Our Times Journey group of Alexandrians no sooner got acclimated to Athens than it was time to bid the city – and its mesmerizing views of the Acropolis – a brief farewell and head north to Thessaloniki, about an hour’s flight, or the distance between New York and Washington D.C.
Named for a younger half-sister of Alexander the Great – his father, the crafty, lusty Philip II, having loved much but apparently none too well – Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece but the main one in the misty, highland Macedonian region that was once Philip’s kingdom.
At Athens International Airport, I scored a small, hefty, well-molded head of the Acropolis Museum Alexander in a gift shop, plus a free copy of the “Greece is….Thessaloniki” magazine, with an Andy Warhol Alexander on the cover, so I was pumped. ...
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Read MoreMichael Phelps won his 21st gold medal and the U.S. men’s swimming team took its fourth consecutive gold in the 4-x-200 meter relay Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro. In all four relays, the common denominator was Phelps and longtime teammate and rival Ryan Lochte. He and Phelps swam the third and anchor legs respectively. They are now the grand old men of swimming at 32 and 31. Seems like only yesterday they were teenagers crowned in laurel and giggling on the podium in Athens.
Phelps, who’s had his share of problems with alcohol, has a newfound maturity with fiancée Nicole Johnson and baby Boomer (so adorable). Some things, however, never change. Lochte, noted for his, shall we say, striking sartorial choices, dyed his hair ice-blue for the Rio Games. Instead it looks platinum.
Why do thoroughly gorgeous people tamper with Greco-Roman beauty?
Read MoreMuch has been made recently about Ted Cruz going Marc Antony – the Roman general, not the singer – on The Donald at the Republican National Convention in a speech in which he congratulated the Trumpster but declined to endorse him. This sent some political and literary experts alike scurrying to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which Antony – a Caesar ally who is waylaid by the conspirators on the day of Caesar’s assassination – turns the tables on the assassins in his famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” eulogy.
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” he says, but praise him he does, however subtly, sealing the murderers’ fates.
The analogy here is to Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” thereby undermining Trump’s bid for party unity. ...
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Read MoreSo as the world knows by now – or at least the world that cares about American football knows by now – the Denver Broncos’ D got inside Cam Newton’s head at the Super Bowl Sunday night, frustrating the Carolina Panthers’ QB, who sulked on the sidelines and then through the postgame press conference he walked out on.
Outrage was swift among the Twitterati, who admittedly have their share of anti-Cam fans for a variety of reasons.
Roger Federer once observed that the athletic loss is doubly painful: You lose and then you have to discuss it immediately with the press. It’s enough to disturb anyone’s equilibrium. Newton can be forgiven his disappointment, of course. No one likes to lose or see his team – a surrogate for the self – lose. But losing with grace, like winning with grace, is a necessary part of the athlete’s arsenal. A sore loser just gives his opponents and detractors ammunition. ...
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Read More“Concussion” – the new movie about football and head trauma – is a beautiful film beautifully rendered. That may be an odd choice of words for a story about two of the sometimes uglier games men play – power and violence – but then, football, like humanity, is a multifaceted subject, at once mindless and Shakespearean, as one character notes.
This football tale is told from the viewpoint of an outsider who longs to be an insider, a Nigerian immigrant who has grown up thinking of America as God’s country. Armed with a slew of degrees from Nigeria, New York and London, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a proud, accomplished but obscure forensics pathologist working for Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), the chief medical examiner in Allegheny County, Pa., in 2002 when he is given what he describes as “a dangerous gift” – a gift for knowing. ...
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Read MoreIn the end, I think Stan Wawrinka did Novak Djokovic a favor. By beating Nole in the French Open final, he took the Grand Slam pressure off of him and enabled him to say, “You know what? The heck with it. I’m slamming that door (pun intended) and going for it at Wimbledon and the US Open.”
All the talk was about Serena, but Nole actually came closer to winning the Grand Slam as he lost in the French final but won the other three (US Open, Wimbledon, Australian Open) whereas she won the French, Australian and Wimbledon but lost in the US semifinals. ...
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Read MoreThe Pluto flyby has shown us how well the little planet that could is served by its name. Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld (Hades in Greek), whose queen, Proserpina (Persephone) spent spring and summer with her mother, the earth goddess Demeter, in the upper world, and fall and winter with her gloomily handsome hubby, the lord of the dead. Indeed, this arrangement was the reason we have spring and summer, when the earth is recalled to life and warmth, and fall and winter, when the earth dies coldly to itself.
Pluto the planet has icy mountains and geological activity, suggesting heat somewhere at some point:
“That leaves rethinking how thermodynamics apply at the dwarf planet,” Mika McKinnon writes. ...
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