7.20.2002

Happy hours and tenant melancholy

tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius quidquid erit pati,
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
tyrrhenum: sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

This ode is very precious to me. Especially after drinking wine around a table with old friends. But is it not, in retrospect, just a little bourgeois?

7.17.2002

A Wiley Primer

a – age: 28
b – bonding activity (best): road trips
c – computer: Apple Powerbook G4
d – dream date: to lead her through a dark wood to a high mountain, to show her the kingdoms of the world and their history, to ravish her and whisper in her ear: Omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus amori.
e – epic (favorite): Aeneid or Paradise Lost
f – film (favorite): L’Avventura or Vertigo
g – greatest accomplishment: teaching myself Greek or surviving the first year of law school
h – happiest day of your life: walking across London and realizing that history was real
i – issues: with democratic culture
j – juvenilia: whales, dinosaurs, battleships, and the outer planets
k – kind: Homo sapiens
l – language work: Latin, Greek, Arabic m – meat of choice: New York strip or raw salmon
n – name: Joshua, not Josh
o – opera (best): Otello or Turandot
p – pizza toppings: pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives
q – quality (best): intellectual curiosity
r – raison de etre: to read, dream, and write
s – sport of choice: chess
t – television show (best): Babylon 5
u – urbs: Columbus
v – vacation (favorite): Italy
w – weakness: bookstores
x – xenophobia: really beautiful women ;-)
y – year born: 1974
z – zodiac sign: Gemini

(shamelessly reinvented)

7.11.2002

Carla Hesse, "Intellectual Property, 700 B.C. to a.d. 2000," Daedalus (Spring 2002), 26-45.

The Spring issue of Daedalus has a very fine article (available in PDF!) on the history of intellectual property. I can't recommend this highly enough for the "big-picture" overview of where such concepts come from and how they've evolved.

7.10.2002

Really Colloquial Arabic
Looked up "al-qaeda" in the dictionary yesterday. Had heard that Americans mispronouce "the base," Well, they sure do....

Try al- qaa 'i Da!

Stupid Americans... :-(

7.09.2002

quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis
ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram
non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces?


Thus Aeneas calls after his mother (Venus) at Aen. I.407-409. I remember Dr. Holmes pausing there and telling us: "This is one of Vergil's great questions." And so it is, but it's particularly relevant here and now as a mediation on abyss of the internet. Why do we play with each other with false appearances? How is it that the net doesn't really lead us to hold hands or have true conversation? All this virtual stuff gets so old. But that problem is hardly new, as Vergil teaches us.