An epic tragedy: “Have you ever regretted reading a book? Which one and why?”
The game: Raiders at Patriots
The beer: Jack’s Abby Post Shift Pilsner
The result: Win, 45–17
The record: 3–2
The headline: “Woo! You better watch that man standin’ there pointing the finga, just like a bee gettin’ ready to sting ya.” – Marvin Gaye, “Try It, You’ll Like It”
The commentary: I started “Sir” Max Hastings’s Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945–1975 at the end of June and finished it yesterday. I bought it on Kindle years ago, long before going out of my way to avoid Amazon products, but its listed eight hundred ninety-six pages (actually just over seven hundred fifty of non-bibliography, non-index prose) intimidated the hell out of me. Why can’t they just teach the history of Vietnam in high school?
It’s not the only thing I read in four months, as I progressed on the loveseat through several paperbacks in succession (including rare five-star-receivers in Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party and Daniel Mason’s North Woods) while reserving the darkness-friendly ebook format for bedtime. How long can you read in bed before falling asleep? Right. And how many seven-minute chunks does it take to finish a dense geopolitical/military history with little forward motion? Following North Woods I resolved dedicate myself to reading its remaining… five hundred plus pages. Sheesh.
“Regret”? No, I don’t exactly regret reading it—Robert McNamara might even walk into a bar with someone come January—but I don’t know how much I learned other than how far back it all went, and Apocalypse Now: Redux did some of that work already with the overlong colonial French bullshit. Still, I didn’t realize American responsibility predated JFK, which is interesting. And I did pull these four magnificent quotes—two hilarious and two poignant:
Eisenhower said he had been warned by the State Department that Laos was “a nation of homosexuals,” which bemused Kennedy.
Between killings, there were also spasmodic lunges into comedy. [General Creighton] Abrams was briefed on the deployment at Cam Ranh Bay of five US Navy bottlenose dolphins trained to attack swimming saboteurs. “The enemy,” said the briefer, “has been led to believe that the dolphin is trained to attack a male swimmer’s privates. Our latest information is that the enemy plan to counteract this by employing female swimmers in the future.” The general was informed that one dolphin had already deserted.
Both of these stories should be ten-episode series on Netflix.
[James] Reston wrote in the New York Times, “The time has come to call a spade a bloody shovel. This country is in an undeclared and unexplained war.… Our masters have a lot of long and fancy names for it, like escalation and retaliation, but it is a war just the same.”
None more timely.
“What was it all about?” muses [General] Walt Boomer. “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.”
Can every MAGA motherfucker be forced to read these last two every morning before breakfast? Who am I kidding, they can’t read. And they can’t afford breakfast either.
Anyway, I’m glad I read it (three stars), though I wish it spent less time on the minutia of individual sieges and more on US-based protest movements and election campaigns—George McGovern’s 1972 shortcomings got more black ink than 1968’s field of Democrats and the lost opportunity of fucking Hubert Humphrey defeating Eugene McCarthy at the convention. I mean, everything changes if Nixon faced a true anti-war candidate, right? Even had Nixon still won? Hastings doesn’t seem to care. Rats.
(If you want to learn what the Gulf of Tonkin incident was all about, though, you’re in luck! For pages and pages! Just not so much about the My Lai massacre—it’s a gaping hole in the book and there is no good reason for eschewing the kind of examination he relishes when it comes to, say, the AK-47’s superiority to the M16.)
Now to cleanse the palate with Tommy and Tuppence’s Partners in Crime stories from 1929. It’s a goddamn miracle they stayed married in the six years since The Secret Adversary—do they even like each other?
This Week’s Sign the Buffalo Bills Are Fucking Toast! DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD!
How Bills QB Josh Allen has become a star on and off the field
Athletes have been pitching products in TV commercials for almost as long as there have been TV commercials. They act. They sing. They dance. […] One thing they don’t do all that often in commercials is, well, play sports. […] It’s the way it is. Unless you’re working with Josh Allen.
“Some athletes will be like ‘I’ll give you three throws’ or ‘I’ll kick the ball four times’ or ‘I’ll run at no more than 50%’ or whatever,” said Alex Bower, former creative director. “Josh, we shot him in LA, it was a hot day. He gave us a lot of takes of him running lines and throwing the ball full pelt. He committed. We kind of used his shots heavily in the edit because it looked real because he was giving it 100%.” […]
“I just try to be myself,” Allen said when asked if there’s a trick to being a successful commercial actor. “I just kinda wing it.” […]
“He wasn’t the kind of athlete or celebrity who as soon as he’s done with his shot he’s running back to his trailer,” [executive creative director Steve] Yee told ESPN. “He’s hanging out with us and sitting amongst us at Video Village. He’s just really cool and chill.”
“He’s just curious,” [chief creative officer Bobby] Pearce adds. “He wants to look at the process. He’s like ‘Did I do that right? Did I give you what you need?’” […]
“It’s almost like he became buds with people on set a little bit, people we’ve worked with. Which is kind of unusual,” Bower said. “Athletes, or talents in general, tend to be quite cloistered and separated off. It makes sense why that would be the case. But in the small moments between takes [Allen] seemed to be joking around and being friendly with regular people that were on set.”
“People will ask me after they know what I do ‘Is this person really as nice as they seem on television?’” adds Rebekah Lyle, chief marketing officer. “I think Josh is one of those individuals where I’m always proud to say ‘Yes.’” […]
“What comes across for me with Josh is he looks like he’s having fun,” Yee says, trying to sum up why he’s proud of the ads. “I think he is. That’s a difference. A lot of times when a camera turns on, people freeze up. He’s cool as a cucumber.”
I swear to god, the guy burned down several schools or something.
Up next: What can go wrong with Geno Smith behind center? Oh right. Cheers!
