A pronoun pointing all over the place...

On the bus this morning two women were talking. One asked the other what she'd done this weekend, and this exchange took place:

A: I watched the thirtieth anniversary of MASH.
B: Which did they show?
A: All of them. You know some of them have gone on. I loved that show.

Wow. Check it out.

The pronoun "they" is used three times, and it has a different referent every time. One of those referents is outside the text - the last one; it refers to the actors. The first one refers to the television station that was running the shows. The second refers to the 'which', which is to say to 'episodes'.

And what's truly astonishing, when you think about it, is that neither I nor either woman hesitated a second to assign the proper referents. I'll bet even Watson couldn't have told that the "they" who had gone on wasn't the same "they" in "all of them" - or that that wasn't a peculiar sentence possibly contradicting the first.

Language processing is an amazing thing.

Happy Birthday, Walt

Born today in 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, Walt Whitman:

Fitting for Memorial Day, here is his Dirge for Two Veterans

                1

    THE last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,
On the pavement here—and there beyond, it is looking,
    Down a new-made double grave.

                2

    Lo! the moon ascending!
Up from the east, the silvery round moon;
Beautiful over the house tops, ghastly phantom moon;
    Immense and silent moon.

                3

    I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles;
All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,
    As with voices and with tears.

                4

    I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring;
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
    Strikes me through and through.

                5

    For the son is brought with the father;
In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell;
Two veterans, son and father, dropt together,
    And the double grave awaits them.

                6

    Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive;
And the day-light o’er the pavement quite has faded,
    And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

                7

    In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d;
(’Tis some mother’s large, transparent face,
    In heaven brighter growing.)

                8

    O strong dead-march, you please me!
O moon immense, with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans, passing to burial!
    What I have I also give you.

                9

    The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music;
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
    My heart gives you love.

(a few more poems are here)

Memorial Day

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
    I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
    What place is this?
    Where are we now?

    I am the grass.
    Let me work.

-- Carl Sandburg

The Week in Entertainment

The weekend got away from me...

DVD: The annual back-to-back-to-back marathon of The Lord of the Rings. Yes, Peter Jackson changed stuff, but when you're making a movie you have to. He got it as right as it could be gotten, I expect.

TV: The House finale. I'm not totally crazy about that format - teasing us throughout the show with the knowledge that he (did/is going to do) something terrible - but it worked well enough. And I do wonder how he's coming back. The finales of The Middle and Modern Family were, respectively, good and very good - I love Cam and Manny together, even if it didn't work out just like Cam wanted. And Haley's saving Alex from herself was lovely. A commercial for The Closer makes me hope that Leverage will be back really soon, too.

Read: I realized when I saw One of Our Thursdays Is Missing that I'd never finished (maybe never started) First Among Sequels, so I caught up on the whole series. The latter two aren't nearly as good as the first four, though the last one is intriguing in that it's told by Thursday5 (a written version) rather than the real Thursday (who's the missing one of the title). I do wonder about "9/11 conspiracy" people being in existence; surely in this alternate universe 9/11 didn't happen? But then, who knows what 9/11 might mean there... Finished Baba Yaga Lays an Egg, the third part of which is weird and undercuts the first two, in my opinion. But the first two stand on their own as quite remarkable works. Began Simonov's The Living and the Dead (Мертвые и живые) in Russian; it's one of the great WWII novels of Soviet literature, and I'm heartened at how easily I can read it... unlike Marinina, they're not filled with current slang! (Well, probably with '40s slang, but that I learned in school ;-) )

Chuck!

He's big, but he's shy: he has boltholes everywhere.

Memorial Day

Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France

To have been read before the statue of Lafayette and Washington in Paris, on Decoration Day, 30 May 1916

I

Ay, it is fitting on this holiday,
Commemorative of our soldier dead,
When—with sweet flowers of our New England May
Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray—
Their graves in every town are garlanded,
That pious tribute should be given too
To our intrepid few
Obscurely fallen here beyond their seas.
Those to preserve their country's greatness died;
But by the death of these
Something that we can look upon with pride
Has been achieved, nor wholly unreplied
Can sneerers triumph in the charge they make
That from a war where Freedom was at stake
America withheld and, daunted, stood aside.

