El Ratoncito Pérez, or "Pérez the Little Mouse," is a familiar figure to children all over the Spanish-speaking world. Like the Tooth Fairy, when a child loses a baby tooth, they can place it under their pillow, and El Ratoncito Pérez sneaks into their room to exchange it for a small gift. Little did all those children know that you can find the mouse's house hidden inside an old gas company register in central Madrid.
The creation of Pablo Herrera Valencia, the doorman of the building in which the installation is found, this tiny house for El Ratoncito Pérez is equipped with miniature furnishings for the mouse to enjoy his time off between nocturnal trips, some typically Spanish foods, and even tiny slippers and hooks to hang up his work clothes when he gets home. It also includes a thread and a sewing machine in reference to the traditional concentration of sewing, fabric, and haberdashery businesses on this street. But the furnishings aren't static—Herrera Valencia intends to update them seasonally, adding or subtracting things over the course of the year.
The house was created in November 2024 and became a sensation in Madrid after spreading on social media, with TV and print news stories following soon after.
To find the house, look for a rusty metal door in the building wall, about 1.5 meters off the ground, which says "Compañía Madrileña del Gas." You'll know you've found it by the mouse tracks leading up the wall and the small gold medallion of El Ratoncito in the middle of the door.
I've been reading a lot of stuff for class, including articles and on-topic chapters from various books. But I also managed to finish some of my books in the past couple of months.
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: I really enjoyed this fantasy novel about a demon and the city that she loves and considers hers. Nghi Vo is a favorite and this was so good. I loved the characters and the descriptions, and the worldbuilding was really topnotch.
What You Are Looking For is in the Library: by Michiko Aoyama: this was a nice read. Like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this novel is a series of vignettes about different people who visit the same library, where they find books, etc. that change their lives. There is some interaction between people from different vignettes at times, but for the most part, each one is a standalone story about the particular character. The book is well-written and the individual stories are quite lovely and sweet. I actually decided to read this book because I liked the cat on the cover, lol, not because I had any idea what it was about. I'm leaning toward more plot-based fiction these days, so while I enjoyed this and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I don't really need to read more of these types of books.
The Double Tax by Anna Gifty Opoku Agyeman: discusses the "pink tax" on women generally, but focuses on the added costs for women of color, specifically Black women.
Japan at War: An Oral History by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F Cook: just started reading the intro. The authors interviewed Japanese people who lived through WWII and documented their stories. Their focus is on how they talk about it and how Japan addresses and acknowledges, if at all, the war and their role.
This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 3.
Book 3 of the Iliad provides another great example of Homeric style: first, while the catalogue of Greeks and Trojans in book 2 set us up to expect the beginning of actual fighting, the book delays it further by introducing a duel between Menelaos and Paris. Second, the book introduces motifs or scenes that would not at all be appropriate in a logical sense to a war that has been ongoing for 10 years: it features an all-or-nothing duel between Menelaos and Paris (that fails), an introduction to some of the Greek leaders from the Trojan perspective, narrated by Helen (the so-called Teikhoskopia, or “viewing from the walls”), an introduction to Priam and Antenor, the elders of the Trojan people, a somewhat contentious exchange between Helen and Aphrodite about comforting Paris, and the subsequent, somewhat awkward sex-scene.
In my view on the reading and teaching and my general sense of the five major themes to follow in the Iliad book 3 emphasizes most epic’s dependence and divergence from narrative traditions, although politics and family & friends aren’t far behind. There’s a bit about the relationship of gods and humans in the exchange between Helen and Aphrodite (which could be taken psychoanalytically as an individual struggling with lust) that is crucial for larger questions about divine plan(s) and human agency.
But the dominant theme of the Iliad’s third book is the past. If the Iliad were prestige television like The Last of Us or, probably more appropriately, Band Of Brothers, book 3 would be a flashback episode. Epic narrative, however, seems to accommodate flashbacks primarily in micronarratives (cf. scenes like those of Philoktetes and Protesilaos in the Catalogue of Ships) and character speech, with the exception of a massive, stylized flashback like that of the end of book 2. In a way, the Catalogue of book 2 sets us up for thinking about the beginning of the war and questions of how we got here and who is involved.
