Fun Facts From My Future Home State

I'm moving to Vicksburg, Mississippi in a couple of months, and because I like to be prepared, I did a bunch of research about my soon-to-be-home state.

Fast Facts

-Jackson is the largest city, with a population of 174,514. The total population is around three million, about 1/3 of whom are black.

-59% of Mississippians consider themselves "very religious", the highest percentage in the U.S. It's also the only state with over 50% Baptists.

-As of the 2010 census, Mississippi was last in per capita income and had the lowest median household income out of all U.S. states. It also had 14 of the 100 lowest-income counties in the U.S. The American Human Development Project ranked it third-worst in the country behind West Virginia and Arkansas. CQ Press ranked it the least livable state in 2011. It's not all bad, though: Mississippi has one of the nation's lowest costs of living, and one of its highest rates of charitable giving.

-According to the private Commonwealth Fund, Mississippi is ranked 50th in overall health care, 50th in mortality rate amenable to health care, 50th in infant deaths per 1,000 live births and 51st in percentage of overweight children (including U.S. territories, I believe) at 44.5%. 34% of Mississippians are overweight, as per USA Today.

-Mississippi has not gone Democratic in a Presidential election since Jimmy Carter, and has voted for a non-Republican candidate only thrice since 1960 (the other ones were George Wallace in '68 and Robert Byrd in '60). It was the only state where every single county voted for Barry Goldwater in '64 (Alabama had no Democratic counties, but a few with unpledged delegates). Excepting the Attorney General (Jim Hood) and one member of the House (Bennie Thompson), Republicans control every major political institution or position in the state. In 2004, their constitutional ban on same-sex marriage passed with 86% approval, the highest margin of any state.

History Time!

-Mississippi has been a French, Spanish and British colony. It went over to the U.S. in the Treaty of Paris (1783). Between 1795 and 1832, the U.S. government negotiated ten different treaties with various Indian tribes for the state's present-day territory. It became the 20th state admitted to the Union in 1817, and was the second to secede from it in 1861.

-And boy, did they pay for it. Mississippi suffered the largest casualty percentage of any state in the Civil War. 78,000 Mississippians entered the war and 59,000 were either killed or wounded in it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Memorial Day evolved partially from a Mississippi custom.

-Related to Vicksburg specifically: Newitt Vick, after whom the town was named, was a Methodist minister and a conscientious objector during the Revolutionary War. The siege of Vicksburg was one of the Civil War's pivotal battles; the town fell after a 47-day siege, effectively cutting the South in two. Vicksburg surrendered on July 4th, so the town didn't celebrate Independence Day for another 82 years thereafter.

-Mississippi hates alcohol. Absolutely loathes it. It banned alcohol in the state in 1907, a dozen years before Prohibition was passed, and it was the first state to ratify the 18th Amendment. After the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition, it kept up the statewide ban for another another third of a century. When it finally went to a county option system, allowing counties to decide whether they'd be "dry" or "wet", the language of that law specifically reaffirmed the spirit(s) of Prohibition.

-Incidentally, Mississippi didn't actually ratify the 13th Amendment (banning slavery) until 1995.

-Mississippi's is the only state flag to incorporate the Confederate battle flag.

Economy Time!

-Mississippi's unemployment rate dropped to 9.0% in March. Before that, it had been over 9.6% for the previous 28 months, including 26 over 10%. The state GDP grew by 1.1% in 2010, one of the lowest rates of any state.

-It ranks third in casino gambling income among the states, behind only Nevada and New Jersey, due to the profitable riverboat gambling trade. Six riverboat casinos work Vicksburg alone.

-Although the days of King Cotton are long over, Mississippi still ranks sixth among the states in cotton exports. It's fourth in rice and fifth in poultry; its top agricultural commodity is broilers (5-12 week old chickens; I had no idea), followed by soybeans, corn, cotton and aquaculture. In fact, it's the country's leading producer of farmed catfish, and one of the leaders in shrimp.

