Christopher T. George's Blog

Baltimore in Winter

2012-02-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

Purple flamingo in Baltimore snow last year.

Bird City

The Orioles play
in orange 'n' black,

and tho' Ravens are black,
our team wears purple.

Folk got purple flamingoes
on their lawns and porches.

My Gloves

I am wearing black gloves,
one wool and one leather;

they keep me warm
as snow sifts down.

I may remove one
if I feel the urge

to write a poem.

Christopher T. George

Flattened glove in a Baltimore gutter.

Prayer

Lord, are we finished with winter?
Daffodils dance near my D.C. office,

herons repair their nests by
the Anacostia River, getting ready

to rear a new crop of youngsters.
All of Mankind longs for Spring.
Will you give it to us, Lord?

Christopher T. George

Filthy Baltimore snow, in February 2010.All photographs by Christopher T. George.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

2012-02-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

The Delaware Regiment at the Battle of Long Island, 27 August 1776. Domenick D'Andrea for the U.S. National Guard (public domain).

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, fresh from his triumphs in the GOP primary in Florida and the Nevada caucus, leaving former House speaker Newt Gingrich in the dust on both occasions, said the following yesterday:

"We are the only people on the Earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem. It was FDR who asked us to do that, in honor of the blood that was being shed by our sons and daughters in far-off places."

A short piece in today's Washington Post finds fault with this statement on several bases.

First of all, the writer, Glenn Kessler, expresses amazement that Romney, who ran the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, doesn't remember seeing athletes of other countries besides those of the United States putting their hands over their hearts during the playing of their national anthems. Maybe he has a short memory!

Second, there is no evidence that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself said that Americans should put their hands on their hearts during the playing or singing of the national anthem. True, the U.S. Flag Code does call for citizens to place their hand over their hearts both during the Pledge of Allegiance and the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." But that comes from a directive at the time of World War II in 1942 when the United States was at war with Nazi Germany. It was felt that the old salute looked too much like the Nazi salute! Get those hands down.

According to Kessler, who had an email communication with Richard J. Ellis, a professor at Williamette College, and author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, there is no evidence whatsoever that FDR himself asked that Americans put their hands over their hearts during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance. So those are the facts, my friends. For more go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker.

I was reading yesterday on the Maryland State Archives website about the origin of the term "The Maryland Line" for the Maryland troops of the American Revolution. Here we come across more myth and misinformation. Read on. . . .

The legend is that the first U.S. president, General George Washington, conferred the name "The Maryland Line" because of his gratitude for the bravery of the 400 Maryland soldiers who protected the rear of his army at the time of the Battle of Brooklyn (aka Battle of Long Island) in August 1776, when they saved the American army by themselves taking grievous losses while his troops withdrew across the Gowanus Creek ahead of a massive army of Redcoats, saving General Washington's bacon and likely that of the nascent United States as well.

In fact, according to Ryan Polk, Research Archivist at the Maryland State Archives in a 2005 article, "Holding the Line: The Origin of 'the Old Line State'", while it does seem as if the name "Maryland Line" was indeed a name conferred on the Maryland Troops for their bravery and does date first from the time of the Battle of Brooklyn, there is no evidence in anything that Washington wrote to prove that he came up with the name. I had suspected that the name might also have some relationship to the a nickname for Maryland as "The Old Line State" which I had thought had to do with the Mason-Dixon Line, which of course is the dividing line between Maryland and Pennsylvania and also the technical divide between the rebel "South" and the "North" in the Civil War.

However, Mr. Polk writes: "Though the first use of the name remains elusive, the history of the name does not support a relationship to the Mason-Dixon line. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon finished surveying their boundary line by 1768. No hint of the name appeared before the Maryland Line fought in the Battle of Long Island on 27 August 1776."

So there you have it my friends, Just the Facts, Ma'am!

Your App Doesn't Love You

I stepped out of the cab into a river
of cold storm water this morning;
now at lunchtime, sun, brisk breeze,
the yellow blossoms of daffodils nod.

I walk up the hill toward the hotel,
see cops with dogs, reminder of
the Jihad-fearing times we live in--

over the trees, the white dome
of Thomas Jefferson's memorial;
the Post prints his hand-written
list of slaves he owned; beyond--

the monument to Martin Luther King
lies hidden across the Tidal Basin.

Christopher T. George

* This poem was written at the end of January.
A couple of hours later around 3:15 pm, I
received an email to say that the Secret Service
were closing off 12th Street and that we better
leave. Don't know what it was about... maybe a
visiting dignitary or Biden going to meet someone?

War of 1812 Talk by Christopher T. George

BRITISH REAR ADMIRAL GEORGE COCKBURN ATTACKS HAVRE DE GRACE – MAY 3, 1813 – NEW FINDINGS, Wednesday, February 8, 2012, 7:30 P.M. Historical Society of Harford County Headquarters, 143 North Main Street (at the corner of Main and Gordon Streets), Bel Air, Maryland. Sponsored by the Archeological Society of Northern Chesapeake (ASNC). No Charge. http://www.harfordhistory.net/. Note: Archeological Society meeting starts at 6:30 P.M.

Also see a new blog I have started at http://chrisgeorgewarof1812.blogspot.com/

And a new entry on my Jack the Ripper blog at http://blog.casebook.org/chrisgeorge/ -- I am on TV tonight in Canada. Check the blog out!

Recreating a Historical Character

2012-01-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

Time-Travel with Emily Dickinson

written and performed by MiMi Zannino

March 2012 Performance Dates - Free to All

March 10, Saturday, 3 pm, Federal Hill Library
1251 Light St, Baltimore, MD 21230
Enoch Pratt library phone: 410-396-1096

March 31, Saturday 2 pm, Govans Library
5714 Bellona Ave, Baltimore, MD 21212
Enoch Pratt library phone: 410-396-6098

For more information: call 443.528.6464
or email: MiMiZannino@gmail.com
http://www.emilydickinsonlive.com/
http://www.memorylanepress.com/

My friend and fellow poet Rosemarie ("MiMi") Zannino will be presenting a one-woman show on poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) at two local Baltimore libraries in March. I will be advising MiMi on the project but she did not want me to see the script beforehand but asked that I see her presentation first. It should be interesting.

I suppose in a way I have mixed feelings about actors playing historical characters. First of all, as I mentioned to MiMi in a recent telephone conversation, any director or writer coming to a historical project is going to bring their own point of view to the portrayal of past events. Just the mere distance in time means that as much as directors and screenwriters try to capture the past, they may or may not do so, and today's political and sociological whims don't help in the effort. While hopefully whomever mounts such a portrayal of a historical figure will attempt to faithfully portray the character and the events in which they were involved as they happened, it is likely that the artist is going to at least bring their own flavor to the portrayal or, in the extreme, give a distorted view of the person and the occurrences.

There are two current films that come to mind that provide portrayals of larger-than-life characters: Leonardo Di Caprio as the long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar and Meryl Streep's portrayal of former British Prime Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady directed by Phyllida Lloyd (previously known for Mamma Mia).

I have seen J. Edgar but have not yet seen The Iron Lady.

Both portrayals have been slated by some critics as being more "impersonations" than fully rounded portrayals. Indeed, The Iron Lady has been described by many as being a poor movie despite the fact that the actress has been praised for her performance. Noticeably also, in the Academy Award nominations announced on Tuesday just before President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address (the President was not nominated for an Oscar!), but Streep was nominated but DiCaprio pointedly was not. I am not surprised by this, because although I thought J. Edgar was an interesting film, it was by no means a great one.

Part of the trouble with J. Edgar is that, as director, Eastwood was trying to cover too much territory in following Hoover for over a half century from the Red scares of 1919 right up to the time of his death in 1972 -- the FBI man just missed out on Watergate -- Hoover died on May 2 and the "Plumbers" break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, ordered by President Richard M. Nixon, took place six weeks later on June 16. Given that Nixon and Hoover were both notoriously suspicious men who nursed grudges, it is intriguing to wonder, if Hoover had lived longer, what the FBI director could have done to discredit the president over the scandal. Might Nixon might have been forced to resign earlier, or would Hoover have just blackmailed Nixon?

In any case, because of the need to cover so much of Hoover's long career, as a result, J. Edgar doesn't quite hold together. I also felt that Eastwood was trying to tiptoe around the issue of Hoover's relationship with his longtime associate Clyde Tolson. The director more hints at the homosexual nature of the relationship than actively explores it.

In terms of the Streep portrayal of Thatcher, who unlike Hoover, is still alive, a number of the former British PM's political associates have slammed the film as being an "insulting" portrayal of the British leader.

As for Emily Dickinson, the Amherst, Massachusetts poet, long regarded as reclusive and virginal, famously characterized as "The White Lady" based on a portrait of her, has undergone somewhat of a revisionist reappraisal in recent years with feminists and others seeing her as much more activist and engaged in her New England society than previous treatments of her have conceived. It will be interesting to see how MiMi Zannino approaches her.

Meanwhile, yours truly is due to provide the voice for Sir Charles Warren in Erie, Pennsylvania director Justin Dombrowski's Ripper script, "Autumn of Terror." Initially, this will be a play for voices preliminary to doing a full-scale film of the project. Justin tells me: "Think of it as a project to build up a visonary medium for when it will be optioned out."

Sir Charles Warren (1840-1927), Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the time of the Whitechapel Murders of 1888.

Newt and the Bomb

2012-01-24T05:28:00.000-08:00

The Conspiracy Theory of History. . . .

Which would be worse: Newt Gingrich becoming president of the United States or Iran getting the Bomb?

Of course, U.S. presidential history is replete with examples of scare tactics being used by political opponents. In the 1964 election, Lyndon B. Johnson's operatives famously employed the TV commercial showing the girl counting from one to ten as she pulled the petals off the daisy followed by an image of a hydrogen bomb exploding, intended to discredit Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and to imply that a Goldwater presidency would put the nation in peril. Similar fears were expressed by the Left about Ronald Reagan, who did go on to beat Jimmy Carter for the presidency in 1980.

“Daisy ad” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. It was broadcast on September 7, 1964.

At the NBC debate last night, Mitt Romney tried to discredit former House Speaker Newt Gingrich implying that he is erratic and unstable and that he himself would be the clear choice for GOP voters and the country -- the "stable" and "safe" candidate.

What was amazing about the debate last night was that you had two candidates pretending to be what they are not. Romney insisted that Gingrich served for years as a "K Street lobbyist" while Gingrich kept saying that he acted as a "historian" for housing finance agencies Fannie May and Freddie Mac, which were complicit in the 2008 housing crisis and subsequent financial collapse. Gingrich released a copy of one year of his contract with Freddie Mac prior to the debate which clearly shows that he was a "consultant" and that he earned $300,000 in that period. Many might argue that consultant equals lobbyist. Similarly, Romney is running away from his record as CEO of Bain Capital which was responsible for people losing their jobs let alone pretending that he is a staunch conservative when in reality he was the moderate governor of Massachusetts, and enacted a version of health care that is virtually identical to and was used as a model for the national health care bill passed by Barack Obama.

Clearly many Republicans are afraid that Gingrich will get the nomination and wish that his rise be stopped. The trouble is that the bumbling Romney may not be capable of stopping him. Attempts to do so, as shown in South Carolina, may only fire up the Republican base more. Perhaps with the rise of the Tea Party the age of smoke-filled rooms has passed. Maybe.

Meanwhile, as reported by NBC, at a rally, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was faced by a woman who said that Obama is a "practicing Muslim", a charge that Santorum refused to deny, which does him discredit. At least in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, GOP presidential candidate Arizona Senator John McCain had the good grace to deny a claim by a supporter that Obama was a "terrorist."

The Florida primary is coming up in a week's time. Will Gingrich continue his surge or will Romney have damaged him enough to win?

What would Gingrich be like as a president? My fellow football (soccer) fans might appreciate this analogy. What if Mario Balotelli became president of Italy? Think about it.

Forget
the candidate's
past: he's someone else now
-- a new person. . . not the same old
devil.

Christopher T. George

The Rebel State Speaks Its Mind

2012-01-22T14:45:00.000-08:00

Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston harbor, April 12, 1861 (Currier and Ives print).

The state of South Carolina prides itself of having chosen every the Republican presidential candidate since 1980. South Carolina is also of course where the Civil War began 150 years ago this April, when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, igniting a bloody four-year-long Civil War. Yesterday in South Carolina, Republicans chose former House Speaker Newt Gingrich from neighboring Georgia as the winner of the state's GOP primary.

Was this a seismic event or just a blip in the inevitable route march of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to the nomination? Romney was beaten by a landslide, 40% to 27.9%, with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum lagging behind. No doubt Gingrich's victory was made larger by the good debate performance he showed in the CNN debate in Charleston on Thursday night, right from the get-go with the opening question when he was able to blast CNN moderator John King for the inaptness of asking the candidate about the charge by his second wife that he had asked for an "open marriage" and Gingrich was able to take a sizeable hit at the media, which fired up the conservative audience. The canny former House leader thanked King for a great debate at the end of the event. "Thank you, CNN, you sleazy, slimy media you!"

Meanwhile, at the same debate, Romney fumbled an answer about when he will release his tax returns, giving the impression that he has something to hide, although on Fox this morning he did say he will release his 2010 tax return and a partial 2011 return... well, that's just only one full year and fails to include all the years that he ran Bain Capital that some observers think he should be releasing to satisfy his critics.

The "Republican establishment" (whatever might be) is said to be worried about the rise of Gingrich, feeling that he would be unelectable in the Fall. Commentators on the Sunday morning political talk shows puzzled over what exactly that establishment is. It is true though that many of the Republicans who served in Congress with Gingrich in the 1990's have expressed doubts about him, saying that even though he engineered the Republican takeover of Congress during the Clinton administration, he proved to be a poor and unpredictable leader. From my point of view, it looks to me as if Gingrich at least stands for something, although conservative values that I as a liberal Democratic voter do not hold, whereas it's hard to know what exactly Romney stands for. Because Romney has chosen not to run on his record as governor of Massachusetts, he has left himself open to criticism that he is a hard-hearted capitalist and a man who does not hold the conservative values that Republican voters today say they admire.

See the following video, where Romney backer New Jersey governor Chris Christie pushes back hard about what he claims to be Gingrich's character flaws and lack of executive experience:

http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/22/christie-on-gingrichs-past-newt-gingrich-has-embarrassed-the-party-video/

Spitballs.... Great Political Theater!

2012-01-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

CNN's Southern Republican debate last night in Charleston, South Carolina, began with fireworks as host John King attempted to get former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to address a televised claim by his second wife that he had requested an open marriage, and Gingrich heatedly attacked King for what he described as the despicable act of beginning a Presidential debate with such a scurrilous charge, much to the delight of the audience. It was great political theater and couldn't have played better into Gingrich's hands, combined with Newt's master stroke of releasing his tax returns. Meanwhile, nominal Republican front runner Mitt Romney has refused to disclose his tax returns and badly fumbled his response to King about when he might do so. This once more reinforced the idea that Romney is a bumbler. Mister Vanilla Ice Cream.

Last night's debate performance and the associated political theater will put Gingrich in a good position to win Saturday's South Carolina primary, considering that he was already rising in the polls based on a likewise solid debate performance in last Monday's debate. Romney's candidacy meanwhile received another blow when it was announced early yesterday that a final count of votes in the Iowa caucus of a couple of weeks ago shows that Rick Santorum and not Romney had won the vote, although by an extremely narrow margin. Whoops. Also with Texas governor dropping out yesterday and backing Gingrich, the momentum has seemed to go to Newt.

Romney might still go on to win the Republican nomination but Gingrich will certainly have given him a scare. Coming as he does from the South, from neighboring Georgia, the ex-House Speaker might have been expected to have an advantage, as almost a favorite son, just as Romney was anticipated to have an advantage in New Hampshire, right next to the state of Massachusetts where he had served as governor and instituted the "Romneycare" so controversial today among the Republicans he will need to win the presidency. Whether any Gingrich surge and possible win in South Carolina will vault him to the nomination remains to be seen. There's a long, long way to go, it seems.

MSNBC’s Bill Press has stated, “Newt is a GOP Suicide Bomber.”

See http://AmericaNeedsMitt.com/blog/2012/01/13/msnbcs-bill-press-newt-gop-suicide-bomber/

*******************

In honor of the Bicentennial of the War of 1812, I have begun a new blog on the war at http://chrisgeorgewarof1812.blogspot.com/. There I intend to share news of upcoming events on the War of 1812 including speaking engagements in which I will be featured as well as my views on the conflict. It is one of the most significant events in the history of the United States but a war that has been woefully overlooked. Hopefully we can remedy that in the next three years.

Not a new line-up of Republican candidates but Chris, right, as a presenter at the "Flag Making in the Early Republic: The Fourth Annual Symposium" hosted by the Star Spangled Banner Flag House Association, Inc., March 31, 2001. From left to right: Marilyn Zoidis, Sally Johnston, Stephen W. Hill, Fenella France, Earl P. Williams, and Christopher T. George. Photograph by Richard R. Gideon.

Mitt Marches on to the South. . .

2012-01-11T06:36:00.000-08:00

Romney won, but will there be buyer's remorse
-- can the candidate stay the course,
is he the nation's bright new up-and-comer,
or will there be four more years of Obama?

Yes, a handy win for Mitt Romney in the New Hampshire GOP primary yesterday. With 92% of the vote counted, the former Massachusetts governor received 39.3% of the vote. Libertarian Ron Paul coming in second with 22.9% and fellow moderate Jon Huntsman finishing third with 16.9%. Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a distant fourth with 9.4%, similar to Rick Santorum with 9.3%, and Texan governor Rick Perry who is concentrating his campaign on finishing strongly in the South, with a measly 0.7%.

The New Hampshire win sets up Romney nicely for the South Carolina primary on January 21 and the Florida primary at the end of the month. Reportedly Winning Our Future, the pro-Gingrich Super PAC has bought $5 million of media commercials to attack Romney in the Palmetto State with money donated by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. And Gingrich is the man who accuses Romney of sleazy politics and of attacking him with unfair Super PAC commercials. Ugh.

Most pundits seem to think that in South Carolina, as in Iowa, the conservative candidates, Paul, Gingrich, and Santorum, will divide the vote enabling Romney to win again. If that happens, he might be on cruise control to the nomination going toward the Republican convention. The question might be what Ron Paul will do. He has little chance of winning the GOP nomination given his extremely conservative policies and ideas. If, in the general election, Paul decides to run as a third party candidate, it could damage Romney's chances of winning the presidency. Stay tuned.

A casino owner's super PAC keeps Gingrich afloat,
enables Newt to attack the Mittser's throat
with commercials that treat Romney with disdain.
Which of these two candidates will remain?

Michele Bachmann. . . flaky, nutty, choose your word,
and still the gal from Minnesota persisted, undeterred.
It was a short, comic run -- a quite entertaining one.
If Sarah Palin had stood instead, would she have won?

You might enjoy the following hilarious video parody of the Republican debates if you have not seen it:
http://news.yahoo.com/cyber-debate-parody-funny-or-die/

My friend, the Aardvark, has no opinions on politics. Let me know what YOU think. . . .

Meeting Dave and Steve at the One World Café

Three poets, survivors from the Sixties, meet for coffee and more.
Earlier, on my sixty-fourth birthday, an Ethiopian Evangelist tries
to save my mortal soul -- he offers to murmur a prayer for it.

The retired mailman, the ex-prison worker, and the still-slaving
editor (me) discuss the economy, how saps these days can't afford
to entirely retire: it's each man or woman for him or -- er -- herself!

I grunt down the path with an overloaded garbage bag.
A young female student offers to help. Doesn't she know
that I regularly struggle up and down the three flights

of our Baltimore walk-up apartment house?
A boy becomes an adult, becomes an elderly man.
Order me a drink -- make it a double. Boats against the current.

Christopher T. George

Mitt Romney's Most Genuine Moments

2012-01-10T06:01:00.000-08:00

Sign in a New Hampshire restaurant: Oh, yeh?

Unfortunately, Mitt Romney's most genuine moments are when he is caught off guard and speaks unscripted. As when he said that "Corporations are people" or offered the $10,000 bet to fellow candidate Texas governor Rick Perry. Or, most recently, on the eve of today's New Hampshire Republican primary, when he said at a breakfast meeting with business leaders, "I enjoy being able to fire people who provide services to me." He was talking about about firing insurance companies but it sounded too much like he received enjoyment from firing employees. Just the wrong thing to say when Americans are hurting from high unemployment. It is very revealing that at a moment when he would be expected to feel most comfortable, around businessmen such as he has been for much of his life, he would say such a thing.

All these unprovoked remarks show that Mr. Romney, a multi-millionaire, is realms away from the average American voter. Not only do many of his own Republicans feel uncomfortable with him but he is proving himself so with a broad swathe of Americans as well. So the question remains whether a Romney coronation is inevitable as the Republican nominee let alone the Republican who will deny President Barack Obama a second term in the White House.

Another significant moment occurred on Sunday morning during the "Meet the Press" Facebook Republican debate when fellow candidate Jon Huntsman, answered Romney's criticism during the debate of the night before that he had worked for President Obama as U.S. Ambassador. The former Utah governor made the salient point that he, Huntsman, would always put the nation first and that the type of Romney's criticism shows what is wrong with the country today. Huntsman followed up his riposte to Romney and the Massachusetts man's gaff about firing insurance companies (read people) -- when he told reporters in Concord, New Hampshire yesterday, "Governor Romney enjoys firing people; I enjoy creating jobs."

It remains to be seen what traction Huntsman can get. Thus far he has seriously lagged in the polls. Is he too moderate for the voters in Republican caucuses and primaries? He didn't campaign in Iowa and has put all his efforts into giving a good showing in New Hampshire. But can he be a valid alternative to Romney when it seems as if many Republicans are looking for a conservative alternative to the former Massachusetts governor? One thing that could benefit him is that unlike in other states, Democrats and unaligned voters can vote in the Republican primary. It will be fascinating to see how the Republican candidates do in today's primary. Stay tuned, playmates.

The first few shots photographs that appear below are not of New Hampshire. They were taken on a recent evening looking into the window of the Thunder Grill, Union Station, Washington, D.C., one of my favorite watering holes. Oh, yes, and it is my sixty-fourth birthday. Why, happy birthday, Chris. Enjoy that Harvey Wallbanger.....

Have another drink, Chris.

Will They Learn to Love Mitt.... Or the Tale of the Activist Judges

2012-01-05T11:11:00.000-08:00

So former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney squeaked through as victor of the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses held on Tuesday evening by a mere eight votes over conservative former U.S. senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.  Romney won 25 percent of the vote, with a total of around 30,000, an almost identical percentage and number of votes to what he received four years ago when he finished second to the eventual Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona. Clearly, Republicans don't love Mitt, and the idea that he is the obviously ordained GOP nominee for President in 2012 took a severe hit. A big hit for Mitt. Hmmmm. Now if he fails to win in New Hampshire in that primary to be held next Tuesday or else only wins by another squeaker, in the veritable backyard of Massachusetts where he served as the moderate leader of that state, I predict that his candidacy will be in real trouble.

Meanwhile, former 1990's Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, renowned for his showdowns with former President Bill Clinton, took a major hit from attack ads from the special interest PAC groups supporting Romney, and he is as mad as hell about it. As Howard Beale (the late Australian-born actor Peter Finch) yelled in the 1976 movie Network written by Paddy Chayefsky, "I' m as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

The ironic thing is that when Gingrich was riding high in the polls a few weeks ago, before those attack ads hit him, he was railing against "activist judges" or, as conservatives like to put it, judges who "legislate from the bench." They mean, of course, liberal judges who rule favorably for progressive causes. But what could be more activist than the conservative court ruled by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts? In fact, it was Roberts and his colleagues who ruled in favor of Citizens United in 2010 and made it possible for Super Pacs to operate without any oversight and without answering to the public, the very thing that torpedoed Newt's campaign in Iowa. Newt might have to do another flip flop--on his thinking on the judiciary.  How about it, Newt?

I understand that at upcoming at the end of March, the Roberts Supreme Court has scheduled three whole days for the justices to contemplate President Obama's health care initiative. Such a block of time to be taken by the justices to contemplate one legal matter. is almost unprecedented. Of course, the Obama health care law is being challenged by conservatives all across the country so it was going to land up in the nation's highest court sooner or later. Will Roberts and his conservative allies on the court be able to help the Republicans to dismantle national health care? Serious questions have arisen, for example, over whether Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from the deliberations. Liberals point out that his wife Ginni Thomas’s ties to a group opposing the health care law. Questions have also been raised by conservatives in regard to the possible participation in the discussions by former Solicitor General and now Justice Elena Kagan.  Her role as Solicitor General in litigation challenging health care reform legislation has been questioned, and right wingers say that as a result she should recuse herself from the upcoming deliberations. See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/groups-suggest-elena-kagan-clarence-thomas-should-be-recused-from-health-law-decision/

Romney for President?

