It's hot out there. One brave turtle was sunbathing out on a submerged tree trunk in the Fens, but that was about it. Of course I went for a brisk walk today, because I'm an idiot.

Good news - the Killer Space Rock isn't going to end the world in 2019 after all. But like all good Jerry Bruckheimer-esque apocalytpic events, a sequel is already in the works, for 2060. Hopefully by that time our planet will have gotten its collective head screwed on a little better and will finally listen to my old astronomy professor Richard Binzel, who's been the figurative John the Baptist of the danger posed by Near Earth Objects for quite some time now.

Hey, just because I got out of the astronomy biz doesn't mean I don't keep up!

And here's a bonus link about the Chinese space program. Apparently China wants to go to the moon by 2010. Maybe that will inspire the U.S. to start dreaming big again, when it comes to the final frontier. Well, good luck to the "taikonauts". That's the term being used to describe Chinese astronauts, using the Chinese word for "space". I guess every major power has to have a unique name for their space travellers: the Americans have "astronauts", the Russians call them "cosmonauts", and now there will be Chinese "taikonauts", which to me sounds disturbingly close to Micronauts, a series of tiny action-figure toys from my youth. But that's just me - I'm betting it sounds better in the mother tongue.

At this point I should probably note that the Chinese were the inventors of both gunpowder and rockets. That and they were serving take-out during the time of Charlemagne. China's been around long enough as a continuous civilization to have done pretty much everything at least once. We discover, but they rediscover. We in the West don't think an awful lot about China, except to stereotype and/or demonize. Perhaps someday that will change.

Another baseball link, since it was that kind of day. My brother informed me that the costume of the Phillie Phanatic, the mascot for the Philadelphia Phillies, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's permanent collection yesterday. Go Phanatic! Other teams' mascots simply pale in comparison.

Oh, yeah, and before I forget - I found a picture of E.A. Sophocles, the esteemed Greek-born Harvard classicist who has become the unofficial patron saint of The Greek Institute. The director tells me that Sophocles used to raise chickens, who would follow him all over Harvard Yard. And I learned only today that although the man taught Greek at Harvard for almost forty years and authored many books on Greek grammar, vocabulary, and literature, he had never completed a formal college education, although he went on to accumulate no less than four honorary degrees. What a fascinating individual.

Blogging on a Sunday.

Me and the wife went to see Derek Lowe, or "D-Lowe", as the fans affectionately call him, and the Boston Red Sox face the Baltimore Orioles this afternoon. The Sox won in a 12-3 blowout, but the main event was a bench-clearing brawl during the fourth inning when D-Lowe hit Gary Matthews, Jr. with a pitch in retaliation for the Orioles' pitcher hitting Manny Ramirez in the inning before. Apparently Matthews and Lowe had words, and then Matthews tried to charge the pitcher's mound, with predictable results (though nothing like Izzy Alcantara's immortal kickboxing fracas). The funny thing about watching a fight at a baseball game is that you have no idea what the hell is going on, only that the players aren't where they should be and the crowd is even more unruly than usual. There are no announcements explaining the situation, no instant replays of the offending actions, just a lot of noisy confusion until the teams go back to their respective dugouts and resume play. Reality is messy, I guess. So much of what we experience is now so parsed and packaged by our myriad forms of media that it's hard to imagine that there was a time when life was nothing but the mess, with the detailed play-by-play of what actually happened not emerging for days, months, or even years later. Sure, we always had carrier pigeons, fire signals, and Marathon runners to satisfy our ancestors' need for Headline News, but back then true information junkies really had to work for their fix.

Speaking of information junkies, here's a strange collection of links. Have fun!

I'm supposed to be hosting a kitten poker game this evening, but there's something seriously wrong with the message board at Clem's Corner. Hmph. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Sunnydale's most popular underground sport, kitten poker - which is traditional poker, using kittens as betting currency - is all the rage with the demonic set. We at Clem's Corner use virtual kittens, and try not to let the demons get out of hand. Or cheat. Still a little confused about all of this? Then click here.