-The importance of the poultry industry extends into manufacturing, where its biggest manufactured good is processed goods, especially chickens. It also produces furniture, chemicals, motor vehicle parts and ships; the Huntington-Ingalls shipyard at Pascagoula manufactures merchant vessels and nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. The state also has important petroleum and natural gas mining concerns.

Trivia Time!

-The word "Mississippi" is believed to originate from the Ojibwa/Cherokee mici zibi, which means "Father of Waters". The entire state is lowlands, and is subject to frequent flooding from the Mississippi River. Thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes are common (the latter average is 27 per year).

-The Mississippi state fossil is the basilosaurus, a prehistoric whale. The state tree and the state flower are both magnolias, and its official nickname is the Magnolia State (other nicknames include the Hospitality State, the South's Warmest Welcome, and the Birthplace of America's Music). Their motto is "Virtute et armis" (By Valor and Arms), the state reptile is the alligator and the state beverage is... milk. (#prohibition)

-Speaking of culture, Elvis was a Mississippian, as were Jimmy Buffett and Howlin' Wolf. Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones and Oprah Winfrey are all from the state; same with William Faulkner, John Grisham and Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets.

-Mississippi has produced some unbelievable football players. Brett Favre, Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Archie Manning, Eli Manning, Deuce McAllister, Patrick Willis, Steve McNair, Donald Driver, Ray Guy and many others were either born in the state or went to its schools.

-Coca-Cola was first bottled in Vicksburg. The first human lung and heart transplants were performed in Mississippi. When Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear cub and inadvertently inspired the teddy bear, that was in Mississippi too. The state hosted the first world heavyweight championship, is home to the International Checkers Hall of Fame, and is home to the graves of the King and Queen of all Gypsies in the United States. Finally, the world's largest shrimp resides in the Old Spanish Fort Museum in Pascagoula, presumably dead. (I'm slightly terrified.)

This is what I imagine daily life is like there--fighting off giant cannibal shrimp!

Decision Points: Big Choices

Hello, Internet. It’s been a while.

If we’ve never met, my name is Andy. I write down the ramblings that come into my head and post them as a part of Tisdel’s Tirades, my online clearinghouse for all things coherent. Whether these things are actually tirades is up to my mood on any given day; usually they’re reviews, football critiques, or sometimes generally angry rants about an obstinate person in the national political environment (or closer to home). None of it is particularly special, inspired or relevant to the day-to-day lives of a majority of my readers.

Today, however, I’m going to break that particular trend and put out what I think is some good advice. It’s advice I intend to take, and it applies fairly well to most of my recently-graduated classmates, friends and kindred spirits. It’s entirely possible that you’ve heard it before, and if so, I invite you to read mine anyway; perhaps I used a different adjective, a fresh example, or some unconventional way of catching your eye and reshaping the clay into something reasonably new. Or maybe not.

When you’ve just graduated college, and you’re sitting in your old room in your parents’ house at 22 and trying to figure out what you want or have to do with your life, your mind has a way of looking for guidance from any source available. For me, the things that come easiest to mind are the movies, TV shows and books with which I spend so much time. Protagonists, and even for subsidiary characters, have it comparatively easy: sure, your life may be ended or altered or changed in massively unpredictable ways at the author’s whim, but at least you’ll always know when it’s coming. The horns will blare out a Hans Zimmer war march, or the violins will script a sad and passionate leavetaking, or a swarm of unlikely-but-true events will wipe out all your prevarications and leave you facing your Big Choice with no barriers or delays allowed. Your life will change, and you will see it coming.

