mattersofthemoment

So how big is the Pacific Ocean? Bigger than the planet Mars. The world’s total land mass would fit in the Pacific with 17,000,000 sq. kilometers to spare. It covers 32% of the planet’s surface area and 46% of the Earth’s water surface. That is pretty darn big!

We crossed it twice. Once by air west to Singapore and then by cruise ship east to Hawaii via Australia. Google says it was more than 46,000 km of travel from our home near Ottawa! The circumference of the world is only 40,000 km. Hard to believe!

We loved it. After spending the winter in Nuevo Vallarta MX, we flew to Singapore. The flight from Los Angeles was 17.5 hours but on one of the best rated airlines in the world. We took some melatonin, slept for 4 to 5 hours and arrived relatively refreshed – 2 days later. Dave had lots of leg room, Marie not so much. The attendants on Singapore Airlines actually run, they are so intent on providing good service.

Our first impression of Singapore was the hundreds of freighters at anchor in the bay. Next the quick processing through immigration and customs. Singapore like many other countries now requires an Electronic Travel Authorization where they vet your passport details in advance. We were through and on our way by taxi within 30 min. of landing.

Our apartment hotel was just a few blocks from Orchard Road, the upscale shopping street of Asia and right next to a Buddhist temple. Our room had a small balcony and kitchenette. It was adequate but noisy at times. We were treated well by the hosts there.

After picking up some groceries, we walked along the picturesque Singapore River and found our way to China Town. The shopping was great as well as the people watching, the colour and the beer.

Over the ensuing 5 days we discovered the extensive underground transit system and used it to explore the Gardens by the Bay, the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, Little India, the Botanical and Orchard Gardens, endless shopping concourses and numerous outdoor food hawkers selling every kind of (cheaply priced) Asian food. We particularly enjoyed satay (chicken skewers with peanut sauce). Yum!

Did we mention how hot it was there? At just a few degrees above the equator, it was impossible to go out between 1 and 3 pm. Everyone uses a sun umbrella – one lined with a thick lining. We bought one!

Near the end of our stay we went to Raffles Hotel for a Singapore sling iconic experience!

We moved on to see the Merlion monument- half fish half lion across from the Marina Bay Sands.

Finally we attended Mass at a local church. It was a beautiful experience.

Our impressions of Singapore: exotic, beautiful, rich, modern, hot and very Asian! We were now ready to catch our cruise ship to Australia.

This is the fascinating story of sailing round the world in a 20 foot long sail boat over a 4 year period in the early 1950s. John Guzzell from Victoria, BC, built the boat and sailed her solo from east to west right around the globe. This was in an era when there was no internet, GPS etc. making it all the more an amazing accomplishment.

His love of people and places comes thru clearly making it a great read. Imagine yourself out on a small sailboat for up to 60 days at a time without any sighting of land or contact with other people.

So how does he do it? He uses paper charts and navigation techniques learned from his dad to make his way thousands of miles from island to island. But it is not that simple. He has to know the best port to enter into, the tidal times and deal with ever changing wind conditions that could dash him into rocks.

He does make use of a small outboard motor at times when there is no wind. He also has to drop all sails and ride out cyclones on several occasions. At night, the boat can actually sail and steer itself when the sails are lashed to the tiller!

All in all a fascinating first hand account of an amazing experience by a Canadian. Trekka held the world record as the smallest boat to circumnavigate the globe for a number of years. I rate this as a 9 out of 10 story even if you are not into sailing which I am not.

After reading various accounts of exactly what led to the creation of the fateful gap in the Union lines on the 2nd day at the Battle of Chicamauga, I am somewhat of the opinion it was not Rosecrans fault.

First of all who is Rosecrans and what was Chicamauga?

