Stories

Homer on the Run

90 Comments
Featured Image: “John William Waterhouse – Ulysses and the Sirens (1891)

Test time!

How much do you know about the Odyssey and the Iliad?

If you’re like me, the answer is – Nothing!  If you’d asked me yesterday to identify the author, I would have told you (after checking with Google), that it’s “Homer”.

But if you ask me today I might hedge, because Adam Nicolson, author of “Why Homer Matters“, says Homer is really a whole culture, not just one guy.

Which is strangely reassuring.

After all, the thought of a single person writing two timeless classics is inherently annoying to any writer who has taken pen to paper in an attempt to become known. It relieves some of the pressure to think the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey is actually a thousand-year parade of around-the-campfire spellbinders who memorized and refined tales that people wanted to hear.

But as a single individual, “Homer” may not have existed at all.

This casual dispatching of such a famous storyteller is completely in keeping with the contents of the Iliad, which is, after all, wholesale bloodshed. The story is a catalog of who impaled whom on the battlefield, and how the Gods were appeased by sacrifices that were flayed so their meaty thighbones could be cooked. Who knew someone would someday come along and flay the very idea of Homer himself?

Or as the author(s) might have said it:

“Adam sprang on Homer and took him alive as he was entangled in the crush; but he killed him then and there by a sword-blow on the neck. The sword reeked with his blood, while dark death and the strong hand of fate gripped him and closed his eyes.”

That’s it. No time to dally. So long, Homer, hello Oral Tradition!

I thought an epic poem should be written to mark the passage of this individual who probably never was, but of course I can’t write or recite an epic. I’ve tried and the result was excruciating for everyone involved.

The best I can do is come up with a bit of doggerel.

The guys who told the Iliad
were not much fun to know.

They’d memorized each stabbing
and each cutting, lethal blow.

They spat them out for listeners
who came to hear the gore.

An awful catalog of woe,
with spikes and blood and more.

Their plots had lots of detail

but their credits, a misnomer.

They were storytellers sure enough,
but not one guy named Homer.

How are you as a storyteller?

Poems, Science, Travel

Limerick Formation in Space

84 Comments

I had no idea there was an object in the asteroid belt big enough to be considered a “proto-planet.”   Ceres is about to get its close-up as a NASA probe closes in for a rendezvous in three months.

Ceres (pronounced SEER-eez) has enough gravity to hold itself in a spherical shape, and scientists think there may be some water there, but apparently that is still not enough to get past the “proto” stage, planet-wise. I confess I am not aware of the technical requirements for a space rock to advance beyond big-asteroid status, but there is some doubt that Ceres will ever qualify.

Why?  For me, a place is not a place unless it can generate a decent limerick.

Based on my remote amateur observations, Ceres will fall short, as witnessed by these promising starts that were never able to form fully functioning rhymes:

I.
There was a young fellow from Ceres
Who delighted in posing odd queries.
Such as, “Why do birds fly?”
And “What constitutes pie?” …

II.
There once was a woman from Ceres
an admirer of Timmy Leary’s.
She said “Let’s all drop out”
For she was no Girl Scout …

III.
An ill-defined creature from Ceres
Had appendages he called his “dearies”.
They were all rather cute,
but fell out of his suit …

Sorry, Ceres. Planetude seems very far away indeed.

To prove that you originate from a genuine place, write a limerick about where you’re from.

Media

This Squirrel’s Life

67 Comments

Trail Baboons seem to be starting 2015 united in the belief that their lives are not compelling enough to document on video – as confirmed by comments on yesterday’s Ask Dr. Babooner post. Apparently nobody who reads this blog (except tim) feels even as interesting as Kim Jong Un, while at the same time acknowledging that the Dear Leader is truly not very interesting at all.

I beg to differ, of course.

Ordinary lives can be fascinating. Sometimes the more ordinary they are, the better.

The producers of the podcast “Reply All” just dealt with this very topic when they were able to connect with one of the originators of the concept of the online examination of ordinary lives, Jennifer Ringley of the late ’90’s sensational and now-defunct website “Jennicam”.

Interestingly, the most curious thing about Jenni now is how successful she’s been in walking away from fame and removing her current self from the Internet.

