Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 28 Jul 2015The epic conclusion that no-one asked for! Virgil steps up to the plate and finishes the trilogy that Homer never expected to be a trilogy.
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The anti-booze activists of the church tend to waffle a bit when you bring up the wedding at Cana. It’s a metaphor for something else, they might say, or they come up with biblical quotes to justify their stance, most of which come from that Saint Paul chap, as far as I can figure out. Look, I’m sure Saint Paul was a decent fellow and good to his mother, but he was not a barrel of fun. Old Miseryguts — as I’m sure his former friends called him after his conversion — was against practically everything that makes this vale of tears at all palatable. You will look in vain for a joke of any sort in either of the Epistles to the Corinthians, and the Thessalonians don’t get off much lighter.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Jan 2020What do you do when life takes away half of your empire? Well, if you’re the Medieval Byzantines, you make comprehensive structural reforms to better manage a changing geopolitical landscape — And then you make an absolute crapload of mosaics.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
This video was edited in part by Sophia Ricciardi, AKA “Indigo”.
FURTHER SOURCES: A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich.
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Steve H., “Cracking on Crackers”, Hog On Ice, 2005-01-21.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Jan 2020Tantalus! The number one dude known for his eternal punishment in Hades, perhaps second only to Sisyphus
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002.
At The Register, Alistair Dabbs reveals some unfortunate truths about the French railway service (the Société nationale des chemins de fer français or SNCF) and its mobile app:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, 1May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
Actually, the hotel app is rubbish. The booking system is slow, the property information incomplete and some of the buttons don’t do anything at all. From time to time, the app flashes up a notification inviting you to install the app … er, that you’re already running. Much better to book using a proper computer. Still, flashing the screen around got me the Presidential Disability Suite. Franklin D rocked a wheelchair, remember, and I’m a fan.
This, however, pales into insignificance with the tedious and frankly silly collection of smartphone apps I had to juggle to manage my train journey to get here. Yes, it’s my own fault for trying to navigate my way across France on public transport in the midst of a general strike but surely that’s precisely the kind of thing digital communications ought to be able to help you with, don’t you agree?
Map of the French railways on which the TGV (LGV: blue; normal tracks: black) and Intercités (grey) SNCF trains run. Only lines going to and from Paris are shown here.
Wikimedia Commons.The French train company, SNCF, has been doing its best by notifying travellers with bookings every day at 17:00 which of the following day’s trains would be running and which would be cancelled. I’m a lifelong union member myself and I fully support the workers’ rights to … oh buggeration, my TGV’s been rerouted to set off from a city 300km away. Fucking union arsewipes – sack ’em all bastard wankers.
Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to work out another way. Fire up the SNCF booking app!
A banner at the top informs me that I should seek information about which train services are running by checking its Twitter feed. So I launch the Twitter app. SNCF on Twitter says I should check via the idiotic INOUI brand for TGV bookings. So I launch the INOUI app. This tells me I should check with SNCF or, if I want more information, click on a highlighted link. I click on it: it links to a one-sentence message that tells me there is a strike on and that train services may be affected.
Two hours of thumb-numbing smartphone tomfoolery later, I have worked out my own alternative route via multiple connecting services. This was made more challenging by the SNCF and INOUI apps providing contradictory information about the same journey. Best of all is they can’t agree on where my TGV will actually go. Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille? According to SNCF and INOUI, it will do both. It’s Schrodinger’s train.
Just as I go to bed, the Eurostar app sends me a notification reminding me to get to my local station on time tomorrow to catch the TGV that’s been cancelled.
As you can see, my much prolonged, zig-zag route up the country and into Blighty worked, no thanks to these ridiculous apps. It wasn’t all bad: I got to see more French farmland than I expected and experienced first-hand the extraordinarily rich cultural variety of train station beggars that France has to offer the modern rail traveller.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Jan 2020Classical and Medieval Indian History is a tale of constant flux — but in between the dozens and hundreds of states at play across the peninsula, there are clear trends that arise. Let’s take this chapter of history as an opportunity to dig into different types of sources, and try and wrap our heads around a story that doesn’t fit neatly into a single chronology.
FURTHER SOURCES: The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru, “A History of India” by Michael H. Fisher (lecture courtesy of The Great Courses).
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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Also, because many women tend to over-analyze, they assign all sorts of deep meaning to trivial gestures and then demand explanations. Sometimes a rose is just a rose and five minutes of silence is just a man thinking about what he has to do at work tomorrow. You want to get a man to talk? It’s not hard. Ask him to explain what’s going on in a UFC fight or what his favorite sexual fantasy is and you’ll have trouble getting him to shut up.
John Hawkins, “5 Things Women Do That Secretly Annoy Men”, PJ Media, 2012-08-23.
Anton Howes, “The House of Trade”, Age of Invention, 2019-11-13.