There have been scholars who have seen book 2 as a pastiche of scenes from different epics or poems edited cleverly together. I think that this is partly right: it brings together images and ideas from a different timeline in the war and makes them somehow make sense to be told in this particular tale. The ordering is clever, but I don’t think we need to imagine the major scenes cut whole from other poems and stitched together like this. Instead, I think we can imagine popular song traditions and melodies deftly integrated into a much larger symphony.
Malcolm Davies (2007, 146) writes:
It is well known that the Iliad’s poet ingeniously constructed entire episodes in his composition by transferring them from portions of the Trojan War that precede his actual plot. Thus, the Catalogue of Ships, the Teichoscopia, the duel of Menelaus and Paris, the love-making of the latter with Helen, and the truce and building of the Achaeans’ defensive wall and trench, all owe their existence to this device, and have inspired various qualms as to the propriety of their featuring at so late a stage as the War’s ninth year
But what does all this mean for our understanding of this poem? There’s a neat bit near the beginning of the poem where we get a bit of a metapoetic reflection of epic composition, centered on Helen in particular.
Homer, Il. 3.121-128
Iris then went as a messenger to white-armed Helen, Looking for all the world like the wife of Antênor’s son, sister-in-law, The wife of the lord of Helikaon, Antênor’s son, Laodikê, The most beautiful of Priam’s daughters, Who found her at home. She was weaving on her great loom, A double-folded garment, in which she was embroidering The many struggles of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-girded Achaeans, All the things they had suffered for her at Ares’ hands.”
Helen is creating an image here and it is poetic, although she does not sing her narrative as other female figures do (as noted by a scholion). (For more on women and weaving in Homer, see this post and the included bibliography).
Schol T ad. Il 3.125b ex: “She does not sing like Kirke and Kalypso, for they live without suffering and calmly.”
Fredric Leighton, “Helen on the Walls of Troy” 1865
Helen is, as we will see from her comments in book 6, almost uniquely concerned about her future reception. But here she is taken for standing in a position similar to the Homeric narrator.
Schol. bT ad Il. 3.126-127: “The poet has shaped here a worthy archetype for his own poetry. Perhaps on this [s?]he is trying to show to those who see it the violence of the Trojans and the just strength of the Greeks.”
This is, of course, not a new or unpopular view, as clarified by George A. Kennedy (1986, 5):
“both the web itself and the subjects it depicts are in process. Helen is somehow like the bard, whose poem an audience is hearing or reading, though she is working in a visual medium, rather than in oral verse. Critics have reasonably concluded that her action should be regarded as somehow reflective of the poetic process. This view was already adopted in medieval scholia on line 3.126-7 which comment “the poet has formed a worthy archetype of his own poiesis.”
What I think is important here, is that before venturing to retell tales that belong in a flashback, the Homeric narrator provides this metapoetic breadcrumb for us to consider. As José González shows, following the work of Greg Nagy, in The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective, stitching or weaving poetry together is a functional metaphor for what ancient audiences conceived of Homeric poets as doing. Derek Collins provides a nice bit from the scholia to Pindar in his Master of the Game:
Some say that, since the poetry of Homer had not been brought together in one collection, and since it was otherwise scattered and separated into parts, whenever they would sing it rhapsodically they would do something similar to sequencing or sewing, producing it into one thing.
But, as Andrew Ford argues, ancient rhapsodes didn’t merely edit pre-existing material: there’s good evidence for the term applying to new compositions, “remixes” (my words), and genres other than epic. So, part of the trickiness of book 3, is weighing how Homer engages with ‘traditional material’, whether or not the Iliadic appropriation of scenes from earlier in the war is more homage or revision, and how the details help to set us up for what comes later.
