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ἢ μὴ γενοίμαν ἢ πατέρων ἀγαθῶν
εἴην πολυκτήτων τε δόμων μέτοχος.
εἴ τι γὰρ πάσχοι τις ἀμήχανον, ἀλκᾶς
οὐ σπάνις εὐγενέταις,
κηρυσσομένοισι δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἐσθλῶν δωμάτων
τιμὰ καὶ κλέος· οὔτοι λείψανα τῶν ἀγαθῶν
ἀνδρῶν ἀφαιρεῖται χρόνος· ἁ δ᾽ ἀρετὰ
καὶ θανοῦσι λάμπει.
κρεῖσσον δὲ νίκαν μὴ κακόδοξον ἔχειν
ἢ ξὺν φθόνῳ σφάλλειν δυνάμει τε δίκαν.
ἡδὺ μὲν γὰρ αὐτίκα τοῦτο βροτοῖσιν,
ἐν δὲ χρόνῳ τελέθει
ξηρὸν καὶ ὀνείδεσιν ἔγκειται δόμος.
ταύταν ᾔνεσα ταύταν καὶ φέρομαι βιοτάν·
μηδὲν δίκας ἔξω κράτος ἐν θαλάμοις
καὶ πόλει δύνασθαι.

I've already given one concrete reason why learning classical languages does indeed have practical utility: it can save you from getting a nonsense tattoo. This selection from Euripides' Andromache is another example; but explaining why requires a little context.

The section that is in italics in the text above, "οὔτοι λείψανα τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν ἀφαιρεῖται χρόνος· ἁ δ᾽ ἀρετὰ καὶ θανοῦσι λάμπει," is engraved in stone at McGill University (my alma mater), over the entrance to the Sir Arthur Currie Memorial Gymnasium and Armoury, which was the main student sports building, where I regularly worked out as a student.

The noble sentiments expressed in this quote, clearly intended in memory of McGill's war dead, are only part of what make it an inspirational thing to read on one's way to a workout. As choral verse, this passage also happens to be in the Doric dialect of Ancient Greek—the dialect of Sparta (as you can immediately see from "ἁ ἀρετά"). There is nothing more motivating, when you are setting off to lift weights and train, than having an inspirational verse of Spartan Greek put into your head on your way in the door. Not only does the entire Greek ideal of physical perfection come to mind, but beyond that the extreme training of the Lacedæmonian state as well. (ἢ τᾶν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς!) By the time you lift the first weight, you already picture yourself training for Leonidas! I have no doubt that my university workouts were far more effective because of this inscription over the door than they would have been otherwise, and it would have had no effect if I did not know Ancient Greek :-)

Besides that personal anecdote, I do think that this is a fine passage of Greek poetry, easy to read while at the same time offering a thought-provoking pre-Judæo-Christian take on morality, so I recommend taking a look at it if you study Ancient Greek. Bonus points for any commenters who relate the selection to this quote from Sallust :-)

Nam sæpe ego audivi Q. Maximum, P. Scipionem, præterea civitatis nostræ præclaros viros solitos ita dicere, cum majorum imagines intuerentur, vehementissime sibi animum ad virtutem accendi. Scilicet non ceram illam neque figuram tantam vim in sese habere, sed memoria rerum gestarum eam flammam egregiis viris in pectore crescere neque prius sedari, quam virtus eorum famam atque gloriam adæquaverit.

Nothing was missing more from the holidays in France for me than Egg Nog. I used to drink gallons of this stuff back in America, but it's unknown here. Well I don't know what took me so long, but finally this year it occurred to me to see whether I couldn't make my own Egg Nog myself. The good news? It is a success! I now have Egg Nog in France, and it's pretty darn easy to make.

The bad news? Now that I actually know what's in Egg Nog, I'm a little more hesitant to drink it by the gallon!

There are a lot of Egg Nog recipes on the web, most of which are more involved than this one, which I used as my reference; there are a lot of the more elaborate recipes on that same site, though. I went for ease of preparation with my choice of recipe, because my consumption of Egg Nog has always been more about quantity than quality. Below I have modified the proportions a bit on the recipe I linked to, in order to fit in with what works well with French milk bottles.

Ingredients

• 1L milk "démi-écremé"
• 7 eggs
• 3-4 tsp nutmeg ("muscadet" in French)
• 8 tbsp sugar
• 3 tbsp vanilla extract

Preparation

Before beginning, make sure you have something to store the completed Egg Nog with (I use an old water bottle with a funnel). In a large mixing bowl, beat eggs, adding bit-by-bit sugar and milk, finally adding vanilla and nutmeg, and beating thouroughly. Put all in bottle and chill for at least three hours. Serve with a dash of armagnac.

