The Trojan War

I watched a documentary on the Illiad and Oddesey today. Sometimes I think academics overthink things. They gassed on and on about how the Trojan War if it happened at all (which they were not sure was the case), was really about trade, commerce, and economics despite the fact that wars are almost never fought over those things. Most wars are actually, or so it appears to me, fought over ideology though sometimes economic issues are involved.

When I read the old tales like this I come to a different conclusion than the professors of ancient history and anthropology interviewed for the documentary. Most of these ancient kings would, I think fit right in with what might be called a Red-Neck culture and that means their motivations were not the same as Harvard/Oxford-educated eggheads.

Those ancient kings hunted, fished, worked on their farms, and as the Greeks invented wrestling watched 'rasslin' in their spare time. 

They let the dogs in the dining room at dinner time and fed them scraps while the meal was in progress.

 They hung their weapons on the living room wall so everyone could see their newest assault-style spear, sword, or bow.

They raced their horses and chariots. 

Gambling was a favorite pastime. 

They drank beer and wine by the gallon (Harder stuff hadn't been invented yet). 

They used mildly hallucinogenic plants like mandrake on a regular basis. 

They probably scratched,  belched, and told fart jokes. 

I doubt they took showers or baths more than once a month or so.

They worked with their hands. 

They camped out. 

They'd get together to watch sports, sing songs, or play games.

They ate the ancient equivalent of BBQ several times a week, and most meals included bread and cheese.

They were all veterans who showed off their scars and weren't afraid of a fight.

They were also loyal to their friends. They knew what they wanted and worked at getting it. These brutes worshiped their gods with sincerity. 

They loved their wives and children. 

They valued honesty and expected to be treated with respect by both friends and enemies.

If the description above doesn't describe a bunch of Red-Necks I don't know what does. This doesn't make the old kings perfect by any means but I just think these men were not as sophisticated and refined as academic hotten-tots try and make them out to be.

I think if old Menelaus had come home from a hard day hunting deer and fishing for crappie and bass (or whatever fish there are in Greece) and found out his wife had run off with some Trojan Yankee (Troy was North of where he lived after all) he'd have immediately called his best friends Aggie, Oddie and Lee (Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Achilles) and said "We gotta go bring Helen back! That fool must have kidnapped her because they ain't no way in Hell my wife'd run off with an SOB that stupid and ugly."

And that ladies and gentlemen, was the cause of the Trojan war.

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger who watches nerdy history documentaries

Fraught and Broken

Isn't it sad how often the people we should love the most are the ones hardest to love?

Sometimes this is due to the secular proverb, "Familiarity breeds contempt," but not always.

Sometimes families have real issues that they need to work out, othertimes there is a miscommunication. Still other times there are irreconcilable differences between children and parents. In such instances there may be blame on both sides. But, in my experience, one side is usually much more right, and the other nearly completely wrong. It is amazing how the idea of situational ethics and morality so quickly falls apart in the cruicble of existence.

This is where virtues cease to be platitudes and become active agents. It takes humility to admitt you're wrong. It takes patience to hold your tonge. It takes circumspection to see both sides. It takes bravery to confront hard issues. It takes fortitude to not give up. It takes wisdom to sometimes just let things be. It takes grace to accept an apology. It takes love to forgive.

Until Next time
Fai Mao

The Twilight Zone

My favorite TV show as a child before Star Trek came along

https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/the-twilight-zone-finale-60-year-anniversary

My five rules of "Reciprocal Ethics"

1. I don't comment on the sartorial choices people make. That gives me the right to demand that they don't disparage how I dress.
2. I don't tell people how to raise their poorly behaved, undisciplined, soon-to-be career criminal children. That gives me the right to demand that they don't complain about how I raised my kids.
3. I don't tell you how to run your crappy little country or state. That gives me the right to demand that you don't comment on mine
4. I don't make unsolicited comments about your weird, fat, criminal, tattooed-like-a-freak, or ugly spouse (Significant other). So I can demand you don't complain about my wife.
5. I don't complain about your culinary proclivities. So don't complain about mine.

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger resembling a grumpy old man

On Nightmares

I've had vivid nightmares and anxiety dreams since I was a child.

The first one I can remember was being chased chased by a fossilized dinosaur and watching it attempt to eat cars driving down the street. (Note this was a good 30+ years before Jurassic Park movies) It was scary enough that I can still remember the dream to this day over 55 years later. While the description is comical it wasn't funny when I was 7 years-old.

Most of the time the dreams were during stressful times but not always.

What is also strange to me is that often the dreams recur multiple times over multiple nights, weeks, or even years. Some of the common dreams have been, standing on a pole or pillar that is thousands of feet high with no way down. I've had dreams where shadowy ghost or spirits talked to me and left me wide awake and trembling. Once I dreamed that there was a man with an ax standing over me about to chop me in two. This one ended with me standing up in bed, punching the ceiling and yelling “No!”.

One less scary but frustrating dream that was repeated probably 7 to 10 times, had me driving a car, normally with another passenger. In the dream we are driving to a city, but must avoid a different city at all cost. The cities have changed over time but let us call them Houston and San Antonio. I keep taking the splits or exits for Houston but as I do, I get further from Houston and closer to San Antonio. I think I wake up n the middle of this one. I don't really remember how it ends.

Several times I've dreamed of having to cross a swamp full of monsters, snakes, or alligators to get to an MTR station in Hong Kong. If you've ever been to Hong Kong you'll understand how strange, and borderline funny, that is.

