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Post by Tails82 on Jul 25, 2011 15:54:41 GMT -5
More of the Odyssey with the cyclops. And the end where he makes it home. Hesiod: wrote somewhere around the 7th century BC. Parts of the creation myth, with Prometheus bringing fire to people and getting punished for it. Then Pandora opens the box and brings evils into the world. People regress from good to bad, with an idea that it'll get worse. Then there are some poems about the seasons...
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Post by Tails82 on Jul 26, 2011 2:53:55 GMT -5
Lots of authors, so much I'll have to refer back to the book.
Archilochus: early one, said to write stinging lines against people he didn't like to ruin their reputation. Tyrtaeus: Urges Spartan bravery in battle. Sappho: Lady who wrote about life and things. Xenophanes: got out of some Greek city when Persians invaded. Unlike many Greeks, opposed the rewards and honor given to athletes and had monotheistic ideas. Solon: Put in charge of Athens for a year in order to reform the laws and prevent civil war. Managed to do it. Did some poetry and explained why he changed the laws. Anacreon: wrote about pleasures in life. The melody of the US national anthem is the same as a British drinking song that began with a dedication to him. Pindar: wrote a bunch of different things. This book contained odes to Olympic winners and some legends like Asclepius the healer. Herodotus: considered the earliest historian, of both Greek and foreign leaders. A nice sizable section dedicated to him in this book. Some stories were from oral accounts and he acknowledges them as not being entirely accurate, but he includes them. One was about a king who wanted to prove to another man that his wife was hot so he told him to spy on her while she undressed. The queen noticed this and decided to retain her honor, either the man who saw her naked had to die, or he had to kill her husband and become the new king. So the guy chose to become king. Next section was on Solon meeting Croesus of Lydia (probably didn't happen since one lived decades before the other. Herodotus notes this but includes it). Croesus was considered the happiest man in the world, and asks Solon who he thinks is happiest hoping he will be flattered. Solon doesn't say his name, and when asked about it says a happy person is someone who lived their entire life in good fortune. It is too early for him to make a judgment on Coesus because he has not died yet. Those who are happy are happy throughout their life, while those who are happy temporarily are just lucky and this may change. For Croesus it does change and he dies after being taken prisoner by the Persians. Next, the Egyptian king Rhampsinitus, who arranged a room for his treasure to be buried. Before dying, the chief builder passes on a secret way into the room to his sons, who go in and take stuff. The king notices and sets traps. One of the brothers necks gets caught in a trap and tells the other to cut his head off and take it, so they can't identify the other brother. The king responds by taking the decapitated body and hanging it up, ordering his guards to arrest anyone who is found mourning there. The thief, at the urging of his mother, manages to get the guards drunk and takes the body away. Finally the king decides to let any man sleep with his daughter, but before doing so they must tell her the most clever and the most wicked things they've done in their life. If the thief revealed himself she was to grab hold of him. The thief realized this was an obvious setup but went anyway, bringing an arm of a dead man with him. When she tried to grab him in the dark room, he held out the dead arm for her to take and got away in the confusion. The king decides to grant the thief immunity and the girl as his wife if he came forward, since at this point he admired the man's wisdom. The last portions were an account of the battle of Thermopylae, with the Spartans holding off the large Persian army for a while. Herodotus then credits Athens for driving back the Persians at Salamis.
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Post by Tails82 on Jul 28, 2011 1:50:10 GMT -5
NatGeo article on Burma/Myanmar's slow but potentially promising adoption of some democratic ideas.
Aeschylus:tragic poet. Portions of Oresteia and other things. I believe I read Orestes' trial with the Furies before. Thucydides:Picks up history where Herodotus left off. Tried to be more accurate and not as reliant on things like prophecies. Deals with the Peloponnesian War. Survived a plague in Athens and wrote about it. We don't know exactly what it was but it wasn't pretty. Also reread the Melian dialogue, where Athens is flexing its influence and wants the neutral island of Melos to join their side against the Spartans. Not an important territory, but Athens demands they ally with them so Athens doesn't appear weak. They refuse, hoping Sparta comes to help them. But that doesnt happen and their citizens are killed or enslaved. Sophocles: A few bits of the plays we still have, along with Antigone in its entirety which I reread.
