More Marathon Madness

Author's Note:  today's blog was prepared before any news of the terrible bombings at the Boston Marathon.  As a nation, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.

Methinks Marathon Monday manufactures much myth and misconception, minus more meaning (nice alliteration there, eh Cute English Adjunct Proff?)  So, in order to set the record straight on this 26.2-mile race with a long historical pedigree, Adjunct Proff is going to spend an entire blog on the real Marathon, a battle fought between the Ancient Greeks against the Ancient Persians way back in Ancient Greece (Q: What does one find in Ancient Greece?  A: Ancient bacon!)

Nobody move!  I just KNOW that contact lense is around here SOMEWHERE...

In September of 490 BCE (Before Crap Existed), 20,000 Persian fighters invaded the Greek mainland in order to punish Athens for helping out the Ionian Greeks in their rebellion of the last two years.  The Athenians managed to scratch together about 10,000 hoplite soldiers, plus an additional couple hundred Plateans, Athens' allies.  One of the Generals, Militades, advocated attack.  Other generals pointed out that they were outnumbered 2 to 1 and that an attack would be suicide.  The command was split: 5 in favor of attack, 5 against.  Because of the deadlock, they went to an official called the Polemarch to resolve the question.  Militades spoke to the Polemarch thusly, according to Herodotus:

'On you therefore we depend in this matter, which lies wholly in your own power. You have only to add your vote to my side and your country will be free - and not free only, but the first state in Greece. Or, if you prefer to give your vote to them who would decline the combat, then the reverse will follow.'

Miltiades by these words gained Callimachus; and the addition of the polemarch's vote caused the decision to be in favor of fighting.

Gonna whomp us some Persian booty!

The Greeks took their entire force and stretched it out as far as it could go, right in front of the Persians.  Then, they did what at the time appeared nothing short of suicidal: they charged directly at the Persians at a dead-run!  One can only guess what was going through the minds of the Athenians: free my country from Persian despotism!  hurrah for Athens!  death or glory!  What was about to go through the head of the average Persian soldier was, of course, a Greek spear.  The Greek center wavered and faltered a bit, but the flanks closed in on the Persians, smothered them and totally chewed them apart.

Wait: we outnumbered them and we're LOSING?  WTF?!?

The Persians then fought their way back to their boats, hoping to save themselves and to attack the city of Athens itself.  The Athenians then mushed-back to Athens and fortified the city.  Seeing it so well defended, the Persians did the sensible thing: they gave up and sailed for home, leaving the Greeks to do what they had always done before: grow grapes, make wine, bugger each other and cook everything in olive oil.

So, how does all of the above turn into a race from Boston's ex-urbs, up the hideous "Heartbreak Hill," and

Do these ancient running shorts
make my butt look big?

down through the heart of the Commonwealth's biggest and snazziest city?  It all has to do with a soldier named Pheidippides   Everybody knows that the Big P (ok, maybe only a few of his friends called him that!) ran from the Plain of Marathon to Athens.  Many also know that this is a distance of 26.2 miles.  Several of you might even know that the poor bugger died once he got back to Athens, presumably from the stress the run.  What only a select number of total history geeks know is that this was Pheidippides' second or third marathon that day, depending on how you count it.

Since there weren't phones, radios or even reliable signal flags in Ancient Athens, the way messages got around was by runners.  Every army employed a number of long distance runners to keep in communication with the civilian authority and different parts of their army.  That September day, Pheidippides had already run from Athens to Marathon to relay the decision of the Polemarch.  He then did what his general expected of him: picked up his shield and spear, and fought the Persians all day.  Once the Persians beat it back to the boats, his general sent him on yet another run back to Athens (which was uphill from Marathon) with the news of the Athenian victory.  True to his word, Pheidippides made it to Athens, collapsed, spoke the words, "Rejoice, for we conquer," and then died.

