Tagged: aesop

you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers

As oracular devices go, Internet search engines are a little better than reading sheep entrails and a little worse than the I Ching. The Internet is so full of bad and misleading information, that unless you already know what you’re looking for you’ll be easily duped. And because most search engines add a little “wisdom of the crowds” (or the “none of us is as dumb as all of us” principal) to their algorithms, bad information tends to reinforce more bad information. In most cases, you’re better off asking a person–your father (who might lie to you), the guy at the end of the bar (who will definitely lie to you), or a librarian (who will certainly not lie to you, but might giggle when you’re not looking)–or trying to find the answer in a book.

Case in point: this site should be flooded with searches for things like heartbreakingly beautiful short stories and incredibly astute political commentary. Alas, such is not the case. Indeed, some of the searches that have landed people here are a little puzzling indeed.

So, in the spirit of public service, here’s a little help for people who’ve wandered here and have probably not found the answers they wanted.

sailor’s destination in a yeats poem

As noted earlier, the L.A. Times crossword from last weekend has puzzled a lot of people. I thought the traffic from this search would die down quickly, but it’s been steady. I find myself equally bemused and peeved to see it in the analytics logs.

The answer is Byzantium. But you get extra points if you thought the answer might be Innisfree.

different kind of literature

Yup, there are different kinds, some more so than others.

how to be a successful english major

Simple, really. Key definitions to learn would be “oxymoron,” “irony,” “sardonicism,” and “mordancy.”

novel story

All novels are stories, but not all stories are novels.

whoopie pie recipe, gingerbread, healthy

Refer to the answer above. “Oxymoron” applies here as well.

fluffernutter whoopie pie recipe

Much preferred to anything “healthy.”

poem of the sky was lovely, dark and deep but i’ve far to go until i sleep

Close! Please try again.

ronnie scotts bar cover charge

It all depends on when you go. Go to the DJ show tonight, and it will set you back £5. Saturday night, £7.50. New Year’s Eve will cost £60. But Sunday afternoon is only £3 if you bring your own horn. This is the site you’re really looking for.

i love ibm song

Don’t we all? Yet somehow I’ve never felt moved to vocalize my adoration of WebSphere and Lotus Notes. But, of course, IBM’s praises have indeed been sung:

our reputation sparkles like a gem.
we’ve fought our way through
and new fields we’re sure to conquer, too,
for thee ever onward IBM!

iron cage of bureaucracy madoff

I think that’s a great idea!

raymond carver driving the heart

Close again! I think you’re looking for Jason Brown, though.

detailed coherent paragraph on how learning from and aesop fable experience is a good method of teaching a lesson

Remember, your homework is due at the beginning of class. More info here.

I do hope this has been helpful!

yet what grim society

. . . Peterson’s

calls them ‘social creatures,’ yet what grim
society: identical pilgrims,

seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path
only three seconds to touch another’s

face, some hoisting the papery carcasses
of their dead in their jaws, which open and close

like the clasp of a necklace.

Ants by Joanie Mackowski

It’s starting to feel like summer now–Minnesota springs are a short and unpredictable affair–and one of the sure signs that things are warming up beneath ground is the sudden activity of ants.

At the bus stop this morning, I noticed a swarm of them running along the seam in the sidewalk. When the kids joined me down on my hands and knees over the ants’ busy errands, we noticed that they were traveling a two-lane highway between twin hills on either side of the sidewalk. Surely there’s some huge subterranean metropolis underneath the sidewalk itself, where the queen is busy producing more citizens to go about their constant work. These are tiny ants, smaller than a fingernail clipping, and the queen’s flight must have gone unnoticed a week or two ago.

We all know Aesop’s story of the “Ants and the Grasshopper,” in which the diligent ants are shown to be better adapted to winter survival than the profligate grasshopper, who spends a lazy summer playing and singing when he should be storing food away for lean times. In the Disney version, the ant is invited into the queen’s court where he earns his food by fiddling for the colony; in the original version, though, the grasshopper (or cricket or dung beetle; versions vary) is cast back into the cold when he comes begging, we assume to die in a snowbank. In any case, it’s one of those stories that we’ve interpreted as having a message that is not only practical but moral.

Less well known is Aesop’s fable of Ants and the Pigs. Like the grasshopper’s ants, this is another colony that spends all summer hard at work, collecting grain for the winter. But in the fall, a herd of pigs descends on the colony and gobbles up their stores. The moral, it would seem, is that the miserly gathering of material wealth is vanity: all our efforts will be for naught against the rapaciousness of thieves.

Taking moral lessons from insects is probably unwise. In more recent times, E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which grew in part out of his work with ants, was given a simplistic just-so-story interpretation and attacked as neo-Social Darwinism. (Wilson’s approach wasn’t so different from the anarchist Petr Kropotkin’s in Mutual Aid, though Wilson was armed with better scientific methods and skills of observation.) Ants are intrinsically interesting, have yielded a lot of useful information about chemical communication, and are a good distraction for kids waiting at the bus stop, but not a very useful metaphor for human behavior.

After the bus came, the dog and I continued on our morning walk, no doubt hurrying past many more Formicidaen cities. We didn’t notice, and I suspect that the ants didn’t notice, either.

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