It reminds me of my favorite "lost or stolen item" disclaimer, on a coat check rack in a place I no longer remember: "Not responsible for personal loss."

Obviously, these are the result of too-creative responses to the problem of having a warning sign that may or may not be relevant to the actual situation.  Warn of ice in July? List all the things your patrons may lose or have stolen?  It's fear of sounding dumb, which leads to sounding even dumber.

For example, consider the problem of the exit from a long tunnel, where people have put on their headlights.  It may or may not be daylight on the far side.  Do you tell them to turn off their headlights only if it isn't dark?  The solution, I've read, is just one word:  "Lights?" Leave it up to the user.

At work, in the bathroom, is an insultingly detailed discussion of why I should wash my hands after using the toilet.  Now, I appreciate that this is a real hygiene issue:  a physician acquaintance once told me of observers at an infectious disease conference who were startled by how few of the participating physicians washed their hands after using the toilet.  If you want to know how smart doctors really are, just watch their behavior when they aren't pushing you around or giving you useless drugs... On the other hand, don't.  It will just make that health insurance bill even more unbearable.

But as for the sign at my work bathroom:  I'll bet the level of compliance is lower than if the sign just said "Hands washed?" Appeal to my sense of self, not some alleged rational faculty I barely possess, and that I certainly won't activate on your account.

But what communications department is going to leave their work at two words?  Makes you look lazy.  "How much did I end up paying you per word?" So you create a big illustrated poster with a bunch of useless text whose only effect will be irritation.  Believe me:  this is my life.

At least my work life.

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning.

Bummer!

Both Newmark and Mead think the solution is working even harder than the competition.

Double bummer!

But they ignore a better solution: bringing some joy to the lives of these grinding cubicle dwellers by moving them into our cultural economy more quickly.  Our greatest export products are titillation, distraction, and pointless pleasure. We should work harder only at getting those out across the world, hobbling our competition before it even gets out of bed.  I certainly try to produce as much of it as I can.  Who's with me?

This blog post has been a test of the Emergency Distraction System. If this had been an actual cultural catastrophe, you would have been asked to face the music, and dance.

We now return you to your partial differential equation problem set, already in progress.

So, when I go away on vacation, I go away.  And my children are forced to accompany me, while leaving all their electronics behind as well.  And in the Adirondacks, where we were, you can't even get a cell phone signal, and there are actual telephone booths with pay phones in them.  Amazing!

And I don't miss any of it.  That, of course, puts me out of step with pretty much everyone else.  I like quiet and stillness.  I like to sit and read.  In the early morning I write novel notes in a spiral notebook.  I do jigsaw puzzles with my children. Since our usual family media diet is fairly sparse to begin with, they deal with it.  We do have electricity.  And hot water.  I also make them climb mountains and paddle canoes across lakes.  Classic dad, I am.  I can just hear the eulogies.  They'll be sorry then....

The fundamental problem is that my brain is really really slow.  Despite my lack of distractions, I get little done on any given day.  So don't think I'm virtuous, and have one up on you.  You can probably write your tweets, watch videos, track your stocks, update your Facebook status, and still get more of your novel done than me.  And good for you.

Now, if you'l excuse me, I really should get something done....

No, what we fear is what I encountered today: the swinging open car door. That can take you out instantly, and if it pushes you out into traffic, can kill you. It's hard to predict, and maneuvering around it can be almost as dangerous as hitting it.

I was on my way to work. I know the pattern of lights on the hill down toward the Charles and the Science Museum on Cambridge Street in Cambridge, so I had timed my approach down the hill for the extremely short green at First Avenue.  I saw the seconds counting down on the pedestrian signal. As it hit zero, I pushed forward along the line of cars that was about to start, keeping half an eye out for anyone who might go suddenly right, across my path. But I was going pretty fast, about the fastest of the entire ride.

