I’m on a boat! I’m on a boat! Take a good, hard look at the motherf***ing boat!
I’m on a boat!
Ancient Greek Firsts
As my Bard Microcollege students know, I am currently in Greece looking for great bread. (I made one comment about how good the bread is in Copenhagen, and now they think I spend my vacations traveling the world in search of baked goods.) Along the way I have managed to visit many museums in Athens, with some startling results. We all know that the ancient Greeks invented western civilization (just look at any Great Books course), but I had no idea that they invented so many other remarkable things. I provide a list below of examples, culled from a single day of museum visits.
1. The First Thumbs Up
(Take that, Fonzie!)
2. The First Field Hockey Game
(Very dangerous, especially prior to the invention of the first jockstrap.)
3. The First Huddle
(“Arsinoe, go deep for a Colossus of Rhodes play.”)
4. The First Pith Helmet
(“What ho! Could one of you strapping acorn-eaters carry my luggage to Megalopolis?”)
5. The First Piggy Back
(“Get off me, Clytemnestra!”)
6. The First Piggy Bank
(Since coinage was not invented for another two millennia, this seems a bit premature.)
7. The First Case of Indigestion
(“I should not have had the chicken ceviche.”)
8. The First Little Red Riding Hood
(You’ve seen it. Now you cannot unsee it.)
9. The First Depiction of Benedict Cumberbatch
(From an audition tape for an as yet unproduced biopic of Walt Whitman.)
10. The First Palantír
(“We do not know who else may be watching.”)
And last, but surely not least:
11. The First Squatty Potty
(Note the extremely useful didactic graphic.)