The result is as good as any store-bought Egg Nog I would've had in the States—the only challenge is, that whereas before Egg Nog for me was just the embodiment of the taste of holiday cheer, now one has to drive the notion out of one's mind that one is drinking little more than a mixture of milk and raw eggs! It's good enough stuff that I think I will still be able to enjoy it; but all the same I may reduce my consumption rather more than I would have back in the days when I didn't know what exactly "Egg Nog" contained!

When I was at McGill, in our intermediate Greek class we translated three books of Homer's Odyssey, studying at home of 50 lines or so per day and then coming to class the next day and reading it over as a group, discussing the nuances and making sure we had the sense right. In order to facilitate this, I wrote my own glosses in the margins, so that I wouldn't have to flip back and forth from text to notebook when reading in class. Here is a picture of my old copy of the Odyssey:

I enjoyed this class, and enjoyed Homer, so I still read some as often as I can (although in the context of all my other eclectic hobbies, that doesn't work out to all that often). I prefer the Iliad, though, so that's what I'm reading. Here's a picture of my Iliad, and with it a picture of how well I've progressed in Greek since college:

There are three big differences between then and now. (I) I now have the good sense to write my glosses lightly in pencil rather than in loud blue pen! This is also because my Iliad is a nice hardcover while my school text was a fairly ugly paperback. (Notes in black pen were written in class; it means I hadn't figured out the right meaning on my own.) (II)There are a lot less glosses. This shows how much my vocabulary has improved—now there are often whole paragraphs that go by without a single gloss, which never happened back in my school days. Back then I usually wrote my glosses in longhand too, for compactness, whereas now I use so many fewer that I can always use shorthand instead. (III) My school text has grammatical glosses ("3 pl perf"); I never need these anymore. Partly this is because I don't have to live in fear of a professor saying, "parse that for me, please", but mostly it is because grammatical rules are rules, and once they are learnt, they stay learnt, whereas vocabulary is a never-ending process of learning.

It's nice to be able to look back and see one's progress like this, especially since I haven't studied Greek anything like regularly since college. Yet nowadays I can do 50 lines in 15-20 minutes, whereas back then took a lot longer. On the other hand, back then I did 150 a week, every week, because it was homework, whereas now I am nowhere near so consistent (I might do 150 in a day, and then not touch it again for weeks). But it's just because I so infrequently have the time to look at Homer that I am so proud to see that I have still managed to make so much progress.

It's time for a poem in English this time:

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.

This is of course the introduction to the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive game Zero Wing, and was not intentional poetry. Rather it is the most famously egregious case of bad Japanese-to-English translation, something that Western gamers struggled with regularly in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.

That said, however, it is one of the most quoted texts in the history of the internet age, and after the De-CSS haiku, the poem that I would consider most representative of our unpoetic age. Not only that, but I'm sure that most of the confused kids playing the game thought that the odd language was intended to be poetic.

As a poem, too, "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" holds up rather well. One proof being that it is so eminently quotable. I have seen separate references not only to the celebrated "all your base are belong to us" but also "somebody set up us the bomb", "how are you gentlemen !!", "what you say !!", "you have no chance to survive make your time", and of course, "for great justice". And if I ever have a voice-activated television or computer, you can bet I will program it to respond to "main screen turn on"!

We're not quite to the point where we have an instance of a famous poem created by a computer, but in some ways I feel like "All Your Base" comes close :-)

O tempora ! O mores !

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
Et quod vides perîsse perditum ducas.
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
Quum ventitabas quò puella ducebat
Amata nobis quantùm amabitur nulla.
Ibi illa multa cum jocosa fiebant,
Quæ tu volebas nec puella nolebat,
Fulsere verè candidi tibi soles.
Nunc jam illa non vult; tu quoque, impotens, noli,
Nec quæ fugit sectare nec miser vive,
Sed obstinatâ mente perfer, obdura.
Vale, puella, jam Catullus obdurat,
Nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.
At tu dolebis, quum rogaberis nulla.
Scelesta, væ te! Quæ tibi manet vita?
Quis nunc te adibit? Cui videberis bella?
Quem nunc amabis? Cujus esse diceris?
Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis?
At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

This is, if I'm being honest, probably my favourite poem in any language. (Officially though that honour still belongs to the Iliad, the fons fontium.) I'm aware that this poem probably speaks to me so clearly now because it is simple to understand, and my tastes may well evolve with my language ability, but even so, it speaks to me on a very personal level (taking our puella as a personification of another feminine noun in my case...) Nunc jam illa non vult; tu quoque impotens noli, nec quæ fugit sectare nec miser vive, sed obstinatâ mente perfer obdura pretty much sums up the story of my coming to France. (Although I like to think I live without the venom of the last six lines!) And you know that it's a very personal poem for Catullus as well—how could anything published "ad se ipsum" not be?

