How I spent my Long Weekend

A pipe organ with 30,000 pipes located in the grand court of a department store makes an interesting backdrop to reading a book about baseball. But then I suppose some ballparks actually have theatre organs so it's not as crazy as it sounds. I bought Billy Bean's Going the Other Way because of the gay angle but I'm surprised at myself that I'm more interested, in the first chapters at least, at how a small scrawny overactive kid threw himself into team sports despite the discouragement and derision of those around him. Having waited over a decade to top a yard stick and weighing all of 130 lbs when I joined the Post Office 34 years ago I can identify with the scrawny part, if not the athletic ability. I can also identify with being a lonely outsider who excelled in school and enjoyed reading and writing. The insight into the use of sports as a ticket to get out and the camaraderie of team participation even interest me though I can't in any way identify with either. I've even gotten interested in baseball though I won't be sitting down to watch a game on TV any time soon.

Denied a place to park by the cleaning of my underground garage I went out for early supper at a local pub called the Niblick on Friday. They served me Moosehead Lager--I prefer the ale mind you--and a mixture of chicken, cheese sauce and asparagus in a bed of Yorkshire Pudding. I spent Saturday reading, surfing the web, and watching TV. Guess I missed the episode in which John-Boy Walton acquired Blue, the white mule the first time round. Sunday I helped a friend, actually he's my immediate supervisor but I've always marched to my own drummer, move. Luckily there wasn't any particularly heavy furniture as the day hit over 30º C and the new house had some ugly stairs. Getting a king-sized mattress into the second storey would have been an impossibility. Today I should run the dishwasher, the vacuum, and think about baking muffins--though in this heat I may demure.

In the Iliad I've moved on to book 3, the duel between Meneleus and Paris. Yes, I ploughed through the muster of the troops in book 2. Before the invention of gunpowder invading armies laid siege to walled cities and fortresses. Troy's walls were apparently 60 to 70 feet thick therefore unless its defenders were inept enough to leave those walls the only means of defeating them was to encircle the walls and starve them out; hence the 10 year siege we read of. A city that had sufficient stores and an internal source of water could hold out for years particularly if it had access to water that enabled ships to run the blockade. Being under blockade may not have been comfortable but it was the countryside that suffered. If, as legend has it, 100,000 men arrived aboard 1000 ships and stayed for 10 years their campfires would have consumed every source of wood for hundreds of miles around along with every animal and other source of food. You may remember that Mount Calm lost the Battle of Quebec to James Wolf because he was imprudent enough to march his troops outside the walls of the Quebec Citadel. Whether he wished to spare his citizens a protracted siege, his city the damage from the cannon Wolf dragged up the cliff face, or pride demanded he meet his enemy on the Plains of Abraham neither combatant lived to explain his tactics. In the case of Troy, it was the Trojan Horse, which today lives on as a name for internet malware, that led to their eventual defeat.