Today's arrivals for me, via the magic of Interlibrary Loan:

1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Loeb Classical Edition). Made a part of the Widener collection by a generous contribution on the part of Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, Tutor and Professor of Greek at Harvard University, 1842-1883. E.A. Sophocles was a rare bird indeed, an actual Greek in the Harvard Classics faculty, and championed among many things the idea of studying the Greek language as a living continuum, and not a series of arbitrarily-drawn subdisciplines. I asked for the Diogenes in order to find the original Greek for the alleged first meeting between Xenophon and Socrates that I mentioned a few posts ago that I had culled from a second- or third-hand source. The quotation is from Diogenes' Life of Xenophon (II, 48):

The story goes that Socrates met him in a narrow passage, and that he stretched out his stick to bar the way, while he inquired where every kind of food was sold. Upon receiving a reply, he put another question, "And where do men become good and honorable?" Xenophon was fairly puzzled; "Then follow me," said Socrates, "and learn." From that time onward he was a pupil of Socrates.

Good ol' Socrates.

2. Route 66 A.D., On The Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, by Tony Perrottet. A new book that I've been dying to get my hands on. Finally, a lender was willing to part with it! Mr. Perrottet explores the not-so-modern-after-all concept of tourism in the ancient world, specifically that of the Romans, who piled into their carriages and thronged the "must-see" sites of the Mediterranean in a manner eerily reminiscent of our own summer vacations. Tacky Trojan War souvenirs, anyone? Can't wait to read this one!

It's come to my attention that this page is utterly devoid of "zazz". Changes are underway to fix that - that is, if I can pry my brother-in-law away from my laptop long enough to get a good night of futzing in!

My wife and I missed an additional chance to visit the Jersey Shore this past weekend, thanks to a line of rolling thunderstorms, large hail, and localized flooding. Pity. Maria is losing 0-1 in the World Series of Skee-Ball, and it would be a shame if she couldn't at least tie things up before the summer slips away entirely. For those of you who have never experienced what has been called (by me, admittedly) the "apotheosis of sport", Skee-Ball is a coin-operated arcade game invented in 1909, the object of which is to roll a series of nine wooden - never plastic - balls up a long ramp and, with a combination of skill and luck, into one of the concentric circles of the scoring bullseye. You get ten points for the outermost, fifty for the innermost, and later variants of the game also include a pair of 100-point holes for the desperate or extremely charmed. I know, sounds boring, especially in the era of Playstation 2. But it isn't. Skee-Ball is a game of grace. If you have it at that very moment, you can do no wrong. The ball rolls in slow-motion, and you can just feel, as it leaves your hand, that it will go exactly where you want it. Fifty points, fifty points, fifty points, a hundred points, whatever! One time the missus and I were in a duel with the arcade operator, who kept setting the threshold for a free additional game higher and higher as we both inexplicably went into this Zen-archer like state (I know the link is to a record company, but tell me that Flash intro doesn't just kick ass!) and started hitting everything. On other days, however, it just fails to click. Somehow you're locked out of the Zone, and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it - trying harder, a different machine, even telling the Ritalin-starved kids playing air hockey to your right to pipe down or else try to swallow the oaken sphere you're about to cram down their throats. The magic simply isn't there. Of course that's the whole Zen-thing coming at you. The more you want it, the less you get it.

Skee-Ball. A game of grace. Chew on that with a fistful of caramel corn, next time you're down the shore!

I've been coffee-free for six days now, and strangely today I didn't once feel the urge to crawl under my desk, assume the fetal position, and zonk out. Assuming that this means my energy levels are returning to normal, I might actually make it through the week - all five of my classes at The Greek Institute are meeting during the same week for the first time in about a month, so I'm definitely running the gauntlet.

If you're anything like my brother or me (God help you), you'll appreciate a website devoted to Superman II's General Zod.

(Or is that, "ZOD help you?")

I have foolishly decided to give up drinking coffee again. It's been an extremely long day as a result. I bumped into a coworker up in the staff lounge, who, when the conversation turned to the need for caffeine and my attempt to abstain today, started talking about "this great little coffee place" on Mass Ave, which is actually a tea place that happens to serve excellent coffee...