So, Pheidippides wasn't really the first Marathon runner --he was the first ever extreme iron-man-triathlete in history, running two marathons and fighting for his life in a battle in between.  Wow.  No wonder the entire world remembers Pheidippides and his run of 26.2 miles.

Long distance running had always been a part of the Olympic Games in ancient times, although it wasn't called a Marathon (just the bloody-long-foot-race).  It wasn't until 1879 that the English poet, Robert Browning (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sweetie) wrote the poem, Pheidippides, that the story makes its way into that realm between history and myth.  Organizers of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 were casting about for an event that would really tie-in the whole Classical Greek thing, when someone remembered Browning's poem and suggested they have a Pheidippides race.  Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, thought it was a good idea, but the name was, in his words, "wicked rhetahded," so another Frenchman, Michel Breal, suggested Marathon instead, and Marathon is has been ever since.

I won the Pheidippides?
Aw HELL no, I won the Marathon!

Today, Marathons aren't just run in the Olympics.  Cities and towns, large and small, all over the world host Marathon runs --even Disney's  Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida has one.  And it's not just runners that compete: wheelchairs also make the grueling trip.   There are different t divisions for men and women, and there are even half-Marathons for less ambitious runners.  Over the years some pretty colorful characters have emerged, like Frank Shorter, whose 1972 Summer Olympics win would revive the sport in the United States.  Then there was the infamous Rosie Ruiz, a woman who "won" the 84th Boston Marathon because she took the Green Line Subway for a big part of the race.  Needless to say, she was stripped of her laurel crown and subsequently set a world record for the sprint in her getaway from thousands of totally pissed-off Bostonians.

I would be remiss if I didn't say something about the tragedy of the 2013 Boston Marathon.  To whomever did this: all you managed to do was kill some completely innocent people and maim a few more.  You did Nothing to the heart and spirit of the city you so cowardly attacked; you did Nothing to stop people from running and enjoying watching others run; and as far as history goes, your name and twisted cause will mean Nothing and will be forgotten, whereas the race will continue and the souls of all the innocents will be received into the hands of a loving God.

Remember this: Pheidippides was a soldier; the race he ran has been honored throughout the ages.  We shall never, never forget and we shall never, never give up the race for fear.  Today, everyone who runs, walks, gets around in a wheelchair or who loves sport can proudly say, "We are all Boston Marathon Champions!"

Just try to stop us!

A Visit to the No-Tell Motel

After a particularly nice stay at a Marriott Comfort Inn and Suites (with soft-core porn on demand!  That, AND a make-your-own-waffle machine), I got to wondering about who and where the world's first ever hotel was, and whether or not they had as great a breakfast buffet as my Marriott (granola!  bacon AND sausage!  scrambled eggs that weren't slimy at all!)

Note the complete absence of unsupervised children running amok

The first hotel was probably in one of the first cities, Jericho and Chatal Huyuk in contention for that honor, and was probably nothing more than a spare room in a house where the kids had grown up and married, grandma and grandpa had died, and the dog had been roasted in honor of a local deity's feast day.  There are no records of this first hotel: no advertising, receipts, star-rating or snarky comments on the ancient equivalent of Yelp!.com.  Ancient peoples were more concerned with getting out of the rain and wondering if their hosts would rob them during the night to bother with filling out the obligatory guest survey.

That's your room on the roof under the stretched goat skin.  Check-out at 10 am.

Those wacky and wonderful Sumerians upped the hospitality-game by featuring inns run by widdows that served beer and that exotic import, wine.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of these fine establishments shows up, in all places, and I am completely NOT making this up, at the END  OF  THE  WORLD (not to be confused with Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe).  Here is what happened when the title character, Gilgamesh, showed up at this tavern at the end of the world:

You like my kitty?
He's an actual lion

The tavern-keeper Siduri who lives by the seashore,she lives...the pot-stand was made for her, the golden fermenting vat was made for her.She is covered with a veil ...Gilgamesh was roving about...wearing a skin,...having the flesh of the gods in his body,but sadness deep within him,looking like one who has been traveling a long distance.The tavern-keeper was gazing off into the distance,puzzling to herself, she said,wondering to herself: "That fellow is surely a murderer(!)! Where is he heading! ..."As soon as the tavern-keeper saw him, she bolted her door,bolted her gate, bolted the lock.