The metre may be choliambic, which generally denotes a satirical tone, but as is so often the case in Latin poetry, the meter is used in deliberate counterpoint to the stress and content of the poem: Catullus is putting on a strong face, but we don't believe him. (This is something we can't do in English where stress and cæsura are bound to the metre; in Greek and Latin they are freed since the metre is quantitative and unrelated to stress, and this allows the poet to arrange harmonies and counterpoints that would not be possible otherwise. To say nothing of that distilled pith that is only possible in an inflected language.) Also, of course, as an English speaker, I am required to show partiality to iambs :-)

I've said before that it bothers me somewhat when a lyric poem uses proper names in the vocative, even though this is extremely common in Latin poetry. (I mean when they are specific individuals—I don't mean gods and muses and the like.) But that's because the poet is addressing someone whom he knows personally and the reader does not, so you can't help feeling a bit lost or left out. That is not the case here, though: here I love it! The difference being that we do feel like we know Catullus personally, because we know him through his poems.

Moreover structurally, he uses his name here in a way that ties the whole poem together: in the vocative in the first and last lines, and then in the nominative in the middle, a sudden surprising shift from the second into the third person that harmonises perfectly with the poet's own shift from self-pity to vengeful resolve. It's so impactful that if you're reading the poem out loud sitting down, at that point you almost feel the need to stand up! This poem is the perfect salve for anyone who has ever had his heart broken.

If any of you tried to get on James' website, or any of the other password protected ones, between Thursday and Saturday last week, you may have found it impossible to log in. I was aware of the problem myself, but little did I expect to uncover what turned out to be its cause: Chinese hackers had partially infiltrated my system!. Luckily, 'partially' here is the key word: root access was never compromised, which allowed me to quickly remedy the situation and block the IP addresses in question from ever accessing the machine again. I also changed all the passwords on the machine to adhere to the highest security level, to ensure that no such easy cracking can happen again.

The account that was cracked had a very poor password, because I had not intended for it to be exposed to the outside internet. However, although the port the account was used for was blocked by firewall, I had not realised that an ssh login—an open port—would still be possible! I never used that account for remote login, so it didn't occur to me that someone else might! Looking at the failed logins in auth.log, apparently people overlook this with a lot of other software packages too. Thankfully, the account in question had very minimal permissions on the server, and an audit showed that nothing nefarious had been done with the cracked account before I was able to fix everything. Still, it was quite a wake-up call as far as internet security goes! (From my description you may think that I stupidly had logins enabled on a daemon account, but that's not exactly what was going on—I just don't want to get into too many details.) I've now implemented a much larger /etc/hosts.deny based on blacklists widely available on the internet (such as here), in addition to tightening my passwords, which was the most important thing.

Above all though it was a reassurance to me, in that I now know that I am able to deal with a security breach calmly and thouroughy, and that my UNIX knowledge is of sufficient depth that I feel certain that not only have all effects of the attack been purged from my system, but also that any future attacks of the same nature will not succeed. To be able to say with confidence that the problem has been handled is no small feat, and I can only imagine how stressful it would be if I did not have the certainty of having all my bases covered. There is definitely something to be said for having an open, transparently-functioning operating system when you need to figure out what has and what hasn't been tampered with!

And now, I have the oddest urge to go read the Cuckoo's Egg for some reason :-)

Classical Latin is a very artificial language, which both in prose and poetry favours complex constructions that to this day define what Western culture considers erudite sounding, intellectual speech. Because of this, it is hard to read, in a "pick up a book and read it" sort of way. This sentence from Cæsar is a typical, and by no means extreme example:

Ubi (Cæsar) se diutius duci intellexit et diem instare quo die frumentum militibus metiri oporteret, convocatis eorum principibus, quorum magnam copiam in castris habebat, in his Diviciaco et Lisco, qui summo magistratui præerat, quem vergobretum appellant Ædui, qui creatur annuus et vitæ necisque in suos habet potestatem, graviter eos accusat, quòd, quum neque emi neque ex agris sumi possit, tam necessario tempore, tam propinquis hostibus ab iis non sublevetur, præsertim quum magnâ ex parte eorum precibus adductus bellum susceperit, multo etiam graviùs quòd sit destitutus queritur.

