Snarking The Odyssey (with AD&D)
WARNING: Those of you who are accustomed to pithy political remarks here on Internal Monologue should brace yourselves for a major dose of gaming geekitude. Here's a link to one "Jamie R." who does a very snarky close reading of Homer's The Odyssey (HT: Mad Latinist via email). I've only read book 1, but it's pretty funny so far. An excerpt: Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men… Sooooo, he’s in charge, and everybody dies. Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero and his colossal failure. What? … for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever rea...
Comments
First off, did they actually check a several-times-opened jar of peanut butter to see if there was microscopic life in it? We think there would be. And if they did check, did they then do a scientific analysis to see if that life was related to life as we know it or was a new form of life all together?
Second, are they proposing that exposing a vacuum-packed, sealed jar of peanut butter to the atmosphere and the energy from a light bulb, then keeping that jar closed for a few days or weeks until the peanut butter is eaten, is the equivalent of lightning and meteors striking an entire, open air planet over a period of millions or billions of years?
Third, if new life did spontaneously appear in that jar, are they saying it would be superior to already existing life, so that the already existing life wouldn't just eat it?
Fourth, are they aware that abiogenesis, which unlike evolution deals with life coming from non-life, replaced Aristotle's concept of spontaneous generation? This is the idea that maggots spontaneously generate from rotting meat, fleas from putrid matter, etc. Are they aware that the Christian church viewed Aristotle as the authority on such matters, and that it was the Christian church that for centuries promoted the idea that life spontaneously came from non-life?
Fifth, do they truly believe that planet Earth is a jar of peanut butter?