most of the apple was worth eating...but this is scratched and dented produce
big news this week...and also small news...first the little news...the people who researched quantum spots or dots got a Nobel prize...this research made possible better TV screens and some other things too...the big news is that there has been spotted by the Webb space telescope some very unusual round things about the size of Jupiter floating in space...and not near a star so these objects do not seem to be rotating around a body at all...and there seems to be about 40 of them and they are in pairs...DAMN!...
on a more earthly plane i need to make some corrections to some errata from previous blogs...the comment that i would drop half a dozen more nukes on japan for their treatment of prisoners of war was a comment made in the heat of...well being mad...but sortition (see previous blog) is a very poor way to serve up revenge...i do believe in revenge...mainly served cold...also i made some comments about the early Greeks being not too ahead of anybody with their stupid wars...i bought a DVD made by the PBS called "The Greeks-crucible of civilization"...it is about 140 minutes long narrated by Liam Neeson made in 1999...the commentary is a must hear also...so it seems these folks were living by this big plateau looking thing which came to be called the acropolis which means high place and one day a fellow named Peisistratus showed up with a tall beautiful young woman and he said she was the goddess Athena...OK sure...she was actually from the next village over but back then (as now) a tall beautiful woman can make the old thinking a little clouded...so this guy says since me and Athena here are pals you should make me the king of this place...and so they did...well this guy eventually sort of made the locals mad and they decided to have a vote...they voted on everything every 9 days they voted...a black stone meant no and a white stone meant yes to whatever it was they were voting on...this voting stuff (called democracy) got the people so energized that they built the Parthenon and carved beautiful statues and generally built a heavy duty city state...which lasted about 250 years when they bit off more than they could chew and got their butts kicked...they sent several hundred boats (triremes) to Sicily to whoop on them and got beat so bad that it only took 24 boats to bring the survivors back...the people of Athens did not even know what had happened until a guy who went into the barbershop got to chatting with the barber and he mentioned that he had been in the neighborhood and knew how bad the Athenians got their butts kicked...serious bummer...well it only got worse...anyhow a good story about the Parthenon being built was that the huge blocks of marble were brought from the quarry by mule teams ( i am assuming in wagons)...well there was a mule that got too old to pull the wagons but it liked to walk along side the other mules to keep itself busy...good mule it you ask me...also the director said they looked high and low for a model of the Parthenon but could not find one...UNTIL...they found one in...wait for it...in NASHVILL, TENNESSE...who knew...
"The reason , Earth is short-/And anguish absolute-/And many hurt,/But, what of that I reason, we could die-/The best vitality/Cannot excel Decay,/But, what of that I reason, that in heaven-/Somehow, it will be even-/Some new Equation, given-/But, what of that? EMILY DICKENSON (1862)
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