II

Be they remembered here with each reviving spring,
Not only that in May, when life is loveliest,
Around Neuville-Saint-Vaast and the disputed crest
Of Vimy, they, superb, unfaltering,
In that fine onslaught that no fire could halt,
Parted impetuous to their first assault;
But that they brought fresh hearts and springlike too
To that high mission, and 'tis meet to strew
With twigs of lilac and spring's earliest rose
The cenotaph of those
Who in the cause that history most endears
Fell in the sunny morn and flower of their young years.

III

Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise,
Nor to be mentioned in another breath
Than their blue-coated comrades whose great days
It was their pride to share—ay, share even to the death!
Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks
(Seeing they came for honour, not for gain),
Who, opening to them your glorious ranks,
Gave them that grand occasion to excel,
That chance to live the life most free from stain
And that rare privilege of dying well.

IV

O friends! I know not since that war began
From which no people nobly stands aloof
If in all moments we have given proof
Of virtues that were thought American.
I know not if in all things done and said
All has been well and good,
Or of each one of us can hold his head
As proudly as he should,
Or, from the pattern of those mighty dead
Whose shades our country venerates today,
If we 've not somewhat fallen and somewhat gone astray,
But you to whom our land's good name is dear,
If there be any here
Who wonder if her manhood be decreased,
Relaxed its sinews and its blood less red
Than that at Shiloh and Antietam shed,
Be proud of these, have joy in this at least,
And cry: `Now heaven be praised
That in that hour that most imperilled her,
Menaced her liberty who foremost raised
Europe's bright flag of freedom, some there were
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette;
And when of a most formidable foe
She checked each onset, arduous to stem—
Foiled and frustrated them—
On those red fields where blow with furious blow
Was countered, whether the gigantic fray
Rolled by the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot,
Accents of ours were in the fierce mêlée;
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
And on the tangled wires
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: —
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops;
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.'

V

There, holding still, in frozen steadfastness,
Their bayonets toward the beckoning frontiers,
They lie—our comrades—lie among their peers,
Clad in the glory of fallen warriors,
Grim clustered under thorny trellises,
Dry, furthest foam upon disastrous shores,
Leaves that made last year beautiful, still strewn
Even as they fell, unchanged, beneath the changing moon;
And earth in her divine indifference
Rolls on, and many paltry things and mean
Prate to be heard and caper to be seen.
But they are silent, clam; their eloquence
Is that incomparable attitude;
No human presences their witness are,
But summer clouds and sunset crimson-hued,
And showers and night winds and the northern star
Nay, even our salutations seem profane,
Opposed to their Elysian quietude;
Our salutations calling from afar,
From our ignobler plane
And undistinction of our lesser parts:
Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave hearts.
Double your glory is who perished thus,
For you have died for France and vindicated us.

-- Alan Seeger

Tiny tiny tiny birds

These guys are tiny - tinier than goldfinches, tinier than kinglets even. But then their food is tiny, too: blue-gray gnatcatchers out on a hot late-May morning.

Happy Birthday, Terence

Today in 1906, in Bombay, India, T.H. White was born. The Once and Future King is enough to warrant celebrating him, but his other novels are fun, and England Have My Bones and The Goshawk are fascinating looks into English country life.

Here's a lovely website devoted to White.

"I don't believe what I just saw!"

Kirk Gibson was born today in 1957. He's not one of my favorite players; it's not that I don't like him, it's that he never played for a team I like - in fact, played most of his career for a team I don't like at all.

But his home run in 1988 off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the World Series is one of the all-time great moments in sports.

So, Happy Birthday, Kirk.

Mystery oriole

I'm not at all sure what this bird is. It's absolutely not a Baltimore oriole. It's not the right color for an orchard oriole. And it has too much brown and is waaaay out of its normal range if it's an Audobon oriole. Perhaps it's a young male orchard oriole molting into its adult plumage? It's looked this way for several days - these pictures were taken on May 19 and May 25, in College Park, Maryland. Anybody have a good ID?

added: He is a young male orchard oriole. Thanks, Sarah!

OK I'm stumped

Did the Post crossword today.



(Note - there's really only one error here; I just wrote 11D in 10D, while I originally had "Serb" for 23D even though I muttered to myself 'that's not right' as I wrote it... Anyway...)

You can see the title, but in case you don't have images it's Can You Forward Me That Link? The long answers are

summer camp
pork barrel

... oh. Duh. Yes, I just got it. Just now - literally as I typed 'pork barrel'. The others:

Vienna Boys' Choir
liver spots
blood money

Liver spots messed me up as I was thinking of doubled letters, not that that was making any sense, of course.