Mitt Romney man doesn't excite anyone, Republicans or anyone else. The man looks and sounds like a storefront mannequin. His assertion that he has business experience and thus knows how to fix the economy is complete hogwash. The best economic minds don't have a quick fix so Romney as a former corporate executive surely has no fix either. This is the same man who several months ago declared that "Corporations are people too!"

Activist judges? How about instead, activist citizens to take our Democracy back?!!!

Elsewhere, I have written some thoughts about the prospects of Rick Santorum becoming the Republican nominee for President in 2012.  Go to my blog at Eratosphere at http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/blog.php?b=131

Also check out my Jack the Ripper blog for some discussion of "A Bit of Graffiti and a Few Letters." Go to http://blog.casebook.org/chrisgeorge/2012/01/04/a-bit-of-graffiti-and-a-few-letters/

Lady Liberty Rubber Ducky

2011-12-31T15:11:00.000-08:00

****************** ****************** Above: Rubber Ducky Mark 1 purchased 1994. Below, Rubber Ducky Lady Liberty, 2011 A few years ago, back in 1994 when I had to have an operation for a slipped disc and the neurosurgeon told me to take hot baths for my back, Donna bought be a rubber ducky, which I have kept ever since. Donna and her girlfriends were just up in New York and she brought me back a Lady Liberty Rubber Ducky. Unfortunately when I placed the new Lady Liberty Rubber Ducky in the bathwater this evening, in preparation for us going out to a New Year's Eve meal at Gertrude's Restaurant at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where we have been on New Year's Eve previous years and always enjoyed, the poor Lady Liberty Rubber Ducky went down headfirst in the bathwater which made me laugh... I had to call Donna in to see. Maybe that's why Lady Liberty Rubber Ducky has that startled look on her face! ****************** Below are a few sunset pictures of Baltimore taken yesterday in the waning hours of 2011.

Dimly seen in several of the photos is a Geico Insurance billboard. The Geico "Gecko" looking down with the words "Want to Save Money?" Like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby in the Valley of the Ashes. The photograph below is an artsy rendering of a photograph taken at the same time.

Soft Focus Baltimore

It's how you see it --
this place you call home,
the scrag end of another year

as the cars whiz by
years stream by too.

You can't get a hold on
anything. . . can't find
a solution to the problems.

Christopher T. George

Soft Focus Baltimore, photograph by Christopher T. George

Thoughts at Christmas 2012

2011-12-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

Christmas Wreath at Union Station, Washington, D.C.
on a recent evening.

Midwinter in the Palm House

Outside, it is snowing; a lone robin grubs
for millet seeds on the cement path.
Inside, it's steamy, banana plant fronds
stretch to the roof, platforms for monkeys.

Water blinks like an eye in a purple bromeliad;
bee buzzes trapped in nectar of a pitcher plant.
We explore musty forest of mosses and ferns,
hidden niches with white catleya orchids, throated

with speckled saffon. The snow melts on glass
above us, but in here it is eternal summer.
My hand presses yours; your thumb traces
a hieroglyph on my palm.

Christopher T. George

Donna and I went to Joey Chiu's Greenspring Inn last evening for Christmas Eve dinner where we exchanged gifts. They sat us overlooking a gentle stream and the lights came on in the shrubbery on the stream bank as we looked out. As we were leaving we remembered we had been there after I broke my left ankle. In fact, I had begun down the steps of our apartment house and slipped on the black ice. See link through the title for some thoughts and photographs on that episode. Happily, I have made a complete recovery, something to thankful for on this Christmas and as we go into 2012.

I actually made it into work in Washington D.C. on that morning but, as you might expect, in pain, and after talking to my boss, Sterling Williams, M.D., he advised me to contact my doctor, which I did. I was referred to PatientFirst where Donna and I drove after I arrived back in Baltimore by train. It so happens that the branch of PatientFirst is near the Greenspring Inn so after they x-rayed me and put me in a walking cast with crutches it was natural that we would go there for a meal and for me to have a gin and tonic (strictly against doctor's orders). They sat us by the window, overlooking a gentle stream. . .

Loch Raven Review Literary Extravaganza: Review and Comments

2011-12-17T09:34:00.000-08:00

First a review of last night's event by Dave Eberhardt

Last night's Loch Raven Review literary extravanganza emceed by Chris George was an amazing success-with 30 + in attendance-a good number for a reading- many glittering personalities in the audience-

Many PIB (Poetry in Baltimore) members were represented, not just those published in the Review- which is, perhaps, Baltimore's classiest.

Mike North- the Bardmaster-channeling Johnny Cash in attire- raw, corruscating power

Danuta E Kosk-Kosicka- a poem read in Polish? a very dignified and noble presentation- must be descended from Polish nobility...look at that name!

Michael Salcman- serene, Olympian, classicism- most polished- Michael is a show stealer.

Alan Reese- most entertaining- with a lit up nose and poetry to match- Alan stole the show; when is he going to get that med mix right?.

Dino Pantazonis from Ohio- quirky, down home, highly accomplished work- appearance by his beloved Kiwi- definitely stole the show.

David Eberhardt- raw, corruscating power

Caryn Coyle- at once, pathos and sex represented in fiction- rock and roll- troggish

Charles Rammelkamp- a hilarious prose excerpt, a product garanteed to make you more youthful

Mike Monroe- a geek that turns into a Hell's Angel poet

Chris George- wonderful poetry about Mum- usual Liverpudlian brilliance; this reading was Chris's idea and Dave E helped with the organizing. Thanks to Neil and Jim of B & N. An added feature- Chris gave a bit of history about Johns Hopkins, who stared down upon us imperiously from a highly placed banner. He also described the Loch Raven Review and introduced fellow editors present.

Dan Cuddy- Dan's usual Carneyan brilliance....bounty from the county.

Julie Fisher- PIB mother dominatrix- her usual warm, quirky wit.

The reading went from 7- 8: 30 at the Barnes and Noble at 33rd and St./ Paul on 12/16. Mark Sanders could not make it- being under the weather. His poster with a sexy black haired Santress much admired.

Thanks, Dave.

In regard to merchant Johns Hopkins, whose money provided the endowment for the university and the hospital that bear his name -- I note that those institutions don't dare name it M&T University or anything like that, as with the way of things these days -- he was born in Anne Arundel County in 1795. At that time, his Quaker family owned slaves but along with a number of other Quaker families, the Hopkinses gave up their slaves, setting them free, showing some enlightenment. Of course some Quakers, notably flour miller Elisha Tyson (1749–1824), openly helped former African American slaves to escape in the Underground Railroad.

Johns Hopkins -- the name "Johns" is a family surname not a first name -- never married. He made his fortune in railroads at the time of the Civil War. The man was arguably a carpetbagger or war profiteer. When he died in 1873, he left his money to found the university and hospital, but before the will was read no one knew that his fortune would be used for that. During his lifetime, he had told nobody about his intentions. For all anyone knew, he had died an old miser.

One other Bit O' Trivia:

If you travel west on 33rd Street past the Bookstore, the street deadends onto North Charles Street, and you are facing the monumental head of Johns Hopkins mounted on a plinth. That monument used to be in the center of Charles Street and the traffic going both ways had to go around it. In 1954, there was a major traffic accident when two fire trucks collided when they were responding to a report of a fire at one of the student dormitories at the university. Two firemen were killed in the collision. It was after that tragedy that the statue was moved to the side of the road.

Ferry 'Cross the Mersey

2011-11-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

"2 Birds a Daffodil and a Queen" by Liverpool photographer Gerard Fleming (visit his website through the title above).

It has been a month since my wife Donna and I boarded the Mersey Ferry to scatter my mother's ashes in the middle of the River Mersey off Wallasey along with a few friends and relatives. The day after the ceremony, Donna and I were in the Imagine shop in the Mersey Ferry building buying a few things. Donna bought another red Liverpool hat for me (she had previously bought official Liverpool FC hats for me in the LFC store). The items that I bought were two CD's of Merseybeat music, one of them titled "The Mersey Sound: 30 Fab Original Merseyside Hits 1963-74" which includes the classic by Gerry and the Pacemakers, "Ferry 'Cross the Mersey" and liner notes by Gerry Marsden. I must admit that in those early days, 1963-1964, I preferred Gerry and the Pacemakers to the Beatles. Gerry and the Pacemakers' "How Do You Do It?" which topped the charts ahead of the Beatles, becoming the first Merseyside group to do so. Although the Pacemakers and the Beatles were the leading artists of the day, both signed to Brian Epstein's Nems Enterprises, they were just two of hundreds of acts to come out of Liverpool at the time.

In addition to Gerry and the Pacemakers's hit about the famous ferry, the CD includes an upbeat opening to the collection, Gerry singing "A Shot Of Rhythm and Blues," followed later by "You'll Never Walk Alone" which remains a famous anthem for Liverpool's Reds as well as football teams around the nation, and his evocative "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying."

Also on the CD are artists such as Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Scaffold. The Scaffold were a three-man comedy group that included Paul McCartney's brother, Mike, who had renamed himself "Mike McGear", John Gorman, and well-known Liverpool poet Roger McGough, one of the "Liverpool Poets" along with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten. On the CD are included their hits as "Lily the Pink," "Liverpool Lou" (written by Irish writer Brendan Behan) and "Thank U Very Much," a hit in 1974, the most recent hit on the album. Cilla -- once the coatcheck girl at the Cavern under her original name of Priscilla Black -- and Billy J. Kramer and the Foremost, also included in the collection, were also among the stable of artists managed by Epstein, who I often think is the forgotten man in the Beatles story as well as in Liverpool entertainment history. It's nice to see recent commemoration of him on Merseyside. The the Neptune Theatre has been renamed the Epstein Theatre, and there's a Plaque on Epstein's Guest house on Anfield Road, former home of Brian's grandparents.

Some of the artists on the CD I frankly had never heard of, despite living in Liverpool at the time of the Merseybeat boom, I mean such acts as Cindy Cole, Steve Aldo, Lee Castle and the Barons, and The Kubas. I do remember the Swinging Blue Jeans, who were one of the leading groups of the day. It might be noted that the Fourmost's "Yakety Yak" is an excellent example of how the Beatles and other Merseyside artists, along with other British rock and roll boom acts, re-introduced American rock and roll and rhythm and blues to the United States, which is exactly what the British invasion largely comprised, as innovative as the Beatles and some other British artists later turned out to be. Two rather more sophisticated songs on the CD are Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "Anyone Who Had A Heart" originally recorded by their favored artist Dionne Warwick, but covered here by Cilla Black, her first big hit, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas with "Planes And Boats And Planes." I remember my late Uncle Bruce, a family friend named Bruce Williams who was a Liverpool undertaker who wrote songs for the late Lancashire comic film star and music hall artist George Formby under the name of Eddie Latta, saying he was mystified by the structure of "Anyone Who Had A Heart." Another of Cilla's songs included on the CD is the classic "Liverpool Lullaby" written by Stan Kelly.

On the Death of Gaddafi

2011-10-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

Gaddafi: a petty desert dictator, shot down,
the Internet makes his brutal slaughter its own.
Primping despot with massive ego
-- no one mourns to see him go!

Inspired by "Ozymandias"

Some say the desert dictator was shot
in the skull with his own gold pistol
by a kid in a Yankees baseball cap.

The lone and level sands stretch on and on.

Western leaders and media pundits vied
to press the flesh of the tainted officer
who primped in medals and comic braid.

His wrinkled lip, his sneer of cold command.

So used to ordering death with the swish
of his fly whisk, oasis-emperor dragged
from his sewer hiding-place like a rat.

Look on his works ye mighty and despair.

Christopher T. George

"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The picture above the great poet's sonnet is a color inversion of a portrait of Shelley, an image perhaps more suited at this time of the year to his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. You can read about Mary Shelley's unhappy life through the title to this blog posting.

Yoria's Ashes, October 8, 2011

2011-10-09T22:39:00.000-07:00

Photograph by Kev Keegan

Mum in the Mersey

As you wished
I followed your request
-- not so swish --
our hairdresser, Mr. Bill,
expressed the wish
to be "The Fairy 'Cross
the Mersey" in absentia.

So we gathered, we few,
to remember you,
a new adventure
on a blustery day,
Liverpool child set
sail for horizons wild.

Mum: the urn unwrapped,
I poured your ashes
down a varnished ramp
cast your ashes
onto the Mersey breeze:
gone, gone -- vanished
into the waters below.

Christopher T. George

Donna and I were here in Liverpool at noon Saturday for the scattering of my Mum's ashes from the Mersey ferry, as per her wishes. Yo Liverpool forum webmeister Kev Keegan kindly took the shots of us on the boat and later in the Crowne Plaza hotel at the Pier Head enjoying refreshments. Further photographs may be seen by clicking on the title of this blog posting. Following are remarks I posted on the forum.

Thanks to Kev for the great photographs and to all who were thinking of us at the moment when my Mum's ashes went into the Mersey. Kev, it was great that you could be with us to welcome my Mum home to Merseyside. As I stated in my remarks, my Mum and I left on the Cunard liner Saxonia from the landing stage in January 1955 bound for New York, and though she henceforth lived in the U.S., mostly in the Baltimore area except for a year in Connecticut when my Dad worked at a hospital in Wallingford, she never forgot her English and specifically Liverpool roots. When I asked where she would like her ashes scattered she said unhesitatingly, "In the Mersey." Lindy, the weather conditions could have been better but the rain held off for the actual ceremony, the river relatively calm as Mum's ashes slid into the water. Also had a private message from a member who came to the Pier Head and thought it might be a bit rough, so did not join us but nonetheless cast a rose into the water for my mother. Thank you!

In terms of the people in the photographs, you will recognize me in the red Liverpool hat and my wife Donna is the pink jacket. The man seated next to me is Alan Bennett, a cousin who runs an extensive genealogical website which lists my Matchett relatives. His mother Edith Jones is in the light blue -- she and Alan had come over from the Haydock Park area for the occasion. The lady in purple is Sue Shinkfield, along with her husband Neil, a school friend of mine from Quarry Bank High School in the Sixties. Neil was telling us that he was an extra in "Ferry Cross the Mersey", the Gerry Marsden film of 1964 and got paid £5 for the day's shooting. The song by Gerry and the Pacemakers was played during the voyage.

The Waters of the Mersey

2011-09-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

View of Liverpool from the Ferry in a postcard posted 1908

Another view of the ferry a few years later, in a postcard posted 1916 -- the Liver Building and the Dock Board Offices have been built.

Compare these two old views of the Pier Head to a dramatic modern view of the Liverpool waterfront by Kev Keegan available by clicking on the title of this blog posting.

Donna and I will be in Liverpool on Saturday, October 8 to board the Ferry Across the Mersey at 12 noon, as arranged by my friend Liverpool photographer Gerard Fleming who happens to have an exhibition opening on October 13 which we will unfortunately miss. We will be there to spread my late mother's ashes in mid-river as allowed by Mersey Travel -- the ferry will stop for such ceremonies. Such family events are, I am told, popular. . . you have to book ahead, which we have done. I hope it will be good weather for this emotional occasion. I am trying to contact some of my cousins to attend the ceremony which will be a non-religious occasion. I do know some friends will be in attendance.

My mother Yoria C. George (September 27, 1920 to August 24, 2010) was the daughter of George Thompson Matchett and Sarah Elizabeth Matchett. Her uncle, George's brother, was the Liverpool comedian Billy Matchett, born William Charles Matchett (1889-1974). From a bookseller in the Midlands, I have just bought the following tuppenny theatre program from February 1944 that lists Billy Matchett "The Mirthquake" among the performers at the Pavilion Theatre, Lodge Lane -- a theatre where as a lad I saw Uncle Bill perform in the Fifties (he was the red-nose comedian between some scenes of scantily clad girls). In case of an attack by the German Luftwaffe, the program notes, the audience is free to leave but the show will go on. What resilience! The old British fighting spirit! Billy was a World War I veteran who served with distinction in the Liverpool Scottish Regiment in France.

Journey to the Mersey

It's my mother's 91st birthday
and her ashes wait patiently
to make her final journey

by the front door
in a cloth sack with
the green logo "Dignity"

-- the funeral home chain's logo
offers a modicum of respect. . .
she will journey in my suitcase

through airport security as I
get ready to slide her ashes into
the peaceful Mersey waters.

Journey onward, Mother
journey forward in time
although you've left us,
you are always in our hearts.

Christopher T. George

My mother and father on their wedding day, St. Anne's Church, Aigburth, Liverpool, February 22, 1945

St. Anne's Church, Aigburth, Liverpool, photographed by me, May 2007

Yoria's Ashes

After a year of death,
we have an appointment

on the Mersey ferry
at 12 noon; Yoria's ashes

repose now in the closet
in their plastic urn,

ready for the final
journey across the ocean.

Age just shy of ninety,
she looked so small

when I identified her,
a personality shriveled,

rendered nut-size -- my
heart shrank in turn.

Now I will carry her
to the muddy Mersey,

ready to accept Yoria's
ashes -- the same river

that bore us to America
almost my lifetime ago.

Christopher T. George

Studies of Lichen and Church Windows

2011-09-02T18:59:00.000-07:00

I posted the above photographs at the Yo Liverpool forum with the following message:

Considering that you guys can post pictures of Arizona wildcats and Fazakerley kestrels, and so on, these photographs of Baltimore lichen might seem a bit tame. The lichen were on photographed on a rotten branch that came down either in the recent storms or conceivably with the East Coast earthquake we had last week.

And who says things aren't exciting round here?

Ballet for 9/11

Like Cirque du Soleil acrobats
flourescent yellow hardhats balance
on scaffolding by the big rose
window of the National Cathedral,
safety net flying above them
to catch the bits and pieces
dislodged by the earthquake,
in this nation battered by
hurricanes, economic despair,
readying for 9/11 remembrance,
sprucing for the beauteous eternal.

Christopher T. George

*********************

Finding the Lost Liverbird

For Jonathan Wild

You emerge from the soot-dark crypt,
from the dust of centuries,
into the Liverpool daylight --

powdered brick, shattered glass
in traceried windows,
in bombed old St. Luke's.

Yet hark: high above,
in a cracked pane
still flies the Liverbird!

Christopher T. George

You can access the thread "Liverpool's Lost Liver Bird - Unseen till now......." at Yo Liverpool started by Cadfael (Jonathan Wild) through the title to this blog posting. Jonathan is responsible for the website on Liverpool's St. Luke's Church which was bombed in 1941 and has been kept in its bombed out state as a war memorial to those killed in the city during the Blitz. As Jonathan explains, after taking a recent tour of the crypt he happened to notice a hitherto unnoticed small pane of remaining stained glass high up in a usually inaccessible part of the church, that contained an image of Liverpool's famous Liverbird.

On the Trail of Jack the Ripper

2011-08-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

This fall is going to be a busy time for me in terms of my activities on the Whitechapel murders.

I will be appearing at the Whitechapel Society convention in London on the weekend of October 1-2 (Whitechapel Society convention) where I will speak on "Early Theatrical Depictions of Jack the Ripper."

At the end of October I will give a talk at the upcoming "Jack the Ripper Through a Wider Lens" conference at Drexel University in Philadelphia on October 28-29 on the same topic of early dramatic portrayals of the Ripper, and be part of a panel discussion on the case. See http://drexel.edu/honors/conferences/jtr.

Here is information I've received from Drexel conference organizer Fred Abbate on what I will be contributing to the conference:

"I'm really pleased to tell you that your outline as a panel participant at our Drexel University Jack the Ripper Through a Wider Lens Conference has been accepted. The panel topic is 'Images of the Ripper' and we know your presentation on early theatrical depictions of the Whitechapel killer will be a great contribution.

"Paula Marantz Cohen, my co-chair for the Conference, and I really look forward to seeing you in October. For your information, we have paired you on the panel with John Curra, Professor of Sociology at Eastern Kentucky University, who will speak on 'Seriality, Sexuality and Murder: Jack the Ripper as Folk Devil.'

"I have no doubt that the dialog will be extremely interesting. You should plan to speak for 15 or so minutes to allow as much time as possible for questions and comments. Since the deadline for submission of papers is September 6, we will certainly let you know if we install a third panelist."

I will also teach a short course on the Ripper case in the Kaleidoscope program at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore in late October and early November (catalog available for download through the title above).

THE MYSTERY OF JACK THE RIPPER

The Whitechapel Murders that occurred in the Autumn of 1888 in the East End of London continue to fascinate new generations. Although the crimes constitute the classic "cold case," it seems that annually new suspects and theories are proposed. Yet, no one has yet managed definitely to identify the anonymous murderer known as Jack the Ripper.

On Evening One, I will evaluate the known facts of the murders. On Evening Two, I will examine the different theories and theorists. On Evening Three the class will discuss the enduring legacy of the Ripper murders and the portrayals of the crimes in novels, movies and stage plays, and try to come to some conclusions about what the murders were and were not. Who was Jack the Ripper? Warning: not for the squeamish. Powerpoint images will be projected that will show the murder scenes and the corpses of the women killed, and the mutilations caused by the killer will be discussed in detail.

Three Sessions $75
Thursday, October 20, 27, and Wednesday, November 2
7:00–9:00 pm

Apply:

Roland Park Country School
Office of External Programs
5204 Roland Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21210
Or call with credit card information, 410-323-5500 ext. 3091

Finally, I have a new blog on the Jack the Ripper case at http://blog.casebook.org/chrisgeorge/

Return of the Bugle Vines

2011-07-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

On my Marc Train journey between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. to go to work, I always look out for the bugle vines that grow wild along the trackside. They always come out with their distinctive orange blooms in the very hot weather. Well with temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit in this region, they have really been burgeoning, as you might imagine! Now across the street from where I work at 12th Street and Maryland Avenue, S.W., in D.C., there is a small plot of land next to the railway line running to Virginia. Some highway workers were there working some months ago to upgrade an offramp from Maine Avenue, a major expressway just south of my work headquarters. The workers had a works office on the plot of land and they cleared the scrub including the lushly growing bugle vines that cascaded down from the stone walls beside the tracks. So I was afraid that the vines might be gone for good from the location. A few weeks ago, however, I noticed the vines starting to spring back up, and yesterday I noticed blooms there for the first time this summer. See the above photographs. Enjoy.

A Tea Party Republican Flips Obama the Bird

If our government defaults,
Mister Obama, it will be your vault--
I will disavow any guilt
as debt-laden to the hilt,
the U.S.A. screeches to a halt.

In the Halls of Congress

Makes us sick to think
we are once more on the brink
as disaster looms
and Congress endlessly talks
in the same stuffy rooms.

Watering the Lawns of Congress

As temperatures soar to triple digits,
the Capitol grounds crew unleash fountains
of water that arc over lush grass; it mists

above the sod as lawmakers haggle over
a looming government default: pressure-
cooker politics while we the public teeter
on the brink of losing Social Security.

Water mists as the sun rises
above the Capitol dome,
creates a rainbow.

Christopher T. George

Key Lime Pie in the Thunder Grill, Union Station, Washington, D.C.

2011-06-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

Key Lime Pie in the Thunder Grill, Union Station, Washington, D.C.

I've slurped my two double Harvey Wallbangers,
am now sipping espresso with Key Lime Pie,
unwinding after another hard day's edit;
the train to Virginia rumbles beneath

the booth, rattles my pelvis; at the bar, guy in
orange sports gear, "Jesus Walks" on back, chugs
his beer; older geezer with swarthy skin cozies

up to a dame. He looks like... 'cept he couldn't
be him, could he? The guy heads the CIA, for
chrissake, is nommed for Secretary of Defense.
His lady friend has her hand on his thigh.

Christopher T. George

Juice Train

From Florida, all the way up the East Coast,
the Juice Train lumbers daily up the line,
squealing up the silver track, mile by mile,
O, Tropicana, O, so wholly holy Americana!

I watch the juice cars screeching up the line,
each car emblazoned "Tropicana", graffitied,
all that steel and juice, clanking and rankling,
O, Tropicana, O, so wholly holy Americana!

I borrow time from my duties, putting commas in,
taking them out, to watch through chainlink
as the Juice Train groans again up the tracks,
O, Tropicana, O, so wholly holy Americana!

From city to city, from mile to mile,
the Juice Train grinds on up the line:
O, Tropicana, O, so wholly holy Americana!

Christopher T. George

The Tropicana Juice Train can be seen YouTube if you click on the blog title above. When I went down by train to Charlotte, North Carolina a few years ago for the rehearsals of my musical on Jack the Ripper, my train followed the Juice Train on its journey southward.

