"Even if the family occasionally finds evidence that mountain goats have been in the kitchen, being so connected to the land is worth it."

"'The intensity of the light, the smells of the plants, the noise of the cicadas — it’s like everything is turned up to 11,' he said. 'There’s something completely cathartic about being there.'"

From "He Built a House With No Doors and Windows You Can’t Close/Inspired by homes open to their natural settings, an architect designed a house on the Greek island of Corfu with minimal barriers from the 'wild landscape'" (NYT)(free-access link).

Makes me think of that Paul Mazursky movie "Tempest," with John Cassavetes as an architect who's fed up with New York City and relocates — with adolescent daughter Molly Ringwald in tow — to a Greek island....

"It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly..."

"... the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece. The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson. The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as 'incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on' with a 'stunning '"it girl."'"

From "Amid Rumors of a Breakup, Kimberly Guilfoyle Is Appointed Ambassador to Greece/The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr. has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida" (NYT).

Don and Kimberly got engaged 4 years ago. I don't trust long engagements! What's supposed to be going on? Either you're getting married or you are not. Don't live in limbo. Are you testing commitment... by being half-committed?

"Over the summer, everyone I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea."

"The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an interesting summer, except everyone else was taking it too, stuck replicating one another in an effort to be perfectly interesting."

From "Going Dull/Being interesting is a burden. Is there relief in choosing to be bland?" (NY Magazine).

I think the problem here isn't being interesting. It's trying to be interesting, AKA trying not to be dull. Just stop trying. Ironically, that's your only real shot at interestingness. Let the chips fall where they may.

"I told [my 12-year-old daughter] she needed to read because novels are the best way to learn about how people’s insides work."

"She said she could learn more from watching the people she followed on social media, who were all about spilling their insides. I said books offered storytelling. She said, 'Netflix.' I said books taught history. She said, 'The internet.' I said reading would help her understand herself and she said, 'Um, no thank you. I’ll just live.' I promised, extravagantly, that I’d buy her all the books she wanted and construct bookshelves in her room, so that she could see the spines of all the books she loved from her bed. She said, 'Mama, welcome to your dream.'... So I decided to cut through all the reasoning.... I told my 12-year-old I would pay her $100 to read a novel.... $100 if she finished the book within a month. We then embarked on a beach holiday, along with my boyfriend, to a romantic Greek island...."

Writes Mireille Silcoff "I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book" (NYT).

Should you use money to get your kids to do things you can't reason them into doing? Money becomes the reasoning. Money talks, as they say. 

I don't know. But I do know you shouldn't take a 12-year-old daughter along on something you call "a romantic Greek island" "with my boyfriend."

What was the "romantic Greek island"? Santorini?

"A life-size head of a horse, made from Greek Pentelic marble, that looks remarkably like the one on display in the museum, tiny chips and chisel marks and all..."

"... carved by a robot. At a workshop in Carrara, Italy, a robot sculptor has been putting the finishing touches on a copy of the Horse of Selene, scheduled to go on display in London during the first week of September. The horse is one of the best known of the 2,500-year-old sculptures — also known as the Parthenon Marbles — taken from the Acropolis in Athens in the early 1800s by Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin, when he was ambassador to the occupying Ottoman Empire.... The British government says Elgin had permission to remove them. Others say the permission was limited to pieces found in the rubble.... In any case, Elgin had the 5th-century B.C. marbles torn down from the Parthenon and shipped to Britain, where he intended to display them privately in his home. He instead sold them to the British government for $42,000 to help pay for a costly divorce."

From "A solution for the Elgin marbles: Robot-carved replicas? Amid a global reckoning on colonialism and cultural supremacy, pressure is growing on the British Museum to return the sculptures to Greece" (WaPo).

Ostracon and ostraconophobia.

