Stygius

A moment of zen...

The Crab Nebula, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope, via the Washington Post. Also see www.HubbleSite.org.

[Photo Credit: Jeff Hester -- Arizona State University Via Nasa And European Space Ageny Photo]

A captive with style

Curzon details an episode I recently read about elsewhere:

On a voyage to study in Rhodes in 69 BC, a 24-year old senator by the name of Julius Caesar was taken hostage by pirates. The pirates sent a ransom letter to his family in Rome demanding 20 talents of gold, equivalent to the annual wage of a senator. Caesar, upon hearing this, demanded that the ransom be raised to 50 talents—he was no ordinary senator!

For 38 days Caesar was the hostage of these pirates, but he behaved with fearless arrogance. He boasted to the man how many women he had bedded, with one rumor even have him bedding the wife or mistress of one of his captors. When their snoring disturbed his sleep, he ordered them to be quiet. He beat his captors at their crude games of card and dice, insulting their intelligence to their face. He even promised, while a captive, that one day soon he would come back and crucify the lot of them for daring to kidnap him. This drew much laughter and bemusement from his captors.

When he ransom was paid, Caesar was freed. The young senator demanded that the proquaestor of Asia Minor capture and punish the pirates. When the request was refused, Caesar hired a fleet of ships and descended on the cove where he was held with such speed that he caught the pirates while they were dividing the treasure. True to his word, all of the pirates—several hundred in total—were crucified.

'Getting tired of this damned siege'

I'm spending all morning reading the new mil blog now sweeping the sphere: Under Odysseus.

From the latest entry:

After I had called our men to order, the General berated them for a good thirty minutes. In his words, the men looked like: "A stinking flock of lecherous seleni!"

Odysseus informed them all that the camp better look like "an Olympian wedding hall" by tomorrow morning, or heads were going to roll.

Before he stomped off, he nodded to me and said: "See to it, Eurylochus!"

The General was right. Our camp badly needed to be cleaned. However, I knew that his sudden desire for order was actually a result of the failed horse-capturing attempt.

Many props to Eurylochus for making his war so real for the rest of us. The Internet is such a powerful device for personal expression, isn't it?

(HT The Agonist)

Update: I mean, it's stuff like this:

Ajax is the General of the Salamisians. The two Generals are always very cordial to each other, but I know that Odysseus is intimidated by Ajax. Like Odysseus, Ajax is a monster of a man, and he looks every part the leader too. However, unlike Odysseus, Ajax is a quick thinker and smooth talker. Odysseus can own just about any room, but not one with Ajax in it.

Malcom in the blogs

Well hot damn! For the wonky, the New Yorker's Malcom Gladwell has fired up his very own blog. Looks like he has all the usual newbie problems: remembering to link and whatnot. Linking creates depth. Writing about things -- especially ongoing conversations and other people's ideas -- without them gives the blog a sense of flatness.

Digital killed the dinosaurs

I've long thought anyone investing loads of money in a movie theater complex is insane -- given their economic, technical, and aesthetic obsolescence -- and the Washington Post story on Steven Soderbergh's experimental "day-and-date" project exemplifies this. Soderbergh is on the creative forefront not only of the medium, but of the film industry's very structure.

On Friday, Soderbergh and his producing partners, Internet entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, will release "Bubble" simultaneously in theaters, on cable and satellite television and on DVD, the most visible example of an emerging model that could seismically shift the way Hollywood does business.

The project site is here. As a form of resistance, large chains are refusing to carry Bubble. Since we can't even get Capote locally, I'm thoroughly underwhelmed by the tut-tutting about day-and-date. In a Wired interview, Soderbergh explains:

Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.

And the artificial barrier between a film's release and a DVD release is just part of the problem. From this, I would like to see the continued decline of the megaplex dinosaur, since I think that people will continue looking for a dynamic theater experience afterward, and will increasingly look for the smaller, independent boutiques to find interesting cinema.

The theater experience isn't always pleasant. Theater owners need to address that. There are often problems with projection; tickets and concessions are expensive; theaters aren't always clean; people talk during the movie. They're making it easy for people to stay home.

I became enamored of Soderbergh's innovative style after the brilliant, distinctively postmodern K Street came out on HBO. I wish they had been able to keep up that project's momentum, since it was like irony-crack for a political junkie; and their ability to instantaneously weave in the emerging political controversies was a thing to behold.

On the creative front, Soderbergh will continue to inspire. From Wired again:

I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, "Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out there - people can see either or both. For instance, right now I know I could do two very different versions of The Good German.

