Who Is it? Rooney

Rooney Lee, son "Ol' Marse" Robert E. Lee; papa was, of course, the commander  of the Confederate Army and the iconic arch-saint in the mythology of the Old South.  The description comes from the iconic New Englander Henry Adams, as quoted in what may be the best book ever written about the Southern ethos: W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South at 102.    Adams and the young Lee were at Harvard together from 1854 to 1858.  Cash draws Adams' description from Adams' autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.   Ellipses re in Cash's quotation:

Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginia openness toward all he liked he [Lee] had also the Virginian habit of command. … For a year, at least … was the most popular and prominent man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else.  He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground
 … Strictly, the Southerner has no mind;  he  had temperament.  He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.

Cash remarks that Lee and his Southern classmates "had behind them two hundred years of shaping in the pattern and [] are  to be taken, as Adams infers, as the typical flower of the Old South at its highest and best."  Cash sums up:

From first to last, and whether he was a Virginian or a nouveau, he did not (typically speaking) think; he felt and, discharging his feelings immediately, he developed no need or desire for  intellectual culture in its own right--none, at least, powerful enough to drive him past his taboos to its actual achievement. 

Go back to the original post.

Who is the COS?

The Chief of Staff is Denis Richard McDonough who came to the job earlier this year via the foreign policy apparatus and former Senator Tom Daschle.  He is said to be noteworthy for his loyalty, and for the fact that he once played football on a team called the Johnnies.   Back to main post.

Answer: Chinese Restaurants in Trier

How come there are so many Chinese restaurants in Trier, especially down by the railroad station?  Bob says it is because so many Chinese come to Trier to visit the birthplace of Karl Marx (commies, remember--a billion of them). 

I get partial credit because I knew it was Marx's birthplace.  But I had guessed it was so Marx's Jewish relatives had someplace to eat on Christmas.

My only reservation about Bob's answer is--do Chinese eat at Chinese restaurants?  Do Mexicans go to Taco Bell?  Do Swedes patronize the smorgy?

Back to the question.

First Nation to Abolish Slavery?

Vermont, by its founding constitution in 1777.   See link, cf.  link.

Wait a minute, nation?   Yes.  Apparently Vermont counted as an independent nation until it was folded into the United States in 1791.   

Return to Underbelly.

How Many Battleships in Acfive Service?

The answer is "none."  The last two--the Iowa and the Wisconsin--were striken from the Naval Register in 2006.  Link.  Their demise ended a long trajectory of development which perhaps began with the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, the first which actively involved aircraft carriers.  Return to the question.

And FWIW I just saw a tweet saying that the world's fifth largest navy belongs to Disneyland.

Wilder's Endings

Both films end with two men in an intimate moment as one confesses his affection for this other.  You don't get that in Sunset Boulevard.

Who Is It?--Dimitrios

The story of Dimitrios Makropoulos, eponymous protagonist, or at least focal center of Eric Ambler's Coffin for Dimitrios, outside the US The Mask of Dimitrios. It's the first great modern espionage novel. My 60-cent Dell Publishing edition bears an imprint date of 1964, but with an original copyright of 1939.  The speaker is the narrator, Cornelius Leyden--Peter Lorre in the movie--who spends the book trying to untangle the life of the mysterious (and absent) title character.  I know Ambler had precursors but I'd say his work, and particularly this his best book pretty much define the genre.   But then, I didn't know until tonight that he also wrote the novel behind Topkapi, which used to be a favorite movie of mine, although I guess I haven't seen it for 40 years.