Varia has recently been mildly obsessed with antique electric fans. There’s a big market for old fans which have been restored, but they don’t come cheaply. She did find an inexpensive fan on eBay and snapped it up. It’s probably 40 or 50 years old; it’s in fairly good shape, and very powerful.

In fact it’s so powerful that it propels itself backward across a surface. We’re thinking of ways to keep it stationary.

Click the fuzzy image below for a short, fuzzy movie demonstrating the fan’s moonwalk.

I managed to squeeze out a more than a few solid hours of coding, which pleased me greatly, given the will-sapping power of the current heat. I’ve enlisted James Brown and a very large glass of iced coffee to keep me peppy enough to get through the afternoon. Keep it movin’ now. Huh.

It’s been a scorcher this weekend, and priority number one has been keeping cool. These are some of the few days in the year I wish I had some air conditioning.

We did risk a short outing yesterday in the car (also unairconditioned) to pick up a new blender to replace the less-than-astonishing blender which unexpectedly destroyed itself last week. I can’t do without my smoothies, especially in this heat.

As a note of interest, the site’s referer logs turned up this picture of me in a tin foil hat on the Ted Nugent message boards. Clearly work of the illuminati. Or the elves.

EDIT 12/8/05: I have removed the link to the image, so as not to encourage the internet paranoid. If you’d like me to send it to you, mail me.

Adjusted for population, the Bahamas is cleaning up in Athens.

This is a great story. There is drama and sex (though surprisingly not violence). Alcibiades is a famous rake of antiquity. Originally from Athens, he changes allegiances more often than most people change clothes; he is intelligent, charming, and persuasive. I still can’t understand why people continually put Alcibiades in positions to do the damage he does. But they do, and if they didn’t, this story wouldn’t have ever existed outside of fiction.*

The tale with Alcibiades coming to Sparta, having been exiled by his home of Athens for some old-time sacrilege. He has a great time, taking up the culture enthusiastically and drinking a lot. Soon one of the two queens of Sparta, Timaea, becomes pregnant; rumours fly that Agis, the king, is not the father. The climate in Sparta grows a bit hostile to Alcibiades, and, wily enough to know when he isn’t wanted, he heads out to Persia to hang out with his friend the satrap Tissaphernes.

The kid, Leotychides, is born, but Agis doesn’t recognize him as his heir, saying that the child isn’t his, but Alcibiades’; the king wasn’t even around nine months before the birth. The next in line for the throne is Agis’ brother, Aegilaus. Agesilaus is lame, a trait not highly admired by the burly Spartans, but remarkably cunning.

I’ll turn to the amazing Plutarch for help recounting this story. Among his writings (around 75 CE, nearly 500 years after all of this happened) is a scandalous book on Alcibiades. Here’s what he has to say about this incident:

Alcibiades, you see, is a bad man. Things look pretty good for Aegisalaus’ kingship prospects, but there’s always a twist. Agis, on his deathbed, declares the son to be truly his after all! In Plutarch’s life of Lysander, we find this:

I can only imagine the chaos this caused. A great argument starts. A leading man, Diopithes, cites an oracle, which predicts that putting a lame person in charge of Sparta will bring great ruin. Lysander counters by claiming that the “lameness” isn’t physical, but impurity of blood. There’s a good bit of rhetoric here involving omens, but eventually Agelisalaus gets the crown and goes on to be a good, if not ruthless, king.

So was Alcibiades the father? Was justice done? It’s not clear, and it probably won’t ever be, unless some authoritative ancient text come out of hiding. But it’s a great story.

*This post wouldn’t have existed if Mr. Warry would added the clause “when it was rumored” that to the sentence “Alcibiades, who had left Sparta hastily when the Spartan queen Timaea became pregnant by him, had now taken refuge in Asia Minor with Tissaphernes.” Anyone who can definitively prove who the father of Leonthychides is in this maze of a story deserves a galaxy of gold stars.

