugs, sexual assault and manslaughter. During the same time period, only three soldiers in Kuwait, a comparable deployment locale with more soldiers, were arraigned for court-martial.

Troops at the border had more than three times as many car accidents over the past year — at least 500 incidents totaling roughly $630,000 in damages — than the 147 “illegal substance seizures” they reported assisting.

One cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded due to misconduct and command climate issues — an extremely rare occurrence."

Gee. I wonder? Where did we have the occasion to learn - and recently - that soldiers are usually good at soldiering, usually not so much as domestic - or foreign - policemen.

"Tensions were ignited on April 28, however, when soldiers from the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment opened fire on a group of protesters in front of a school, killing 15 and wounding more than three dozen others. Although the military said the soldiers fired in self-defense under attack from Baathist provocateurs, residents said many of the demonstrators were unarmed.

The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks. Exchanges of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks started to occur almost daily."

 Oh, shit, yeah. That.

I swear, we're the fucking 21st Century Bourbons. We learn nothing but we forget nothing.

Big Iron On His Hip

 Back in November I wrote a short piece discussing the latest firearm atrocity. I had exactly the same effect on firearms in this country as every other opinion piece, editorial, blog post, and survivor plea after another nutjob takes his bullet launcher and sends another bunch of poor sods to join the Choir Eternal.

Nothing.

But today I was thinking how utterly weird the current insane gunlicking going on at the American Right is, and, in particular, how sudden it has arrived.

This isn't some sort of trace-it-back-to-the-Revolution thing. It's basically been invented out of whole cloth over about the past forty years. Contemporary with the rise of the modern GQP (hmmm...what an odd co-inky-dink, Bug Bunny would say).

The whole hyperammosexualization of firearms is only about twenty or thirty years old and how freakishly weird is the notion of living in a modern industrial democracy and wanting, NEEDing, to be strapped at all times.

I was a medic in an infantry battalion in the early 1980s. 

 

 It was legal for a GI to own a personal weapon (mind you, not many did - certainly nobody in my platoon, and infantrymen, even infantry medics, ain't exactly your soy-boy peacenik hippies...).

 

Keep in mind that this was an airborne infantry battalion. Infantry. The kind of people who, y'know, made their living with firearms.

 

And the ironclad Armywide rule was that IF you had a personal weapon, whatever the make and model, that weapon lived in your company arms room at all times 1) unless and until you signed it out to go to the range and 2) was immediately returned to the arms cage when you returned to the company area.

 

The notion that you the individual Joe would keep your bang stick leaning up against your bunk? Or your hogleg in your desk drawer? Your First Sergeant would square your young ass away most quick smart.

 

So here's a bunch of people who are thoroughly trained and experienced using firearms - whose trade is using firearms - whose first, last, unbreakable rule is that unless you're going to shoot at targets you don't get to keep and bear the sonofabitch. 

 

Period. 

 

It stays locked up with the rest of the weaponry.

But here's some idiot Joe and Molly keeping their nine-mil in the bedside drawer where their whacked-out sprog can use it to work out his testosterone issues.

 

Nope. 

 

This whole business is completely whacko.

 

And as always on this subject, I refer you to Jim Wright for a bit of bang-bang-sanity.

 

Not A Day Goes By

I woke late this morning.

Well, late for me, used to the cold and dark of 4:00 or 5:00am on days when a drill rig or contractor was waiting, but I'd had another night of broken bad sleep. Between the knees and the Little Cat (who continued her tradition of rising loud and proud several times a night) I was still tired and disoriented as I made the coffee and checked my phone to see what had happened overnight.

I found that I no longer shared the Earth with Stephen Sondheim.

It's strange-funny how life and time transmute us and the world around us.

The Girl is a high school sophomore, and if she can be categorized as part of a high school clique - and I assume there still are cliques; jocks, nerds, stoners, normies - she's a "dramat", part of the thespian society which is delightfully strong in her otherwise-fairly-sketchy-urban high school.

She's not a dramat-dramat, not an aspiring actor with all the baggage associated with that. She's a  "techie", running her sound booth or light board for the shows. In fact, she has a fairly side-eyed view of actors, whom she blames for insisting on missing their cues or marks and messing up the tech. After the fall musical she came home cussing the actors so vituperatively that we ad to watch the Mel Brooks The Producers for the moment that Zero Mostel tells Kenneth Mars; "Here! Take the pistol! Go to the theater! Kill the actors!"

Because of her enthusiasm I've been pulled back into a world I left forty years ago; musical theater.

When you stop to think about it, the American musical is a very weird thing. How do you explain a particular subset of live drama where at random moments the actors break into song? Is there anything even remotely similar in real life?

But if they're good, musicals can be powerful in ways that no straight play can be.

