Is the Odysseus Discourse on X an Op?

 

No cap, if the commenter is just fooling with us, this is totally goated. After all the "Gen Z" don't write cursive, don't write checks, can't read entire novels, don't know what a rotary phone or a Walkman are stuff, pretending not to know the first thing about Homer would be, um, EPIC!

How does Christopher Nolan even find these wild things man? Does he even speak like, Greek? 

What even is this:

Yes, because when Ulysses, as he was then called, was a big old book in the early 20th century, it was written by an entire American not a notable Irish...

Grrr. I do not believe this discourse. I picked up The Iliad and The Odyssey both in one of their many, many English translations, from the used books at a Salvation Army thrift store when I was like, eight years old. I already had some acquaintance from sword 'n'sandals movies and Classic comics what I was looking at. I wanted to read the Big Kid Books. The serious grownup literature.  Are there young people seeing "Odessey SUV's" and hearing about "Achilles' tendons" and going around with no idea what those names are all about?

What Faustian bargain has our youth unaware of Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships?  What have they gotten in return? Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast? 

What do kids get read to them these days? Do they know what the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales even are? 

I feel weirdly conservative when I say that kids should learn of Achilles and his wrath or Odysseus and his peregrinations and feel like Keats looking into Chapman's Homer--like some part of the ancient past had the power to totally blow their little minds. Knowing ancient mythology and the names of ancient heroes is only additive for appreciating so much of what came after: Frankenstein in the context of Golems and Galatea, the Wicked Witches of Oz through Circe. Bryan Johnson and his desire not to die through Gilgamesh. 

Every human story spawns a replay of an old game in which not a single one of us is an NPC, but all of us are everyday heroes, with a tie to something greater than ourselves. Is that the missing puzzle piece? Are the youth fooled by false narratives because they haven't been schooled on the existing really cool ones? 

These kids today, they don't know what the old heads have been saying. This is why they are so disrespectful. Which I know from my reading goes back at least to Aristotle. At least! 

But now, these kids need to know about gorgons outside of Versace labels and all that. (They can't be missing out on The Kraken, Percy Jackson, I mean, these ancient stories are still out there--anime, and whatnot, right?) I'm happy to send kids to Padraic Colum and Edna St. Vincent Millay (I'm an old soul!) and let them go wander into a world where we had belles lettres before no one knew how to write thank you notes. What harm would it even do?

(None.) 

Grizzly: Predator

I know I am not living my best life.

I am also in no hurry to start.

Bill Cosby is a Problem

I'm from Philadelphia and Bill Cosby is a huge part of my experience. "Fat Albert" was as much a part of my childhood as "Super Friends" or "American Bandstand". I saw the HBO specials and I watched "The Cosby Show". I grew up with "Picture Pages" and in a world where comedians found having a Bill Cosby impression up their sleeve de rigeur.

In a way, I have not ever not known of Bill Cosby and liked him as a kind of father/teacher figure. He has been a person who succeeded in my city, a person who attained his goals mentally and intellectually. A smart man. A funny, successful actor. A pillar of our regional community. A supporter of athletics and learning.

His delivery as a comedian and ability as a storyteller influenced me a lot. He did not need to use blue language, because he could make a sound or a facial expression that said a thousand things more than a bad word would.

But I believe women. I do. I have to. Women are abused by rich men and poor men, by nice men and mean men. It's always their word against the other person. But when there are so many women, fifteen, now, that have come forward, it really becomes difficult not to see a pattern, and a bad one. Fatherly, professorial, funny, gentle, interested, gallant, Bill Cosby, who I have liked for all my life, did bad things to women. I liked him, and he was not a good person to those women. He is a person who I felt so sorry for when his son was murdered, and whose wife I wanted to cape for when people questioned her for thinking out loud whether racism killed her boy--

People gave her grief for wondering if racism was why her child was victimized. They seriously did. People with no authority at all wanted to question her lived experience as an educated aware black woman with a dead son. And I would still hit anyone who wanted to grief her for that line of thought.

But I can't stand up for Bill Cosby Himself. After hearing all the stories, I can't. I believe women. so I can't. I can't see how this many women are liars, and their stories are so similar, and plausible.

And I have all the shade for Don Lemon, who seriously asked a victim why she didn't bite an irrumator on his cock for violating her mouth. Because there is no instinct for a drunk and drugged person to do that? Because hard dicks are actually hard? Because when it's shoved in, you open so you can breathe and not feel sick or gagged? Because she did not want a tall, athletic man to smack her teeth in?