A passenger, opening her door and jumping out just as the cars started, hit me like a baseball bat across the forehead.  I smashed into the end of the door and went down instantly, face planting on the pavement. Once I realized I could move, and wasn't lying in a pool of my own blood, I jumped up, and may have uttered a few oaths.

The woman who had taken me out was apologetic. What could I do? My cheek was cut, my prescription sunglasses scraped up and pushed into my face. I got her contact information, but was not sympathetic to her apologies. We've all opened our door without looking, but...Jesus, she could have killed me. I was in a bike lane, I had the green light: rarely am I so virtuously in the right.

Seven stitches and a tetanus shot later, I was in my office.  I should have been home in bed, because the shock had me quite shaky. But I have a week's vacation coming up, and a lot to make sure gets done before I go.

It certainly could have been worse. I'm an aging bag of bones, and don't bounce like I used to.  I'll see how black and blue I am tomorrow, but I think I escaped more serious consequences than a potential GI Joe scar on my right cheek.

It's those passenger doors that are the most dangerous. I regularly scan parked cars for heads.  But I just don't have the bandwidth to keep my eye on passenger-side doors too. Cars in the street naturally have heads in them, so it's impossible to filter. So, please, car passengers who get out in the middle of the freaking street. Give a mind to who you can kill, particularly in a busy biking city like Cambrige, and give a quick look before you swing.

How the North Won, by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, is the book for someone of non-military background who is interested in the Civil War, but is not a buff.  Buffs read (and own) books about specific units, can talk calibers and muzzle velocities, and can tell instantly that the illustration of the private in the Clinch Rifles is wearing a piece of trim issued only the following year.  People interested in history, but not the Civil War in particular, know the high points, but don't care about the details of military strategy.

I'm in the middle (as I am in many things). The first thing about the Civil War is that it was a war, a bloody one between two determined opponents. How did they fight it? What problems did they face?

While the North had the resources, it had by far the tougher job:  conquering and subduing the hostile and violently resisting South. It proved impossible to conquer and hold territory--that took more troops than the North could possibly raise (even after it finally instituted a draft, and thus faced violent resistance from urban mobs). Hattaway and Jones are extremely clear on the war in the West. As long as they could move along the rivers, they could penetrate South.  When the rivers turned the wrong way, they had to move by land.  Their supply lines were constantly harassed and raided.

And armies need to be supplied. These are tens of thousands of active men. Think about this: when McClellan's 1862 Army of the Potomac was standing still, it was the second-largest city in the South, after New Orleans. An army in one place for a few days devoured the countryside around it. When it moved, it pulled supply lines after it.

Without access to the rivers, it was impossible to progress.  A raid at Grant's supply base at Holly Springs delayed his attack on Vicksburg by months. Grant only took Vicksburg by cutting himself loose from his supply lines and moving across a springtime forage-covered countryside that had not had to support an army.

Incidentally, this need for springtime forage accounts for the seemingly late timing of both Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia (the 1941 Wermacht was still largely a horse-drawn force, with mechanized forces used only over short distances): they needed to feed their horses, or be stranded.

And Civil War armies, armed with accurate long-range rifles, were like porcupines, almost impossible to get at and kill.  They could be defeated, but then would retreat, falling back on their own supply lines and leaving a devastated country for the pursuing army to pass through.  Even Lee after Fredericksburg did not pursue the savagely defeated Burnside. Decisive battle proved impossible, though it was constantly demanded by the childish and pathetically self-deluded populations of the respective regions.

Grant took what he had learned in the West and applied it when he came East: his war was a series of raids, not invasions. Even the bloody Overland Campaign was supposed to hold Lee's forces in place while raids did their work elsewhere. Sherman's raid on Atlanta, and then to the sea and up into South Carolina, succeeded, while the others (Butler, Sigel, Banks) all failed. And Grant was only fighting Lee in northern Virginia because it was politically impossible not to--he would much have preferred fighting almost anywhere else.

How the North Won also has sharp schematic maps with just enough detail to show interior lines and turning movements, with good explanations for the non-buff of how all that worked.

