fortune-hunting for dummies

How does one become a soldier-of-fortune? Is it something you have to work hard at? Do you have to know how to be in the right place at the right time? Or do you just wind up there by chance?

In other words, do I need to work harder at becoming a reckless, wandering rogue, or do I have to wait and seize the opportunity when it arises?

I'm a romanticist. I'll confess the fact openly. Adventure calls to me. Yeah, sure, I hear you scoff. This is the 21st century. Adventures are passé. No one has them anymore. They went out the window a long time ago. The world shrank. The maps were filled in. Technology outran us. The world is safer now than it's ever been...and yet, somehow, more dangerous than ever. That means that (a) either the would-be adventurer just flails around attempting to have adventures and discovers that safety measures and fail-safes and civilization have occluded his efforts, or (b) he is immediately killed in the attempt by a heat-seeking missile or a pissed-off terrorist.

I know adventures are dangerous. I know I'm a foolhardy, air-headed young man with hardly any worldly experience. I know I probably won't last two seconds in the middle of an intrigue or a murder mystery or an international incident. But I can't stand just sitting around and having a normal life, cutting coupons and listening to talk radio. Maybe on my days off I'll do that stuff. For now, however, I seek adventure, and romantic old-fashioned adventure at that.

I've just been reading about a guy named Frederick Townsend Ward. Does that name ring a bell? I thought not. I'd never heard of him before, either. I've never seen his name in any history book. And yet I should've heard about him by now, because he led the sort of life I would've liked to have led if I'd lived in the 1800s. Or any century, really. This guy did it all: ran away to sea, filibustered in Mexico with William Walker, served under Juarez, rode from Mexico to San Francisco on a mule, enlisted in the French Army, served in the Crimean War, resigned after being insubordinate, and finally sailed to China. It's in China that he forged his most enduring legacy: training, commanding, and kicking major ass with the Ever Victorious Army in the Taiping Rebellion.

Now, here's the setup. A fellow named Hong Xiuquan (who was sort of like China's version of Joseph Smith) proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ's younger brother, set himself up as a prophet, established the Taipei Heavenly Kingdom, declared the ruling Manchu Dynasty to be decadent and sinful, and started a war that would eventually kill 20 million people.

Freddy Ward arrived in Shanghai in 1860, when the Taiping Rebellion was already a decade old. He and his brother had ostensibly come to set up a branch of their father's trading company, but Ward's biographers cite "ulterior motives" for his presence in China. Given that he had spent the last decade as a highly successful mercenary on two continents, we can hazard a guess as to what that purpose might've been. In any case, Ward's brother set up shop while Ward took a job as the executive officer on the Confucius, an armed river gunboat (commanded by a fellow American) in the service of something called "the Shanghai Pirate Suppression Bureau." This was a private paramilitary group put together by Xue Huan and Wu Xu, members of the Shanghai city government, and bankrolled by Yang Fang, a banker and mercantilist from Ningbo.

Sources are somewhat vague on Ward's service record with the Suppression Bureau, but he must've distinguished himself highly. Before the year was out Wu Xu and Yang Fang had contacted Ward and made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Impressed by Ward's lack of racism, his military experience, and his mercenary ambitions, the two Chinese men told Ward that they were organizing a new group, which would become the Foreign Arms Corps, composed primarily of foreigners who could handle firearms and were interested in a free bunk and the spoils of war. Though anxious to keep any association between the Imperial government and the Western powers a secret, Xu and Fang realized that a mercenary army was necessary. Conscripted peasants and poorly-trained Imperial officers simply weren't cutting the mustard against the fanatical Taiping rebels. Fortunately, the Chinese G-men had found the perfect man for the job. Ward immediately agreed to head up the Foreign Arms Corps. He then went straight to the Shanghai wharves and began recruiting every Westerner he could find who could shoot a gun, even if they were too drunk to hold one at the moment.

