It looked a bit like a corkscrew, or maybe an awl.

No thanks.

It's charmingly humble!

What I'm saying is maybe your Jamaican friend is overreacting (unless she's doing so for comic effect, in which case, well done, says I).

To be fair, I've got a masters degree in Latin & 20+ years of teaching experience, focusing on grammar & vocabulary, so I always notice stuff like this, probably more than most people.

I dunno, the book JAWS was pretty weak—the movie adaptation is a level up from The Exorcist, IMO. Of course, I also think The Godfather is a better book than people give it credit for, so what do I know?

It wasn't funny at all when Chris Martin sang that bit of it, but Emilia Clarke, bless her, went all-in.

I honestly don't get the Coldplay hate. They're not terrible—they barely register. It's hard for me to hate something so nondescript & harmless. They ain't no Nickelback.

Wasn't the point of it that it was ridiculous & terrible? And a joke about Very White People co-opting Jamaican culture, mon?

It was amusing, & I even chuckled aloud to myself once or twice.

Would you settle for elegiac couplets? Or maybe hendecasyllables?

I watched it when it was on, but I can't say I remember much about it. My general sense, though, is that it was pretty good, & most of these types of things are not.

Yup.

This is the post I was gonna make, so I checked to see if it was already done. I'm not at all convinced that they won;t fuck it up, but The Odyssey is complex enough to require at least two feature-length films—ditto for The Iliad.

The principal casting was the only thing that elevated it from terrible to merely bad. And I had high hopes, what with Wolfgang Petersen involved. I still don't understand how they took a tale that's stood up for 3,000-some years & fucked it up so badly.

Respectfully disagree. It's mostly pretty damn brilliant—the only reason he wasn't gonna publish is that it wasn't polished to his high standards. And I think it's giving Augustus too much credit—and Vergil too little—to suggest that he only wrote the thing "because Caesar said so". I mean, the man dedicated a…

Bullshit on your bullshit. Even if Augustus did suggest Aeneas as the hero, & even with the Book 6 ekphrasis of Aeneas' shield glorifying the Julian clan's lineage, there's a hell of a lot more going on than propaganda.

There really isn't any actual gay sex in either epic, just the understood relationships. Still, my guess is they'll go the Troy route & make Achilles & Patroclus "cousins".

I am strictly T-shirts under sweaters for this very reason. Also, sweater + collar = uncomfortable.

I learned in college that, buried deep in the soundtrack, so deep as to be basically subliminal, is the sound of angry bees. It's a sound humans have an instinctive, visceral fear of. Pretty brilliant.