But real life doesn’t work like that. You can still fall in love, lead your company to huge successes or die bravely on the battlefield, but you’ll never see it coming. Life doesn’t broadcast its life-changing events; they’re sneaky, they’re tricksy and they’re disguised as normal, everyday decisions. You’re still making a Big Choice, but instead of one climactic moment where Hagrid asks you to go to Hogwarts, it’s the million tiny choices you’ve made over the years that light up your path. My choice of the College of Wooster has shaped me to a huge degree, but nobody sounded the trumpets when I visited the campus in the spring of 2008. And it was a series of tiny decisions, mine and others’, that put me in the position to choose that school at all. I’m sure every reader of these words can relate to that in some fashion. If movie choices are love at first sight, life choices are meeting at a coffee bar, seeing each other a few times over the next month or two and slowly getting to know the other person as the relationship flowers into mutual attraction and romance.

In a brave new post-graduation world, it’s easy to panic and overreact about the Big Choice or series of Big Choices you’ll be making in the coming months and years; getting a full-time job that you can live off of, getting an apartment, picking a graduate or law or medical school, and on and on. And it’s easy to get paranoid and freak out over the Big Moment lurking somewhere on the horizon. You don’t have to. There are Little Moments all around you, and it’s your choice at any given moment that might end up setting your path for years to come. Instead of waiting for the huge choice, focus on keeping your life in order from day to day, and the Big Choices will reveal themselves in due time. (This has helped me not freak out, or at least freak out less frequently.)

Wisconsin Campaign Coverage

There's a fine line between massaging the facts to your advantage and being downright disingenuous. Everyone does the former because it makes you look good. If you choose the latter, though, you'll alienate more voters than you draw in... at least if those voters are actually paying attention, like I was a few minutes ago.

One of the ads currently airing on Channel 12 Milwaukee just told me that under Governor Jim Doyle, unemployment in Wisconsin went up 37%, and unemployment in Milwaukee went up 28%. While not an actual lie, this is manifestly disingenuous. Unemployment didn't go up 37% in real terms under Doyle; assuming the underlying numbers are correct, it went up 37% from whatever it was pre-Doyle... like moving from 10% to 13.7%, not 10% to 47%. If unemployment in WI had hit that level, it would be a national catastrophe. The unannounced change in emphasis conceals the true meaning of the statistic (however meaningful it actually is; unemployment under Doyle was relatively static in his first five years before the 2008 recession began) and makes it just blatantly misleading.

I choose not to vote for candidates who fuck about in that fashion.

While I'm on that subject, let's tackle Scott Walker's claim that Wisconsin created over 23,000 jobs in 2011.

First: as Forbes pointed out, for the first 15 months of Scott Walker's governorship, he was content to use the same method of measuring job creation that saw him posting a loss of around 24,000 jobs in the past calendar year. Even the most ardent supporter of the Governor might balk at the timing of discounting conventional statistics that make him look bad... instead of his new statistics that make him look better... a few weeks before the election.

Second: Whether it's a net gain or a net loss over the past calendar year, 23,000 jobs is a relatively small number in a state with 205,000 out of work. I understand the symbolic importance of running as a job creator or attacking an opponent as a... job destroyer(?)... but either way, it's not an incredibly significant number. (Never mind the debate over the role of government in job creation; that's another thing entirely.)

Third: Any way you look at it, using whatever numbers, Walker is not on track to hit his target of 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin by the end of his first term. Although this has very limited significance due to the timing of the recall election... since Walker will have been in office for about a year and a half on Election Day... it's still worth keeping in mind.

Dear American Electoral System,

Yesterday, President Obama approved an expanded policy of drone strikes in Yemen to kill suspected members of Al-Qaeda. Now, U.S. officials are authorized to kill people whose identities are not known at the time the missile is fired. President Obama has continued Bush-era policies of holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay trial, authorized the killings of Al-Qaeda leaders in other sovereign states, and proclaimed the right to kill American citizens who are plotting against the United States without a trial. There isn't much major domestic political opposition to these policies; Democrats in the House and the Senate go along with them, and Republicans don't often mention them.