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Post by Chromeo on Jul 28, 2011 18:24:36 GMT -5
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Post by Preventing Google Doxxing on Jul 28, 2011 18:58:11 GMT -5
Pretty sure she was raped too. Think I saw that on TvTropes.
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Post by Tails82 on Jul 29, 2011 3:25:48 GMT -5
Euripedes: portions of his plays. Medea and Jason. A part from Hippolytus which I may have read before. Some of these things sound familiar but I can't remember when I came across them. Anyway, Phaedra is the second wife of Theseus, the king of Athens. She thinks she's in love with her son in law, Hippolytus. She talks with her nurse, who advises her to pursue these feelings. The nurse uses an argument taken by sophists, whose primary concern was learning the proper way to argue for any position, even incorrect ones. The ideas reflected here are 1) natural desires are more powerful than man's reason or morals, and 2) some are above the law and should not be restrained by rules crafted by lesser men. The nurse manages to persuade Phaedra. But after their talk, the nurse tells the king and he kills both Phaedra and Hippolytus. Portions of the Bacchae, women involved in ritualistic orgies to Dionysus. Unrestrained celebrations, with extreme fervor present in their dances. Often this lack of restraint was portrayed as leading to violence. Aristophanes: Portions of The Clouds, which I reread. Strepsiades becomes enthralled by the teachings of a "Socratic" school (actually sophists, which Socrates would be opposed to). The schools teach what we'd call secular humanism, along with methods to win lawsuits even if someone is clearly in the wrong. In the play, Socrates convinces Strepsiades that the gods do not exist, and things can be explained by looking at the forces of nature. Strepsiades joins them but flunks out. He makes his son Pheidippides go to be taught there, since his son has amassed large debts and he believes the Sophists can find an argument to get out of paying them. This works but things backfire when Pheidippides starts beating his father, managing to find a persuading argument for it (fathers beat their kids, so kids should beat their fathers harsher since grown men should know better). Entertaining stuff, if I say so myself. There were a couple other parts to other plays. Plato: Some dialogue dealing with Socrates, his method, and ethics. The admission that the only thing he knows for certain is what he does not know. His trial over "corrupting the youth" (he had taught the leader of the hated "Thirty Tyrants," installed by Sparta after they took the city-their rule lasted only 18 months). Socrates' respect for the law which prevented him from making a potential escape from prison, and his death.
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Post by Laharls_Wrath on Jul 29, 2011 14:17:55 GMT -5
Medea was a fun play
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Post by Tails82 on Jul 30, 2011 13:49:43 GMT -5
Menander: new form of comedy, wrote a lot but we don't have much. From other fragments we have the names of nearly a hundred of his plays, but only have one of them in its complete form. Theophrastus: Next in line as head of the Peripatetics after Aristotle. Describes certain characters based on people he knew, like stingy men or boasters. Callimachus: wrote a lot of short stuff. Catalogued stuff in Alexandria's library. Since he was good at short stuff he wrote epigrams. "He stooped to put flowers on his stepmother's tomb, thinking she'd changed since meeting her doom. He died when her gravestone fell on his head. Stepmothers are dangerous even when dead." Appolonius of Rhodes: head librarian at Alexandria for a time. Wrote epics. Part of Jason and Medea. Some other guys I don't really care to write about. For one translation, for whatever reason, the guy who did it thought it'd be a good idea to apply a Southern accent to it, to show how the original author wrote in a different dialect. It was painful to read. What followed were random poems out of the Greek Anthology, a collection of thousands of poems through several centuries. And so ends the Greek section of this book, next is the smaller section on Roman authors.
