Just reread "A Night in the Lonesome October" by Roger Zelazny. It is entirely as good as I remember, and this is probably at least the tenth time I've read it over the years. Really, really holds up well. Just magnificent.

#writing #GreatWriting #classics #RogerZelazny

Plato Has Been Censored

“PEN America condemned new levels of educational censorship at Texas A&M, after a professor was instructed to remove certain works by #Plato from an introductory #philosophy class.

The directive was issued under new university rules prohibiting discussions of “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” in most undergraduate courses.”

#classics #dei

https://pen.org/press-release/plato-has-been-censored-what-next/

Guaranteed to get me laughing! One of my favorite movies! #ArsenicAndOldLace #CaryGrant #Classics #Movies

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Black and White photo. An older gentleman stands by the table with his hat in hand. An older woman is smiling seated at the table by a decanter of wine. Another is standing beside her. The seated woman asks, "Won't you try a glass of our wine before we start up?"

Hyperion's name comes from two Greek words that together mean "watcher from above" or "he who goes above".

Hyperion was a Titan, the ancient Greek gods that preceded the Olympian gods like Zeus, Athena, etc. Prometheus, Atlas, and the word Titan itself are frequently used to name tech projects. A fun web search is "COMPANY_NAME Titan"; try it. It seems lost on these folks that the Titans were deposed by the Olympian gods and condemned to an eternity in Tartarus, a kind of hell. In other words they're the loser gods, if you want to be simplistic and vulgar about it.

It is believed that one of Hyperion's offspring, Helios, as well as all of Helios's offspring, were imagined as being black-skinned.

My wife, who is a classicist, and I regularly shake our heads about the names of tech projects like this. I always ask her for the dirt on the name, and she always delivers (as in the above, which I credit to her).

#DataCenters #Cloud #AI #Facebook #Meta #Hyperion #GreekGods #AncientGreece #Titans #Classics

Beach vacations only became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries as part of the lifestyle of the wealthy in Western countries. Early Europeans, and especially the ancient Greeks, thought the beach was a place of hardship and death. As a seafaring people, they mostly lived on the coastline, yet they feared the sea and thought that an agricultural lifestyle was safer and more respectable.

A post in The Conversation by my favorite classicist (my wife!)

#summer #beach #AncientGreece #myth #classics