On A Meme From WidgetFox

[danieldwilliam]

My letter was R.

Something I hate: Red Sauce. I have never liked tomato ketchup. It's one of perhaps only three foods that I struggle with. If something has been touched by tomato ketchup it is contaminated.

Something I love: Radio - it's such an information dense medium but also one that allows parallel processes. Some of my happiest memories are of doing something else whilst listening to Test Match Special or one of the Radio 4 commedies. The drive through the southern Highlands to Oban on honeymoon listening to The Now Show was positively dangerous.

Somewhere I've been: Red Centre, the colloquial name for the middle of Australia. I've been to Ayres Rock and Alice, to Coober Pedy and Port Augusta. I've seen water in Lake Eyre and the New Year in the desert. There is a great deal of not very much out there and it is all red.

Somewhere I'd like to go: the Round Tops, both Big Round Top and Little Round Top at Gettysburg. It's perhaps not the most important battle of the US Civil War but it is the most famous and I admire Joshua Camberlain. I would like to see where he won his Medal of Honour.

Someone I know: Robert

A film I like: Robots - an animated film about work and life and entrepreneurship, corporate ownership and the role of capital in society. It's a searing indictment of American capitalism which offers a typcially American solution of replacing the wrong sort of capitalist with the right sort of capitalist, Daddy Warbuck and Henry Ford instead of Gordon Gecko and Enron.

If anyone else would like a letter, leave a comment!

Comments

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Ah yes - the Round Tops

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Perche?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

It's the site of a pivotal moment in the Battle of Gettysburg when, early in the battle the Confederates tried and failed to turn the Union army' flank and were repulsed by a dogged defence and finally by a famous and famously well executed downhill bayonet charge by the 20th Maine lead by Joshua Chamberlain. He, I think is one of the people who exemplfy how and why the North won. He was a college professor who left a comfortable position and joined up because he thought the cause of the Union was right and that it would only prevail if men like him took on the risk and hardship of war.

It is arguably the case that had the 20th Maine not held Little Round Top that the Confederates would have won the Battle of Gettysburg, gone on to sack Washington, DC and broken the will of the Union to carry on the war. I'm not personally of that view but there's a case to be made for it.

I'd like to go and see it because I think the topology of the place is important to the event. I'd like to understand it better.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten your fascination with the Civil War. You might be interested to talk with hano about such things sometime.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to seeing him in June.