Abraham Lincoln's Opera Glasses and Assorted Ripper Artifacts.... The Facts

2011-06-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

An article in today's Washington Post discusses a pair of opera glasses that President Abraham Lincoln supposedly had in his possession when he was assassinated at Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C., on the night of 14 April 1865. The opera glasses are due to be offered for sale at Sotheby's auction house in New York next week along with a rare letter in Lincoln's hand of 1864 as well as a letter of Robert E. Lee and a flag from the Birkenhead-built Confederate blockade runner C.S.S. Alabama. See the link through the title above which will lead you to the article on the sale by Washington Post writer Michael E. Ruane.

The trouble is, although the same opera glasses have been sold for sizeable sums before ($22,000 in 1979 and $424,000 in 2004) and are now expected to reach as much as $700,000, as the article relates, there is no proof that they are actually President Lincoln's opera glasses. They are described as German manufactured opera glasses of gilt metal and black enamel. The story is that a Union officer discovered the opera glasses in the middle of Tenth Street after the mortally wounded President was carried across the street to the Petersen House, where he would die hours later. Captain James M. McCamly of the 70th New York Infantry found the opera glasses and believed they had belonged to the chief executive. But did they? Sotheby's auction catalogue notes, "As Lincoln was being transported, the opera glasses--perhaps still in Lincoln's hands, perhaps tangled in his clothing--fell to the street." As if that is exactly the way it happened. But isn't it just as conceivable that the binoculars were dropped by one of the hundreds of theatre-goers in the audience disgorging from Ford's Theatre in the chaos of the aftermath of the assassination?

That the opera glasses would still have been clutched by the President after he had received the first attentions of doctors inside the theater seems inconceivable despite Sotheby's auction catalogue musing on that possibility. Captain McCamly's great grandson, in researching the story in the later 1960's heard about an opera glass case found in the Presidential box, and believed the opera glasses belonged to it. But, according to a National Parks Service employee, it appears out that the case belonged to Mrs. Lincoln--and her opera glasses are accounted for, though are now in private hands (the glasses case itself is on display at Ford's). Hmmmmmm.

This situation calls to mind a number of instances in Ripperological studies in which various artifacts have been said to have featured in the case. Recently, a poster on the "Casebook: Jack the Ripper" message boards has been claiming that they found a knife that figures in the case--a knife found by Thomas Coram after the murder of third canonical Ripper victim Elizabeth Stride a number of streets away from the murder scene. Also of course there is the broken "Jack the Ripper knife" in the possession of veteran Ripperologist Donald Rumbelow that was said to have been found at one of the murder scenes. Well, maybe. (It appears to be a fact that there was no knife found at the most famous Ripper murder scenes.) The alleged shawl of fourth canonical victim Catherine Eddowes is another dubious "Ripper" artifact that comes to mind.

A few years back, a seller on ebay offered for sale a pocket watch that was inscribed with the name "Dr. Francis Tumblety" and that was said to have belonged to Irish-American Ripper suspect and quack Dr. Francis Tumblety (circa 1830-1903). There was also several years ago a Victorian "Jack the Ripper" inkwell offered for sale. It was not clear how it was connected to the case but the wording "Jack the Ripper" was handwritten on the base.

Such Ripper and Lincoln artifacts are colorful and interesting but because they don't seem to match up with the facts they are probably not the real McCoy despite claims about their authenticity. Possibly such items might either be hoaxes or there has been some confusion of facts along the way. Maybe not surprising given the fame of the Ripper case, and the Lincoln assassination similarly! Yet real or not, such things command a price at auction, despite the lack of proper provenance or clear links to the events and persons with which they are alleged to be associated.

Pink and Purple Flowers

2011-05-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

Pink and Purple Flowers

Mother's Day is here again;
the ads on TV make me ache.
I will not lift a receiver

or click a mouse to order
the purple-pink bouquet
you would have loved; the

colors sting me; a smear of purple
bluebells swaying under sycamores;
how you spoke of "Boo Bell Woods"

near your Garston childhood home;
always those "baby-talk" phrases,
and more so toward the end

as you regressed; still--
I would take you back,
even sad as you were then

still so delighted
to be taken out, treated
by your only son.

Christopher T. George

"Boo Bells" for Lulie.
Happy Mother's Day, Mum!
Wish you were still here.

Baltimore County and Harford County During the War of 1812

2011-04-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

On this strip of land located in Dundalk, Maryland, something significant happened in the history of our nation, when citizen soldiers stood up to the might of the British Army and prevented Baltimore being burned and so helped to ensure that "Our Flag Is Still There."

An Introduction to Baltimore County During the War of 1812 Saturday, April 30 2 p.m.
(North Point State Park)

Two authorities on Baltimore's role during the War of 1812, author and historian Christopher George as well as independent historian Robert Reyes, will address that topic during a one hour program in preparation for Baltimore County's bicentennial celebration of that war in 2012. George, author of Teror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay, and co-editor of the Journal of the War of 1812, has spoken widely regarding the topic while Reyes has researched the role of North Point and its inhabitants during the war. Together, their program will certainly prove to be a memorable kick-off to the region's bicentennial celebrations.

- Free Park Entrance and Free Event Entrance to all attendees -
Address and directions available from the North Point State Park website:
http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/central/northpoint.asp

This will be one of a series of talks I will be giving over the War of 1812 Bicentennial. Next weekend, May 7-8, I will be at the 199th anniversary re-enactment of the Burning of Havre de Grace. I am also serving as the historian for the city of Havre de Grace bicentennial. We have a blog for the project where I will be posting regularly. Go to http://hdg1812.wordpress.com/

More Clerihews

2011-04-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

In an earlier blog posting, I wrote about "How to Write Clerihews" -- follow the link through the title to go to that previous blog post. Briefly, clerihews are short poems that follow a few short rules:

1 - They are four lines long.
2 - They rhyme aa, bb.
3 - The first line contains a name.
4 - They are usually humorous.

Thanks to Oudeis at the Yo Liverpool forum
for posting those rules.

Here are a few more clerihews of my own:

It's time for the wedding of William and Kate:
like any couple, they prepare to meet their fate.
He's Diana's son, a prince, and she's a commoner
and now Wills and the world will honor her.

When, Icarus flew too close to the sun,
Daedalus cried, "Don't do it, son, you'll be undone!"
The kid is as mythical as Castor and Pollux,
but trust poor Icarus to make a bollocks.

Airheads rewarded
for ignorant cavorting:
each of them a glutton.
Punch the ignore button.

Television's "Real Housewives" are feeling blue
and now I'll gossip about them in this Clerihew:
if only they didn't all have PMS
their bloomin' lives wouldn't be such a mess!

There lived a poet called Frances Cornford.*
Her husband was named "Francis Cornford."
We really must learn to differentiate the two:
spelling one with "e" and the other with "i" will do.

* See "To a fat lady seen from the train" by Frances Cornford at http://triolets.org/t6

To use and abuse is what all tyrants know,
from Hitler and Stalin to Saddam and Nero:
the more things change, the more they're the same
--- for shame! for shame! for shame!

The more Khadafy's people tell him to go,
the more he says the Libyans love him so.
A strange individual -- totally perverse.
I fear this will end badly. Order a hearse.

As the world ponders curtailing Khadafy with a no-fly zone,
that is, chucking international justice a bone,
do we sense the wily dictator might yet survive
tweak the world's nose, give us more of his jive?

The Libyan leader might be off his head;
all the same, he's clever as a fox, it's said.
However, that's not what is worrying me today.
No! How d'you spell his darn name -- with a Q, G, or K????!!!

St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland
Paddy had moxie--he used it like a brand
And though he chased away the vipers
he left the little people and the pipers!

The passing of an age: Liz Taylor -- gone!
For six decades, her star so clearly shone!
Not merely an actress, an activist too,
an example to emulate for me and you.

Too many times we blame ourself
for ideas that ought to have been left on the shelf.
We are all capable of making a mistake,
we can all tread on a rake.

They inevitably end up blaming the murder on poor Jeeves
-- but the gun or knife might have been Madge or Steve's.
Why should the butler swing for bumping off the victim
when capturing the true killer should be the dictum!

Time for the South to Lose the Civil War

2011-04-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Robert E. Lee: A True "Knight" of the South?

As some of you might suspect, as a historian of the War of 1812, I am not pleased that the hoopla over the 150-year anniversary of the Civil War is going to steal the thunder from my favorite war, a war that is much overlooked and misunderstood but nonetheless important in making the United States what it is today.

In today's Washington Post, columnist Richard Cohen has an interesting article attacking the myth of Robert E. Lee and questioning why a man who defended slavery is so admired these many years after the Civil War (see the link through the title above). It's an important article and goes to nub of much of the guff and legend of the Civil War and the idea of the nobility of the Southern warrior, whether it be the rebellion's commanding general or the ordinary Johnny Reb in his nutbrown uniform.

There's a lot of hypocrisy in the enduring celebration of the South, the side that lost. And it always amazes me that many of my War of 1812 colleagues, who celebrate the writing of "The Star Spangled Banner" and the fact that "our flag is still there" are the same individuals who line up in parade every cold January at the double equestrian statue of Generals Lee and Jackson in Baltimore's Wyman Park under the Rebel "Stars and Bars." It seems to me they can't have it both ways -- to want to honor the fact that the United States was saved from foreign domination and to celebrate a bloody rebellion against this nation at the same time.

Donald Trump for U.S. President in 2012? Will "The Donald" Trump Obama?

2011-04-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Donald Trump -- underestimate him at our peril

He has latched on to what most people think is a bogus issue -- the allegation that U.S. President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii but in Kenya, the incumbent president's father's country, which would make him ineligible to be president -- but business tycoon Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention just because of who he is.

Some Republicans and liberals alike are tending to view Trump as a mock candidate just trying to get attention for his reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice. I would not underestimate him. How about a Donald Trump - Michele Bachmann ticket for 2012? Don't discount it. Now that will certainly get out the left wing vote won't it? At present, it is understood that Trump plans to make an announcement about his intentions in regard to the presidency on the May 22 season finale of Celebrity Apprentice. See link through the title above.

What other Republican candidate can you think of that has such an outsize image and reputation as a figure in this nation? Mitt Romney, Mike Huckerbee, Sarah Palin, Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich? Each of these people appears to be a pygmy compared to Trump. While "The Donald" might have some questions about his business practices, with a number of his companies having been allowed to become bankrupt, something on which opponents are bound to attack him, he nonetheless overall has a reputation and an image of solidity. In an era when there is not much to cling to, will American voters go for a Rock of Gibraltar-type of leader rather than a leader they are unsure about or distrust?

If Trump runs for President in 2012, he just might win, partly because Obama has lost a lot of credibility with the left wing of his party and with the independents that put him over the top in 2008. Don't forget that now when he runs, he will be a known quantity and will not be the unknown, shock candidate that he was when he ran before. Conceivably he has lost too much credibility. Clearly he needs to reinvent himself to be the force he was in 2008.

"Change We Can Believe In" might have proved to have been a fairly empty promise on the part of Obama in 2008 except for people who saw the potential he offered, but what can he do to fend off a high visibility, strong Republican challenger? Donald Trump has already shown that he can latch onto an issue that gets him attention. What if he is serious and really does run in 2012? Who would you put your money on?

April Showers in Washington, D.C.

2011-04-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Japanese Cherry Blossoms, Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C.

April Showers in Washington, D.C.

Cold showers pepper my office window;
raindrops slant across glass. Below,
12th Street's silver as pedestrians labor

with umbrellas; headlighted cabs sail
past, windshield wipers awash. I woke
to thundercrashes; yesterday's balmly,

summery sun's swilled away, and I fret
for the fragile Japanese cherry trees round
the Tidal Basin: Kwanzan, Usuzumi,
Yoshino, Akebono, Takesimensis. . .

Christopher T. George

The names at the end of the poem are the different varieties of cherry trees that grow round the Tidal Basin. The original cherry trees were a gift from the people of Japan to the people of the United States in 1912.

See the link through the title above for a National Park Service site giving more information on D.C.'s cherry blossoms and their history.

Unfortunately, the cherry blossoms did suffer some damage in yesterday's rainstorm and some near Union Station seem a bit worse for wear and not as glorious as they looked on Monday which as expressed in the poem was a summer-like day.

Green Beer and One Red Scouser

2011-03-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

Shirt available from Who Are Ya Designs at www.whoareyadesigns.com/

Last evening, St. Patrick's Day, this Scouser was at the Lucky Bar on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., to see Liverpool FC lose on aggregate 1-0 to Braga of Portugal in the Europa League -- the match at Anfield ended 0-0 and LFC didn't show gumption and adventure enough to win. Our inspirational midfield attacking captain, Steven Gerrard, the dynamo that makes the team run is sidelined for a month recovering from groin surgery. Our record-setting signing, big new centre forward Andy Carroll got his first start in a Liverpool shirt but you could tell that the team has not accustomed itself to playing with him. Our other new signing, the brilliant Uruguayan Luis Suarez, who had a hand in all three goals in our preceding game was ineligible because he had played in the Europe League this season for his last club, Ajax of Amsterdam. So the team was foundering and hardly had a decent shot on goal all night.

Still it was a night out. The bar was full of kids in green shirts and spangly green paraphernalia drinking green beer. Not me -- some cool Guinesses chased down by some shots of Jameson whisky~! Had my usual fish and chips there that I enjoy. We few soccer fans were far outnumbered by the green revelers whooping and hollering to basketball "March Madness" on most of the screens. Liverpool better do better on Sunday against Sunderland and get a decent position in the league -- at least sixth would be a mite better than the seventh position we achieved last year in another poor season. Better results coming next year hopefully by which time new signings Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez should be banging the goals in, big man, little man, aided by Stevie Gerrard and Raul Meireles.

Better times remembered: Pics from the match against Chelsea that we won 1-0 with a goal from Meireles (video through link above). A lot more of the same, please, Raul!

Jamie Carragher -- fine tackle on Fernando Torres, Jamie!!!!!

Raul Meireles after scoring the match-winning goal.

Chelsea's coach Carlo Ancelloti -- beaten foe

Yours Truly and, below, some pics of "Julia's Empanadas" next to the Lucky Bar on Connecticut Ave, NW. I must remember to pick up some next time I am at the bar for a Liverpool match.

Chris's February Tumble

2011-03-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

Hello all

Sorry to be so long away from blogging. Perhaps you will excuse me if I tell you that it was partly because I broke my left ankle on leaving our Lincoln Apartments building at 6:00 AM on February 1 and falling on black ice down the front brick steps! Following are a few pics and several poems that I hope will make up for my absence. Among the snowfalls and other winter weather in January and February, we had one 5-inch snowfall that broke the branches of a white dogwood in front of the apartment building. Still, the winter weather in Baltimore has not been as severe as elsewhere in the U.S. midwest and northeast so we can count ourselves lucky -- all breaks and sprains, etc., notwithstanding!

Crutch

1.

Oh, crutch, you make me pay. How much
I lean on you! Perhaps next time, we'll go Dutch?

Oh, bishop's crozier, shepherd's crook,
how fashionable you make me look!

I raise you -- my dividing rod --
you part the crowds, O gift from God.

2.

I feel elegant
as Quasimodo,

but maybe better
than I ought to.

3.

Now my leg's in this damn cast,
the world of sudden seems vast.

I struggle everywhere by crutch;
even simple becomes too much.

Hobbling around is no hoot;
I crave to give the world a boot.

Not acrobatic Cirque-du-Soleil.
Far more sadly basic. Oy Vey!

4.

I pronounce my injury: ma blessure!
Announce it to everyone as if it's a blessing.

I whisper, "Fractured distal fibula -- left peg."
Folk, take pity on me and my throbbing leg.

But, unhappy, put-upon world, how you too ache!
I offer these impoverished thoughts for mankind's sake.

Christopher T. George

Chris after ice fall, Feb 2011. . . and the wounded dogwood!

Baltimore snow Jan 2011

Donna's purple flamingoes in the snow

Winter Breaks

I negotiate our brick front
steps on my crutch, notice
the blond ragged stubs
of the white dogwood, snapped

by the weight of January's
heavy snow, clear proof
that I am not the only
victim of winter, here where
I slid and crumpled down

the black-iced steps, splitting
my distal fibula like a twig.
Oh, dogwood, oh, soul-mate,
I'll miss your bridal blossoms
we lost in that thundersnow!

Christopher T. George

Getting Dopplered

My shin gored by the bull of winter,
left leg still blown up twice its size
where I fractured my distal fibula,
I go for a doppler to rule out DVT.

The gell freezing cold as the day I fell,
she says, "Usually we have it warm."
Great to hear! From my groin to my toes,
she thrusts the doppler probe

close to the family jewels.
"Ee-ooh!" I cry.
"I know!" she says.
"No! You don't!"

Christopher T. George

Poetry in Baltimore reading, Friday, Jan 21, 2011, 7-9 PM

2011-01-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

Happy Holly Days

2010-12-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

Happy holly days
hippie holy days
happy Doc Hollidays
happy dolly days
snippy doily days
snappy darling days
snappish dervish daze
sippy snappy dirges
sappy hoppy urges
happy holiday mergers

Union Station Christmas Wreath

I stand beneath this
golden Christmas wreath

to take this photograph
with my picture phone.

Now, I'm not the only one
to see it... I am not alone.

Christopher T. George

Of Time and Tidings

It's Christmas week and I am driving to a local diner
to meet an old friend; Friday's snow skulks in the gutter.

Donna's CD "Best of Christmas Cocktails" plays smoothly,
Dean Martin slurring, "Winter Wunnerland." I imagine Dino

with martini clutched in hand, and I think, "Was it then
that we began to lose Christmas -- the holiday mutating

into the sell-out that it has become -- all honesty bartered
for commercial profits?" I order bacon and eggs; Dan, retired,

walking with a cane, orders omelette with scrapple on the side
-- such a proletarian meat! We've known each other forty years,

half a lifetime; we spend time talking about all the people we've known:
aye, so many passed on, but we survive. Later, driving to the bank,

I'm singing variations on "God rest ye merry gentlemen ... God pest
ye manic mental men.... Rod invest ye gentle merrymen... God rest."

Christopher T. George

How to Write Clerihews

2010-12-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

Lewis and Clark

Lewis and Clark were quite a pair;
together, they journeyed everywhere.
They explored to the Pacific in tandem.
Yet, at the end, their deaths were random.

Christopher T. George

Per Wikipedia:

"A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The lines are comically irregular in length, and the rhymes, often contrived, are structured AABB. One of his best known is this (1905):

"Sir Christopher Wren
Went to dine with some men
He said, "If anyone calls,
Say I'm designing Saint Paul's."

Here are some more clerihews that I have written recently:

Laurel and Hardy

"This is another fine mess!!!" Ollie'd say to Stan.
In each flick, we moviegoers expected it, man, oh man!
Eternal victims of life's pranks:
Stan, the clueless Brit, and Ollie, the bumbling plump Yank.

Elvis sang "I'm All Shook Up!"
swiveled his pelvis, didn't look up--
That was then. . . this now: it's all
Elvis sighted in every shopping mall.

The next one is not biographical but seems to fit here, given the season:

Soon, before we know, it will be another Blue Christmas!
Believe me, if you miss it, you won't miss much!
Nowadays, it's so tawdry, so indecently commercialized!
So -- hold your gifts, your offerings, whatever size!

And a couple more clerihews for good luck:

As a working poet, I always remember the example of Sir John Betjeman:
when they complained, "That's no poem!" Sir John said, "You betcha, man!"
He might have written near doggerel,
but he didn't pen it to earn his doctoral.

Siegfried and Roy

Ja, you knew better than to play with tigers
but those big cats paid your wages;
always disaster threatened
-- the sharp teeth beckoned.

Burns and Allen

You could always trust Gracie Allen
to play the dimwit, without failin' --
a lovable, clueless broad
that George and the whole world adored!

The Passion of the Ripper by Nicholas Nicastro

2010-11-29T20:00:00.000-08:00

Here’s a novel about Jack the Ripper which right away shows its literary aspirations. The first section of the novel, which pitches the reader immediately into the poor districts of London of the day where the Ripper murders occurred, is titled, “The Morlocks.” Astute readers will recognize that title as a nod to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine---and in fact Wells himself appears as a character in this novel.

Immediately below that allusive title is an appropriate quote from Shelley: “Hell is a city much like London, a populous and smoky city.” And the opening line of the novel may remind many of T. S. Eliot’s opening to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when Mr. Nicastro opens with: “The guts of London are laid out as if on a surgeon’s table.”

From there on in, the novel is all Nick Nicastro as the London of 1888 is well evoked by the novelist, the author of five previous historical novels on various topics. The writer tells us that his aim in writing The Passion of the Ripper was to create “a different kind of Ripper story: not a whodunit, but a naturalistic exploration of the man, his city, and his times. It tells this well-known story from the inside out, from the points of view of the killer, the cops, and his final victim. It is the result of extensive research on the subject, but the aim is a kind of truth beneath and beyond the facts.”

It is not too forthcoming to reveal that the Ripper of the story is identified pretty early on in the novel when the scene shifts from London to Poland and we get a glimpse of the early life of an assistant surgeon named Severin Klosowski, who would later emigrate to London to work as a barber (being unable to qualify for licensure as a medical man), taking the name George Chapman. While in his native Poland, the suspect is portrayed as a man with strange sexual proclivities in the presence of an icon of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa—whose bloody-cheeked image is featured on the cover of Nicastro’s novel.

George Chapman is not a mainstream candidate for the unknown murderer of 1888 that we know today as Jack the Ripper. The infamous serial killer either gave himself the name or else possibly he received it--for better or worst and for all time--from an enterprising London journalist desiring to “hype” up the stories by writing the “Ripper letters” written to the authorities in which the writer claimed to be the bloody murderer.

Chapman was ultimately arrested for the poisoning murder of several common-law wives and was hanged in 1903. Although the main detective on the 1888 case, Scotland Yard’s famed Chief Inspector Frederick George Abberline, by 1903 retired, supposedly said to his former subordinate, Inspector George Godley, “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!”, most experts on the Ripper case point out the large gulf in nature between the types of crimes attributed to Chapman and those of the Ripper: Chapman’s disposal of his “wives” secretive and duplicitous and the Ripper crimes bloody murders and mutilations done on the public streets of the East End of London; the Chapman crimes done to women the murderer knew and lived with, and the Ripper crimes done to street prostitutes that the killer probably did not know beforehand.

Nick Nicastro expertly captures the passion of the moment of the murders and the psychology of the man who committed them. Whether the barber Polish barber was Jack the Ripper or not, the novel makes for an enthralling and informative read. The book is available through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

* Here's what Lord Dundreary thinks of George Chapman's candidacy as Jack the Ripper. . . .

That's actor Edward Askew Sothern in the role of Lord Dundreary in "Our American Cousin," the play the Lincolns went to see on the fateful night of April 14, 1865 at Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C., when President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Sothern is wearing the "Dundreary whiskers" he made famous.

The above review (without the Dundreary afterword I might add!) is a taste of what is on offer in the Fall issue of Loch Raven Review just released. I join my fellow editors Jim Doss and Dan Cuddy in unveiling the issue. Check it out at http://www.lochravenreview.net/2010Fall/

Loch Raven Review Fall 2010 contains:

Poetry by Eric Basso, Carol Bindel, Shirley J. Brewer, Joe Conard, Tobi Cogswell, Stan Galloway, Peter D. Goodwin, Lois Marie Harrod, Carl Kavadlo, May Kuroiwa, Michael Monroe, Joseph Murphy, Alan C. Reese, Susan Louise Sgroi, and Philip Wexler

Fiction by Paul Beckman, Carl Kavadlo, Elisavietta Ritchie, and Anna Sykora.

Review by Dan Cuddy of White Asparagus by D.R. Belz, and reviews by Christopher T. George of The Slow Creek and Other Stories by F. de Sales Meyers; The Passion of the Ripper by Nicholas Nicastro; Memoir of a Dog by Frank Prem with illustrations by Leanne Murphy; Palette of Life by Virginia Bates; Street Magic by Grant D. McLeman; and Manorborn: The Water Issue edited by Margaret S. Mullins.

For writers interesting in submitting to Loch Raven Review, the deadline for the Spring issue, which posts in March, is February 28th. (Reading period February 15th - March 15th).

Lennon Triptych

2010-10-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

Well I didn't make it into the slam final of the Liverpool Lennon Performance Poetry Contest upcoming in Liverpool a week on Saturday. Finalists in both the performance and paper poet categories have just been announced. In any case, here now is the full three-part poem. The winners in both the performance and paper poet categories will be announced by Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, at the Liverpool Lennon Poetry Slam Final. This is to be held on Saturday, 6th November at The Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts founded by Sir Paul McCartney. Further details available though the Beatles Story website through the title above.

