Rain

Rain
It rained today; just like the forecast said it would. I got out early and did my marketing so I only had a minimal exposure to the rain gentle readers. I did manage to bang my head as I was getting into the car after putting the food in the trunk. I think my feet may have slipped just a bit to through me off balance and not bend my back as usual.

When I had the Prelude serviced over the weekend, I replaced the windshield wiper blades because they were old and starting to go bad on me. They were not sweeping away the rain on the windshield very well.

Today was an excellent drive in the light rain. The new wiper blades swept the area clear and left it almost dry with each pass. That was a major improvement.

Of course the Prelude is not heavily water spotted and will look unsightly until I get it washed again. That maybe next year.

I had planned to visit the City’s recycling yard today and off-load a couple of broken printers and scanners as well as dump a bunch of dead batteries. Actually, the scanners work just fine. I no longer need them since my new printer is a combination printer, scanner, and copier. One of the scanners is an old, early generation sheet feed scanner. The other scanner is a simple flat bed model. In their day, which could have been ten years ago, they were perfectly suited for my needs. I think my trip to the recycling yard will happen on Saturday because it is not supposed to rain.

I can take the Pathfinder and get it out on the road for it’s once a month driving experience. I want to make sure the Pathfinder is functioning because the Princess will be driving it when she comes home for Christmas.

The Three Kingdoms
I finished The Three Kingdoms this morning. I learned a great deal about Chinese culture from reading this classic.

I learned that the Chinese tend to place a great deal of value on family honor and duty and more importantly, doing the right thing. One lord’s wife hung herself to preserve her family’s honor when her husband changed sides and surrendered the city that was given to him by his lord to safeguard, without a fight or defense. This illustrates the duplicity that seemed to abound throughout the novel.

Men would swear undying allegiance to their lord. Then, when the times got tough, they bailed out and took the best offer from the other side. To the credit of the other side, they would often kill the lord who sold out his master on the theory that it he sold out to us; he might sell out to his old master if the time came.

Punishment seemed unduly harsh. Whole clans would be executed when it was only one lord who created the transgression like plotting to over through the current government. People who were in a distant city and who had no contact with the plotters were summarily executed.

It reminded me of the Reign of Terror some 1500 years later and the great Soviet purges of the 1930s.

There is the redeeming characteristic of nobility in the novel. Many of the characters were true to their oaths and willing died because they could not serve another master in order to live.

Governments were just as base as some of the lords. Not honoring treaty commitments was a common place event; even where the treaty was bound up in blood and included inter-marriage by the respective ruling families.

I also learned that Chinese generals were often not very bright. They would regularly fall into the same traps, battle after battle. Ambush seems to have been a common tactic and highly predictable. There was no sense of a well thought battle plan. The respective generals would fight in individual combat until one died, was captured, or retreated. Then, the massed armies would engage in a close quarter battle.

I think the legion commanders from the early Roman Empire would have felt right at home. I think they would have handled the light forces better and they would have been able to make better use of the cavalry.

I was amazed the Chinese generals had little use for light or heavy cavalry. In a war where the armies had to march hundreds of miles across open land to reach the battlefield, cavalry could have been used to better scout the opposing forces and screen their own forces. Generals would not have been caught unprepared when the enemy appeared while their own battlements were still under construction and their own troops were scattered.

Doug
The Big Guy called this afternoon to see how I was enjoying, as he called it, the end of my Winter break from work.

I said I was doing fairly well. I told him that I was watching Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy as a wind up for my Winter break from work. I said that there was some truly magnificent cinematography in the first two films. I felt the sword fighting was not as good as some of the fighting in Kurasawa’s films like The Seven Samurai for example. Still, it was well worth the three or four hours that I spent in front of the television monitor.

I was stuck inside because it was still raining and it was windy and cold. Not weather to go out on the balcony and read while smoking a cigar. I could have done that but I did not want to bundle up in sweaters and jackets.

Be well and stay happy and I will try to post these blogs on time. I guess this is what happens when one spends too much time on Winter Break. [This was supposed to post on November 9th.]