“Shiver me timbers Philip. At this rate I’ll never get to my Kraft dinner.” – South Park
I defeated my school’s chess champion in two moves. Guess football and wrestling came in handy.
I apologize for the Lame Repost, but by the time I got to sit down to write, without even the start of a first draft, it was 11pm, and the morning comes early. So, please enjoy this Lame Repost from back in 2021.
Last week Remus, the late proprietor of the Woodpile Report came up in the comments. Mike in Canada (one of Canadians that the triumphant armies of the right, good, and true will spare when we kick off Operation Leafblower: The Cleansing Of The North, which is scheduled right after we finish Operation American Commie And Collaborationist CEO Helicopter Drop) made this comment:
“If you could have dinner with anyone, whom would it be? Remus. I would have given a great deal to have met him and had a conversation. I miss him very much. . . Tuesday mornings just aren’t the same now.”
That hit a nerve with me, for several reasons. The first time any of my posts received any notice of any kind was on his site. I’ll admit, I asked him to read it via email. And he did read it, and posted it on one of his weekly musings. Then, we emailed each other back and forth several times.
I still have his website bookmarked. I can’t really bring myself to delete it, because I read it weekly for years even before I was featured on it.
I miss him very much, too.
Remus was very special to many readers and writers, primarily because it was obvious: he was a reluctant warrior. Like many of the posters here, and many of the blogs I frequent, he wanted no part of this. He wanted peace, but circumstances kept dragging him back in.
In my case, I wanted to post funny stories and make fun of the events of the day while mixing in whatever wisdom I could scrape from the ages. Oh, and add in some bikinis. Why?
Because they’re bikinis.
Duh.
I watched a two-part series about the bikini. It was very revealing.
But Mike’s question remained: who would I want to have dinner with. Remus is a wonderful answer, but I excluded him and other commenters/fellow bloggers from my list. Also, I excluded dead family members, and religious figures and, of course, Deity.
Why? Well, I’m the one writing this post. My youngest experience (this really happened) with Jesus was when I was coloring a picture of him in Sunday School. I colored him purple. The nice Sunday School teacher said, “Johnny, Jesus wasn’t purple.”
My rejoinder? “Well, he’s God, so if he wants to be purple, he can be purple.”
The Sunday School teacher sighed. So, yeah, I haven’t changed. Besides, I’m sure Jesus could drink me under the table if He chose to, purple or not, so it’s not fair including Him on the list.
That being said, I have several categories. The first is, who, in history, would I like to have dinner with?
George S. Patton, Jr.
Since the age of five, I’ve been fascinated with Patton. How fascinated? So much so that my high school history teacher ordered a documentary film on him for our US History class, just for me. When the lights went down and the projector started and his baby picture showed up even before the title showed – I yelled, “Patton!”
Yup, this was the picture.
My history teacher smiled.
Sure, Patton wasn’t fighting the best the Germans could throw at him. Sure, he had intelligence information from Enigma knowing what the Germans would do (sometimes before they knew) but he was hip-deep in the intrigue and politics that created the postwar world.
He didn’t know all the dirt but he knew a lot of it. Plus, the man knew a good cigar and a bad commie from a thousand miles away. Dewey couldn’t defeat Truman in 1948, but I bet George S. Patton could have rolled over him like a Sherman tank.
Imagine the world with Stalin staring down Patton at the start of the Cold War. Commies in the State Department? They’d be hanging from lamp poles, and Patton would have led the columns of tanks entering Red Square when Stalin had used his one and only atomic bomb.
Stalin’s grave? It’s a communist plot.
This wouldn’t be any silly single-course dinner. This would be a full-on dinner that would last for hours and end with cigars and brandy on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean on a cool autumn night.
Besides, who would pick better food or cigars for a dinner than Patton?
Who would I skip?
Einstein. He looks like he smells like cheese, and not in a good way. Also he seems like he’d be sort of like that guy who mumbled to himself in the back of the class and rocked back and forth.
Honorable Mention:
Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton did more in any three years of his life than 99.999% of humanity will ever do in a full lifetime. Me? I want to understand what he learned about things other than physics, which are largely lost to history. Downside? I’d need to record it all because I’d want to hear it again and again. Other downside? How can you compete with that hair?
Okay, both Brian May and Isaac Newton have doctorates. Only one of them had groupies.
Who would I like to get into a (no weapons) fight with?
Alexander the Great. I’m pretty sure that 18 year old me could dust the floor with 18-year-old Alexander the Great. Check that. I’m certain I could take him. But if I lost?
“Yeah, I remember the time that Alexander the Great just barely beat me.”