.
.
.
Lennon Tryptich
.

I. O, Johnny-O

O, where have you gone, Johnny-O!
Where have you gone, O, Lennon-O!

You left us too soon, so long ago
-- although we saw you, back then,

in the clubs of Liverpool: the Cavern,
at the Mardi Gras, at the Jacaranda,

or else supping with your mates in Ye Cracke
or The Grapes. Aye, lad, we grooved

hearing you, O Johnny lad, as you stood
with your legs-apart stance,

thrumming your old '58 Rickenbacker geeee-tar,
raunchily singing for us, mugging

for the birds.... oh, what a flirt!
Oh, aye, we know what took you away:

Sex, drugs....... and, yeah yeah yeah,
Rock and roll! Segs, dregs, and drool.

"The Smoke" drew you from us -- a date
with fame. The world yearned for you,

you and your mates. And you and Paul had a ditty
or two or three to write, anthems for the universe,

for better and for worse. O, such dead-on lyrics!
Said so much -- dead good, yeah, as any poet's verse,

the sound of your generation... and who will
deny that you two Scousers often said it best?

Aye, but we were your fans first
-- in the damp and grimy streets

of the 'Pool, within hearing
of the foghorns on the river.

O, Johnny-O, you were a giver and taker!
Listen to that Managua-bound freighter!

O, Lennon-O, you left your mark on us
-- and Liverpool left its mark on you.
.
.
.
II. Julia

I stand over Julia's grave
in Allerton Cemetery, sense
some of what you're about:

an unmarked grave, just like my
great grandmother's in this same
cemetery; faded teddy bear tribute.

The night that the car took Julia
away from you, liquor stinking
on the off-duty cop's breath.

Julia -- knickers on her head
-- adult and child all in one.

Leather-clad rocker's mum gone
but not! -- not! -- not forgotten!

No room for sentiment, except
in your songs -- somehow;

the girls scream anyhow.
.
.
.
III. Here and Yet Not Here

strawberry gooseberry
strawberry gooseberry
strawberry gooseberry

walrus
songs for us
listen to the chorus

strawberry gooseberry
strawberry gooseberry
-- sirens in the night

broken spectacles
flecked with blood

Here and yet not here

rags to stem the blood
rags to stop the bullets

Here and yet not here

The same greased-back hair
the same leather jacket
sweat on the ceiling of the Cavern
rocking in the warren
rocking in the womb

Here and yet not here

Something else inside
something else driving
the gum-chewing ted
slouched against
the smoke-black wall.

Here and yet not here

Not just a snide word
a mouth full of knuckles
circles encircle eyes
crazed squiggled figures
words encircle thoughts
in a Lear-nonsense tongue

Here and yet not here

Inside the black leather
behind the hard eyes later
dreams from one to nine
a dream of guns stuffed with rags
quiet over the fields of war

Here and yet not here

One of four singing love
to the virgin world
yet the orphan the poet
the renegade for peace

Here and yet not here

Christopher T. George

Imagine

2010-10-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

John Lennon would have been age 70 today. The above photograph taken by JC Racing on Flickr is a beautiful tribute to the late singer. The photograper calls the photograph "A Shot in the Park." Yes I know, John was not shot in Central Park where this mosaic in his memory is located. John was shot on the night of December 8, 1980 as he arrived back at the nearby Dakota apartment house with his wife Yoko Ono.

Much is happening in John's home city of Liverpool to celebrate what would have been his seventieth birthday, including the unveiling of a peace memorial by his first wife Cynthia Lennon and his son Julian. (More on the monument and the unveiling through the link in the title above).

I have entered the international John Lennon poetry competition, to be judged by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and am awaiting word whether I might be a finalist. I entered the performance poet category rather than the paper poet competition. There is to be a poetry slam event in Liverpool on Saturday, November 6, at which the three finalists in the performance category are to perform three poems each. The information from Beatles Story said that the finalists in both the paper and performance contests would be informed on Friday. No word but someone who entered the paper poet competition received word that Ms. Duffy has the poems, implying that the response to the competition might be greater than expected and that it is taking time to select the finalists. No news, I suppose, is good news! Stay tuned.

The Lennon poem I have written for the competition is not the same as the following piece but if I am lucky enough to be chosen to perform at the slam event on November 6, I will need to perform three poems, and this is likely to be the second one I would do, part of a Lennon trilogy, as it were.

LENNON

John, as I stood over Julia's grave
in Allerton Cemetery, I understood
a little of what you were about:

an unmarked grave, just like my
great grandmother's in the same
cemetery; faded teddy bear tribute.

The night the car took Julia
away from you, liquor stinking
on the off-duty cop's breath.

Julia -- knickers on her head
-- adult and child all in one.
Leather-clad rocker's mum gone

but not! -- not! -- not forgotten!
No room for sentiment, except
in your songs, somehow;
the girls screamed anyhow.

Christopher T. George

John Lennon by Judith

No results yet (as of October 19) for the Liverpool Lennon Poetry Competition. The Beatles Story site has the following information in its news release section:

"Liverpool Lennon Poetry Competition - Update

"15 Oct 2010

"Due to the high caliber and sheer volume of entries to the Liverpool Lennon ‘paper' poet competition, the announcement of the finalists has been delayed. The entries are being carefully selected by the poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. The finalists will be announced shortly - watch this space!"

Meanwhile information is out on the tickets for the Poetry Slam scheduled to be held at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA) on Mount Street on Saturday, November 6:

Liverpool Lennon Poetry Competition
Date: November 6, 2010
Time: 19:30
Venue: Paul McCartney Auditorium, LIPA
£5 Per Ticket

2010-10-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

Lines to an Ex-Girlfriend

The names carved in the campus beeches
expand each year like our love

-- the cringe-worthy words I wrote back then
seem artificial to me now -- what art and artifice.

And we never carved our names in the trees,
although I implied we did. All those initials:

hearts peeled like beech bark. I remember
the ache even now, wonder if I was just
one more man who shared your bed.

Christopher T. George

Thoughts about My Mother, Yoria C. George (1920-2010)

2010-09-27T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Terrible Shears

"The terrible shears went clack clack clack."
D. J. Enright

Today would have been your 90th birthday, Mum.
Last month, you were slipping away from us
in hospice care, diagnosed with kidney failure.

Such a well-appointed room; outside, a buddleia
swarmed with butterflies. Donna remarked,
you were too far gone to enjoy such luxury.

As with Dad, dying of cancer three decades ago,
I wished I could drag you back from
where you had gone, use the jaws of life

to restore you to what you'd been. But oh no,
the terrible shears, they never stop do they,
the terrible shears going clack clack clack.

Christopher T. George

The Muddy Muddy Mersey

Tomorrow, at midday, I'll
receive Mummy's ashes
in a plain box, eschewing
an extravagant receptacle.

The time's come to collect
her and to take her home,
to the city she knew before
we sailed that ocean-blue.

Aye, come next year, I will
scatter my Mummy's ashes
in the muddy muddy Mersey
-- the Mersey of memory.

Christopher T. George

Chocks Away, Chaps

Thinking of my mother passing at 2:30 AM today,
I keep looking at the happy wedding photographs

from seventy-five years ago: all those uniforms!
Woollen gray of the Royal Air Force: Dad rakish

sergeant in the RAF medical corps, khaki jackets
of my Mum's fellow Auxiliary Territorial Service pals.

My Mum's Joan Crawford-plucked eyebrows;
Dad pulled her into the seclusion of the limo.

Christopher T. George

My father was a sergeant in the Royal Air Force medical corps. He told me a story about being in the French countryside before Dunkirk and seeing German Panzer tanks coming along the lane. He said he dived into a haystack to hide from the enemy.

The above image of my Mom and Dad on their Wedding Day, February 22, 1945, was taken while the war was still ongoing -- it didn't end in Europe until May when the Russians captured Berlin. My Dad wore his RAF uniform but Mum wore a suit though she was in the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS) helping to monitor the German planes flying over Britain. Her ATS friends, all in uniform, formed a guard of honor for Mum and Dad when they emerged from St. Anne's Church in Aigburth, Liverpool, after the service.

The fold-out Christmas card shown below was sent by my father to my Uncle Doug, Mum's brother, from northern Germany (Schleswig-Holstein) at Christmas 1945. It shows the occupied zones of Germany, with the Russian section shown by the Soviet soldier dancing with the Russian bear at top right.

We had a nice memorial gathering at the Burgee-Henss-Seitz Funeral Home on Falls Road in Baltimore on Saturday, August 28. Following are some of my remarks at the memorial.

Yoria Christine George (1920–2010)

"To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."
—Inscription on an old gravestone, courtesy of Lisa J. Cohen

The Naming of Names
By Christopher Thompson George

A number of you might not know the origin of my mother’s unusual first name, “Yoria”.

Here’s the explanation:

My maternal grandfather, George Thompson Matchett, served in the First World War in the Lancashire Fusiliers as part of a British Expeditionary Force sent to Greece in 1916, a sideshow to the Western Front and the Allied forces disaster at Gallipoli in 1915. Grandad was there for nearly three years, mainly helping to guard supply wagons going to the front, where the British were fighting the Turks and the Bulgarians.

Grandad was based in Salonika, present-day Thessaloniki, the capital of the Greek province of Macedonia. The local people called him “Yori”—Greek for “George.” When he returned to England in 1919, he decided that when his daughter was born he would call her “Yoria.”

You also might not be aware that in our family Mum’s nickname was “Lule.” Yoria’s cousin, Frank Norman, whom Mum characterised as “a lovely boy,” could not pronounce “Yoria”—so he called her “Lule.”

I never had the privilege of meeting Frank. He was the only son of my favorite aunt, Auntie Mary, my grandmother’s sister. Frank was killed in June 1943, part of a crew flying a Lancaster bomber on a bombing raid on Germany.

My father, Gordon B. George, also had a nickname within the family. It was “Grod.” He received this nickname because as a little boy, he was unable to spell his name, and he wrote it as “Grodno Groeg.” So, to me, as his son, he became “Daddy Grod.”

I would like to think, if all things are right, that “Lule” and “Grod” are at this moment together again.

(The title above links to a memorial page for my mother on the Burgee-Henss-Seitz Funeral Home Inc. website)

The Blitz in Liverpool

2010-06-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Liverpool Blitz Memorial by Tom Murphy, St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Liverpool

I recently had an exchange on a poetry forum with a fellow poet who thought that the word "Blitz" should only be applied to the German Blitzkrieg aerial attack on Poland in 1939. Tell that to the people of Merseyside who suffered greatly during the German bombing of the port of Liverpool and the shipyards of Birkenhead during 1941. Also hit during the attacks was Liverpool's elegant Gothic St. Luke's Church, which was gutted by an incendiary shell just after midnight on May 6, 1941. The church has never rebuilt but has been left as a memorial to those who died in the Blitz of the Second World War.

An acquaintance of mine on the Yo! Liverpool forum has now started a website on the church. Go to St Luke's "The Bombed-Out Church" at http://www.stlukeliverpool.co.uk/. The church is also covered in an article in the local press today "Former glory of Liverpool's ‘bombed out’ church found after 80 years" by William Leece, Liverpool Daily Post, June 14, 2010 (access the article through the title above).

A recent book on the damage sustained by the area during the Blitz is Merseyside's Secret Blitz Diary--Liverpool at War by Arthur Johnson. This supposed reproduction of a World War II diary kept by a Merseyside journalist might be totally on the up and up, although I am a bit leery given the questionable Maybrick "Jack the Ripper" Diary and the Bridget Hitler diary as well... and the mocked up Hitler Diaries that were exposed as a hoax after they were sold to Der Spiegel. Is Merseyside's Secret Blitz Diary a bit too good to be true?

The book was published in paperback in 2005. The book, reproducing the typed pages from the diary, was brought out with an introduction by the author's son who himself became a journalist but never knew his father -- Arthur Johnson Sr. died of disease while serving in the Royal Navy later in the war. It seems to be unexplained how the Diary, hidden at the time because it would have been forbidden to keep such a diary of local war-related happenings, came to light.

The narrator seems to know too much, right at the time, and there are also "add-ons" adding additional information that might not have been known till years later.

Possibly I am being too suspicious but I do think the document bears some scrutiny. For more on the book go to "Story of Merseyside's secret blitz."

The Day War Broke Out Evening Express

On the newspaper my Grandad
bought one evening in 1939,
the print is rubbed off along the folds
after a duration in successive drawers
in successive dressing tables
but the headline BRITAIN AT WAR
still stands out
like a burst of shrapnel
in a clear sky.

Half the front page is filled
with German troop movements in Poland
and the Prime Minister's announcement
broadcast at 11:15 a.m from Dowing Street:

"I have to tell you now
that no such undertaking has been received...
we will fight brute force, bad faith, and oppression..."

At top left, an announcement in red ink, to say
"Mervyn Russell's Film Fan Fare" is on page 4.

At the bottom of the page,
T. W. Garnett, sole survivor of the first test
match between England and Australia, has turned 81,
and J. L. Coleman has holed what's believed
to be the worlds longest putt from 220 yards.

An 18-year-old playing his first league match
has scored the winning goal
for Liverpool, first in the First Division,
against Chelsea, placed eleventh;
the season is one week old.

Miss Mollie Bowdler has married Walter Roberts
at St. Luke's Church; she wore a crinoline gown
of white lace and carried a bouquet
of red roses and lilies of the valley.

Christopher T. George

Do Not Pass Go

2010-06-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

Parabolic curve!
Survive paralytic scare,
pass "Go", go to Jail,
trade Boardwalk for Water Works,
raid the Community Chest.

Blue Goddess

To think that hulking boy
arose from your thighs!
Oh Belladonna Madonna,
image of blue mystique,
intrigue me with your wiles
entertain me all the while,
haunt me like a phantom,
hovering on my horizon,
graveyard spectre,
eternal sceptre,
phallus and womb,
tomb and manger.

Christopher T. George

And your gilt-edged invitation to attend. . . .

I am planning to read poetry but also some songs from my songwriting partner Erik Sitbon's latest CD, Rusty, for more information on which, hit the link through the title above.

Rhododendron Path

Sick of the photographs
of oil-slicked pelicans
from the Gulf oil spill,

the chat about culpability
of corporate executives
and playboy serial killers,

I wish instead just to dream
like Millais' "Bubbles" and wander
the rhododendron path
of a childhood park.

Christopher T. George

Bubbles (1886) by John Everett Millais (1829-1896)

Otterspool Park, Liverpool, by Joe Neary

The Bhoys and I

2010-06-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

The Bhoys and I

set down for this portrait --
thought you'd like it real fine.

We're wearin our best duds.
Me, Butch, enthroned

on the right, derby hat at
a slick angle, and Sundance

settin in a wicker job at left,
Ben "Tall Texan" Kilpatrick

settin in the middle, weighin
down a rickety ole chair. Behind,

mindin our backs, en-bloomed
is Kid Curry and fobbed News Carver.

I confess we left our sixguns
a-layin on the photographer's

antimacassar by the aspidistra after
blowin smoke from the muzzles.

See our gold watch chains shinin
and our faces a-beamin more than

on any Post Office wall:
Five desperadoes is all!

Christopher T. George

See link through the title for information on Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch.

Haiku and Hoku

2010-04-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

Cherry blossom at Union Station

Rain coming
cherry petals
drift down

Christopher T. George

Aficianados of poetry will know that a traditional haiku has a set pattern of syllables, namely 5-7-5. I have been writing a number of haiku recently but also some shorter haiku, which I have named the hoku. It is also three lines, like the traditional haiku but less than the 5-7-5 syllables that a haiku calls for. No set number of syllables, just less syllables than the 17 syllables of a haiku. On a general basis, a hoku, despite the Oriental sounding name, is probably more fitted for Western verse than the usual nature theme of a haiku.

Herein are some examples of hoku and haiku.

Koi-ku Hoku

Gold
very fishy
fish

Emu-ku Hoku

Emu chick
to go to good home.
-- You?

Grackles in White Narcissi (Haiku)

Sleek black grackles
move through the white narcissi
as silent as sharks.

Hoku

I clear my
throat; you read
these lines.

Hoku Live

Here! Listen
to these
few words!

Astronomical Odds? (Haiku)

Path across night sky:
friendly visitor or foe?
You just do not know!

Christopher T. George

Funny Face

That smiley face bag stuffed in that space
has a certain imbecilic personality;
the snow's fast disappearing here in D.C.,
crocus in bloom in the Smithsonian gardens.

Dunned for a light by a bum with a dog end,
I see I've a hole in my crotch -- I mean,
my tan pants have a hole in the crotch area,
shame-faced when I'm supposed to be dressed up

for work, and the soles of my shoes need repair,
my wife and I need to go see the orthodontist;
our bought-used Saturn needs to be traded in,
our Twenties bathroom needs new grout.

I withdrew $50,000 from my retirement
to pay my mother's nursing home bills.
But -- just got word we'll get government help.
Gonna go around town wearing that smiley face.

Christopher T. George

Resurgence

2010-04-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

What Mankind Hath Made

"Bay sees blue crab resurgence"
Baltimore Sun, April 15, 2010

As I smoke my cigar,
I watch a man with
bedroll on back pick
through an ashtray for
a gourmet smoke.

Tonight he'll sleep on
a grate in our capital;
I'll sip another Scotch,
toast my father who died
of cancer on this day,
a lifelong smoker.

Mankind giveth,
mankind taketh
-- despite the Dioxins
and Palmolive bottles,
the Blues survive!

And we remain the dirty
bomb in our own oyster.

Christopher T. George

Letter to Douglas Jemal, head of the Douglas Development Corp., owner of the Washington Coliseum, near the New York Avenue Metro station.

Hello Mr Jemal

I read in the Washington Post about the development about the "tombstones" appearing as an apparent anti-war protest on the roof of the old Washington Coliseum. [See link through title above]

As a rider on the Marc Train, as a Beatles fan, a man born in Liverpool, England, as well as a historian and a preservationist, I have been concerned for some time about what is going to happen with the Coliseum.

Have you thought of developing it as a Beatles Museum?

It would appear clear to me that the fact that the Beatles played there in 1964 is the building's greatest claim to fame, along with its long use for different events dating back to 1941 as a significant building in Washington, DC history that deserves to be preserved.

Washington, DC, is already a tourist destination and it would seem to me that as a museum on the famed Liverpool rock group that played there in 1964 this building could become a lucrative and interesting asset for the City of Washington and the Douglas Development Corporation much as the Beatles Story is in my native Liverpool. See http://www.beatlesstory.com/

Best regards

Christopher T. George
410-908-5634
http://christophertgeorge.blogspot.com/

Bioletti's Barber's Shop, Liverpool, from the Beatles' video of "Penny Lane." In reality, the barber's shop was at 11 Smithdown Place and not in Penny Lane, which is a road west of the old bus station.

You can download a copy of my article, The Bioletti Family of Liverpool: From the Maybrick Case to John Lennon and the Beatles, in pdf format. The article originally appeared in Ripperologist magazine at the time of the 2003 Jack the Ripper Convention held at Liverpool's Britannia Adelphi Hotel. Enjoy!

Staying On Message

2010-04-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

According to news reports, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Michael Steele's "longtime political consulting firm, On Message" has parted ways with him.

Are those the people who have kept Mr. Steele so "on message" that over the last year he has been a barely credible voice for the Republican Party? Are they the same people who advised him back in 2006 when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland that it would be good to run an ad in which he said he liked puppies (click on the title above for my blog post from November 10, 2006 questioning Steele's credentials back then).

In a fit of self-denial, instead of recognizing his own shortcomings in being unable to run the RNC, Michael Steele is now saying that he is being picked on because he is an African American.

When he was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "Good Morning America" he was asked whether his race gave him a slimmer margin for error. In the sort of barely coherent and rambling statement that has become typical of his statements to the media, Steele answered:

"The honest answer is yes. It just is. Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. We all -- a lot of folks do. It's a different role for me to play and others to play, and that's just the reality of it."

It might be a different story if Mr. Steele had shown any competency as chairman of the RNC over the past year. It is truly significant that Republicans are showing no confidence in him and are refusing to funnel money to the RNC. Time for him to admit his shortcomings and to step down.

Tour Duck at Union Station, Washington, D.C.

Union Station Impressions

1.

This woman possesses
some powerful pheromone,
always has a man in tow;
pixie-like red hair,
leather knapsack on back.
Is she giving it away?

2.

A little chap, a miniature
man like British comedian
Ronnie Corbett, black hair
carefully combed, almost
shellacked, black-framed
glasses; he runs beside
the taller woman as if
craving her attention.

3.

Two elders: he walks
with aid of a twisted
briar, wears a safari
hat, grizzled gray
beard; she follows: jowly
with a sour look, gap-
toothed, wearing a yellow
t-shirt printed with coiled
snake, slogan exclaiming,
"Don't Tread on Me!"

Christopher T. George

"Oh, say can you see. . . ?"

2010-04-02T02:15:00.001-07:00

Hello All

I spent a pleasant day Thursday visiting Maryland Eastern Shore War of 1812 sites in brilliant spring sunshine and during which yours truly got some accolades as a published War of 1812 historian. I also was able to have some input talking to the group at various locations. The last stop was a beautiful colonial farmhouse on the Chesapeake Bay that was burned by the British in 1813. The owners had arranged tea, both hot and iced with mint, on the patio along with gourmet cookies, and there was a brilliant view looking out toward the Chesapeake Bay with black and white ospreys making their peeping cry flying overhead and other waterbirds, ducks and cormorants out in the water. (You can hear the cry of an osprey here.)

My friend Scott S. Sheads, long-time ranger-historian at Fort McHenry, was one of the speakers on the tour. He is an entertaining and informative fellow. Scott always delivers whatever he is saying in a deadpan manner, a very funny guy.

Scott said he had a lady come up to him at the Fort who told him that "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the Baltimore Orioles (baseball team) theme song and that she amazed to learn that it was actually the U.S. national anthem. Hard to know if it was a true story. Donna pointed out to me that on the "Oh!" of "Oh, say can you see. . .", the crowd always shouts out the word "Oh!" for "O" in "O-rioles" so there may be some truth in the story.

Scott is co-author, with Ralph Eshelman and Dr. Don Hickey of the new book, The War of 1812 in the Chesapeake: A Reference Guide to Historic Places in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, which I highly recommend. Ralph was one of the tour leaders on yesterday's tour of Eastern Shore sites along with Mary Margaret Revell Goodwin who is working on saving part of the Slippery Hill Battlefield of August 1813 near Queenstown, Princess Anne County. See Eastern Shore 1812 Consortium.

For an article by me on Fort McHenry and the story of the Star-Spangled Banner titled "Birth of a National Icon" click on the title above.

I should add something more about Scott Sheads:

Scott is impassioned about honoring the men who fought in the War of 1812. In Spring 2006, when Robert Reyes and I were working on saving 9 1/2 acres at the center of the battlefield at North Point that had originally been slated for a supermarket that was never built -- land that is now, thankfully, safely in the hands of the State of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources as part of North Point State Park, Scott came along in a private capacity as a historian and citizen with Robert and myself to a meeting of the Board of Public Works in Annapolis. Some local Dundalk, Baltimore County politicians made a last-minute attempt to ask for an extension of Trappe Road across the piece of land, which effectively would have cut the land in half and defeated the object of trying to preserve as much of the battlefield as we could. (As many of you may know, a small section of the North Point Battlefield, known as "Battle Acre" was donated for public use to commemorate the battle by local landowner Jacob Houck in 1839; Battle Acre is on the west side of Old North Point Road south of Trappe Road, while the acres that needed to be saved, which formed the very centre of the Baltimore City Brigade under Brigadier General John Stricker on that memorable Monday, September 12, 1814, are on the east side of the road.)

Scott stood up before then-Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Comptroller William Donald Schaefer (himself a former Governor of Maryland and Mayor of Baltimore) and spoke passionately about the sacrifice the militia of Baltimore had made on the battlefield and that therefore the land should be saved for posterity. Thankfully, both Governor Ehrlich and Mr. Schaefer agreed with Scott. Obviously, the land needed to be preserved to tell the story of the battle for future generations.

And long may it be!

Dear President Obama

2010-03-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. President

When you spoke in Baltimore in War Memorial Plaza prior to your inauguration I was impressed that you mentioned a brave African-American, an escaped slave, who as a private in the U.S. Army had his leg blown off by a British cannonball during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, September 13-14, 1814 when Francis Scott Key wrote the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Pvt. William Williams, slave name Frederick Hall, died a few weeks later at the Baltimore public hospital. In my capacity as a historian of the War of 1812 I have written about that brave man, Although African-American men in that period were forbidden by law to serve as fighting men in the U.S. Army or state militias, he was light enough to pass as a white man. (See "Escaped Slave Made the Ultimate Sacrifice at Fort McHenry" by Berry Craig.)

