No sooner had I finished episode six and gotten the message that two more hours of House had done by partner in than my little bugger approached the door of my office with his big Mater the tow truck pillow in one hand. I crawled in bed with him – his lower bunk bed not mine until a minute passed and he told me he needed a drink of water. Water became a potty break became a little request that I sit in the chair beside him and NOT in his bed and then a minute before slumber took over.
I’m not much like the character that Spacey portrays. He broke the teacher’s union president by taunting him into punching out the Congressmen which is, evidently, a federal offense. The Screen writer decided that the provocation would not win the union rep any sympathy. I thought it would have had it been skillfully described to a public curious why he would punch the lights out of the Congressman. Oh well, I wasn’t the screen writer.
Kevin Spacey’s character is described by his cold blooded wife. He offered her power and adventure not children. He wouldn’t have gotten my kick out of babysitting two grandson’s solo.
I haven’t posted much for the past few days. I’ve taken in lots of interesting things and I’ve been doing some mental collating and a page of notes for blog posts staring me in the face. I won’t post them but here are some examples:
A. Shakespeare’s plays, not the highest rated of their time, survived only because he and his partners were shrewd businessmen. I wonder how America would have progressed had they not been there for Abraham Lincoln to memorize.
B.That reminded me of something I had read thirty years ago in a Isaac Asimov history of Greece. I recall Asimov saying that a Roman General recovered Arisototle’s books after they had been hidden underground. Turns out that’s not quite what happened. We may owe their recovery to a book collector:
To protect the books from theft, Neleus’s heirs concealed them in a vault, where they were damaged somewhat by dampness, moths and worms. In this hiding place they were discovered about 100 BCE by Apellicon, a rich book lover, and brought to Athens. They were later taken to Rome after the capture of Athens by Sulla in 86 BCE. In Rome they soon attracted the attention of scholars, and the new edition of them gave fresh impetus to the study of Aristotle and of philosophy in general.
The Arabs probably had an equal hand in saving Aristotle so that St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, could us them to undergird Catholic theology.
A book lover in the 1500’s was the principal hero in the book Swerve when he got hold of another ancient book on the stoics.
I also recalled reading a tidbit from twenty years ago about a massive wave of destruction for ancient Chinese texts some 2000 plus years ago.
Over the years I’ve read a half dozen books on similar episodes of censorship. The Black Sea dwells on the reshuffling of the many ethnic populations around the Coast of the Black Sea.
There is much more but this is already far too much.
Today I decided to build my third snow sculpture of the year. I made great progress probably because it relates to something that has been a burr under my saddle for almost as long as I’ve kept track of the books I’ve read – the take over of the Republican Party by the ghost of John Wilkes Booth. Pisses me off. It was accomplished by the kind of guys like the one Kevin Spacey is portraying so brilliantly. People interested in power over truth.
I flatter myself when I muse that this has been the biggest obstacle to my progress in the world of politics. This and my stubborn refusal to become a DFLer when I wanted to run for local office back in 1976. Lincoln did read widely. His Republican successors include far too many who have not followed his example.
