Saw Nolan's "The Odyssey" last night... it was - Epic (pun intended but regretted) - catching in a sorta historically respectful way the feelings of being literally lost at sea, encountering weird and gruesome and horrifying things - the movie really got into the visceral nature of things. And then a lot of themes of Odysseus feeling responsible for the deaths of this men but also regret for what happened to Troy (a modern lens interpretation, but still)

I've seen a fair bit of The Odyssey in the past year or so - this movie, Kate Hamill's stage production, and the musical "Penelope" ... also the Orpheus reinterpretation "Eurydice".

I always think of this poem:

Ithaka
By C. P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon--don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon--you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind--
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

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best worse joke pickupline I came up with - "are you on a perilous journey from troy to ithica? 'cause you're the only Odd-I-See 😃 "

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I assure you that joke is not as bad as Lynette thinks. I got to thinking about the design language of Star Wars' "second tier" of droids, and some of their possible influences...

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airnow.gov - this seems like a good resource to know about if you're near or downwind of the forest fires. purpleair is considered much better

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$1 Trump Coins Being made what a blatant disregard for widely known and accepted law.

Oh it's a "commemorative coin"? Yeah, that's like Vanilla Ice saying he didn't steal from Under Pressure, see, it goes "bump bum bump badda BUM bump" not "bum bum bump badda bum BUMP"

And then his bullshit response "very unusual but I was honored by it," and "its very cute they gave me a coin."

Right. "Cute". And not your idea and/or tailored to his idiot predilection for putting golden something on everything, like a dog talking its walk

Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

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50 funniest tweets ranked...

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a trophy for trump - but is it gold enough?

Lindsey Graham is dead at 71. In 2016, he dared America on camera: "Use my words against me." This is his obituary. These are his words.
The facts first, plainly. Graham died Saturday night at his Washington home of what his office calls a brief and sudden illness. He served four terms, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and spent decades as one of the loudest voices in American foreign policy.
By sunrise the whitewash had begun. Trump declared him a "true American Patriot." Netanyahu called him a beloved friend. The eulogies will tell you about his service.
They will not tell you about the ledger. So we will.
In December 2015, Graham looked into a camera and called Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." By February 2016: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy." That May he wrote: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." He refused to vote for him.
Then Trump won, and Lindsey Graham discovered golf.
By late 2017 he was scolding the media for calling the president, yes, really, a kook.
His best friend was John McCain, a man Trump mocked for being captured in Vietnam and kept mocking after he was dead. Graham wept for McCain on the Senate floor, then deepened his devotion to the man who spat on his grave.
The words he wanted used came in 2016, when he swore that if a Supreme Court seat opened in an election year, the next president should fill it. In 2018 he repeated the promise and added: "hold the tape."
In October 2020, as Judiciary chairman, he rammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court eight days before the election.
In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.
On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floor, he announced: "Count me out. Enough is enough." He was back at Mar-a-Lago within months.
He cheered the country into Iraq. Three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Trump was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."
Honesty requires one more line: he was, to the end, one of Ukraine's most reliable champions in the Senate, and he died the day after standing beside Zelensky in Kyiv. Even a ledger this dark has an entry in the other column.
But the ledger is the legacy. A man who saw exactly what Trump was, said so in the plainest English of his era, and then spent nine years kneeling to it for relevance.
He asked us to use his words against him.
Consider them used.

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We're all living in a prequel. We're all going to die, and we're all in a prequel

Reminds me of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog "I've got some spoilers... who wants to hear a spoiler? It's a spoiler: You Will Die Alone"