That's from de Bello Gallico I.16, and you don't need to know any Latin to get my point: all that is one sentence! You need to keep a lot in your head to keep track of that many subordinate clauses, and that means that even with a perfect grasp of Latin grammar and vocabulary, you still need to read very attentively. And Cæsar is considered one of the easiest classical authors to read! (I'm told that some of Thucydides' sentences run over four pages.)

In contrast, a lot of the Latin written after the fall of Rome, mostly by monks, is a lot closer to the way we talk today. The Gesta Romanorum is exactly the kind of book you can just pick up and read once you know the basics of Latin grammar and vocab, but it's not considered appropriate to give to students because its style is so "barbarous" in comparison to the eloquent classicism of Cæsar and Cicero. (I really have to question that reasoning—it seems to me to be akin to giving King Lear to kindergarteners because Dr. Seuss' works lack literary merit—but that's an whole other article.)

This leaves students of Latin and Greek with a hurdle even greater than that of students in modern languages: not only do they have the same difficult leap from the textbook to the real thing, but the only "real thing" they come into contact with is exceedingly difficult in terms of its content!

Even though grammars, dictionaries, and introductions to Latin abound, there is still relatively little material that guides the beginner gradually yet expeditiously towards a confident mastery of classical material. For all too many aspirants, the leap (or toss) into the primary texts has entailed a falling into a kind of void: suddenly, the project slows down, often ending in a perpetual stall.

That quote comes from Claude Pavur at Saint Louis University, whose site takes one approach to the problem which you can read about there. While I don't doubt that his accelerated readers are a godsend to some, it's not a method that resonates with me. (In fairness, he's targetting the 'beginning intermediate' level whereas I probably fall closer to 'advanced intermediate'.) But I am in total agreement with him as to what the problem is:

Under such conditions, reading Latin becomes puzzle-solving, an adventure in decoding, a challenge to patience, a therapeutic escape in "busy work" — anything but an instructive and vital encounter with an interesting, complex, and vastly influential culture that often offers great writing, important ideas, valuable teachings, and significant personalities.

What I ended up doing back in university was instead turning to mediæval texts like the Gesta Romanorum that were easier to read, or less erudite Roman texts like the Passio Perpetuæ. They might not be the pinnacles of world literature that the canonical classics are, but at least I could have "an instructive and vital encounter with an interesting, complex, and vastly influential culture" through them. But I still moved like a snail through classical Latin, going to the dictionary with what seemed like every other word.

It so happens however that I recently stumbled across a fantastic new way to learn Classical Latin that makes getting across this hurdle so much easier. It came to me when I was looking for Ovid's Metamorphoses on Google Books, which has a huge selection of beautifully typeset Latin and Greek books printed in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries (when, as I've already asserted, typesetting conventions were also superior to those of the present day). I found just what I was looking for: an 1821 edition of Ovid, beautifully typeset with js and ligatures. At first I noted with amusement that the explanatory notes, pointing out the meaning of difficult words or allusions, were themselves in Latin, which didn't seem very helpful on the editor's part! But as I started looking it over I discovered something even more amazing: in addition to the footnotes, each page has a paraphrase of the text in simple-to-understand Latin! After some assiduous searching, I was also able to find an even more copiously annotated edition of Virgil based on the same principle (this time with a Talmud-inspired page layout, no less). Here's an excerpt:

An intermediate-level student can usually understand the Interpretatio and Notæ on his own, but the poem itself would be too difficult without a lot of dictionary work. But with their help, he can understand the sense and context of the poem (all the while excercising his Latin skills), and so figure out how to read the verses all by himself.

This strikes me as such a brilliant way to bridge the gap between learning the basics of Latin and learning how to deal with the intricate literary complexity of the great classics. And the reader is never discouraged to be looking at the "interpretation", since it is still Latin after all: There's no shame in being told that tellus means terra—the reader will go on to discover the nuances on his own, and through his own experience, which is much better than just being told it and adding it to one's vocab list to memorize. (And if you don't recognise even the simple word in the paraphrase, then looking it up is only half the chore, because you know that when you do you will most likely learn two words in the process, since it is a priori the synonym of another word you don't know in the text itself.)