Links. Sausages.

Sometimes I feel so slow.

Happy Birthday, Tony

On this day in 1925 in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, Tony Hillerman was born. Most of his novels take place on the Navaho reservation and feature Navaho cops - first Joe Leaphorn, "the legendary lieutenant", and later Sergeant Jim Chee, and then later both of them. Leaphorn is in his fifties in the first book, long married, secular and a master of his craft; Chee is young, single, religious (training to be a Singer/shaman), and just learning that and police work. Nevertheless, people couldn't keep them straight, and enough people actually had conversations with Hillerman which made it clear they thought the two characters were the same person that he put them into the same book. The clash between their world-views worked well in the novel, and they've been in the books ever since. I love these books; even when the quality dropped a bit I still bought them in hardcover - so-so Hillerman is still better than the best of many others - and the last few have been a return to his best form.

Not big Rogers & Hammerstein fans, I see

They had to name the musical after getting two characters. "Emile deBecque and Ensign Nellie Forbush" baffled them - badly. One guessed "The Pirates of Penzance"! The next must have figured he'd just said the wrong G&S work, and tried "HMS Pinafore".

I couldn't believe it.

And then "Aunt Eller Murphy and Lauie Williams" left them totally blank.

(South Pacific and Oklahoma!)

a tiny ambiguity

Today's Tiny Seppuku answers a question from someone whose parents like her ex enough to let him live with them. Here's a panel from the strip:

The parents say this to the woman:

Let us tell you how much we enjoy having your ex living with us instead of you.

This is ambiguous - do they enjoy having him live with them instead of live with her, or instead of her living with them?

And the brilliant thing about this is, the context of the conversation doesn't disambiguate it, as context usually does. Either reading would fit beautifully.

Wow.

Oooo, I hope he's right

Paul Krugman comments on the NY-26 election:

The obvious point is that Republicans, having run in 2010 largely by scaring seniors with tales of death panels, are now horsed on their own pet aardvark, or something.

The difference is that whereas Democrats were not, in fact, trying to impose death panels, Republicans really do want to dismantle Medicare – and that’s the truth no matter how many times Very Serious People reach for their smelling salts when Democrats say that. And you would think that would make Medicare an even more potent weapon for the Dems than it was for the Rs (unless they go out of their way to ignore what the electorate is really concerned about.)

It’s now starting to look like a real possibility that we will have had three electoral waves in a row – a Democratic sweep in 2006-2008, a Republican countersweep in 2010, and a countercountersweep in 2012 as voters realize that the GOP is the same as it always was, only more so.

Greek prefixes on Jeopardy!

Tried to post this last night, but Blogger was acting up.

They had a category of Greek prefixes - what did they mean, in English? The contestants only got the first two. How would you have done?

proto-
necro-
leuco-
syn-
melano-

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Rosario!

Today in Mexico City, in 1925, Rosario Castellanos was born. She was one of Mexico's great literary figures. Her novel Oficio de tinieblas (The Book of Lamentations) dealt with cultural oppession in the Chiapas region and is one the classic novels of Mexican, or perhaps world, literature. She was also, or primarily, a poet.





Nocturne

Para vivir es demasiado el tiempo;
Para saber no es nada.
A que vinimos, noche, corazon de la noche?
No es possible sino sonar, morir,
Sonar que no morimos
Y, a veces, un instante, despertar.


Nocturne

Time is too long for life;
For knowledge not enough.
What have we come for, night, heart of night?
Dream that we do not die
And, at times, for a moment, wake.

This translation is from a Western Michigan University website that didn't name the translator (but did cite Miche Vicuna, Cecilia and Bogin, Magda, eds. The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos. Graywolf Press, Saint Paul Minnesota © 1988. I grabbed it quickly this morning and not only forgot to source it, but didn't even notice the poem's translation was a line short! (Thanks, Kathie...) This site - which has more poems - credits Magda Bogin with the translation, but also is missing the line. Every other page I find has the same translation. Don't know if Bogin skipped it, or if the first posted version of it did and the others (there aren't many) just copied it.

My Spanish is not good. I hazard this - very much hazard! - "Nothing is possible but dreaming and dying".

ps - Google Translate offers this

To live is too much time;
To know is nothing.
In we came, night, heart of the night?
It is possible but sounds, dying,
Sonar not die
And sometimes, an instant awakening.

