![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Birling down a-down
Mar. 4th, 2006 11:57 pm
High today, here: 0. Dewpoint then: -8. High dewpoint: -7.
High today in TO: 3. Dewpoint then: -9. High dewpoint: -8.
Low today on the balcony: for some reason, the thing says -38.5. Um. High: 1.9. Currently: -3.5.
For the second time this season, I sat a Senators goalie against the Leafs, for mostly sentimental reasons. At least it didn't cost me a win tonight, because at least I now have an option other than CuJo, who is currently getting shelled, again. It did, however, cost me three extra goals. Woe Leafs Woe.
Etymology paper sent. Whoopdeedoodle. I may not be scoring yet, but I'm starting to get some pucks on the net. Gotta keep those point shots low, get some traffic in front, set up a screen and look for the tip, don't let 'im pick cherries in there. Stay out of the box, do the little things, outwork 'em on the boards, and we'll be all right. Got a good bunch of guys in the room.
Read an piece in Newsweek nominally about what the new SCotUS might do with the Roe v. Wade test cases that may or may not be coming down the pipe, but actually more, or at least more interestingly, about the softening of the pro-choice line--which isn't anything particularly new; it's been a number of years now since H.R. Clinton et al. took the "safe, legal, and rare" tack, but what is new, to me at least, is the, I dunno what you'd call it, grief counselling, but more than that, for abortionees (hmm, would the abortionee be the one who gets the abortion, or the one who gets aborted?) at abortion clinics, like getting them to write messages to their aborted fetuses on heart-shaped pieces of paper, which then get put up on the clinic walls, and ... wait for it ... having them hold their aborted fetuses in blankets. Yikes. Now, I dunno, maybe they found the only abortion clinic in the world that does things like that ... but still.
Read several obits on Summers, all of which have it that he was forced out by the faculty because they didn't like his efforts to reform Havard so as to re-emphasize the basics of undergrad education at the expense of research and/or specialization.
Slogged through a bit more of that Veyne book, which, as it turns out, is a pretty lousy book--he seems to be just reeling it off the top of his head--sprinkled with the odd Interesting Fact, or at least Idea, one of the main ones of which is that the Greeks conceived mythological time and historical time as somehow discontinuous, such that they could believe that what the myths say is true, though it didn't happen in, exactly, their world.
I sometimes wonder, if an asteroid hit the Earth and we all died, what alien anthropologists might make of the cult of Santa Claus. I mean, obviously, there's no more important religious figure in North America. Merry Christmas, Santa Claus. Anyway, another of Veyne's suggestions, though he doesn't put it quite this way, is that the Greeks believed in their myths like we believe in Santa Claus: you tell these stories to your kids like you believe them, and the kids believe them until they're old enough to know better--but still, nobody comes out and says they're wrong (except bricks like Aristotle who just don't get it). But then again, one of the things I get from this book, like I got from the Plato's myths book, is how little the Greeks had to go on, compared to us. I mean, I've thought for a long time, there's something uncharitably ridiculous about supposing that the Greeks actually believed that Zeus and the gang were all sitting in a castle somewhere up Mount Olympus, and if you went up there you could see them--but it's not like they had aerial photographs or anything. By the time you're, I dunno, eight, ten, today, the means are well within your grasp to conclude, as determinately as anyone can conclude that the Earth is not flat and the moon landing wasn't made up, that there isn't a toy factory located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. But for the Greeks, there was just absolutely no way to be sure.
High today in TO: 3. Dewpoint then: -9. High dewpoint: -8.
Low today on the balcony: for some reason, the thing says -38.5. Um. High: 1.9. Currently: -3.5.
For the second time this season, I sat a Senators goalie against the Leafs, for mostly sentimental reasons. At least it didn't cost me a win tonight, because at least I now have an option other than CuJo, who is currently getting shelled, again. It did, however, cost me three extra goals. Woe Leafs Woe.
Etymology paper sent. Whoopdeedoodle. I may not be scoring yet, but I'm starting to get some pucks on the net. Gotta keep those point shots low, get some traffic in front, set up a screen and look for the tip, don't let 'im pick cherries in there. Stay out of the box, do the little things, outwork 'em on the boards, and we'll be all right. Got a good bunch of guys in the room.
Read an piece in Newsweek nominally about what the new SCotUS might do with the Roe v. Wade test cases that may or may not be coming down the pipe, but actually more, or at least more interestingly, about the softening of the pro-choice line--which isn't anything particularly new; it's been a number of years now since H.R. Clinton et al. took the "safe, legal, and rare" tack, but what is new, to me at least, is the, I dunno what you'd call it, grief counselling, but more than that, for abortionees (hmm, would the abortionee be the one who gets the abortion, or the one who gets aborted?) at abortion clinics, like getting them to write messages to their aborted fetuses on heart-shaped pieces of paper, which then get put up on the clinic walls, and ... wait for it ... having them hold their aborted fetuses in blankets. Yikes. Now, I dunno, maybe they found the only abortion clinic in the world that does things like that ... but still.
Read several obits on Summers, all of which have it that he was forced out by the faculty because they didn't like his efforts to reform Havard so as to re-emphasize the basics of undergrad education at the expense of research and/or specialization.
Slogged through a bit more of that Veyne book, which, as it turns out, is a pretty lousy book--he seems to be just reeling it off the top of his head--sprinkled with the odd Interesting Fact, or at least Idea, one of the main ones of which is that the Greeks conceived mythological time and historical time as somehow discontinuous, such that they could believe that what the myths say is true, though it didn't happen in, exactly, their world.
I sometimes wonder, if an asteroid hit the Earth and we all died, what alien anthropologists might make of the cult of Santa Claus. I mean, obviously, there's no more important religious figure in North America. Merry Christmas, Santa Claus. Anyway, another of Veyne's suggestions, though he doesn't put it quite this way, is that the Greeks believed in their myths like we believe in Santa Claus: you tell these stories to your kids like you believe them, and the kids believe them until they're old enough to know better--but still, nobody comes out and says they're wrong (except bricks like Aristotle who just don't get it). But then again, one of the things I get from this book, like I got from the Plato's myths book, is how little the Greeks had to go on, compared to us. I mean, I've thought for a long time, there's something uncharitably ridiculous about supposing that the Greeks actually believed that Zeus and the gang were all sitting in a castle somewhere up Mount Olympus, and if you went up there you could see them--but it's not like they had aerial photographs or anything. By the time you're, I dunno, eight, ten, today, the means are well within your grasp to conclude, as determinately as anyone can conclude that the Earth is not flat and the moon landing wasn't made up, that there isn't a toy factory located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. But for the Greeks, there was just absolutely no way to be sure.