If you are interested in the military side of the Civil War, and already have a good sense of the sequence of events, you will find enlightenment in this book.  You'll understand why things that seem like they should have been easy, weren't. You'll gain an appreciation for mud. You'll even have some sympathy for McClellan and Halleck, two men who usually get little of it. Solutions are only obvious afterward, and the price Grant paid for his was strikingly high.

How the North Won
Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones

It's tight, scary fun, with a lean 78 minute running time, a novella among films, and, aside from the usual what's-the-rated-life-of-that-battery question about the camera (particularly pressing in one of its predecessors, The Blair Witch Project, which allowed shooting for days), made narrative sense, until a poorly conceived scene near the end, which purports to "explain" something.

I've never gotten why people feel they need to explain zombies. Zombies don't, um, actually exist, so any explanation is just as ridiculous as the zombies themselves. And this one comes out of left field, and is mostly to make us relax a bit before the final horror arrives. Understanding helps nothing.

Now, as usual, I'll come up with a couple of twists I thought the movie would have that it didn't, and are thus fair game for any works I may create in the future.

At one point during the steady collapse of the culture inside the sealed apartment building, ethnic tensions rise between a couple of Asian immigrants and the Spaniards, in an extremely convincing way. The Spanish call them Chinese, though they are actually Japanese. Unfortunately, this tension plays no role in how events play out, and I think it would have been more interesting if it had, and a possible solution to their problems proves impossible because of their squabbling.

All the video is from one camera run by a single cameraman. Several times he drops the camera, or there is some other interruption. It would have been interesting if something significant happened during the dark time, and then we, as viewers, would have to figure out what that might have been, since everyone else went through it and knows it perfectly.

Who is the cameraman?  His name is Pablo, but has no real existence. But he is just as terrified by zombies, and just as likely to have bad things happen to him as anyone else. Could you tell that something has gone badly wrong by a significant change in his camerawork?  Can how you pan, focus, and zoom be diagnostic of becoming a zombie? After one of those significant blackouts, someone else, not as skilled, is running the camera.

I don't make movies, but the use of the "actually part of the movie" camera would seem to make stunts like that irresistable.

Anyway: face ripping, sinister child, buckets of gore. As Joe Bob Briggs used to say, check it out.

Joon-ho Bong's film is interesting because the consequences of the oppression are seen through its effects on character. The rural cops have spent their time breaking up demonstrations and beating demonstrators. A real criminal is something far beyond their experience. And the thuggish and befuddled cops are, finally, sympathetic characters, or at least characters whose fate we care about. In Secret, who is oppressive and who isn't is kept carefully clear, so that there is no audience confusion about the compromises everyone makes in order to survive in an unfree society.

Secret seems like half a movie.  It sets up a situation, and then pretty much fritters it away, quickly getting to an ending that doesn't really make any sense. I won't say what it is, except that you have to spend a lot of time with the least interesting of the story's characters, to discover that he has kept an impossible secret for decades.

In order to buy the way things get resolved, we have to believe that a woman, a woman in macho Argentinean society, humiliates and degrades a violent sex criminal who ends up being a deadly and active secret policeman--and then has to have no fear of the consequences. This is the key piece of tension, and the film-makers decided to completely ignore it.

Various reviewers compared this to an episode of Law & Order, partially because of director Juan Jose Campanella's history with the show. It is really more like the first episode of a two-parter, where you only got to see previews for the second episode. Extremely unsatisfying. And don't get me started on the ridiculous typerwriter with a missing key, which seems a lot of build up for changing one word to another.

Of course, no episode of even the dumbest TV cop show would have someone fingering the killer because of a few sidelong glances in the background of photos in a photo album. Esposito's certainty (not just "here's a possibility") is itself a totalitarian attitude. He breaks into a house without a warrant, seeking evidence.  His certainty is exactly that of the rural South Korean cops of Memories, except that, through the generosity of the writer, he turns out to be right, whereas they, much more realistically, get it, not only wrong, but wrong in a way that actively hampers their investigation.