That's not very satisfactory, though, is it?

Any Spanish-speaking readers want to chime in? I'll also ask at work tomorrow; we have some folks there who could help out.

pps - One did:

Time is too long for life;
For knowledge not enough.
What have we come for, night, heart of night?
Nothing is possible but dreaming and dying,
Dreaming that we do not die
And, at times, for a moment, wake.

This just drives me crazy

The guy just got penalized for saying "Muskokee" instead of "Muskogee". But spelling doesn't count in Final Jeopardy?

For crying out loud, spelling is much more standardized than pronunciation. And people devoice all the time.

Happy Birthday, Michael

Michael Chabon, author of (among others) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys, and Summerland, was born today in 1963. His The Yiddish Policeman's Union was tremendous. I've also read Borderlands, essays about reading and writing, and enjoyed most of them a lot.

Happy Birthday, Bob

Bob Dylan was born today in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941.





Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

ohhhhhhhhh

Alex is lucky that guy didn't phrase "Here are dragons" in the form of a question, if he was going to say that "the correct translation is 'here be dragons'." That may indeed be the standard English phrase found on maps, but if was trying to say that "sunt" means "be" instead of "are", well...

"Sunt", as William Whitaker's Words puts it, is the PRES ACTIVE IND 3 P of "be; exist". And the third person present (active) indicative of "be" in English is .... "are".

Grattis på födelsedagen, Carl

Today in 1707 in the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden, Carl Linné, who is better known by the Latinised version of his name - Carolus Linnaeus - was born. The family's surname was chosen by his father, Nils Ingemarsson, son of Ingemar Bengtsson, when Nils went to the University of Lund and needed a permanent surname; he used the Latin form in the academic setting. The inspiration for the name was a giant linden tree on the family homestead - their warden tree, in fact.

Linnaeus was primarily a botanist, and throughout his life he made efforts to introduce new crop-plants into Sweden, most of which were failures (due to the climate); he did succeed with rhubarb, though.

But his legacy is the scientific naming system - the binomial nomenclature - used to this day, and the taxonomic system for classifying living things that it encapsulates. When you speak of Families and Orders, of Genera and Species, you're using Linnean language. When you say Homo sapiens, Quercus alba, Tyrannosaurus rex, or Buteo lineatus, your precision is his gift.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Incendies, a fairly ... intense ... and brilliant Canadian film that plays out as inexorably as a Greek tragedy.

DVD: Delgo - a truly bad movie. If you have the chance to see it, and you just really want to look at a nice color palette of a movie, go ahead but be doing something else at the same time. Otherwise, just do something else. On the other hand, The City of Your Final Destination is another beautiful movie (though not animated), this one with intriguing and flawed characters (particularly Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney's brother- and sister-in-laws) and a story that feels important but perhaps isn't. Still, it was gorgeous to watch.

TV: School Ties - perhaps most interesting for the very young Brendan Fraser and Matt Dillon who anchor the slightly predictable, but not overwhelmingly so, story of bigotry and passing and the choice between passing or succeeding. House: damn, I do not care about 13 and her friends and their problems. And I am fast not caring about Cuddy, either. The Mentalist - O. M. G. what a gut-kick ending to the season. Wow. And then Doctor Who - lovely to see Rory standing up for someone. Can't wait to see how they end it. And what a line they gave the Doctor in "I have to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose." Pause. "I never thought I'd get to say that again."

Read: Finished Palin's Halfway to Hollywood, and eagerly awaiting the next installment. Began Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, which is fascinating so far (about halfway through).

Happy Birthday, Bernie

Born today in 1950, in Lincolnshire, England, "the man who writes the words for Elton John" - and other people - Bernie Taupin. Here's one of my favorites of his lyrics...

Daniel

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane
I can see the red taillights heading for Spain.
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes

They say Spain is pretty though I've never been
Well Daniel says it's the best place that he's ever seen
Oh and he should know, he's been there enough
Lord I miss Daniel, oh I miss him so much

Daniel my brother you are older than me
Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal
Your eyes have died but you see more than I
Daniel you're a star in the face of the sky

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane
I can see the red taillights heading for Spain
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes
Oh God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes

Happy Birthday, Edith

Today in 1936, Edith Grossman was born today in Philadelphia. She's one of the great translators from Spanish - her Don Quixote, which came out in 2003, is considered one of the, if not the, best translations (Carlos Fuentes called it "truly masterly") and was a best-seller, and Gabriel García Márquez calls her "my voice in English". She has also translated Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and Álvaro Mutis. In 2003, at the PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, she said:

"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."