One particularly frightening nightmare occurred several times. It is a lucid dream, I knew I was dreaming. In the dream, I wake up and there is someone standing beside my bed, just at the edge of my sight. As I turn to see who it is, they backup. So no matter how far, or how fast I turn I can never see who is there. I just keep turning until I yell, “Enough!” and truly wake up.

I had a new dream last week. A strange one.

In the dream I was living in a dark and scary place with almost no light. Everything was in shades of grey. I thought of getting a dog but it was too big and more frightening than whatever I was scared of. So I decided to just leave. As is common in dreams, there was no transition I went from standing in a yard to standing on the sidewalk of wide city street. I could see the shape of non functioning traffic lights when I looked up the street. But everything was deserted. For some reason, I had to push a dumpster or skip across the street to check for invisible cars. Then I was across the street and entered another house. There was a man in the house who gave me a guitar and asked me to play a song. He was the first person or thing in color in the dream. I haven't really played a guitar in decades but I took the guitar and started to play. As I did the dream changed perspective. I saw the dark city from a bird's eye view. My house, where I was, was the only point of light in the dark city. The overarching theme of the dream was loneliness.

This dream has haunted my thoughts for a week.

I don't place any psychic or prophetic importance to my dreams. I am not a pharoah who needs Joseph to interpret my dreams. If standing on a pillar in a dream is just a dream then this one was too. And yet, I am not an irreligious man.

The prophet Joel wrote;

“And afterward,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your old men will dream dreams,
    your young men will see visions.”

All I can say is that if the dreams of an old man are so intense, then I don't want to know the young man's visions.

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger who dreams the dreams of an old man

Hearing Aids

About 1 year ago I got hearing aids. It took a few months to get used to them and overall I really like them. But being able to hear got me thinking about the philosophical aspects of hearing.

Scientists who study such things tell us that senses like sight and hearing are adaptations that allow us to hunt for food or mates or avoid being hunted for food or mates. I guess that's true, though I wonder how a little organism that has neither the ability to hear nor see could even realize that light and sound existed?  

But anyway, I enjoy not having to continually say, "I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?" The hearing aids work with my phone so the phone call is piped directly into my ears. So unlike way too many Yahoos, I don't yell into my cell phone because I can hear what's being said on the other end. I can also listen to radio stations via the phone which is nice if I want to hear something in a crowded room and don't want to bother other people.  Lastly, the warning beeps and chimes in the car now play directly into the ear as well as out loud 

All of this leads me to ask two questions.

1. How much of the world do I actually want to hear?

2. How much of What I hear is actually worth listening to?

Do I really want to hear the world around me? Often time the answer is no. 

And, much of what I hear is worthless.

It makes me question the need for hearing aids/

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger who isn't sure if liked being deaf better

 From my FaceBook page

On Collecting Quotes

On FaceBook, the only thing I post that gets even 1/3 the likes as pictures of my really smart, still looks like she’s 35 years old, loving and gracious wife, are quotes. I can understand why people like to see photos of Kim, especially those in my extended family who may have never met her. The likes for quotes were harder for me to understand.

It was, I think, the American philosopher Richard Rorty who said, “90% of everything philosophers say is wrong. But, the 10% they get right explains 90% of everything.” Quotes are like the philosopher's 10%. They distill the essence of an idea down into a pithy, insightful, humorous, or provocative statement condensing a whole book’s worth of wisdom into a sentence or two.

For a long time, I didn’t realize that you could collect quotes like people collect silver spoons or stamps but you can, and evidently, I have. I didn’t think of myself as a collector of pithy sayings until recently. I sort of approached my list of quotes like the actor Edward G. Robinson did cigars when he quipped, “I didn't play at collecting. No cigar anywhere was safe from me.” Quotes were things I used like he smoked cigars. They were references for research papers and the dissertation. They were tools to advance a career.

And yet, I have a word-processing file that is several pages long with just quotes. In fact, I’ve had several such lists over the years, and a couple of them have gotten lost. I don’t know the number of insightful quotes, limericks, or oneliners I’ve tried to keep. Many were made by people who are unknown to me; I have no idea who they are or were. I have some favorites but others I just found.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past several days.

Why do I collect quotes? I can't really say. However, I think that if, "joy is," as C.S. Lewis wrote, "the serious business of heaven," then quotes are the everyday business of wisdom. Look at Western Philosophy. It starts with Aesop and his fables. Notice how most of those fables end with a pithy saying or proverb. Something easy to remember and that cuts to the heart of the moral issue being presented. That's what good quotes do.

David Furnish said, “A good art collection is emblematic of the people collecting it.” Quotes are, I think like art. The sayings you remember, the words that inspire you reveal a lot about who you are.

What is particularly interesting to me is that some of the best quotes come from fiction and fiction writers. Great scientists, politicians, philosophers, theologians, and engineers do not seem to have the market cornered in truth or wisdom. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. In the end, I guess I have to agree, as I so often do with Mark Twain's acerbic remark that “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction, fiction has to make sense.”

That evil genius Nietzsche thought that “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” I don’t agree. Most of my truly great thoughts occur when I am trying to sleep but can’t. There seems to be something about the conscious process of relaxing, trying to sleep that on a subconscious level triggers my mind. While trying to get to sleep last night, tossing and mumbling to myself in bed at 3:30 in the morning, I had a much more extensive essay planned out. Now, in the light of day with the grass begging to be mowed, the flowerbeds wanting weeding and the floor screaming to be mopped, I can’t remember half of what I wanted to write.

But, as the French say, "C'est la vie"

 I want to start blogging again. Not that I have any readers left. But, it helps me cope