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You can tell the situation in Iraq has really started to stink when even the White House stops claiming credit for progress there. Presidential posture on Iraq has swung wildly in the past few weeks, but never once to the point of claiming responsibility, either for causing past problems, or the need to make some painful choices to fix them. It feels to me like desperate fishing for a face-saving exit.

A couple months ago, Bush sought to enlist the UN, and specifically western Europe, to pitch in and do their part. Presumably, the world community will have forgotten his flagrant disregard for world opinion on how and even whether to go in when the war started. Presumably, too, the world community hasn’t noticed that hope for success—however that has failed to be defined—continues to diminish, with or without additional troops, so they’ll be happy to jump in. And if they don’t, it could be a face-saving exit: if American voters can be persuaded to think the war effort was sabotaged by some mean-spirited Frenchies, it’s hardly a surprise that Iraq is such a mess.

A couple weeks ago, Bush sought to blame the problems on the government we installed there, insisting that American support for the war would be greater were the Iraqis to show some sincere public gratitude for what we’ve done, whatever that is. This could be a face-saving exit: their parliament can’t afford to appear too grateful for wrecking the country’s material well-being and creating the environment for violent unrest to incubate into civil war; they’d look like a puppet government installed by American imperialism. (And so they would be.) If American voters can be persuaded to think Iraq owes us something for wrecking their country while pursuing our own safety, maybe it won’t matter so much if we pull out and leave the mess behind. It’s Iraq’s fault.

Last week, Bush kept asking for the American public, and especially for the Congress he drove into the Democratic party’s hands, to give his proposed troop deployment—the “surge”—a chance, as though Iraq is just now becoming an ugly situation, and as if he hadn’t already had five years to work on things. And as if we’re not so short on troops because the White House tried to go in on the cheap in the first place, keeping costs and body counts palatably low. This too might be a face-saving exit to take: if the war doesn’t get ever-expanding support, Bush can claim he could have made everything all right, had not those naughty Democrats and their allies, the voters, sabotaged their leader. It’s our fault.

A couple days ago, Bush tried not even talking about Iraq at all. His appearance at the Caterpillar plant this week looked so desperate, an attempt to claim credit for the company’s turnaround, built on someone else’s hard choices, and to keep the conversation off of Iraq entirely. This could be the final refuge of face-saving, and one the current administration has always been fond of: pretending there is no problem, and that anyone who wants to discuss one is just making trouble. So Bush will just hang in there until his term ends, and somebody else has the painful job of cleaning up his mess.

I suppose it’s only appropriate to see our leader fishing for an excuse he can sell. That’s how we went in in the first place, fishing for a casus belli. It wasn’t about oil, or imperialism; it was all about 9/11, until no link could be shown. Then it was about spreading democracy, until other countries were shown to have just as great a need for democracy. Then it was really about saving a country from a brutal dictator committing genocide against his own people, until people began mentioning other countries where dictators committed genocide. Then it was about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a rogue state, as long as we didn't discuss North Korea. And the American public took the bait, and Bush got his war.

I wonder whether Bush will speak so loudly and proudly about our exit as he did about our entrance.

Posted by at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moved by some deep tectonic shift in her memory, Eileene suggested we have sloppy Joes tonight. This is surprising in two respects. One, she has never been a fan of sandwiches generally, and especially not for supper. And two, she couldn’t really remember what sloppy Joes were. Or that I used to make them fairly often when we were first going out. Perhaps it’s because she preferred to eat her sloppy with rice, instead of the traditional bun.

But mine not to question why. My pleasure, actually; they’re tasty and very easy to prepare, though I really had to search my memory for my own recipe, never written down. I took a walk down to the A&P to get some buns and cheese. I add cheese partly to mellow the seasonings, but mostly to act as a binder, keeping the sloppy less… well, sloppy.

Which brings me to my point. A few years ago, I was shocked to learn that some major chefs make regular use of Velveeta. They do not—heaven forbid!—slice or grate it directly onto food, but they do find it invaluable for soups and sauces. Like the package says, it’s real cheese; it just doesn’t have the fine qualities of better cheeses because it isn’t aged patiently, which means it develops little in the way of flavor and nothing in the way of texture. As long as the flavors are coming from somewhere else, Velveeta serves as a pliant canvas.