Helen, in this scene, is presented as creating a synoptic visual narrative of everything everyone had suffered on her part. And this anticipates what she does later on: she selects details in response to her audience’s questions to set the scene for the action to come. She tells us about herself, and the heroes and also provides a vehicle for characterizing Priam, Antenor, and Paris too. By engaging in narrative thus just as the epic begins the violence again, the Iliad tips its own hand: it is fitting together the major motifs of the Trojan War and creating a synoptic account of all the suffering in a singular creation of its own. Helen is our guide, but Homer’s creation.
Some guiding questions for book 3
What are the characterizing functions of the teikhoskopia (the “viewing from the walls”)? Whom do we hear about? What do we learn?
Why do we have a duel between Menelaos and Paris in the 9th year of the war? How does the outcome drive the plot of the Iliad?
What is the characterization of Helen in this book and how does it relate to the Iliad and the larger Trojan War?
Brief Bibliography on Helen and the Teikhoskopia
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. There will be a second post this week on Helen.
BLONDELL, RUBY. “‘Bitch That I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 140, no. 1 (2010): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40652048.
Blondell, Ruby. “REFRACTIONS OF HOMER’S HELEN IN ARCHAIC LYRIC.” The American Journal of Philology 131, no. 3 (2010): 349–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40983352.
Ebbot, Mary. 1999. “The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad,” 3–20 in Nine Essays on Homer, ed. Carlisle and Levaniouk, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Jamison, Stephanie W. “Draupadí on the Walls of Troy: ‘Iliad’ 3 from an Indic Perspective.” Classical Antiquity 13, no. 1 (1994): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/25011002.
Lesser, Rachel H. “Female Ethics and Epic Rivalry: Helen in the Iliad and Penelope in the Odyssey.” American Journal of Philology 140, no. 2 (2019): 189-226. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0013.
Roisman, Hanna M. “Helen in the ‘Iliad’ ‘Causa Belli’ and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker.” The American Journal of Philology 127, no. 1 (2006): 1–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804922.
Rynearson, Nicholas C. “Helen, Achilles and the Psuchê: Superlative Beauty and Value in the Iliad.” Intertexts 17 (2013): 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1353/itx.2013.0001.
Scodel, Ruth. “Pseudo-Intimacy and the Prior Knowledge of the Homeric Audience *.” Arethusa 30, no. 2 (1997): 201-219. https://doi.org/10.1353/are.1997.0010.
Warwick, Celsiana. “The Maternal Warrior: Gender and Kleos in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology 140, no. 1 (2019): 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0001.
Worman, Nancy. “The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts.” Classical Antiquity 16, no. 1 (1997): 151–203. https://doi.org/10.2307/25011057.
Kungsgrottan is a small grotto formed by a huge Ice Age rock in the Swedish town of Trollhättan, which is famous for its waterfalls. The Trollhättan waterfalls have been used for hydropower and boat travel since the 19th century and the town is well known for its King Oscar's Bridge which overlooks the powerful Trollhättan Falls.
Somewhere along the way, Swedish royalty began to memorialize their visits to the town by putting their signature on this large rock which sits just below the bridge. Many visiting monarchs and personages have carved their name into the rock, with the oldest entry dating back to 1754, when King Adolf Fredrik and Queen Louisa Ulrika first started the tradition.
The exact reason why this particular rock was used is unknown, but it became known as the Kungsgrottan soon after, even though it is not even a proper cave or grotto. Today there are over a dozen royal signatures, including that of the current heir to the Swedish throne, Crown Princess Victoria, who left her mark on the Kungsgrottan in 2001. Perhaps the royals chose to carve their names there simply because the spot offers a beautiful view over the waterfalls.
You can find the King's Cave right before Oscar Bridge, down a small flight of stairs.
Happy Caturday, feline fam! Every week, the internet lets out a mighty mrrrp, stretches its whiskers, and delivers a fresh batch of hissterical, wholesome, and delightfully unhinged cat memes. And we? We scoop them up like premium kibble. Because when Caturday hits, we are committed - dedicated, even - to cultivating the crème de la catnip of the entire meme world. No low-effort crumbs. Only elite-level silliness. Only majestic floof energy. Only the finest claws for the finest paws.