This is why it's hard to quit, folks!

(Though now I'm looking forward to checking Tea Tray out, when I inevitably fall back off the wagon.)

When I'm not up to my armpits in homework to be graded, I spend my lunch break walking around the Back Bay Fens, one of Frederick Law Olmsted's contributions to Boston's park system, a beautiful oasis snaking around the hustle and bustle of Kenmore Square, the various museums, and the Longwood Medical Area. One of the ponds in the fens has a very large submerged tree branch, which I've noticed always attracts some form of wildlife, depending on the weather. Sunny days meant turtles, usually about five or six of them. On cloudy days, there were ducks. Sometimes the day was neither fair nor foul, and I'd find a mixture of turtles and ducks somehow finding the courage to coexist peacefully in close quarters. The Middle East should take lessons - these guys aren't even the same species, and yet I don't see turtles strapping bombs to their shells or ducks dive-bombing indiscriminately. But generally just by looking at the sky I could predict whether ducks or turtles would prevail, or whether I'd see an indeterminate combination. This went on for months. Sunny - turtles. Rainy - ducks. In between - in between. I figured this was more or less a permanent feature of the fens, and I always looked forward to seeing the weather confirmed by the denizens of the tree branch.

Enter the inevitable spoiler, in the form of a cormorant. I don't know where he came from, but now he sits up there, rain or shine, and fouls up the delicate balance of turtles and ducks. There's probably some more political allegory buried in here, isn't there? But I won't go there today. Stupid cormorant.

Note to self: Krinos brand canned squid does not make for very good bait. That and it makes your hands stink for about a day and a half afterwards. No offense intended to Krinos, of course, who offer many fine and otherwise unavailable Greek food items to schlubs like me in America.

Back to work, although I never really went anywhere. The boss did, though, for three weeks, so there was much slackage. Too much. For some reason I absolutely love to wallow in free time, whenever it crops up, so much so that absent a deadline or authority figure who will be very disappointed in me if I goof off, I will keep eating my freedom like a goldfish until I'm floating belly up in my bowl. Or cubicle. It's good to be happy on the job again, even if I know the feeling is only good until the next power vaccuum. Ah, but in less than a month, my wife and I will be in glorious Bar Harbor for a week, so maybe that will keep me going when today's euphoria inevitably melts away.

The funny thing is that I don't even hate my job - Library Assistant (Library Ass for short) at the Countway Library of Medicine's Document Delivery Department, if you're just joining us - for real. It's a nice job, and in fact it offers me one thing that I know virtually no other job on the planet could offer me - unfettered access to Widener Library and, in the rare instance that Harvard's stacks can't deliver, all the other great libraries of the world. Even when I'm not ordering wheelbarrows full of books for myself, it's just a lot of fun sometimes to play library sleuth and find rare and unusual items for grateful patrons. For instance, today I received a photocopy of an extremely rare book in French from 1917 about military medicine from a library in Marseilles, France. Since the request fell outside of my normal powers to locate and fetch things electronically, via OCLC, I had to make a handwritten request in French - employing Altavista's universally-translating Babel Fish, since the closest I come to a knowledge of French is a decade of Latin, and I'm pretty sure there's been some linguistic drift over the past two thousand years - as a last-ditch attempt. And it worked, without even one snide comment about my canned French!

Gone fishing.

Oh, and by the way - I love baseball, but I hate the All-Star Game. Last night's game was a perfect example of why I feel the way I do. Is it an actual game, or is it a pony show? Here's a tip for you, Bud Selig: decide in advance next time. A stadium-ful payed through the nose thinking they were coming to see a game, while the players, managers, and apparently the Commish were in it for the pony show. If it's a game, play it to conclusion. If not, nine innings will suffice, tie or no tie. Making tens of thousand baseball fans stay for extra innings and then arbitrarily pulling the plug was arrogance, plain and simple.

At least in the Home Run Derby, you know what you're getting - dingers, and lots of them.