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Post by Tails82 on Jul 31, 2011 0:38:26 GMT -5
Lucretius: big fan of Epicurus and wrote about their philosophy. The section provided deals with death and urges people not to fear it. Epicureans believed everything was composed of atoms which were always forming, falling apart and forming into other beings, so why worry about death? Enjoy things as they are and don't worry about superstitious fears. Although I disagree with his conclusions I would've liked the book to have a little more of his stuff. Catullus & Horace: went through these before for assignments. Two poets. Catullus' poems were discovered in medieval times on accident when someone recognized Latin words were written on some packaging. They were assigned a numerical system based on the order they were copied. I like the part from Horace's satires about how country life kicks city life's butt. Virgil: portions of the Aeneid, rereading. Best part is the patriotic description of all the future souls that'll be Aeneas' descendants once Rome is founded. Livy: Wrote a history of Rome, including distinct Roman legends like Romulus and Remus. Book includes the fall of the last king of Rome. Also read some Catholic stuff. www.ncregister.com/daily-news/spanish-civil-war-75-years-later/thousands of people — mostly military personnel and Catholic priests, but also doctors, lawyers, professors and writers — were taken from Madrid by bus to fields near Paracuellos del Jarama, where they were systematically executed for three straight days, and their bodies were dumped in mass graves in November 1936.
This massacre was not something the Spanish would come up with on their own, Nieto pointed out; recent evidence points to Santiago Carillo, a longtime Spanish Communist Party secretary, as the chief of the operation, who was being directed by Soviet Comintern representatives. They also sent the whole Spanish gold reserve to Moscow.
Carillo, who is still alive, “would be, and should be, serving a life sentence,” according to Nieto. Instead, he has been an influential European political operative for some seven decades, never condemned for his role in a major European massacre.
Nieto concluded, “The crimes committed by the 40,000 international red brigades, under the leadership of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, remain, to date, uninvestigated and unpunished.”That's pretty disappointing, will have to look more into it. Oh and there was a mention of that professor who got pressured to resign for saying what the Catholic church's stance on homosexuality was. He has a new job at a religious school now.
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 1, 2011 13:08:19 GMT -5
Sunday paper. An article on how a gang was busted up by using laws originally intended for organized crime. Some sillies have been saying the laws shouldn't apply to gangs and they should do other things like social reform. Other side says it's a disservice to the community to say they're all in poverty so they're forced into a life of crime. It ignores all the people who work hard and raise a family, and tries to explain away gang violence. Violence wasn't the way it is because of the environment, but because the gang itself was causing much of the violence. Which (surprise, surprise) went down significantly after cops got tough on them and rounded them all up.
Propertius: love elegies. Better than most poets in this collection. Ovid: wrote the Metamorphoses which I've translated portions of before, for class. A story about legends and stuff, including their version of the big flood story. Also wrote other stuff like the Amores and Ars Amatoria, which the emperor Augustus wasn't keen on because he wanted a return to traditional Roman values. Meanwhile Ovid was writing about how to pursue mistresses and have adulterous relationships. Ovid was exiled from Rome later on, for unknown reasons. Tacitus: historian who I looked through a lot at my research job. Just a small section in this book, covering the death of Agrippina. She was Nero's mother, and a very manipulative woman. She got her son adopted by the emperor Claudius, who then died from possible poisoning. Nero became the new emperor but his mom seemed to have her nose in many affairs from behind the scenes, which others didn't like. Some rumors that she tried to seduce Nero, which weren't surprising since by marrying Claudius she had already married her own uncle. Nero decided he had to get rid of her, so it was set up to look like an accident. When Agrippina went out on a ship, there was a heavy weight placed above her couch so the roof would fall on her couch at the given time. This didn't work. She was not crushed and the boat didn't sink quickly enough. Her servant, trying to get herself saved first, said she was Agrippina and got killed by the rescuers. Agrippina saw this and swam away to another boat. Once at home, she acted like she thought this had been an accident but Nero knew better. So he sent a small force to her room to finish her off while she was in her bed. Petronius Arbiter: meh. Some philosophical dialogues that didn't interest me that much.