We search through the digital litter box of the week to find the memes that make cat lovers laugh, keyboard smash, whisper "same", and spam the share button like an overstimulated kitten with a feathered toy. We're talking about kitty derp faces, various loaf forms, many dramatic zoomies, void cats defying physics, orange cats being… well, orange cats. These memes aren't just content - they're serotonin with toe beans.
Because if you're here, you're one of us: a proud hooman owned by a fluffy feline overlord, living on a steady diet of purrs, bleps, zoomies, and love. And nothing says weekend joy like scrolling through the internet's silliest felines while your own cat pretends not to care. Get yourself comfy, grab a cozy blanket, give your kitty a boop on the nose, and enjoy the very best cat memes we paw-picked for you this week. Happy Caturday!
We love many things about cats, but one of the things we love the most is that cats have a way of finding their hoomans at exactly the right time. Fur example, we found one of our first cats behind a dumpster on our way out from the movie theater. If we hadn't gone to see that exact movie at that exact time, we might never have found her, and our lives would be completely different. Life works in meowsterious ways, huh?
Today, though, we're talking about Finnegan, purrobably the floofiest orange cat we've ever seen, who went from a lonely forest cat to a pampered city kitty all thanks to a heartwarming encounter with his furrever hooman four years ago. The cat dad lived in a cabin outside the city, and Finnegan appeared one night, looking for love. Skittish and afraid, it took a while, but Finnegan eventually warmed up to him and learned to trust hoomankind. His hooman saved him from his feral fate, sheared off all his matted fur, treated his wounds, and taught him the joys of sleeping in the sun behind the safety of a loving home.
Finnegan's story purrfectly shows how far love goes when it comes to a cat's life. You'll see how he looked before, and how he looks now, and you can tell that he's much happier being pampered at home than sleeping in the leaves. We wish Finnegan and his hooman dad nothing but happiness until the end of their days!
What do Forrest Gump and Oppenheimer have in common? Both movies had buses in main scenes provided by the Pacific Bus Museum.
The museum is an active organization of “bus enthusiasts” based in Northern California that started in the 1980s, dedicated to showcasing the history of this mode of transportation.
It has over 20 coaches ranging from the 1920s to the modern era, mostly from California and the western United States. Visitors can explore the collection, along with bus artifacts and memorabilia, on guided one-hour tours.
The museum regularly rents out its buses to production companies. You can recreate the Forrest Gump scene in which Jenny looks out to Forrest out the back window of a 1959 GM TDM 4515 bus and flashes a peace sign, or hop aboard the loaned 1929 Yellow Coach that served as transportation for John Walton Sr.’s trip home for Christmas in The Waltons: Homecoming.
The museum also sponsors historic bus excursions where the routes of a particular bus system are retraced, usually aboard a vintage bus.
Volunteer bus mechanics, archivists and bus fans will all like this family-friendly museum.
Volleyball hours have changed. We used to play 2 hours. But now we are going to start 30 minutes later on Tuesdays and Thursdays and end 30 minutes earlier on Saturdays. I like the 2 hours but apparently, others do not. Whatever. I can sleep in.
Today I need to remember to do pills. Put them in my sun-sat boxes I do 4 months at a time and it's time. I put them out on the bathroom counter the other day so I remember and I'm tired of looking at them.
Elbow coffee this morning.
And my back stretches. My back is way better but my leg is still cranky. Its cranky is coming from my spine. So back stretches.
In the olden days, when I would put on something with pockets, a dress, top, jacket, it wasn't odd at all to find money in the pocket. Most often, a nicely washed dollar bill or, if times were fat, a five dollar bill.
These days, I put on a top with something in the pocket and it's a very nicely washed wad of kleenex. Every time. It's why I always buy Kleenex instead of off brand or another brand. All the others seem to shred in the wash. Not Kleenex. I should do an old lady commercial.