I hate like hell to totally understand that this shit was okay with the network PTB--but that's what I think happened. They understood Bill Cosby was a sexual sadist liability, and they were making a shit-ton of money. And that money made the bad stuff ok.

They did not get it is never ok. It is never okay to accept that your star is a rapist and let him go ahead and keep raping. I mean seriously? WTF?

Okay--The Onion Just F'd Up Tweeting the Oscars

Quvenzhane Wallis is a nine year old girl. She's already a really gifted actress, but she is still a nine year old girl. You really shouldn't post that about even a grown-ass woman, but whoever was on the Onion Twitter feed tonight? You really, really, really don't use that word about a nine-year old girl. People would be afraid to use that word because that is not a word that civilized people would use. We don't say it about women because gendered slurs are reductionist cheap nonsense--

But that's a nine year old girl in Hollywood you just used that on, Onion. C'mon. The media and the business and all that will surely screw with her brain enough the rest of her life over her being a woman, celebrity, actress, how she looks and how she acts without you dropping a c-bomb on her for a lazy throw-away joke. Grow the hell up and figure out the line between cruelty and humor.

A Good Day to Die Hard Is A Weird Movie to Watch

Okay--this trailer has nothing to do with movie I just saw except that the same people and some scenes are in it. But if you were to take this trailer and spread those scenes out in a movie that served as a justification for some family-based schmaltz and some badass oneliners and some actually mentally insulting chase scene about twenty minutes in that makes you feel a little ashamed for watching--

Oh lord, this is not a smart movie. That doesn't mean it isn't an enjoyable movie--you could like it, if gratuitous car-smashing and shit getting blowed up was your deal, but I'm just saying, if you like your action pictures to make any kind of sense, and have any kind of thin pretext to justify the millions of dollars of collateral damage to cars, trucks, all kinds of infrastructure, and whatnot--not.

This movie has adopted the meta-violence attitude as expressed in such movies as The Expendables franchise, of which Willis is a part. But this isn't even a knowing wink at the gratuitous badness of action movie pretexts--the way any old thing is a gratuitous pretext for porn--for example--so much as a nearly played-straight family movie( the what?) tied up in a genre movie with some real lapses in logical sense and an obvious twist and just some sick lack of attention to the laws of physics or the complete ignorance of the limits of the human body thrown in.

What I'm saying is--this movie is kind of enjoyable, but you really got to put your dumb-hat on to like it. Willis's McClain is a cartoon. His son is a non-entity. Their situation is transparently fucked in a way you can't help but notice all at once before they seem to. And if you can suspend your disbelief that a high-speed truck chase after a terrorist attack on a courthouse can occur without a billionty Moscow police turnout including helicopters and such (because if you don't know, Moscow is kind of the capital city of Russia?), okay. Enjoy away. I'm just saying these lapses killed my enjoyment.

It isn't the worst movie--it just isn't all that good. I can't recommend it unless you are bound and determined to see it, and if that's your thing, you are welcome to it. But it is a damn dumb movie.

Truly Dumb-ass Story of the Week: London 2012 Olympics Logo Spells...Zion?

This is one of those "LOL--whut?" sort of stories. I just recently came across this news item, and what the, I don't even....oh just look here:

Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells the word 'Zion

'Almost four years after the logo's launch, Tehran threatens to boycott the Games unless the design is changed



Iran has threatened to boycott the London Olympics unless the organisers replace the official logo, which Tehran claims spells out the word "Zion".

The logo, a jagged representation of the year 2012, has been said by its critics to resemble many things, from a swastika to a sexual act, but the Iranian government argues it represents a veiled pro-Israeli conspiracy.

In a formal complaint to the International Olympic Committee, Tehran has called for the graphic to be replaced and its designers "confronted", warning that Iranian athletes might otherwise be ordered to stay away from the London Games.

Well, sure, because: Iran. But seriously--why would London go out of their way to promote Zionism in their Olympics Logo? Because, duh, if there was conspiracy afoot, you wouldn't want to broadcast it in code in a commercial logo. C'mon. You'd keep it on the downlow. But the real surprise is people who saw the logo as depicting a sex act--which I totally didn't see until reading that some people were interpreting it a depicting a sex act.

But now? I can't not see it. Thanks, dirty-minded people.

Anyway, if we're playing "logo-Rorschach", I see it as resembling one of those doodles of a sample band-logo that a tween paints  in White-out on the front of her binder, colored in with highlighter pen. Sort of like this:

So actually--um, no. The UK isn't secretly being run by the Elders of Zion or whatever. It is being run by 13-year old girls from the '80's. So there.