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calimac1. The Daily Journal doesn't normally cover events outside of San Mateo County, but I'd agreed to review the 5/14 SF Symphony concert for them. Alas, the task got buried amidst more urgent ones, and the review didn't appear until the end of the next week. It was mostly unwritten until 4 or 5 days after the concert, as well, so apart from the few notes scribbled at the time, it's a little distant and ruminative about the music. Strangely, although I reviewed SFS 6 times for SFCV in the 2012-13 season, this is the only non-blog review I've written of it this year. I guess it depends on who's available.
2. The gruesome tale of the "I hate girls because they won't date me" assassin in Santa Barbara affords an opportunity for a linguistic note I've observed before, which is the dramatic mutation of the meaning of the term "nice guy." In current discourse, it's defined as "a man who feels he is entitled to sex based on positive personality traits known only to him," and it's a self-descriptor. That's not what it used to mean at all. Originally, it was applied as a consolation prize to the man by the women who wouldn't date him. A man didn't get to call himself a "nice guy"; only a woman could do that, though the man could report that she'd said so, and the personality traits she complimented were genuine. The perceived problem was women's supposed preference, knowingly or not, for men who were rougher, less nice, and more of a challenge. But somewhere along the way the term got co-opted by guys who weren't nice at all. The prototype of this type of guy was surely Charles Guiteau, probably the 19th-century's greatest monster of unearned self-entitlement, who before he became known as President Garfield's assassin was most remarkable as (as I believe Sarah Vowell put it) the only man who could join a free-love colony and still not get laid.
3. Among my mother's books that I've been reading is the historical classic The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith. The reason why what? you ask. "Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die" - the reason for the pointless, futile, and deadly Charge of the Light Brigade, of course. Puzzlingly, however, the book never quite engages with its own topic. The bulk of it is an indictment of the arrogance and general incompetence of the pre-Crimean War military command career of Lord Cardigan. What makes this puzzling is that Cardigan is depicted as showing no incompetence whatever in his role as the officer who led the charge: he was courageous and absolutely steadfast. Nor did his long-standing feud with his immediate commanding officer, Lord Lucan, have anything to do with it. Cardigan is said to have protested to Lucan that the order was insane, and Lucan agreed, but said that they still had to follow orders. The problem appears to have lain in the vagueness of the order from the overall commander, Lord Raglan, plus the error of the staff officer who delivered it in pointing to the wrong Russian guns when Lucan read it and said, "Huh? This doesn't make any sense." But Woodham-Smith doesn't explore the background of either of those men as she does Cardigan or Lucan. The thrust of the book, once the war starts about halfway in, is of the waste and incompetence with which the war was fought at the command level. The only British victories came when they did something so foolhardy, which they did repeatedly, that the Russians flinched in awe at the sheer audacity of it. I would have liked to read something about what the official U.S. Army observer, a Captain McClellan, made of it all, considering that he spent his later command career avoiding foolhardiness at all costs whatever.
2. The gruesome tale of the "I hate girls because they won't date me" assassin in Santa Barbara affords an opportunity for a linguistic note I've observed before, which is the dramatic mutation of the meaning of the term "nice guy." In current discourse, it's defined as "a man who feels he is entitled to sex based on positive personality traits known only to him," and it's a self-descriptor. That's not what it used to mean at all. Originally, it was applied as a consolation prize to the man by the women who wouldn't date him. A man didn't get to call himself a "nice guy"; only a woman could do that, though the man could report that she'd said so, and the personality traits she complimented were genuine. The perceived problem was women's supposed preference, knowingly or not, for men who were rougher, less nice, and more of a challenge. But somewhere along the way the term got co-opted by guys who weren't nice at all. The prototype of this type of guy was surely Charles Guiteau, probably the 19th-century's greatest monster of unearned self-entitlement, who before he became known as President Garfield's assassin was most remarkable as (as I believe Sarah Vowell put it) the only man who could join a free-love colony and still not get laid.
3. Among my mother's books that I've been reading is the historical classic The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith. The reason why what? you ask. "Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die" - the reason for the pointless, futile, and deadly Charge of the Light Brigade, of course. Puzzlingly, however, the book never quite engages with its own topic. The bulk of it is an indictment of the arrogance and general incompetence of the pre-Crimean War military command career of Lord Cardigan. What makes this puzzling is that Cardigan is depicted as showing no incompetence whatever in his role as the officer who led the charge: he was courageous and absolutely steadfast. Nor did his long-standing feud with his immediate commanding officer, Lord Lucan, have anything to do with it. Cardigan is said to have protested to Lucan that the order was insane, and Lucan agreed, but said that they still had to follow orders. The problem appears to have lain in the vagueness of the order from the overall commander, Lord Raglan, plus the error of the staff officer who delivered it in pointing to the wrong Russian guns when Lucan read it and said, "Huh? This doesn't make any sense." But Woodham-Smith doesn't explore the background of either of those men as she does Cardigan or Lucan. The thrust of the book, once the war starts about halfway in, is of the waste and incompetence with which the war was fought at the command level. The only British victories came when they did something so foolhardy, which they did repeatedly, that the Russians flinched in awe at the sheer audacity of it. I would have liked to read something about what the official U.S. Army observer, a Captain McClellan, made of it all, considering that he spent his later command career avoiding foolhardiness at all costs whatever.