 In 2007, Obama's presumptive challenger, Mitt Romney, compared "jihadism" to fascism and communism, and said that "Their strategy is the collapse of the economy, the government, and the military of America and our friends". He has since spoken of making the 21st century an "American Century", and stated that members of Al-Qaeda are not entitled to due process. It's unrealistic to think that Romney, if elected, would decline to use the powers that Obama has claimed.

Under Obama, military spending--adjusted for inflation--has risen to the highest levels since 1950. We spend more money now than we did during the Korean War, the Vietnam War or when expanding our nuclear arsenal. And Mr. Romney has repeatedly stated that, if elected, he will "restore America's national defense" by reversing Obama's minimal defense cuts and adding more spending. This contributes to the problem of a country that has not balanced its budget since 2001 and with a national debt that is well over $15 trillion, a number so vast as to defy comprehension.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Most of the leaders of Al-Qaeda are either dead, imprisoned or being detained. By almost any measure, its ability to conduct terror attacks inside the U.S. or in other Western states has been greatly reduced. But by its nature, there can be no definitive end to the fight against global terror. After bin Laden's death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Americans to "renew our reserve and redouble our efforts". If bin Laden's death didn't end the war, what will?

Both of the presumptive candidates seem inclined to pursue America's current path, that of increasing defense spending, intervening in other countries to kill suspected terrorists and expanding the powers of government to wiretap, detain and to kill U.S. citizens without trial.

I think that this is not the only path available to the United States. I question the decision to spend, expand and kill without any end in sight, in a fight against an enemy that is unlikely to ever be fully eradicated. And I assert that the choice America is facing is not merely one between being tough or soft on terrorism, of spending big or making America weak, of curtailing our rights or letting Al-Qaeda strike us again. I believe there is a middle ground, one of prosecuting terrorists in civilian courts instead of military tribunals, of giving up the "right" to kill American citizens without a trial, and one where it is possible to spend less on defense without being perceived as weak... because the U.S. spends more on defense than the next ten largest spenders combined, and around six times as much as China (the next biggest)*.

I do not support the policies that President Obama has instituted, nor those which Mitt Romney has said he will enact. I feel like the 2012 election is going to be 1964 re-done, when the American people had to choose between one massive hawk (Lyndon Johnson) and another massive hawk (Barry Goldwater). So where do I go to find a candidate, one with a legitimate chance of winning, who supports the idea that there will eventually be an end to the War on Terror, and that we should not continue to spend, expand and kill at our current levels?

Sincerely,

Andy Tisdel

*Let's put this in perspective by using just one issue: The Chinese are currently in the process of building their first nuclear-powered aircraft supercarrier. The U.S. has 11, with two more on the way. We have more missile firepower, more nuclear submarines and more naval aircraft than any other state, and in some cases more than the rest of the world combined. Our fleet displaces more tonnage than the next 13 largest navies combined, 11 of which--as the above link says--are our allies. Yet you have Romney saying that China will "[brush] aside an inferior American navy" and criticizing Obama for weakening the fleet, saying that the number of ships is less than at any time since 1917--as if World War I-era battleships were remotely comparable to modern aircraft carriers!

Awesome Untranslatable Words From Around the World (200th Post)

I'd love to say that I'd planned something special for my 200th post on this blog, but to be honest, I was just logging in and noticed the little "199 Posts" ticker. My 100th post passed unremarked, whatever it was, but this time around I would like to humbly thank y'all for reading. Friends, family, complete strangers, arch-nemeses, thank you kindly.

By way of a thank-you for watching me manipulate the English language for 200 posts, here are a load of words it's impossible to directly translate into my mother tongue. I'll give you a bunch of definitions that I found online, then offer one untranslatable word of my own that I found in Israel at the end. Ready? Here we go. 