Or, as she put it in an interview with Guernica:

Yes, I think we have to be faithful to the context. But it’s very important to differentiate between fidelity and literalness. Because you can’t be faithful to words, words are different in different languages. You can’t be faithful to syntax, because that changes from one language to the other. But you can be faithful to intention and context. Borges allegedly said to one of his translators, “Don’t translate what I said. Translate what I meant to say.” That is, in fact, what a translator does. Because languages are very resonant and various levels of diction and styles of discourse echo in the mind of the native reader and native speaker. I always think that my job is to find the English that will resonate like the original Spanish for the English speaking reader.

And here's a bit about translating García Márquez for the first time, from a piece in Criticas:

“I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”

Happy Birthday, Al

Today is the birthday of Al Franken, member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and junior senator from that state.

A few birds

Here are a few birds from the past week. Not all great photos, but great birds.

Baltimore oriole


a Green heron




a female Redwinged blackbird


and a male one


a juvenile Robin


a male Goldfinch

Happy Un-Birthday, Johann

Not today in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany, was Johann Sebastian Bach born (see comments). The world would be a poorer place without him.

One of my favorite CDs for the office is The Goldberg Variations, scored for a string quartet. But it's hard to go wrong picking something of his.

He spent a large part of his life as a playing musician - an organist, mostly - and much of his composed music was considered too old-fashioned or too ornamental. He changed jobs a lot, until 1723, when he became a choirmaster in Leipzig where he remained until his death in 1750. Most of his jobs were for one church or another, in fact, but he happily wrote secular music when he worked for Prince Leopold of Cothen - until his wife (the prince's) disapproved of such a frivolous expense as chamber music. But whatever kind of music Bach wrote, he did it gloriously.

Happy Birthday, Manly

Today in Kamundongo, Angola, in 1903, Manly Wade Wellman was born (his father was a medical officer). My first book of his was one of his Civil War YA novels (Ghost Battalion), but I quickly fell in love with the John the Balladeer stories. Exquisite writing, and about my homeland - how could I not?

Karl Edward Wagner says, "There hadn't been anything like the John stories at that time, and there hasn't been since. No one but Manly Wade Wellman could have written these stories. Here his vivid imagination merged with authentic Southern folklore and a heartfelt love of the South and its people. Just as J. R. R. Tolkien brilliantly created a modern British myth cycle, so did Manly Wade Wellman give to us an imaginary world of purely American fact, fantasy, and song."

If you don't know John and his stories, try one - I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Yellow in the green

Even with my Sibley's I'm not sure, but I think this is a young Orchard oriole. Anybody out there have a (different) idea?

З днем народження, Іван

Іван Степанович Мазепа - Ivan Mazepa - was born today, in what is now called Mazepyntsy, near Bila Tserkva in Ukraine around 1640. The usual English spelling of his name is Mazeppa, which is from the Russian.

Mazepa was an ambitious Kozak (Cossack) officer who rose quickly through the ranks in the post-Pereyaslavl Left Bank Hetmanate (the 1653 Treaty of Pereyaslavl between Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyy and Tsar Alexey I of Muscovy was fraught with misunderstandings from the beginning). Mazepa began as a loyal ally of Russia (as Muscovy was now called under Peter I, the Great), and became hetman in 1687 after accusing his predecessor, Samoylovych, of planning to break the treaty and secede from Muscovy. In 1702 Mazepa crossed the Dnipro (Dneiper) and annexed large portions of Right-Bank Ukraine after Semen Paliy's failed uprising against the Poles, establishing him as a wealthy and powerful ruler.

But the Great Northern War wasn't good to Russia - the Swedes and Lithuanians were a serious force back then - and Peter I decided to take steps - steps Mazepa saw as threatening the Hetmanate's autonomy. Peter I began sending Kozaks to fight in foreign wars, instead of leaving them to defend Ukraine against Tatars and Poles (as the treaty stipulated). Kozak soldiers were neither equipped nor trained for modern warfare, and they were often commanded by Russians and Germans who often did not much value their lives. They suffered loss of morale, and heavy casualties, while at home a Russian force became an oppressive occupier.