Stephen Sondheim created those sorts of musicals.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties I was, like The Girl, a sort of peripheral member of the college Green Room and the people who hung around it. I had a bit part in Romeo and Juliet, not for my acting chops but because I fenced and the director wanted some realism for the opening fight scenes.

 
It was though the Green Roomers that I found musical theater, and the towering figure at that time was Sondheim.

Keep in mind that in the Seventies and early Eighties a Broadway ticket was an expense, not an investment. You could get a pass to a matinee for twenty bucks, and if you hit the TKTS booth in Times Square even an evening performance for maybe twice that - a bit of a stretch for  a college student but not insane, not the eighty or hundred dollars (or more..!) you'll pay now.

So I learned musical theater at the feet of Sondheim.

Oh, sure, I went to see the other sorts of stuff showing in the late Seventies; Nine, Side by Side, Barnum, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (and is there ever a property that has worn less well..?) and, in 1979, Sweeney Todd.

Sweeney was a thunderbolt, a revelation, that you could tell a story - a grim, dark, convoluted, intensely gripping story, through song alone. Dialogue was minimal, just bridges between the numbers, and the songs themselves were jewelboxes; rich, melodic and harmonic while at the same time jarring and atonal and as dark and twisted as the tale itself.

I was enthralled, in my cheap matinee seat in Row GG.

So, a convert to the Church of Sondheim, I waited impatiently for his next work of genius. That came two years later, and I couldn't wait for Opening Night. I scored preview tickets for Merrily We Roll Along.

 
I knew that the original was a Kaufman and Hart property from the Thirties, something about a dramat who makes it big by selling his soul, but that was all I knew other than it would be Sondheim and Hal Prince, those colossi who bestrode the Broadway world while we petty men crept between their legs to marvel at what they wrought.

So, dressed in my "business casual" that was as dressy as I could afford to fit in with the Broadway crowd, I waited eagerly in the dark for the curtain to rise.

It did...and that was the high point of the show.

What's peculiar is that Merrily seems to have grown in the telling. It's been revived several times, successfully, and is supposedly considered among the better Sondheim/Furth properties - perhaps not up there with Pacific Overtures or Company but better than The Frogs...

The 1981 production was a resounding disaster. 

Even a theater noob like me could sense it coming, as the muddled story and interchangeable cast struggled through the backwards-chronology towards the first act curtain. The intermission applause had a tentative quality that boded poorly for the second act which turned out to be as poorly received as the first. Along with the rest of the audience I was sort of stunned. This was a Stephen Sndheim show? The book, not the songs, was largely the problem, attempting to lift the story from the cynical opening to the sunshine-y final curtain and largely producing, instead, the sort of grim, forced brightness of a Hallmark commercial pitch.

The original run notoriously closed after 16 performances, the worst a Sondheim show had ever done up to that point.

I read that the failure of Merrily hit Sondheim hard. He considered abandoning Broadway altogether. And, indeed, his Broadway work was greatly reduced; Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, his first collaboration with James Lapine and Into The Woods three years later.

In a life that has featured as many failures as successes - as I imagine many, probably most lives do - it may sound odd that the immediate memory the news of that Sondheim would never again write the music and lyrics for a musical play brought to my mind was that of one of his great failures.

Even in failure, though,the enjoyment of musical theater I'd come to, largely though Sondheim's talents, never left me so that so many years later I could sit and enjoy Wicked and In The Heights with my neo-dramat daughter.

Is there a point to this ramble?

Perhaps only that we touch each others lives in odd and unpredictable ways; that the life now ended touched me, and mine touched my child's, and here we are, waiting in dark for the curtain to rise on another production for another day.

Get Strapped or Get Stripped

I'm not going to go deep into the weeds on the Rittenhouse verdict. It was prima facie from the moment the trial opened. Between the trial judge's Trumpkin antics to the jury selection, the odds were tilted towards getting the little bastard off.

But when the result of this decision produces crap like this:

Let me phrase it this way. Do you believe liberals need to bring guns to their protests?

Carrying a firearm is a personal decision, and more people on both sides need better education about what it means to carry a firearm in the public sphere so that they can make those decisions for themselves. I’m not trying to get around that question. That is a big, complicated question. And my answer to that is everyone needs more training.

 ...my country has a serious goddamn gun problem. And politics problem.

Yeah, it's Slate. I get that. And I have no idea who "Lara Smith" is other than she's a gormless nitwit.

But one of the most misunderstood Bob Heinlein quotes is that damn "An armed society is a polite society" one from Beyond This Horizon. The context - that the speaker is essentially advocating a sort of eugenics through firearms "kill(ing) off the weak and the stupid" - is never mentioned any more than the "well-regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment is cited alongside the keep-and-bear-arms part.

Because an armed society isn't "polite". It's barely a society at all. When you have to back your political ideas with armed force, every debate will inevitably degenerate into a gunfight. Smith basically admits that; ""everyone needs more training"? Seriously? That's your recommendation when your political opponents come at you armed? Spartakists versus Freikorps in the streets of Portland?