Secret does have an extremely well-cut and paced foot chase scene through a soccer stadium, and a great character in Esposito's drunken and self-sacrificial friend Sandoval.

As so often happens, my feeling about the movie is quite at odds with most commentators, who seem to universally love it.  Now, to be clear, it wasn't a terrible movie.  But it certainly does not deserve the amount of praise heaped on it.  See Memories of Murder instead.

The gentleman pictured, Mr. Berger, objects.  He is motivated by "a deep distrust of government". And he fears "that the redesign would make it difficult for emergency crews to pass through snarled traffic, endangering lives."

I haven't seen the plan, and can't judge how well it would actually work. But, as I have wondered before, why does opposition to bicycles always take on such a melodramatic tone? Mr. Berger seems to feel that the Mass Ave. exists in a state of nature, untouched by the hand of man, or oppressive government. Clearly any road redesign will involve government action.  Just, in this case, government action of which he does not approve.  Car-oriented design is just natural, dammit. Why mess with it?

And this "emergency vehicle" thing gets trotted out in all sorts of urban design issues, from raised pedestrian crossings to alleys. It's childish. Yes, I picture a flood of bikes, like Peking before capitalism, so dense that fire trucks are stranded, wailing their sirens desperately as small children are burned alive in their ramshackle Arlington slums.

Now, maybe he can't actually say, "I think bicyclists are a bunch of smug jerks, and don't want them in my town. Every time I see one I want to run over him." But that is, I think, what underlies a lot of opposition.

Napoleon liked a gamble, but even he was probably uncomfortable with spinning the roulette wheel and putting all his chips on the double zero of a cross-Channel invasion. So having some slow-moving enemy armies on the other side of Europe must have been a relief. He turned the Army of England around and sent 200,000 men east.

They moved with incredible speed, and were masked by a splendid deception operation, and in 20 days they were crossing the Rhine. In early October they were at the Danube, to the confusion and shock of the Austrian army.

Napoleon had accurately predicted where the Austrians would station themselves, and what route the lumbering Russian army under Kutuzov (ten days late because of a confusion between the Gregorian calendar, used in the West, and the Julian calendar used by the Orthodox Russians) would take in joining them.

He defeated the Austrians under Mack at Ulm (readers of War and Peace might remember the shabby figure saying: "You see before you the unfortunate General Mack!", though he actually said this to Napoleon), and then the Coalition army at Austerlitz, probably his greatest tactical victory.

The story is excitingly told by Alistair Horne in How Far from Austerlitz, Napoleon 1805-1815, and if you want to get up to speed on Napoleon's military career in an entertaining way, there are few better. Horne has written a number of pleasing military histories, mostly dealing with the encounters between France and Germany in their three wars--Austerlitz then forms the first of these, for it is during this period that Germany really starts to get it together as a military power.

Aside from clearly delineating the strategy and operations of the wars, Horne gives us the required illuminating anecdotes.  Napoleon was

an indifferent horseman (Odeblen says scathingly, 'Napoleon rode like a butcher.... Whilst galloping, his body rolled backwards and forwards and sideways') and was thrown more than once

not too surprising for a former artilleryman. Horne details the detail Napoleon went into to make his dispositions:

As soon as the site for Imperial Headquarters in the field had been decided, d'Albe would set up Napoleon's 'operations room', the centre-piece of which would be a vast map table of the theatre of war, so large that the Emperor and his topographer would often be forced to lie on it full length together. 'I have seen them more than once,' wrote Baron de Fain, the Cabinet archivist, '...interrupting each other by a sudden exclamation, right in the midst of their work, when their heads had come into collision.'

Though it covers the period 1805-1815, Horne sketches in Napoleon's early career, including Italy and Egypt, as well as Napoleon's fate after defeat.  Highly recommended.

Alistair Horne
How Far from Austerlitz, Napoleon 1805-1815