Category: General

up way too late composing Latin

cause some guy on ISCA bbs asked how to render into Latin the sentence “to truly live is to stare defiantly into the face of death.”

I started working on it and noticed that my sentence was about half hexameter, so I labored and obsessed until I put the whole thing into dactylic hexameter, or something close enough for government work. I had to ditch the “defiance” but I thought the epic meter made up for it:

intueri in vultum mortis, id vivere vere est.

Then I realized I had totally jumbled around the sense of his words to get that. It should be more like:

Vere vivere, id est fortiter intueri in vultum mortis.

No epic meter there, nor any easy way to cast it that way.

But “fortiter intueri in vultum…” — that’s a lovely little chunk of hexameter in the middle of it. Makes me sad not to be able to render it all that way.

Ah, Latin. What fun.

Here’s an awesome page giving English verses composed in Classical meters.

Thinkin Bout Fallujah

Cause MC Frontalot’s Special Delivery just came up on the iTunes.

“Uh, yeah, I got a delivery for Iraq here; can Iraq sign for it? It’s a large box of freedom. Thanks. Sorry, I meant explosions. The freedom is backordered.”

And I wish that I could afford the ear of Bush the Second.
I’d ask is it your favorite philosopher who recommended
Invading and exterminating all who defy us,
Crying out “Justice!” but seeking out triumphs.
Was it your Christ, unbeloved of empires?
One nailed his ass to a post, he expired!
A terrorist, as Roman evidence showed,
Put down like a retard on the Death Row
In Texas, I guess, tough luck, right George?
Aint’ that how every war gets scored?
Big gun wins, winner gets a free turn?
Enemy after enemy burns?

A lot of killing going on there now, our men and women dying and killing.

A lot of killing.

No Press Anthology

I just got a copy of the No Press Anthology, and boy, it is one cool book of short roleplaying games.

Just from skimming the games, it looks like Snowball would be a cool off the cuff narrativist RPG engine, WTF a much more silly one, Pretender, Pagoda, and The Agency would be good high adventure high coolness short narrativist games, Cell Gamma and Discernment, would be good conceptual weird-out games.

Oh, and Over the Bar is kind of a joke, though I guess you could play it. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take up much of the page count. :)

Highly recommended. Hope to play some of these sometime.

This is What Happens To Saints

Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/08/2004 | Priest who led Druids resigns

“He’s a saint,” said Jessica Kenworthey, who belongs to another church but attends services at St. James’ with her husband, Mark, who is a member. “This is what happens to saints.”

This little witch hunt might seem to be of interest only to Episcopalians, but PJ points out that it’s a small part of a big picture that others might find disturbing.

This whole thing was instigated by a particularly sinister political organization called the “Insitute for Religion and Democracy,” which is dedicated to subverting mainline churches in favor of fundamentalism. The whole sequence of events is pretty creeptacular.

Getting the GAO Involved

Cool!

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to “immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration.”

John Doty, spokesman for Nadler, said the congressmen emphasized that they were not seeking a nationwide recount and were not anticipating that an investigation would change the outcome of the election.

“But we do want to make sure that where there are problems they’re fixed so that it won’t affect other elections in the future,” Doty said. “We want to make sure that people can be confident in the system.”

See, that’s me too. I don’t want the election changed to make Kerry win, now. I just want to have a justified confidence that I still live in an actual democracy.