From the Daily Mirror, we have:  

Jayus - Indonesian: someone who tells a joke so unfunny you can't help laughing.
Kamaki - Greek: the young local guys strolling up and down beaches hunting for female tourists, literally "harpoons".
Dii-KOYNA - Ndebele, South Africa: to destroy one's property in anger.
Hira Hira - Japanese: the feeling you get when you walk into a dark and decrepit old house in the middle of the night.
Shnourkovat Sya - Russian: when drivers change lanes frequently and unreasonably.
Gadrii Nombor Shulen Jongu - Tibetan: giving an answer that is unrelated to the question, literally "to give a green answer to a blue question".
Layogenic - Tagalog, Philippines: a person who is only goodlooking from a distance.
Rhwe - South Africa: to sleep on the floor without a mat while drunk and naked.
Creerse La Ultima Coca-COLA EN EL DESIERTO - Central American Spanish: to have a very high opinion of oneself, literally to "think one is the last Coca-Cola in the desert".
Vrane Su Mu Popile Mozak - Croatian: crazy, literally "cows have drunk his brain". (I love this one.)
Du Kannst Mir Gern Den Buckel Runterrutschen Und Mit Der Zunge Bremsen - Austrian German: abusive insult, literally "you can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake".
Tener Una Cara De Telefono Ocupado - Puerto Rican Spanish: to be angry, literally "to have a face like a busy telephone".
Bablat - Hebrew: baloney, but is an acronym of "beelbool beytseem le-lo takhleet" which means "bothering someone's testicles for no reason".
Snyavshi Shtany, PO VOLOSAM NE GLADYAT - Russian: once you've taken off your pants it's too late to look at your hair.

From Boingboing:

-I couldn't find a translation, but apparently the Dutch phrase for 'pays too much attention to insignificant details' translates to ant fucking. 

-Afrikaans: "Jou mammie naai vir bakstene om jou sissie se hoerhuis te bou Vieslik!" your mother engages in prostitution in order to raise funds for the building materials necessary to construct a brothel from which your sister will operate.
-German: "backpfeifengesicht" - a face in need of a fist
 

Wikipedia gives us the translation for the French L'espirit d'escalier, literally "Staircase wit". It's the snappy comeback you think of after the moment has passed. 

German just knows how to do excellent words. From the BBC, we have Kummerspeck, or "grief bacon": the weight gained by emotional overeating (definition theirs). Also, Drachenfutter - literally translated as dragon fodder - are the peace offerings made by guilty husbands to their wives. 

Matador Network had a list with several of the really common ones--apparently untranslatability is a widely agreed-upon trait. 

Ilunga. Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) : a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.”

Saudade. Portuguese: This word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.”  

L’appel du vide. French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

Wabi-Sabi. Japanese: “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.” Note: Alternate translations I found had wabi-sabi as 'the one flaw in an otherwise perfect entity that, by its existence, makes the person beautiful'.
Toska. Russian: "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom." -Vladimir Nabokov

And from NPR:

korinthenkacker. German:  Literally "raisin shitter" — that is, someone so taken up with life's trivial detail that they spend all day crapping raisins.
meraki. Greek: This is a word that modern Greeks often use to describe doing something with soul, creativity, or love — when you put "something of yourself" into what you're doing, whatever it may be. Meraki is often used to describe cooking or preparing a meal, but it can also mean arranging a room, choosing decorations, or setting an elegant table.

yoko meshi: Japanese. Taken literally, meshi means 'boiled rice' and yoko means 'horizontal,' so combined you get 'a meal eaten sideways.' This is how the Japanese define the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language: yoko is a humorous reference to the fact that Japanese is normally written vertically, whereas most foreign languages are written horizontally.