I didn’t use Velveeta, but settled for American, which is practically the same thing, in individually wrapped slices. It might be bad cheese, but it does the job and tasted swell, for me as well as the professionals.

Posted by at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Saturday, I got my first chance to handle a Wii, the new game console, and my first impression was just like everyone else’s: “Boy, this is fun!”

Let me elaborate. The big selling point of the Wii is its motion-sensitive controls. More is promised in the future, especially a robust online community, but that remains to be seen. Right now, Wii has a radically new hand control. It comes in two plastic grips, each about the size of a Mars bar, with a few buttons attached here and there. When you tilt the controls or wave them through the air, the system senses it and reacts appropriately. This gives an immediacy to sports games you just can’t get through pushing buttons alone. You can punch the controls through the air to simulate boxing, swing them to mimic a tennis stroke, whatever the designers can think for you to do. Perhaps more importantly, you don’t need to learn complicated button combinations to perform useful maneuvers, you just do them.

Sort of. I noticed that the sports simulations, while easy to pick up, weren’t very good at simulating the sport. For example, the golf game measured the power of your swing not by how quickly you waved the control through the air, but by how high you lift it on the upswing. Lift it too far, and the game treated your power swing as a manic chop resulting in a hook or slice. Actual golf technique places a huge emphasis on “following through,” that is, letting your club continue to swing freely through the entire stroke, so players who actually golf will have some heavy unlearning ahead of them, and anyone practicing golf on the Wii will learn some terrible habits for real golf. We had similar problems with bowling and tennis. But I am confident such problems will be overcome in future games that emphasize realistic technique.

As a gaming geek, and one not especially into video games, I found myself paying more attention to design than to the actual experience, taking note of what worked and what didn’t—because some things didn’t. In particular, when we tinkered with the latest installment of Legend of Zelda (MMDCLXXXVII, I think), the Wii was clearly out of its element. Apart from swinging your virtual sword, you interact with people and things by walking up nice and close and clicking the cursor over them, and not by mimicking Link’s actions. It was boring: Nintendo had simply ported an old game design into a new system without really thinking about how to take advantage of all the new system’s potential, and play suffered for it.

As things stand, Wii is a marketing smash. The games are shallow but definitely engaging and fun, with no learning curve to speak of. And like Dance Dance Revolution, it can provide honest-to-goodness exercise, if you play the right games. Real enough to leave me sore the next day.

But also as things stand, Wii won’t have any staying power; those oversimplified sports games and uninspired adaptations of older franchises won’t keep interest up. If Wii is really to become successful, it needs a handful of really smart guys in the game design department to match the really smart guys who have just scored a big success in the hardware department. Those designers need free reign to launch into risky new territory, and they need to do it quickly, before interest fades. I’m not clever enough to imagine where they might go, but I do know there’s huge potential here to do really fun things that nobody thought to do before, just because the tools to do them weren’t available before.

I look forward to seeing them.

Posted by at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While visiting my parents at Christmas, I began reading Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Abraham Lincoln’s political genius, and especially on his ability to unify political rivals, whose talents he desperately needed, into a working cabinet. I checked it out from the library today, in hopes of finishing. As much as the book has to say about Lincoln, the single tale that most stuck with me is the introduction to Edwin M. Stanton, later to be Secretary of War under Lincoln, but then newly appointed Attorney General under Buchanan.

Lincoln had been elected, and southern states were breaking away. From his position in the cabinet, Stanton learned that officers with southern sympathies were diverting arms to the south, and deploying (presumably loyalist) soldiers to innocuous locations. He became convinced of a plot to seize Washington, D.C. should Maryland and Virginia secede, and especially of a plot to assassinate Lincoln before the inauguration. Stanton was at his wits’ end over Buchanan, who could not be made to credit any such fears.

Goodwin continues:

At this juncture, his co-biographers report, Stanton "came to a momentous decision: he decided to throw party fealty and cabinet secrecy to the winds and to work behind the President’s back." With the White House paralyzed and the Democratic Party at loggerheads, he determined that "Congress and its Republican leaders were the last hope for a strong policy, the last place for him to turn." Stanton knew that becoming and informer violated his oath of office, but concluded that his oat to support the Constitution was paramount.”

