Operation AXIOM
One hundred years ago to the day (probably), 29 March 1912, Robert Falcon Scott perished, the last of his five-man party of polar explorers to succumb to malnutrition, exhaustion, & the killing cold. Scott & his men were beaten in the race to be first to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen's Norwegian party; whereas Amundsen & his men all lived, Scott lead his men to their doom. Heated debate continues to this day over whether "Scott of the Antarctic" was a hero or a villain, a victim of misfortune & the harsh Antarctic conditions or a murderously incompetent fool who lead good men to a bad end. I've not yet read any of the books on the subject & so shall withhold any direct comment on Scott's culpability. I will say, however, that my idol, of all those who participated in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, is Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922), in no small part because despite the travails of his ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition—being shipwrecked in the ice, marching across vast expanses of sea ice, & braving the frigid Antarctic waters in open boats—Shackleton brought every single one of his men home alive. Requiescat in pace to Captain Scott, Doctor Edward Adrian Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, Captain Lawrence Oates, & Petty Officer Edgar Evans.

Project MERCATOR
I played Risk this evening with my fellows from the History Club. Five individuals on four teams, three lads playing solo & two lasses playing in tandem. Mr. Red quickly established himself Down Under & put the Australian Gambit into effect; Mr. Blue drove the lasses & me out of South America & initiated Pinochle with Pinochet; the Mademoiselles Green began an Asian Simmer; & I was soon utilizing Out of Africa, with a strong defensive foothold in Europe.

Mr. Blue made a few tentative moves toward the suicidal European Hurry Up & Wait, but I responded in force & used my silver tongue to explain that Europe was too rich a prize for me to allow him to hold it uncontested; so, if he persisted in trying to seize that prize I'd be forced to stop him & we'd be locked in a death struggle while Mr. Red cultivated the Australian Gambit to our eventual doom. Mr. Blue also made a few moves toward pursuing the North American Dream, but I had a large enough contingent there to spook him; he was afraid that if he went too much on the offensive that I'm swing down into Central America & take away his continental bonus. Silly Mr. Blue, he'd have helped himself a great deal if he'd just launched an all-out assault on my fairly weak North American garrison. Mr. Red also began pursuing the North American Dream, & they went tit-for-tat, neither ever attacking except "for card." I don't feel bad about shaking on the Brazil-North Africa Non-Aggression Pact with the hapless Mr. Blue, since it was his idea. Meanwhile, I used Out of Africa to expand not northward into Europe but eastward into Asia, & the Black Raj was soon extant; I have had my most consistent success at Risk pairing Out of Africa with the Black Raj. Knowing that the Australian Gambit is the long game & Mr. Red would only grow stronger, as soon as I had the right slot in the turning-in-cards rotation I attacked Indonesia from Siam-I-Am; the rolls were with me, leaving more of my forces intact that I'd dare hope, but even with bad rolls I'd have had the numbers to make the Australian Gambit mine instead of his.

All this time, the Mademoiselles Green were simmering away in Asia, playing without an apparent strategy but accumulating cards & amassing a large, sedentary army in Kamchatka. In his pursuit of the North American Dream, focused on Mr. Blue's similar dreaming, Mr. Red had left his rear exposed & vulnerable. Once I had blasted through the large red army in Indonesia & seized the continental bonus, Mr. Red looked irrecoverably vulnerable; it took only a little persuasion before the Greens were spurred into action, wiping out Mr. Red & seizing his cards. Turning in three sets of cards simultaneously mid-turn, the Mademoiselles Green were very uncertain what to do with their new, preposterously large, poorly deployed army. They launched assaults against Mr. Blue's Asian Simmer & made his Pinochle with Pinochet their own, but their offensive fizzled before it encroached on my empire. I marshaled my forces & finished off a demoralized Mr. Blue, claiming his cards. They'd been plainly evincing fatigue; so, on the cusp of turning in cards mid-turn to launch a campaign of annihilation to win me the world entire, I proposed that we call it a game & resign ourselves to a cold war 'twixt green & black. This proposal was greeted with enthusiasm & the game night (we'd first played Apples to Apples) drew to a close.

The doctrine of "Who Dares Wins" & my calm throughout the proceedings had won me a clear psychological advantage over the Mademoiselles Green, who seemed confident that they could not defeat my global Black Raj, even though they had massive armies placed haphazardly around the globe—so haphazardly as to comprise a halfway defensive alignment: the "snake" to annihilate them would have had to have been a many-headed hydra, a proposition that poses challenges & great peril to the attacker. I was aided earlier in the game by Mr. Blue's timidity, a chillingly accurate reflection of the sorry way I used to play (&, like clockwork, lose) before I instituted "Who Dares Wins." These advantages were not mine by random chance, though, but the calculated products of my comportment throughout. Sweet fancy Moses, I love playing Risk!

Autobahn
At one point of my drive this afternoon Lumi the Snow Queen was behind an Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan. I glanced in the rear-view mirror & saw the vehicle behind was also an Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan. It's sad to think that it has been eight years since the demise of Oldsmobile, sad because such an idiosyncratic marque is gone, & because with the bankruptcies & bailouts of General Motors & Chrysler & the demise of other marques such as Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, Saab, & Mercury Oldsmobile seems to have gone gentle into that good night unnoticed & unmourned. I have a T-shirt, purchased from the R. E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, with the following emblazoned across the chest: "Before Chevy, before Dodge, even before Ford, there was Oldsmobile. Established August 21, 1897." The station wagon in which my siblings & I were ferried as wee bairns, before we in our childish idiocy advocated for our parents to adopt that weird status symbol of late 1980s suburbia, the minivan, was an Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser.

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
The Association, "Windy" from the Rhino Hi-Five: The Association E.P. (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: Yes, an argument could be made that the R.B.D.S.O.T.D. should have been "In My Merry Oldsmobile," but "Windy" was already stuck in my head before Lumi the Snow Queen became the meat in-between two pieces of Silhouette sandwich bread.