Apparently, ancient bar-keeps had the same problems as modern ones, what with murderers and creepy-looking semi-mythical heroes strolling by and wanting a drink.

You probably remember from your kid's Christmas pageant the Inn at Bethlehem that didn't have any room for Joseph, Mary and the future Baby Jesus, thus missing out on the best free publicity any hotel could ever hope for, especially once the Magi finally showed up.  What you probably never heard about was the fact that the Romans --who basically invented the interstate highway --recognized this problem and actually did something about it.  Emperors from Augustus to Constantine made it a policy to encourage inns, hostels, horse-stables, rest areas and scenic views all along their superb network of roads in order to make the traveller's journey a little more pleasurable.

I had to give birth in a STABLE
 because YOU wouldn't call ahead for a RESERVATION!

Travel accommodations got the royal treatment during the Middle Ages when a king-on-the-road could expect lodgings at any one of several castles owned and operated by his vassals.  Amenities typically included hunting, feasting, fooling-around with the kitchen wenches, hawking, feasting, recreational horseback riding, feasting and feasting.  Even a nobody-knight could expect hospitality from brother knights and terrified peasants along the way.  Before you wax nostalgic about the days of yore, remember that staying at a castle was no picnic: they were cold, drafty, unhygienic, crowded --they basically had the same ambiance of a National Guard Armory.

Your room does include a bath, but unfortunately it's located in the dining hall.

And while we're on the subject of the Middle Ages, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the great accommodations offered by religious denominations along the pilgrimage routes.  These could be had at the hostelry or hospital of any monastery --word has it that the Benedictines were the best.  In fact, a whole order of chivalry was dedicated to the hospitality industry: the Knights Hospital, or the Hospitalers.  They are particularly noted for providing security for Jerusalem-bound pilgrims and for surviving the destruction of the Knights Templar order.

Would you prefer a smoking or a non-smoking room?  With or without armor?

As cities and commerce recovered during the High Middle Ages, inns and public-houses proliferated at about the same rate that stay-and-bugger-off-without-paying travelling salesmen, so much so that laws were adopted to punish these early spongers.  The English Common Law was especially helpful in this area, setting up the rights of guests and the duties of innkeepers towards their guests.  This was a problem, as there was one particularly notorious inn on the way into London whose guest room included a trap door which, when opened, deposited the guest under the inn where he would be robbed and his body tossed into the Thames.  If our guest escaped this trap, he could look forward to a shave-and-a-haircut from Sweeny Todd.

That was a CLOSE shave you wanted?

With a legal framework in place, the only thing that the hospitality industry needed next to make it even better was the automobile and --Presto! --the Motel was born.  A motel or motor-inn can be found in most American towns today.  My fondest motel memory was the motel in New Hampshire ski-country in the late 1960's.  My brother and I had our own room with a door in between my parent's room; there was a tiny refrigerator stocked with sodas and snacks; but best of all, there was a coin slot on the nightstand that, if you put a quarter in it, magic fingers would massage the stressful day of skiing right out of your body!  How cool was that!

The golden age of motels in the United States was, of course, the 1950's, and the road these great motels were on were the Mother Road, Route 66.  The space-age designs, modern exteriors and predictably good accomodations were famous the world over, almost as famous as America's wacky roadside attractions.  Dinosaur parks?  the birthplace of the guy who invented Saran Wrap?  the world's biggest ball of string?  See it all from your Chevrolet in the USA, and then pull in to the local motel for a rest, a dip in their pool, and some homemade pie from the diner across the street.

Or you could stay here and, um, see Norman's Mom?