Ostraconophobia:

Ostraconophobia is the fear of shellfish.[1]

NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin has this phobia. On July 16, 2017, after winning the Overton's 301 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, he was given a 44-pound lobster by crew chief Mike Wheeler (a trophy that is traditionally given to winners at the track), and Hamlin attempted to leap away. "I have a lobster phobia. I don't know why. I just don't like them," Hamlin stated. "I cannot eat dinner if someone beside me is eating lobster. I can't look at it. So as far as I'm concerned, they need to put it back in the water and let it live."[2]

Ostracon:

An ostracon (Greek: ὄστρακον ostrakon, plural ὄστρακα ostraka) is a piece of pottery, usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel. In an archaeological or epigraphical context, ostraca refer to sherds or even small pieces of stone that have writing scratched into them. Usually these are considered to have been broken off before the writing was added; ancient people used the cheap, plentiful and durable broken pieces of pottery around them as convenient places to place writing for a wide variety of purposes, mostly very short inscriptions, but in some cases very long....

In Classical Athens, when the decision at hand was to banish or exile a certain member of society, citizen peers would cast their vote by writing the name of the person on the shard of pottery; the vote was counted and, if unfavorable, the person was exiled for a period of ten years from the city, thus giving rise to the term ostracism....

What's going on here? The etymology of "ostracon" (from the OED) explains it: 

Etymology: < ancient Greek ὄστρακον earthen vessel, potsherd, hard shell < the same Indo-European base as the word for bone (see osteo- comb. form), with an -r- suffix (shown also by ancient Greek ὄστρειον oyster n.).

I'm pulled into the upper right hand corner of The Washington Post — so dangerous, so syrup-drenched.

Here's that corner (9 items):

It's an omakase breakfast — omakase, not omicron — the selections entrusted to the illustrious mainstream newspaper. I will update this post, course by course. 

1. "For Clarence Thomas, avowed critic of Roe v. Wade, Mississippi abortion case a moment long awaited" by Robert Barnes. There's oral argument in the big abortion case this Wednesday, and, we're told, Thomas receives "unprecedented deference" these days — because of all his new colleagues, who "think like him," and because there's a new method of asking questions at oral argument, and not only does he speak now, he goes first, and no one cuts him off. They let him finish "his low-key inquiries." Thomas has repeatedly written separate opinions to say that Roe ought to be overruled. "Thomas’s idiosyncratic views and his resistance to compromise still make him the justice most likely to write a solo opinion," writes Barnes. But what's to prevent these new Justices, who may genuinely respect him, from curing that loneliness? Asking that question, I thought of the adage, "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." And then I realized I'm talking about the person named in the next headline down, Henry David Thoreau.

2. "The Black people who lived in Walden Woods long before Henry David Thoreau": "'Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill lived Brister Freeman, ‘a handy Negro,’ slave of Squire Cummings once... With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly – large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since,' Thoreau wrote in 'Walden.'"

3. "Amid massive shortage, Canada taps strategic reserves — of maple syrup": "Petroleum stockpiles aren’t the only strategic reserves being tapped this season amid concerns of supply shortages and sky-high prices." There's a Canadian federation that, we're told, gets called "the OPEC of maple syrup." The shortage seems to have mostly to do with people cooking more pancakes and such on account of the lockdown, but there's also stress to the maple trees from climate change, so make sure to keep worrying about climate change. It affects pancakes!

4. "The Rule of Six: A newly radicalized Supreme Court is poised to reshape the nation" by Ruth Marcus. The conservatives are no longer just looking for a 5th vote. With 6, it's like "an heir and spare." They can afford to lose one. No more need to cajole that last one, the fussed-over "swing" voter. And Marcus tells WaPo readers to be be afraid, be very afraid.

5. "Hanukkah isn’t ‘Jewish Christmas.’ Stop treating it that way. No need to include our holiday in the winter extravaganza of commercialization, thanks." Sample sentence, representing the tone and message of the entire piece: "No Jew has ever gazed longingly at a 12-foot inflatable reindeer and wished in her heart she had an equally large Moses to display in front of her house."

6. "Greece was in deep trouble. How did it right the ship? Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the arrival of migrants — and tech companies." An interview with the prime minister. Highlights: "We should agree in principle that no country has a right to weaponize migrants. . . . We won’t let people come in as they please." About criminalizing “fake news”: "What we are doing is very measured and very valid."

7. "Five myths about the supply chain/No, self-driving trucks wouldn’t fix all our problems." "Much of today’s mess was caused by relying on extremely fragile — and extremely long — supply lines. Ohno would have shuddered at the thought that his ideas were being applied in this manner." Oh no! Taiichi Ohno originated the concept of just-in-time delivery.