By contrast, at sea, this was a golden period of opportunity for blacks. We believe about one-fifth of men in the U.S. Navy as well as aboard American privateers and merchant ships were African-Americans and we know the stories of many of these men.

As you will know, the British on August 24, 1814 defeated an American army of mostly militia at Bladensburg. It is possible that Pvt. Williams was in that battle as there were several hundred U.S. Army regulars in the battle, fighting with D.C. militia, U.S. Marines, and the sailors of Commodore Barney's Chesapeake Bay flotilla in the area of what is now Fort Lincoln Cemetery. One of Commodore Barney's flotillamen was a former slave named Charles Ball who served helped service the cannons in the battle and later left an important slave narrative, Slavery in America. Barney's position was overrun and the Commodore was severely wounded with a bullet in the thigh. The British under General Ross marched into Washington D.C. and after his lead forces were fired on and his horse killed, this led to the burning of the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and other public buildings.

Mr. Obama, you might know that a War of 1812 Bicentennial bill has been considered in Congress but has stalled. This is perhaps not surprising because despite the great significance of this war in our nation's history, not every of the 51 states of our nation were touched by the war, so it can't be said that every state has a stake in the legislation. This is the reason the backers of the bill, including the Maryland congressional delegation, have had trouble trying to persuade other lawmakers to vote for the bill. I do believe you have had some difficulties getting legislation passed in the past year as well.

Mr. President, I have a better suggestion. I have a plan for a National Museum of the War of 1812 including an archives and research center and have identified a disused Federal building which might be ideal for such a museum. It is the Department of Agriculture's former Annex, also known as the Cotton Building, at 300 12th Street, S.W. The building is within sight of the National Mall and so just across from the National Museum of American History where the newly restored "Star-Spangled Banner" that flew over Fort McHenry can be viewed by our citizens as well as overseas visitors. I would like the proposed museum if it is to be in that location or any other to tell the story of the war, including that of African Americans and all ethnic groups that helped defend this nation.

Mr. Obama, I hope you will back this effort. On March 23, as I was instructed in a telephone conversation with Mr. Juan A. McPhail, General Services Administration (GSA) Building Supervisor, about the former Dept of Agriculture Annex, I emailed Mr Robert Roop, Deputy Director, GSA, but have not heard back from him. I include a copy of that email below. Perhaps you could be helpful in getting me in touch with Mr. Roop so we can explore whether the building in question could serve the needs I have specified. Many thanks in advance. I work near the Cotton Building and can see it out of my window. I cannot wait to see a replica giant 15-star flag flying over the building if it becomes the National Museum of the War of 1812, just as it did over Fort McHenry that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words of the anthem.

Best regards

Christopher T. George
Author, Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay

*****************

For an article by me on African-American Sailors in the War of 1812, click on the title above. Incidentally, in a cover article in the Washington Post on Wednesday, it was revealed the President Obama receives an astounding 20,000 letters per day, out of which he does personally read about 10 per day.

Red Pencils and Blue Pencils: Of Slavery and Bondage

2010-03-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

My favorite Maryland Republican, Michael Steele (above), chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), has been in the news again.

First, on the weekend of the final House of Representatives vote on health care reform, when Tea-Party activists verbally attacked Democrats entering the Halls of Congress to vote yelling out racial and homophobic epithets, Mr. Steele, an African American, failed to strongly condemn such behavior instead just labeling such people as "stupid." And this against the background of the long history of violence and hatred displayed at times in this country in the past.

Need Mr. Steele be reminded of the slavery, Jim Crow, fiery crosses and the Ku Klux Clan? The same weekend featured a number of instances of vandalism against the offices of congressman, apparently both Democratic and Republican as violence, even if just (so far) against property reared its head.

Second, Steele and his personal expenses for February, as revealed by the Federal Election Committee last week, totaled $17,514 and $12,681, respectively, for the use of private planes and private cars. And the RNC are reportedly in trouble for authorizing an undisclosed Republican's expenses of $1,946 spent at a California nightclub known as Voyeur West Hollywood that specializes in bondage and simulated lesbian sex.

A spokesperson assured the media that the person whose expenses were covered, and who will now be made to reimburse the RNC, was not Mr. Steele himself. Well, that's a relief. (Subsequently, it was revealed that the man who billed the RNC for their time at the club was Erik Brown, an Orange County, California GOP donor-vendor. Should we say, "Good work, Brownie"? The RNC staffer who paid Brown was fired by Michael Steele.)

Bottom line is, the GOP operatives have been enjoying themselves while the country faces serious issues. Remember this is the party that speaks about "Family Values" and fiscal responsibility. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!

The U.S. Capitol in 1829 with the copper dome designed by architect Charles Bulfinch. H. and J. Stokes, after Charles Bulfinch "United States Capitol," The Jackson Wreath. Philadelphia: Jacob Maas, 1829, p. 87.

In regard to where hateful rhetoric can lead, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson has an excellent column in today's Post, "Where the rhetoric of rage can lead." Check it out by clicking on the title above.

As a War of 1812 historian, I am reminded of the savagery of pro-war Baltimoreans against anti-war Federalists in the streets of the city in the summer of 1812 after President James Madison declared war on the British. A man who when I got into research on the war appeared to me somewhat of a hero because as a private in the 27th Regiment at North Point on September 12, 1814, made a statement that appears consistent with some of the nasty rhetoric we are hearing these days. Levi Hollingsworth, who owned the copperworks on the Gunpowder River where the copper for the Bulfinch Dome on the restored 1830's U.S. Capitol was made after the then Capitol buildings was burned by the British in August 1814, remarked about Federalist tortured and killed by the mob "They deserved it." Are such incidents and such sentiments the price of democracy? I hope not.

Meanwhile, talking about democracy Google has removed itself from Red China after the hopes of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who grew up in his native Russia under the Soviet Communist regime, to liberalize China through the internet were dashed after the Red Chinese hacked into Google to trace dissidents.

China continues to use strong arm tactics against anyone who opposes the regime despite the hopes of Brin and even Bill Clinton that the Internet might help open up the country. The former President reportedly in 2000 mocked Chinese attempts to control the Internet, "Good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."

And Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. . . .

Image and Words

Sometimes image comes first and words follow,
stumbling along in the wake of the eye candy.

Here are March raindrops I captured for you,
the photographer drenched in the downpour.

Was it worth it, a few words dripped on the page:
image to startle the eye, words to tickle the mind.

Christopher T. George

Of Asteroids and Asterisks

Health care got enacted and as Barack declared,
the earth didn't chasm, nor did asteroids attack us
tho' GOP eyes rolled and Obamacare's foes groaned.

Soon all those i's will be dotted and asterisks added
as the wheels of government creak into motion.

The new GOP cry has become "Repeal and Replace!"
But heading to November's polls, they best save face
-- to repeal the new reforms might bring more disgrace.

Christopher T. George

"Heap Bad Medicine"? Fellow Citizens! Is U.S. National Health Care Good For You?

2010-03-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yes It Has Happened, America, Despite Republican Opposition! A Significant Victory for President Obama and for all of America, I truly believe.

As the Washington Post headline states this morning, "Divided House passes health bill. The Republicans who stirred the tea" -- the latter being of course a reference to the Right Wing "Tea Party" movement that has so vocally opposed what they call "Obamacare" which they liken to what they see as Socialized medicine and a significant shift of the country to the Left, if not a total Government take-over. (To read the Post story click on the title above.)

To hear the triumphant President and his Democratic allies speak, this is a great day for America and a great step forward. Even the Republicans admit it is the most massive social reform since LBJ passed Medicare in 1965, so the day is certainly significant whatever your political stripe! It will enact significant changes for the American people, including covering some 39 million Americans who are not currently covered by health insurance. It will enable individuals to purchase affordable health insurance and allow small employers to offer health care for their employees.

Republicans claim that Obama is saddling the American citizenry with debt for decades to come, taking us to the brink, wrecking the country. Of course that might not be the case if the last Republican President, George W. Bush, had not led us into an ill-advised war in Iraq in Spring 2003 (all that long ago????) on apparently trumped up evidence that Saddam Hussein had developed Weapons of Mass Destruction that Coalition forces were subsequently unable to locate, right? Oh, dear....

Arriving at Union Station this morning under stormy skies, I did hear some ominous booming sounds. What were they? Just thunder, Or the Metro rumbling under Union Station, or planes taking off at Reagan National Airport across the Potomac. Don't ask me. (There was a massive thunderclap at Noon today!) Whatever the case, this is an important day in the history of our nation. A whole new day.

I don't necessarily buy the rightist political argument that the Democrats will lose heavily in the Fall because they backed this health care reform package that supposedly, as they insist, most Americans do not want. That's not correct. As I have written before, powerful moneyed forces have been working for decades to defeat health care reform and probably no more so than in the last 12 months. And no doubt many ordinary Americans have been confused by the size of the bill, some 1,200 pages as the Republicans are quick to point out, and by the long and arduous legislative process. Health care is an intricate and complex problem and hard to explain. Most Americans when they are told about the good things in the bill, such as that you cannot be dropped by your insurer, no matter what or that you cannot be denied by an insurance company for a pre-existing condition, are for the health care package, once it is properly explained to them.

Now that the Dems have found the message, now that they have triumphed over the forces of "No" and have rediscovered their voice to explain the good that health care reform will do for all Americans. America should be proud. If only the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) had lived to see this day! Teddy Kennedy's dream as a Senator was to bring about national health care. It is finally happening. I understand Sen. Kennedy's widow Vicki will be on Larry King on CNN tonight.

Federal Eagle

Above the portal of the old Federal office,
a bronze eagle is emblazoned, green with age.
Health care reform has passed in Congress,
despite partisan foes and vested interests.
Gray storm clouds broil over Washington,
a thunderclap splits the air at midday.
I walk up a hill past pink cherry trees as
rain spatters my cheeks. On a rooftop corner
a roosting hawk silently watches and preens.

Christopher T. George

Citizens, Will You Join Me in My Dream to Establish a National War of 1812 Museum in Washington, D.C.?

I have an idea for a National Museum of the War of 1812 and have identified a former US Department of Agriculture building at 300 12th Street SW close to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that possibly could be the home for such a major museum and archives and research center dedicated to the War of 1812.

What attracted me to the building which is only a block from where I work in Washington, D.C., was the lovely Federal Eagle above the doorway, shown above. Around the doorway is the fasces design from Roman history, seen both on Baltimore's War of 1812 Battle Monument honoring the city's dead in the Battle of Baltimore of September 12-14, 1814, and on the old U.S. Morgan dime of the 1940's, I was taking photographs with my cell phone camera when I noticed the glass doors of the building were padlocked and the building unoccupied.

Frankly, I think such a project for a National Museum of the War of 1812 in our nation's capital might be more doable politically than the Bicentennial Commission that has stalled in Congress but that we advocates of the war still bring about -- not every state has a stake in the war, but the nation's capital was clearly at the center of events when the British captured Washington, D.C., the only attack on the U.S. capital by a foreign attacker before September 11, 2001. And what location could be more appropriate to tell the whole story of the War of 1812 than our nation's capital? This is a way to raise the visibility of the war and teach American citizens about the significance of a little understood war.

I have made a preliminary enquiry with the Government Accounting Office and have been told there are no plans at this time for the presently vacated facility, known as the Dept of Agriculture Annex or Cotton Building at 300 12th Street SW, a block south of the National Mall and the Smithsonian Castle, and within a mile or so, across the Mall, of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where the newly restored Star-Spangled Banner that flew over Fort McHenry in September 1814 is housed. The same flag that inspired Georgetown lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key, detained on a truce ship in the Patapsco during the famous bombardment, to write a poem entitled "The Defense of Fort McHenry" soon to be renamed "The Star-Spangled Banner"!

I hope within the next several weeks to arrange with the GAO to tour the facility and see whether it in fact could be adapted for the purposes expressed above. Meanwhile there are photographs of the building in question as well as posts about the proposed museum on the Maryland Star-Spangled Banner 200 list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/starspangled200. To get put on the list contact Kate Marks at KMarks@choosemaryland.org - you might need a Yahoo account to join.

Of course, as with the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail that I helped initiate along with Mr. Robert Reyes, I realise the founding of such a National Museum of the War of 1812 will not be an easy task. Even so I would like to inform the list at this early stage of the attempt to initiate such a significant institution which will help inform the American public and overseas visitors of the importance of the War as we enter the Bicentennial celebration of those events 200 years ago.

Edgar Allan Poe Class and Tour with Christopher T. George

2010-03-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

An unfamiliar, unmoustachioed Edgar Allan Poe looking more like he would have looked when he lived in Baltimore in 1829-1835 when he tasted his first literary success in his family's city.

I will be teaching a one-evening class with a day tour of sites associated with Poe in the Kaleidoscope program at Roland Park Country School (RPCS) on "The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe." The class will discuss the mystery of Poe's death here in Baltimore in October 1849 as well as his many connections to the city.

Class night Thursday, April 29, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, with field trip, Saturday, May 1, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Bus will leave the parking lot at RPCS, 5204 Roland Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland 21210 (located between Northern Parkway and Deepdene Road; RPCS is about 1/3 of a mile from Northern Parkway on the right) promptly at 8:00 am and return by 4:00 pm. Class registration includes lunch at Patrick's of Pratt Street not far from the Poe House on S. Amity Street, West Baltimore. Download the Kaleidoscope program in pdf form through the title to this blog listing or call (410) 323-5500 x 3045 with any inquiries.

Church Home Hospital, formerly the Washington College Hospital, on Broadway, East Baltimore, where the writer died in mysterious circumstances in October 1849, will be one of the stops visited on the tour.

A "Deeming Vote" for the Dems?

2010-03-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

As reported in The Hill on Tuesday:

"Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Tuesday defended a tactic that would allow the House to 'deem' the Senate healthcare bill passed without actually voting on the bill.

"Hoyer (D-Md.) said at his weekly news conference that a rule deeming the Senate bill passed is consistent with procedures and practices used by Republicans and Democrats alike, and that it’s appropriate for a bill that will be moments away from being amended anyway."

A "Deeming Vote" is a new term to me. When I first heard the term spoken on one of the cable news programs I was sure that the pundits were saying "Demon Vote" which of course would be utterly consistent with the way G.O.P. politicos have been characterizing Democratic plans to finalize health care reform!

I wonder if any of the Dems who are considering such a "Deeming Vote" know that Frederick Bailey Deeming was a mass murderer who killed his family in Rainhill, England, and then went to Australia with another woman whom he had romanced in England. Then he killed her too. Deeming, a confidence trickster who also went by the name of Baron Swanston, was found guilty of murder and hanged in Melbourne on Monday, May 23rd, 1892.

Newspapers of the day thought that Deeming could have been Jack the Ripper, the notorious but uncaught serial killer of London's 1888 "Autumn of Terror." Above is a press conception of Deeming with fifth canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly, killed and grievously mutilated in her one-room lodging at 13 Miller's Court, Spitalfields, in the early morning hours of November 9, 1888. Certain it is that Deeming did have a thing for bladed weapons -- he had a collection of South African assegais among other nasty killing instruments.

Yet most Ripperologists discount Deeming, seeing him more as the family murderer he appeared on the surface to be. It is believed that the con man and killer was in South Africa at the time of the Ripper crimes.

He may not have been Jack but the Public Record Office of Victoria, Australia, have done an extraordinary job of putting on-line documents and information about Frederick Bailey Deeming. Check it all out by clicking on the title above.

With Jackie O and Joe Cocker at Union Station

Okay, so it wasn't Jackie O
-- a woman hustled by me with
an oil of the late Missus JKO.

And it wasn't Joe C -- a bloke
with Joe's pushed-in fizzog
and scruffy ponytail scuttled

thru with groupie toward the
U.S. Capitol dome, maybe to get
health care reform passed at last, pray,

"With A Little Help From My Friends."

Christopher T. George

Take This Bill and Shove It

2010-03-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

According to a front page article in today's Washington Post (read the full article by clicking on the title above), "After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate's health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it."

Well, yes, of course, because the Democrats are not sure they have the votes to pass the Senate bill, such is the strident opposition to it by Republicans both in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

And the American public supposedly doesn't want the bill because they have been soured on it by critics who say it is too expensive or would jeopardize what benefits they do have. Or else, the more extreme accusations, because President Obama and his Democratic cronies want "to pull the plug on Grandma" or bring Socialist medicine to the United States, the nation that the deluded think has "the best health care system in the world" -- indeed, friends, it is the best system in the world, . . . er, if you can afford it. You can have all the latest tests and procedures. Save up, Americans! Keep playing the numbers! Pray to your fuzzy dice.

How Ridiculous!!!! Of course all Americans want Good Health Care!!!!!! And Health Care Reform, if Americans did but know it, would be Good for them. Swallow that medicine, America. We all know medicine can taste nasty. But it makes you better. . . in the end.

My friends, isn't it more likely that the citizenry have been brainwashed and misled by the vested interests and fat cats who love their health care and don't care for the rest of us who can't afford health care???? And people who have been denied by insurance companies because of "pre-existing conditions" as the industry notoriously does. Oh, dear. Will President Obama and his allies be able to deliver health care or not? Aaaaargh. Stay tuned.

All for Oil and Allah

Jihad Jane and G.I. Joe got on down, created
a clutch of blue-eyed G.I.-Jihad terrorists,

a mixture we found both unexpected and unsettling.
What happened to racial profiling: the filthy Arab,

the raghead, the stereotypical Jihadist?
Don't tell us you're right here among us,

in suicide vests, ready to detonate
as we kiss each other's cheeks.

Christopher T. George

Homage to Holy Frijoles

I'm in Hampden* to pick up our fajitas
because Holy Frijoles won't deliver,
they’re one of those go-to-places for
burritos, chimichangas, refried beans.

I'm waiting for them to finalize the order,
wonder if I should chug a beer at the bar,
a cool Dos Equis, Corona with wedge of lime
but instead I skulk around back with my cell-

phone camera, still with your ABBA CD ringing
in my ears (SOS!) that I heard on the drive over:
imagine I'm decked in turquoise spandex
and platform boots as I photograph detritus

left from the snow -- a crushed Bud can, myriad
cigarette butts and some mysterious eye graffiti
by the sign where the bank threatens to tow my car.
Finally, stroll back down the side of Frijoles, snap

the pictographs on the wall of the Aztecs
who used to populate Hampden centuries ago.

Christopher T. George

* Hampden is a working class area of Baltimore, maybe a bit akin to Wavertree in Liverpool, to characterize it for my Merseyside and British friends and other readers of this blog. The area has recently become yuppified with trendy restaurants, clothing boutiques, antique stores.

The neighborhood is a favorite place of movie maker and schlockmeister John Waters. He and I live about the same distance from the place. Johnny boy and his artsy thin moustache live just up the street from Donna and myself in an old carriage house. That's envy speaking.

But we can be the poor Waters neighbors. After all Donna put those two plastic purple flamingoes out on our balcony. :-)

Pop Goes the Weasel?

2010-03-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, photographed while in detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

POP!!!!!

Wait, was that the sound of Obama's spine snapping?????

"Obama aides near reversal on 9/11 trial" -- a front page headline in today's Washington Post. Check out the on-line version of the article through the title above.

Despite Attorney General Eric Holder's earlier decision that the correct course of action would be to try the man who allegedly planned the Al Queda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in a New York civilian federal court and the established fact that under the Bush administration almost all terrorists were tried in such civilian courts, it appears the Obamaites are caving to unjust and unreasonable Republican pressure. Reports suggest the White House will reverse itself and prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed genius behind the horrendous attacks, before a military tribunal.

An Obama administration official had said on November 13, 2009 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees would be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court. Well, guess what, now, three months later, after relentless criticism from critics who claim that decision showed weakness in the face of the terrorist threat, as well as complaints from New Yorkers including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that a New York location for the trial could leave the city open to attack, the administration seems to have backed down and reversed itself.

Sorry, White House!!! This just goes to prove exactly what your critics have been saying: the current Obama administration has a backbone of Jell-o when it comes to dealing with terrorism. You should be able to stand up to your critics just as you should be able to stand up to terrorists. For shame. And by the way, New York a target for attack??? Give us a break. When has it not been a target for attack.... just like the entire United States.... ever since the Age of Terror began?

Once again, this shows that the White House needs to take charge of its own messaging and lead rather than appear to be unable to lead. Get your act together, Mr. Obama, please. You've sounded better recently on health care. Forceful. It needs to be done. Yes. Then get it done. If you don't get it done, your foes will get the win they crave through your defeat. That would be bad news for you and for the nation.

Guilty

Okay, so I was home watching the AM ESPN soccer
match I'd promised to show you at your nursing home.
I know you won't remember my promise. I should be there

to take you for a drive, the ritual Royal Farms coffee
but there's been overnight snow, if just a light dusting,
and I'm still tired from our Wednesday night outing,

wheeling you in and out of the ladies, you squealing
as I took you out to the chill parking lot; a man glared
as if I was abusing you. In our politically correct times,

I could be brought up on charges. So I phone you now
to say I can't take you: I'm guilty as sin, the guilty son.
You tell me "Go to hell" and hang up: guilty as charged.

Later I walk to the deli, buy a cheap green plastic bottle
of scotch, take cell phone photos of wall moss, lichen,
and snow, and a fossil leaf dimpling sidewalk cement.

Christopher T. George

The Jury Pool

I've begun this poem in the Quiet Room
of the Baltimore City Courthouse;
the name is a joke given the periodic

belching flush from the restroom
in the corner. I've been dozing--
snooze interruptus; my lunchtime

BLT's repeat. A slumped fat guy snores,
his "Juror" tag rises, falls on his chest.
Woman with scarf wrapped round her head

might be the first casualty of jury service.
Fellow awake jurors clack on their laptops.
And I feel consoled: I've made this poem.

Christopher T. George

Signs of Spring?

2010-03-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

Jonquil Advent

In soil free after weeks buried
under feet of frozen snow,

yellow shoots thrust up
hard by dwindling ice--

arise, jonquils, in gentle rain.
Arise! For your season has come!

Christopher T. George

A UK poet at FreeWrights Peer Review poetry forum (see link through title) questioned my use of the term "hard by" and some other elements of the above poem--

Hi C.T.G,

I had a job understanding line four, if the earth is clear of snow, where did the ice come from, I thought you said it was gently raining; it seems to be a contradiction in terms. Maybe you could explain what you mean by “hard by dwindling ice” did you perhaps mean that the narcissus were hard, or is it just some strange North American term. Last time I heard “hard by” used was at the Sheep Dog Trials at Keswick.
I rather like Poeticus they are rather appealing don’t you think...

Mor
The jack of doggerel.

I replied:

Hi Mor

Well I am from Liverpool as you may know but do admit some confusion any longer on what are Yankee or Limey terms. I would have thought "hard by" in the UK means "close to" just as it does here. And per the photograph and what I mean in the poem, the some 30-inches of snow we received here in the Baltimore-D.C. area within a week a month ago has now, through warmer temps and rain, mostly disappeared: what had been vast piles of snow turning into ice and melting away as described. I hope this helps. Thanks for reading and commenting.

Chris

Petals
look so pastel
pink by the red brick wall
-- the Korean rhododendron.
Beauty!

Christopher T. George

Photography and Poetry -- For Sale!

Gerry Temple, a talented photographer and poet in Derry, Northern Ireland, has made me aware that he is marketing some of his images combined with poems at a site called RedBubble.

Gerry reports:

"I've been putting a lot of my work onto another site that allows people who like my work to buy anything from a card right up to a poster.

"It's worth having a look there just to see some of the beauty some good photographers have captured."

Check out Gerry's beautiful poem and photograph "Calm":

Enjoy! I thought this might give a few of us some ideas on how to market our work.

Cheers

Chris

President Obama's "Dog and Pony Show"?

2010-02-26T08:02:00.000-08:00

My favorite Republican, Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and former U.S. Maryland senatorial candidate (see links to my previous blog posts on Mr. Steele through the title above) declared yesterday morning on MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown" that President Barack Obama should have held his "dog and pony show"--the gathering yesterday at Blair House to bring together Congressional leaders of both parties--a whole year ago, when the Congressional Democratics began their effort to craft national health care reform legislation.

Specifically, Mr. Steele stated:

"This whole dog and pony show that we're about to witness today is something that should have taken place a year ago, when the administration first came in last February and laid out its agenda for health care. This is how you should have started it - bipartisan, public forum, CSPAN, your cameras rolling to capture this and to capture, most importantly, what the American people want. And right now, they want us to start over, and I think we should."