Today's hotel experience can be anything from a student hostel with Dieter and Sven, the Techno-Twins, all the way up to the most exclusive hotel room in the entire world: inside Cinderella's Castle. At Walt Disney World, there is a room that one can't rent --one must be invited --and you would not believe all the luxury inside: a priceless glass slipper (hey, it is Cinderella's room after all!), a pool-sized tub that one can adjust the lighting-color-scheme to match your mood; priceless wood carving on the bed headboards; an amazing mosaic of Cinderella's pumpkin-coach on the floor --it just goes on and on!  Here is the link to this most exclusive of all hotel rooms:
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=82325
If you are lucky enough to ever stay in this room, a few words to the wise: don't set out any mousetraps; don't swat any small, flying creatures that might be buzzing around your head (it might be Tink!); and don't, DO  NOT  bug the concierge about seeing Cinderella and Prince Charming in person BECAUSE  THEY  ARE  FAIRY-TALES  AND  NOT  REAL.

So, have a nice stay and remember: checkout time is 10 am.

OH NO! Zombies Ate My History Homework!

If your whole life (death?) revolves around watching the Walking Dead, watching the Talking Dead podcast, visiting Walking Dead fan-sites, reading Walking Dead graphic novels and fanzines, then your world --like so many others' worlds, Adjunct Proff's included --is on hiatus until the next series installment.  But not to worry: Adjunct Proff is ready to fill the breach in our sadly temporarily depleted lives by filling you all in on the origins and continuing influence exercised by fears of the Zombie Apocalypse on our collective zeitgeist (German for whatever is friggin' buggin' you now).

Zombies ate my zeitgeist!  Either that, or
there's a zeitgeist peeking at me when I pee!

So, zombies have been around since... "Weekend at Bernies 2?" --the zombie movies of the 1950's drive-ins?  --the days of Vaudeville shows?  How about ever since the first friggin' story that human beings bothered to scratch onto a clay tablet sometime during the Akkadian period of Sumerian civilization?  Yup, those wacky Mesopotamians are at it again --this time giving voice to humanity's fear of the Zombie Apocalypse.  It's all right here in the first real story ever cuneiformed: The Epic of Gilgamesh:


Ishtar spoke to her father, Anu, saying:"Father, give me the Bull of Heaven,so he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!"

Now I don't claim to be able to translate ancient Akkadian cuneiform, but that sure sounds a lot like any given day on AMC's "The Walking Dead."  Why do zombies show up troubling the minds of ancient Akkadians?  Was this a recurring problem, dead rising from the grave and eating the living?  

We turn next to the ancient Greeks, who knew a thing or two about fighting monsters.  Ladies with snakes for hair?  --half-man-half-bulls who lived in an underground maze?  --whirlpools with teeth?  No problem: the Greeks would kill 'em all, then sit down with Homer and tell him all about it so that he could stick their adventures in his next epic poem.

"To which mighty Achilles said, "D'oh!"

Everybody knows the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two poems made ancient Homer's rep as da mos' def-jam mutha of the Greeks, yo. Nobody knows about the Nostoi, yet another epic poetry spin-off of the Trojan War. This story follows Achilles' kinsmen, the Myrmidons, and their long, adventure-filled journey home from the Trojan War. On one island, guess who they come across? These guys:

“It was there on that island when they noticed the men of ragged appearance. 
Their skin was a dull pale gray and the scent of putrid flesh was upon them. 
Their eyes were black as beings void of souls, they approached the Myrmidons with all the madness of a wild beast.”

And who might these dudes be? I dunno, maybe WALKERS?!? Guess what the baddest-of-the-badass Trojan War veterans, a.k.a. the Myrmidons, did then?  Did they stop those ancient Greek walkers with precise sword-head-shots?  Noooooo- they ran for it and "cursed Hades for sending these fiends amongst them."  Wow, where's Michonne when you need her?

About three thousand years in the future...