The start was rocky. Xu, Huan, and Fang were demanding financiers, and Ward was virtually their slave until he had won several impressive victories against Xiuquan's forces. This was not accomplished easily. Though Ward's rowdy crew of sailors, deserters and brigands was equipped with the latest small arms (including Colt revolvers and rifles) they had only begun to train properly before the Manchus sent them out on their first mission. Ward protested, but in vain; at his backers' urging he and his men were forced to accompany an Imperial force to recapture Songjiang, without so much as an artillery piece to back them up. The initial attack failed. The second was successful, but at a heavy price: despite reinforcements of some 80 Filipinos and a couple of artillery pieces, the 250 men of the Foreign Arms Corps lost 62 men, with 100 more wounded, including Ward himself.

Virtually the same thing happened at the town of Chingpu, the FAC's next target, and this time around, the Taiping knew they were coming. The FAC lost half its men, and Ward was shot in the jaw. The musket ball exited his cheek and left him with a speech impediment for the rest of his life.

After resupplying in Shanghai, the FAC attempted to bombard Chingpu into submission, but Li Xuicheng, the Taipings' best general, sent 20,000 men to sweep the attackers off the map. Ward's troops retreated to Shanghai to lick their wounds. Ward himself left the city for a time to get his face fixed, and one of his subordinates (H.A. Burgevine) took over. But Burgevine didn't get along so well with the Manchu management, and after some dust-ups he was arrested and died in an accident.

When Ward returned to Shanghai in 1861, he managed to get the group back together. It wasn't difficult, even after the disastrous defeats the FAC had suffered. The Corps was beginning to make a name for itself. With its advanced weaponry, the puny force had held its own against the Taiping war machine even in defeat. Ward's stock was rising with Chinese civilians. The rogues and deserters and thieves and beggars down on the Shanghai wharves loved him too. With its solid financial basis, the Corps was able to offer extremely lucrative contracts—so lucrative, in fact, that they caused several mass desertions from the British warships in the harbor. This destroyed Ward's standing among the foreign powers, who already saw him as a filibustering, money-hungry brigand and a loose cannon. His forays against the Taiping rebels threatened trade routes and destabilized diplomatic relations. So ticked were the foreign powers that they issued a warrant for Ward's arrest. Realizing that sitting in a jail cell might impede his efforts to stuff a Bible down Hong Xiuquan's ugly neck, Ward opted for Chinese citizenship. He then led a bunch of new recruits into a third engagement at Chingpu, which likewise disastrously failed.

Then Ward sat down and had himself a think. It was no good. This kind of war was doomed to failure. He had a bunch of boisterous, drunken, disorderly vagabonds who depended largely upon the element of surprise and superior weaponry to get the job done. Furthermore, they were being pushed, nudged, chivvied and shoved into battle by their corporate sponsors in Shanghai, who desperately wanted victory and didn't care about training their troops. So Ward decided that, from now on, he would recruit the local Chinese into his army. These he would meticulously train and properly discipline into an effective fighting force.

Here, I can more adequately explain this with pictures. Freddy Ward was going to turn his army from this:

...into this.

And he succeeded. He set up a training camp in Shanghai where, aided by the most skilled survivors of the old Corps, plus a bunch of hardasses from the regular Imperial Army, he trained a crack outfit of 1000-plus Chinese troops (uniformed, helmeted, equipped and well-paid). He pronounced them ready for action in January 1862. This was timely, as Taiping forces had just re-invaded the region with 120,000 troops, bent on capturing Shanghai.

This time things were different.

With only 500 men, Ward drove a vastly superior force from their fortified positions in Wu-Sung in the middle of January. Shortly thereafter, at the city of Guangfulin, the Imperial troops demoralized and scattered twenty thousand rebels. In ensuing weeks, Ward and his hand-trained Chinese soldiers (with a little help from the Imperials) routed the Taiping from several cities near Songjiang. Thousands of rebels were killed or wounded. Ward himself suffered several wounds, which included getting his finger shot off.

Li Xiucheng, the Taiping army's best general (remember?), went out of his skull when he heard about all this. He sent a host of 20,000 men to attack Songjiang and crush Ward. Ward had about 1500 men to defend the city, and performed with flying colors. As the rebels approached, they came under fire from hidden artillery positions. Two thousand men were mowed down instantly. Like lightning Ward's infantry charged out of Songjiang and captured 800 more, in addition to some supply barges on the river. The rest of the rebel army beat a hasty retreat. The Chinese peasants in the surrounding countryside went mad with joy and hailed Ward as a living god. There was no longer any question about financial backing from Shanghai or Imperial military support. Ward had made his name at last, and his contingent was dubbed "the Ever Victorious Army." Ward was given an official title under Imperial law, an exceedingly high honor for a foreigner.