Major General Rosecrans (Old Rosy) was commander of the Army of the Cumberland on that fateful day Sept 20, 1863. A West Point graduate, he had worked his way up from 2nd lieutenant starting in 1842 in the Army Corps of Engineers. He was a civil engineering professor and superintendent of a coal company before rejoining the Union Army in 1861. At the Battle of Chicamauga he was in charge of 60,000 troops facing Confederate Major General Braxton Bragg who outnumbered him with 65,000 troops that day. He was generally recorded as the best general the Union had in the west and had just skilfully maneuvered Bragg out of Chattanooga with minimal losses.

The Battle of Chicamauga was fought over 2 days in Sept 1863 around the Chicamauga Creek in northern Georgia just south of Chattanooga, TN. As such it was the second deadliest of all US Civil War battles with 34,600 total casualties behind only the Battle of Gettysburg which had occurred just 2 months prior. We toured the Chicamauga site in 2012 and that was when I first learned of General Longstreet’s breakthrough and the splitting of the Union lines in the late morning of day 2.

Union General Thomas (who was to become known as “The Rock of Chicamauga” for his heroic stand later that day) was heavily attacked on the morning of day 2 by a superior number of Confed forces under Gen Leonas Polk (see above courtesy Wikipedia). He sends an aid, nephew Sanford Cobb Kellogg down the lines to the right seeking reinforcements to come to his aid. Kellogg asks Brig Gen Brannon if he would help out and move his men north to help his uncle George out. Brannon naturally reluctant to move without Rosecrans approval, awaits confirmation.

When Kellogg reaches Rosecrans headquarters, there is a naturally quite a bedlam of activity. By some reports Kellogg makes it known that Brannon had already moved out which indeed was not the case. In a panic, Rosecrans dictates an order to fill the unauthorized (and unexisting) gap to Brig Gen Wood to “close-up and support Reynolds” divisions. “Close-up” in military jargon means to link up with while “support” means to get behind of. So in fact the order was slightly ambiguous in the actual context. The order was written down by a secondary aid verbatim as Rosecrans primary aid was busy documenting other orders and would have known that Brannon had not moved out and so would have stopped the order from being issued.

So the order reaches Wood who looks left and sees Brannan is still there so there is no way to link up with Reynolds. But because he had been scolded publically by Rosecrans just that day for not promptly obeying orders, he decides the order must mean to pull back and go behind Brannan and come up behind Reynolds in support. This he does creating an unintentional gap in the Union lines that the order was meant to prevent from happening in the first place. 20 minutes later Longstreet’s Corps by chance is ordered to charge the Union line at the exact spot where Wood had just pulled out of and hence the massive breakthrough.

After thinking about this, it seems to me Rosecrans was given false information by Kellogg and possibly others which led to the debacle. Rosecrans was dismissed as a result, rather unfairly in my view.

For a somewhat supportive view of this please read the following report about the irony of this whole affair here.

So why have I bored you with the details of this? Because I made a brief presentation on this subject at our most recent National Capital Civil War Roundtable study group. See their website info here.

The Steam Ship Athenia was a transatlantic passenger liner that worked between the UK and eastern Canada from 1923 to 1939. It was the first UK ship sunk by Germany in WW II. My Aunt Joan was a passenger on the ill fated crossing and survived. 117 passengers and crew did not including Joan’s brother Alan. My cousin Anne tells the story:

“82 years ago today, on September 3, 1939, the first day of World War II, the British passenger ship “SS Athenia” was torpedoed in the North Atlantic. My mother Joan, age 6, her brother Alan, age 7, and their mother Dorothy were aboard that ship.

They had boarded 2 days earlier on Sept 1 in Liverpool. They had been visiting family in England. My grandfather Edward sent word for them to return home to Montreal early as there was talk of war starting up in Europe. And 2 days into their journey – on Sept 3, war was officially declared between Germany and England.

The ship was overcrowded and behind schedule because they had taken on extra passengers. The captain was sailing in a zig zag pattern to make up time. The windows had all been painted black to avoid detection at night. But still this was an elegant passenger ship and at 7 pm that evening, most passengers were having supper in the dining room.