And to think that for her to become known in the first place, all it took was a camera in an unexpected place, and some gumption. As the number of places where we don’t expect there to be a camera dwindles, we’re going to find out how long that formula works. It still has not lost its appeal, as witnessed by this charming video trip up a tree courtesy of a larcenous squirrel. Thanks to Clyde for forwarding this!

If only Mr. Nutsy had taken the camera back to his nest and set it up so we could watch the mundane everyday-ness of cracking nuts and grooming your bushy tail. Now THAT’s real celebrity!

You have a camera to place anywhere in the world. Where would you put it?

Uncategorized

Ask Dr. Babooner

22 Comments

We are ALL Dr. Babooner

Dear Dr. Babooner,

I believe in setting goals and taking positive action to achieve them, so I have great ambitions for 2015. I want this to be the year I learn to crochet and finally finish my Master’s Degree in Applied Physics.

And I also want to walk a tightrope across a narrow part of the Grand Canyon.

I’m very linear, so I’m going to get to work on the crocheting first. Once I’ve perfected that, I’ll brush up on my math, and after I’ve got that Master’s Degree in hand I’ll start with my balancing practice.

But I’ve also realized that achieving new things feels pointless unless you can share them with the world, so I’m wondering if having a camera crew follow me around might be a good idea.

Having a production crew to document your activities just seems to make sense in the age of digital media. Me reaching my tightrope goal will be a dramatic video event all by itself, but I’m thinking it will be great to have some martial music playing in the background while people watch me work on my math and crocheting.

Something like the music Kim Jong Un uses in this new video about him flying a plane is exactly the thing I have in mind.

The subtitles help too! I’ll add subtitles to my crocheting video for sure, since they speak a special language in that field that only a few people know. We’ll probably be fine without subtitles for my other achievements, since everybody pretty much gets it about Applied Physics and gravity.

Dr. Babooner, I’m excited about my 2015 goals but I’m not sure I should reveal them to the world right now. Declaring my intentions will force me into action because avoiding embarrassment means there can be no turning back. But I know it would be much less stressful for me if I set my goals quietly and announced my magnificent achievements only AFTER they were actually achieved.

What would you do?
Excited But Already Exhausted

I told E.B.A.E. that quiet goal setting is much less stressful, but often it ends right there. If you really want to reach a difficult goal, you have to corner yourself into doing it by declaring your intentions to the world, or at least to the people whose approval you crave. That said, I think documenting your life with a video crew, martial music and subtitles is a great idea even if you don’t achieve remarkable things.

ESPECIALLY if you don’t achieve remarkable things.

 

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

Uncategorized

Window Shopping

44 Comments

Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, national poster child for the campaign to end social promotion and a fixture at Wendell Willkie High School.

Hey Mr. C.,

I know the economy is (supposedly) picking up and people in my age group have better employment prospects now compared to just a few years ago, when the likelihood of finding work after graduation was pretty much zero.

Now they say if you study the right kind of thing you have a good chance of getting hired if your training lines up with all the jobs they say are coming – jobs that have real specific requirements.

In fact Mr. Boozenporn organized a job fair just before the Christmas Break where we had a chance to go to the gym during our study hall hour and talk to experts in a bunch of different fields about what we need to do to get ready.

There were people there from the medical fields to talk about being nurses and doctor’s assistants. There were technology people there to talk about being all different kinds of engineers.

And there was even one who said we could get work right out of high school as long as we were willing to change bedpans and take care of old people, a super-needy and traditionally grumpy group that is growing every single day.

Nobody wanted to talk to that guy.

I took a walk around but didn’t see anything interesting, mostly because I was still holding out for my dream job – being a NASA mission specialist on the International Space Station, in charge of looking out the window.

Seriously – being in space is awesome (I think) but everybody we send up there has a hundred different jobs to do so nobody gets to just look at stuff.

I was super-ready to take that job, but then I got a big disappointment. Somebody already has it!.

Still, I think this is pretty amazing, and when you consider that the universe is vast, there’s lots more to see. Notice he only spent a little bit of time looking out the windows on the other (non-Earth) side!

Now that we know it can be a “thing”, maybe there will be other openings for Space Lookout Observation Boy. My mom says I was born to be a S.L.O.B.!

Your hopeful pal,
Bubby

What can you see out your favorite window?