For me, it’s a no-lose situation. For him? My first thought was it would be pretty embarrassing. But, after thinking about it, if Alexander lost a fight to someone who came from 2400 years in the future just to kick his butt? Also a cool story.
Seriously, Alexander would be toast, though.
Who would I skip?
18-year-old Chuck Norris. I don’t have a death wish.
Honorable Mention:
18-year-old Genghis Khan. I hear he was tough, but it might be worth it. While a challenge, since 8% of the men living in the former Mongol Empire are his descendent I’d get to say, “Who is your daddy now?” to millions of dudes. Me? I’ll turn Genghis Khan into Genghis Khannot.
Genghis was tough as a child. I remember when he took his first steppe.
Discarded:
Karl Marx. It would be like hitting a fat, slow and stupid bug, and give me zero satisfaction. And it wouldn’t stop communism, even if I gave him a swirlie and an atomic wedgie. Someone would come along and write the “something for nothing” manifesto.
Have a (few) beer(s) with:
Ben Franklin.
I think Ben knew all the dirt on all the founding fathers. If not, I think he would have an excellent collection of ye olde fart jokes. Failing all of that? Rumor has it he was quite funny when toasted. Plus, he was rich enough to buy really good wine.
Who would I skip?
Any Kennedy. Never drink with a Kennedy. Any Kennedy. And never, ever, drive with a Kennedy.
But if Teddy was driving, he would have drowned.
Honorable Mention:
Andrew Jackson. Skinny as a rattlesnake and twice as mean. He’d probably take you to strange bars that weren’t on the map because they were in someone’s basement or on their back 40 that you’d have to shoot your way out of. Since Andrew Jackson was invulnerable to weapons like Wolverine®, just stand behind him.
Who would I like to be on a long airline flight with?
This one was hard. When I used to be on long flights, I pulled out my book as a shield to not talk to the person next to me. Who would I want to be stuck next to for four to six hours as I jetted across the country. There’s only one answer:
Elvis.
Okay, just kidding, since he would probably eat my in-flight meal. He’d want my hunk-a hunk-a airplane nuts. The tough part of this answer is that you’re going to be trapped with this person for hours. So, if they’re a jerk? Yeah. Hours of that. So, I think I’d choose Mark Twain. Worst case is that he’d tell you stories. Best case?
He’d tell you stories. Some of them might even be true. And it would be fun to fight alongside Twain after some Stewardess told him he couldn’t light up an epic stogie in flight.
Who would I like to choose but I’m afraid he’s a jerk and I’d end up hating a legend?
Steve Martin. I love Steve Martin’s work, and think he has a lot of genius and wisdom behind it. That being said, being famous for, oh, nearly fifty years just might have jaded him to people. Maybe. And I’d hate to think that a national treasure like Steve was a, well, jerk. Plus I bet Twain could take out a stewardess with a single punch.
Honorable Mention:
Quentin Tarantino. I know he’s a jerk, but I think I’d love to argue with him for six straight hours when he couldn’t escape. That sounds sort of fun. And if he was a real idiot? I bet I could make him smell my unwashed clothes from the trip.
Who under no circumstances would I want to be on an airline flight with?
Gilbert Gottfried or William Shatner. Gottfried for obvious reasons, and Shatner because every time he’s on a flight something is on the wing trying to rip the engines out.
Don’t worry – William Shatner would never run a criminal enterprise.
All of that being said? I think Mike is right. I think Remus would have been a wonderful dinner companion.
Who are your choices, and (for more fun) what categories did I miss? One category I drew a blank on was “who would I like to work for” and then I thought of Jesus again.
He would know when I was goofing off.
Dangit. He already does.
You are so right about a dinner with Remus. I would not be eating much so I could write down every single thing he said. I miss him every day. Not just the advice, but the historical photos and the meandering discourse (always interesting) that followed. Still have him bookmarked too.
Yup. A good guy.
besides all the great info, advice, and opinion; the artwork Remus would put up every week was fantastic too
And the pictures from the past . . .
With interpreters, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte. Then Remus. Then George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson. Maybe Ronald Reagan.
Stonewall would be very, very interesting.
I will take the easy category.
Who would I like to have dinner with?
Kaibara Ekiken, Japanese samurai, scholar, and naturalist (A.D. 1630-1714)
Alexius Comnenus, 11th Century Byzantine Emperor (A.D. 1081-1118)
Constantine XI Palaiologos, Last Emperor of Byzantium (A.D. 1404-1453)
Epictetus, Stoic Philosopher (~ A.D. 50 – 120)
And, of course, definitely Ol’ Remus if he was in the running. I truly miss him and his commentary.
(And John, nice turn of phrase. I think “Reluctant Warrior” applies to many.)
A very nice batch. Why not Seneca?