Stanton began feeding vital information to the incoming cabinet, including then Senator Seward, Congressman Henry Dawes, and Lincoln himself, across party lines—information that would qualify as “top secret,” had that designation existed at the time. And this despite his distrust of Republicans generally, and a low opinion of Lincoln specifically.

That is amazing stuff!

And I really don’t know how to take it. Was he a hero, doing what had to be done? The secrets he betrayed certainly were vital, not just to the future government, but to the nation itself. A decision like that, taken at great personal risk at virtually no personal gain, takes incredible nerve. Doing so to give all possible aid to his political rivals, just because they needed to know, proves Lincoln did not have a monopoly on willingness to place the needs of the nation first.

On the other hand, Stanton knowingly and flagrantly betrayed his office in a volatile moment, when lots of people were reaching similarly extreme decisions with similar conviction towards very different ends, and steady thinking was in short supply. This is, after all, the same guy who barricaded himself in his office when later President Andrew Johnson attempted to remove him from office. Stanton might have been less the clear-headed champion seizing the moment than dangerous maverick who happened to guess right. Maybe both.

One thing I am sure of: the first heady days of secession were a crazy time, bad crazy. I’m glad to be well out of it.

Posted by at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We tried out a new grocery store yesterday. A bit of a drive for groceries, but we hoped to save enough money to make it worth it. Eileene had already been there once before, and reported real bargains, but she also freely admits to a poor memory for prices.

The bargains were certainly there: snow peas at $1.19/lb., for example, about half what we normally pay. Selection was there, too: the fish department, for example, was so large that I couldn’t bear the smell—not that the fish was spoiled, but it was just too large not to smell strongly. From a safe distance, the fish certainly looked good. An entire aisle was devoted to ground pepper, and the next aisle had the same in paste form.

Unfortunately, the bargains and selection were only for certain items. Red bell peppers, in contrast, were $2.99/lb., about four times the price at our regular supermarket, and milk was a dollar a gallon more. Bread was limited to one shelf, and lunch meat was Oscar Mayer or nothing.

There’s a reason for all this, of course: the market is under Korean ownership, and caters to a neighborhood with a heavy Korean population. Naturally enough, the products that regularly make it to a Korean-American dinner table are in demand, and so come in a wide variety at competitive prices. Staples for our table, however—spaghetti, apples, milk, olive oil—are oddities and delicacies.

Eileene’s perception of the market had been selective, focusing on the things we can’t easily get at Shop-Rite. In the end, our bill was about what we would ordinarily pay, though this may be due to skipping a few overpriced items. We will need to make a separate trip for these. I found it funny to be on the other side of the fence for once, with weird, foreign appetites for weird, foreign foods like breakfast cereals, but I imagine the situation must be wearing for immigrants who have that same experience weekly, or even daily, and no opportunity to retreat to a store that does stock the foods they grew up with.

Posted by at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My mailbox is gone. That is to say, the mailbox I most often used for posting is gone, removed by the US Postal Service, I’m sure.

I had a second-hand warning that this was coming. An end-of-program news report explained that the post is removing mailboxes around the country, centralizing them to cut down on operating costs and collection times. Although the actual quantity of mail is increasing, the quantity of personal letters has dropped. Both are the result of the internet: online shoppers need their purchases mailed instead of taking them home, but email is replacing the handwritten note. So the iconic blue mailbox is less needed, and becoming scarcer.

When I heard this, I knew some of our boxes would go. Although we live just three or four blocks from a post office, we had two mailboxes on the way there, not counting the three out in front of the office itself, and another two on opposite sides of the street another half block further down. That’s a lot of mailboxes for five blocks. I expected them to remove one from each side of the post office, and maybe even remove all the boxes except the ones in front of the post office itself. That would be no skin off my nose, since I walk regularly just for the exercise, though of course my favorite is the box that is easiest for me to reach, and which incidentally sees the most pedestrian traffic.

What they did in fact do was remove my favorite box, and leave all the others in place. Including the two on opposite sides of the street half a block from the post office itself. Isn’t that always the way?

Posted by at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s mid-January, and now that the city has (finally!) picked up our tree from the curb, the last of our Christmas decorations are gone, save one. On one of the small bookcase shelves in our living room, bordered by framed photos, are all the figures from our Lego advent calendar. I am particularly fond of the pizza chef and his brick oven. His pizza paddle I recognize as an actual paddle from earlier kits for rowboats.

