The Rhinoceros Times Greensboro
Uncle Orson (Continued from page 12)
good. Santa Cruz Organic is a little sweeter and has a more pronounced apple flavor. Earth Fare tastes just fine, but it’s a little bland and not as sweet by comparison. If I had not had them side by side, I would have found nothing negative about either. Earth Fare’s blandness is only by contrast; by itself, you wouldn’t think, “Ick. Bland.” Likewise, Santa Cruz’s slightly more liquid texture is just fine. By itself, you wouldn’t think, “Ick. Runny.” That’s the bad thing about taste tests. Because of the contrast, both came off worse on some features. Whereas by themselves, both would have been absolutely fine. Very good, in fact. Applesauce does not need sweeteners. It can, sometimes, use cinnamon – but you’re much better off putting on (or mixing in) your own cinnamon, especially if you use one of the stronger cinnamons from Savory Spice Shop. And I daresay that it’s the Earth Fare that would provide a better base for cinnamon applesauce. Still, preference is preference, and when I shop again, what I’ll probably buy, for the way I use it, is the Santa Cruz Organic. I didn’t compare price. Nothing has price tags anymore, just product codes, and I had already thrown away the receipt by the time I wrote this. If the price matters to you, taking whichever one is cheaper will leave you with a very good unsweetened organic applesauce.
....
Speaking of simple, with nothing added, I have a new favorite packaged popcorn. At Fresh Market they had a point-of-sale display of Skinny Pop popcorn. Zero trans fat, cholesterol-free, 39 calories a cup. All it has on the ingredient list is natural popcorn, sunflower oil and salt. With such simplicity, it shouldn’t be so addictively delicious. Flavored popcorns often slather on the flavor so that your hands are coated with powders, oils and dyes. Skinny Pop doesn’t have anything like that. Even the oil is so lightly applied that you don’t have to wash your hands before touching anything else. Or, at least, I didn’t. But my wife and I, who usually disdain anything but fresh-popped popcorn, finished the bowl during one hour-long TV show. I happened to find Skinny Pop at Fresh Market, but the skinnypop.com website says that in Greensboro you can also buy it at Earth Fare, Harris Teeter, Walgreens, and Total Wine (which rather makes me question the name of the place).
....
A friend who is also a history buff mentioned that he had recently reread Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. I felt a little stab of guilt: I had never read it at all. What kind of student of the Civil War was I? I was only a kid when I read Bruce
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Catton’s brilliant three-volume Army of the Potomac. The overarching narrative was Abraham Lincoln’s search for a commander who would actually lead the splendid Army of the Potomac to victory. Without realizing it, when I wrote my own Ender’s Game I showed all the ways someone can be a bad military commander that I had learned from Catton’s books. Since then, I had read many books about the Civil War, each of them focused on one commander, one campaign, one year, one theme. What Foote created, however, was much more ambitious: A single long work in which he narrated every battle in the entire war. Most histories – even good ones – perform a kind of triage, deciding what to leave in and what just doesn’t matter enough to be included. For instance, the entire Civil War west of the Mississippi is usually summarized briefly, referred to rather than recounted. Not in Foote’s book. He gives a reasonably detailed account of every combat in which more than a handful of soldiers died, from the coast of Texas to a miserable little failure of a campaign in Florida, from the naval campaigns along the coasts and rivers to the slogging marches from Memphis to Selma, from Chattanooga to Vicksburg. And he wrote it well enough that I continued to look forward to every chance I had to listen to the Audible.com recording. No, he wasn’t a perfect writer. There were the normal range of petty annoyances – he didn’t understand that “harried” is not an exact synonym of “hindered,” for instance, so he said that the civilian onlookers who fled the First Manassas battlefield “harried” the Union Army’s retreat. This conjures up the image of civilians darting their carriages at the flanks of the retreating soldiers, taking potshots at them as they passed. What he meant, however, was only that the civilian wagons and horses blocked the road here and there, making it hard to get the army and its equipment safely out of harm’s way and back toward Washington. The most annoying thing about the book was that Foote apparently thought that repeating the names of certain generals too often was Bad Style. So he came up with nicknames for the ones he mentioned again and again. Sometimes they were just obscure. Did it matter and was I really required to remember who was from Ohio or Virginia? Because a couple of generals were often called each other’s “fellow Ohioan,” and General Thomas’ endless nickname was “the Virginian,” which was unusual in the Union Army but very common in the war as a whole. Most annoying was the fact that General Sherman was almost never mentioned without reference to his red hair. “The redhaired general” may have been used more often than his name. Sheridan was “the bandy-legged” general, but he didn’t become important until much later in the war, so the repetition