I wish I could have dinner with the names on that vast genealogy chart of mine from the great-grandparents I never met on backwards in time. They are all just names, eight of them at this level, then sixteen, then thirty-two, lots of gaps in a branching tree going back 500 years to my direct paternal ancestor Andrew Robeson Jr. from Scotland in the mid 1600s – and the hundreds of equally important men and women who were contributors to ME that were his contemporaries. But all of them lived their own unique life of decades in a world so unlike my own, and their lived experience would be as much a snapshot of history as that lived by Patton or Kahn – all lost today. And those are lived lives I wish I knew more about, and of the personalities who lived them.
My own blindingly brilliant insights and deep profound wisdom (ha ha ha) will be lost to my own descendants 400 years from now. But with their endlessly entertaining brain implants spinning the web of a fantastic virtual world I can’t even imagine, they won’t care.
Or, they might hunt Elk in what is now St. Louis. Who can say?
Yeah, but I bet your horse doesn’t have as good a name as Alex the Great’s horse – Bucephalus. Unless of course, yours was named Secretariat. Or Silver.
Nope, Alexander wins by a mile.
I emailed with Remus regularly, like myself he was an Engineer. He would be a good choice, here’s my favorite quote:
“Middle class America is no less violent than any other people. They seem passive because they’re results oriented. They rise not out of blood frenzy but to solve the otherwise insoluble. Their methods of choice are good will, cooperation, forbearance, negotiation and finally, appeasement, roughly in that order. Only when these fail to end the abuse do they revert to blowback. And they do so irretrievably. Once the course is set and the outcome defined, doubt is put aside. The middle class is known, condemned actually, for carrying out violence with the efficiency of an industrial project where bloody destruction at any scale is not only in play, it’s a metric. Remorse is left for the next generation, they’ll have the leisure for it. We’d like to believe this is merely dark speculation. History says it isn’t.” – The Late Ol’ Remus
And that is what is coming friends
And as far a Jesus Christ goes if you are a Believer you WILL dine with Him.
Point taken.
I can’t think of any famous person I would like to have dinner with, but wonder which one would like to have dinner with me? I’d even foot the bill, as long as they don’t suck their teeth after eating.
Hahahaha!
Here’s an interesting throwback to Wednesday’s topic of volcanos and global warming. I commented that we are just now slowly coming out of an ice age that has left ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica, killing all life there and leaving them as barren wastelands. This ice age is an unnatural event and the Earth is warming up naturally to bounce back from this and return to “normal”. Any human warming caused by hydrocarbon burning that produces smog or CO2 is only helping to heal a frozen planet and bring life back to entire continents – even at the minor inconvenience of coastal flooding that will force humans to resettle some of their cities.
Well, a big report has come out showing the supporting evidence for this viewpoint. It is currently colder now on Earth than it has been for the last 500 million years – and the natural trend upward to more normal temperatures (that blip upward at the end of the chart) began before human civilization began to add to it. At the scale of that chart, human civilization of 5000 years doesn’t even register as a single pixel.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-09-20_12-56-21.png?itok=Lz9sDJ4N
.
Yes, and in tie, it’ll be a might too toasty, but that’s the Sun, again.
So. Nix on Einstein, Marx, Gilbert Gottfried, Shatner, and Jesus?
Hmmm.
Jesus only because my worthiness factor is low 🙂
Two can play the recycling game:
I too was touched by the Remus Effect.
Every time my scribblings were made mention of on his page, I felt like I’d gotten an A+ on my test that week, and was never anything less than deeply satisfied I’d made the cut that week.
As to this line:
“Don’t worry – William Shatner would never run a criminal enterprise.”
You are herewith sentenced to watch “A Piece Of The Action” and “Mirror, Mirror” from TOS, serially, until you recant.
And 50 geek points will be deducted from Gryffindor for your error.
Guests:
Twain, Newton, Franklin: sure. Of course.
Shakespeare, for certain.
Mozart.
Aristotle.
Patton: did I mention the time I got pneumonia in college, and spent an entire college semester in the library, reading the 1800 page two-volume Patton Papers cover to cover, plus War As I Knew It, and every other scrap I could find on the man, and making notes as if it was a college thesis? So hell yes. But I want Chesty Puller there as well. And Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Stonewall Jackson. Along with Napoleon and Custer.
Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz.
After dinner would be spent with bags of army men at the pool table, followed by epic matches of Risk.
Refereed by Shelby Foote and David McCullough.
Both Hitchens: Christopher, and Peter.
I’d sit Thomas Edison down next to Franklin.
And Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. on either side of Shakespeare, across from Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Peter O’Toole, Kenneth Branagh, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Paul Newman.
Peter could give the blessing, and he should bring Mary Magdalene as a dinner guest.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as a matched set.