I know I should scoop them up into the bags where I store all my Lego men in case I should ever want them again for RPG miniatures. They don’t match the décor in the room, or even on the shelf. But they just look so cheery there. And, apart from the Santa figure from December 24, there’s nothing overtly Christmas-y about them. If I moved him to the back, he’d just look like a lumberjack with a dogsled. (Yes, Santa’s sleigh is pulled by dogs in Legoland.) Something about Lego people, with their blocky, yellow heads and perpetual smiles, brightens my day as well as anything else does.

And in drab New Jersey winter—if you can call this winter—that’s important. When I need sun, I settle for turning all the lights on and sitting in our bright yellow living room. And the Legos happen to be directly across from me, so I see them often. So maybe I’ll leave them out on the shelf a while longer. Until just before the next time I need to nag Eileene about clearing up some of her junk.

Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The etymology of obscure words can be fun. I particularly enjoy the segments of “Says You!” which ask for the derivation of words or phrases, but their variation on the dictionary game—where one team must pick the correct definition from among fake definitions made up on the spot by the opposing team—is a reliable diversion, too. Often, the words are picked simply for sounding silly: words with lots of G’s and U’s, for example, or anything with “inkle” as a component, or obscure Yiddish.

The most interesting words, though, are the ones whose purpose is difficult to understand. Words, after all, exist because somebody once had a need to talk about what they describe, and sometimes it’s hard to see the need. Words for obsolete fashions, for example, or parts of sailing ships, are easy to understand: once, people used them daily. They are less mysterious, and thus less interesting. The perfect example of what I’m talking about is a word I have long forgotten, but whose meaning has stuck with me for over a decade: there is a word for the distance between a hole and the pile of earth that results from its digging.

I couldn’t figure out the purpose of that one, and needed the explanation. How about you—give up?

If a hole is too near the resultant pile of dirt, there is a danger that the dirt and rocks will pour back into the hole, or that the weight will collapse the edge of the hole, harming the diggers below. Worker safety regulations demand a minimum distance between the two to prevent this hazard. And, since the regulations needed to refer to this space repeatedly, some enterprising civil servant coined a word to simplify the job of writing them.

It’s easier to find phrases, and especially idioms, like this. Individual words are rarer.

Posted by at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face that is supposed to be a measure of how close we are to Armageddon. It was recently adjusted to 5 minutes to midnight. This happens periodically. The board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will move its hands a few minutes forward or back. But not too far.

There’s no room to move far forward, since the time was 7 minutes to midnight—doomsday—at its creation, and it’s never been set farther than 17 minutes to midnight. And moving it a significant distance back would undermine its purpose: to get people wringing their hands over how close we are to destruction—look! We’re only 8 minutes to midnight!

Whatever that means.

I mean really, even setting aside the question of why the self-appointed committee that sets the clock is any authority, what, literally, does the clock measure?

It doesn’t measure actual time, obviously, since it’s been around longer than seven minutes. But neither does it measure time on any scale. The clock occasionally goes backwards, after all.

It doesn’t measure probability of the earth’s destruction. The earth will definitely be destroyed within a few billion years, when the sun enters a red giant stage and engulfs our planet. Regardless of what may happen to it first, the earth is definitely a-goner, not 12 minutes to a-goner.

It doesn’t measure the probability of humanity’s destruction, either. Even presuming we escape earth into the greater universe before the sun vaporizes our planet, sooner or later the universe will die of thermodynamic exhaustion. Or, by some models, it will collapse under gravity into a big crunch. Either way, no one gets out of here alive.

If anything, the clock measures a ratio of time and velocity, the time we have left if we approach self-destruction at the current rate. As if anyone knows either value. Not long ago, the clock stopped measuring the urgency of the threat of nuclear war alone, and began to measure the urgency of the threat of pollution. Because the earlier atomic scientists overestimated the first, and underestimated the latter. Presumably the experts have it worked out right, now. Atomic scientists being so knowledgeable about chemical pollutants and global warming and all.