Of course, given Mr. Steele's scathing and dismissive characterization of the President's effort to enable bipartisanship on health care as "this whole dog and pony show," presumably the Republican national chairman would have thought such an event a year ago would have been equally of little consequence.

Reminded by "Daily Rundown" hosts Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie that President Barack Obama did indeed convene a similar forum on March 5 of last year in Baltimore, an "Oh" moment occurred for Steele showing how well briefed he was (an African-American Sarah Palin?). Todd stated, "And it wasn't just the legislative leaders. They brought in folks from the industry as well. And that one was televised. So. . . does that one not count? I'm just curious."

Steele replied lamely, "Well, apparently it didn't. Because we don't have health care. And we don't have reform like everyone is talking about."

The RNC Chairman was also asked why Republicans had not tried to enact health care during the eight years that Republicans had the majority under President George W. Bush. Well, replied Steele we had things like the Iraq War to worry about.

Oh, again.

Yes, indeed, if Bush had not led us into the ruinously expensive Iraq War that has not made America any safer, we might have the resources for things such as affordable health care that Americans need!

Dreaming of Spring!!!!!

Blessed Are The Lawnmakers
(Dedicated to Senator Grassley of Iowa)

Every politician on the stump
(tree stump, that is) promises
much. They speak of high ideals,
gaze toward the purple horizon
and survey the lordly forest.

When they reach the Capitol
in Washington, they mutate
into Lawnmakers: bugs lost
among the blades of grass
unable to see the trees.

And Baseball season. . . . and Poetry, perhaps?

My Belated Confession

I admit it -- I cheated: I took steroids
-- they helped me to win all those awards,
the Pushcart, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel
-- even if it's ignoble of me to admit it.

Although I claimed that I took no stimulants
(here, I dab my eye) I've let down my family,
all my fans and all aspiring poets who believe
they can reach the pinnacle without a fix.

I confess, I doped myself up real fine. . .
I deserve to be stripped of everything.
For my success, anonymity I would trade.

My megalomaniac malice was incontestible,
my artful duplicity all too contemptible:
I fully deserve the world's tirade.

Christopher T. George

Health Care for All? Dream On. . . .

2010-02-23T06:04:00.000-08:00

This Thursday, in the health care showdown. . . .

Republican leader John Boehner
and President Obama
will both show us what they have. ;)

Is it too much to hope that the American public will get the health care system that it needs and deserves? Well, probably not, because I think President Barack Obama made a rookie mistake in his first year of office in wishing for health care and handed the idea over to the Democratic leadership in Congress, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California on the House side and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada on the Senate side.

Obama should have led from the beginning instead of letting the Congressional Democrats do it because it led to all the sweetheart deals and wrangling that has characterized the health care debate over the past year and led to the mess we are in today.

Obama and the Democrats, moreover, did not do enough to defuse the charges of the vested interests that passage of health care would be bad for the country, would put us further in debt and lead to such things as "death panels" for Grandma.

Now in a televised meeting between the Democrats and Republicans at the Blair House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Obama will try to fix the impasse that his earlier lack of leadership has created.

As has been widely reported among the pundits, the Republicans have largely become the "Party of No" with some right wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and even certain conservative politicians as well openly saying they wish Obama will fail.

This is hardly a recipe for passage of health care that will provide coverage to the some 45 million Americans who are not covered, that will help lower skyrocketing premiums or ensure health care for those with pre-existing conditions. It does not look good, Playmates.

There was a Prez named Obama
who couldn't be dumber
to wish for health care
while foes yell "Don't you dare!
We would rather be sick Plumbers!"

When Obama took office, a few commentators predicted that he could be the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, getting us out of a recession almost as bad as the Depression of the 1930's and finally passing landmark health care in a long-awaited and much-needed reform that could be likened to President Roosevelt's passage of Social Security or President Lyndon B. Johnson's passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960's. A new New Deal like the one FDR gave the American people or a new Great Society similar to the one insituted by LBJ.

I do believe that with the Recovery Program instituted a year ago, Obama and his team saved this country from a worse recession, although Republican critics have carped at the cost and some Republican lawmakers have even refused "stimulus money" for their states or districts. As with the health care discussion, the wimpy Democrats lost the debate and let the Republican charges stick.

As far as I can see, the only PR victory was the "Cash for Clunkers" program that helped the U.S. automobile industry by allowing the public to trade in their old cars for new ones. "Cash for Clunkers" got good publicity and was widely reported to have been successful.

"Cash for Clunkers"--a great and nifty slogan that captured the public imagination. Obama and the Democrats need to come up with similar ideas for slogans that will help them win over the American people to the idea of health care reform. Americans need to be persuaded that such reform is good for them, as of course it is. Don't let the special interests and the rich cats win. They already have their health care. What do they care about the majority of American?

Go for it, guys. For the nation's sake, for the sake of all of us. Please!!!!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Postscript written Friday morning, February 26:

President Obama's attempt to get Republicans on board to finalize health care has apparently failed. As reported on the Hill blog (see link through title), Republicans "continued to assail Obama's proposal for its cost and size, repeatedly asking the president to 'scrap the bill' and start over."

Democrats meanwhile seem prepared to pursue health care alone, through the so-called "Reconciliation Process" by which they will try to iron out the differences between the House and Senate bills and pass it in the Senate for Obama to sign.

Donna's Purple flamingoes on our apartment balcony during the big Baltimore snow, February 10, 2010!

Purple Flamingo Out in the Baltimore Snow

It's a hard hard winter in Bawlmer
we ain't used to the white stuff
but we got our purple flamingoes
out on the balcony to memorialize
the Ravens who didn't go all the way
oh Poe save us do a flip in your grave
under the big marble hunk at the corner
of Greene and Fayette, city under feets
of the white stuff and s'more on the way
hey hey hey, wail the sax, thrum the bass
purple flamingo out in the Baltimore snow
purple flamingo out in the Baltimore snow
purple flamingo out in the Baltimore snow
oooo-wee purp flamingo in Bawlmer snow

Christopher T. George

What Was So Great About J. D. Salinger?

2010-02-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

Let's face it, J. D. Salinger, who has just died at age 91, was a virtual one-hit wonder, known primarily for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, a well-thumbed copy of which was found famously in the pocket of convicted John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman when the loner shot the rock star on the night of December 8, 1980. Chapman supposedly killed Lennon because he recognized in the former Beatle the same phoniness that Catcher in the Rye hero Holden Caulfield saw in the world around him.

What's the world's fascination with Salinger? Or is it a kind of Baby Boomer longing for a lost innocence, a desire to have what could not be, more literary jewels from the reclusive Salinger? An aching throb like a missing phantom limb? But Salinger was America's literary ghost long before his death, and in the nearly four decades since he last wrote for The New Yorker in mid-Sixties. He was literature's Greta Garbo. AWOL from the scene, understandably perhaps conjuring dreams among his admirers of a luminescent and glorious return like the legends that King Arthur or Elvis might one day return.

Now of course those same Salinger junkies have thoughts that there could be more great novels written by Salinger just waiting to be discovered. But couldn't it have been more that the writer realised that he had written his one great book and had nothing more left to contribute??? According to Lillian Ross, the writer once said he'd never "had the annoyance" of meeting Truman Capote.

That was a case, I suppose, of the admired superior moral values of Salinger, able to look down on the more commercially oriented Capote, a noted publicity hound. So thus did one literary legend dismiss another. Yet perhaps the real truth is that J. D. Salinger and Truman Capote were very much alike: two peas in a pod. Both famous mostly for just one great book each, The Catcher in the Rye and In Cold Blood, respectively. Their promises equally unfulfilled.

Hit the title above for a number of tributes to Salinger in The New Yorker of February 1, 2010. Enjoy!

Loch Raven Review 5th Anniversary Reading, Ukazoo Books, Towson, Saturday, February 13, 2010

2010-02-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

Gabriele Munter, "Black Mask With Rose," 1912, from the cover of Loch Raven Review Print Volume 5 shortly to be published.

I am pleased to let you know that the Loch Raven Review Fifth Anniversary Reading will be held beginning at 2:00 pm on Saturday, February 13 at Ukazoo Books (www.ukazoo.com), 730 Dulaney Valley Rd., Towson, MD 21204, opposite Towsontown Town Center Mall (it is one of the stores behind Superfresh), (410) 832-2665.

We are aiming to have as many local poets/writers as we have published in the five years of our existence as are able to attend, maybe some out of towners too.

Scheduled readers include Caryn Coyle, Dan Cuddy, Jim Doss, Dave Eberhardt, Christopher T. George, Reginald Harris, Clarinda Harriss, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, Dan Maguire, Mike Monroe, Michael North, and Dr Michael Salcman.

To read the latest material by these and other talented writers in the Winter issue of Loch Raven Review, just released, tap the title above. Enjoy!

All the best

Chris

The Brown Party: No More Red or Blue?

2010-02-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

Of course, there's no real reason to think that U.S. Senator-elect from Massachusetts Scott Brown will be much different than any other of the vote-down-the-line Republicans who have been resistant if not to say obstructionist to the Democratically led health care proposal initiated by the Obama administration. But he did run more as an Independent than as a Republican, actually a very canny thing to do for a man who hoped to capture the Senate seat so long held by the late Edward M. Kennedy. And as a state senator in Massachusetts he did vote for the state's health insurance program even if he now opposes the proposed federal health insurance package now stalled in Congress. He even told ABC's Barbara Walters that he supports Roe versus Wade, the woman's right to choose. And on gay marriage he says that should be left up to the states. In Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal, he states that the matter is "settled."

It would be nice to think that as a United States Senator for Massachusetts, Mr. Brown would be a genuine Independent. So far, he has called himself a "Scott Brown Republican" -- whatever that means. Might we dream perchance of a Brown Party that would help us break the gridlock that so often seized Washington? I really don't know whether the guy has what it takes. But maybe the former Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold has more going for him compared to that other rising rising (or is that falling???) star of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, the former Governor of Alaska, lampooned on Saturday Night Live for saying she can see Russia from her house. Ahem.

Independent parties have not faired well in American politics; the national government has long been sewn up tight by the two main parties. Still, it would be nice to think that someone could throw some spice into the mix to get us out of the current impasse.

For more on Brown and a look at that Cosmo centerfold, tap the link through the title.

The State of the Onion

2010-01-27T06:52:00.000-08:00

First off, it stinks.
And there are so many layers,
no wonder nothing gets done.
Or undone.

Christopher T. George

I am featured poet this week in Allen Itz's zine Here and Now, "Winter on the South Frontier," Friday, January 22, 2010. Get to it through the link in the title. Enjoy, my friends!

My Belated Confession

I admit it -- I cheated: I took steroids
-- they helped me to win all those awards,
the Pushcart, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel
-- even if it's ignoble of me to admit it.

Although I claimed that I took no stimulants
(here, I dab my eye) I've let down my family,
all my fans and all aspiring poets who believe
they can reach the pinnacle without a fix.

I confess, I doped myself up real fine. . .
I deserve to be stripped of everything.
For my success, anonymity I would trade.

My megalomaniac malice was incontestible,
my artful duplicity all too contemptible:
I fully deserve the world's tirade.

Christopher T. George

Yoria Painting Within the Lines
To my mom, Yoria C. George

Tacked on the institutional varnished door
in your simple nursing home room, a flower
so garishly pink; did you choose the color?

You are proud to tell me you were the sole
patient to stay within the lines; I wonder
if you drew the flower too -- I fail to see

if the plant is printed. You are proud
at your age of eighty-nine, as I am, to recognize
this chink of light in your humdrum existence.

Blessed Are The Lawnmakers
(Dedicated to Senator Grassley of Iowa)

Every politician on the stump
(tree stump, that is) promises
much. They speak of high ideals,
gaze toward the purple horizon
and survey the lordly forest.

When they reach the Capitol
in Washington, they mutate
into Lawnmakers: bugs lost
among the blades of grass
unable to see the trees.

Christopher T. George

Steele in the Night: Flipping America the Bird

2009-12-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

Several times in the past, I have criticized Republican Party Chairman and former Maryland Deputy Governor Michael Steele for the odd things he says and does (see link to my last blog post about Mr. Steele through the title above). Now Steele is back saying that the Democrats in Congress are "flipping America the bird" for the way they are trying to pass the health bill in the Senate before Christmas.

Of course Steele's remark is entirely in line with the policy of his fellow Republicans, to be obstructionists and to refuse to contribute to forming what will be, even in the watered down version of the bill as now conceived, landmark legislation concerning health care for all Americans, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, the young, the poor, men, women, Latinos, native Americans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. In short, All Americans.

The Republican strategy in fact flies in the face of history considering that Republicans such as Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon tried to pass health care, as did former Republican vice presidential candidate Bob Dole, although in the end ironically he helped kill the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy's bill to institute health care.

Universal health care is long due here in the United States and is something that Republicans should want to see brought about for their constituents.

Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele's remarks are not helpful to the American people.

Priceless!

2009-12-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

Christmas on the Moon

NASA has found water on the moon
and the intergalactic geeks exult
at the notion of a lunar space station.

Christmas has come early in Houston:
spangled gifts, the renewed dream
of intimacy with heavenly bodies,

intercourse at astronomic costs.

Christopher T. George

The Price of Poetry

Its worth?
Butterfly scales?
Beauty lacks any price.
We write masterpieces, demand
no wage.

Christopher T. George

At Desert Moon Review, Guy Kettelhack commented:

"well, we write, anyway! masterpieces? hmm: once every 164 yrs. maybe

"'beauty lacks any price' -- interesting twist on 'priceless' - sort of gives it a spin I hadn't thought of before - although it does perhaps imply that it 'lacks' a price because we haven't given it one yet. priceless (though cliche: wouldn't suggest you use the word here) implies we couldn't give it one.

I replied:

Yes, Guy, I do think "priceless" has two distinct meanings:

1) something is worth so much that you can put no price to it; and

2) the thing is so worthless that it has no price.

So two opposite meanings both with the same word, two meanings for the same price. Priceless! Ha ha.

I wonder how many other words have definitions that mean the exact opposite? This proves once again, what we already knew:

What a strange language English is!

Chris

Obama Speaking in Front of the Turkey Eagle

2009-12-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

President Obama is addressing the nation,
speaking to the cadets at West Point,
talking in front of a blue eagle flag,
the shield over the eagle chest, a target,
a barber's pole of blood and bandages.
(Franklin wanted the bird to be a turkey;
other Fathers chose the steel-talon eagle.
We savor Ben's passion each Thanksgiving.)
President Obama is counting the sacrifices:
all the letters he must write to each and
every family -- the families of the fallen,
all serving multiple tours, moving targets,
boots shuffling in the dust to their destiny.
President Obama is addressing the families
sitting with the corpses of their loved ones.

Christopher T. George

Chen-ou Liu at Wild Poetry Forum kindly pointed out that the following in regard to my statement, "Franklin wanted the bird to be a turkey":

"This is based on popular legend. In the letter to his daughter, Benjamin Franklin made a reference to the Bald Eagle and the Wild Turkey as a satirical comparison between the Society of the Cincinnati and Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He never supported the Wild Turkey as a symbol of the United States.

"Chris, an engaging read. Your poem proves that the poetic is the political.

"Chen-ou"

Of course just as John Keats was wrong in his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" about Cortez seeing the Pacific, I think I can be allowed a bit of leeway here.

The following seems to be the truth about Ben Franklin, the eagle, and the turkey, as extracted from his writings:

Franklin was actually talking about the look of the eagle on the First Great Seal of the United States. See below:

"For my own part I wish the Eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree near the river, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

"With all this injustice, he is never in good case but like those among men who live by sharping & robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our country...

"I am on this account not displeased that the figure is not known as a Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. [Emphasis mine.] For the truth the Turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on."

The Mystery of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe

2009-11-20T05:40:00.001-08:00

The jury remains out on what exactly killed writer Edgar Allan Poe in early October 1849. He had been lecturing in Richmond and was on his way back to his home in Fordham, New York, where he lived with his aunt and mother-in-law Maria Clemm, his wife Virginia having died of consumption two years previously. It is thought that Poe had aspirations to remarry and that was one reason he was in Richmond, to renew his acquaintanceship with certain ladies. . . In any case a week after leaving Richmond he was found in bad straits on a Baltimore sidewalk. What had happened to him in the intervening week is a mystery.

His body was probably weakened from years of drinking and exhaustion although it's not clear whether alcoholism killed him. The local story that he was taken round the voting polls and voted as a repeater is probably not true. He was found by Baltimore Sun compositor Joseph W. Walker in a dying condition in a drumming rain on the afternoon of 3 October 1849 on the sidewalk outside of Ryan's Tavern on East Lombard Street, where the 4th Ward polls were located. This location is a block east of the existing Carroll Mansion near the corner President Street and Lombard. The fact that Poe was wearing poor and bedraggled clothes that were not his own is suspicious and might lead us to believe he was robbed. And yet his missing trunk was later recovered and is now in the Poe Museum in Richmond. Mystery upon mystery.

Poe murmured the name of a friend, Joseph E. Snodgrass, M.D., who lived a few streets away, and Snodgrass was duly sent for. A bit of a mystery pertains here as well, because the writer's cousin Henry Herring and his family lived closer to the location of the tavern, in a house opposite to the Carroll Mansion. The fact that Herring was not sent for might indicate that Poe had been drinking and he didn't want his cousin to see him in that condition. In 1833, Dr. Snodgrass had been editor of the Saturday Evening Visiter. The newspaper sponsored a literary competition in which Poe won first prize of $50.00 -- no small sum back then! -- for his story "Ms. Found in a Bottle." It was his first literary success. No doubt fond memories of his big break remained in Poe's memory bank, as well as the thought that perhaps Dr. Snodgrass might be more sympathetic to him than his relatives.

Unfortunately for Poe, Snodgrass later became a rampant teetotaler and lecturer on the evils of drink. In his firebrand talks he cited the example of Poe as an inebriate. He described the writer as disgusting looking when he found him slumped in a seat in Ryan's tavern. He bundled the writer into a carriage bound for Washington College Hospital on Broadway, some seven blocks to the east. The fact that Snodgrass, a physician, did not attend to the ailing writer himself might be significant. In any case, four days later on 7 October, Poe died in the hospital. He apparently spent much of his last four days delirious.

In regard to Poe's final hours, more controversy exists. Poe's attending physician Dr. John J. Moran later published A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe (Washington, D.C.: W. F. Boogher, 1885) in which he claimed that the writer did not die of alcholism. However, in his a letter to Poe's mother-in-law, Mrs. Maria Clemm, on 15 November 1849, five weeks after the writer's death, Moran hints darkly that Mrs. Clemm would know of what ailment he died ("Presuming you are already aware of the malady of which Mr. Poe died. . . .") -- which most scholars take to mean the writer had taken to drink while in the city and alcoholism played a part in his demise.

According to Moran, if he is to believed, Poe called out the name "Reynolds!" several times. There was an explorer named Jeremiah N. Reynolds whose accounts Poe used as source material for his sea novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Could a delirious Poe on his deathbed have thought he was on the high seas with Reynolds?

In my research, I found a more mundane and Poe-like reason why the dying writer might have called out the name. According to Baltimore City street directories, around the time of Poe's death, a "Washington Reynolds" was a gravedigger living on Greene Street. On 9 October, Poe was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in the Presbyterian graveyard at the corner of Fayette and Greene Streets. His cousins Henry Herring and Neilson Poe were among the smattering of mourners in attendance.

Follow the link through the title for a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's life and death. The writer has a few things wrong and might overly emphasize Poe's drinking. . . but he or she covers a lot of aspects aboout Poe quite well and succinctly, and the accompanying cartoons are interesting as well. Check it out.

Lady Liberties

2009-11-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

"Altar to Liberty", Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn

I tried to go up the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor some years ago, I think in the eighties, but since I was carrying a big briefcase I gave up on it as being a bit beyond me and a chore as well! Not sure I like such a claustrophobic feeling. Didn't enjoy the Catacombs in Paris for the same reason, and doubt I would like to try Williamson's Tunnels in Liverpool.

One of the most moving experiences I have had was a year ago when I was in New York City to give a talk on the War of 1812, which is my specialty besides Jack the Ripper! I had asked if any member of the New York Military Affairs Symposium would be willing to take me on a tour of New York City Revolutionary War sites, the city having been recaptured by the British in November 1776.

As it was, two members stepped forward one of them with a Lincoln town car with an Indian friend acting as chauffeur. We visited a number of sites in Brooklyn, one a fort right below the Verrazano Narrows Bridge close to where the British landed in a massive D-Day like landing.

It was misty out in the harbor and I could not see much as I clambered onto the damp, leaf-strewn wall of the fort. Later we visited Greenwood Cemetery where some of the fighting had taken place. They have there an "Altar to Liberty" much less well known compared with the Statue of Liberty but it looks out toward its more famous Sister. Just as we got there, the fog parted which gave us a view across the nearby rooftops of a sunlit Lady Liberty in the harbor through a parting in the mist! Magnificent!

************

Ghosting Through Brooklyn

I.

Oh we are ghosting through Brooklyn
chauffered in a silver Lincoln town car.

We are a polyglot, ragtag pick-up
army, treking to sites in America's

fight for freedom, hosted by our Indian limo
driver, a husky dusky Ernest Borgnine

who mutters an ancient Hindi poem about
laughing while dying as we cruise through

Greenwood Cemetery with its plastic flowers,
its hillsides of monumental Victorian tombs

where in 1776 Yanks and Brits alike fell,
in inglorious stump-hole sacrifice.

II.

Above our heads, traffic thunders over
the Verrazano Narrows Bridge; we look

from the damp, autumn-leaved ramparts
of Fort Hamilton out into blank white fog

toward where the British landed
in Gravesend Bay ready to trounce

the breakaway rebels; there's me
with my red Liverpool FC scarf,

my unkempt gray beard as one journalist said; Jeff,
spectacled, short with white beard, leather jacket, and

Russian winter hat, and Colonel Frank, gray-moustached
with the military maps and apology for the masking fog:

the Englishman, the Jew, the Italian, and the Indian
on a pilgrimage through modern-day Brooklyn.

We stop to tour the Old Stone House, by a playground,
kids yelling as they sweep down slides, moms with walkers.

Fortuitously saved from being swept away for Ebbets Field,
used until recently as a rest station; here perished

Maryland's four hundred saving George Washington's ass.
Stop at Chance Cuisine for miso soup, duck with plum sauce

near the site of Gowanus Creek and Corkscrew Hill where
Washington watched the ebb and flow, the touch and go.

III.

I remember best still, how we drove the winding paths
of Greenwood Cemetery, our driver reciting the Hindi

about expecting to laugh as he dies, Colonel Frank
eating a banana (the peel of which he dropped

in the waste receptacle as we left the cemetery)
and how we climbed up Battle Hill to the "Altar

of Liberty" with its black helmeted apocryphal figure
as we gazed out into New York Harbor; luckily,

a hole had been burned in the fog at last:
Lady Liberty stood greenly shining just for us.

Christopher T. George

"He Knows Jack" - Chris George in the Baltimore City Paper

2009-11-16T07:05:00.000-08:00

He Knows Jack | Baltimore City Paper
An old article, from 2002, but it may be of interest. Note that the Casebook Productions website www.casebook-productions.org is defunct. For more on the Whitechapel murders go instead to Casebook: Jack the Ripper at http://www.casebook.org or JtR Forums at http://www.jtrforums.com

Chris holding a Liston amputation knife of a type that might have been used by Jack the Ripper

Chris and Donna in the East End of London

2009-11-16T05:58:00.000-08:00

A comment on trying to navigate the East End without a compass? Chris during his talk at the Jack the Ripper Conference, Widegate Street, 24 October, 2009. Photograph by Jeff Leahy.

First of all let me begin by saying that I have for some time felt a fake and a fraud in that although I have been an editor and a contributor to Ripper magazines for over a decade, I had not taken previously a tour of the murder sites. Not for want of trying, I might add: I was supposed to go on such a tour back in 2001 with the late great Adrian M. Phypers (aka Viper)... but for one reason or another it did not occur. I had been in the East End in 1969 and took some Super 8 movie film of Petticoat Lane Market but was not at that time interested in the Whitechapel murders.

So it was with particular interest I signed up for the London conference to be held at Kings Stores, Widegate Street, on 23-25 October, organized by Adam Wood. My wife Donna and I signed up to stay at the Ibis Hotel, Commercial Street and rented a sporty black Vauxhaull Invicta from Auto Europe (aka National) at Heathrow Airport for our whole 2-week trip, arriving on Friday, 16 October, the week before the conference. What we didn't have though was satellite navigation which would have helped greatly since the directions from Ibis were next to useless -- take the A13 from the M25 in toward the City and look for Aldgate. We spent around an hour driving round the East End trying to find the hotel in the dark on Friday night. This included an unwanted impromptu tour of the murder sites since I looked up at one point and noticed the street sign for Durward Street (formerly Buck's Row), site of the murder of Mary Ann ("Polly") Nichols on 31 August 1888.