At the same time a German U-boat, U-30, captained by Fritz Lemp surfaced and spotted “ Athenia” in the distance and misidentified it as a merchant ship. He fired 3 torpedoes and missed the target on the first and third but hit the ship with the 2nd. Lemp submerged so he could get closer to fire again.

On board “Athenia” there was an explosion and the ship began to list. When U-30 surfaced again they were close enough to realize they had mistakenly fired on a passenger ship but Lemp fired again and missed and then submerged and fled the scene. He did not admit his error for years and it was not officially acknowledged by Germany until after the war.

Back on “Athenia” the overcrowded lifeboats were launched. Joan, Alan & Dorothy made it into a lifeboat together but in the ensuing chaos, young Alan was lost. Joan and Dorothy, like many of the other passengers suffering from hypothermia & frost bite after spending the night in the cold North Atlantic were eventually rescued by the Norwegian ship “MS Knute Nelson”. Alan’s body was never recovered and for years afterwards whenever an orphan boy was found (as often happened during the war) my grandfather would travel to see if it was Alan. The loss of Alan was a wound that never healed in their family.

My mom died this week (on Sept 1, 82 years after boarding “Athenia”) and although she was very ill, this event was very much on her mind. She wanted to talk about it and about Alan. I sincerely hope that their spirits have finally been reunited and that the Alan shaped hole in her heart has finally been filled.”

Here is a link that lists Allen Vincent as a casuality of this monstrous war crime. Thank you Anne for telling the story.

This book written 8 years ago tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the company that invented the BlackBerry smart phone some 20 years ago. It is a detailed account of the partnership between Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis the engineer, and Jim Basillie the business executive, that changed how we live and work on a global scale. A truly fascinating Canadian story!

I came across it after watching the BlackBerry movie (2023) which I highly recommend. The movie is a humorous factual and fictional account of the amazing Blackberry story based on Losing the Signal. I watched it 3 times and will likely watch it again. The movie uses a lot of foul language, so beware.

You can watch this movie in its entirety (and many others) for free on CBC Gem.

Back to the book. I found the the BlackBerry story intriguing for 3 reasons. Firstly, I have been the addicted owner of 3 BlackBerrys over the years and was absolutely hooked on them for over 15 years. I got my first one in government in 2006 or 7 (a Quark I think). In 2010 I purchased the BlackBerry Bold and in 2015 the BlackBerry Classic which I still use as a wifi machine! Secondly, I went to the University of Waterloo and graduated in chemical engineering 6 years before Mike Lazaridis started there in electrical engineering. For 2 years I lived within a few blocks of where this story was to take place. Finally, I worked for a small high tech start up firm for 3 years (SHL Controls) and experienced the personal pressure, uncertainty and excitement that working for a fragile start up IT shop entails. I identify with the story,

The most amazing aspect of the story for me is how two (Canadian) men with totally different skill sets, interests and backgrounds, could work so congruently together for over 10 years to innovate and keep the corporate sharks like Motorola, Google, Bell South, US Robotics, Palm Pilot etc. from squashing them. Where is Waterloo Ontario anyways? Things begin to unravel when Apple brings out their iPhone in 2007 and Google licenses their Android operating system in 2008 to any handset manufacturer. The future market for non IOS or Android phones was dead for all intents and purposes. But as the book describes in great detail, it took BlackBerry management another 3 to 4 years to admit this and get out of the business. The company has since morphed into a software and services company (like Balsillie was seeking to do when he was pushed out along with Lazaridis in 2012.). Lately it is really struggling.

The authors McNish and Silcoff are veteran business reporters who know how to get the facts out clearly, Based on countless interviews of staff and management including the Co-CEOs, the book won several awards. Somewhat exhausting in detail at times, a very thorough account of the Lazaridis and Balsillie years that, when the end finally comes, it almost made me cry. Note both men are billionaires and have since sponsored several scientific and leadership institutes and think tanks since “retiring.” Overall a riveting account of a great Canadian business story, 10/10.

