Author: Gil

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Skygod is keepin’ it real

Zeus is such a player he can bed his old lady by telling her about all the times he cheated on her:

But now let us go to bed and turn to love-making.

For never before has love for any goddess or woman

so melted about the heart inside me, broken it to submission,

as now: not that time when I loved the wife of Ixion

who bore me Peirithoos, equal of the gods in counsel,

nor when I loved Akrisios’ daughter, sweet-stepping Danae,

who bore Perseus to me, pre-eminent among all men,

nor when I loved the daughter of far-renowed Phoinix, Europa

who bore Minos to me, and Rhadamanthys the godlike;

not when I loved Semele, or Alkmene in Thebe,

when Alkmene bore me a son, Herakles the strong-hearted,

while Semele’s son was Dionysos, the pleasure of mortals;

not when I loved the queen Demeter of the lovely tresses,

not when it was glorious Leto, nor yourself, so much

as now I love you, and the sweet passion has taken hold of me.

Iliad, 14, 313-328

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Hot Gates, Hot Box Office?

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I was going to mark-out for 300, and that Amy & I would likely go catch it this weekend at the local IMAX, so as to get the full theme-park experience of Thermopylae on a giant screen.

This morning, I went online and discovered that every single IMAX screening this weekend is sold out.

I have to admit, my powers of prognostication aren’t the greatest, when it comes to movies and other pop phenomena. I mean, Ghost Rider looks like a godawful movie, and it’s based on a godawful character from Marvel’s nadir. So of course it ran away with the box office and is going to pass $100 million in sales this weekend. Did I underestimate how bored and/or stupid teenagers can be in February? I guess so.

But 300? Projected to pull in $60 million in its opening weekend? I’m happy that it’s getting so much exposure, but I’m just afraid that it’ll give Frank Miller so much Hollywood cachet that he’ll pursue a bigscreen version of Give Me Liberty.

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Rush ‘n’ Attack

I’ve been thinking a lot about Russian policy (domestic and foreign) lately. For my magazine this month, I tried to discuss the untenability of running a secret police state in a world where health issues don’t respect borders. I don’t think I was all too successful, but I wrote most of it at 4am before hitting the road for Seattle.

I want to write a longer piece about Russian politics, the KGB-defined worldview, petroeconomics, the meanings of Chechnya, and the question of “deep chrono” as it relates to secrets revealed during the years between the USSR’s collapse and the ascendence of Putin. That is, I could spend the rest of my days writing something that would be out of date the moment I publish it.

The engine for this whole project was my realization that, while we’re engaged in another cold war with Russia and China, this one isn’t driven by the ideological opposition of Capitalism vs. Communism. Rather, it seems to me that the policies of both of those countries are designed to assure the security of their ruling parties.

Now, you could argue that that was the “true” motivation of the cold war itself, but it strikes me as fundamentally different, seeing as how this opposition is stripped down to the concept of retaining power for its own sake. The aspects of socialism that remain in both regimes are geared to sustain autocracy.

I’ll continue ruminating on the subject and offering up occasional impressions. Meanwhile, here’s a piece (courtesy of Andrew Sullivan) from a (sorta) pro-Putin journalist who is freaked out by the number of murdered journalists in Russia.

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Not just tan: Spartan

In keeping with my inner classics-geek of that previous post, here’s Victor Davis Hanson on 300, the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book about the battle of Thermopylae:

[T]he impressionism of 300 is Hellenic in spirit: its buff bare chests are reminiscent of the heroic nudity of warriors on Attic vase paintings. Even in its surrealism — a rhinoceros, futuristic swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean-esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast — it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder takes, like Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus, in their strange deviation from the party line of the Homeric epics. Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy — with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth — 300 consciously abandons realist portrayal.

I don’t remember a ton of the comic book. The one time I read it, I was at a friend’s house in Auckland, NZ, trying desperately to stay awake till nightfall, so as not to get wrecked by jetlag. Fortunately, he was one of the greatest cartoonists in the antipodes, and had a room full of comics that I hadn’t read.

And, yes, I’m thinking of catching 300 at the local IMAX. Sue me.

(Here are some terrible pix from the premiere.)

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Giving old meaning to “homecoming”

Lately, I’ve been rediscovering my inner classics-geek. I guess it might be obvious from the contents of this blog, between those Monday Morning Montaigne snippets and my return to the Iliad.

During the weekend, I opened up the Poetics so I could try to make a smartass point about Alcestis & Admetus (for That Thing I’m Trying To Write). I never had a productive time with Aristotle, but I’m trying to convince myself that this was partly because of the tiny typesetting of the Penguin editions I used to read.

Last night, I got a brochure in the mail from my graduate school, the inestimably important (to me) St. John’s College. The college is launching a continuing education program for alumni, consisting of weekend (or slightly longer) sessions on some of the great books.

The first offering, Aristotle & Aquinas on the Unity of Intellect, didn’t appeal to me too much, but the second one, a 4-day session in June on the Odyssey, made me wince and got the wheels turning in my head: “Hmm. . . if I get ahead on my Top Pharma Companies report a bit, I can afford to head down to Annapolis Thursday morning and get home Sunday night. . .”

I saved the flyer. This morning, when I looked it over, I noticed something strange. See, this being St. John’s, the program is named after the port where Socrates and his buddies had the conversation that comprises The Republic. It’s a typically intelligent gesture for a place that New York magazine once called “a school for hyperliterate misfits.”

That said, the school is referring to the program as “Pireaus”, and that’s what struck me as odd. I had to run downstairs to my library to check that I wasn’t misremembering, but as far as I can tell, it’s supposed to be “Piraeus”, not “Pireaus”. That’s how Bloom has it, and that’s how Jowett has it. Unfortunately, I can’t find my Greek/English lexicon down there (I’ve got a ton of books, okay? And, yes, I do own a Greek/English lexicon), and don’t have a Greek version of The Republic around.

So, can anyone (that means you, brother) get me a ruling on why they’re called it Pireaus?

(Now if I can just make an early start on those Top Company reports. . .)

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Wish your cancer away!

Good thing the British National Health Service has been trying to reduce its reimbursement for Herceptin, a very focusedly effective breast cancer treatment*. That way, they can spend money on dowsers, flower therapists, and crystal healers! Yay!

(thanks to Cato-at-Liberty for pointing this one out)

* By which I mean, Herceptin works really well against around 25% of breast cancers, but is not effective against the other types. That said, it’s a major advance in treatment. Pity that, since it doesn’t work for every case, the NHS tried to keep it off the reimbursement list.

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Look to the skies

If I had the patience, I’d fix up this pic in Lightroom. So you’re stuck with my attempt at catching a little bit of glory from the vantage of the Home Depot parking lot in Paramus, NJ.

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When bad metrics happen to bad GMs

Anyone who’s read our VM basketball previews in the last few years knows that the Timberwolves are in terrible shape, and it’s due to the incompetent dealings of its general manager, Kevin McHale, who can also be faulted for being part of the Joe Smith debacle that ruined Kevin Garnett’s career.

So that’s why it’s really funny that when Forbes.com came up with a system of metrics to evaluate general managers across the major sports, they ended up with Kevin McHale as #1.

Given the failure of that system, I’m going to have to take any of their other rankings with a grain of salt. I think this is an instance where the metrics sounded good, but when they were applied and led to this Bizarro world where McHale’s #1 and Billy Beane is #26, someone should have said, “Maybe we need to re-weight or add some other factors.”

And ranking Billy King of the Sixers at #3 was also pretty mind-boggling.