But even granting that they do, the clock’s reading is meaningless without a scale. As noted above, the clock obviously doesn’t operate one a one minute to one minute scale, so just how urgent is 5 minutes to midnight? Does that mean doomsday is 5 minutes away? 5 years? 5000 years? To establish the scale, we need two points. We have one: current conditions. A second point, however, is hard to find. Earlier settings could be used, had they been reliable, but they aren’t: the setting during the Cuban missile crisis, for example, was earlier than the setting when Gorbachev introduced Glasnost.

It occurs to me that we could, alternately, use an absolute: the zero point. If an infinitesimal notch past the previous midnight is no danger at all, then we could figure out how far we are from annihilation. Indeed, that is the implicit message of the clock: look at all the time in our metaphorical day, and how little is left. So what corresponds to no danger at all? Well, humans use non-renewable resources, and humans war over scarce resources, and humans pollute. (We’re counting pollution now, remember.) So really, the ideal the Doomsday Clock implies we should be striving for, of complete peace and prosperity, corresponds to no human population at all.

Achieving which would be a fair approximation of Armageddon.

Posted by at 5:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night we saw Pan’s Labyrinth in an attempt to keep our minds off the fact that we weren’t playing World of Warcraft with our online friends. (Perversely, people who pre-ordered from Amazon are getting their copies up to a week after it hit the shelves at Best Buy.)

It was pretty darned good. The evil stepfather is a satisfyingly monstrous instrument of Fascist rule in Spain, and the supernatural monsters are satisfyingly monstrous, too. The soldiers, fascist and rebel, are unconvincing, prone to arbitrary moments of activity or inactivity, and especially to standing mutely in order to frame shots of the major characters. But the fairy-tale elements manage the difficult task of keeping the audience guessing while still observing the ritual elements of fairy tales.

With one noteworthy exception: children in folk tales, and especially little girls, traditionally overcome their trials through patient endurance, doing as they are told, until rescued from their plight. This fairy tale runs parallel to a story of fascist cruelty, and both make a virtue of renouncing blind obedience. Rebellion by reflex gets no praise, but thoughtful rebellion is the defining characteristic of the film’s sympathetic characters. Naturally, the young heroine is the most thoughtfully rebellious of all.

The willful girl (or willful young woman) is a recent addition to fairy tales, only really becoming common as part of the general attention to breaking down stereotypes in the latter 20th century, part of the package including civil rights, feminism, “young adult” literature, and Sesame Street. And now that we’ve got some sterling examples, it seems wondrous that we didn’t get more of them sooner.

Posted by at 3:33 PM | Permalink

I like maps. Not so much for their usefulness as for their esthetics. To some degree, I share this with my father. But where he likes local maps, on which he can plot ever more efficient drives, I prefer maps on a regional or global scale.

Again, this is largely an esthetic choice. One thing I learned from my drawing classes long ago was that, to be pleasing to the eye, a picture must strike a balance between regularity, which lends structure, and sufficient asymmetry to add dynamism. Local maps, unless they lie on a crinkly bit of coastline, or an unusually interesting stretch of river, tend to lack variety of shape. While especially true of flat states in the heartland, where I grew up, even mountainous areas and stretches of glacial lakes don’t have much artistic shape. They have geographic features, sure, but mostly the same geographic feature, repeated. All about the same size, more-or-less evenly spread about. That kind of balance, or rather, imbalance, is a lot easier to find on large-scale maps: the land surrounding the North and Baltic seas, for example, or Japan, or the Mediterranean. Or, happily, the whole world.

But my preference is not purely esthetic. I also prefer large maps for the way they can capture critical elements in the broad sweeps of history. Battles are fought between nations. Trade routes necessarily stretch between geographically disparate locations with disparate resources. And the tales of explorers reach far and away, to where the dragons be.

For me, the beauty of maps is inextricably bound to history. Like young men in the early chapters of novels watch the ships, or trains, or caravans, and dream of adventures in distant lands, I study my maps and fill out the edges of what I know of history. Rarely, I even imagine historical alternatives: what would national borders in North America look like had there been no Old World to interfere with the nascent agricultural societies? More often, I think in the ahistorical terms of computer games: if this were a map for Civ, where would I most like to start, and how would I try to grow?

And once I get that far, I begin to design new game maps, with an eye to interesting play variations. It’s very therapeutic. When the day is done, my wife knits beautiful things. I draw worlds, and imagine developing them.

Posted by at 5:10 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, I saw a package of herbal medicine, if “medicine” is the right term, called Airborne. It’s a powder. You dump it into bottled water, and drink the mix.

