Back to the Future.

Men who have lived in wars are branded by them.

In 1884 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Civil War veteran and great Supreme Court Justice, gave a Memorial Day speech and said, in part, "...Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing..." *

My war was Vietnam, a controversial one. It is fashionable among the fashionables to condemn that war, as if any war is pure good. But some things are worth fighting for, if we are to be morally solvent.

The late John Updike wrote this about the war in Vietman in 1966, after the full-scale American intervention was underway. It has something to say to us today, too, about surrendering to a world run by terrorists.

“...Like most Americans I am uncomfortable about our military adventure in South Vietnam; but in honesty I wonder how much of the discomfort has to do with its high cost, in lives and money, and how much with its moral legitimacy. I do not believe that the Vietcong and Ho Chi Minh have a moral edge over us, nor do I believe that great powers can always avoid using their power.

"I am for our intervention if it does some good -- specifically, if it enables the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political future. It is absurd to suggest that a village in the grip of guerrillas has freely chosen, or that we owe it to history to bow before a wave of the future engineered by terrorists. The crying need is for genuine elections whereby the South Vietnamese can express their will. If their will is for Communism, we should pick up our chips and leave. Until such a will is expressed, and as long as no willingness to negotiate is shown by the other side, I do not see that we can abdicate our burdensome position in South Vietnam."

* For the whole O.W. Holmes, Jr. speech, see
http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/memorial.htm

That melancholy jailer

Do you ever want to know
Do all dreams go on endlessly?
Or do they just run down somehow
And gradually become the custody
Of that melancholy jailer, Father Time?

(Lyrics, "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind," by Bonnie Raitt; second verse.)

Bunga! Bunga!

Great Moments in Practical Joking: The “Dreadnought Hoax”

In 1910, a bunch of English intellectuals called The Bloomsbury Group tricked the British Navy into allowing them to tour its most famous, state-of-the-art battleship - HMS Dreadnought - while posing as members of the Abyssinian royal family.

"The Bloomsbury Group’s members included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality." * None of which had much to do with battleships, but nevermind.

Disguised with skin darkeners and turbans (the main limitation of which was that the "royals" could not eat anything or their make-up would be ruined, they tricked the Royal Navy into showing them the RN’s flagship, the warship HMS Dreadnought, to a supposed “delegation of Abyssinian royals.”

On 10 February 1910 the trick began. The hoaxers had sent a telegram to the commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought, which was then moored in Weymouth, Dorset. The message said simply that the ship must be prepared for the visit of a group of princes from Abyssinia. The telegram was purportedly signed by Foreign Office Under-secretary Sir Charles Hardinge.

In Weymouth, the navy welcomed the princes with an honour guard. The Royal Navy did not have an Abyssinian flag, so the officers of HMS Dreadnought used the flag of Zanzibar, and played Zanzibar's national anthem; neither error seemed to faze the visitors.

The group inspected other ships in the fleet too. They distributed cards printed in Swahili and talked with each other in a broken Latin. To show their appreciation, they yelled invented words. They asked for prayer mats and bestowed fake military honours on some of the officers. One officer familiar with both Cole and Virginia Stephen failed to recognize either one, possibly because he heard the interpreter's strong German accent and was worried in case a German spy came on-board.

When they were on the train, one of the disguised imposters, Anthony Buxton, sneezed and blew off his false whiskers, but managed to stick them back before anyone noticed.

In London, the pranksters revealed the ruse by sending a letter and a group photo to the Daily Mirror. The Royal Navy briefly became an object of ridicule and demanded that the leader of the group be arrested. But, inconveniently, the jokesters had not broken any law.

During the visit to Dreadnought, the visitors had repeatedly shown amazement or appreciation by exclaiming, "Bunga! Bunga!" When the real Emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik II, visited England some time later, he was chased by children shouting "Bunga! Bunga!"

Ironically, the Emperor afterwards requested to view the Navy's facilities, but the senior Admiralty officer in charge declined to grant his request-possibly to avoid further embarrassments.

In 1915 during the First World War, HMS Dreadnought rammed and sank a German submarine. Among the telegrams of congratulation was one which read "BUNGA BUNGA".

* Source: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoax

Boil the ocean?

In business lliterature, to "Boil The Ocean" means to try to solve too many problems at once, or some other overambitious project, typically resulting in a complete failure…an attempt at something that is way too ambitious.

The phrase was popularized by Will Rogers, during World War I, who was asked what could be done about the problem of German U-boats. "Boil the ocean," he suggested. When pressed for exactly how, he is supposed to have said: "It's your job to work out the details!"