The Rittenhouse verdict sends a clear message to the political opponents of the Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers - you have two choices; arm yourselves or be at the mercy of being shot down whenever the armed wingnuts show up.

I know what my choice would be.

I also know that if I brought the bullet launcher to a protest that the Portland coppers would be all over me and not to pal around comparing cool rifles. 

As the Homestead strikers or the Stonewall rioters or the Freedom Riders could tell you; the police are the natural allies of the Right. If you're out there raising hell against the Authority the cops are your natural enemies, anyway, and when the Rittenhouses turn up armed and looking for trouble they will get a tongue-bath from the Blue that you, the dirty antifa BLM radical commie hippie bastard, will never receive.

Just like the murderous little bugger did in Kenosha.

Regardless of the circumstances of the individual case, the Rittenhouse verdict presents the American Left with a stark choice.

Arm yourselves, or be destroyed whenever your Proud Boy enemies choose.

And that, my friends, is not a sane way to run a nation.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

Frankly, I can't say it better than Jim Wright did, so instead of wasting your time blathering on about this, my forty-second Veteran's Day, I'm just going to hand you over to him.

I do want to emphasize Wright's point about the politically dangerous business of "heroing" soldiers in a notional democracy.

To lionize the military as we do, to exempt soldiers - because that's what "hero" does; it takes the object of that veneration out of the sordid business of daily living and makes them a shining object of veneration - from criticism and scrutiny is to make them the idols of your society. 

That's not "democracy". It is "militarism", the heart of totalitarian doctrines like fascism and soviet-style-communism.

Like Wright, I'm not vauntingly proud of what I did in the Army.

I did my time, and did it well. I had some good times, some bad time - though not as bad as the troops who had to fight real wars had - had a good laugh and came home sound.

Which is a damn "good war" all things considered.

I'm good with my past.

But I'm concerned for my and my children's future. So I want you to think - just as it made me think - about what Wright says about this day.

For as he has said elsewhere; if you want a better country, you have to be better citizens.

Trail of Tears

Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.

The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.

That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.

Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized. 

Today the trail looks more like this:

 

Most housed North Portlanders won't stray onto the trail anymore; it's not worth the debris and the random whacko and the ride is no longer peaceful and pretty.

Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.

But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.

I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.

But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.

The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland. 

The article tries hard to make O'Connor into a sympathetic character, but can't avoid noting that:

"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."

So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.

What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.

Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.

I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.

But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little. 

But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.

Getting on with things

Today is four weeks post-op for Knee #2 (nearly two months for #1). The aftermarket parts are...settling in; still stiff and creaky (the right obviously a LOT more than the left) and requiring lots more work to approach anything like normal walking.

But I can walk. It's not fast and it's not graceful - I'm still pretty stiff and tottery, particularly on the stairs - but it's doable with just a cane or even without, if I go slowly enough.

Sleep is still a huge issue which is why I'm typing this at 3am on a Friday morning. I've gotten into a weird sort of routine where I turn in about 11ish and then spend the next four to five hours just lying around. Occasionally I can sort of drift off into a doze, but seldom for more than a quarter-hour or so.

Until about 4:00 to 5:00am; then I drop into a light sleep. It's not a great sleep, it's like when you're so exhausted that you don't so much "go to sleep" as "fail to stay awake". When I wake - usually around 8:00 to 9:00 - I feel mazy and disassociated, wanting to get back to sleep but unable, but still not very "awake". As you can imagine, this shit is getting very old, and I sure wish I could do something about it.

I'm slowly beginning to re-engage with my job, with the intention to return to indoor work at the end of October. This past week I was yanked back in abruptly by a minor crisis and not happily.

I am the "Radiation Safety Officer" for my office. We have several machines - "nuclear density gauges" or "nuclear densometers" - that are used to test soil (or asphalt) density and, as the name implies, use radioactive isotopes for the measurement. Needless to say, they're expensive and have to be handled with great care; the isotopes (Cesium and Americium) are quite radioactive for the small size of the sources.

That's me in 2009 with one of them - it's the orange thing just behind me. The long black rod sticking up is the "probe"; it's all the way retracted so the source is enclosed in a little lead box with a sliding lead "shutter" on the bottom. When you use it you push the rod down into a pre-driven hole in the soil - the shutter slides out of the way - take your test, and then pull the rod back up to shield the source again.

Well...I got a call from one of our senior engineers who had been dragged out to the field because we're short-staffed. He described a litany of problems with the machine, the worst of which being that the sliding shutter that is supposed to close when the radioactive sources are in the "safe" position was jammed open.

This shutter thing is kind of a kludge. It needs to be decently clean to function, but it's used in all sorts of filthy soil materials which, unsurprisingly, will build up inside the shutter well and cake the thing and make it stick.