Fast-forward to Ireland in the 700's.  Archaeologists have recently uncovered a pile of skeletons buried sometime in the 700's with --get this -- bricks in their mouths.  When asked why the usually sensible medieval Irish did this wack-burial-job, anthropologists hypothesized that they were buried with a brick in their mouth in order to prevent them from --wait for it --rising from the dead like a zombie!  I am SO  COMPLETELY  NOT  making this up!  Ok ok, St. Patrick may not have driven the snakes from Ireland (see my St. Patrick's Day blog for more on this) --maybe his miracle was keeping the medieval Irish zombies DEAD  AND  BURIED  instead of running around the Emerald Isle noshing on the living.

...and they're magically delicious!

I could go on and tell you about Voodoo and Rastafarian religious practices, as well as relate Christian beliefs in an end of days that will occur before the return of Jesus Christ from, ah, Rancho Cucamonga, but you already know that  if you're hard-core zombie-apocalypse-preppers like me --that, or the demographic targeted by "The Walking Dead."

So, what's my favorite zombie scenario?  I really, really liked that movie, "Shawn of the Dead," where this British guy, his slacker buddy and his girlfriend survive the British zombie apocalypse by hiding out in the local pub that she gives him grief about spending so much time in before the British zombie apocalypse.  Funny, witty, edgy and ironic without being annoyingly British smuggish.

Let me leave you with this one brain-stretcher.  As already blogged-about in her award-winning blog, Jenny Lawson, a.k.a. The Bloggess, and her husband, Victor, a.k.a. the saint who's still married to The Bloggess, once had a conversation that went like this:

Me: Oh my God, did you see the name of that cemetery?  “Resurrection Cemetery”.  What a terrible name for a cemetery.

Victor:  It’s because they believe in the resurrection of believers, dumbass.

Me:  Still.  Some things just shouldn’t be resurrected.  Just what we need is a bunch of damn zombies wandering the earth. 

Victor:  Yeah, that’s not “resurrection”.  That’s “reanimation”.

Me:  Same difference.  Although I guess “Reanimation Cemetery” would be slightly more disturbing. 

Victor: It’s not the same difference.  Zombies are reanimated, but they don’t have their previous mental capacity so it’s not a resurrection.  Technically it’s “zombification”.

So, just what IS  this resurrection anyway, hmmm?  Isn't it the same quality that FREAKS  US  OUT  in zombies?  It's like, Jesus  JUST  WON'T  STAY  DEAD!!!  But worse of all, it means that for 2013 years, a lot of people have been worshipping, have constructed an entire religion around, and have committed unspeakable acts in the name of  A  ZOMBIE!!!  Ponder that one until Rick, Karl, Daryl, Michonne and the whole live-and-undead gang return for Season 4 which will be, no doubt, Totally Killer.

...and, unlike all those other zombies, Jesus can also walk on water
--which makes him slightly more creepy, come to think of it!

Don't Just Go Away, Go Extinct

For all of you cave-men and women out there (cave-boys and girls too!), the big movie-hype that you would have had to be living in a cave to miss is that Jurassic Park will re-issue in theaters this week.  The big difference is that terrifying dinosaurs will be chasing humans around, eating them (or at least eating the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld), snotting dino-snot on them, and in general cavorting around the big screen IN  3-D!  That got ol' Adjunct Proff's rusty wheels a-turning on matters of extinction and whether it would be a good idea to bring some of these extinct critters back.

Do these ridiculously tiny arms make my butt look big? 

Before I rant about humans and dinosaurs on the same movie screen at the same time (NOT historically accurate; NOT cool!), it may surprise you to know that human beings almost went extinct --and I'm not talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis or the time a huge flock of 99 luftbaloons flew over from East Germany (or was that a Flock of Seagulls?  The Eighties were, like, 25 years ago, dude!).  I'm talking about early modern humans being so fucked-over by climate change that we were about 150 breeding-age females away from extinction.  Luckily, we made it out of Africa (which was being re-done by super-huge climate change) into the future Saudi Arabia, and thence to Europe, Asia and Tierra del Fuego (I am SO not making this up!) where we could thrive, diversify into the different races you see today, and eventually drive lots of other species extinct.

