Until I started listening to Stanley Lombardo's translation of Homer's Odyssey, my primary association with the name Telemachus was from The Illuminatus! Trilogy, in which the Roberts Shea and Wilson make fun of Atlas Shrugged with a cult novel called Telemachus Sneezed. I thought that was a funny spoof title for the trippy spoof novel.

Imagine my surprise, a dozen years later, when I encounter this passage from the Odyssey, in which Penelope addresses a servant:

"As for the suitors, let them take their pleasure indoors or out as they will, for they have nothing to fret about. Their corn and wine remain unwasted in their houses with none but servants to consume them, while they keep hanging about our house day after day sacrificing our oxen, sheep, and fat goats for their banquets, and never giving so much as a thought to the quantity of wine they drink. No estate can stand such recklessness, for we have now no Odysseus to protect us. If he were to come again, he and his son would soon have their revenge."

As she spoke Telemachus sneezed so loudly that the whole house resounded with it. Penelope laughed when she heard this, and said to Eumaeus, "Go and call the stranger; did you not hear how my son sneezed just as I was speaking? This can only mean that all the suitors are going to be killed, and that not one of them shall escape.

Apparently, the ancients considered a sneeze to be a good omen.

(And, apparently, the ancients considered mass murder to make a happy ending.)

And they can't even claim it's "really about slavery" this time.

From blog.Mises.org:

She actually considered breaking up the union: thought crime

September 2, 2008 10:56 AM by Jeffrey Tucker | Other posts by Jeffrey Tucker | Comments (0)

Alaska only became a state in 1959, but somehow we are supposed to believe that it is part of the enternal natural law that it should always and everywhere be part of the union, and any thought to the contrary--the mere thought!--is grounds for permanent exclusion from public office.

Such is the implication behind the completely bizarre claim that Sarah Palin's involvement with the Alaskan secession movement amounts to a disastrous revelation for the McCain camp.

Why precisely this is such a horrid thought is never explained. Alaska would surely be better off, and does anyone in the other 49 states really believe that some calamity would befall the U.S. if Alaska became independent? It's nuts. Separating off territories from a mother country is at the very core of U.S. history and its founding, and we really saw many examples of peaceful secession in the old Soviet Union.

But somehow in the U.S., the very idea that the existing configuration of the nation state should ever be diminished by a single inch is a great taboo. And why? Because the media tell us so.

This book on secession clearly needs broader circulation.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart was an Oxford scholar who died in WWI. He wrote this during 3 days of R&R as he waited to be sent to fight at Gallipoli, which is across the Dardenelles (formerly known as the Hellespont) from the site of ancient Troy:

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Upon the Dardanelles:
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea;
Shrapnel and high explosives,
Shells and hells for me.

Oh Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese;
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not;
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros o'er the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

I haven't followed the Olympics and I don't plan to follow the electoral horse race.

We don't even plan to adjust our lives or our technology to the upcoming switchover from analog to digital television (and no, we don't have HDTV, just an old-fashioned behemoth that mostly serves as a screen for the DVD player).

But I still identify with this comic:

In his article, "Nixonian Socialism," Murray Rothbard defined economic fascism as "an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses."

That definition was already damning to our current system of political capitalism well before the PTB started bailing out all these government-business "partnerships." I've added this cartoon to my definition of fascism. I doubt the artists realized the economic history behind their astute joke.

As iceberg recently reminded me via email, Murray Rothbard pointed out that inflation can lead to more than rising prices:

All sorts of monstrous situations will occur. Decline in quality, for example. We will find that there will be more air in the Baby Ruth — you can't find the Baby Ruth anymore anyway. There will be less chocolate in the chocolate. There is no way the state can police this, of course. And it's very harmful to the public.

I fleshed out Rothbard's example in "What ever happened to sexy stews?" and gave my own example:

With many goods, quality can vary significantly, not always in easy-to-measure ways. If people are used to paying 25¢ for a Baby Ruth, to use Rothbard's example, then the Baby Ruth company is going to be loath to raise the price to 50¢, even if inflation has doubled all their input costs. What they do instead is cut whatever costs they can to keep the price at a quarter. So maybe they cut the number of peanuts in half, dilute the chocolate with cheaper vegetable oil, and make the candy bar 10% smaller. The product looks the same on the outside, and many people won't notice the difference on the inside. But fans of the Baby Ruth chocolate bar will notice that the quality has fallen.

In my case, it wasn't the falling quality of the candy I noticed, but the ever-crummier toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jack. Grownups would tell me about the whistles and decoder rings their childhood boxes of Cracker Jack had contained. Meanwhile, I watched plastic toys become cardboard-and-plastic toys become pure cardboard crapola.

Now it's happening to the McDonald's "Dollar Menu":

McDonald's Cuts Cheese to Save Dollar Menu

Turns out the cheese in McDonald’s cheeseburgers is actually made with real dairy! The Wall Street Journal reports that the rising cost of cheese has put the franchise’s famed Dollar Menu in jeopardy. Some restaurants are now pushing a double cheeseburger with just one slice of cheese instead of the usual two. At other locations the price has been jacked up to an obscene $1.10. Now McDonald’s executives are considering yanking cheese from it altogether and calling it a double hamburger. But then there’s the price of beef to consider, which is also rising! It’s only a matter of time before the double mime burger – wheat-free bun, some lettuce and a little imagination – is rolled out.

(via Gothamist via iceberg)

Mises on schooling:

It is often asserted that the poor man's failure in the competition of the market is caused by his lack of education. Equality of opportunity, it is said, could be provided only by making education at every level accessible to all. There prevails today the tendency to reduce all differences among various peoples to their education and to deny the existence of inborn inequalities in intellect, will power, and character. It is not generally realized that education can never be more than indoctrination with theories and ideas already developed. Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them. (Human Action, c15, s11)

Salacious bed-sheet print ad from 1949:

(via Snopes via steve2 via email from Scott Lahti)

The ad copy says "This buck may look more like 47¢ — which is what most bucks are worth these days." I thought I'd check this inflation calculator to see if 47¢ is the right number.

Nope. According to the calculator, a 1947 dollar was worth 40¢ (meaning that what cost a buck in 1949 would have only cost 40¢ the year the Federal Reserve was created).

Of course, that's still ten times the value of a current dollar.

"You would be hard-pressed to find any industry with this level of income that is less efficient than higher education. If Wal-Mart gets into the field, this will change. "

(Click to Enlarge)

Harper Lee has been on my mind recently — ever since seeing her portrayed in Capote a few weeks ago.

But tonight she came to mind in an unusually perverse way. I found myself wondering if there was a cocktail called Tequila Mockingbird. There had to be, right?

Turns out there are a bunch of them. They all start out with tequila and lime juice, but the last ingredients vary:

• tomato juice
• green peppermint liqueur
• green creme de menthe (2)
• white creme de menthe (2)
• black currant-flavored liqueur & apple cider
• triple sec, blue curacao, OJ, cranberry juice

That's not a complete list, I'm sure, but it's what I pulled from the first page of Google hits. The green and white cremes de menthe each occurred on 2 pages, so I think creme de menthe, generically, wins the competition for genuine recipe.

That image in the upper right is from MAD magazine issue 289, September 1989. Because Google reads PDF files, and because I run Google Desktop on my MacBook, and because I have decades worth of back issues of MAD magazine stored on my hard drive, the top hit for "tequila mockingbird" was for this panel from MAD289.pdf.