Month: November 2006

Mycenaean Gods

Ever wonder which Greek gods are found as far back as in Mycenaean inscriptions? A footnote in Wikipedia brought me here. Notable is Dionysus (DI-WO-NI-SO-YO) who before Linear B was cracked was widely believed to be a foreign deity, brought only recently into Greek culture — not back in Mycenaean times, that is, the 12th-16th centuries BC, before the Greek Dark Ages! These Greeks were the stuff of myth and legend to even the most ancient of what are usually understood as ancient Greeks — Homer and Hesiod. They didn’t write in Greek letters; those wouldn’t be invented for centuries after their own script (Linear B) was forgotten. That’s how old these folks are. And yes, they worshipped Dionysus, the god thought “new,” “foreign,” “non-Greek,” “Asiatic” by Classicists before Chadwick deciphered.

You just never know.

BTW, as you can see from the link, they are not known to have worshipped the uber-Hellenic Apollo, unless you identify him with Paean, which only much later Greeks did and not always consistently. (Paean was a physician-god to Homer, and was not clearly the same god as Apollo, the plague-bringer, though they would eventually be unambiguously united; one who brings the plague can heal the plague, after all!)

This post brought to you again from the ease of blogging with Ecto, where I drop a link onto the task bar icon and I’ve got a new post started.

Presidentially “Pardoned” Turkeys

cbs2.com – Pardoned Turkeys To Their New Home: Disneyland:

(CBS) ANAHEIM, Calif. A pair of turkeys that got a presidential pardon Wednesday at the White House will soon be the main attraction of Disneyland’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

In a White House Rose Garden ceremony, President Bush patted the red, fleshy head and feathered neck and back of “Flyer,” a 20-week-old, 36-pound tom, and said, “I am granting a full presidential pardon.”

This would be cute if not for Bush’s past as the executingest governor in recent American history… And his history of pre-emptive pardoning of Americans for war crimes abroad…

As it is, it’s just creepy.

UPDATE: It’s not a Bush thing, it dates from Harry Truman. Which, I dunno, you start thinking about what he did in Japan, maybe it’s still creepy. Presidents can be a creepy bunch.

Comment Sickness: Note To Potential Commenters

I’m dreading checking my comments, because, as I mentioned, they seem to get sicker by the day. I’m going to try to cut back on some of the worst offenders, by outright banning words that I imagine will be far more common in the urschleim than in real people’s comments. Comments with these words in them (even as partial words) will drop straight into the primal ooze, instantly deleted without even being queued for moderation. I think probably banning the f-word will get rid of most of them. Going to give that a try. Apologies to friends leaving posts with casual profanity who get them deep sixed for that reason. Try to clean up that pottymouth.

I had several other words that seemed obvious candidates for banning but many words are really nasty in one context but perfectly normal in another. Or they may occur as parts of innocent words or phrases. A friend named kept getting her emails returned by a corporate email filter and experimentation eventually proved it was objecting to her last name, Van Dyke. That kind of thing. If I ban the most common slang term for micturation, as I was tempted to by a particularly vile comment spam, I will never hear of anyone “pissing and moaning” in my comments, which seems like overkill.

I think I’m probably safe putting the kibosh on “shemale” though. Let me know if that inconveniences anyone, kay?

UPDATE

I think I’m going to give some plugins a chance before I try to come up with words to block myself.  Starting with Akismet and  thinking about Bad Behavior.  So if you want to use naughty words in comments you should be cool if you’re not an evil spambot.

Aquamacs emacsedit

HollenbackNet – MuttOnMacOs provides a good solution (via this mailing list post) for anyone who wants to use Aquamacs as an editor for a command-line-based application. To wit: don’t use emacsclient directly; create a little script like this:

#!/bin/sh

# script to force Aquamacs to open in front of terminal
open -a Aquamacs\ Emacs
/Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient "$@"
# Now make sure the focus goes back to the terminal when we are done
open -a Terminal

in a file called, say, emacsclienthack.sh, and reference that shell script instead of emacsclient itself. Makes things quite pleasant.