Scientists believe that the passenger pigeon went extinct
because of excess baggage charges and TSA screenings

So, just what was the first victim of humanity to go extinct?  There are several contenders among the larger fauna of the most recent Ice Age, such as the cave bear, cave lion, cave talking-with-an-English-accent gekko, and the woolly mammoth.  It appears that cave men actively hunted three of these species and bought insurance from one of them, so they could have had a role in their demise, but let's face the facts: there were way too few cave people running around and their weapons weren't all that sophisticated (we had yet to master the Predator Drone), so the only real culprit had to be ol' Mother Nature and her climate-change-thing.

Some animals we  know for certain that went extinct because of humans include the dodo-bird, the passenger pigeon (pictured in model form in flight above) and something called the pig-footed bandicoot, a relative of that adrenaline-junkie Crash Bandicoot of video-game fame.

Crikey! Cousin Pig-footie has popped his clogs!

But the biggest mass-extinction event ever recorded (but not by humans because we hadn't quite evolved from a thing that rather looked like a hairy shrew) wasn't caused by humans or Mother Nature's hot-flashes, but by a big-ass meteor that slammed into the Earth, creating the Gulf of Mexico, and destroying everything on land with a body weight of over 20 lbs.  Nothing like a piece of space-crap to ruin an otherwise promising career as a species.

But hold your extinct North American horses and camels: it seems that those brainy geneticists who brought us Dolly the Cloned Sheep have progressed to the point where they can use DNA from extinct species to implant them into sperm and eggs of currently living related species, which would then result in an elephant giving birth to a woolly mammoth.  This could be done with all kinds of recently extinct  animals (sorry dinosaurs!), including the Laughing Owl, the Palestinian Painted Frog and something called the Kaua'i 'O 'o, a honey-eating bird from Hawaii who went extinct when the bees whose honey it ate also went extinct because the tree the very last hive was hanging from got bulldozed to build yet another Hawaiian tourist hotel-for-the-Howli.

Fuckin' tourist-trash!

There are currently three schools of thought regarding the ethics of scientists actually bringing a species back from extinction, and they fall into these camps: those who think it's wrong for scientists to play God (yeah, right- like that's ever stopped them before!); those who say it is an obligation for humans to bring back species that we actually drove extinct; and those who were totally underwhelmed by the season 3 finale of "The Walking Dead" to notice that there was any kind of current ethics debate about anything going on.

As for me, I find myself (more often than I lose myself) gravitating towards Camp #2 (not Slaughterhouse 5 --that was a Kurt Vonnegut story where this survivor of the Dresden Firebombing of World War II gets kidnapped by aliens, stuck in an alien zoo and bread with a Playboy Centerfold.  Vonnegut was smoking some pretty heavy shit in the 60's).  I think it's on us to un-do the damage that we caused.  Besides, it would be cool to have dodo-birds back, wouldn't it?

In fact in this post, Adjunct Proff is having a contest to see which extinct species of the three pictured below you would like to see running, crawling, swimming or flying around once again.  Just choose one and in the Comments section, in 10,000 words or less, explain why scientists should de-extinct-ify that particular species.  The winning entry will be e-mailed to a scientist for consideration (no, I won't be sending it to Sheldon from Big Bang Theory --he's just a pretend scientist!)

"Penny?  Penny?  Penny?  I'm worried about our show going extinct.  Penny?"

So pick one of the three below and "gimmie one reason to stay here," --ah, give me a good reason for its reintroduction, and "I'll turn right back around" --umm, I'll pass it right along.

Baiji River Dolphin

                  Tasmanian Tiger

African Quagga