All this Civil War activity reminds me of a wonderful book I read several years ago entitled, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. It's a collection of true stories about modern-day Southerners and the current state of the Civil War. One bit that still stands out in my mind is the examination of a "southern" town that prides itself on its Confederate heritage, somehow forgetting that it was actually on the Union side during the War.

Over the weekend PBS re-broadcast the entire The Civil War series by Ken Burns and of course, we’ve got it on TiVo now and are making our way through each episode. I’d only caught bits and pieces of this masterpiece over the years and knew it was good. But it’s simply amazing, especially when the episodes are watched in order, back-to-back. I thought I knew a lot about the Civil War but I wasn’t familiar with Union General George McClellan and his continued refusal to engage the enemy and requests for reinforcements when he already outnumbered the Confederates by tens of thousands of men.

Watching this documentary now, as America pushes towards a war with Iraq, raises many important questions in my mind. What does it really mean to fight for freedom? And what causes are so great that we commit men (and now women and civilians) to the inevitable destruction and slaughter of war? I won’t pretend to have easy answers to those questions.

Some astonishing Civil War facts:

• "Two percent of the population — more than 620,000 — died in it."
• "At Cold Harbor, Va., 7,000 Americans fell in 20 minutes."
• "During the Battle of Antietam, 12,401 Union men were killed, missing or wounded; double the casualties of D-Day, 82 years later. With a total of 23,000 casualties on both sides, it was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War."

Re-reading Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner I came across a sentence I'd underlined during some prior read, "Hard writing makes easy reading." Something I think I'll keep in mind these next few months as I try to do more writing.

Seen recently at eBay: "Click to supersize this picture." Have we abandoned all use of the word enlarge?

I've always thought there should be two versions of "so" in English, like with "to." We've got our to to indicate direction (e.g. "I'll send all my loving to you") and our too to indicate some kind of extra or excess (e.g. "Those Prada heels are too expensive.") So why not so and soo? That way something could be "soo choice" and you could be "soo sorry" while still getting a nice segue with "So, what are you doing?" And imagine the possiblities here: "I'm feeling so-so" and, when you're really feeling so-so, "I'm feeling soo-soo." Of course, we need to still pronounce the second "soo" as "so" and not "sue" or none of this makes sense. Actually, upon further consideration, there might be no way this makes sense. Except perhaps to me. You might even say it makes soo much sense to me.