Uncategorized

Bird Brains

57 Comments
Today’s post comes from Bart, the bear who found a smart phone in the woods.

H’lo, Bart here.

Well there’s snow again, finally. ‘Bout time, if you ask me. The woods get kinda dull in winter without a white blanket to make things look clean and crisp, like a freshly made bed.

Not that I know anything about freshly made beds. I’ve heard tell, that’s all. I know there’s three kinds of freshly made beds – too hard, too soft and just right.

That’s the legend among us bears, anyhow.

Most of MY freshly made stuff is exactly the kind of junk the new snow covers up, which is why we like it so much. The woods can get kinda messy and gross, to tell the truth. Gotta love the snow.

It’s funny, because people think we bears and all the other wild creatures hate the “bad” weather and run from it and complain about it, just like you do. But for us, the weather is the weather – we never think about changing it or how it could be better than it is.

What’s the point of that? I would shrug right now but I don’t have the shoulders for it.

So anyway, I was surprised to see this article the other day about birds having the power to sense severe storms days in advance and then they take action to avoid them, which makes birds look pretty smart.

Read it if you like. Some people think this means that birds are oh-so sensitive and highly intelligent because they can fly out of the way of bad weather the same way we would if only we could be so smart for even a day.

Some are even saying we should let pigeons do the daily TV forecast – that they would rescue us from harm because of their extreme weather smarts.

Seriously, though, that’s not a good idea. I’ve known a few birds and they’re as dumb as stones. Pigeons especially!  Not really hero material.  Not even close.  Suppose they knew some bad weather was coming – so what?  Birds wouldn’t be able to tell you why, or how they knew, or what to do about it, except “Fly!”

That’s pretty much the whole bird vocabulary right there. “Eat”. “Poop”. “Fly”. Not the kind of TV role model you want for your kids.

I’m not saying birds are worthless. You just have to know who you’re dealing with. Here’s a YouTube video from the Budapest Zoo that pretty much sums it up:

So I’m a creature of the woods. I don’t know what it’s like to be a zoo bear. But if I was set up in a pen like this with tons of visitors every day, I’d want to keep it tidy. Lots of people say this bear was trying to save the bird, but I think she was just trying to get that annoying thing out of her water. They can cause such a ruckus, and for what?

All that squawking, flailing and flapping would make people forget to look at the cool bear!

Your pal,
Bart

When have you rescued a wild creature?

The Baboon Congress

Lost & Found

62 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Steve Grooms.

After living 38 years in my Saint Paul bungalow, I decided to move closer to my family.

I spent half a year last winter and spring preparing my home for sale. The job would have been impossible without the help of several people who contribute to this blog site. They helped clean and paint my home. They loaded decades of junk in a pickup and took it to the dump. And they boxed up a few precious things so I could ship them to Portland.

We finally ran out of time. There was still work to be done when my friends said goodbye the last time and turned their attention toward their own homes, their own families and activities for Memorial Day.

That’s when things fell apart for me. The folks who would run the estate sale wanted me out of the home so they could organize the sale. I still needed to box up more stuff and ship most of it to Portland. And I needed to fill my station wagon with a few things I’d drive to my new home.

When my home hit the real estate market I had to keep leaving while groups of potential buyers toured it. Seven groups came through the first day the home was listed for sale. I sat in my station wagon from a discrete spot up the block, waiting for them to leave so I could go back to packing.

I expected it would take from four to six weeks to sell my home. But 30 hours after going on sale I had two parties offering to pay more than my asking price for the home.

That was wonderful, but it meant that instead of having many weeks to pack and leave I had two days! That would have been difficult for someone young and fit. For a senior citizen with health issues the overnight sale of my home created a crisis. On my last day I limped with boxes of stuff between home and my car in a thunderstorm. It was one of the worst days of my life.

Many things I meant to take to Oregon never got packed because I ran out of time. I didn’t realize how severe my losses were until I got to Portland and discovered how many useful or beloved things had failed to make the trip. The box of precious family photos ended up in a landfill in Minnesota. I forgot to bring my warm coat. My favorite Christmas memorabilia didn’t show up after the move.  Molly, my daughter, grieved the loss of the Christmas box, although she understood I had left Minnesota in near panic.