We were even stopped by the police at one point ... they noticed we were driving haphazardly. The female constable gave us directions that supposedly would take us to the Ibis but she had directed us to Commercial Road not Commercial Street! Eventually I bought a spiral bound AA Street by Street Guide to Greater London from a Muslim newsagent on Whitechapel Road with a white knit cap. We eventually found the Ibis and I realized we had driven past it at least once because I recognized the lit-up sign of Toynbee Hall across the road. The hotel as it turned out was partly obscured from passing vehicles by a construction hoarding for whatever the building is that's going up at the corner of Commercial Street and Whitechapel High Street.

The Ibis is French run and I was directed by the French mademoiselle behind the desk to the nearest public parking facility, which turned out to the White's Row Parking Garage. We had purposely arrived late at night to avoid the "congestion charge" that is levied by the City of London, eight pounds a day, if you are on the streets between 7 am and 6 pm. Of course with the snafu of being lost I was way too late and too exhausted to take part in any of the conference activities on Friday evening. I was though curious to find the King's Stores so determined to seek out the convention site the following morning first thing.

One would have thought that the precious spiral bound AA Street by Street Guide to Greater London would be an aid here, wouldn't one. Well it wasn't, not unaided by outside internet help. Widegate Street although in the Index for the series of maps was not as such marked where it should have been. I eventually, through the aid of the conference website, determined that the Kings Stores is at the corner of Widegate Street and Sandy's Row, and I saw that the AA in their maps had Widegate Street, being a narrow and short road, marked as "W.S."!!! It wasn't the only such small road marked in the AA Street by Street Guide to Greater London with initials either. So much for authority!

So I discovered I could walk the following morning down the side of the White's Row Parking Garage to make my way toward the conference venue. As I neared the western end of the parking garage, I was astonished to see the stately pile of the Providence Row Night Refuge on Crispin Street right in front of me. I therefore realised that the murder site of Mary Jane Kelly at what was 13 Miller's Court, off what was on the morning of 9 November 1888 Dorset Street (now demolished) was only a few hundred yards away from me, on the opposite side of the parking garage. And this gave me what has remained an enduring impression of my visit to Spitalfields: how close together all the sites are. I had a real spooky feeling, and it impressed me how the killer was able to get away with it time and time again.

The below map by Jane Coram shows some of the sites. The Crossingham's lodging house at 35 Dorset Street is now gone, swept away to make way for the same circa 1920's warehouse built in Duval Street that replaced the site of Miller's Court, as was another Crossingham's at 16-19 Dorset Street, now under the site of the parking garage.

The Providence Row Night Refuge, since 2006 known as Lilian Knowles House and used as accommodation for students of the London School of Economics, is built in the sort of sickly looking yellow brick which is characteristic of a number of London buildings. I don't know whether it is something to do with the chalk in the London area that the brick is often yellow and not red. I am used to the red brick and red sandstone of Liverpool, blood red, like Gladstone's birthplace on Rodney Street in my home town!

I made my way up Artillery Passage, along the southern side of the former night refuge, a narrow medieval-like passage, which gives you the idea of age, and is a remainder of the old East End. There was a New Age bistro and a frou-frou store or two in the passage but otherwise, it could have been a century or more earlier. Thankfully such remainders still remind of how the area once looked even if, disappointingly, most of the murder sites are changed absolutely from what they once were. I found the Kings Stores and started on the way back to the hotel. I was serenaded on the walk back to the Ibis by two men in suits, one with a guitar, who claimed to be out-of-work bankers. I kid you not. They were singing something about Blackheath and accompanied me almost all the way to the Ibis before I eventually outdistanced them and one "banker" sang to the other that they had lost me and I was not going to fork out some money to them as they hoped. This trip was costing too damned much as it was! I did feel somewhat threatened by the experience but as a regular commuter from Baltimore to Washington D.C. on the Marc Train I am used to panhandlers at Union Station and don't usually "fold" when solicited.

To say I felt threatened while walking in Whitechapel/Spitalfields in early morning or at night and other times as well is probably an understatement. The area had a run-down look, not helped perhaps by the fact that the shops on Commercial Street all had metal shutters or grills pulled down and locked.

When walking from the Ibis Hotel, it was better to walk in a group than walking alone. Donna said she did not enjoy staying at the hotel because of the depressed feel of the area.

The Ten Bells looked from the outside paint-peeled and unattractive. I saw a prostitute or two hanging around in the area as I walked the streets.

In short, Spitalfields in October 2009 appeared to me not that different in atmosphere to what I would imagine the atmosphere was in same area in 1888.

I believe part of my unease of being in the East End was racial. That is, I knew of course that the East End now had a large Asian population, mostly immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, many of them Muslims from Pakistan. Was the feeling of being on the streets with people that were "other" than me part of the problem. During the walking tour with Philip Hutchinson on the morning of Sunday, 25 October, we went through Petticoat Lane Market on Wentworth Street. As per tradition, the market consisted of close together stalls on both sides of the street with clothing and other goods for sale, old CDs, records, bric-a-brac, people milling in the middle of the the street and on the sidewalks shoulder-to- shoulder, trying to get through or examining goods on tables or racks of clothing. Unlike the way I remembered the market from the Sixties when I was last there, the merchants in the market and the customers too almost all had an Asian background.

I thought that Philip's intent was to make for the site of the Goulston Street graffito, but that wasn't his idea. As a result, in the melee, part of the tour party got separated from the rest. To go through the area on market day with a tour party was probably not the brightest idea. Sorry, Philip!!!

Philip was actually heading down a side street, Castle Alley, to show us the Alice MacKenzie murder site (appropriate for the 1889 theme of the convention and my particular talk on police activity between the murder of Mary Jane Kelly and MacKenzie in July 1889). The two parts of the tour party managed to get patched back up together.

So in Petticoat Lane Market today most of the traders today are Indian or Pakistani. One of the party on the tour characterized what is sold today in the market to me as "tat" or cheap and shoddy merchandise. Perhaps so. We could have been in Cairo or Islamabad not the East End of London. Is it the language barrier or the spectre of Islamic terror that heightens the unease, or both?

During the Jack the Ripper tour: Chris George with Philip Hutchinson and his newly found photograph of Dutfield's Yard circa 1900. Photograph by Jeff Leahy.

Chris and Donna in Liverpool and Northern Ireland

2009-11-15T06:44:00.000-08:00

Donna and I have just returned from a trip to the United Kingdom. We were there October 16 through October 30.

After landing at Heathrow on Friday morning, Oct 16, we drove up to Liverpool where I was part of Poetry Kit's World Poetry Night at the Fly in the Loaf, Hardman Street.

The evening was arranged by Merseyside poet Jim Bennett.

At the Fly in the Loaf, Liverpool, Saturday, 17 October 2009

Nervous, you cross the fancy mosaic threshold of an ex-baker's shop,
nudge past garrulous and muscular young guzzlers, ascend
to the upstairs quiet hushed aerie where the poets gather.

No, it's no longer your city, though the street sign "Baltimore"
hard by the Fly in the Loaf at Hardman and Baltimore Streets
recalls your "other city" all those three thousand miles away. . .

"The Liverpool of America's East Coast" and how Adrian intro'ed
you as "a poet from Philadelphia" ha! and he told of streets
near his Mount Street home: Baltimore and Maryland,

testimony to Liverpool's slavery past. It's no longer Ade's
Liverpool or the slaver's Liverpool. Discursive as ever! Wrap
your mind round that. . . wrap your words round that, Poet!

Muscular words to tell of that evening, arc lamps burning,
sweating, drops of perspiration dot the paper. Now!
Squeeze the words out. Let the people hear. You're here.

Christopher T. George

On Monday, October 19, we left Liverpool for Lancaster, to stay at the Royal Arms on Market Street just down the hill from Lancaster Castle. We dined that night in a restaurant set in the vaults of an old merchant's house dating to 1688. The following morning we caught the car ferry from Heysham to Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland. The passage with rough with high winds and we laughed at each other trying to negotiate the rolling floor of the passengers lounge. Pretty wild.

That night we stayed at the Whistledown Hotel on the seafront at Warrenpoint. My friend and colleague Rostrevor historian Dr. John McCavitt arranged for us to stay in the bridal suite. The room had a magnificent view of Carlingford Lough looking over toward the Mountains of Mourne and General Ross's monument.

The following day, Wednesday, October 21, I gave a talk in Rostrevor, the home village of Major General Robert Ross, the man who captured Washington, D.C., on August 24, 1814, and burned the Capitol and White House and other public buildings. The 100-foot granite monument to Ross on the shoreline of Carlingford Lough has been recently restored by the District Council of Newry and Mourne. Chris is working with Dr. John McCavitt on a biography of General Ross.

Chris in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, with Mayor John Feehan, showing the Ross Monument in the background near the shoreline of Carlingford Lough. You can access the entire news cutting from the Newry Reporter through the title above.

U.S. Military Cemetery, Normandy

2009-06-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

They did their duty: the wild kid
from Nebraska with the Lucky on
his raspberry lip, the sodajerk
from Teaneck with the violet pressed
in Katy's letter. The markers stand
to attention, row by row, above
the foam on the ragged beaches where
each of them drew their final breath.

Christopher T. George

A hero of Barack Obama, the 44th President of these United States, was Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), the 16th President of these United States. It was Abraham Lincoln who said:

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history."

This is what Abraham Lincoln said:

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility."

Lincoln was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and lived in Illinois. He died as the result of an assassin's bullet in Washington, D.C., April 15th, 1865.

At his inauguration 144 years later, Barack Obama, 44th president of these United States, born in Hawaii, rose to power in the United States Senate representing Illinois, said on January 20th, 2009:

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, . . . . For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn."

Barack Obama, the 44th President, stood on the battleground at Normandy on June 6th, 2009, 64 years after the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy, and this is what he said:

"As we face down the hardships and struggles of our time and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."

(In composing the foregoing narrative with quotes from Lincoln and Obama, I owe a debt to composer Aaron Copeland's outstanding "A Lincoln Portrait" which quotes the words of Abraham Lincoln and those of Lincoln's biographer, poet Carl Sandburg.)

Man of Steele II

2009-05-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

Back in November 2006, I criticized the weak campaign of then-U.S. Maryland senatorial candidate Michael Steele (see link to my blog post through the title above).

Mr. Steele has now risen to the vaunted heights of Chairman of the national Republican Party and he is the first African American to achieve that position. I give him every credit for being chosen by his fellow Republicans to lead the party, undoubtedly a great opportunity for him.

Indeed, Michael Steele has been appointed to this important position at a time when the "Grand Old Party" (G.O.P.) is at its lowest point in recent history. The November election results favoring the Democrats can be partly attributed to the unpopularity of the Republican administration of former President George W. Bush, characterized by sky-high spending and grave mistakes in regard to the war in Iraq and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Bush's unpopularity and the surprising political skill of the young and charismatic Democratic Party candidate, Barack Obama, led to Mr. Obama's clear victory... and the election of a man who is himself of course an African American.

Of most consequence to the future of the G.O.P., the success of the Democratic presidential bid also led to Republican defeats for seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. With the recent defection of moderate Republican Senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania to the Democratic Party and the likely seating of comedian and Democrat Al Franken (for better or worse!) as the second Senator for Minnesota, the Democrats will control both houses of Congress at a time when President Obama is proposing major legislation.

The G.O.P. appears divided, hung up on issues such as opposition to abortion, stem cell research, and the environmental movement. Verily, the party is sundered, calling out for new leadership.

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and ex-V.P. Dick Cheney have become the G.O.P's loudest voices. While the demogogic Limbaugh and the driven Cheney have supporters on the far right, I believe, along with more moderate Americans, that they are for the most part not popular with the electorate. They are preaching mostly to the choir. Oh, dear. The G.O.P's lack of unity is particularly disappointing when the nation faces dire economic times. I do believe a two-party or multi-party system, and it would be nice to see the Republicans get their act together and propose workable solutions to the ills that face us instead of just being the party of "No" opposing Obama's agenda.

Back in 2006, Steele, then Maryland lieutenant governor, ran against and was defeated by popular Democrat 35-year veteran Congressman Benjamin L. Cardin to fill retiring Senator Paul S. Sarbanes' seat. As I wrote then, while Mr. Steele dissed Democrats for dirty tricks, the candidate portrayed himself as honest and clean cut, his candidacy characterized most by his statement in a TV ad that he had a "liking for puppies"! I noted that he came across as "a nice guy but a politician with no substance."

Now it seems as if this Man of Steele is unfortunately acting in much the same way in the role of Republican Chairman. Man of Steele? More like feet of clay and, worse, an out-of-control off-topic opinion machine that makes Obama's gaffe-prone VP Joe Biden look like a neophyte.

Kathleen Parker, in an op-ed piece about the Republican Chairman in yesterday's Washington Post wrote that Biden must begin each morning with a prayer, "Please, God, let Michael Steele go on TV today."

Here's more from Ms. Parker's opinion article, "Steele but No Magnet":

"The running joke is that Republicans have 'tragic' where Democrats have 'magic.' The emerging consensus is that Steele, though he means well, has the wrong personality for the job.

"'He's goofy and light in heavy times,' as one insider put it.'"

So, Michael, he's your chance to live up to your name, and provide the inspiration that your ailing party needs. It would be nice to see a Marylander do that. Good luck, Michael!

Dramatic sky at the Columbus Statue, Union Station, Washington, D.C.

Union Station, D.C., 3:48 P.M.

Congressman Bluetooth berates
an intern, hands flapping,
guarding Samsonite luggage
like a mother barracuda.

Homeless man with ebony skin
touches each granite block.
Pencil-thin-moustache guy with
Stars and Striped tie pulls

a screwed-up ball of dollars
from deep within a pocket
of his baggy pants, scrutinizes
each bill, Marlboro on lip.

Christopher T. George

Chris's World War I Presentation at Fort Mifflin

2009-05-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

Luckily the weather over the weekend was brilliant compared to the dire English-style rain of the days before. So I had a good drive up and found the correct exit to find Fort Mifflin on the outskirts of Philadelphia National Airport. One of the jokes about the fort, which was begun in the 1770's, is that a visitor asked "Why did they build the fort by the airport?" Akin to one I was told while at Mifflin, that a visitor at Gettysburg asked, "How did they fight around all the monuments?"

So despite getting a bit lost, speeding past the entrance to the fort itself and ending up down a long road past the UPS facility and oil refinery facilities I doubled back and found the right road. If I had read the instructions more closely I would have seen that I had been told to take the immediate left after I went through a tunnel. It didn't help that the Fort sign was not on the road itself but set back a bit by a woodline parallel to the road I was on. Excuses. Excuses.

So I arrived in time for coffee and doughnuts, though I stuck just with a cup of Joe, and I was able to meet the organizer of the seminar, Jeff LaMonica of the East Coast Chapter of the Western Front Association, and to get ready to set up for my talk. There were about thirty interested persons of all ages in attendance.

I had been preparing my presention for several weeks, and was able to get information on my grandfather, George Thompson Matchett's war service through researcher Mark Andrew Pardoe as well as a Liverpool contact, John Robertson. My grandfather had two brothers, William Charles Matchett or Billy Matchett, born 1892, who became a well-known Liverpool comedian (he is in a book called Mersey Stars by Michael Smout, 2000, next to Paul McCartney who ironically was once his paperboy... Uncle Bill would shout at him for climbing over the fence between the houses), and Henry or Harry Matchett, born 1896, who later was a greengrocer with a business supplying the ships with produce. Mr. Robertson was able to tell me, based on information on the general war medals they received, that they were both in the Liverpool Regiment, but that their actual full war records do not survive. In fact, about 60% of British World War I records were destroyed in a German World War II air raid on London. Incredibly, my grandad's records did survive though those of his two brothers did not.

I'll post some excerpts from my talk:

Grandad told me he was educated with his two brothers, elder brother Billy, born 1889, and younger brother Harry, at the Harrington Board School in Toxteth Park, Liverpool. The school and the family house was just up the street from the city’s southern line of docks. As a boy he remembered watching a Highland regiment march down the street toward the docked troopships bound for the Boer War.

Before the First World War, he went to Canada in 1912 with his friend from Liverpool, George Naylor. During the ocean passage on board the liner that brought them to Canada, Naylor and my grandfather met a girl. She wrote down her address in Montreal, and they decided to look her up when they got there. When they finally located her house, it appeared too grand a mansion for the two young men to make an appearance, and they went away without calling on her. The two friends parted ways and my Grandad answered an advertisement for a farmhand to work for a farmer in Yorkton in Saskatchewan on the Canadian prairies. He told me that he was mistreated by the “old German farmer” and yearned to get away. One day, in the distance, he saw a horseman approaching. He was pleasantly surprised to find that it was his friend from home, George Naylor. Between them, they hatched a scheme for my grandfather to run away from the farmer and for them to both seek work as cowboys on a ranch. My grandfather said that he always had a liking of horses and wanted to work “among them”, as he told me. He also informed me that Naylor later was a member of a “horse-stealing gang” across the border into the United States. An old leather wallet that Naylor gave to my grandfather as a gift is one of my mementos of my Grandad. It has an Indian in full headdress on the front.

My Grandad decided to return to England with the idea of later returning to Canada. Remarkably, although he had told no one that he was returning from Canada, his grandmother was waiting for him at the landing stage at the Pier Head in Liverpool when his ship arrived. With events in Europe escalating toward war and the fact that he met and married my grandmother, the former Sarah Elizabeth Potts (born Gateshead, County Durham on August 4, 1897), the opportunity to return to Canada evaporated. A year before war was declared, he volunteered for the Lancashire Hussars Yeomanry Regiment. Given his liking for horses, it made sense for him to join a cavalry unit.

Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914. At the beginning of the conflict, my grandfather found himself in training camp at Rufford Park near Ormskirk and Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire.

The Lancashire Hussars were a Territorial army unit, the counterpart of a U.S. National Guard unit, called up for national service in the emergency. The cap badge for the unit shows the red rose of Lancashire. It can be seen in the handout. I also do have the Lancashire Hussars dogtag for my grandfather, erroneously stamped “T. G. [sic] Matchett 782 Lancs. Hrs. Y.”

My grandfather related to me a number of anecdotes about camp life. He said that because of a shortage of toilet paper, the Sergeant Major barked out to the enlisted men that they would only be allowed [I]three sheets of toilet paper[/I] each, or as the Sergeant Major put it, “One [sheet] up, one down, and one for polishing off!”

He also talked about the way some of his fellow soldiers would pronounce their surnames. One soldier bore the stout Northern English last name of “Sidebottom”—but called himself “Siddy-Butt-Em.” Yet another soldier’s name was “Death”—certainly a most unfortunate name for any serviceman who would be going into harm’s way, not to mention possibly being felt to be unlucky by his fellow soldiers; the man adopted the name instead of “De Ath” to get round that problem.

In 1916, George T. Matchett was transferred to a regular infantry regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, again as a private. The Fusiliers are a storied regiment, the descendant of the East Devonshire or 20th Regiment, which is of interest to me as a War of 1812 historian, because it was the regiment for which Major General Robert Ross, killed outside of Baltimore on September 12, 1814, served as commanding colonel until the time of his death.

In September 1992, as part of my research into Ross’s career and role in the 1812–1815 war in the Chesapeake Bay, I visited the regimental museum of the Lancashire Fusiliers in Bury, outside of Manchester. At that time I made an enquiry with the regimental secretary about my grandfather’s service during the Great War. But of course the major reason for my visit was to gather information on General Ross, not on Private George Matchett.

The emblem of the Lancashire Fusiliers, as seen on the regiment’s cap badge worn by my grandfather, is the Sphinx seated above the word “Egypt” in honor of the regiment’s service against Napoleon in Egypt in 1801—operations in which General Robert Ross was involved as a young officer.

My Grandad was mobilised on August 5, 1914, and transferred from the Hussars to the Lancashire Fusiliers on September 8, 1916. G. T. Matchett was a private in the Fusiliers’ 12th battalion as part of the British–French Expeditionary Force sent to Greece. Specifically, the 12th battalion of the Lancs. Fusiliers were part of the 22nd Division, 65th Brigade, based in Salonika, present-day Thessalonika, capital of the Greek province of Macedonia. The first elements of the Lancashire Fusiliers had arrived in Salonika in November 1915 and the regiment would be based there until July 2, 1918. The British force in Salonika were under the overall command of Lt. Gen. George Francis Milne.

As noted in the web biography of General Milne at FirstWorldWar.com:

"From January 1916 Milne was placed in command of all British forces serving in Salonika; but his scope for command was severely limited by the determination of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, to prevent offensive operations in Salonika—in his opinion a pointless theatre for operations."

Indeed, the Salonika or Macedonian front was regarded as a less important arena by Field Marshal Sir William Robert Robertson, and presumably by others in the British high command in London as well. Because of the view at the time of its lack of importance, and subsequent agreement by historians that it was not a major front, what occurred there in 1916–1918 is one of the lesser known episodes of the Great War. Originally the British and French forces were sent out to help Serbia in fighting Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria but the Serbs were defeated before the Allies got there. It was decided to keep them there anyway. One area north of Salonika was so laden with barbed wire that it was known as the "Bird's Nest". The following image shows French troops laying some of that wire.

My grandfather told me during his time in Greece, he was involved guarding troop transports travelling north into Macedonia during battles against the Bulgarians and Germans. In a somewhat self-deprecatory and low-key statement he told me that in ferrying these supplies to the front, “Some horses were killed, a few men as well.”

In total, the records show that my grandfather served in Salonika from September 19, 1916 to January 25, 1919. He transferred to the Western Command Labour Company (WCLC) Labour Corps on March 12, 1918. A year later, the war having been brought to a close by the defeat of Germany and the Central Powers, he was judged to be “surplus to Military requirements” and discharged on March 12, 1919. His character was deemed to be “Very Good” and he subsequently received a pension.

As did so many other Allied troops serving on the Macedonian front, Private George T. Matchett contracted malaria, symptoms of which would recur later in life, as is characteristic of this mosquito-borne disease. Malaria proved to be a serious drain on manpower on the Allied effort during the Salonika campaign. British forces suffered 162,517 cases of the disease and in total 505,024 non-battle casualties. Because the campaign had been given low priority by the War Office, the assistance rendered by voluntary medical organisations, such as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, proved invaluable.

My grandfather’s medical records show that not only did he have recurrent malaria, but also internal complications in his left knee. The knee trouble started in 1915 and is attributed to a kick from a horse while he was still serving with the Lancs Hussars. Remember I said that he said he wanted to work “among horses”?

After my talk I along with the other speaker for the day were able to enjoy a nice sandwich lunch at a local eatery paid for my Mr LaMonica and we returned for a tour of Fort Mifflin in brilliant sunshine. The tour of the fort was interesting. In November 1777, it withstood a 6-week seige by British Royal Navy forces under Admiral William Howe which were trying to force their way up to Philadelphia, where the British Army had already chased out General George Washington's troops which then went into camp in Valley Forge.

The tour guide did a good job at emphasizing the pivotal role of Fort Mifflin in ensuring Washington's survival and the ultimate American victory. He did though I thought miss an important part of the American story in that he didn't mention Pennsylvania-born Colonel Samuel Smith, the acting commander of Fort Mifflin during the seige of 1777, later on commander-in-chief at Baltimore in 1814, that withstood the British bombardment and attempted British Army invasion that led to the writing of The Star-Spangled Banner. I am going to write to the fort to get them to focus on that part of the story.

In all a most satisfying day. I slid out from the group touring the fort as a black powder demonstration began since I have seen such demonstrations so many times before. I climbed up on the battlements for a nice view over the river and relax while smoking a cigar. I able to see swallows landing on birds nests round the moat and a large turtle basking on a log in the sunlight. Had a good drive back to Baltimore, as good as the journey up.

Great War Presentation by Chris George at Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia, Saturday, May 9

2009-05-02T05:11:00.000-07:00

This coming weekend I will be making a presentation on my grandfather's World War I military service in the British Army. It is going to be at a meeting of the East Coast Chapter of the Western Front Association at historic Fort Mifflin near Philadelphia Airport. For information on Fort Mifflin, hit the title above. The presentation is entitled "A British 'Grunt' in the Great War: The Service of Private George T. Matchett." Complete details on the day's program below.