In 1708, Polish King Stanislaus Leszczynski, an ally of Charles XII of Sweden, threatened to attack the Hetmanate. Peter I refused to defend Ukraine, expecting an attack on Russia proper by Charles XII. In Mazepa's opinion, this blatantly violated the Treaty of Pereyaslav, since Russia refused to protect Ukraine's territory and left it to fare on its own. As the Swedish and Polish armies advanced towards Ukraine, Mazepa allied himself with them on October 28, 1708.

The Russian army responded by razing the Kozak capital Baturyn, killing the defending garrison and all of its population. The Russian army was ordered to tie up the dead Kozaks to crosses, and float them down the Dnieper River all the way to the Black Sea with the goal of scaring all the people loyal to Mazepa who lived along the river.

The Battle of Poltava, June 29, 1709, was won by the Russians (a victory which shook Europe and established Russia as a true imperial force and power player in European politics), and this destroyed Mazepa's hope for an independent Ukraine. He fled along with Charles to refuge in Bendery, among the Turks, where he died soon afterwards. The tsars began to dismantle the Hetmanate, and by 1764 the largely puppet remains of it were abolished.

Mazepa's legacy during Russian rule of Ukraine, and Soviet rule thereafter, was one of treason and revilement. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, Tchaikovsky's opera "Mazeppa" casts him as the villain, and any positive view of him was "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism", a serious crime in Soviet days. But since Ukrainian independence the hetman's memory has enjoyed a resurgence, and he is recognized as a national hero.


He's even on the money.

Software expert?

Alex just pronounced "aide-de-camp" as "aide-de-comp". Yes, it's possible (per MW) to have that vowel, but you must make it very nasal - and it's the fourth listed variant.

Alex is just a tad on the pretentious side, isn't he?

And not just him ...

Paul Krugman asks, about Newt:

Now you may ask, how did a once-powerful figure become such a clown? But that’s the wrong question: what you see now is what he always was. The real question is why so many media figures pretended, for so long, not to notice.

Red-winged Blackbirds

They're bold and noticeable - "their wings are so crazy" says my Russian coworker - loud, gaudy, and perched in high, easily seen places to challenge each other with their raspy call and occasional sweet singing. When they get too close to each other, they chase each other in swoops and arches. Every now and then, though, you see the ones they do it all for: brown and cream and usually hidden away in rushes and reeds...

Adios, Seve

I came home from work today and collected my mail. A couple of magazines - one of them my Golf World. It had that classic, almost iconic picture of Seve Ballesteros - the one in black, fist raised, fiercely triumphant at St Andrews in 1984 winning The Open. But it was accompanied by those significant paired numbers.

He was younger than me, I thought. And then it actually hit me. I'd missed it, somehow, the actual day he died. I knew he was sick, so badly ill - brain cancer - that he hadn't even been able to come to the Ryder Cup last fall, having to send a video of his encouraging words. But I missed that he'd actually died. (Teach me to skip the sports sections on busy days...)

Seve was one of my favorite players of all times - right up there in the top three, maybe top two. He was a dramatic player, a scrambler who never met a lie so bad he couldn't get out of it. He didn't have the cleanest swing, and he missed a helluva lot of fairways, but he could get up and down like nobody else - in 1979 at Royal Lytham in The Open, he hit a three-wood off the tee into a temporary parking lot, then made an incredible recovery shot onto the green and holed out. He won.

He could take your breath away, drop your heart to your feet or put it in your throat, and pull you to your feet in shouting joy. Watching Seve play was like nothing else, ever.

Seve appeared like a thunderbolt at Royal Birkdale in the 1976 Open Championship, coming in second at age 19 - and followed up by winning the Dutch Open three weeks later. Over a career cut short by back injury he won 87 events around the world, including five majors (three Opens and two Masters - he was the first European to win at Augusta, in fact), plus five World Matchplays and a PGA.

And he was the beating heart and fiery soul of the European Ryder Cup team. He and Jose Maria Olazabal still hold the record for foursomes / four-ball wins - for either team. He led Europe to dramatic victories on both continents, and who can forget his captaincy at Valderrama? He was everywhere - every hole, it seemed the camera caught Seve in that cart, guiding, urging, lifting his team to victory.

Here's an appreciation by Ken Schofield. And here's a good obit.