Last Thursday Molly and Liam came over to my new apartment. I mentioned that there was one last box I hadn’t opened after the move. Parked on a high shelf, it was too heavy for me to bring down. From its weight, I guessed the box held books.

Liam and I were in the living room when Molly called to me in a strangled voice. I rushed to the bedroom. The mystery box was on the bed, flaps open. Molly was holding a Lunds shopping bag that had been packed in May by one of my baboon friends, probably Linda or Barbara. That bag held our old family Christmas stockings. Tears streamed down Molly’s cheeks. She wasn’t able to talk.

The red stocking was made for me by my dad in 1956 when we lived in Iowa. A plump green fish swims near the top of the stocking and exhales a bright spray of sequin bubbles. My name is written below, the letter shaped from red and white pipe cleaners.

My erstwife’s childhood blue stocking was there too. Kathe’s mother sewed this stocking by hand when the family still lived in New York City. She decorated it with a reindeer fawn, a Christmas tree and a little girl dressed for Swedish folk dancing.  Stitched letters proclaim “Merry Christmas Kathe Ann.”

While my former wife was not artistic or crafty, she had a gift for making charming Christmas stockings. There in the Lunds bag was the stocking she made for Molly in 1983. The white stocking sparkles with sequins and carries several iconic Christmas objects: a teddy bear, a dancing girl and a goofy jack-in-the-box. At the bottom of the stocking a six-year-old girl sleeps lies in her bed, her arm thrown over an orange kitten. The little girl is, of course, Molly. We gave the kitten to Molly just before Christmas.

When Molly first saw the exuberant kitten, she said, “Wow, that’s one froshus cat!”  And that is how Froshus got his name.

When she finally could speak through her tears, Molly said, “Nothing else matters. The other stuff you lost doesn’t matter. I didn’t want you to know that it broke my heart to think we’d lost these. And here they are.” The old stockings now hang on Molly’s hearth, waiting to be filled by Santa.

Merry Christmas, baboons.

What precious object would you dread to lose?

Weather

Complicated Relationship

43 Comments

Yesterday was the day of the annual Winter Solstice.  From now on the days slowly lengthen – until they begin to shrink again.  This on-again, off-again type of relationship has led to many angry/needy notes like the one I’ve just written to The Sun.  

 

So I get this feeling that things are warming up again between us.

Am I wrong? I don’t think so. You’re coming back, aren’t you?

Well don’t.

And don’t say you haven’t changed. Change is all I get from you. Last summer … well let’s just say June 15 was pretty special. Not going to forget that soon.

But I can’t count on you. Just weeks before that I felt so frozen and hurt.   You could have warmed me then but where were you? Behind a cloud all day? What does that even mean?   In what kind of relationship do you get to do that and it’s OK?

And it’s like this every year. You get closer and the intensity is overwhelming.  Then you fade. It’s like I hardly see you. And then it seems like you’re hanging around a few more minutes each day until you’re always here and I can’t get any sleep because there is So Much You.

And as soon as I start basking in that, I can sense you turning away.

This is getting old. Like billions of years old.   Make up your mind – do you want to be close or distant?

And don’t say I’m the one who’s all tilted and elliptical and orbity.   That’s a cop-out. I know for a fact that you wobble. And I don’t think it’s me that makes you do it.

I turn to you every day and some days you are just not available. But still I turn to you again the next day and the next so tell me who’s steady and reliable.

When it comes to temperament, only one of us has spots. Only one of us has flares. And only one of us can give the other one a stroke.

So now you’re coming back and I’m supposed to be all happy but get over yourself because I already know how this turns out.   So don’t waste your time and mine trying to heat things up if you’re just going to leave again in six months.

I can live without you … Is a lie that I tell myself every year. But this time around I am not going to get burned by you.  I bought a hat.

How do I look?

Your forever,
I’m Still Angry

So what’s up with you and the sun?   

 

Uncategorized

Loop Fruits

56 Comments

Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty.

At ease, civilians! But don’t be lulled into a false sense of security!

And as I say that, I realize it’s redundant because “false” is the only “sense of security” brand on the shelves these days.

Nothing is secure!

Look at what an isolated foreign potentate was able to do without leaving his hermit kingdom – he cancelled our plan to go to the movies! That’s a level of meddling in the personal entertainment lives of Americans that I thought was reserved only for the FBI or the Mall of America Police.

