At it again, those two

The New York Times has an article by Edward Wong about the mini-war between China and India over, of all places, Tawang:

This is perhaps the most militarized Buddhist enclave in the world. Perched above 10,000 feet in the icy reaches of the eastern Himalayas, the town of Tawang is not only home to one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most sacred monasteries, but is also the site of a huge Indian military buildup. Convoys of army trucks haul howitzers along rutted mountain roads. Soldiers drill in muddy fields. Military bases appear every half-mile in the countryside, with watchtowers rising behind concertina wire.
A road sign on the northern edge of town helps explain the reason for all the fear and the fury: the border with China is just 23 miles away; Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, 316 miles; and Beijing, 2,676 miles.
“The Chinese Army has a big deployment at the border, at Bumla,” said Madan Singh, a junior commissioned officer who sat with a half-dozen soldiers one afternoon sipping tea beside a fog-cloaked road. “That’s why we’re here.”
Though little known to the outside world, Tawang is the biggest tinderbox in relations between the world’s two most populous nations. It is the focus of China’s most delicate land-border dispute, a conflict rooted in Chinese claims of sovereignty over all of historical Tibet.
In recent months, both countries have stepped up efforts to secure their rights over this rugged patch of land. China tried to block a $2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank on the grounds that part of the loan was destined for water projects in Arunachal Pradesh, the state that includes Tawang. It was the first time China had sought to influence the territorial dispute through a multilateral institution. Then the governor of Arunachal Pradesh announced that the Indian military was deploying extra troops and fighter jets in the area.
The growing belligerence has soured relations between the two Asian giants and has prompted one Indian military leader to declare that China has replaced Pakistan as India’s biggest threat. Economic progress might be expected to bring the countries closer. China and India did $52 billion worth of trade last year, a 34 percent increase over 2007. But businesspeople say border tensions have infused business deals with official interference, damping the willingness of Chinese and Indian companies to invest in each other’s countries. “Officials start taking more time, scrutinizing things more carefully, and all that means more delays and ultimately more denials, “ said Ravi Bhoothalingam, a former president of the Oberoi Group, the luxury hotel chain, and a member of the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi. “That’s not good for business.”
The roots of the conflict go back to China’s territorial claims to Tibet, an enduring source of friction between China and many foreign nations. China insists that this section of northeast India has historically been part of Tibet, and should be part of China. Tawang is a thickly forested area of white stupas and steep, terraced hillsides that is home to the Monpa people, who practice Tibetan Buddhism, speak a language similar to Tibetan and once paid tribute to rulers in Lhasa. The Sixth Dalai Lama was born here in the 17th century. The Chinese Army occupied Tawang briefly in 1962, during a war with India fought over this and other territories along the 2,521-mile border.
More than 3,100 Indian soldiers and 700 Chinese soldiers were killed and thousands wounded in the border war. Memorials here highlighting Chinese aggression in Tawang are big draws for Indian tourists. “The entire border is disputed,” said Ma Jiali, an India scholar at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government-supported research group in Beijing. “This problem hasn’t been solved, and it’s a huge barrier to China-India relations.”