8. "The newest coronavirus variant is raising alarms. The pandemic is not over." "It will take time to determine if the variant is more transmissible than delta, or more virulent, but it is a worrisome development." Won't there always be a new variant so that we will always be told we don't know enough yet and we will need, once again, to err on the side of safety? This feels like a treadmill that we can never step off.

9. "Stephen Sondheim made art that made life more real" by Alexandra Petri. A song "can’t be too clever, and it can’t be too dull. It has to land on your ear as a surprise. If it contains jokes, they have to rhyme. (If it contains rhymes, words that are spelled differently are funnier, Sondheim thought, than words that are spelled the same.)... The song has to take the character singing it somewhere. It has to be essential to the show. 'If you can take the song out,' Sondheim said, 'and it doesn’t leave a hole, then the song’s not necessary.'... Life also exists in time. You cannot stop it and start it and go back and hope to make yourself better understood. You must express yourself in the moments allotted and make yourself heard and choose what to say." 

If I hadn't committed to reading every one of those 9 stories, the ones I would have read would be: 1, 2, and 9. And I would have blogged all 3. 

Having read all the stories, I rank their bloggability, for me, beginning with: 1, 9, 2. Then, there's a big drop off. There's something I'd wanted to say that 8 gave me the chance to say, so I'll put 8 next. I'd put 3 dead last, because I don't really want to blog about the syrup supply, though it would shoot to the top if I had a "syrup" tag (and I might create a "syrup" tag, but it will take a while to add it retrospectively, and it's only interesting if it collects a lot of old things, which it will, more than 10). I put 4 next to last, because it's obvious to me what it will be from the headline and the author, and I don't need more of that. Third from last is 5, which is unnecessary holiday fluff, and I didn't like the insinuation that I was "treating" Hanukkah in any particular way. That leaves 6 in dead center. The Greek Prime Minister. I had to force myself to read that, but he was concise and hard core — quotable.

Oops, I forgot the supply chain. I know it's important, but it's not my thing. I put Greek Prime Minister at what I called "dead center" and in 5th place, so let's put 7 in 6th place. 

Final ranking: 1, 9, 2, 8, 6, 7, 5, 4, 3.

ADDED: I have now made the tag "syrup." Click. It's pretty exciting. 

"Nothing could be less representative of Maria Callas, as no opera singer, not even a second-grade student at music school, would ever adopt such a pose with crossed arms in front of their chest."

"Opera is about singing and … freeing up the voice. If Callas were to try singing, in real life, in the stance conceived by the sculptor, the result would be like a violinist trying to play on a broken violin."

Said one former opera singer, quoted in "Gandhi in heels? Maria Callas statue hits the wrong note/Critics compare figure of famous soprano erected in Greek capital to an Oscar statuette" (The Guardian).

If you wanted to search for Plato with a 7-year old, what would you do?

I'm reading "Searching for Plato With My 7-Year-Old" by Thomas Chatterton Williams — in the NYT — and I see from the photo and the subheadline that he's not doing what I would do. 

The subheadline is: "In Athens with his daughter, Thomas Chatterton Williams could finally pay homage in person to the classical education his own father gave him." 

I wouldn't take a 7-year-old halfway around the world,* spending time in airplanes, hotels, restaurants, and ruins and walking long distances through confusing, complicated environments. What does that have to do with philosophy? (I ask, Socratically). Even for an adult, but especially for a little child, the scale is all wrong.

I would take the little child on child-scale walks on the sidewalks of our town and in the nearby woods, and I would gently and subtly offer simple philosophical questions of the sort that would occur to a child. What is the best life for a child? And I would listen to the child's answers and form new questions, challenging myself to do what is best for the child.

"Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told Europe it will have to take the 'burden' of 'millions' of incoming migrants..."