Finally, when I was in Israel in January, I learned their word for the Holocaust: Sho'ah. It's not a direct translation, because 'holocaust' is derived from Greek and literally means, more or less, 'the ashes left after a fire'. Sho'ah (or Shoah) can translate to calamity, but the deeper translation has no direct equivalent. It was demonstrated to me at the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, called Yad Vashem. 
The final room of Yad Vashem has, in its center, a pit surrounded by a railing. Stand at the railing and look up, and you see a conical board with hundreds of pictures and stories and names, that circles the edge of the pit and continues on upwards. Stand at the railing and look down, and you see a pit. The sides of the pit are rough, jagged sandstone. It goes down and down until, about thirty feet below you, there's a pool of still water. You can see the pictures and faces and names above you reflected in the water, but no matter how hard you look or how long you try, you can't quite make out the picture in the water. You will never quite be able to see the reflection as clearly as the real thing. That is the meaning of shoah: the reflection in still water that is impossible to see clearly. 


Thank you, once again, for reading. 
-Andy

Watching Disney Movies as an 'Adult' is Fun! (Every Officer in Mulan is Terrible at War)

Mulan, as a movie, is all about war. The backdrop is a Hunnic invasion of China, every major character including Mulan herself is or has been in the Chinese or Hunnic militaries, and the movie concludes in triumph shortly after the Huns have been defeated. So that's settled. The problem, however, is that everyone involved is apparently horrendously terrible at the business of making war. 

This starts with the opening scene, when a sentry atop the Great Wall of China is surprised by what appears to be half the Hun army. 

How is that possible? Don't they send out patrols north of the Wall to, you know, give them some advance warning of approaching massive armies? And it's not even just the grappling hooks; as we see in a second, the Huns are already inside the Wall itself (how is not explained). 

 The brave Chinese watch commander manages to get to the top of the tower and light a signal fire, spreading the word that the Huns have come to China. "Now all of China will know you are here," he says defiantly, and Hun leader Shan Yu replies, "Perfect". 

"Perfect"? What, did he plan it this way? If so, why attack in the middle of the night when everyone is least prepared? If not, then why allow the guard to light the signal fire? What does he gain by losing the element of surprise? Later, Shan Yu explains his motivations to a hapless Chinese scout, saying that "By building his wall, [the Emperor] challenged my strength". This is presumably why he wants to fight the biggest Chinese army at a place and time of their choosing, to prove his strength, but that's a horrendous military strategy. Half of the point of war is not letting your enemy know where you are and what you're doing!

Anyway, that's just the first of many bad decisions. Shortly thereafter, Captain Shang's father, General Li, leaves to fight the Huns on a troop of white horses. Cavalry. He's a cavalry commander. So why in the name of Sun Tzu does he stop and wait at the Tung Shao pass for the Huns? On paper it's not an indefensible idea; if the mountains act as a natural barrier except for that pass, that would be a good place to stop the Huns. But they don't. When informed of this development, one of Shan Yu's aides says "We can avoid them easily". Therefore, there must be other routes to the Imperial City. Therefore, giving away the biggest thing any cavalry troop has going for it--mobility--in favor of sitting and waiting at the pass is stupid. They didn't even build any fortifications that we can see in the movie, choosing just to sit and wait in some village until the Huns crashed down on their heads. 

Shan Yu, of course, doesn't pick the "avoid the enemy soldiers" option. He attacks them head-on with all his strength and wins. We're not given many details about the battle, so it's reasonable to assume that there was some kind of strategic reason for eliminating China's best troops right there, as opposed to bypassing them and moving on to Peking. Still, it's hard to believe that most military commanders would choose to fight the enemy's elite forces on ground of their choosing when an "easily" used option to avoid them exists. 

The centerpiece of bad decision-making, however, is the movie's biggest military confrontation: the battle in the mountains. After discovering the rubble that used to be General Li, Captain Shang and his command head through the pass to the Imperial City, telling us that they're "the only hope for the Emperor now". (What, the whole rest of the Chinese army was twenty guys on horses?)  They're on their way through when Mushu accidentally sets off a cannon and gives away their position, as Shang yells at Mulan. 