Some of us have given thought to those details, in case German U-Boats become a problem again.

Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) figure that the world's oceans consist of 275 million cubic miles. The problem is simply one of finding the energy to bring it to a boil. To find out how much energy is needed, we consulted MichioKaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York. He confirmed our worst fears: "It would take a lot of energy," he discovered, "about 4.7 x 1026 joules, give or take. It would probably require more energy than all the fuel on earth."

But perhaps, since "boil the ocean" has become a popular term in business circlese, a particularly powerful consulting firm might be able to do it. By our calculations, one day of really serious business consulting involves about 1 x 107 joules of energy. Assuming no vacations, this means every single person on earth would have to consult for more than 26 million years to actually "boil the ocean."

Anyway, what would happen if they succeeded? Jeffrey Chanton, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University offered us a discouraging opinion. "It would mean the end of the life we know on earth. It is a terrible idea."

Placing the garnish

My first client, when I became a CPA, was a restaurant owner in Florida.

Bob Cook was the founder of Holiday House Restaurants and my first and most significant client as a CPA. In the beginnings, being new, I had to do the grunt work of auditing - going into the walk-in freezers for hours to count the swinging beef and hamburger patties, and other fun things.

Then one day Bob Cook, who I later learned had taken a liking to me, came to me and said, "If you're going to audit my books, you need to know how a restaurant works," and asked me to come to the flagship restaurant at 6.00am the following morning, and told me to be prepared to spend all day. "All day" for Cook was 12-14 hours, I discovered.

So I did. 14 hours. He showed me all the tricks to restaurant profitability. How to reheat a leg of lamb. How to make chocolate sundae from yesterday's chocolate cake. How to time the grinding of coffee beans. How to manage labor costs. How to clean a chopping block and sharped a Forshner knife. I have had few more interesting days. What an artist he was! It was mesmerizing it was just watching him use a spatula to fold ingredients into a recipe, or put a garnish on a plate - he did not just put it on the plate; he placed it on the plate with the softness of a lover's kiss. There was an artist's flair to everything he did.

And his stamina! Goodness! He'd start at 6.00am for an 11.00am opening and not even look tired at closing, still fresh and excited until the lights went off late at night. And...in fairness, he was not the easiest man to get along with, demanded devotion from everyone around him, and he did not suffer fools lightly.

I think it was one of those few times with I was in the presence of greatness. It taught me the power that comes from a talented man who loves his work.

The Bad Judgment Hall of Fame

There are some questions that one just does not ask, ever.

The first time I sat on the dugout bench next to an actual New York Yankee baseball player I was a 10-year old kid batboy for a Yankee farm team. I had heard that he had played in Yankee Stadium, so I was impressed.

So out came the forbidden question: “Mr. Cerv, why did the Yankees send you down to Kansas City?” I seemed like a fair question at the time.

Bob Cerv had signed with the New York Yankees in 1950, after being a standout baseball and basketball player at the University of Nebraska. The Yankee teams of those years were very strong, so Cerv did not play much. He’d played in the Bronx but at one point he was sent down to the Kansas City Blues, which was a Yankee farm club. No major league player welcomes being “sent down,” and no one with any baseball sense asks a Yankee play, in particular, “How come you got sent down to the minors” and expects to live to tell the tale.

I recall Cerv replying, as he looked at the dugout floor, “Well, I guess I was not good enough...”

A hour or so later, another player (I have forgotten who) called me aside on the dugout steps. Calmly, but in tones that even an oblivious 10-year old could not misunderstand, this forgotten baseball player said, “Johnnie, never, ever, ask a baseball player a question like that. It is hard enough to get back to the Bronx without having some kid ask a question like that.” He looked at me with steel eyes for what seemed like a year, then he stood up and walked away.

It was the first big league moment for a 10-year old boy.

Cerv came out of it just fine. According to Wikipedia, following the 1956 season, he was sold to the new Kansas City Athletics, where he became a regular.

His best season was 1958, when he hit .305, hit 38 homers, and had 104 RBIs, was elected to the American League All-Star team, beating out Ted Williams for the starting spot. He also finished 4th in the MVP voting that year. He did all of this while playing injured part of the season. Cerv also participated in the Home Run Derby, where he lost to Frank Robinson.

He followed up in 1959 with 20 homers and 87 RBIs. Some say had Cerv not played back-up to such greats as Mickey Mantle he would have done so much more on the field. Cerv still holds Kansas City's major league record for home runs with 38.