"... as Greece today tried to fend off an 'invasion' of people after Turkey threw open its borders. More than 13,000 migrants have gathered on the Turkish side of the river which runs 125 miles along the frontier and separates them from Greece, and therefore the EU. Greek police were today firing tear gas at the crowds, as migrants tried to swim across the river or squeeze through fences at one of the few land crossings, although only dozens have succeeded so far. One child died when a dinghy boat capsized during a sea crossing, the Greek coast guard said today. Turkish security forces also claimed that a Syrian migrant had died from injuries after a clash with Greek security forces, but Athens has today branded the claim 'fake news.'.... Turkish leader Erdogan... [told] party supporters in Ankara: 'After we opened the doors, there were multiple calls saying "close the doors." I told them it's done. It's finished. The doors are now open. Now, you will have to take your share of the burden. Hundreds of thousands have crossed, soon we will it will reach millions'..."

The Daily Mail reports.

"There are just two daily meals. One menu consisted of lentil purée, tomatoes, olives, fruit and water or red wine, at 9:30 a.m."

"'We eat fast,' Father Jeremiah warned. A typical meal lasts 15 minutes. One monk reads prayers, and any visitor who tries to talk is shushed. After the morning meal, the monks work — gardening, cooking, painting icons — until it is time for vespers before sunset, the evening meal and bed. Even while working, most pray, their lips constantly moving with the refrain, 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' Monks often summarize their existence in pithy shorthand. 'He is happy because he has nothing, but he has everything,' Abbot Alexios said of a monk’s life.... Expensive SUVs now whisk affluent visitors along dirt roads once limited to donkeys and trekking pilgrims.... Some monks grumble about the tide of visitors overwhelming their devotions. Some pilgrims dislike it, too...."

From "Mount Athos, a Male-Only Holy Retreat, Is Ruffled by Tourists and Russia" (NYT).

"A job at a cat sanctuary on the idyllic Greek island of Syros has come up, complete with accommodation, views of the Aegean Sea and - currently - 55 feline friends."

"[Sanctuary owner Joan] Bowell, an artist, is looking for someone over the age of 45, who is not only capable of loving the cats, but also knows how to 'trap or handle a feral or non-sociable cat.' That means knowledge of 'cats' psychology' as well as good 'cat-whispering skills' are vital for the successful applicant." BBC reports.

From the Facebook page:

"Tiffany Trump and Lindsay Lohan were spotted on Wednesday continuing to live it up on the Greek island of Mykonos."

They're old friends, says The Daily Mail.

Lohan is working on a Mykonos-based MTV reality show that just put out this teaser:



It's hard to imagine how bad the show must be if that's the best they could come up with to fill 17 seconds. Lohan is 32 years old, in case you're wondering, and I assume you will be if you stick out that clip to the end.

One of the worst-rated comments at The Daily Mail raises a very good point: "Shame on them.especially Tiffany. Greek fires took lives and ravaged towns and she['s] partying up a storm there. Shameful behavior." Yeah, now's not the time to be posing and teasing something about cavorting on a Greek isle. Or... maybe it is, what with "Mamma Mia Here We Go Again" in the theaters, feeding the female fantasy of geography and romance.

What's Tiffany doing lending support to this nonsense? Maybe she just likes enjoying Mykonos, but it did give The Daily Mail reason to remind us of Lindsay's support for the Tiffany's father:

Lohan has also expressed her support for Tiffany's father Donald Trump. 'THIS IS our president,' Lohan tweeted. 'Stop #bullying him & start trusting him. Thank you personally for supporting #THEUSA,' she tweeted.

During a Facebook Live... session... in February 2017...  Lohan [said]: 'I think always in the public eye you're going to get scrutinized. He is the president — we have to join him. If you can't beat him, join him.'

ADDED: I've heard it actually sucks to attempt to live it up on Mykonos:

On my first day in Mykonos, in fact in the first five minutes, the hotel driver who picked me up from the airport —there are only 30 taxis on the island, so good luck getting one — let me in on a secret... "Mykonos is not really Greece. It's nothing... Look at a map, find the islands that don't have airports, and go there. Any one will do. They're all beautiful."

"What we wear should not matter: Ideas, arguments, theories, and thought are the stuff in which academics trade."

"But our institutions are riven by power, and teaching and research are themselves underwritten by claims to authority and expertise. No matter how much we know, we still feel the need to show that we know it to solidify our status as bona fide intellectuals, deserving of deference and respect. One of the ways we demonstrate our possession of knowledge is in what we wear — an age-old tradition beginning with Plato orating in a toga. Only now we stroke manicured beards in thought, carry bulging book bags to demonstrate commitment, and wield Moleskine notebooks when inspiration strikes."