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 1, 2011 23:37:54 GMT -5
Juvenal: wrote satires. I like him. All this stuff about corruption and other junk in the old days. One setting has a guy leaving Rome and he gives the reasons for it. Thieving public officials, adulterers, no jobs an honest men could take without compromising his principles. Buildings are crowded, not built well. Everyone's judged by how fashionable their possessions are, though in the country no one cares. Inflation keeps the poor from advancing. Greeks and other foreigners diluted Roman culture. The crowds are loud at day and at night they bring in heavy wagons to get construction materials through, which is loud as well. At night someone could be run over by such wagons, or robbed, or attacked by drunkards. Marcus Aurelius: philosophical emperor who wrote some meditations on life. I also like what he says a lot. Very...meditationey. I wanna put some of his quotes up later. St. Augustine: last writer in this collection and a good inspiration. Portions of his Confessions dealing with his earlier life outside the church. He had a mistress and a child by her, fell in with the Manichees (which kind of combined Christ with the teachings of the 4th century prophet Mani, who said he was the "Paraclete" Jesus mentioned). How a book by Cicero started his philosophical journey, as he realized he was not happy with the way things were. He went to Rome against his mother's wishes, and to Milan from there. He leaves the Manichees and, after some searching, decides to end things with the mistress he had a child with. He converts after an experience in a garden at Milan. He hears someone's voice nearby repeating, "pick up and read." So he reads the first scriptural passage he opens to: "Not in riots and in drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts" (Rom 13:13-14). Nice message to remember...
A pretty good selection of authors to end the book. I would've liked to have seen some Cicero or Seneca. Maybe I'll read some of their work next.
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 3, 2011 15:57:04 GMT -5
Nintendo Power. A section on the SNES where the term "Mode 7" was used a bit too much.
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 4, 2011 1:34:20 GMT -5
Non-canon scriptural works.
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 5, 2011 10:46:35 GMT -5
Maccabees.
Catholic stuff. Talks about natural gas drilling and other stuff I've already brought up, not interested in repeating. Someone new's entering into a monastery. In addition to contraception, Obamacare plans sterilization procedures to be covered by insurance companies. Ridiculous how "choice" now means "you have to pay for my choice." And an Illinois judge has allowed Catholics to keep some adoption/foster care agencies open. He said if they were to close down over gay adoption issues, 2,000 kids would be affected. The law itself says, "nothing in this act shall interfere with or regulate the religious practice of any religious body." So we'll see.
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 5, 2011 23:14:50 GMT -5
A book on Nelson Baker, who was a well-known priest in the late 19th/early 20th century. He was a Civil War veteran, then was a partner in a small business in Buffalo NY. In his mid-20s he decided to become a priest. He went through an awful sickness during his studies, and it took him months to recover. After he was ordained, he did a lot of neat things. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome, although Europe wasn't being exactly friendly to Catholics in the 1870s-Bismarck was jailing priests/bishops, while Italian nationalists confiscated papal holdings, and those who spoke in favor of the pope could be arrested as Baker witnessed on his trip. But it was a good journey for him, paid for by the leftover money he had earned while in business. In France he was deeply motivated by Our Lady of Victory. Guess this reminded me of how Catholics faced problems back then, too...Buffalo needed priests and the diocese was struggling to pay the bills. But Baker managed to do much good while he was around. He was a pioneer in a few areas. First, he learned that natural gas deposits had been found in the area, and he had the idea to drill. If gas were found, it would mean an end to heating and electric bills. But he didn't have the money for it and some experts had said the deposits were scarce. However he had faith in Our Lady of Victory, and $5,000 was donated to the diocese as a gift toward a worthy project. Baker convinced the bishop to fund drilling, and although it took weeks gas was found past 1,100 feet. Some tried to drill nearby but were unsuccessful in finding any. Baker also started serious mailing efforts asking for donations to help the needy. In addition to being involved in the orphanage, Baker's efforts led to the opening of other buildings, such as a hospital. Upon learning about infanticides where children were left to die or drowned in the Erie Canal, he opened an infant home and helped single mothers. Another achievement was the building of a basilica (which I've been to). He was a very charitable man, helping many in need even when some were seen as taking advantage of him. He said something like: the Lord will not ask if others are worthy, but whether you gave. One post office worker took some money from the donation letters, but Baker later offered that man a position. When the Great Depression hit, he helped several people with money and meals. He made efforts to instruct and convert African Americans. Baker did this for 60 years, living into his 90s. His efforts helped thousands, and the institutions he founded continue to do so. There were miracles attributed to him. A crippled girl, and a man who could not move his arm after an industrial accident, were healed and attributed it to Baker. Some significant recoveries from illness also took place. While moving Baker's remains into the basilica in 1999, a few vials were found by his casket. One contained his blood which was still in good condition after 60 years. There are efforts to canonize him as a saint. Beatification would happen if one posthumous miracle was found, canonization as a saint if two are found. The effort's ongoing.
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