Having finishing Warfare in the Classical World, I decided that scythed war chariots were definitively a bad idea, as every single reference to them ended into derisive disaster, and at one point causing the enemy forces bursting into laughter. Of course, only one (the least important) of the four references actually made it into the index, but annotations were made. I’m now curious as to whether there are any recorded instances of a scythed war chariot working successfully in an ancient battle.

This book, with fascinating accounts of politics and battles and atrocious editing, is a good example of a non-reliable source. I want to believe, but there were a few instances in which he treated things which were rumors even in ancient times as fact without qualification, and others where he made an especial effort to hedge. Without footnotes, it’s an exercise to the reader to delve into his sources to figure out what’s right and what’s fancy. I’d have thought that after all the complaining he does about this very thing happening in his source texts, he’d be a bit more careful.

Setting my sights on the Eastern Empire for a bit, I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium, which should be here early next week. I thoroughly enjoyed the strange, yet eerily familiar, factional culture and politics presented in the books of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosiac, and no doubt will be even more amazed by the real article.

A bit of time earlier this week was spent looking for Latin study aids for OS X. It was a less than fruitful search, yet worth it if only for the glory that is Latin Words, a remarkable little gizmo that takes a word as input and returns a wealth of grammatical information. Would that I had it during college.

Via my brother-in-law James, galleries of stunning photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand of people and their farm animals, horses, people, and landscapes.

grep 2.5.1 will highlight matches in color.

Sometimes I’m easily impressed.

I’ve been out of sorts the past few days while the cold did its worst. I made the mistake of trying some non-drowsy cold medication, which rendered me unable to think straight but also prevented me from sleeping, no matter how fiercely I wished to. Great.

There’s a lot to do this week, health permitting, and I’m looking forward to it. Between one thing and another I’ve been out of the game for over a week now.

I’ve got a bit of a cold, which is irritating. At least it’s not a knife wound.

I enjoy the Olympics season, but it never fails to make me feel unfit.

On the trip back from Oregon, our plane was stuffed full of children. There seemed to be a 3:1 child to parent ratio, so there was a lot of youthful exuberance. Directly in front of me was a small wisp of a girl who named Seneca. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t named after the great (male) stoic philosopher, but that was all I could think of; I pity her experience in higher education.

At some point, Seneca, fed up with the strains of travel, burst into tears, which caused her mother to exclaim “Don’t cry, Seneca!” It was I all I could to to not laugh.

Hot on the heels of a history of The Spartans, (who went from Big City-State on Peninsula to “Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks — except the Spartans — dedicated these spoils from the barbarians of Asia” in a few hundred years) I’m reading Warfare in the Classical World by John Warry. It’s a wonderful book, spanning military engagements, tactics and weaponry from Troy to the early 5th century. He compares phalanx combat to a rugby scrum; how cool is that?

The editing, on the other hand, is atrocious. When I got to this passage, I wondered what terrible things I had done to cause the heroes of the ancient world to speak so poorly.

Another passage talks about the historian Ucydides, who seems to have lost his Th.

I’m back in action in a limited way; most importantly, I can now hold things and type. There’s a pretty big backlog of code to write that built up on my enforced holiday from the workforce, so my work is cut out for me.

So much to do, so little time.

Another day wrapped up in gauze. The bandages come off tomorrow morning, after which time I’m to avoid using the hand as much as possible until the cut heals. In the scope of injuries, it’s a small one, but frightfully incapacitating.

I spent most of today at the cafe, slowly typing with my right hand and drinking coffee while Leonard Cohen crooned on the stereo. For those who want to know, one handed emacs is really not fun.

After an unpleasant sleep I took myself into the doctor’s office and emerged an hour later with a tetanus shot in my arm, a hand wrapped up in white gauze, and orders not to use the hand for 48 hours.

So for the next few days I am more felix and less sinister, but mostly out of commission. I feel pretty darned useless.