The solution is to remove the cover plate and remove and clean the shutter and then put everything back together again. It's a pain, but it's fairly safe (you face the bottom of the machine away from you and reach around to clean the shutter well...) if you know how to do it right.

Well...in the seven or eight weeks I've been out our two staff-level people have thoroughly trashed two of the three gauges, the worst problem being that the shutters were both jammed open with crud.

I spent a frustrating evening trying to solve the problem before deciding that standing a foot in front of an unshielded radioactive source was a fool's business. I shoved the things back in their carry boxes and sent them off to Seattle for our depot maintenance person to fix.

But I can see I need a little wall-to-wall counseling with the staff people involved. That sort of negligence - hell, they could have called me at any time and I'd have come in, knees and all, to try and clean and repair the things - is truly culpable. These aren't $1.49 gadgets from Radio Shack, but because of the staff guys' laziness now $8,000 worth of density gauges are both useless and dangerous.

How freaking hard is it to clean up your damn equipment..?

Rrrrrr.

Oh, and the other excitement is that Little Cat has started scratching herself again.

 

She was doing that when we adopted her; clawing out bits of fur and injuring herself for no reason we could see. It wasn't fleas, and we went to a vet allergist for several months, spent a shit-ton of money including this horrible "rabbot-and-pea" food that Little One hated, and got nowhere.

Well, she's at it again, so this time we went to a little kitty-cat ER and got some corticosteroids and a special flea treatment and she seems to be better. Still a goof, and very sweet and affectionate - she's our lap-kitty now that Drachma is too proud to let himself be mauled by hairless monkeys.

One last note; for some reason I got interested in a bit of history I'd pawed over and kind of tossed aside; the 1071 Battle of Manzikert; Seljuk Turks versus Byzantines for control of the Anatolian heartland. So that should be coming along here not too long.

I'll probably be back before then, though, with something.

But not I have gotta try and sleep.

G'night.

The thieves of glory

One of my passions is soccer (no, really..?) and particularly the local soccer teams, the Timbers on the men's side and the Thorns on the women's.

Laid up as I am I spend a fair bit of time watching both teams - and the Timbers are, after a pretty awful start, on a bit of a tear so Howay you Timbers! - as well as thinking and writing about them over at my other gig, Riveting!

So it was with sickened horror I read this past week that the Thorns' coach during the 2014 and 2015 seasons was a loathsome rapey scumbag who was savaging his own players while we all cheered and sang for him and them and then got away clean after being fired for fucking up the 2015 season on the pitch.

It's a sad, tired, familiar old story, but carries a heavy blow because it comes so close to home.

Anyway, I'm still immersed in this mess as I go through the boring daily round of my rehabilitation, and though I don't want to go any deeper into it here (you can read my full thoughts on the mess over here), I just thought I'd mention it briefly. 

I'm sick, sad, and angry at everyone - in my club, in the league - who had a role in this desecration of the young women of my beloved Thorns and, through them, many of my own happy and cherished memories.

La Boîteuse

One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to. 

It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.

Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.

So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.

You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.

It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.

Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.

So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).

The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.

The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.

I'm all in, anyway.

Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)

One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.

Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.

But this is where the GQP is now.

What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.

Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.

Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.

You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."

No.

The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.

Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.

That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.

And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.

Well...shit.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble. 

I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.

Knee Replacement - The Adventure Continues

This coming Friday will be both six weeks post-op left knee and surgery date for the right.

I won't kid you; I'm not looking forward to the NEXT three or four weeks. It's going to be a pain-suck mess just like the first three or four weeks post-op was, and that's assuming that everything goes as well as the first replacement.

But the alternative - living with knees that are effectively destroyed and continue to deteriorate - is worse.

The really sucky part, though, is for my Bride, who this week finally got some relief from driving me everywhere, and now is thrown back into the tied-to-the-immobile-mass-of-living-tissue that will be me for a month and a half assuming everything goes well.

We've been taking turns sleeping on the couch, since I still haven't licked the insomnia problems, though after this coming weekend she's back out there for a solid three weeks or so until the post-op pain management becomes manageable. Which means this:

Little Cat luuuurves a nice warm person to sleep on. And the couch is perfect for that. So this was 3am this morning, when - after finally dozing off - I woke to a heavy, hot, furry little body lying on my sternum.

She really is a very sweet cat. But...damn, catto, I made you a special soft fluffy cat nest so you wouldn't do this, fer crying out loud.

Well. At least it keeps my mind off this coming Friday.

"Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre."

 

Well, it's That Day again.

I'm not going to bother going over all this nonsense again; it's bad enough that my country will, for the twentieth time, wave the bloody shirt of the towers and the Pentagon and the farm field where the fourth airliner went down to try and draw the audience's attention from the mountainous heap of death and destruction it built on those ruinous foundations.

I've already talked that sonofabitch to death and there's nothing more to say.