Teaching five classes now, with a potential sixth in the wings. I made an offhand remark to the director this afternoon that maybe ancient Greek's stock is rising because faith in material things is bottoming out. Not sure if it's a one to one correlation, but it's a thought. Makes me think of a story:

Diogenes told a story about a casual encounter of Socrates and Xenophon in the streets of Athens. Xenophon bumps into Socrates who asks him "what is the road to the market?" Xenophon diligently gave him directions. Unknown to him, Socrates had little intention to go to the market. He asked a second question: "Tell me, what is the road to virtue?" Xenophon responded with a blank stare. And Socrates answered with the later famous remark "Come follow me, and I will teach you."

Back to my day job. Working in academic libraries for most of my adult life - first at M.I.T., then at the Harvard Medical School - has given me somewhat strong opinions on things like the First Amendment, the importance of unimpeded flow of information, and the continuing relevance of the printed word. It's a comfort to know that I'm not the only one out there thinking about these things!

(Link courtesy of The Flaky Librarian)

William Hazlitt, "On Corporate Bodies":

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor good-will. The principle of prviate or natural conscience is extinguished in each individual (we have no moral sense in the breasts of others), and nothing is considered but how the united efforts of the whole (released from idle scruples) may be best directed to the obtaining of political advantages or privileges to be shared as common spoil. Each member reaps the benefit, and lays the blame, if there is any, upon the rest.

Now the good Mr. Hazlitt (1778-1830) has a slightly different definition of a corporate body, which in his day could refer to any collective association and not just a business as we understand it, but he's still dead on the mark nevertheless. I got turned on to Hazlitt by a cryptic remark in Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City", where the second person protagonist of the novel, an aspiring writer working as a fact-checker at a prestigious New York magazine, is advised by one of the cranky but brilliant old editors to write every morning and "read Hazlitt".

I'm thinking of taking the old man's advice myself.

Hey, this place actually has a website. Keen. The Deauville Inn (located in tiny but picturesque Strathmere, New Jersey) is where me, my dad, and my brother drank beers and discussed the fish we didn't catch last week.

Just returned from the Deep South, aka New Jersey below the Atlantic City Expressway. Fun fact: the original Mason-Dixon Line ran east-west at the 39° 43'N line of latitude. A.C. sits at 39° 27' 45". This is not a mere technicality, either. In Southern Jersey, the drawl is distinctively Delmarvan (i.e., from the peninsula named after Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, which all lay claim to a part of it), and sometimes sounds like what you hear down in Tennessee. Sweet tea is readily available, as are crab-cakes, snapper soup, and other non-Northern delicacies. The geography of the region - Pine Barrens, saltmarshes, and barrier island chains - is also much more like the States to the south than to the north. Ah, I missed the marshes. We have a couple up here, and Rumney Marsh in Revere is right next to Lynn, my present home, but there's nothing like driving as fast as you can around sunset down Highway 9 or the Garden State Parkway, towards Cape May.

Did a lot of fishing with my dad and my brother along Corson's Inlet, which is the channel separating Ocean City from the village of Strathmere. I caught two flounder, although neither were big enough to keep. The inlet was nice, but there were a ton of jet skiers out on the water all weekend, and I have zero patience for those turkeys. Why any region hesitates to ban a form of "recreation" that spews into the water as much gasoline as it burns (fouling the air as well), creates an insanely disproportionate amount of noise pollution that can be heard for miles up and down the coast, and presents a hazard to marine life, boaters, and swimmers alike is totally beyond me. Another consequence of living in a country with ridiculously cheap gasoline. Where people stop raking their leaves or shoveling their snow and turn to loud and obnoxious gas-powered alternatives, is it any surprise that the same folks will want to "experience" the outdoors in exactly the same way? Snowmobiles, mopeds, jet skis. Three forms of transportation that should be reserved for the pit of hell, and nowhere else.

What I'm reading right now- two books.

Achilles, by Elizabeth Cook. A literary re-imagining of the son of Peleus, from his birth to his death to his afterlife in Hades. Lovely.

