Happy Fun Time with the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice

If I were more philosophically advanced perhaps I wouldn't take quite so much joy in this, via Ash-sharq al-awsat:

According to Dr. Al-Marshood, the two commission members approached the girls in order to "politely" advise and guide them regarding their inappropriate clothing.

Consequently, the two girls started verbally abusing the commission members, which then lead to one of the girls pepper-spraying them in the face as the other girl filmed the incident on her mobile phone, while continuing to hurl insults at them.

Most excellent.

Wm's Improvised Beet Salad, Thai Flavor

• several medium roasted beets


• one large-ish cucumber, or most of one of those European "burpless" ones


• cayenne pepper


• one lime


• fish sauce


• cilantro, if you're not one of those people for whom it tastes like soap

The best way to roast the beets I've found is to trim, wash and wrap them individually in foil and bake at 350 until tender, about 50-70 minutes for medium beets, 90 for the big daddies we're getting this late in autumn. Peeling them after roasting is a greater danger to clothing, but much easier.

After the beets are cooled and peeled, medium dice the beets and the cuke — seed the cuke if it it's one of the watery varieties. Toss in a bowl with the juice of the lime, several sturdy dashes of the cayenne and at least 1 tsp of fish sauce, more if you share my fondness for it. If you're afraid of the fish sauce, you may want add some salt. Chill for a bit, toss in a handful of cilantro before serving.

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There are in both Thai and ancient Roman cooking simple recipes which pair melon and fish sauce. Beets aren't quite like melons, but it's hard to lose with the the sweet + tart + salty combo. Here's the Roman recipe, from Apicius (85):

pepones et melones: piper, puleinum, mel vel passum, liquamen, acetum. interdum et silfi accedit.

Cantaloupe and melon: pepper, pennyroyal, honey or passum, fish sauce , vinegar. Sometimes also silphium is added.

Passum was a sweet wine made from raisins. Sylphium is a probably extinct plant about which ethnobotanists dearly love to speculate. It may have been like a milder asafoedita.

Travel Anxiety

In addition to the usual worries about air travel most people have — schedules, did I remember to pack enough socks, where will my luggage end up this time? — I have another massive decision to make. With my reading material do I include the big and useful Greek dictionary or the crappy but less heavy one?

Some Archilochus

Worked up for Aoidoi: Archilochus 13, mourning recent deaths at sea, reportedly including his sister's husband.

No Roses in Homer

Someone posted a brief poem on the Textkit forum as a verse composition challenge. Unfortunately, the opening stanza is mostly a list, which is always a nightmare in verse translation. I decided to check Homer to see if there are any epithets with rose I could use to save me some metrical pains. There aren't, because Homer not once uses the word rose, ῥόδον. Nor does Hesiod, nor any of the Homeric Hymns except one, the Hymn to Demeter, where it is part of — ta-dah! — a list:

ἄνθεά τ' αἰνυμένην, ῥόδα καὶ κρόκον ἠδ' ἴα καλὰ       6

There are compounds and derivatives involving roses — ῥοδόεις, the famous ῥοδοδάκτυλος. Just no roses themselves. This is surprising to me.

Aoidoi.org: Pindar's Isthmian 2

Using the new house style made possible by XeTeX I worked up (rather, finished working up) the famous poem with the "Mercenary Muse," Pindar's Isthmian 2.

Ratatouille, or, What do the critics know?

If you fear spoilers, you should probably just stop reading right now.

When I saw Ratatouille earlier this week, after I left I felt that some editor somewhere needed a bit more backbone to stand up to Brad Bird. Now I'm not quite so sure.

I was feeling a little bit ambivalent about Bird after his last film, The Incredibles, which has the very in-your-face message that excellence is better — "everybody's special" means nobody is. Aristotle would have grokked this, but in contemporary culture this out-loud aristocratic sentiment all too often keeps company with odious political movements. But there was nothing else in the film worry me about Bird's agenda, unlike the most recent Star Wars movies, which are full of the worst sort of divine-right, aristocratic nonsense.

More than one reviewer has complained about the scene in Ratatouille where Rémy — our heroic little chef — and his father go on a trip to see what humans do to rats. They go to what I assume is supposed to be a rat-catcher's business and see dead rats hanging above boxes of poisons in the store-front window. One reviewer thought this pointless. I think it's absoultely vital for the message of this film.

The scene is at night and dark, so I wouldn't say it's gratuitously bloody or violent. But there certainly is something alarming about the scene: a dozen rats all hung from ugly, outsized traps. The arrangement is tidy and one could, if feeling a bit overheated, call the presentation ritualistic. Rémy's father has brought him to witness an atrocity.

The entire movie is about Rémy escaping the identity imposed on him by an accident of birth. Near the end of the film there's a brief scene where he declines to go home either with his family or his human companion, Linguini. The parting is friendly, and Rémy walks down the street in his own direction. For him to go his own way — being a chef and a rat — requires him to be able to not be hindered by the terrible history between humans and rats. Perhaps in the film Rémy forgives faster than any but a saint in real life could manage, but this idea, that we don't need to be enslaved by imposed identities or by history, is a powerful one I can endorse whole-heartedly.

I don't think I'm reading too much into this. The same film ends with a remarkable monologue on art criticism.

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Edit: And now I see that the original work on the film was done by Jan Pinkava. What don't the Pinkavas do?