Instead I want to think about the original pile of corpses harvested from that day twenty years ago; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

By pure coincidence, one of the books on my nightstand the day the last U.S. troop walked up the ramp to the evac bird was Andy Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam.

Krepinevich is supposed to have been moved largely by another Vietnam post-mortem, Harry Summers' On Strategy, that posited that the problem was that the U.S. wasn't WW2-enough, that the real problem was that the Army never really went full-D-Day on the Communist forces and defeated them militarily.

Krepinevich's analysis, though, suggested that the opposite was true; that the Army have never really stopped trying to D-Day the war. That what he calls the "Army Concept" - "a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties" (Krepenevich, 1986, p. 6) - was central to the reason that the U.S. failed to realize either it's military or political objectives in Vietnam.

Krepinevich's assessment of low-intensity (call it "guerrilla war" or "counterinsurgency" or "foreign internal defense"...) conflict is that the ultimate objective of the counter-insurgent forces has to be to separate the rebels/insurgents/guerillas from the bulk of the local people, and then to weld the locals to your local proxy through...well, a bunch of stuff, but basically by making the proxy attractive to the locals.

You do that, you eventually win.

He writes that while paying lip service to this objective that, outside a small and relatively powerless group of low-ranking officers (largely in the Special Forces and advisory cadres), the Army hierarchy had no interest in doing this. They wanted to meet the NVA and VC Main Force units in open combat and smash them.

So the low-level, day-to-day, grinding work of securing the population was left to the South Vietnamese, from the ARVN down to the Regional Force and Popular Force paramilitaries and the National Police.

And this crippled the actual counterinsurgency. The ARVN and the police were a corrupt mess even where they were militarily competent, the RVN government was, if anything, worse, and the RF/PF (the "Ruff-Puffs") starved for resources and unsupported so at the mercy of the local VC.

The "contribution" of the US and ARVN maneuver forces was to swing through in a "big sweep", shoot the fuck out of the landscape, create a bunch of refugees among the survivors, and then move on, leaving the locals to get re-occupied by the local force VC and the political cadres that had largely gone to ground before the sweep.

That pretty much tallies with my reading of the conduct of the war, and Krepinevich in his conclusion, says that:

"Low-intensity warfare represents the most likely arena of future conflict for the Army, and counterinsurgency the most demanding contingency. As in the period following the Korean War, (after Vietnam) the Army is erecting barriers to avoid fighting another Vietnam War...instead of gaining a better understanding of how to wage counterinsurgency warfare within the unique social, economic, political, and military dimensions comprising that form of conflict, the Army is trying...to transform it into something it can handle." (op. cit., p.274-275)

That, fundamentally, the Army Concept "won" the war for the U.S. Army's hearts and minds. Instead of being in Vietnam one year twelve times, the Army tried to forget that the nasty interlude even happened so it could return to the sort of high-kinetic warfare it was good at.

Fast forward thirty years, then, and the U.S. Army gets dragged into southcentral Asia.

I won't pretend to have read any tactical or operational studies of the ISAF mission in general, but the impression I get from what I have suggests that not only did the US operational command not review or learn from the lessons of Vietnam, it actively repeated the mistakes that it had made before.

The maneuver forces leaned hard on firepower and air-and-vehicle mobility. Units rotated in and out without ever spending enough time to truly learn the ground and the people they fought over. The primary focus seems to have been trying to find, fix, and finish the Taliban field forces rather than securing the population.

The Afghan military and police appear to have been as bad or worse than the ARVN; vastly corrupt and randomly brutal. The ISAF command doesn't seem to have been particularly picky who it sponsored, and that ended up putting a lot of the same people whose bad behavior had encouraged Joe and Molly Afghan to support (or, at least, tolerate) the Taliban in the first place - Anand Gopal's The Other Afghan Women does a good job of detailing the problems this created.

From what I can tell - and it's worth noting that whatever truth is there in the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan it's surrounded by an imperial guard-size bodyguard of lies - what horrifies me the most is that having had twenty years to learn the fundamentals of suppressing a rebellion in Vietnam my Army, the U.S. Army, not only didn't learn those lessons but actively turned their back on them and spent another twenty years reapplying the methods they knew, they should have known from the beginning, had failed before.

And that, for me, sums up my personal connection to the tragedy of the twenty years that began this day.

My Army, my country, We, the People, forgot none of our outrage and fears and grievances.

And then we proved that we had learned nothing, as well.

You can argue about whether we should have sent an army into Afghanistan. I tend to agree that the occupation was not a bright idea...but I also understand why it happened.

But once that Army was there...how the hell did we manage to do things not just catastrophically wrong, but catastrophically wrong in nearly the identical way we'd done them - and knew we'd done them - wrong fifty years before? 