All through 1862 Ward and his army continued to pull off random acts of badassery, defeating numerically superior opponents in entrenched positions. Ward fitted a fleet of steamboats with heavy guns and turned them into floating fortresses, sending them up canals and rivers to wreak havoc on the poorly-equipped rebels.

Sadly, Ward was mortally wounded in the Battle of Cixi in September of 1862. He lived just long enough to dictate his last will and testament, in which he provided for his son, his Chinese wife, and his brother. He had endured no less than 14 battle wounds and dealt the Taiping Rebellion a blow from which it would never recover. Though Ward's army won the war under the command of a different leader (Charles Gordon, who would die himself some years later in the Mahdist War in Sudan), it was Ward who had raised, trained, and led the brave Chinese on so many successful sorties.

(Whew.) That's quite a life, huh?

Now, my question is (as it was at the beginning of this post), how do you wind up doing something like that? Post a flyer? Stick an ad in the paper? Ward was born in Salem, Massachusetts. That's on the other side of the world from China. And yet he was such a rowdy cuss and did so poorly in school that his father stuck him on a ship to make a man out of him. And so Ward found himself sailing to all these different ports all over the world—East Asia, Central and South America, Europe—and, somehow, fighting in wars or hiring himself out as a mercenary everywhere he went. That takes guts.

I'm wondering: do I lack the guts? Or do I lack the means? Do I merely need to run away to sea for a while and see where the wind blows me?

What do you think?

news from the front

Okay, I'm really behind and I know it. But that's what this post is intended to rectify.

First off, the outlook for Korea no longer looks bleak. After weeks of trying to go through other channels, other recruiters, other schools, our original recruiter—the first one we e-mailed, and with which I dealt when I went to Asia last time (ESL Park)—contacted us with a job a few days ago.

Huzzah!

It looks good. It's in Dongtan, a smallish town on the outskirts of Seoul (connected by express bus and subway line). The pay is 2.2 million won per month per person, and we get paid housing, airfare, and all the other benefits. The unexpected plus side to being in Dongtan is that it's where Jeff, my Canadian homey from the old days on Geoje Island, now lives. It'll be just like old times!

Only problem is, the job doesn't start until late February.

Rats.

So that leaves us to find temporary employment here (one of the worst places in California) for a meager three months until we leave for Asia. We have to make ends meet somehow: we both have bills to pay, supplies to obtain, and thirsty cars to buy drinks for. We need jobs, and quick.

To that end, Miss H and I have decided to stop by the local employment offices tomorrow morning and see if they can place us anywhere. And I do mean anywhere: Miss H and I are young, strong, and unafraid of toil, and we'll be happy to make ourselves useful instead of lounging around all day. The money coming in will sure help eliminate them Poverty Blues. (I might just take my harmonica or my concertina down to the Target parking lot and sing some of them "Poverty Blues" for passersby. Maybe I can get some pocket money that way.)

I'll let you know how it all goes.

So! That's the news. Now, I'm way behind on my reading updates and I should let you know how they're going. It's far too late to do a detailed review so I'll just summarize for you quickly:

• The Sand Pebbles: Richard McKenna's breakout novel stars Jake Holman, mechanic's mate aboard the gunboat San Pedro on a routine patrol of the Yangtze River...right before the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition of 1926 shatters the warlords' grip on the country and unifies China under one flag. Caught in the midst of the chaos and struggling to find meaning in it (and his burgeoning love affair with a missionary's daughter), Jake must somehow keep his wits and his spirit together as the world he knows dissolves all around him.
  The book was simply but beautifully written; the description was rich and satisfying; the drama was heartrending, visceral and pulse-pounding; the characters were so real that they seemed to sizzle; the action resounding and the suspense torturous. It was an epic work which took a snapshot of the world at a pivotal moment in time (seen through the eyes of a straight-shooting, hell-raising boy from Nevada); and that snapshot was so fleshy and vivid that it practically leaped off the page. I'd highly recommend The Sand Pebbles to anybody interested in China, American naval history, or a damn good read. 
• Into the Storm: The first installment of Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series. Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy, a Naval Reservist, and the weary but battle-hardened crew of the aging destroyer U.S.S. Walker desperately flee the fearsome Japanese cruiser Amagi after the disastrous Second Battle of the Java Sea...only to be sucked into a mysterious squall which dumps them out in an unfamiliar world. The continents, islands and landmarks are the same, but the ocean waters teem with strange monsters and dinosaurs roam on shore. Reddy and his crew happen upon an enormous seagoing vessel filled with what appear to be sentient lemur-like beings, under attack by vicious reptilian warriors. After routing the reptiles, Walker befriends the furry sapient things, who are known as the Lemurians. Their enemies, the scaly Grik, are an evil race who mercilessly attack and slaughter any living beings they encounter. Reddy vows to help and protect the Lemurians, but as the numbers of the Grik swell (and the ammunition and fuel supplies aboard Walker dwindle), will that promise become too much to for the destroyermen to keep?
  Despite receiving some rather lofty praise from others in his field, Anderson didn't cut ice with me. His writing, in my opinion, was absolutely terrible. His grammar was infuriatingly juvenile: at times I felt a four-year-old child could've produced better. He employed sentence fragments with vexing frequency, and his descriptions lacked poetry and subtlety. His heavy-handed approach to characterization and dramatic elements soured what might otherwise be an excellent story. Nonetheless, the plot and premise were sound, and all in all I enjoyed the work. I might even be persuaded to pick up a sequel or two and see what happens, because for all his shortcomings as a writer, Anderson did create some rather lovable characters and forged engaging relationships between them. I'm curious for more.
• The Hammer of God: Arthur C. Clarke had nothing to prove when he started writing this book. He was already the accomplished and world-famous author of some astounding science fiction. Nonetheless he surpassed himself and created a humdinger of a book, and what might arguably the forerunner of all Armageddon-type sci-fi stories and movies. The Hammer of God concerns, simply, the massive peanut-shaped asteroid dubbed Kali, her imminent impact on Planet Earth, and humanity's concerted efforts to divert her from her course...sabotage, religious fanaticism, bureaucratic fumbling and unforeseen problems notwithstanding.
  What I enjoyed so much about the book, apart from its suspenseful (and yet unpretentious) plot, was the manner in which Clarke gleefully and effortlessly fleshes out his stories with intelligent and scientific speculation. He envisions marathons run on the lunar surface; artificial brains so intelligent that they have been granted human (or near-human) status and rights; homes which are entirely self-contained and self-sufficient, right down to their food-recycling systems; genetic advancements which allow us to miniaturize any animal and turn it into a household pet; concepts of marriage and sexuality free of confining religious mores; and the first digital religion, an amalgam of Christianity and Islam conceived by disillusioned veterans of the First Gulf War. The book, whose format is a rapid-fire burst of one- or two-page chapters and frequent side-notes and prosaic enrichment, is vastly enjoyable and a must-read for any disaster sci-fi fan. Clarke makes this look easy. 
• Transgalactic: Two novels by A.E. van Vogt compressed into one, both concerning the nuclear mutant Clane, born into the royal family of a world devastated by war, where men on horseback ride into giant spaceships and do battle on other planets with bows and arrows and spears...a world where a special caste of scientists worship "the atomic gods" and tend to the giant machines which run on divine power. Clane was a natural-born genius: not only did he figure out how the machines worked (and what the power of the gods really was), but he also discovered that an alien race, not the humans themselves, had decimated the surface of Earth. Those invaders had been likewise destroyed, but now they were rebuilding, and would soon come to reclaim the humans and their planet. Only Clane could stop them.
  So far I'm liking it. Van Vogt, like Clarke (who speaks quite highly of him), has an approachable style, a way of telling science fiction stories without sounding lofty, high-minded, pretentious or sanctimonious. (That's a rare quality, in case you didn't know.) I'll let you know more when I've finished reading.  