In some ways, Tawang has become a proxy battleground, too, between China and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans, who passed through this valley when he fled into exile in 1959. From his home in the distant Indian hill town of Dharamsala, he wields enormous influence over Tawang. He appoints the abbot of the powerful monastery and gives financial support to institutions throughout the area. Last year, the Dalai Lama announced for the first time that Tawang is a part of India, bolstering the India’s territorial claims and infuriating China.
Traditional Tibetan culture runs strong in Tawang. One morning in June, the monastery held a religious festival that drew hundreds from the nearby villages. As red-robed monks chanted sutras, blew horns and swung incense braziers in the monastery courtyard, the villagers jostled each other to be blessed by the senior lamas.
At the monastery, an important center of Tibetan learning, monks express rage over Chinese rule in Tibet, which the Chinese Army seized in 1951. “I hate the Chinese government,” said Gombu Tsering, 70, a senior monk who watches over the monastery’s museum. “Tibet wasn’t even a part of China. Lhasa wasn’t a part of China.”
Few expect China to try to annex Tawang by force, but military skirmishes are a real danger, analysts say. The Indian military recorded 270 border violations and nearly 2,300 instances of “aggressive border patrolling” by Chinese soldiers last year, said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research, a research organization in New Delhi. Mr. Chellaney has advised the Indian government’s National Security Council. “The India-China frontier has become more ‘hot’ than the India-Pakistan border,” he said in an email message.
Two years ago, Chinese soldiers demolished a Buddhist statue that Indians had erected at Bumla, the main border pass above Tawang, a member of the Indian Parliament, Nabam Rebia, said in a session of Parliament. Tawang became part of modern India when Tibetan leaders signed a treaty with British officials in 1914 that established a border called the McMahon Line between Tibet and British-run India. Tawang fell south of the line. The treaty, the Simla Convention, is not recognized by China. “We recognize it because we agreed to it,” said Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile. “If China agreed to it now, it would be a recognition of the power of the Tibet government at that time.”
China has grown increasingly hostile to the Dalai Lama after severe ethnic unrest in Tibet in 2008. This year, it turned its diplomatic guns on India over the Tawang issue. China moved in March to block a $2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank, a multination group based in Manila that has China on its board, because $60 million of the loan had been earmarked for flood-control projects in Arunachal Pradesh. The loan was approved in mid-June over China’s heated objections. “China expresses strong dissatisfaction to the move, which can neither change the existence of immense territorial disputes between China and India, nor China’s fundamental position on its border issues with India,” Qin Gang, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement.
In May, weeks after China first tried to block the loan, the chief of the Indian Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi, now retired, told a prominent Indian newspaper that China posed a greater threat than Pakistan. Another official, J. J. Singh, the governor of Arunachal Pradesh and a retired chief of the Indian Army, said the next month that the Indian military was adding two divisions of troops, totaling 50,000 to 60,000 soldiers, to the border region over the next several years. Four Sukhoi fighter jets were immediately deployed to a nearby air base.
Since 2005, when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visited India, the two countries have gone through 13 rounds of bilateral negotiations over the issue. A round was held just last month, with no results. “The China-India border has got to be one of the most continuously negotiated borders in modern history,” said M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a leading expert on China’s borders. “That shows how intractable this dispute is.”