We knew - we should have known - what would happen when we did the things in Afghanistan we did (and the way we did them) because we'd done them that way before - in Vietnam - and ended up with a heap of ashes.

And yet, here we are again.

That seems to me the bitterest legacy of the lake of bitterness that is this day.

King of Spades and King of Fools

I'm sure I don't need to go into depth about my opinion of the idiot who claims credit for this.

Even so, this nitwit screed is a morass of ignorance and ignorant foolishness profound even for Tubby.

But it points up something that I'd like to briefly revisit that we discussed here way back in 2008, the myth of "Good Ol' Marse Robert".

The second link above points out the many examples of Lee as no better than his treasonous peers as a citizen, as well as no better as a man than many other Americans of his time about race.

But it's the myth of Lee the Military Genius that obsesses Tubby here, and just reminds us that the Artist of the Deal was always a conman and a grifter that knew and knows nothing about anything.

Lee was an excellent tactical commander, and generally decent up to the operational level (although his bizarre obsession with dividing his forces bit him in the ass both in 1862 and 1863 and led to his defeats in Maryland and Pennsylvania).

But above that?

His strategic assessment of the Southern means and ends helped doom the Confederacy. Yeah, he was that bad.

Granted, he had a lot of help from that military nimrod Jeff Davis, but as the rebel equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was his job to advise his political masters of the best way to win independence. 

His advice helped Davis & Co. choose battlefield victory as the means even though those means were always doomed - due to the Union economic and demographic strength, due to the naval mismatch, and due to the political freight of chattel slavery - and had Lee been the strategic genius of Tubby's worm-eaten brain he'd have recognized that.

Fortunately for this nation, he didn't.

Again, I expect little more from Trump. He's simply a bullying fool, a racist, a conman, and an ignoramus.

But this little screed, as misinformed, incoherent, and bizarre as it is, reminds us that Tubby's only real political genius, his dark magisterium, such as it is, is to find the bully, the fool, the racist, the conman, and the ignoramus lurking in us and usher them, blinking and stretching out into the light.

Pathways - taken, untaken, known and unknown.

 So it took the Boy about month - no, really, closer to three weeks - to discover what pretty much every young person getting out of high school over the past twenty years or so has learned; that low-skill, low-responsibility, entry-level commercial/retail wage work sucks ass.

Long hours (usually bad hours - he's got the 2-to-10 shift almost every workday so far...), poor pay, and the work itself is both mind-numbingly boring and irritatingly un-slide-throughable - you can't sort of glide along with it, you have to pay attention, but what you're paying attention to only requires about 10% of your intellectual capacity, leaving a ton of headspace for being irked and bored.

It's not that it's a "bad job". It's that it's a bog-standard "low-skill, entry-level" job that requires the entry-level person to be willing to spend a considerable time doing the drudge work before moving up to, say, produce, and he's the lowest of the low new hires.

Plan B, now?

Begin taking "fire science" classes at the local community college with the eventual goal of full-time professional employment with one of the big municipal departments.

I'm...very cautious about this.

First and foremost because almost every smoke-eater I'm run across has been a pretty serious jock. It's a job that requires a fairly insane level of both strength and aerobic fitness - the level that requires a jock-attitude towards working out.

This is a kid that, love him as I do, could make a sloth look perky. As far as I know the only muscle groups he's regularly exercised are the thumbs-and-forefingers of his gaming controller hands.

It's not that he couldn't change; anyone can do that if they want to hard enough. It's the magnitude of the change. He'd need to re-orient himself completely...to the point of almost being a different person. I'm not sure that he can do that - discipline and rigor have never been huge friends of his - and I'm very sure he has no idea how to even begin.

The second concern of mine is that I'm unsure...no, be honest - I've very sure he has no idea what this career entails. I'm betting he's done little or no diligence to find out what the best pathway towards this goal is, or even what the goal is. It's like he's ten years old and wants to be an astronaut.

I desperately want to sit down with him. I desperately want to map out a fitness plan and begin pushing him along it. I desperately want to find out what he knows about this and point him in the ways he can learn more.

I pretty much want to do the "Learn the pathway to your goal you must, young padawan, but the goal itself you must first find" thing with him.

But...

He's never been a kid who could be either led or driven. He's the king of Flat Affect, the ultimate in "listens with blank stare and then goes and does what he wants" kind of kiddo. I'm not sure whether I really want to spend a half hour I'll never get back trying to get some kind of response out of him that I'll never be sure is truly genuine.

He's eighteen. I get that this is the time for trying, for experimentation. 

My concern is that he doesn't seem to be "experimenting" very hard. I'm okay with him trying this or that...I'd just like to think he's learning more about this or that before he tries. But I'm utterly unsure that I can help him...not learn, but learn how to learn.

In the immortal words of Donald J. Trump; who knew that this parenting stuff would be so hard?