Satisfied? Okay. Immediately after I finish Transgalactic, I'm starting A Man's Life by Mark Jenkins (or sooner, depending on when Miss H gets done with it). Mark Jenkins has a life I'd like to emulate: he's a veteran travel journalist, one of the old breed who still likes to be the first to climb mountains and explore uncharted jungle depths instead of twittering about how nice the tea in the picturesque village is. He's hitchhiked across three continents, was the first man to bicycle across Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved, and has climbed more unfriendly-looking mountains than the average snow leopard ever dreams of doing.

Oh yeah, and he's also married and has two daughters.

Miss H and I would really love to know how that works.

If you want to do me a favor, raise a glass and toast my triumphant return to East Asia in late February 2012.

Thanks. I'll keep you posted.

one Briton, one Scot, and one Irishman

A poor attempt at satirizing a George Thorogood tune, I know. But I didn't want an awkward title. I was going to originally call this "a few of my favorite Scotsmen" but then I thought the English and the Irish would get ticked off (and the Welsh would probably feel that way, too, but I've already talked about them, so they haven't got a leg to stand on). If nothing else, I'm a fair man. So I said, "The heck with it. I'll do what I do best: a play on words." I thought since I'm heading to the U.K. in LESS THAN A WEEK (grooooooooooooooooovy), I'd pen a little article about some of my favorite people who are from around there. There's quite a few. I mean, I have favorite people all over the world. Miyamoto Musashi, in Japan; Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Russia; Montezuma, in Mexico (just for the name); Hypatia, in Greece; and Leonardo da Vinci, in Italy, just to name a few (and NO, I don't like him because of that stupid Dan Brown book). But I've always been something of an Anglophile. You remember how I said I'm on a secret mission to impress British folk? That's part of it. Plus it's hard not to appreciate a country where some of the world's greatest writers, poets, rock-'n'-rollers, explorers, and pirates—all folk I admire intensely—originated. So, in alphabetical order:

England - H.G. Wells
Occupation: Writer I agonized over this decision, believe me. There are a great many English authors who made the final round. But I had to go with the ultimate. H.G. Wells, the first and greatest science fiction author, deserves far more recognition than he's gotten. (Jules Verne was Wells's contemporary, and that Frenchman wrote some excellent sci-fi too, but he was a little heavy on the description.) In all seriousness, I believe that Wells's grave should be platinum-plated. Statues of the man ought to be put up in temples, and his works fired into space on rockets for publication on a galactic scale. The reason Wells deserves such accolades is this: even now, over a hundred years after he wrote his stories, many many years after his death, the man still has the power to scare the sweet bejesus out of us. Honestly, even the dumbed-down, abridged version of The War of the Worlds I read as a kid spooked me something righteous. (The creepy black-and-white illustrations helped.) Horrific aliens fire space capsules from Mars to Earth, pop out in their unstoppable war machines, fry everybody in the vicinity, and proceed to subjugate humanity with laser beams, poison gas, and aircraft. Come on, how scary is that? It's a timeless theme, one that's been done and redone over and over again. But Wells did it first. Don't forget that the mere radio broadcast of this story, done by Orson Welles in 1938, threw the United States into mass panic. Wells's works were oddly prescient, too. The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, long before laser beams, poison gas and flying machines were anything more than, well, science fiction. In TWOTW, Wells predicted tank warfare (his visions of walking tripods armed with guns presaged the rolling war machines on the battlefields of the Great War), chemical weapons, lasers, and airplanes (not to mention space travel), and correctly anticipated, with his usual anthropic cynicism, that such inventions would be put to military use. Unlike a lot of science fiction today, Wells's actually had a point. Ol' Herbert made excoriating observations about human nature, civilization, and society in his books. The War of the Worlds used his invading army of Martians to satirize British imperialism, which had reached its peak at the time of the book's publication. In creating a technologically superior alien race, wholly without conscience, which readily subjugates those judged inferior, Wells showed up the theory of social Darwinism as the rich and privileged of Western society were applying it to society. Wells also hinted darkly at the implications and results of total war by having his Martians attempt to utterly destroy the infrastructure and population of planet Earth. As deep, observant, insightful, incisive, and thrilling as TWOTW is, my favorite book by Wells is one that no one else has ever heard of: The Island of Doctor Moreau. The gloves come off in this one. A shipwreck survivor lands on a tropical island where dwell an enigmatic doctor, his alcoholic assistant, and a race of strange half-men, half-animals. The castaway, named Edward Prendick, first believes these strange creatures to be men, surgically altered by Moreau into beasts; but he later finds out that the reverse is the case. Moreau is a vivisectionist, and through a process of painful trial and error, he has transformed mindless beasts into a travesty of humanity. These half-beasts talk, make primitive tools, walk upright, build houses, cook, even have a religion of sorts. But the beast inside them refuses to be quelled. Infractions are common. The beast-men occasionally lose control, kill animals for food, suck up drink, run wild, break the Law which they have established among themselves. Constant surgeries are required to keep them tame. Moreau, like a vengeful god, summons these transgressors back to his lab, its name whispered among the beast-men: "The House of Pain." All hell breaks loose when a particularly vicious specimen escapes the laboratory and runs wild on the island. The beast-men revert back to beasts, the protective compound burns down, and Prendick is forced to live like a beast himself, hunting and fishing, fighting off the savage and horrific inhabitants of the island, trying to build a raft and escape. Escape he does, but he is never quite the same. He now sees the primitive in the eyes of every man he passes on the streets of the civilized world. He understands now just what a thin line separates the rational, sentient human being from the ravening monster, the savage, the primal thing lurking in the hearts of humans. With The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells simultaneously reinvented the mad scientist archetype, skewered the callous, sinful, bestial side of Victorian society, and wrote a chillingly good piece of science fiction. For writing some of the most intelligent and meaningful essays on humanity, and couching it in some of the most creepy, engrossing and masterful science fiction on the planet, H.G. Wells is my favorite English person. Well, aside from Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena Mountbatten-Windsor of York, that is.

