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People say this to me sometimes and I feel the same way. Get in there and read all the books! It's free and amazing!

Buglarian correspondent Ivo Ivanov, who happens to live in Lawrence, reveals his favorite moment of the World Cup to Bulgarian TV viewers. Watch this if you need a reminder about what, or actually who, really constitutes the United States of America. (auto-transcribed & translated as usual)

Our neighbours are acting like meth heads www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

It is a lot, quite a spectacle. Lots to take in.

I am not a fan or a critic. He is good at some things.

He would have been much better, and also Nolan would not have got the budget he needed.

I think I agree, and I would like it better if it were not like that.

Also, some of the acting is amazing. I was impressed by Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong'o, John Leguizamo and (fantastic Nova Scotian) Elliot Page.

Anyway, so it's a great movie, and inevitably a commercial product designed for a market that needs a relatable hero, and that's fine, and people will still be reading the poem long after the movie is forgotten.

What I like about the Odyssey, the poem, so much, is that you never really get a handle on Odysseus. He is relatable at times and repellent at other times, and it's interesting to think about how the audiences at the time felt about him.

And the sex, with Circe and Calypso, is it elided because Damon is basically playing a 21st century American dad? I guess so. Viewers wouldn't like him if he was the scheming, ruthless pirate who cheats on his wife without a care while she waits for him.

Why leave out the jokes and the sex? I don't get the omission of the cyclops "noman" trick at all. It's such a great story, at the heart of Odysseus's "polytropos" quality.

There are a couple of things he leaves out, though, that I don't quite understand. Mary Beard gets at them here better than I could hope to. t.co/wL1lKaqnkN

So when you think about that, you know, fair enough. What was he supposed to do? Have everyone leave the theatre with PTSD?

It would not be responsible, I don't think, to film the hanging of the maids. And also by not including it, you do not represent the bloodthirsty quality of the poem, which remains perplexing and horrible and brilliant 3,000 years later.

Nolan could not have made a $250 million movie and lured the most desirable actors in the world to participate if the goal was to unsettle us with the very strange (to us) world view of ancient Greeks.

It's not that it is bad, but it is very 21st century. A lot of what I like about reading Homer is trying to understand the people who lived thousands of years ago and were very like us and also utterly different in their values.

3. I'm not sure I really like what Nolan has done with the poem, which is kind of an obsession for me, something I keep returning to, studying in an amateur way, ie, without knowing how to read ancient Greek.

2. All of the people who complained pre-emptively about the casting, warned that it was woke, including the man who owns this web site, should delete their accounts, and we should do our best to ignore their inane critiques. They resemble the suitors.