Nor was the early Canadian drinker certain of what was in his drink. McBurney and Byers offer a few recipes of the day. Wisely they note: “These old recipes are presented for interest only; they should not be used.” I’ll say. Their recipe for port calls for 28 gallons of cider, 9 gallons of whiskey, 15 pounds of white sugar, as well as cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, ground cochineal, carbonate of potash, and — if necessary — two ounces of ground alum. I don’t think that’s the way they make it in Portugal. There are no grapes, for starters. I’m trying to imagine how I’d feel the next day. Now I’m trying to stop imagining how I’d feel the next day.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 11 Jan 2016The oracle at delphi simply tells him, “congratulations”. The standard of nudity was his idea. Narcissus gets shy around him. Patroclus was his boyfriend first. He is … the most interesting man in Ancient Greece.
Extra special thanks to Blue’s professor, Mr. Samons, who taught him about Greek history and the comedic potential of marshmallows and triremes.
Having regaled us with shocking tales of the Basic College Girl (linked here), Severian now gets down to the not-very-salacious details of modern female mating behaviour at US colleges:
University College, University of Toronto (not one of the post-secondary institution Severian used to teach at).
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
When people find out I’m retired from “higher” “”education,”” if they’re anything but rabid Leftists they usually ask me a series of questions: Why are professors such hypocritical assholes? and Is there really any point to ___ Studies? and Why do they pay the football coach umpteen zillion dollars a year to never finish higher than third in the conference? If the questioner is a man, though, and we’re out drinking, after a few martinis they always get around to: But what about … you know … the girls?
Where to start? Since there’s no avoiding prurience here let’s get one thing out of the way up front. This is TLP, not me, but it holds for coeds, too:
These people are prone to two errors. A psychological one: fetishization; and a biological one: mistaking for beauty what is merely youth.
Taking the second first: I made the same mistake. I came to the ed biz later than most, having had a “real” job back in my other life, so when I first got to grad school I was amazed at how hot the girls were. Like everyone else I was a TA for Intro to Studies 101, but unlike everyone else I must’ve gotten the “sorority girls only” section, because every single chick in it was a knockout.
Now I’ll cop to being a little slow on the uptake, but I’m not that dumb. So I started looking a little closer — purely in the interests of science, you understand — and it wasn’t long until I realized that yeah, what I thought at first was smokin’ hotness was just youth. Back in the office I’d been surrounded by women who were equally attractive, but not equally young. A few years in a high-stress job puts a lot of miles on you.
But the other, fetishization element came into it too. Not like that, get your minds out of the gutter, let me explain:
I don’t think it ever really was, but if “coed” was a fetish its days are long past. In a country where the vast majority of people have at least a semester or two of college, not even “sorority girl” really moves the needle much. Rather, all the “fetish” stuff comes from the other side. After spending oh-god-sooooo-many hours getting harangued by the HR ladies about “sexual harassment,” even the most cynical teacher finds himself wondering what he’d do if some slinky young thing really did show up at office hours, close the door, and declare she’ll do anything to pass the class…
Which never happens, of course. I’ve never even heard of it, and I taught at lots of places, for many years, among male colleagues (and a lot of lesbians) who were desperately horny losers. The reason is twofold. The first, and most obvious, is that even if some girl really is that mercenary / sociopathic — and y’all have me on record, at great length, describing what little sociopaths modern kids are — there’s a much simpler alternative available: Straight-up bribery. But notice that’s the one thing you never even hear suggested, though it’s the easiest thing in the world. TAs get paid peanuts; I don’t know how low the bidding could’ve gone, but having seen the squalor in which lots of my fellow grad students lived, twenty bucks doesn’t seem unreasonable …
[…]
Ironically, I’d bet #MeToo and the rest of it actually result in more, not less, of this behavior. Like I always say, today’s blue-haired, nose-ringed slam poet is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer, and one of the main reasons I say it is that I’ve been around a LOT of college people. Shrinking violets who need “safe spaces” everywhere very obviously long to knuckle under to power, any power. Goofy losers who suddenly find themselves with a lot of power naturally start carrying on like Heinrich Himmler. Put them together in the closest possible proximity, in a place explicitly designed to shield them from the real world, and, well, you figure it out.
The Editors, “Who’s Getting Your Vote?”, Reason, 2004-11.
Friend A: “Anime by itself isn’t supposed to be cringy. There’s lots of good anime out there.”
Friend B: “Intentional or not, that’s the effect on me.”
Friend A: “Well, what anime have you watched?”
Friend B: “Let’s see… Pantyflash Crisis, Fanservice High School, and Animal-Eared Preteens, I believe.”
I laughed so hard I nearly lost continence.
Tamara Keel, “Overheard Online…”, View From The Porch, 2019-10-16.
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