The problem is, the Huns shouldn't have needed the cannon to see the Chinese! Look at this picture: 

Or this one: 

The Chinese army are moving dark figures on a field of pure white. Yes, they're in shadow, but they'd still be clearly visible against the snow. How did the Hun archers miss them? Especially since the only reason for them to still be in these godforsaken frozen mountains, let alone posted up on a peak overlooking the pass, is to be watching for Chinese reinforcements! If they're within bowshot of the Chinese party, it's not like they're out of sight, either. There's really no excuse for the Hun lookouts to miss the Chinese until the latter throw up a big, red, explosive "Hello I'm here, come shoot me!" sign. Also, Captain Shang just saw evidence that at the very least, a massive Hun army was here very recently. Why are the men in a straggling, disorganized line? At the very least, shouldn't they be prepared for battle?


But never mind that. After the arrows begin to fall, Shang gets the men to the safety of some rocks, where they reply with cannons. The cannons appear to wipe out the archers, and all is well. Then... THIS happens. 

The entire Hun army shows up and attacks. Apparently they were just sitting in the mountains and waiting for Shang's reinforcements to arrive. There is no logical reason why they should do that. In the first place, Shan Yu wants to sack the Imperial City. Well, it's right over there. There's literally nothing standing in his way from here to there. Second, nobody in the Chinese army command knows Shang is coming; Mushu issued fake orders to get Shang's company (?) into the fight. Shan Yu couldn't have known they were coming even if he'd captured and tortured General Li. Third, even if you wanted to have a rear guard just in case, why leave your entire army there? Why not just leave a few hundred soldiers and move on? Fourth, when you see that there are less than 20 Chinese soldiers, why (again) attack them with your entire army? Why not just leave, say, 150 men to deal with this pathetic little band while you're off destroying Peking?


There are other reasons why this is a terrible idea from a tactical perspective. Here's another picture of the Hun charge:

That little black dot out in front is Shan Yu, who apparently wants to kill all the Chinese himself, which you don't want your general to attempt for obvious reasons. Look at that vast, snow-covered expanse, though. All of those Huns are charging down it, which means their horses are going to be at least tired when they reach the bottom, if not dead from falling down hidden pitfalls or crevasses in the snow. But more to the point, from the fact that they're charging and the fact that they're going downhill, it's going to be very hard for them to stop. This is bad because... 

...they're charging towards a sheer cliff. And the people they're trying to kill are basically standing right on the edge of said sheer cliff. I don't blame Shang that much for picking this horrendous tactical location; it's understandable, given that he was trying to find cover from arrows at the time and that was the only available spot. That's relatively forgivable. But Shan Yu, once again, is charging towards a fucking cliff. And lest we forget his lesser sin, the people he's trying to kill are concealed amongst giant rocks, meaning that the horses will be relatively useless and might even break legs or whatnot if they, y'know, continue to charge straight at the Chinese and into the friggin' rocks. Rocks and a sheer cliff: yep, looks like charging down the mountain was a great decision.

 And the thing is, from Shan Yu's vantage point, this is all completely known. He starts the battle probably one or two hundred feet higher, elevation-wise, than the Chinese do, so at the very least he should be able to see that the land abruptly ends. Plus, he's had the opportunity to survey the terrain, having been here first. Which essentially means he picked this spot and picked this excuse for a strategy in advance.

Who knew that picking a psychopathic murderer to lead your army could be a terrible choice? It's not like Li or Shang do much better, though. All in all, this might be the most ineptly fought Hun-Chinese confrontation in 'history'.

Nine Things I Learned In Israel

I spent around ten days in Israel over winter break, courtesy of Taglit-Birthright Israel and the Hillel organization. These, and what will probably be successive posts, are some of my impressions from there.

1. The deserts are absolutely beautiful. Especially if you’re a tourist who doesn’t have to actually live there, but I mean, wow. Especially for a flatlander like myself, the mountains and all that bare earth and rock are incredible.

Click for a larger version. These mountains are southwest of Masada.

