FLASH! Janet Jackson Has a Left Breast!
Yes, you saw it. I didn't see it - by the time Justin Timberlake's bony hand pulled off the "wardrobe malfunction" that became the water cooler topic du jour this fine morning, I was in the bedroom saying to my wife, "Al, you should tune in the Super Bowl. Janet Jackson has something that looks like a dust-ruffle hanging off her butt like the tail of a peacock." She never did, so I missed the big moment.
"We were extremely disappointed by elements of the MTV-produced halftime show," Joe Browne, NFL executive vice president, said. "They were totally inconsistent with assurances our office was given about the content of the show. It's unlikely that MTV will produce another Super Bowl halftime."
The hypocrisy of the NFL's spokesman in this instance astounds me. What about the commercials? I never saw so many penis-related jokes on broadcast TV in my life. As far as halftime shows go, what about the one that Janet's brother did about ten years ago? It looked like a handful of skanky drag queens trying to restage a low-budget version of "Triumph of the Will", yet no one commented on it. Didn't that contain "elements" that were "inconsistent" with the type of "content" the NFL wants to associate with the Super Bowl? They're a goddamned bunch of liars and cowards, that's what.
There were a couple things "right" with the Super Bowl this year. They were:
a) The Game. I missed most of the scoreless opening quarter, and it's just as well. But I loved the closeness of the game and the fact that it wasn't really decided until the clock ran out.
b) No John Madden. Music to my ears!
Rather than endure the agony of all that pre-game hogwash, I elected to go to Hill Auditorium and check out the local Javanese Dance company in an interpretive representation of The Ramayana accompanied by a gamelan orchestra. It was so awesome I have nothing really to say about it - it was ninety minutes of pure heaven.
Moving, Melesigenes and Mental Retardation
Today was our first day in the new office, and it is fairly comfortable despite things being *ahem* somewhat further apart. I can see I'm going to be getting a lot of excercise just contacting people whom used to be just a few steps away. Today was spent unpacking and tweaking, seeing if everything works.
Naturally, part of that process is checking out the ride to work - see what the bus does and how long it takes to get to work and home. The bad news is that it runs about 7-8 minutes late on the way home. I planned to get to the bus by leaving work at a certain time ahead of the scheduled deaparture and witnessed the preceeding transport passing, late, less than a quarter-mile in front of me. There was perhaps four feet of snow piled in an unavoidable drift at the stop, which I attempted to stand atop, but ultimately my feet sank slowly through the frigid crust into the dust.
On the first bus, I began reading the newly published (2003) Loeb Classics edition of "The Contest of Homer and Hesiod", which is included in Volume 496 of this long-running series of Greco-Roman Classics entitled "Homeric Hymns - Apocrypha - Lives" edited by Martin L. West; I cannot recommend it highly enough. Off the first bus, and onto the second, I find myself fortunate to be trapped on the bus with a tall, oafish, obviously retarded and excessively talkative man whose volume control was permanently set on LOUD. I mean
very loud - a man whose regular speaking voice is just short of a shout. Poor sap; he probably can't help it, but I can't stand it.
"The Contest of Homer and Hesiod" is supposedly a record of earliest and greatest poetry slam in history, held in Chalcis between the two top versifiers of the Archiac Greek period, sometime in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. The only source we have for this text doesn't date until the fourteenth century CE, or two milleniae and a century to spare later. However, the whole fourteenth century text is a copy of part of a lost history, the
Mouseion of Alcidalmus, who wrote it in the first quarter of the fourth century BCE. Oral traditions of text transmission were still strong at this point worldwide, and some of it may have been written down even before then.
Of course, for any of this to hold water, you have to accept that Homer was a real person and not a fictitious personage invented by the Homeridae of ancient Greece (which I do). You also have to accept that Homer and Hesiod lived at the same time, which I also believe, although my feeling is that Homer was the older of the two, probably by a considerable margin, and that Hesiod did not outlast early middle age.
Plenty of Classical scholars would find ample reason to disagree with all three of these points.
Well anyway, I'm reading Hesiod's poised, beautifully phrased, transparent queries designed to trip up Homer:
"Come now; Muse, of things that are and will be and were aforetime-
sing nothing of those, but take heed for other singing."
And Homer's typically rugged, wrathful, ponted and javelin-like thrusts of wonderfully explosive rhetorical responses:
"Never shall clattering steeds about the tomb of Zeus smash chariots as they contend for victory."
and in background, moving swiftly to foreground, there's this:
HAWW FAHH HAWH FAH!! HAW FAH FAH FAH FWAW FWWAHAH!! HF FEH HEF FEH FAW FAW HAW FAH FAHH etc.
"Jesus!" I wanted to shout "Please pipe down!" In the UK they wouldn't let you carry a conversation on public transport at any level above polite muttering - that's the way it should be here, I believe. But since this man is so loud and disruptive, others on the bus are combating the problem by holding increasingly loud converstions of their own in the hopes of at least holding the line against the disruption, if not drowning it out, which would not have been possible.
I close my book with a grunt - Homer and Hesiod's debate will have to wait. Oddly, when the man gets off a few stops before mine, all other conversation ceases and it's quiet again. But I will finish my reading at home - they all conspired to kill the mood.
So who won in the contest of Homer and Hesiod? The retarded guy did.
Go Say Hi to My Friend Jason Drenik
A particularly brilliant and talented friend of mine, Jason Drenik (late of Cincinnati's legendary The Hairy Patt Band, currently of Sacremento and a new father of a beautiful nine-month-old) has erected a stele of blog at:
http://drenik.blogspot.com/
I am already planning to respond to some of his well-stated and clever ripostes, but that is seed for yet another blog to be. But do check him out for yourself - you wont regret it.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com