Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after Saddam's government was toppled, I wrote an article for my then high school newspaper discussing the possibility of a United States-led invasion of Syria as the next step. It was an article meant to satirize Bush Jr.'s “Mission Accomplished”… Read full post »

There is a spider on my bag.  I look at it and consider scale, as we have just considered the contrast of scale between gods and men on the Olympian pediments.  My bag is an entire world to the spider, or perhaps a large continent of the world it knows…

Read full post »

Santorini is beautiful.  Duh.  It's one of those places that has been photographed in so many ways and showcased in so many tryptophantic post-vacation family slideshows that it's difficult to do anything worthwhile with a camera.  At sunset in a place like this, it is often better to… Read full post »

One of Athens' many paradoxes that I have an ongoing fascination with is that of its kiosks, squat huts with goods hanging off of every surface—snack food, ice cream, cigarettes and beer—like the trashiest part of a supermarket condensed and transplanted onto every street corner.  T… Read full post »

I was doing internet things; emailing, blogging, Googling, Flickring, Skyping, tweaktinkertooling—and then I realized it was Greece outside, so I left.  Worddump and photodump (with words to read!) tomorrow./

Read full post »

A friend, Amy, had a pair of friends of her own stay here for a couple of days.  They had been studying in Lancaster and were now taking a whirlwind tour of the Continent, presumably before heading home.  Athens was their first stop.  The very first word they learned was &Omicron… Read full post »

I learned yesterday that the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821 and would go on to create the modern Greek state we know today--the first unified Greek state every, by the way--was fought in large part by partisans that spoke dialects of Albanian.  I hope the irony is…

Read full post »

My Modern Greek teacher has a lisp.  No one should be allowed to teach a language if they have a lisp, unless you want a whole generation of bamboozled amateurs lisping up your language.  That might do the English language some good, on second thought.  Also, as I suspected, it… Read full post »

A man steps into the middle of a busy intersection and does a red light's worth of baton twirling. When the light turns green, he rushes for the cars with his hat in his hand, hoping to get a few alms from drivers before they speed off. When… Read full post »

Obama, he is good? 

Yeah, he is. I voted for him, anyway. Would you have voted for him if you could?

Better than Bush.

Mhm, at least Obama tries to talk to people instead of bombing them.

The taxi driver smiles politely and resumes… Read full post »

The New York Times put out this editorial some time ago. I shuttled it around the intertubes with an extensive, unabashedly ranty rant attached. Now, I repost it here—or is it riposte, ha-ha!—after cleaning it up some.

The editorial itself is pretty good stuff—as one would ex… Read full post »

Question to Entertain toDay:

 

TechReport.com (which everyone even moderately interested in "hard," concrete technology should read) linked to an article on ArsTechnica.com (another tech site that everyone should read in conjunction with TechReport  for a "softer," cultural focus on techn… Read full post »

Finally, Virgin America fully exploits the advertising potential of their name:

 

 

But it's just not visually...stimulating enough to beat out Iceland's long standing tradition of unnecessarily incorporating hilarious innuendo:

 

 

There's that titan that Brandon… Read full post »

I was filling in a gap in my semi-regular gorging of Jon Carroll’s archives, which pairs nicely with Mark Morford’s column, like a sedating digestif after the flaming main course struck through with pink hair dye—ineffably for the pubic region because dying the hair on your head jus… Read full post »

who | grep -i brunette | talk; cd ~; wine; talk; touch; unzip; touch; strip; gasp; finger; gasp; mount; fsck; more; yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep

 

Credit is "AnonymousProgrammer" of 4chan's /wg/.

 

"fsck" is the best part, in many ways, for many reasons.  Read full post »

Does conformity imply consent?

 

See this post on "The Ethicist" on nytimes.com Read full post »

Question to Entertain toDay:

 

Can a deregulatory, anti-welfare state political stance be interpreted as pragmatically Marxist? Read full post »

Question to Entertain toDay:

 

It may be insensitive to say all religions are fundamentally the same in purpose, but is it incorrect? Read full post »

 This is the first entry of more that will chronicle a Californian summer and a Grecian autumn with a series of entries far more frequent than this blog or blogger are accustomed to.

 

I was anxiously itching with the corpse-worms of Marx himself to arrive home from college, st… Read full post »

 

“War...war never changes” is the perpetually pessimistic opening of the popular irradiated wasteland romping video game “Fallout 3”'s dreary diatribe against humanity's predisposition towards total annihilation. What utter nonsense—war has changed fundamentally, f… Read full post »

 

Senator George J. Mitchell, a special envoy to the Middle East and Europe, departed on Monday for a whirlwind tour of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, and Britain. The New York Times reported today that the purpose of his trip will be as a “listening and learning exercise,&rd… Read full post »

 "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal" by Zach Weiner

Stick that in your panegyric and smoke it, Johannes de Silentio! Read full post »

I had begun to write a substantial piece to serve as a retrospective on the recent passing of Proposition 8 in California, but after a long period of abandonment, I remembered Occam's Razor, a rule I frequently ignore and secretly deplore.

So, to summarize.

By taking the passage of Proposition… Read full post »

 

 

First of all, welcome.  Let's get down to serious business.

The idea of the post-apocalyptic world has inhabited the American and human cultural consciousness for decades; in literature, film, and most recently gaming. At its core, it is an idea both romantic and terrifying… Read full post »