Rico says it'd be funnier (and why does he keep hearing Andy Devine's distinctive voice saying "Pluck your magic twanger, Froggie!" whenever he hears 'Tawang'?) if it weren't so dangerous...

But definitely eat here

CNN.com has an article by Wayne Drash about a good place to eat:

Pat Davis was just ten years old in 1947 when two black men came into his father's barbecue joint in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. A huge fuss ensued, with four racists shouting every name in the book. "My daddy went over to their table and said, 'These are people who want to eat just like you want to eat. You don't bother them. You leave them alone,'" Davis says, the incident seared in his mind six decades later. "They told Daddy he could lose his business by letting black people come in."
It's not unusual to find a barbecue restaurant in the South where the ribs are so good you want to run home and kiss your mom. But it's a rare find to discover the South's main delicacy cooked up by Lebanese immigrants in Mississippi, who defied segregation and who've been doing it since 1924.
Welcome to Abe's BBQ, a living testament to good eats and to good people, where civil rights were put to the test and won. In the end, racism took a back seat to slow-cooked pit barbecue. Today, Abe's remains one of the oldest restaurants in Mississippi. It's named after founder Abraham Davis, who arrived in Mississippi from Lebanon in 1913 when he was thirteen years old. Abe's sits at The Crossroads, the landmark spot at Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale where legend has it that blues king Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. Two giant guitars jut into the sky marking the spot where the deal went down. You might be pausing here. Lebanese in Mississippi? Defying segregation? Sounds like something out of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. As you sit down with a platter of ribs this Labor Day weekend, this is one barbecue story you might enjoy over cole slaw, baked beans and beer.
The town of Clarksdale is located about seventy miles southwest of Memphis, Tennessee, with a population of about 20,000 people. It was once known as the "Golden Buckle in the Cotton Belt", complete with Lebanese, Italian, Chinese, and Jewish immigrants, along with local blacks and white plantation owners. Much of the immigrant population has moved on. The town these days is perhaps best known for the Delta Blues Museum and for the nearby Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman. Blues purists may point you around the corner to Red's juke joint, a ramshackle place where raw Delta blues oozes from the walls. On this night, Eli Paperboy Reed and the True Loves brought the house down.
But it's Abe's that has stood the test of time. Abraham Davis started his pit barbecue as the Bungalow Inn in 1924. It moved to its current location around 1936, and Pat Davis renamed it after his father in 1960. Davis says being an immigrant or, in his case, the son of immigrants, gives one a better respect for all people. "It was a humbling feeling, and we knew how the blacks must've felt," he says. "Being Lebanese, my parents weren't truly accepted as first-class citizens when they first got here."
Andrew Clark, a 58-year-old African-American, worked at Abe's from 1962 to 1990, beginning when he was sixteen. He says Abe's is a symbol of great barbecue and a shrine to the civil rights struggle. "They didn't see us as colored. They saw us customers," Clark says. "It didn't matter whether you were white or black... I never seen them turn down anyone." Sometimes he'd hear racist comments from white customers. When that happened, Pat Davis always stepped in. "The whole family is really, really great people," Clark says. "This place really has good roots to it."
Pat Davis refers to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a prophet, "because any time you change things for the better, you've got to come from God." He says change didn't come easy. Many of the local blacks, he says, didn't want his family to be harmed, so they often followed segregation laws. It was when blacks from out of town came that things began to change. "They would come through the front and inside," he says. "My daddy never refused anyone no matter what color, race or religion. That's my philosophy as well." He says his father, who always carried a Bible written in Arabic, was "just doing the right thing."
A hand-painted mural on the wall of Abe's depicts a pig with a fiddle in his hand, a pork sandwich and beer at his side. The hog is grinning from ear to ear, much like Abe's faithful customers over the years. "He's satisfied even though he's eating one of his kinfolks," Davis says with a chuckle.
If you're in Clarksdale but not in the mood for barbecue (something's wrong with you, if so), then you'll want to head just up the road to an even more authentic Lebanese restaurant. Rest Haven dishes out kibbe, grape leaves, and a host of other Lebanese delicacies, along with traditional American cuisine.
Chafik Chamoun, a first generation Lebanese-American, established Rest Haven in 1954. Like Abe's, Chamoun says he has always welcomed people of all races. He peddled wares to black workers on plantations when he arrived in the United States, and learned to see past skin color at an early age. "I made a living with the black people all my life," he says. "I never refused one of them." "Most people tell me how glad they are that I serve them, that my business is here," says Chamoun, 75.
I pause and tell Davis and Chamoun that stories like theirs aren't celebrated enough in Mississippi, that "all we hear about is bad shit" coming from these parts. The men burst into laughter. They nod with approval. They say their message is one of love, honor and respect.
And, oh yeah, one more thing: great food.

Civil War for the day

Peachtree Street, Atlanta, Georgia in 1864.

Okay, so don't eat there

Courtesy of my friend Cliff Cook, these lamentably-named restaurants (in alphabetical order) to avoid:
Rico says there are undoubtedly English-language restaurants that sound as bad when pronounced by Asian diners...

Conversation stoppers

Courtesy of my friend Bob Leone, these historical reminders:

JFK'S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60's, at a time when DeGaule had decided to pull out of NATO, demanding that all US military personnel get out of France as soon as possible.
Rusk asked: "Does that include those who are buried here?"
DeGaule did not respond.
You could have heard a pin drop.