And now comes word that there are people actually working in an organized way to try to build Elon Musk’s extremely scary Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation system akin to those pneumatic tubes that they use to move money, paperwork, and out-of-ink pens back and forth from the bank’s drive-up teller to your car.

As your Bathtub Safety Officer, I’ve made it clear I’m totally against this idea.

As I said in my earlier post:

“Even if everything is OK on the journey from point A to point B, what about the people who handle the tube when it arrives at its destination? During the heyday of pneumatic office communication, the weak link always happened in the basement where all the tubes ended and various boobs and imbeciles fumbled to open the capsules and spilled the precious contents onto a dank cement floor. Or at least that’s how I picture it.”

The Hyperloop planners have considered this very thing, and according to the above article, they’ve lavished their attention on the sticky problem of what happens when Hyper-pod arrives at its station.

“So the team decided on what it calls a ‘bubble strategy.’ There’s the swanky capsule, the one with fancy doors and windows, that pulls into the station. It’s the ‘bubble.’ Passengers get in, and that capsule enters an outer shell as it’s loaded into the tube. The outer shell is built to handle the ride, and has the air compressor and other needed bits.”

Now I’m even more concerned. The thought of riding in a “bubble” that’s inside an “outer shell” that goes 800 miles per hour gets me thinking about the metal ball rattles around inside cans of spray paint.

No illustrations needed!

I have been told that I sometimes over-react to threats that are not real.

Maybe the Hyperloop is one of those cases and nothing will come of it. There are so many potential obstacles to the establishment of system that promotes human travel-by-tube, it will probably not happen in our shockingly brief lifetimes. Earthquakes, rising ocean levels or killer bees could quickly take take this, and every other option, off the table.

Or maybe with the growth of the internet and fully immersive high-definition virtual realities, the whole idea of physical travel to distant locations will begin to seem quaint. We may decide that going anywhere at all is not only too risky – it’s unnecessary.

Especially when you consider how easy it is to keep us from going to the movies!

Yours in Safety,
B.S.O.R.

What does it take to keep you at home?

Uncategorized

The Fake Persona Strategy

46 Comments

Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden of Wendell Willkie High School.

Hi Mr. C.,

I don’t get to see much television ’cause there are so many other screens to watch I don’t have enough time for it. But I know things are different for you older folks. You still think we kids spend our nights the way you did – sprawled on the living room floor in front of the tube, with mom and dad sitting on the couch behind us.

That’s kinda sweet, I guess. But why would anyone ever lay down on the floor in front of a screen that doesn’t respond to you? Weird.

Someday you’ll have to tell me all about how it was in olden times. Maybe when I’m your age I’ll have the patience to sit and listen – can you wait that long? I suppose the math doesn’t really work out.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t watched the TV show that’s the big deal of the moment now that “Stephen Colbert” has signed off the air to make way for Stephen Colbert, who will debut a new show on CBS in September.

If I get what people are telling me, “Stephen Colbert” is a fake know-nothing blowhard character made up by Stephen Colbert to poke fun at people who are real know-nothing blowhards.

And for this they say he’s a genius!

He also got rich doing it, and is going to get even richer in the Fall when he replaces David Letterman. But in that job he’ll be playing his real self, not his fake one.

I’m not too keen on all this using media to pretend to be someone you’re not. Does that really work? I’m pretty sure people are smart enough to see through it without much trouble, just by the language you use and the look in your eye.

But that’s just me.

Still, it does give me an interesting idea – do you think Principal Peepers would buy it if I told him that all these years I’ve spent at Willke High I’ve been pretending to be a snotty, selfish, shallow sophomore when in fact I’m really good-hearted, smart scholar-type who’s just been doing a big con, like a performance art project with me as the star? And that next Fall I want to switch back to my real self and get on with my life?

I could use a lucky break like that. And if it can work once, maybe it would again and again! It would sure be a cool way to get out of a bunch of the trouble I expect to get into after I (someday) graduate!

Hopefully,
Bubby

I told Bubby it all hinges on whether Principal Peepers is:

  1. A Colbert Fan
  2. Gullible

As a high school principal, there’s a slim possibility he’s the first, but no chance at all that he’s the second. Still, it doesn’t hurt to dream big.

What’s your best fake persona?