A Kuwaiti acquaintance reacts to Osama bin Laden's death.

My one Kuwaiti friend was saying that she hates how everyone always calls Osama bin Laden "bin Laden".

"That's a huge family and really well-known from air-conditioning all of Saudi Arabia," she was like, "And he's just some nutjob from it. Just think of what it does to all the other people with the same last name!"

She also added that the Qaddafi family had air-conditioned all of Kuwait (or maybe Jordan; I forget which).

A friend who was with us said that that happens with all famous people (e.g. Obama), so it's not particular to bin Laden.

I added that Lionel Dahmer (Jeffrey's father) changed his last name, since he couldn't take the shame and jokes, even from people who didn't think he was related.

A Turkish acquaintance reacts to Osama bin Laden's death.

On Cinco de Mayo I went to a mole festival with friends, and they had invited one of their friends from tango classes, who's Turkish. As I have been, I brought up Osama bin Laden's death to hear what everyone thought, and he said -

1) he thought the U.S. was lying (to which my friends said that even al Qaeda admitted Osama bin Laden had been killed).

2) that Osama bin Laden's wife had been living cooped up in the house for like 3 years, which "is typical Arab".

My new cooking challenge:

Quinoa.

I don't know what I'm going to do with it.

Classicists are in charge of our high schools!

What I've learned from advertising to be a Latin tutor -

All the high schools pretty much focus on teaching Vergil for the AP Latin test, so that's what kids want help with.

I think that's stupid. Vergil is really hard to read, and must be discouraging, and on top of that you have to learn how to "scan" lines of poetry for long and short vowels, which is a stupid thing of a pissing contest to make kids learn, because even the best classicist I know can't scan a line on sight or spontaneously read out loud a line so the meter sounds good, and even those classicist I know who read Vergil fluently, when they read him, don't think and process the meter as they read!

So, why the fuck make kids learn that? Because, that's what classicists were taught and idolize, that's why.

I think it makes so much more sense to start with easier texts and build up grammar/vocab knowledge and recognition on those texts, and then move into more difficult ones (and Vergil maybe in the distant future, if ever - he's not that interesting).

I also ordered and got in the mail a paperback copy of the classic Homer grammar, so I can understand the snippets of Homer quoted in texts that I read, and the whole intro is about how Homeric Greek is the obvious place to start learning Greek, since from it you can learn the rest of the language, including then the New Testament. How stupid is that?!??!?! It's probably the last place you should start, since (as I understand it), Homeric Greek is a mixture of different dialect forms, so it makes sense to learn one more-pure dialect (e.g. Attic) well, and then work through simple texts to get a handle on that and then skip back to Homeric Greek. Even in the ancient world Homer was the focus of specialized knowledge where they had to explain so many words and forms! On top of that, what the heck kind of comparison do classicists really do between dialect forms? It's probably just listing similar-looking forms next to each other, rather than real historical linguistic analysis of what changed where when - much like what it seems Egyptologists do when they study different stages of Egyptian.

Thoughts when shopping.

Because I would like small more portable laptop (I would *like* one, I really don't *need* one) I went to a Target and then a Best Buy this past Sunday.

The entire time I was in Target, I kept thinking about how I really don't shop that much for consumer goods, and as I went through the store aisle by aisle, I kept thinking, "Who buys all this stuff?".

At Best Buy, the portable laptops were very pricy ($750+), and the Apple super-thin ones over a thousand. I became very angry that people can afford stuff like this, and so many people are out of work and suffering. At every shopper I saw who was looking at high-priced electronics, I kept looking at them and being angry and wondering if they ever thought about that...

I was thinking, too, how so many people are looking for work, and there's not even a program around like the Civilian Conservation Corps where you can go and do honest work to get money, but these people don't realize that.

The rest of the day, whenever I saw ads for iPhones and iPads and whatnot, I'd get very angry and think about wealth inequality in our country.

The prices of things nowadays.

The other week I went to the movie theater downtown to see Werner Herzog's new documentary, "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" (in 3D).

The ticket was $11.50, plus an extra $5 for the 3D glasses (which weren't included in the price of admission).

I tried to justify it, but that seems high. It's the added glasses!

Latin ennui.

After reading Latin for one glorious night, I've kind of lost interest. I don't know why!

So, now I've been thinking about learning Homeric Greek, and have ordered myself the grammars and dictionary.