The effect of all this is that you no longer feel "I don't know Latin because I can't read pages of Virgil effortlessly"; instead you feel that "I can read Latin, but Virgil is a difficult author who takes some effort to tackle"—which after all is just what English students feel when dealing with Shakespeare or Milton for the first time. It's an important difference for the reader's self-confidence—and a more realistic acknowledgement of the difficulty of the great classics.

My own level in Latin was until recently stuck precisely in that rut between being able to read the Gesta Romanorum without ever picking up a dictionary, but feeling like an idiot when confronted with a page of Cicero (the goal of my recent Latin kick has been to at last rectify that). Now with these books I am really looking forward to "leveling up" on Virgil and Ovid, and bet I will progress twice as fast thanks to this brilliant, yet sadly no doubt long-forgotten, idea!

Metal Gear Solid 4 spent the last year as the Playstation 3's flagship game. When I bought my PS3, this was the game that came with every PS3 you could buy. In a lot of ways, it's an odd choice: First, it only really speaks to people who played the earlier Metal Gear games in the franchise, which pretty much excludes the larger public in favour of 'hardcore gamers'. Much of the plot involves tying together loose ends from the previous games, which are constantly alluded to. And the game is very complex, taking time to learn how to play—potentially a lot of time for someone who hasn't played a Metal Gear Solid game before. So why include this title with the system?

At the same time, MGS4 was an inevitable choice as a pack-in title, since no other title so supremely shows off the incredible power of the PS3. The battlefield in MGS4 is so realistic that if it weren't for the heads-up display you could easily be fooled into thinking you're watching a DVD, it's that good. (The screenshot above is what the game actually looks like while you're playing it.) The cutscenes are also gorgeous, all while managing to avoid falling into the 'uncanny valley'. And the gameplay, plot, and voice acting are all on a par with the graphics. In a lot of ways, Metal Gear Solid 4 is the best game I've ever played. It is, without question, a masterpiece.

The gameplay, as I said, almost requires you to already be familiar with the Metal Gear series, which is based on 80's action movies, most obviously Escape from New York. This is not just another shooter: Metal Gear is all about stealth-based gameplay. While you do have weapons, there is only one of you, infiltrating enemy bases with countless soldiers, so while you may have to fight your way out of a jam, going head-to-head with the enemies means certain death. Instead, you have to hide (in lockers, under tables, etc.—there are countless possibilities), create distractions (leaving a Playboy on the ground to trick sentries into bending over to pick it up, throwing an ammo clip across the room to create a noise elsewhere), and use techniques like choke attacks to render enemies unconscious without making noise—making sure to sneak up from behind so they don't have time to raise the alarm! There is a lot of depth to this: if you choke out one sentry, for example, you'd better hide his body somewhere before his partner comes along, or else that one will raise the alarm. All of this is what makes the game fun and unique—you're constantly finding new ways your character can hide, or tricks you can try—but it is also takes a lot to master.

All this sneaking creates a lot of tension, so the game balances things out by interspersing a lot of cut scenes, which bring the plot along and give you a chance to recover after the stressfulness of infiltrating another level. I like this a lot, it makes playing the game a lot more relaxing, and the plot of MGS4, which centres on private military corporations (rather like Blackwater), is at times quite thought provoking. At other times it's quite hokey, but it wouldn't be a proper hommage to 80's action movies if it wasn't!

Some of these scenes are fantastically epic and memorable; some of the gameplay levels vary the standard stealth in ways that not only add variety but make it even more fun, from tracking a trail through the forest on one act to tailing an unsuspecting spy through the streets of an Eastern European city under curfew in another. The bar is high to learn this game and its universe in order to get the most out of it, but the rewards are amazing.

When I bought my Wii, it came with Wii Sports in the box. The contrast between the PS3 coming with MGS4 and the Wii with Wii Sports could not be starker: one is easy for anyone to pick up and play from children to grandparents, even though no effort at all went into its graphics and depth. MGS4 is so hard to figure out how to play to the uninitiated that months went by before I really sat down and started trying to play it (and I had played MGS Twin Snakes before), and even then I had to acclimate on "easy mode" (which gives you a lot more weapons and makes the enemies fewer and stupider). Yet the graphics are so good that it can be mistaken for a DVD, and the amount of depth, both in the plot and the gameplay, exceeds anything that has come before it in the history of video games. The execution is flawless. I am so glad to have played MGS4, but at the same time I have no problem understanding why it is the Wii that is outselling the PS3 by a more than 2-to-1 margin. Five stars. It deserves them, even if it isn't a game for everybody.