HONORABLE MENTION: Cuthbert Collingwood (Admiral of the British Navy, noted for his service in the Napoleonic Wars and his association with Lord Nelson; biggest Geordie hero besides Brian Johnson); Queen Victoria (grandmother of Europe, come on); Emma Watson (enough said); Douglas Adams (galactic hitchhiker); Gertrude Bell (explorer extraordinaire); Sir Tim Berners-Lee (without whom I would not have a blog, nor an Internet to write it on); John Cleese (and the rest of the Monty Python bunch, including Terry Gilliam, who's American, and Terry Jones, who's technically Welsh...but John's my favorite. Silly walks, dead parrots, albatross, argument clinics, "and now for something completely different"). And, of course, no list of awesome English folk would be complete without that king of renegades, the eminently quotable, fantastically witty, hard-drinking, hard-fighting bad boy, the Man Himself, Winston Churchill.

Ireland - George Bernard Shaw Occupation: Playwright I love this guy. I really do. A wit to rival Samuel Johnson, and facial hair to blow Mark Twain, Santa Claus and Friedrich Nietzsche out of the water. And, kind of like H.G. Wells, he was something of a misanthrope. But he was a smart-ass on top of it, which is the best of both worlds. He was primarily a playwright, and used his characters as his own personal mouthpiece, dispensing various ribald pearls of wisdom unto the unwitting world. You should have heard some of the things that came out of this guy's mouth:

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…"

"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."

"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."

"Lack of money is the root of all evil."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"Democracy is a device that ensures we will be governed no better than we deserve."

"The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation."

"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
Shaw made one observation that both I and Robert Kennedy have used as a personal slogan:

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
Or here, read this one. Here I am, calling Shaw a misanthrope and Wells a cynic, and then Shaw goes and sets me straight:

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
And wait! There's more. Here I am giving George some blog love, paging through some quotes of his, and I find this. It seems as if Shaw knew I was going to be writing a blog post about him:

"Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them."

