Occupation of Independence

It's Super Bowl season. What would the ancient Greeks think of the NFL player who dances in the end zone after scoring a touchdown? No matter how proud a modern secularist and rationalist is about their superiority to superstition, don't we still believe in hubris? We start to get nervous about feeling too pleased with ourselves, and especially, if we show it in public. For instance my van (tow vehicle) recently passed the 250,000 mile mark. At first I thought about celebrating th is achievement by posting about it. Then I decided to keep my big trap shut, lest I jinx myself. But by now, the gods have probably moved on to other things, and they won't notice if I do a little dancing in the end-zone about this.  Of course, when a person considers a new vehicle, all they can really do is stack the odds in their favor with statistically-valid generalizations. It still comes down to one lucky or unlucky specimen in a general category. But it is still worth mentioning my g

It is always a bit of a triumph when I survive a Russian novel, in this case a historical novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "August 1914". A worthy book. I'd like to do something I haven't done before on this blog: show what I've been doing most of my adult life when I read a b ook. What good is a book if the words go i nto one eyeball and out the other? In order for the book to have any effect on your life, you must re tain the best parts of it -- its j uicy but condensed nuggets of goodness. And then you can digest and assimilate these nuggets into your own organism. To mix metaphors, let's look for the book's classic quotes, its pemmican of wisdo m, and turn them into building blocks for our own mental s kys crapers in the future.  Just a few years ago now, baby kaBLOOnie and his siblings being programmed and brainwashed by their schoolteacher father. p. 107/622:  He had not expected to find much to hearten him at Second Army Headquarters...