From "What We Wear in the Underfunded University," by Shahidha Bari in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

My first question is: Plato orated in a toga?

The toga is the distinctive garment of ancient Rome (not Greece). And here's something interesting about it, from "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome" (by Mary Beard*):

Everyday Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much more varied and colourful than this.** Togas, however, were the formal, national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, while some contemporary outsiders occasionally laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment. And togas were white, with the addition of a purple border for anyone who held public office. In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters. In a world where status needed to be on show, the niceties of dress went even further: there was also a broad purple stripe on senators’ tunics, worn beneath the toga, and a slightly narrower one if you were the next rank down in Roman society, an ‘equestrian’ or ‘knight’, and special shoes for both ranks.

So the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’.... Perhaps we should eschew the whiteness-infected word "candidate."
___________________

* Speaking of "beards in thought."

** "This" refers to Cesare Maccari's 1888 painting of something that happened in 63 BC (Cicero denounced Catiline to the Roman Senate):

"With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the cafés by the water..."

"... he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. Cars were forbidden. Mules humped water up the long stairways to the houses. There was only intermittent electricity. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother. Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like 'the chairs that van Gogh painted.'... He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon. There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. 'I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,' he said years later... Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Her grandmother used to tell her, 'You are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.'"

His grandmother... her grandmother....

The quote is from the New Yorker article about Leonard Cohen that I've already linked to at least twice. But that passage came back to me as I was reading the NYT editorial tribute to Cohen which plops this sentence...

Many people place Mr. Cohen in a musical trinity, with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon: writers who sail in deeper waters, beyond the chop and slop of the usual pop, filling their notebooks with words and our heads with songs — cryptic, surreal, original, unforgettable.

... which just disturbed me for about 5 reasons but then the Times eds serendipitously linked to that New Yorker article and made me want to show you that room.

"It was a hedge fund portfolio pitched by Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, as an opportunity to bet on a Greek economic revival."

"Now, two years later, the Greece-focused fund is shutting down, after losing nearly 90 percent of its value...."

"A man grasps a bag of tangerines..."

"... as people receive free produce, handed out by farmers, during a protest over the government's proposal to overhaul the country's ailing pension system in Athens, Greece, January 27, 2016."

Caption to a photograph worth seeing and contemplating.

"Let's See What Republicans Learn From Losing Boehner."

A Megan McArdle column that ends:

But maybe the only way Republicans will learn their limits is by crashing into them, as the Greeks did. Maybe they need to elect someone who will try what they’ve been longing for: a full throated, take-no-prisoners approach that doesn’t bother with compromise or concession. Like the Greeks, they’ll discover that this leaves them worse off, not better. If Republicans can't see that coming -- if they can't learn from Syriza's mistake -- then they will very likely learn their lesson from President Hillary Clinton.

ADDED: McArdle did something I wouldn't do — submit to a cross-examination on the "meaning of life":

"What happens next after the 'No’ vote in the Greece referendum/Will the eurozone collapse?"

Asks the UK Telegraph:

A "No" vote is an endorsement of the left-wing Syriza government's view that the austerity package attached to Greece's bail-out deal is too harsh. Leftist opponents of “austerity economics” across Europe and beyond are rejoicing, as are critics of the EU’s bureaucracy, at its having received a bloody nose.... Greece will leave the eurozone. That is what the EU says, and is likely to happen.... Greece will run out of cash. All eyes will turn to the ECB, which on Monday will have to decide whether to continue to extend its emergency financial lifeline to the Greek banks.... Greece will have to find a factory to print drachmas.... Greece’s economy will (still) be in ruins....

"It may seem ironic that Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's extreme right Front National, rooted for the extreme left Syriza in yesterday's Greek election and rejoiced at its landslide victory."

"Yet there's nothing unusual about it: Syriza, Front National and other European anti-establishment parties are partners in a political revolution that appears to be about to sweep the continent, giving back the original meaning to political terms such as 'left' and 'right' — and helping Russian President Vladimir Putin in the process."

So begins a column at Bloomberg by Leonid Bershidsky titled "Syriza, Le Pen and the Power of Big Ideas."