An earlier less humorous version I meant to keep in draft mode got posted (by me). If you read it, please read the new version. I have post neither column nor comment since August 1. This slacking is not due to heat–it has been in the very low 80’s here in Rockford–nor pique with anyone or anything. I’d spent much of a day eating out, smoking a cigar, and talking for hours and was not surprised to find I had a minor sore throat.
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
Though now back in my own bed, thoughts of the fancy hotel where we stayed in Apulia keep me awake at night. What is it about such places? The first answer that comes to mind is that it has something to do with the success of “virtual worlds,”
The empire of the Babylonians was not fated to last, and Cyrus the Persian, after entering the city in triumph in 539, promulgated an edict authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. It has been conjectured that the Persians were rewarding Babylonian Jews for their covert assistance in the defeat of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, but, there is no need to posit such a special relationship.
Out of power, though trying to claw their way back in, the Neocons have become an unintentionally humorous sect. Their howlings could form the dialogue of a woke sitcom.
It was like something out of a movie, one of those Eastern European flicks of vaguely subversive import in fading color from directors with names like Tomasz or Janos which in my childhood the dissidents of the day so cravenly admired.
In the fall of 1963, first-year Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, who already had national ambitions, was facing an image problem.
I had planned to be late with this week’s post to recount something of Rome, but our visit here developed in ways so spectacularly unforeseen – such as five hours on the train from Naples to Milan to meet one friend for a saffron risotto and then another three hours to make it to Rome in time for a spaghetti amatriciana with another – that I decided to throw in the towel and just write what’s on my mind. And what’s on my mind is the reading I’ve done during those eight hours on the Freccia Rossa.
What are we going to do about China’s threats against Taiwan? More importantly, what are we going to do with the tacky music at the end? Someone place tell me who sang this monstrosity.
A podcast in which we begin to answer Dot’s question about the Delphic Oracle. The background of the image is a theater at the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona.
