Open sesame!

Hmm, that song was written 30 years ago (hence 30 years of hurt), and has been sung ever since. I think there was a measure of humility all along, it just manifests very differently from in some other societies.

HELLO SAILORS!!

I wonder about the testosterone distribution among these three heros:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqvCA4c80GQ&rco=1

Hegseth has also ordered a policy of permitting officers to lay hands on recruits.

This sounds like the conservative movement’s deliberate policy over the past 30-40 years of introducing military-grade weaponry into everyday American life, manufacturing, transporting freely, carrying in automobiles and on our persons, and then proceeding to fuck with all of us with big gummint violence and retribution and abuse ….. and then leering at us and daring us to make use of their gift.

The Supreme Court lickspittles have armed the country and now whine that they are being threatened with gun violence.

I noticed in the latest limited government cold-blooded murder by ICE vermin in the vermin breeding ground of Texas that some of the murderer’s accompliced were women.

Maybe testosterone isn’t the vector.

Maybe the Christian Nationalist Republican MAGA conservative mind virus is the culprit.

That sissy-assed tattooed freak Hegseth looks like those serial killers who do life in prison and find the man-on-man prison sex just another way of reaching for the soap and part of their dominant exercise regimen.

We don’t know what we’re up against.

I’m about to start reading this two volume tome:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=male+fantasies+klaus+theweleit&crid=3A5W5B4C69TDG&sbm=true&setroute=search&sprefix=male+fantasies%2Caps%2C144&ref=nb_sb_ss_p13n-expert-pd-ops-ranker_1_14

The late Weimar period was a practice session for what’s coming at us.

A chip off the old blockhead:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/07/transgender-semiconductors

My computer has lots of mammary.

My iPhone looks good in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

My car goes both ways.

As Thomas Jefferson opined: “We hold these truths to be self-abusive, that everyone’s got one, that they are well endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Parts, that among these are what’s mentioned in the fade-out to I Am The Walrus.

I’m a transresister.

FWIW – Nolan’s Odyssey is well crafted, well paced, visually lush, and thoughtfully adapted. Well worth a visit to the theater to see it on the big screen, and well worth a long discussion afterwards.

Thanks nous. What do you make if these critics’ take? (granted, both can be quite grumpy)

https://time.com/article/2026/07/15/the-odyssey-review-christopher-nolan/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-movie-review

novakant – Thanks nous. What do you make if these critics’ take?

Last time I responded to a couple of critics’ reviews of a Matt Damon war film I ended up with 70 pages and a year-and-a-half’s worth of thoughts on the subject, and nearly broke me several times… I promise to be more prompt and more brief.

I found the New Yorker review more productive than the one in Time. I don’t necessarily disagree with the observations from which they are starting, but I don’t find that either of them give me what I am looking for in a review, which is offering a critical perspective that deepens the experience of viewing the film and helps to highlight the most important things that the film wishes to work through. The Time review instead offers a judgment of Nolan’s choices and use of the actors’ talents. The New Yorker review critiques Nolan’s choices as a historian. Neither of those choices of perspective start by trying to understand what Nolan was trying to do or say with this film.

Nolan is making a feature film for wide release in 2026 with Odysseus as his protagonist. That’s going to color a lot of his choices. He could choose to portray Odysseus in a manner consistent with the one that we find in Homer’s text, but that is asking the audience to pay $20 to spend two hours with a character that is an asshole by our standards. Instead, Nolan chose to give us a protagonist who experiences the events that Odysseus experiences, but whose character is based more in Dr. Jonathan Shay’s modern reading of the character through the lens of his clinical work with veterans who have severe, persistent PTSD (read Achilles in Vietnam, or Odysseus in America if this interests you). Nolan also chooses to work from Emily Wilson’s translation f the Odyssey, which itself was Wilson’s attempt to strip the varnish of patriarchy and modern romanticism from the often brutal language of the poem. Leaning into those choices colors the result, as it should.

I don’t know what I would think of the film if I came to it without having read the poem in translation(s) multiple times, or without having spent months of my life struggling to say something productive about Saving Private Ryan and the work of Jonathan Shay. My critical perspective shapes my experience. But I do try to listen to what Nolan is trying to say, and to consider what I believe his influences are, and meet somewhere in the middle with respect for those things before offering my own view.

I don’t think that the more critical reviews have been as generous or patient with their listening before applying their own critical perspectives.

GftNC – I’m anxious about reading something which removes something which I’m assuming is intrinsic to the original (e.g. patriarchy). It’s not that I mind reading an “alternative” version (e.g. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls” about part of the Iliad), but that’s different from reading a translation.

I was using the phrase “strips the varnish” as an art conservation metaphor to describe how translation choices can change the color of the paint beneath, or add a new sheen to things. I’ll. let Wilson speak for herself here, in the note I had in mind when I introduced the metaphor.

The elite households represented in The Odyssey all include a large staff of domestic slaves to work in the house, preparing and serving food and taking care of their masters’ clothes, and field slaves to work the estate and tend the animals. The language used to describe these people poses a particular challenge to the translator. To translate a domestic female slave, called in the original a ‘dmoe’ (“female-house-slave”), as a “maid” or “domestic servant” would imply that she was free. I have often used “slave,” although it is less specific than manyof the terms for types of slaves in the original. The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery, and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poems is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave. I have also used the terms “house girl” and “house boy.” The analogy with a slave-owning plantation in the antebellum American South is certainly not exact, but it is at least a little closer than the alternative analogies — of a Victorian stately home or a modern night club.

I try to avoid importing contemporary types of sexism into the ancient poem, instead shining a clear light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchynthat do exist in the text, which are only partly familiar from our world. For instance, in the scene where Telemachus oversees the hanging of the slaves who have been sleeping with the suitors. most translations introduce derogatory language (“sluts” or “whores”), suggesting that these women are being punished for a genuinely objectionable pattern of behavior, as if their sexual history actually justified their deaths. The original Greek does not label these slaves with any derogatory language. Many contemporary translators render Helen’s “dog-face” as if it were equivalent to “shameless Helen” (or “Helen the bitch”). I have kept the metaphor (“hounded”), and have also made sure that my Helen, like that of the original, refrains from blaming herself for what men have done in her name.

Hope this clears up my intended meaning.

I did two years of Ancient Greek having done Latin for three years, and after being tricked into it by a cool young classics teacher who said it was much more fun than Latin (which I also continued for the same two years). It made my life a misery, and even now the expression “regular verbs” makes me laugh blackly. The literature may well be more fun/interesting, but the language is torture, at least for me.

First day of my first Greek tutorial, our tutor told us: “Truth is stranger than fiction, and Greek is stranger than both.

Spain deserved that win against a flat and cynical Argentina. Was so very afraid that Messi and friends were going to milk it until PKs.

Surprise!

From today’s Times (a Murdoch paper):

President Trump is considering backing Gianni Infantino to head the United Nations because the Fifa president is “respected by everyone around the world”.

Trump is thought to support a move for Infantino to become the UN’s secretary-general, to replace António Guterres after his retirement in December.

The move would break with UN precedent and so is unlikely to be successful, but the suggestion from those close to the president shows the extent of Trump’s relationship with the Fifa president.

“The move would break with UN precedent“ surely has to be right up there in the “understatement of the year” competition.

…but the suggestion from those close to the president shows the extent of Trump’s relationship with the Fifa president.

Someone’s got to say it. “Game recognize game.” Two of the great modern grifters.

Pins are pointy looking, sticking out of the thumb.

Eeeek – gruesome. Sounds like things are going well, nous. Hope it continues.