Presumably, it’s meant for people suffering from colds, or at least fearful of getting a cold, because the package features large, filthy-looking cartoon germs. The central figure is a woman on a city street, with cartoon zip-lines to indicate she is very busy, rushing around to get things done. In the foreground, a man coughs or sneezes openly; in the background, another man blows his nose. The basic message is: “If you don’t consume this, you will get sick, and you won’t be able to complete your busy schedule.”

I can’t find any reason to think the product will help you deal with the scary, disease-ridden world depicted on the package, however. A caption cheerfully informs you that the contents were "created by a school teacher,” as though a school teacher is the ultimate authority on advanced biochemistry. Another caption cheerfully announces the product is “herbal.” The implication is that herbs, being natural, are inherently healthy, but I understand the real significance is that herbal medicine is free from the rigorous testing and safeguards we demand of pharmaceuticals. One such freedom from rigorous safeguards: the active ingredients are not listed, though “other ingredients” include citric acid, artificial sweetener, and something to produce a fizz. A disclaimer in small type on the back of the box warns: "these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration," though the dagger preceding this footnote isn’t attached to an antecedent, so just which statements have not been evaluated is unclear. I'd guess all of them. Perhaps most telling, more small type on the back of the box insists the product “is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease." Just for the legal record.

Well, what good is that? Why not go out and buy a big box of sugar pills, instead? It’s much cheaper. If you’ve carelessly bought Airborne already, I suggest an alternate use: don’t ingest the powder, just flatten the box and hang it from a string around your neck. Maybe the scary cartoon germs on the box will ward off real germs, just like a gargoyle is supposed to scare off actual malevolent spirits. It might not help any more than drinking the stuff, but it couldn’t hurt, either.

*****

Postscript: as it happens, NPR did a story the next morning on Airborne and similar products offering a jolt of zinc and vitamin C as a cold preventative. So I went and looked up Airborne's web site. Among its frequently asked questions is "Is there any clinical proof that Airborne cold medicine really works?" Naturally, the answer is positive: "Beyond the millions of loyal customers who swear by Airborne, there is now a clinical study that shows that Airborne does shorten the length of the common cold." The link, however, is broken, producing a 404 Not Found message.

I'd like to point out that millions of loyal customers are not clinical proof of any kind, and should not be mentioned in the answer. I'd also like to point out that there is "a" study. One. Singular. Naturally, with the link broken, it is impossible to determine who performed this study.

Perhaps the study in question is the one described on the radio: "The makers of Airborne have conducted only one small research study. They found that four out of five people who took Airborne either recovered completely or improved somewhat within five days." Five days?! How long does it take to "improve somewhat" from the common cold without Airborne?

Posted by at 7:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For Christmas, my cousin-in-law got me a lovely, dignified sweater and, as an auxiliary present, a small reference book titled History Makers, a hand-sized volume of biographical thumbnails for the movers and shakers of history. She left the price tag on the inside cover, so I know it came from Marshall’s at $4.99—I’m not sure how to take the attached comment, “compare at $9.00,” as there is no indication of what I should compare the price to. But I do suspect that, at $4.99, the book was overpriced.

I took my first look at it last night; within three minutes, I had found two mistakes and some very dubious labels.

On page 8, one can find an entry on John Adam, second president of the United States. The sentence following this header correctly adds an “s” to his surname.

More upsetting is the attribution of the celebrated gold death mask from a Mycenaean tomb to Agamemnon. This mask is ubiquitous in books touching upon bronze-age Greece, and, while it almost certainly belonged to a great Mycenaean, and quite possibly a king, nowhere have I seen anyone claim the tomb was Agamemnon’s specifically.

Entries are marked with a handy shorthand symbol to let you know in which field their contributions lie: science, travel, entertainment, and so on. The difference between the “politics” and “leader” categories is obscure. Why science should be represented by a dagger, or art by an explosion, even more so. There is a military category, but it is labeled “army,” so History Makers considers Admiral Nelson a great army figure. Naval historians would be outraged.

I guess the object lesson here is not to trust bargain-bin reference books. If you’re going to need to look something up, do you really want to rely on someone who reduces the price by eliminating the error-checking department?

Posted by at 4:07 PM | Permalink