Greek Language and Culture: Their Vitality and Importance Today, by Cedric Hubbell Whitman. This is the reprint of a lecture that Professor Whitman - a distinguished Harvard classicist and ardent philhellene - gave to the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Belmont, Massachusetts) in 1954. Not only is the professor a brilliant man, but he was also the mentor of Athan Anagnostopoulos, founder of The Greek Institute, located in Cambridge, Mass - where I teach, research, and webmaster -, and director of the Treasure of the Greek Language project in Athens, where he is busy scanning millions of pages of original Greek texts so that they may be stored electronically for posterity. I consider Professor Anagnostopoulos to be my mentor, so the writings of Cedric Whitman are that much more dear to me. Even without the personal connection, I find his views on the continuity of the Greek language and Greek culture to be a stirring challenge to the status quo of modern day classicists, which likes to think that Greek history ended with Alexander the Great, and even perpetuate the obnoxious and misguided argument of the German Fallmerayer that "the modern Greeks aren't even Greeks", but Slavs. Anyone who spends any time studying both Ancient and Modern Greek (as well as both the Ancient and Modern Greeks !) can't help but see how little change the centuries have actually wrought, and yet instead of celebrating such a living continuum and teaching it as such the schools of the West chop Greek up into little bits (Homeric, Classical, Koine, Byzantine, Modern) and study them in isolation. Now to be fair, the tide is changing here and there, but there's still a long way to go.

Holy freaking shite! I punched "jersey exile" into Google, and I came up the numero uno hit. Cool. But what a terrible burden at the same time...

Well - this exile is heading back to the Garden State for the Fourth of July holiday. On the to-do list:

1. Give Donald Trump some of my hard-earned (hah!) dough in Atlantic City.

2. Catch a Surf game.

3. Eat a cheesesteak or two. Or three.

4. Stock up on Tastykakes.

5. Search for the Jersey Devil.

The wife and I leave at 2. I can't wait!

Okay, as a big-time Doctor Who fan and an enthusiastic follower of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, this rumor (or shall I say "rumour"?) is the stuff that dreams are made of.

Yes, I'm a dork. So sue me.

Here's a disturbing look at the state of civil liberties in America, from a librarian's vantage point.

I as well do not buy into the argument that we can somehow trade our rights for security. And even if we could, would it be worth it? Jefferson said that the tree of liberty must occasionally be refreshed by the blood of patriots (and tyrants). I agree. I would rather be less "safe" and free than live in a tranquil police state where everything that our country once stood for, such as democracy and the rule of law, are made a mockery of by our so-called leaders. Our liberty is far too precious to squander on threats of dirty bombs, or even the real thing itself.

Oh, almost forgot - happy fiscal new year!

Stupid Ninth Circuit federal judge is apparently in the process of submitting to the tyranny of the mob on the whole Pledge issue. Now if you're going to make an absolutely inflammatory (although correct, in my humble opinion) ruling such as the one made last week, the least you can do is show a little backbone and stand by it for longer than 24 hours. Or did he honestly think that every single politician in America wasn't going to line up to denounce him for it? And if so, how dumb can you be? The issue of God in American society is a loaded one, make no mistake about it, but the fact of the matter is that when Pat Robertson, Henry Hyde, Joe Lieberman, or George W. Bush talk about "God", they're not referring to some abstract concept of godhead that loves and accepts us in all of our spiritual diversity. They're talking about a very specific, very personal Judeo-Christian God. What frightens me is the degree to which "Holy Joe" Lieberman has allied himself in matters of faith with a bunch of people (i.e., fundamentalist Christians) who in their heart of hearts believe he's going to burn in Hell for all of eternity, EVEN THOUGH he technically worships the SAME GOD! Talk about a marriage of convenience. But then again, one of Israel's most powerful allies in America right now is the Christian Right. So go figure.

For those of you still in need of convincing that soccer is a "serious" sport:

1. It's as violent as football (the American variety), only without the pads.

2. It's strenous as basketball, only without the time-outs.

3. As in hockey, you can tie, but there are no sticks or Canadians to be found. Or ice, for that matter.