Posts Tagged ‘Homer’
Monday!
* I may have done this one before, but what the hell: the RAW rejection letter.
* RIP, Sally Ride. And here’s the politicized postscript.
* The NCAA drops the hammer on Penn State.
* Justice Department Investigates Pennsylvania Voter ID Law.
* The New Yorker profiles the Boss.
The tune, thick with horns and vocal harmonies, elides into “My City of Ruins,” one of the elegiac, gospel-tinged songs on the 9/11 album, “The Rising.” The voices sing “Rise up! Rise up!” and there comes a string of horn solos: trombone, trumpet, sax. Then back to the voices. Springsteen quickly introduces the E Street horns and the singing collective. Then he says, “Roll call!” And, with the music rising bit by churchly bit, he introduces the core of the band: “Professor Roy Bittan is in the house. . . . Charlie Giordano is in the house. . . .”
When he finishes the roll call, there is a long ellipsis. The band keeps vamping.
“Are we missing anybody?”
Two spotlights are now trained on the organ, where Federici once sat, and at the mike where Clemons once stood.
“Are we missing anybody?”
Then again: “Are we missing anybody? . . . That’s right. That’s right. We’re missing some. But the only thing I can guarantee tonight is that if you’re here and we’re here, then they’re here!” He repeats this over and over, the volume of the piano and the bass rising, the drums hastening, the voices rising, until finally the song overwhelms him, and, if Springsteen has calculated correctly, there will not be an unmoved soul in the house.
* Six facts about guns, violence, and gun control.
* Dibs on the novelization: Zhang and Li write that the the Milky Way will be torn apart 32.9 million years before the big rip. The Earth will be ripped away from the Sun two months before the end, and we’ll lose our moon with five days left. The Sun itself will be destroyed 28 minutes before the end of time, and the Earth will explode a mere 12 minutes later.
* The headline reads, “Neurosurgeons banned from human research for giving infectious bacteria to brain tumor patients.”
* Radiolab says the Greeks didn’t know about blue.
* Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld go get coffee.
* And Fred Willard is keeping his head up.
Four More
Four more. Thanks to some Facebookers for the links.
* Exact date of Odysseus’s return from Troy pinpointed. With this crucial question settled, no one need read The Odyssey ever again.
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.
* Congratulations to Morgan Ross, winner of the Harper’s Ferry “Worst Love Poem” contest.
Your legs
undulate like two jellyfish tentacles,
moving freely in the ocean
that is your upper lip.
* A slave in Jefferson Davis’s house was a Union spy. Great story. Dibs on the movie rights to this.
News Roundup
News roundup.
* There’s rioting in Oakland following the shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police last week.
* The Odyssey as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
* Sean P. Murphy at Inside Higher Ed says teaching at a community college isn’t as bad as it is sometimes made out to be.
* The Gallery of Obscure Patents.
* At right, via grinding.be, your image of the day.
* A person’s Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one’s Erdős number—which measures the “collaborative distance” in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one’s Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer an individual is to Erdős and Bacon.
* What Obama will look like after four years as president.
* And just for kicks: Scrabulous is back.
Gerry Canavan 