An update on the last, rather eventful week.

* I have finished tablet IX of the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh and am now on Gilgamesh hiatus ( Read more... )

I was listening to Neil Diamond's "I Am, I Said", and I had to look up the lyrics, because there was a line my brain refused to process.

L.A.'s fine, the sun shines most the time
And the feeling is 'lay back'
Palm trees grow, and rents are lowRents are low? You're not kidding when you say you're from New York. A favorite past-time among UCLA ( Read more... )

I learned to read at the age of 3, taught by my mother, using a combination of phonics and the whole-word method. By the time I was five, I was reading on a fifth grade level ( Read more... )

The dinosaur comic http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1658 led me to read the wikipedia article on Alexander Selkirk, which had this bit of information at the bottom ( Read more... )

I read the Babylonian Atra-hasis this week, which includes the creation of man in brief, and the flood myth. I have not yet read the Assyrian recension or the Sumerian version included in the Lambert and Millard edition. It's a nice little edition, with as far as I can tell, facing-page Akkadian in Roman transcription and English translation of ( Read more... )

I finally found a Brazilian Portuguese tutor who's willing to compromise on the issue of meeting on campus, so I begin lessons next week. Hopefully when I go to Rio in September, I can have conversations with the natives beyond "I'm sorry. I'm an American. I do not speak Portuguese." My stock phrase last time, although I had a handful of other ( Read more... )

I always do this. "Let's go see the movie on Greek mythology!"

( spoilers, although any knowledge of Greek mythology counts as a spoiler )

So there's a word in Akkadian that means both "an official" and "a demon". Echoes of the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert?

2 large russet potatoes ( Read more... )

Wow, one of the other nice things about this new place, is that I was exploring the neighborhood a bit when I moved in. Even though it's only technically two blocks from where I last lived, it's two blocks south, and I never went south. So there's a jogging path three blocks from here, and I have decided to take up jogging again, for the first time ( Read more... )