The best Shaw quote in recorded history, though, is this one, in my opinion:

"We should all be obliged to go before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation."
Shaw tickles me pink. Nobody's got the guts to say stuff like this these days and (a) really mean it, and (b) not care what anybody else thinks of you for saying it. Shaw never cared about that. He didn't think much of politics, nationalism or public education, and he made no secret of it. Yeah, sure, he was a Socialist. But he spoke his mind, wrote plays, novels, articles of all sorts, was an amateur photographer, won the Nobel Prize and an Oscar (both of which he hated), and penned most of his best works in a tiny, movable shack in the corner of his backyard. Those are all things I can identify with. For being an intelligent and prolific writer, a curmudgeonly philosopher, an eminently quotable sage, and an opinionated cuss, George Bernard Shaw is my favorite Irishman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Bram Stoker (inventor of one of the coolest literary villains of all time, Count Dracula); James Joyce (rewrote one of Homer's epics, setting it in the modern era, and was even gutsy enough to include a clinical description of the sex act, which got him banned from every bookstore in the Northern Hemisphere); Frank McCourt (rough life, good writer); Gráinne Ní Mháille (better known as Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen); and John French. Don't know who John French is? Well, I'll tell you. He was born in County Wexford. I never met anybody from County Wexford I didn't like. (Heck, I never met anybody from County Wexford, period.) Mr. French emigrated to England (Liverpool) and married Louise Woollam, a local girl. Their daughter, also named Louise, grew up and married a local bus conductor named Triple-H—ha ha, no, really, his name was Harold Hargreaves Harrison. Harold and Louise settled down in Liverpool together and, in 1943, they had a little boy, who they named George Harrison. That is why I love John French.
Scotland - John Paul Jones
Occupation: Badass Uh, hello? John Paul Jones? Honestly, do I even need to explain this? He's every American's favorite Scot (well, except for anybody wearing a kilt). I don't care if he was a dropout. I don't care if he was a deserter. I don't care if he flogged one of his sailors to death. I don't care if he only joined the Continental Navy just to get a piece of the English. None of that matters. The guy was awesomeness incarnate, and probably would've had to hire somebody to carry his balls around for him if he didn't have the steel backbone to hold them up. He got his first naval command when the captain and the first mate of the ship he was on (the John; origin of the phrase "on the john") caught a fever and died. Most people would've been scared stiff by being thrust into a command on the open sea like that, but not Jones. He went and piloted the ship back to port, and the John's grateful owners made him the master and gave him a cut of the cargo. He buddied up with Benjamin Franklin while in France in 1778, and the two of them apparently joined a frat together. Imagine the secret handshakes they must've put on while John Adams and stood nearby and rolled his eyes. When France formally allied with the United States that same year, Jones's new ship, the USS Ranger, became the first American military vessel to be saluted by French forces. Jones got a nine-gun salute from a French flagship as he was heading out to England to terrorize British shipping. Then the Ultimate Act of Bad-Assitude took place. While in command of the USS Bonhomme Richard, running wild in the North Sea off the coast of England in 1779, Jones was engaged by the 50-gun British warship Serapis. During a rare lull in the battle, the British commander yelled across, "You blokes had enough yet?" "Are you kidding, asshole?" Jones shouted back. "I haven't even started in on you sons-of-bitches yet!" This quip is commonly edited in high school history books to read "I have not yet begun to fight!" Rock on, John. For being a feisty short guy, beating the heck out of British shipping during the Revolutionary War, having consistent problems with authority, inspiring the stage name of Led Zeppelin's bassist, and pursuing one of the most colorful and versatile naval careers of the 18th century, John Paul Jones is my favorite Scotsman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Alexander Graham Bell (can you hear me now?); John Shepherd-Barron (inventor of the ATM); Mungo Park (explorer with a cool name, first Westerner to explore the Niger River); Bon Scott (AC/DC's original front man and one heck of a vocalist and bagpipe-player); Angus Young (best guitarist EVER); John Ross (admiral and Arctic explorer); and Ian Anderson (latter-day minstrel, prog-rocker and musician more worthy of the term "poet" than any rapper who has ever lived, or ever will). And now, I'd like to leave you with another of my favorite Scotsmen.

THINK WITH YOUR DIPSTICK, JIMMY!