2. It isn’t all desert, shockingly enough. Above the Negev in the south, Israel isn’t lush by any stretch, but it’s also not barren. There’s plenty of arable land, as well as… palm trees and all kinds of desert plants. (Probably should’ve expected those, but seeing something I’m utterly used to seeing, in California anyway, on a foreign continent shocked me out my metaphorical shoes.)

3. Israeli architects just do not give a fuck. They will build whatever they feel like and to hell with your ideas of architecture. Balconies everywhere, buildings that meet in the middle and have huge gaps below, high-rises that look like they’re going to fall over any second because it goes out where it should go up and you’re just open-mouthed as you pass it on the bus, wondering how does that even work?

4. This occurred to me specifically in the Old City of Jerusalem, although I suppose it applies well to the country as a whole. Somehow it never occurred to me that so much history could be concentrated into such a small geographical area. I mean, you go to the Old City and pass through the gate, and suddenly the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is right over there. Probably the most holy site in Christianity (feel free to correct me on this), and it’s not more than half a mile from the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock. And then over there is the biggest synagogue in the city, and over there is a Jewish cemetery that’s been in use for three thousand years, and, and… I can’t get over it. It just seems so small to contain so many unimaginably meaningful places, and more to the point, where so many unimaginably important things happened long ago.

5. On a related topic, the Old City has to be the best parkour city in the known universe. Bar none. Once you get up on the roofs, a lot of them are basically contiguous and you can just run across them. Then there’s plenty of gaps, places where you can drop down to or below street level, railings to flip off of and things to climb up on… I swear, give the parkour elite a month of lenience from the authorities and a large sum of cash, and you could organize the most mind-blowing exhibition of parkour the world has ever seen.

Like this, only with multiple levels above and below the main streets.

6. On an unrelated topic, Israelis love cucumbers. Absolutely love them. I don’t think I saw a single meal—at hotels, at the kibbutz, from roadside vendors, in the middle of the desert, etc.—that didn’t either have sliced cucumbers somewhere or incorporate them into at least one dish.

7. The dish of choice there is shwarma, which is one of the de facto national foods. Basically you take your meat of choice (lamb, beef, chicken), throw it in a pita, add hummus, hot sauce, cucumbers, tomatoes, French fries (called “chips” there; thank you, British Mandate) and whatever else you want and serve piping hot. It’s kind of the best food: both delicious and a challenge, since the pita tends to fall apart as you eat it. (Those are the cheapest, but you can get intermediate- and expert-level bread products in which to wrap your shwarma as well. I have yet to level up sufficiently.)

8. Another shwarma anecdote—Most places use a rotating vertical grill to keep the shwarma roasted, juicy and warm so they can serve it at any time. Seen for the first time, it looks like some kind of enormous leg of mammal, like mastodon or something, because they don’t have individual carcasses hanging up. They just have this huge composite leg of lamb or whatever. The first time I saw it, it had chicken, beef and lamb legs turning side by side, three feet tall and maybe nine inches thick, and I had no idea what I was looking at. (Speaking of which, lamb is much more common and less expensive than chicken. It’s the little differences that astound you.)

9. You can learn about globalization in a classroom setting, you can read about jobs going to India or components from China or the homogenization of cultures due to it, but you don’t viscerally understand the concept until you’re standing in the middle of a Bedouin encampment in the middle of the Negev Desert, in Israel, in freaking Asia, and staring at the same make and model of paper towel dispenser as they use at your college. Made by Kimberly & Clark. I checked.

10. If my plans for my life go up in smoke, if everything goes wrong and my career lies in ruin and I have no options left for what I want to do, here's one of my fallback plans: I'm gonna move to Israel, I'm gonna open a factory, and I'm going to make barbed wire and concrete. My darkly comic observation during the trip was, "They're not going to run out of demand for those in the foreseeable future..." (Kidding. Mostly. We passed by a cement factory on the way to Tel Aviv, and some of my friends chorused "Andy, they stole your idea!") More to come.