My maternal grandfather, George T. Matchett, was born April 15, 1892, to a father of the same name, George Thompson Matchett, a dock labourer, and mother Margaret K. Rowlands Matchett of 177 Beaufort Street, Toxteth Park, Liverpool, Lancashire, England. My Grandad told the story that he was so weak and puny when he was born that the doctor hesitated to make out a birth certificate immediately. Therefore, his birth was not recorded for a whole month; his birth certificate reads that he was born May 15, 1892. My grandfather would live to age 94, eventually dying January 18, 1987.

In 1914, he volunteered for the Lancashire Hussars Yeomanry Regiment: given his liking of horses, it made sense for him to join a cavalry unit. At the beginning of the war in 1914, my grandfather was in the Lancashire Hussars Yeomanry regiment and he spent time in camp in the first year of the war at Rufford Park near Ormskirk and Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. I have a dogtag marked somewhat erroneously "T. G. Matchett 782 Lancs. Hrs. Y."

A year into the war, my grandfather was issued with a bicycle instead of a horse. The substitution was due to the fact that the slaughter of horses was so immense that all the agricultural horses had been rounded up, enforcing the total mechanization of British farming. Even this was not sufficient, so when no more than a tiny residue of horses remained, which were necessary to draw heavy munitions, bicycles were issued for the cavalrymen’s use.

Horseman, Passed By

Before the war, my English grandfather went
to Canada and became a cowboy on the prairie;
as war loomed, he returned home, enlisted
in the Yeomanry, ready to cry out "Hussar!"
as he waved his sabre, riding over the Huns
in their Pickelhaubes. I see him fresh and
bright-eyed with the cavalryman's leather
halter, neat pockets packed with brass bullets.
But it was, after all, the new, twentieth century,
horsepower on the way out. The high command
reconsidered, horses being shredded just as men,
and they issued the cavalry boys bicycles instead.
Later, Grandad ferried supplies to the Macedonian
front. I never got clear: did he ride a bike then?

Christopher T. George

For the rest of the war, he served in the Lancashire Fusiliers infantry, as a private. His Great War medals show on the rim that he was service no. 209450. G. T. Matchett was in the Lancashire Fusiliers 12th batallion as part of the British Expeditionary Force sent to Greece and based in Salonika (present-day Thessalonika). He told me he was involved in troop transports and supply into Macedonia while fighting the Bulgarians. In a somewhat self-deprecatory and low-key statement he told me that in ferrying these supplies to the front, "Some horses were killed, a few men as well."

He contracted malaria while in Salonika, symptoms of which would recur during his life from thence forward, as is characteristic of this mosquito-borne disease. His elder brother Billy Matchett (1889-1974) was a music hall comedian who entertained the troops, while his younger brother Harry Matchett served with a rifle company during the war.

WFA East Coast Chapter Spring Seminar
at
Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia, PA
9 May 2009

9 AM – Registration, Coffee and Doughnuts

10 AM – Christopher George, A British 'Grunt' in the Great War: The Service of Private George T. Matchett

11 AM – Tim Mulligan, World War I German Naval Records at the National
Archives: Access and Research Possibilities

Noon – Lunch On Your Own

1:30 PM – Tour of Fort Mifflin and Eighteenth Century Weapons Demonstration

3:00 PM – Program Ends

Registration Fee – $25 Per Person

Mail Checks Payable To: WFA East Coast Chapter
3116 S. 17th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19145

Directions from North: South on I-95, take Exit 15 Island Avenue/Enterprise Avenue. At end of exit ramp, you will be on Enterprise Avenue. At stop sign turn left onto Fort Mifflin Road. Follow road, through short tunnel, to the first left turn. See sign on right. After left hand turn, follow signs straight into the Fort. Free Parking is on left.

Directions from South: North on I-95, take Exit 13 - Valley Forge/West 291. Bear right and follow sign for Island Avenue. At traffic light (Hilton Hotel on left corner), turn left onto Island Avenue. At stop sign turn left onto Enterprise Avenue. At stop sign, turn right onto Fort Mifflin Road. Follow road, through short tunnel, to the first left turn. See sign on right. After left hand turn, follow signs straight into the Fort. Free Parking is on left.

Information Contact: JLaMonica@DCCC.edu or (610)355-7147

Presidential Libraries

2009-04-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

Now that President Obama has achieved his One Hundredth Day and had his "Hallmark Holiday"--or was it his "Kodak Klap on the Back"? Or his "Kutsie Klap on the Barack"? I could go on if you don't stop me.

Seriously now, readers, the following was originally written as a letter to the editor at the Washington Post but was not picked up by them, so instead you have the chance to read my words of wisdom on the vexing topic of Presidential Libraries. Get ready.

Back on December 5, in that unearthly twilight zone between Barack Obama's November 4 election night victory, George W. and Laura Bush packing their stuff up and vacating the White House, and Obama's historic inauguration back on January 20, the Post ran an editorial entitled "President Got-a-Buck? Bill Clinton's secret fundraising for his presidential library was wrong--and so is George W. Bush's."

So (big intake of breath). . . let us ask the hard question, "Why should every single new U.S. President get a Presidential Library?"

President George W. Bush was our 43rd President and Obama is our 44th President. All presidents in the modern era have had a library built in their name, beginning with the 31st President, Herbert Hoover (per the National Archives website on such libraries; hit the title above to go there. . .). But imagine if a new library was to be built for the next 44 United States presidents? Isn't this getting a bit absurd? Each time a new presidential library is built it exponentially increases the number of staff needed, not to mention equipment and other requirements, at today's spiralling costs.

True the building of yet another such library creates jobs but surely the money for building and staffing the library could be put to better use if in future the papers of presidents were to be consolidated in one location. Doesn't that sound a more reasonable solution? So in these straitened financial times, will President Obama be public spirited and be the first modern era president to found a generic United States Presidential Library that will henceforth hold his papers and the papers of all succeeding presidents?

How about if former President George W. Bush, instead of founding his own library, agree to share the library of his father, past President George Herbert Walker Bush, our 41st president, in College Station, Texas? Actually, in those circumstances, the library could remain the "George Bush Presidential Library and Museum", could it not? Or would Hillary Rodham Clinton, if she should become president, agree to share a library with her husband? Something to think about.

In this perilous world economy when we citizens of the United States and people worldwide have to tighten their belts, how about if U.S. Presidents were to be reasonable about the need to build future presidential libraries each in their name? And one other thing, concerning the mere matter of bucks, to get back to the theme of the Post editorial, "President Got-a-Buck?", couldn't the donors who are donating to build yet another presidential library put their funds to much better use giving it to humanitarian charities or other worthy causes.

Dad Never Read Novels

He was more of a Newsweek-
Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite man,
but before he died when ill he read
steamy big gamehunter type novels,
on the scent of rhino and cougar.

Dad would rage about the plots
just like he'd rage at the news and
the folk who "climb on the taxpayer's
back." I found a couple of saucy
paperbacks hidden in his closet,
checked the well-thumbed bits.

He read my would-be novel,
offered persnickety edits,
always missed the big picture,
complained that I was being mildly
porno (tho' it was more pun-
ography). He had begun in the UK as

an English socialist, grousing
about Harold Macmillan and
people who "never had it so good."
Argued about America's need for
socialized medicine. But latterly

he'd developed a passion for
talk radio. I feel certain
he'd long forgotten Labour.
I have the notion that today
he'd love Rush Limbaugh.

Christopher T. George

Softly, Softly, April Morning

2009-04-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

Softly Softly, April Morning

Ah! I'll settle for tulips, after
being told off last evening by
a fellow rider on the Marc train
for allegedly trying to photograph
passengers. The blooms won't object!
Won't sue or make me feel blue: I
just stand in the D.C. rain and snap
away in the Smithsonian Gardens,
just me and my cellphone cam
under my umbrella with the raindrops
pit-patter above my head, whoah whoah.

Christopher T. George

Poe's Statue, University of Baltimore

Newly out in The New Yorker is a fine essay, "The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror" by Jill Lepore in which Lepore provides a good perspective on the writer. The essay might anger some Poe fans since it paints him as a habitual liar and con artist. What else is new? Access Ms. Lepore's article through the link in the title to this post. Do NOT throw ripe tomatoes at your computer screen!!!! And don't forget my upcoming talk and tour on "The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe" in Baltimore. I am depending on you to sign up for the talk and tour. If I don't get enough people to sign up, I might just have to do it in cyberspace. Ha ha.

Don't Go Quite As Far

I don't drive quite as far, in the Spring air,
--travel north of Bel Air, to the old Booth
mansion, where John Wilkes dreamed his
dreams. At B and N, to promote my Poe talk
(coming class I hope to teach, signups low),
I hand out all my flyers, to each and each.

Deliver my fervent promo, keep dreaming
my dream. Then, seeing I am at B and N,
I pull my punches on that Larkin poem
(the one about parents who "eff" us up),
read the milder "Annus Mirabilis" instead.

But then, up springs a young pup, borrows
my yellowed High Windows, and, surprise!
thank God, bowdlerizes it for all it's worth!

Christopher T. George

Spring Issue of Loch Raven Review Is Published!

2009-04-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

The Spring 2009 issue of Loch Raven Review is now live. To visit us go through the link in the title above. The issue features:

Poetry by Bob Bradshaw, Dan Cuddy, Dawn Dupler, Liz Gallagher, Bernard Henrie, Guy Kettelhack, Larry Kimmel, Andrea Potos, Casey Quinn, Doug Ramspeck, Paula Ray, Oliver Rice, Michael Salcman, Arthur Seeley, KH Solomon, and Ray Templeton.

Fiction by Stephanie King and John Riebow.

Five poems by Ernest Bryll translated from the Polish by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka and a story by Al Mahmud translated from the Bengali by Ahmede Hussain.

Christopher T. George interviews C.E. Chaffin and reviews Chaffin's Unexpected Light: Selected Poems and Love Poems 1998-2008, while Dan Cuddy weighs in on Stranger At Home, An Anthology: American Poetry With An Accent, edited by Andrey Gritsman, Roger Weingarten, Kurt Brown, and Carmen Firan.

Here is a powerful little poem by C.E. Chaffin:

Baby

It’s 4:30 AM, pitch-black and cold.
I spoon against your body
wishing there were no cotton
to separate us, not even skin.

I want to crawl up your tunnel
and hide deep in your belly
before the sun exposes me.
Let me re-gestate, please.

Maybe this time it will be better,
maybe this time I won’t end up
clinging to you like a life raft
in the shipwrecked night,
forty and terrified.

If you should wake
and want to make love
I may stay inside forever.

C.E. Chaffin

C.E. Chaffin with his dog, J. Alfred Prufrock, whom he describes as “my little English butler with a Japanese provenance.”

Upcoming Events Featuring Christopher T. George

2009-04-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

Barnes and Noble Poetry Book Fair, Bel Air, Maryland, Sunday, April 19 at 2-6 p.m.

A smorgasbord of featured readers, open mic, and music hosted by Harford Poetry Society. Readers include Christopher T. George, Clarinda Harriss, Leslie F. Miller, Dr. Michael Salcman, and Colleen Webster. Barnes and Noble, Tollgate Marketplace, 620 Marketplace Drive, Bel Air, MD 21014. Tel. 410-638-7023.

Edgar Allan Poe in 1848

Also poet and historian Christopher T. George will be teaching a one-evening class with a day tour of sites associated with Poe in the Kaleidoscope program at Roland Park Country School on "The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe." The class will discuss the mystery of Poe's death here in Baltimore in October 1849 as well as his many connections to the city.

Class night Thursday, April 30, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, with field trip, Saturday, May 2, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Download the Kaleidoscope program in pdf form through the title to this blog listing or call (410) 323-5500 x 3045 with any inquiries.

Happy Christmas, Everyone!

2008-12-23T23:49:00.000-08:00

Santa Comes But Once A Year But to the Jolly Old Elf It Feels Like a Lifetime--You Try It, Pal!

bells!
candles!
frosty!
Santa. . .
punch!
-- drunk!

"Wake up, Ma and Pa, Santa's
drinking the spiked eggnog!"

"I need shhhhomethin'
strong!
It's cold lugging
all these
presentsssshhhh
from place
to place!
Not to menshun
trying to get
down those
chimblies
with my
big fat tum!

"So, ho ho ho,
kiddies, I'll just
have another
lil nip to
warm myself up."

"Presents!!!!!
Presnentshhh!!!!!!
Preshenshhhhh!!!!!!!!
Prushunshhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!
Spruchunzzzshhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!"

*Hic*

Christopher T. George

Let me wish you all the best of the season. Happy holidays and a great 2009 upcoming. I hope the new year will be everything you hope it will be. Good health and prosperity!

Chris

Chris George Speaking on the War of 1812 tonight in New York City

2008-11-14T00:46:00.000-08:00

Friday evening talk
November 14, 2008
7 pm to 9 pm

Scottish, Scots Irish, Irish, African Americans and Jews in the Battle of Baltimore, September 1814

Christopher T. George, The War of 1812 Symposium

Room 6-495
CUNY Graduate Center
Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York City

I will be in New York City Friday and Saturday. Starting on Friday morning, I will be taken around New York City by NYMAS members in a silver Lincoln, no less, to see sites associated with the NYC area Revolutionary War battles. The reason I am doing this, in addition to interest in the events of that time, ins that is has some relevance to the talk I will be giving, in that the first slide I will show in the Powerpoint presentation I will give relates to a British soldier who was involved in events both in New York in 1776 and later in Baltimore in 1814. Full details to be revealed tonight.

Bad Blogger

2008-10-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

Yes I know I really don't keep this blog up as I should. It's no secret. I am involved in too many things, such as leading a War of 1812 tour of Baltimore last weekend. Here I am at the beginning of the tour outside the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House in Baltimore, photograph courtesy of Californian Daniel Slosberg during the tour at A Banner Weekend. Thanks, Daniel.

Daniel is in the process of writing captions for the photos. I have though added a number of comments to go along with some of the photographs. Daniel is working up a presentation on Francis Scott Key and the writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." He is a re-enactor and musician who performs "A Musical Journey Along the Lewis and Clark Trail" (see http://www.cruzatte.com/). He wanted to know what connection California might have to the War of 1812 and I was able to tell him that Commodore Robert Field Stockton, for whom Stockton, California, is named, was an aide to Commodore John Rodgers during the Battle of Baltimore.

Last Sunday was a brilliant sunny day for the tour, just perfect, and the timing of the day just turned out just right. I plan to do a lot more of these tours as I ease from doing "real work" and wish to spend my retirement giving tours and lecturing.

Christopher T. George, Baltimore Reading, Sunday, May 18: Come and Hear Me!

2008-05-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

New! 2 HEADS Series
Clayton Fine Books
317 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
Tel. 410-752-6800

The concept of this series is to feature writers with "day jobs" that, for the most part, appear (at least at first glance) to be different from their artistic proclivities. Each featured writer will share his/her work interspersed with comments/insights as to how that work is or isn't influenced by the "day job." An audience/writer Q&A follows the reading.

The 2 HEADS Series will take place at (and in support of as it's closing in 7 months and will be a loss dearly felt) Clayton Fine Books (Cam and Donna Northouse, proprietors). This bookstore/café (just a hop, skip, jump from the Enoch Pratt Free Library), in a charmingly renovated two-story building, offers some 35,000 out-of-print books in literature, fine arts, history, and biography.

The 2 HEADS Series is offered on the Third Sunday of the month at 3 p.m. - beginning May 18 and running through October 19.

So, please plan to join us and grab a sandwich, soup, or snack while sipping some of the amazing coffees and teas at the wonderful café that’s part of Clayton Fine Books.

May 18 ~ The 2 HEADS Series opens with Christopher T. George ~

Christopher T. George has had poetry in Poet Lore, Smoke, Bogg, Lite, Maryland Poetry Review, and online at Crescent Moon Journal, Electric Acorn, Melic Review, Painted Moon Review, Pierian Springs, the poetry (WORM), and Web Del Sol Review. His work has been anthologized in Poets Gone Wild Anthology (Wild Poetry Press, 2005), Mind Mutations: A Collection (Sun Rising Press, 2005), and Living on Hope Street, a collection honoring the naming of Liverpool, England (Chris's home town) as European Capital of Culture 2008.

Chris is also the editor of Desert Moon Review and an editor at Writer's Block Poetry Workshop Additionally, he is co-editor, with Jim Doss, of the electronic and print magazine Loch Raven Review.
~~ Day Job: Medical editor at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Washington, D.C. since 2000.

Your cheerful hosts for The 2 HEADS Series are Reginald Harris and Rosemary Klein - operating under the aegis of The Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society (MSP&LS) and Three Conditions Press.

First Snowfall, Union Station, Washington, D.C., December 5, 2007

2007-12-06T11:28:00.000-08:00

First Snow: Union Station

Eddie the Baseball Umpire disgorges
me from his Red Top Cab; I'm staring
down at pansies drowned in wet snow;

snap the vignette with cameraphone
despite sleet pinging my cheek.
I'm going home on wings of eagles!

Or just the mudslush MARC, ha ha.
Slurred footprints in snowgrass,
sugared holly, oak--holy smoke!

Cabs stream and surge, bus lurches,
grim commuters haul their lives;
giant wreaths hang like bagels

on facade. Whisky-breath, sackcloth bum
craves a buck. I refuse, smoke my cigar,
watch him lurch through the glass doors.

Then I bustle for MARC to the Big B:
bum's passed out on the marble floor,
Smoky-Bear-hatted cops bent over him.

Christopher T. George

Here are some cellphone photographs of the light snow covering we received yesterday in Washington, D.C., the first snow of the year in the Baltimore-Washingon metro region. My Samsung camera is out for the count... maybe needs a new memory card - I change batteries and it just seems dead, and i don't have a power cord (got the cam second hand). If anybody has any ideas, let me know. :(

All the pics are at Union Station after I was dropped off by the red cab driven by Eddie the Umpire, as noted in the poem. Eddie, an older black cabbie, surprised me by saying that when he doesn't drive a cab he is a baseball umpire.

First a shot of pansies in a flowerbox covered by the snow through shots of the front of the station and forecourt with taxis and buses and the Columbus monument in the distance, ending with a shot of one of the three large Christmas wreaths hung on the station facade before I ran for my train to Baltimore!

Peace Is Just a Word

2007-11-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

Peace Is Just a Word

I stroll the National Mall this cool fall morning;
yellow leaves sift from an elm as joggers crunch

pebbles between the white Capitol dome, surmounted by
the effigy of Liberty with eagle-headdress, sun-rose-

red needle of Washington's monument. A group of U.S.
Marines thunder by, scarlet banner flapping, gripped

by the lead runner. They holler, "Sound Off!"
Swathes of sweat stain gray tee shirts; they thud

by the Hirshhorn museum's outdoor sculpture garden,
no-nonsense bronze of a Henry Moore nude, the grim

figures of Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais." A plump
mockingbird ascends to the contorted topmost branch

of Harry Lauder's Walking Stick and commences to sing.

Christopher T. George

Thanksgiving is tomorrow and there is much to be thankful for and there is much to regret and decry. Life as ever is alloyed, never truly joyful nor totally bleak. Lord save us.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton's 270th birthday celebration, Baltimore, September 22

2007-09-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

It's unusual for me to find an event in which I can combine my interests in creative writing and history, but I will be doing just that, reading a number of recently written poems with a historical theme for the Charles Carroll of Carrollton 270th birthday celebration on September 22nd here in Baltimore.

The Carroll Mansion at 800 E. Lombard Street in Old Town, Baltimore, is pleased to announce Charles Carroll of Carrollton's 270th birthday celebration on September 22nd. Charles Carroll (1737-1832) had many accomplishments throughout his long life: the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and only Catholic signer; lawyer and politician; Maryland delegate to the Continental Congress; United States Senator. (Click on the title above to access the Wikipedia entry on Charles Carroll.)

The organizers have separated his accomplishments and interests into several themes. Artists and poets have created works that express the concepts of industry and innovation, revolutionary thinking and building a new nation, and the strength of family.

John Davis, Danny Jones, Brian Kaspr, Mike McNeive, Molly McNulty, and Carlos Vigil will all be exhibiting work for this one time event. I, Christopher T. George, along with Anne Bracken, Shirley Brewer, and Matthew Smith will share our respective works as they relate to the themes of Charles Carroll's life.

The organizers say, "Join us for light fare and drinks as we celebrate history, art, and poetry."

Following are a couple of the poems I have written especially for the event:

The Last Signer

To Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737–1832)

Yes, I outlived them all:
the great and the powerful,
John Hancock, old Ben Franklin,
George Washington, Tom Jefferson. . . .

Born in an era of coaches and saddles,
I lived to see railway lines straddle
the land, even saw gas lights
illuminating Old Town at night!

Such new-fangled things in a new nation!
As faith brought promise of salvation
under the great dome of our Basilica,
we’d steamboats and Maryland rye liquor!

So far now we have come from our unease
with the King’s taxes. I was pleased
thus to sign for our Independence:
Yes! I signed my name, clear as a song:

"Charles Carroll of Carrollton"!

Christopher T. George

Eager to Serve

To Lt. Col. John Eager Howard (1752–1827)

Eager to fight the Redcoats at Cowpens,
to send Bloody Banastre Tarleton packing!

Eager to tell the old wagoneer Gen’l Morgan,
the day was still ours at Cowpens to be won!

Eager to allow the Frenchies of Rochambeau
to camp in my Howard’s Woods, good show!

Eager still to continue the fight at Eutaw Springs!
Although there my shoulder wound grievously stung!

Eager to win and woo my dearest Peggy Chew,
to unite Chews with Howards, Eagers, our few!

Eager to serve the people of my state as governor,
I sat in Annapolis and governed for many a year.

Eager when the Redcoats again came calling
to say that though I was too old to take the field

I’d rather see the city of Baltimore laid in ashes
and my four sons weltering in their own blood

than see the city taken by those Britishers!

Christopher T. George

I will also be reading some of the poems I wrote for the Liverpool 800 site since they fit with themes of Charles Carroll's era. Referenced in the above poem is "Bloody" Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, the Liverpool-born dragoon whose defeat at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina on January 17, 1781.

Banastre Tarleton by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Banastre Tarleton

Me name’s Banastre Tarleton; do you remember me?
I was "Bloody Ban" for all those things I did with glee
against the Patriots that George Washington thanked
for fighting to make Mad King George’s colonies free.

The son of merchant John Tarleton, a mayor of Liverpool:
I was a red-haired runt racking up debts at university,
headed to be a wastrel, a gambling, whoring, drunken fool,
but when I entered the army, all changed quite dramatically.

I was the smart dragoon in green uniform, plumed helmet;
I made my name capturing the Americans’ General Lee,
went down to the south and became the enemy’s scourge;
at Camden, Guilford Courthouse, I made the enemy flee.

Aye, I was Lord Cornwallis’s right-hand man, his enforcer,
I hunted down Buford’s men, gave them no quarter
at the Waxhaws. We cut them down: a sight to see.
We almost turned the tide in the south, dem me!

Got wacked by Morgan at the Cowpens, blast the fellow!
But I chased their celebrated Tom Jefferson from Monticello.
Then we British defeated Nat Greene at Eutaw Springs.
Argh, though I lost two of my blessed fingers, poor things!

Yes, I tell you truly, the war there was ours for the taking,
but the French, those yellow curs, once again did us dirty.
Rochambeau and Washington bottled us up at Yorktown.
On that sad, dishonoured day, we laid our weapons down.

I returned to Liverpool a hero: the dashing cavalryman.
I held up my mutilated hand and people cheered me on:
fishwives with branches of green shouted for Ban!
To them, I was no bloody fiend -- I was their champion!

I stood for Parliament; after a disappointment, took my seat!
As MP for Liverpool, Tarleton would never admit defeat!
I defended slavery -- you might see that as a blight on me.
It was the Tarletons’ trade -- ‘twas what made Liverpool rich!

The King made me a Baronet: Gen. Sir Banastre Tarleton.
Some prefer abolitionist Roscoe, by whom I was chastised,
but I died honoured. To Yanks, I’m Bloody Ban, yet I was
a warrior, never apologised for the colourful life I had led.

Christopher T. George

Because Charles Carroll of Carrollton lived into the Railway Age, his last public act being when he laid the cornerstone for the Carrollton Viaduct of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on July 4, 1828, I thought the following poem might be appropriate to read.

William Huskisson, Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was the first man killed by a steam locomotive. He was mortally injured at Chat Moss during the grand opening of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway on September 15, 1830. Author William Garfield in his book, The Last Journey of William Huskisson, chronicles the MP’s chronic accident proneness which afflicted him his whole life down to the accident which killed him.

Unlucky Husky

To be known as the first man
to be killed by a train
-- what awful luck!

You were our plucky MP,
in your prime when
you were struck,

as Stephenson’s "Rocket"
knocked you down;
now God’s got you
in his pocket.

Christopher T. George