Gillespie and Dean

1.  Something akin to a tornado ripped through Granby last night--I spent two hours this morning with my trusty chainsaw clearing out fallen branches.  This is the sort of information which is of no use to anyone.  It is thus the sort of information which would normally be used as a Facebook status update.  But, since I have yet to ever have a Facebook status, I didn't update it there.

Ah, but given that this isn't Facebook, I can add a moral lesson.  I just had my chainsaw chain sharpened.  A sharp chain makes for a happy chainsaw.

Just try to post that sort of fascinating tidbit for the day on Twitter...

Oh, and we were without power for 7 hours, which would have been a greater inconvenience if I had been dong something other than sleeping.  I know now, however, that when one is asleep, it really doesn't matter if there is electrical current in your house.

2. In the last few days I have been to one of Clara's softball games and one of her band concerts.  Now, I like baseball.  I also like music.  But, while I thoroughly enjoy watching Clara's softball team play, I find her band concerts to be very, very tedious.  Why is 10 year old softball worth watching, but 10 year old band not worth hearing?

[On the title of the post, you can waste some time looking  here and here.  Both of the Dizzys were worth watching--but were they both worth watching when they were 10?]

3. And, I might as well add a book review so that this post will have some reason to exist.

But, come to think of it, does a blog post need a reason to exist? Does a blog post actually exist?  If so, where?

But, for the book:  Euripides, The Trojan Women was a bit of a mess.  It was the tale of the women of Troy (hence the name) after the Trojans had been slaughtered; in the play, the women are being hauled off by their captives.  We see their laments.  The play was a sustained argument that the Greeks are rather barbaric monsters who don't seem to care about their captives.  Hector's young son (age 3 or 4?) was stripped from his mother and thrown off the walls of Troy.  Mothers and daughters are enslaved to different masters.  Nobody in the whole play is happy. (The only Greek we see is a rather depressed low-level messenger--he may be depressed, though, because he doesn't seem to get a slave woman of his own).  And it is all the Greeks' fault.  What is odd is that this play was written for a Greek audience in the midst of a later war. If the modern Left still know how to read and didn't immediately condemn everything old as racist and sexist and so on, then this play would have been staged on every college campus during the Bush administration, with Iraqi women as the main characters and the name "Bush" being substituted for the name "Odysseus."  A good time would have been had by all.

That being said, the most interesting thing about this play is its existence--as far as Euripides goes, it's not one of his best.

4. Speaking of Presidential Administrations: James Carville (James Carville!) is complaining that Obama is being insufficiently  proactive in the oil spill, is naive, and is politically ineffective.  The slow death of the Myth of Obama continues apace.