Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Oh yeah records are shattered. 2.5 miles today brings the 2008 total to 125, and May to 42 (yep 1/3 of the miles this month, 1/3 January, and the other three months hang their heads in shame). That was a Slurpee milestone I tell you. I now need 15 miles a week for the July 4th deadline - not sure how that jives with my estimates from yesterday but it works. At some point I may have miscalculated. Feel free to double-check me.

I present you with 2 quotes:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice
and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and
confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out
of my BMW.. and run off into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a
message on my fax machine, I wonder: "Did little demons get inside and type it?"
I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts.

For I am more than seventy years of age, and appearing now for the first
time in a court of law, I am quite a stranger to the language of the place; and
therefore I would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger, whom you
would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion of his
country...

Given a choice between Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and Socrates, you can probably guess who said which, but Plato's Apology is not a comedy - it's a philosophical treatise in which Socrates is defending himself in court. This book bothers me - Socrates seems more interested in scoring points on his opponent and using sophistry to declaim sophistry. It's clever, probably exceedingly clever for the time, but it doesn't seem to offer anything besides how to be clever if your audience is 2500-year-old Greeks. There could be some interesting points about wisdom and humility and knowledge, but they're indistinguishable from this desperate cleverness. I know some of my readers are better read than me - I'm open to any explanation. Keeping reading through the Apology and Crito, but I'm just not a Plato fan at this point.
posted by Unknown 9:24 PM | 0 comments