Beer-blogging the holidays

Colorado Luis is having fun with the holiday beer-blogging, and I want in.

I think I'll retract my earlier nomination of New Belgium's Frambozen. I put a dent in a keg of it a couple weeks ago, and after three or four it really wears on you. The brewery's other seasonal, the 2 Below, isn't being bottled yet but is gaining popularity. Lots of the local bars are carrying it, and it appears to be a hit from what I've seen. However, I think it needs a lot of work; it's like Fat Tire -- the best amber ale in the world -- with a bunch of hops haphazardly thrown in. In other words: it's lousy.

Really, Deschutes Jubelale is just plain kickass, especially with all the darkness this time of year. Like Luis, I get annoyed with the over-hopped beer, and avoid most pale ales for that reason. (Descutes' Mirror Pond is a marvelous exception.) Jubelale has just the right balance of roasted malt with a sharp hop perfect for the season.

That said, Odell's highly regarded Isolation Ale will soon start disappearing from stores. So make sure to try it soon. For some reason, it's noticeably better on draft than from bottle (and -- oddly -- Frambozen strikes me in just the opposite way).

Beyond drooling

Fascinating piece on Morning Edition on the phased development of babies' language capacity.

Researchers at the University of Washington recently set out to examine the link between babies' early eye contact and their language development. Their study, which appears in the current issue of Developmental Science, pinpoints the time between 10- to 11-months as crucial.

Basically, making eye contact with babies and then looking at other objects -- at this specific age -- prompts them to vocalize, and has a huge influence on their language development later in life. Huge. The Navhind Times:

They found that infants who are advanced in gaze-following behaviour before their first birthday understand nearly twice as many words when they are 18 months old.

The article's abstract is here. More at Science Daily. This seemingly contradicts some previous research.

Curse of the hippy dance

So last night I found myself confronted by the spectacle of that most wretched form of social conformity: the hippie dance.

Having kidnapped jazz fusion for its own "jam band" purposes, Frequinox was giving a concert that -- thankfully -- I attended at no cost. While fortified by 90 Shilling and Patron, what should have been a tolerable performance highlighted by an amazing sax player instead left me feeling a benighted Dante beholding one or another Circle of the Damned.

The hippie dance's visible manifestations are an epileptic flailing of the arms and legs, matched by a twitching of the torso, along with an occasional hopping about accompanied by a kind of beatific look pasted on the face.

Veterans' Day, 2005

This summer marked the sixtieth anniversary of many pivotal World War II events. I marked both Iwo Jima. and Okinawa The Okinawa post was centered around William Manchester's powerful essay on service and patriotism, a piece I find myself returning to constantly.

Decades from now, we will be marking the events and battles of today's young men and women, fighting and dying abroad. Whatever our politics at home, we know these Americans are fighting and dying for us. It places on us several burdens: a debt to them, and to their families, which we can never repay; an obligation to participate in our politics and society, and to try to do so well; and above all do our part to uphold the legacy of the American Revolution and our Constitution.

National Public Radio has two stories from vets who participated in the StoryCorps project. In particular I urge on you Mr. Robertson's story of killing a young German, and it's impact on his life. We should never forget what it is we are asking our military to do on our behalf, and what it does to them.

The Washington Post has an archive of US war dead in Iraq, "Faces of the Fallen." As this editorial puts it, what was once Armistice Day is no longer cause for celebration:

On Nov. 11, 1918, the war to end all wars ended. As at the end of other wars, there were celebrations. The world rejoiced that a massive conflict had been brought to a close. History shows that the "war to end all wars" had yet to be fought.

World War I ended with the signing of an armistice agreement on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Less than three decades later, an even greater world war was a reality.

Today, Veterans Day is a far cry from Armistice Day. The holiday's name changed to reflect the nation's distance from World War I and to include veterans of wars that followed. There have been too many.

Update: See Bill Johnson's column today (and see previously).

Photo source here.

You like pandas, don't you?

Appropriately, we stygii are not given to fuzzy-wuzzy moments.This is by definition, actually; the sort of thing that happens when one is named after an adjective. A good adjective, to be properly informative, is specific and fairly inflexible in and of itself. But given life's changableness, and its variety of circumstance, it's both idiotic -- and arguably insane -- to want or expect to always be in the same state.

Quite the digression there, which is just ham-handed apologism for having a fuzzy-wuzzy moment this morning, and you will too. That is . . . so long as you like panda bears. And everyone likes panda bears.