This is a remarkable book. Not because the author tells us what is right and wrong but because he explains what it is to be human, what humans should be and the relationship between the two, according to the world’s greatest philosophers, theologians and moral thinkers over time. If you have ever wanted to better understand what Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Mohammed, Marx, Lao Tzu, Hegel, Locke, Kant and Buddha to name a few were trying to say about who we are and how we should live, this is the book for you.

Malik exposes their contributions, contradictions, strengths and weaknesses in layman language using well reasoned argument and humour to get at the way they saw how humans are and the way (at least some of them) thought we ought to be. The way we think about moral issues has changed over time due to social change, history and different cultural perspectives. Think about the moralistic changes you have seen in your own lifetime. We are polarized between those that subscribe to rules based morals as in the monotheistic religions and those what believe we can get at what is right and wrong by using reason and science. Another trending view is that there is no objective moral code at all and that all morals are simply a matter of personal “preference”.

And he writes this book in a way as you read it you think, OK this is his favorite thinker e.g., Hegel, wow. But then he goes on in equally exuberant detail about the next thinker e.g, Nietzche only to expose his limitations and shortcomings too. Malik has no favorite thinker it seems – it is the depth and breadth of his coverage which is simply amazing.

In reading this book I discovered a couple of interesting subjects I wish to follow up on. The first is that of the largest successful slave rebellion the world has ever seen led by Toussaint L’Ouverature in 1696 Santo Domingo (Haiti). A book written years ago about this subject is now high on my list to read: The Black Jacobins. Author Malik says this rebellion was the kernel of anti-colonialism still unfolding today and is as equally as important as the French and American revolutions.

A more recent subject Malik addresses was a book written about dozen years ago entitled When China Rules the World. According to the author Martin Jacques, China is a “civilization” not a nation state, is firmly grounded in its history, has the world’s most competent government with the strongest support and has very different views of how “democracy” should work. We tend to judge China using our western lens assuming that it will become more western. Not true according to the book’s author. It is the world that will become more Chinese as China (and India) assume more global leadership and control in the not too distant future. Perhaps China is not the rogue state we have been led to believe it is. Intriguing indeed.

Just a couple of examples of how stimulating and enjoyable a read this was for me. I rate The Quest for a Moral Compass 5 full stars and will likely read it again.

In June 2013, I walked the first 200 km of the Chemin de Saint-Jacques (St. James Way) from Le Puy to Conques in France. It was more difficult than our first Camino de Santiago in Spain on account of the hilly terrain plus I was now … 3 years older. This route, also called the GR 65 – is part of the long distance walking route Grand Randonnée network and part of the European long distance paths. Sometimes I think I was born on the wrong continent since I love walking so much.

I picked up my credential booklet at the magnificent Cathedral in Le Puy. It identifies the carrier as a bona fide pilgrim entitled to stay in the various gites d’etape (equivalent to the refugios in Spain).

I also purchased a copy of an excellent Michelin map book with suggested daily walking goals for this route, as well as the Miam Miam Dodo guide book to eating and sleeping.

So there I was all ready and anxious to head out on a 10 day walking adventure. I attended the early morning pilgrim Mass at the Cathedral in front of the Black Madonna and then said goodbye to Marie over pastry. I started hiking up the steep hillside leading out of Le Puy with pauses to catch my breath.

I remember gasping for air as I continued to climb out of Le Puy. This was going to be a tough one I thought. Not sure if I am going to be able to complete this. It is the familiar ring of doubt one feels everyday on a long hike such as this. I was carrying my pack on my back but already thinking it was too heavy. However, I was soon to be rewarded with some of the most gorgeous scenery anywhere France – the central rural plateau region.

Here are a few pictures of my very first day.

I managed to make it that day to a small town called Montbonnet, a distance of about 16 km and checked into my first gite d’etape (pronounced jeet deh tap). There were 7 other pilgrims there, all women as you can see below!

I had completed my first day safely but was feeling very exhausted. Thanks be to God!