I have SO fucking had it with these people

 So there's not a lot I can do with this damn knee. I can't drive, so I'm locked within the distance I can walk. And I can't walk very far, so I'm pretty much under house arrest. And I can't sit up for long without the damn thing swelling up and bitching at me.

So I spend a lot of time sprawled out on the couch or the bed; reading, cruising the 'Net, dozing or sleeping. It's about as fucking mind-bendingly boring as you'd think, so when there is something to do, I'm all about it.

Yesterday (Saturday) evening the Portland Thorns soccer team was scheduled to play the Washington club here at 7:30. I'm still too banjaxed to go in person (and, frankly, even with the club requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test, not all that excited about mobbing up with people...) but I was really looking forward to enjoying a couple of hours of soccer and cheering for my club over the screen in my lap...until I went to the club site and was met with this:

It turns out the the visitors had a teensy-weensy little pathogen problem:

"Spirit have 4 positive COVID cases; multiple sources also tell me that the club has “multiple” unvaccinated players. One source said # as high as 8."

So. Here's the thing.

NWSL teams roster between 22 and 24 players. So assuming the high end number is correct, a third of the roster is unprotected against the Plague at a time when vaccination doses are aging out for a lack of willing arms to receive them.

Think about that.

A business that is a part of a public accommodation industry - an entertainment or hospitality business that is centered around hosting the public - has not required it's employees to meet the most fundamental of public health measures; preventing or slowing the spread of disease when preventive measures are easily available and free. And the employees have refused to voluntarily meet that simple and logical standard.

As a result the other party, the business that has been responsible (the Thorns roster and staff are fully vaccinated) has lost a massive chunk of revenue and has been put at a competitive disadvantage by having to reschedule this game. And thousands of people like me are out their ticket costs.

Which is better, mind you, than having these disease-riddled harridans show up and breathe the Plague all over everyone.

But.

Here's the thing.

I'm sure that these players had all the usual bullshit excuses. Muh freedums! Don't know what's in it! God will protect me! Personal choice!

To which I simply reply:

You're running a public business that relies on public health measures. You're a restaurant, and an inspection finds that a third of your kitchen staff refuses to wash their hands after taking a dump?

You get shut down. Period. No explanations needed, no excuses accepted.

No health inspector would buy your bullshit that God protects you from getting shit in the food. Or that it's your choice. Or "freedom!" means you get to decide whether to follow simple basic public health regulations.

Kitchen closed. Boom.

And yet...because a bunch of lunatic QANuts and Three Percenters and Republicans and antivaxxers have decided to make "I will wash my hands after taking a shit" into a political issue, the rest of us are supposed to humor these fucking ninnies and accept losing our time and money and health and, possibly, our lives.

I lived with a lurking sort of low-grade fear, like the point man in an ambush terrain, for over a year until I could get vaccinated. It's hard to explain just how liberating that two-weeks-past-the-second-Pfizer moment felt. Finally! I had my MRAP. I had my mine plow! I could look forward to a normal life again. Yay, medicine!

Boy howdy, was I fucking wrong.

I'm SO fucking done with these people.

There's lots of other reasons to be done with them, too. But this - this idiotic demand that the rest of us go live in the QAnon Bronze Age with them when there's an actual modern world just over there - this just sends me into a flame of utter rage. Like the Emperor Caligula I can only wish that they all had one neck so I could choke the life out of them and move on with all the other, less easily solvable, problems we should be dealing with.

But no. And here we are.

Cite your sources

I get that this sort of thing has become so utterly bog-standard from the GQP/wingnut Right that the rest of us have gotten to the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ phase and just kind of elide wingnuts and wingnut pols saying it;

Okay, so.

I've made it pretty clear where I stand on the whole business of theocracy. It's a bad idea, and - believe it or not - not just for those on the theocratic-outside. 

It's bad for religion and especially bad for whichever sect gets the whip hand. The whole sorry history of the European Wars of Religion make that clear. Becoming the state religion of Rome (and its successor states) was bad for the Roman Church.

But here's the part that I think we don't talk enough about.

One of the most troublesome aspects of theocracy (or any political system that depends on an unquestioned, received creed - Nazi-style fascism and Soviet-style and Mao-style Communism were others) is that they rely on the fundamental truth of the received narrative.

In other words, for Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to "work" enough of the fundamental tenets of the creed, from Kapital through the diktats of Stalin, have to be "true". They have to reflect some fundamental political (and economic and social) reality that can be applied to the messy business of daily life.

If the fundamentals don' t work - if they're not really grounded in reality or something close to reality - then the chances of that theocracy of working IRL become significantly more difficult.

We saw that with Marxism.

The fuzzy guy had some interesting ideas. But it turned out that they were really difficult to turn into practice that didn't involve a whole lot of human misery.

Turns out that a LOT of Marxism was a sort of 19th Century political version of Scientology, and it turned out that running a civil society on them was really difficult to turn into anything that wasn't pretty punitive.