At a conference in France, a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and Americans. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying "Have you heard the latest dumb stunt by President Bush? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb them?"
A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: "Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people. They are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities. They have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day. They can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?'
You could have heard a pin drop.

A U.S. Navy admiral was attending a naval conference that included admirals from the United States, along with the British, Canadian, Australian, and French navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of officers that included personnel from all those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks, but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, "Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences, rather than speaking French?"
Without hesitating, the American admiral replied, "Maybe because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to speak German."
You could have heard a pin drop.

Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.
"You have been to France before, monsieur?" the customs officer asked sarcastically.
Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously.
"Then you should know enough to have your passport ready."
The American said, "The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it."
"Impossible! Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France!"
The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained, ''Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn't find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to."
You could have heard a pin drop.

Rico says maybe we're being hard on the French... Nah.

You know you're getting older...

...when one of your favorite movies is old enough to drink. Seems The Princess Bride is now 22 years old, but still one of Rico's frequently-watched movies. These people (in then-and-now photos; the years have not always been kind to them, especially Andre, who's dead) are why:

Peter Falk as The Grandfather

Cary Elwes as Westley (aka The Dread Pirate Roberts)

Robin Wright as Buttercup (aka The Princess)

Andre the Giant as Fezzik

Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya

Billy Crystal as Miracle Max

Carol Kane as Valerie

Wallace Shawn as Vizzini

Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck

Christopher Guest as Count Rugen

Peter Cook as The Impressive Clergyman

Mel Smith as The Albino

Fred Savage as The Grandson

Rico can understand why

Nancy Dillon of the New York Daily News has the related story:

The biological father of kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard said he wants to kill the sicko who held her captive for eighteen years. "I'd love to get my hands on Garrido and kill him," Kenneth Slayton, 64, told the Daily Mirror of London. He and Terry Probyn split while she was pregnant with Jaycee, and he has never met his daughter.
Garrido and his wife, Nancy, kidnapped then-eleven-year-old Jaycee from a South Lake Tahoe, California, bus stop in 1991 and kept her captive in a hovel behind their Antioch, California, house, police said. Garrido repeatedly raped Jaycee, fathering two daughters with her.
Defense lawyer Gilbert Maines said Nancy Garrido insists she was a victim, too— so afraid of her husband that she made sure Jaycee didn't escape during the five months he was in jail for a parole violation in 1993. "He doesn't have to be there physically," Maines told ABC's Good Morning America.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Slayton Jr., 41, was stunned to learn Jaycee was his half sister. "I had no idea I even had a half sister until my full sister called and told me the other night," Slayton Jr. told the Daily News.

You never suspect the wife

John Simerman of the Contra Costa Times has the story:

If she helped strip a young girl of her innocence and perpetrated a heinous, eighteen-year-long crime that has shocked the world, Nancy Garrido never showed it when she arrived at work to help people who couldn't help themselves.
Nancy Garrido worked as a state-licensed aide for a respected nonprofit agency that serves a thousand adults and children with disabilities, mostly in Contra Costa County, even as police say she helped Phillip Garrido keep Jaycee Dugard isolated and under sexual attack for years, authorities say.
She worked full-time for Contra Costa ARC from December 1994 until March 1998, arriving with stellar references as a nursing aide and physical therapy aide, said Barbara Maizie, the agency's executive director. "The people who received services through her, they liked her very much. She was a good employee and she was well-liked by the people she worked with," Maizie said. "They cannot believe that this is possible. They're totally shocked." Maizie said Nancy Garrido worked with adults only. She arrived with a valid California Nurse Aide license, a history of nursing home work and a long résumé with both in-state and out-of-state references dating to 1981, Maizie said.
That's the same year that 26-year-old Nancy Bocanegra married Phillip Garrido in Leavenworth, Kansas, while he was an inmate in a federal penitentiary, a copy of their state marriage license shows. Phillip Garrido was serving a fifty-year sentence for the 1976 kidnapping of a Harrah's casino card dealer he took across state lines to rape in a warehouse.
It is unclear how Bocanegra met Garrido, but one report says she was visiting a relative in prison. Property records show Nancy Bocanegra living in Denver, then moving to Leavenworth in the mid-1980s. Officials could not be reached for information about licenses she may have held in those states.
Phillip Garrido was transferred in 1986 to a maximum security facility in Lompoc before his release in 1988 after 11 years, a federal prison spokeswoman said. Three years later, Jaycee Dugard was snatched from a South Lake Tahoe street outside her house. Authorities say Nancy Garrido, now 54, matches the description of a woman seen in the sedan that spirited Jaycee away.
When Nancy Garrido first came to work at the Martinez-based agency, Dugard was in her teens and having the first of two girls that Phillip Garrido fathered, living in a hidden backyard lair of tents and shacks behind the Garridos' Walnut Avenue house in unincorporated Contra Costa County, police say.
Among the 29 felony charges that El Dorado County prosecutors leveled against the couple last week is a count of forcible rape against Nancy Garrido from the month she began work at the agency, and six other counts of forcible rape against Nancy or Phillip Garrido during her tenure. Both pleaded not guilty on Friday and are being held without bail.
Maizie declined to detail Nancy Garrido's personnel file, citing privacy concerns. She said the agency ran a state background check when it hired Garrido; it came back clean. "Just 'shock' and 'disbelief' are the two words that come to mind," Maizie said of the allegations. Maizie would not to say why Nancy Garrido left the agency. But a neighbor, Helen Boyer, 78, told The Associated Press that she stopped working to become the primary caregiver to Phillip Garrido's bedridden mother, Patricia Franzen. Boyer said she knew Franzen for more than thirty years and often saw Nancy Garrido.
Nancy Garrido's training could help explain how Dugard could deliver two babies and now have two healthy daughters, ages 11 and 15, even though authorities said none of them had seen a doctor. A spokesman for the state Department of Public Health said Nancy Garrido was certified as a nurse assistant in California beginning in March 1989, until she failed to renew her license in 1995. Her training did not include assisting with childbirth, said spokesman Ken August.
A top El Dorado County prosecutor declined last week to say whether evidence shows that Nancy Garrido physically participated in what police describe as a years-long series of rapes against Dugard, saying they only need to prove she aided and abetted with knowledge of the crimes.
But suspicions are boiling over her role, particularly because Garrido was locked up in federal custody, albeit briefly, on an unspecified federal parole violation in 1993. Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, clarified Wednesday that Phillip Garrido spent 38 days in a secure facility before he was released to home confinement supervision in May 1993. During that time, his wife watched over Jaycee Dugard, authorities told The Associated Press. "You can reasonably infer from the charging document that the wife was doing that," said former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, who is acting as a special spokesman for the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office.
Through an assistant, Nancy Garrido's lawyer declined a Times request on Wednesday to discuss the case. But on NBC's Today show, lawyer Gilbert Maines suggested that his client, too, was a victim of her husband's suppressive control.
Though Nancy Garrido is suspected as the one who physically snatched Dugard from the street eighteen years ago, Maines said he's considering arguing that she may not have been fully aware of the circumstances of the kidnapping. "The crux of the matter, the argument, I think, goes to maybe her mental condition at the time, and not so much what physically happened," he said. Maines said his client misses the children, and said she saw them all as a family. "What she said that I can tell you about is that there came a time that when she felt that they were a family and that she loves the girls very much and loved Jaycee very much, and that seems a little strange given the circumstance but that's what she had said to me," Maines said on Today.
Customers say Dugard was the talented graphic designer at Phillip Garrido's printing business, and that he referred to her as his daughter. Dugard went by "Allissa" when she first arrived last week with the Garridos at a Concord parole office, before police unearthed her real identity.
One legal scholar said persuading a court to accept a brainwashing theory is particularly difficult when a large group or cult is not involved, though the concept runs through numerous cases, such as Patty Hearst, Elizabeth Smart, and many others.
"We have here somebody who's not forcibly abducted, and also with access to outside authorities. So it could be argued she fell under his spell, but it would be an extremely tough sell," said Alan Scheflin, professor of law and psychiatry at Santa Clara Law School and author of The Mind Manipulators. "The courts are very reluctant to open up to the idea of a mind control defense. It certainly is, to say the least, a last-ditch defense."