John Cleese and Michael Palin, same deal.
Bob Uecker.
Michael Crichton.
Louis L’Amour.
Edgar Allan Poe.
And at the head of the table, next to me: Robin Williams. O Captain, my Captain!
At the far end of the table: Ronald Reagan. And Teddy Roosevelt.
But you’re missing some guests.
Female guests.
Let’s bring in Helen of Troy; I want to see her in person, hear what the fuss was about, and get her side.
Queen Elizabeth I, without a doubt.
Marie Curie, to sit across from Newton.
Marilyn Monroe and Maggie Smith.
Judy Garland.
Carrie Fisher.
Emily Dickinson, across from Edgar.
Agatha Christie.
Next to me on the other side: Kim Cattrall. (I met her once IRL, for 2 minutes, and she was kinder and sweeter, looking like hell and dog-sick, in that two minutes, than people I was married to were their entire born lives. I’d love to spend an evening with her at her best.)
Party to start on Friday night, and go three meals a day and all the weekend, until the wee hours Monday, weekly, for at least a year. My party, my rules.
Oh, and I’d invite Chuck Norris and Karl Marx, along with Lenin, Mao, and Castro, but I’d arrange it so they all met separate from the other guests, in an anteroom with two-way mirrors, so the rest of us could watch the entertainment when they were introduced. Five men enter, one man leaves. We’ll save him a plate, and a slice of desert.
Skip?
Goethe.
Anyone who ever wrote, sang, or performed in opera. Anywhere. In any language.
Hemingway.
Douglas MacArthur.
Have a beer with?
Sam Adams. I don’t drink, but we could talk a little treason anyways.
On a plane?
Bob Newhart and Johnathan Winters.
But only if we sat next to the cabin intercom, which they’d take turns snatching when the flight attendants were busy, and alternately scaring hell out of or ripping to the floor with laughter, the entire passenger list, on a non-stop from L.A. to Sydney Australia.
Fight with?
Benedict Arnold. Bare knuckles. Over and over and over. Best 200 out of 399.
And then LBJ and Robert McNamara. Tag team for them, same rules otherwise. Which would be “roller derby”.
Argue with?
Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher.
Debate lumps to be actual, not ceremonial, and awarded by Ty Cobb, with bat, or Mike Tyson, any way he wanted.
Since you asked.
Nice list. I’d omit Edison, as he would remind me of someone I used to work for – a brilliant inventor, but an insufferable ass as a human being.
I agree with your choice of Michael Crichton – he got it so right about the climate change cult many years ago before they got the power they have now. It would be interesting to hear his take on where we go from here.
Excellent list – the dinner party of all history!
If I could talk to anyone in the past, it would be Admiral Yamamoto, if I could to it around December 1, 1941. I would describe in detail his plan to bomb Pearl Harbor and blame my knowledge of it on a leak in the Imperial Japanese Navy hierarchy. I would tell him the American carriers will not be there and that the Americans know he is coming. I would tell him to leave the Phillipines alone, so he would not kill Americans there. I would tell him he can have the British and Dutch far east for his oil, rubber and iron, as the American People would not go to war over those interests.
Roosevelt gamed the Japanese into the attack, and sacrificed the men at Pearl Harbor, because otherwise the American people would never have allowed him to enter WW2. No Pearl Harbor, no Day of Infamy, and we stay out of another stupid, mostly Eurpoean, war.
Fishlaw
Well, I can’t argue there, and it has made me think of writing a post about WWII.
Interestingly missing from the comments (so far), are a couple of men that have had my interest long enough that I’d enjoy a chance for dinner and extended discussions:
– Leonardo da Vinci, and
– Nikola Tesla – preferably before he reportedly started losing his marbles.
Both were men born out of their time, and I’d love a chance to learn from them.
They were born with a unique insight, one in billions level stuff.
I had a link or two from Remus, and my feet didn’t touch the floor for days after!
As for women at that dinner, how about adding Boudica – https://infogalactic.com/info/Boudica
Too many of the most successful women are not mentioned in history. Consider that any women of more than 1/2 dozen living children in the early days of colonial America had to be extraordinary. Her offspring could not have survived without superior management of the home, hearth, and with excellent home nursing skills, as well.
How about Clara Barton and Florence Nightgale? And, even Abigail Adams, who knew everyone who was important in the American Revolution, and corresponded with many of them for years. And, ran the family farm in the absence of her husband.
Pick any handful of women who took over the family lands after their crusading husband died in a country far away, and kept them intact for her children to inherit.
Forget about Helen of Troy. How about any number of women who climbed on the wagon, and made the trek to the West? I”m in awe of their strengths.
Nice choices.