didn’t become so nauseating. But there came a point where I was saying “redhaired general” along with the narrator in a sing-song voice. Alas, you see, Foote was completely wrong about style. Repeating the name of a general is exactly what good style requires. The name is the label, and it doesn’t feel repetitive because that’s the guy you’re talking about. But his replacement monickers became obtrusive and annoying precisely because they were not the names, so each time he used a replacement I had to register – oh, that means Sherman; oh, that means Pemberton; oh, that means Sheridan. Was Sherman’s red hair really the most important thing about him? What about the fact that he understood the whole picture of the war better than anyone else, right from the start? How about “clear-thinking general”? Aw, what the heck. Shelby Foote died back in 2005 (he was 88) so he’s not going to learn anything from my comments. What matters is that even with a few annoyances the book is extremely well written. To keep such a complicated narrative clear and alive, with as many as six or seven theaters of combat at any one time, is an astonishing achievement. There’s a reason most historians skip the “unimportant” battles – because it’s easy to lose the thread of one narrative while you cover another. But Foote balanced it all very delicately, making sure that we knew which events were happening at the same time. I’ve heard Foote criticized for being too much in favor of one side or the other. That, at least, is nonsense. Foote’s Civil War is a paragon of balance. He gives every commander and both presidents, as well as many politicians, their due. He worships no one – he’s as candid about Lee’s flaws (which were few, but real) as Grant’s. If he spends more time on Jefferson Davis’ life after the end of the war than Lincoln’s, perhaps that’s because Davis had a life after the war. Foote doesn’t try to cover Reconstruction – there had to be some boundaries to the book – but he does refer to the process caustically. If there’s one group he dislikes, it’s the radical Republicans, the liberals of the day, who were determined to punish the South for causing the war because of their stubborn insistence on keeping slaves. But then, he spends plenty of time on the useless absurdities of diehards among the Confederate Congress – the kind of people who would rather lose the war because of upholding a principle than win it because they compromised even slightly. The miracle wrought by both Lincoln and Davis was that they managed to wage war while being tugged this way and that (or jabbed and prodded) by self-righteous or ambitious idiots of every stripe. Honest Abe had a tendency to make promises that he already planned not to keep – that’s documented and in developing our picture of Lincoln it’s good to keep in mind. He had a way of telling the general
Page 29
he had already decided to fire, “I’ll stand by you no matter what.” It was a necessary lie, in most cases – if they knew they were on the way out, they might do something crazy or subversive to the cause. But it does jar a little. At the same time, Foote does love to quote the people who criticized Lincoln as an idiot – often for the very things that (Continued on page 31)
Yost
(Continued from page 14)
continue replaying the tournament until Duke does win as God intended. (4) The ACC should sue Maryland for $100 million or $200 million for breach of contract or alienation of affection or whatever you can sue them for. The ACC is very rich and has tons of lawyers who can certainly think of some grounds to sue Maryland. The lawyers can tell the Terps that they have to stay in the ACC or pay the piper. (5) Tell Notre Dame, Syracuse and Pittsburg, who are now set to join the league, that we are sorry but we’ve decided not to let them in after all. We should tell them that the ACC is full right now. I think if they take my recommendations then the ACC can be saved. If not – well then, we may all soon be saying … R.I.P, ACC, R.I.P.
Johnny R. Poplin, CPA Has opened an office at 2121 Eastchester Dr., Suite 109 High Point, NC 27265 (Spring Tree Office Park) Phone 336-885-0628 jpoplin@triad.rr.com Providing accounting and tax services to individuals and small businesses
Mention Rhino Times and receive
10% off 2012 Federal and State Personal Tax Return