Civil War for the day

Tents along the ramparts of Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, following the Union occupation.

It's the patch

Rico says there are a bunch of other actors with eye patches out there, but once you've got John Wayne...

Still scary, more than two years later

Rico says if you'd heard it day and night (even subconsciously) for weeks on end, it'd scare you, too...

Not nice, but funny

Courtesy of my friend Dave, this:

Rico still wants one

Rico says it's still extremely cool but, at $500, still extremely out of his price range... (And there's competition on the horizon, including one from Apple.)

Only your hairdresser knows for sure

Courtesy of my friend Rich Shaner, this:

A woman was at her hairdresser's getting her hair styled for a trip to Rome with her husband. She mentioned the trip to the hairdresser, who responded: "Rome? Why would anyone want to go there? It's crowded and dirty. You're crazy to go to Rome. So, how are you getting there?"
"We're taking Continental," was her reply. "We got a great rate!"
"Continental?" exclaimed the hairdresser. "That's a terrible airline. Their planes are old, their flight attendants are ugly, and they're always late. So, where are you staying in Rome?"
"We'll be at this exclusive little place over on the Tiber River called Teste."
"Don't go any further. I know that place. Everybody thinks its gonna be something special and exclusive, but it's really a dump."
"We're going to go to see the Vatican and maybe get to see the Pope."
"That's rich," laughed the hairdresser. "You and a million other people trying to see him. He'll look the size of an ant.
Boy, good luck on this lousy trip of yours. You're going to need it."

A month later, the woman again came in for a hairdo. The hairdresser asked her about her trip to Rome.
"It was wonderful," explained the woman, "Not only were we on time in one of Continental's brand new planes, but it was overbooked, and they bumped us up to first class. The food and wine were wonderful, and I had a handsome 28-year-old steward who waited on me hand and foot. And the hotel was great! They'd just finished a $5 million remodeling job, and now it's a jewel, the finest hotel in the city. They, too, were overbooked, so they apologized and gave us their owner's suite at no extra charge!"
"Well," muttered the hairdresser, "that's all well and good, but I know you didn't get to see the Pope."
"Actually, we were quite lucky because, as we toured the Vatican, a Swiss Guard tapped me on the shoulder and explained that the Pope likes to meet some of the visitors, and if I'd be so kind as to step into his private room and wait, the Pope would personally greet me. Sure enough, five minutes later, the Pope walked through the door and shook my hand! I knelt down and he spoke a few words to me."
"Oh, really! What'd he say?"
He said, "Who fucked up your hair?"

Civil War for the day

Union troops resting after drill, Petersburg, Virginia, 1864

Them Russkies again

Rico says you gotta know how this one's gonna turn out...

Them Russkies again

Courtesy of my friend Tex, another how-do-those-impoverished-Russians-do-it videos:

Well, duh...

Courtesy of my friend Peter Vadasz, the answer to the question: "Why don't Americans emigrate to Islamic countries?"

True words by a smart man

Courtesy of my friend Tex:

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Thomas Jefferson

Oops is now a dating term

Always a sucker for a pun...

...even visual ones. For the non-boating among us, a 'nun buoy'.

Civil War for the day

General William Tecumseh Sherman, USA