Beware the Ides of March!
Especially if your name is Caeser, or you have been recently caught trying on crowns at your local jewelry store.
IBM
That's for Ivan Borges Macbeth, my new nephew, born yesterday. Hurrah!
Alan (the Chicago brother-in-law) tells me he and his mother (hi, Maren!) are doing fine.
I can see that the Macbeths are going to make a habit of the "startlingly original and wonderful middle names," and I'd like to take a moment to appreciate this selection. Jorge Luis Borges is one of the great authors of the 20th century, and a personal favorite even before he lent his last name to my new favorite nephew. Try "The Library of Babel" and "Death and the Compass" today!
I'm a double uncle. Martes Trece is a good luck day in this neck of the woods.
Alan (the Chicago brother-in-law) tells me he and his mother (hi, Maren!) are doing fine.
I can see that the Macbeths are going to make a habit of the "startlingly original and wonderful middle names," and I'd like to take a moment to appreciate this selection. Jorge Luis Borges is one of the great authors of the 20th century, and a personal favorite even before he lent his last name to my new favorite nephew. Try "The Library of Babel" and "Death and the Compass" today!
I'm a double uncle. Martes Trece is a good luck day in this neck of the woods.
Sparta
The release of "300" has got me thinking about the Spartans again. Basically, to be an adult Spartan male was to be a stupendous man-killer. That's what they did, and they were very, very good at it.
How does a society get away with having all of its men be soldiers? Well, on the plus side, woman's liberation! Spartan women were important in their economic and civil society to a degree probably not seen again until the very recent past. On the minus side, slavery. Most of the inhabitants of Lacadaemonia were not "Spartans" at all; they were helots held in slavery to their Spartan masters, and the Spartans went to great lengths to ensure that they (the helots) stayed slaves.
All in all, it was a jaw-droppingly pathological society; give me the duplicitous, conniving, mercantile, semi-democratic Athenians (the spiritual ancestors of modern America--we're not martial enough to be Romans, much less Spartans) any day.
But Thermopylae is still one of the bravest and most moving stories found in history, and nobody but the Spartans could or would have done it.
I don't know what that adds up to, but it does make think.
How does a society get away with having all of its men be soldiers? Well, on the plus side, woman's liberation! Spartan women were important in their economic and civil society to a degree probably not seen again until the very recent past. On the minus side, slavery. Most of the inhabitants of Lacadaemonia were not "Spartans" at all; they were helots held in slavery to their Spartan masters, and the Spartans went to great lengths to ensure that they (the helots) stayed slaves.
All in all, it was a jaw-droppingly pathological society; give me the duplicitous, conniving, mercantile, semi-democratic Athenians (the spiritual ancestors of modern America--we're not martial enough to be Romans, much less Spartans) any day.
But Thermopylae is still one of the bravest and most moving stories found in history, and nobody but the Spartans could or would have done it.
I don't know what that adds up to, but it does make think.
Welcome to the list, roscivs!
Roscivs is my brother-in-law, the one in Seattle. His constancy is a great rebuke to me, as he posts every day, like clockwork.
That simile is a segue designed to bring us to today's topic, which is, the savings of daylight time. In a way it's a remarkably stupid idea, because, the sun is not paying any attention to your stupid clock.
In a way it's quite brilliant, because people are, in fact, paying attention to your stupid clock, and to all the other stupid clocks in the world, because we made them and we want them to be useful. Plus, we can do something about what the clock says, and not about when the sun comes up. Plus, we are all incredibly screwed up by the advent of excellent, cheap artificial lightning (it is still dark outside as I write this) and largely insist on going to bed well after it gets dark, and therefore getting up well after it gets light, even though this is probably wreaking havoc on our nervous systems in some subtle yet awful way, so we have not really been paying attention to the poor old sun for some time now.
So to speak.
That simile is a segue designed to bring us to today's topic, which is, the savings of daylight time. In a way it's a remarkably stupid idea, because, the sun is not paying any attention to your stupid clock.
In a way it's quite brilliant, because people are, in fact, paying attention to your stupid clock, and to all the other stupid clocks in the world, because we made them and we want them to be useful. Plus, we can do something about what the clock says, and not about when the sun comes up. Plus, we are all incredibly screwed up by the advent of excellent, cheap artificial lightning (it is still dark outside as I write this) and largely insist on going to bed well after it gets dark, and therefore getting up well after it gets light, even though this is probably wreaking havoc on our nervous systems in some subtle yet awful way, so we have not really been paying attention to the poor old sun for some time now.
So to speak.