So.

What this led me back to was something I got to thinking about when I went and re-read my old battles piece on First Panipat.

When I wrote the original I hadn't gotten to the point of checking the original source materials. I did the usual "I did the research" thing on the Internet where I peeked at the first dozen Google hits and wrote based on what came up.

But the deeper I dug into the sources - especially for the events that occurred prior to widespread literacy and the printing press - the more I discovered that one of the biggest problems with the "accepted narrative" of these ancient events is that it is often 1) culled from a tiny handful of accounts that are often 2) lost in the original form and exist only as multiple-generations-removed from the original, and 3) afflicted with one or more "unreliable narrator" issues (where there are more than one contemporary source the sources contradict each other, sources state as facts things that we know from physical evidence are untrue, are written by authors that are unfamiliar with the physical realities of ancient or medieval warfare, i.e. monks writing military history...).

So, as it turns out, a lot of what we "know" about these past events - actual events we know really happened - turns out to be either untrue, or partially true, or (more often) simply impossible to accurately pin down.

And these are simple events! We're not talking about using them to set up a political system!

Which got me thinking about theocracy, and specifically Christian theocracy; what do we actually know about the actual events, people, places, and things that have been codified over centuries into the "Judeo-Christian ethic" that a lot of theocratic or theo-friendly politicians, pundits, and other authorities like to cite as the best form of human government.

Here's a little chart that displays the historians who wrote about the world of the Mediterranean littoral (including, obviously, what was then the Roman province of Judea) during the period that we interpret from the books of the New Testament that discuss it was the time of Jesus Christ:

As discussed above; this is perforce only a partial list of the people who may have written histories of this time. This is just those whose accounts remain to us!

As noted in the picture, though; none of these authors mention any of the things that are stated in the Gospels (and Acts) that you'd expect to have come to the attention of a diligent historian.

Many cultures around the 1st Century BCE/CE tended to place great import on astrological signs and symbols. Something like the "Christmas Star"? SOMEbody should have said something. Nope.

The "Massacre of the Innocents"; Herod I's supposed ratissage of newborn Messiahs? You'd think someone - particularly Josephus, who was pretty tuned into events in Judea - would have mentioned that. Nope.

The events surrounding the crucifixion - the darkening sky, the earthquake - should have caught the notice of someone writing from somewhere close enough (like Alexandria or Damascus) to have heard, felt, or seen them.

Nope.

I don't know if the whole basis of Christianity is as sketchy as Joseph Smith and his golden plates.

But if I was researching some event in ancient warfare?

I'd be utterly hesitant to place any confidence in that event - what happened, how it happened, even if it actually happened at all - if all the contemporary sources save one ignored it as if it had never existed.

If you want to govern me based on your love of Christian scripture...okay. That's your call.

But to insist that I accept that's any more of an inescapable "truth" than governance based on the events of the Twilight novels or the philosophy expressed in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?

Sorry. That's not just a bad idea. It's a bad idea based on complete and utter bullshit.

And the fact that We the People don't laugh it out of the public square is...not a good sign.

On the nightstand...

 ...is my palate-cleanser from the turgid prose of Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming; perhaps the most peculiar, wonderful, bizarre, and intriguing train-wreck of a manga adaptation of an anime I've ever come across: Gate: Where The JSDF Fought.

I dunno, but this may possibly be the most manga-y manga I've every read.

(And to out myself as an otaku, I kinda love manga; I've read every tankobon volume of Kimetsu no Yaiba (鬼滅の刃) and everything from the hardcore old-school mecha stories like Shin Seki Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン ) to fluffy romances like Our Teachers Are Dating...)

But this one is...reeeeeally special.

Start with the worked-out premise of an interdimensional gate between worlds.

But then add a bizarre mashup of Tolkiensque fantasy - dragons and trolls? - with Romans (sorta...) and a buxom imperial princess called - I shit you not - "Pina Co Lada". 

Have these mooks invade Tokyo and tear the living hell out of a bunch of innocent Japanese civilians...

(Don't forget to pitch in a whole bunch of gratuitous violence and nudity...)

 ...and then respond to all this with a sort of Japanese Army (sorry..."Self Defense Force") fanservice where the JGSDF proceeds to send an expeditionary force into this fantasy world so we can enjoy antitank weapons against fire-breathing dragons and Japanese recon infantry against Roman legionaries and the boys and girls of the Rikujō Jieitai as heroes...

...plus Rory Mercury, who is so beyond the rest of this weird shit that I leave you to the mercy of Wikipedia.

The whole thing is an absolute hoot, and I hope the outfit that's publishing this thing will continue to put out these in tankobon formate all the way to the end of the original anime run.

If only Atkinson had found a way to write in a loli-goth death goddess into the Battle of Long Island his stuff might work better. I'm just gonna have to call that a serious failure of imagination.