The Pallis Building, also known as Pallis Manor and Pallis Mansion, is an ornate early 20th century building in the heart of Athens whose development mirrors important events in the Greek capital's history. The building is located in Syntagma Square (Constitution Square), an important center of political and cultural life in the city that is home to the Hellenic Parliament.
Originally built as the personal residence of the Pallis family, the site of the Pallis Building has seen many different uses throughout the years. After the family patriarch's death in 1885, his son Filippos hired Architect Anastasios Metaxas to design a new mansion on the family property. Metaxas designed a neoclassical style mansion to be built with reinforced concrete, one of the first buildings in Athens to make use of the material which would later become instrumental in building the apartment buildings that give Athens its distinct look today.
Filippos approved the design, and the old family home was demolished, leaving room for a much larger and more luxurious mansion to be built between 1910 and 1911. The new mansion was 62 feet in height, with 5 different stories and 2 elevators. The mansion was considered one of the finest in the city at the time and hosted many high-profile events with important dignitaries in attendance.
The area slowly became a hub of commercial activity and the Pallis family relocated to a quieter area. The Greek government took over use of the mansion and it became the headquarters of the Ministry of Transportation. The Greek government used the building until April 1941, when the German Army invaded Athens. On October 12, 1944, the German army withdrew out of central Athens and six days later Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou famously addressed the citizens of Athens from the balcony of the building.
Numerous schools and banks occupied the building for the next twenty years until the 1960s when the building was renovated as a cafe popular with the capital's artist crowd. In the 1990s, the building was listed as protected by the city to prevent its demolition. Approved renovations occurred in 2006 and it now houses a large department store.
After the post-war reconstruction boom altered Athens's architectural fabric, with the construction of the polykatoikia-style apartment buildings that dominate the city today, the Pallis Building stands as one of the few remnants of the capital's neoclassical past.
I am not encouraged to read the actual book, but this is amazing BURN:
beneath the carapace of difficult writing and literary allusion, there’s the gratifying gooey centre of a blockbuster PG western, with limited nudity, violent scenes and oddly simple moral choices.
Am now wondering how many pretentiously lit'ry tomes there are of which this could be said....
***
I was thinking that surely there is a class factor involved here, i.e. parents who can actually afford to be this over-involved in their offspring? When Helicopter Parents Touch Down—At College. Okay, am of generation which is quite aghast at this - I bopped off to New York for a summer during my uni years when making a phone call would have been prohibitively expensive.
***
Like I am always going on, 'exotic' ingredients have a long history in global circulation, c.f. lates from the Recipes Project: Globalising Early Modern Recipes
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, escaped enslavement to become a celebrated author and campaigner in Georgian England. His memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was a bestseller. His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe at a time when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.
In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.
Every year I sign up for SGA Secret Santa, I always think I'm going to get my story done early. This is the first year I might actually manage it. Hoo-yay.
Of course, I'm only talking about the first draft, but at 80% done, I'm looking at wrapping up soonish. This has never happened to me this early in the challenge.
Now that we're safely into the Autumn season, our souls are searching for spices. Gone are the light, cold salads of summer; now we're craving spicy soups and drinks filled with cinnamon and ginger. But you've probably heard of all of these before, so allow us to open you up to a whole other world of spiciness - the world of spicy kitties. Oh yes, cats aren't all cuteness and cuddles. Any pawrent knows the spiciness of a feline friend that wants literally nothing to do with you. Between their cold, purrfectly patient stares to their random attacks on your ankles, cats are about as spicy as it gets.
But, just like with all things, it's the balance between the spicy and the sweet that makes cats purrfectly feline. Sure, they may think we are useless monkeys that can't hunt and have no natural defense mechanisms, but we kind of love it. It's like a toxic relationship that we just can't quit. Because when they show us their sweetness, it's so pawsitively intoxicating that we suffer through their feistiness just for a taste of sweet after.
Some people are just gluttons for punishment - that's us. We like the burn, it makes us feel alive. For some reason, we can't get enough of it, and it even makes us laugh most of the time. Mostly because when we realize that their discontent with us can come from something as us sneezing, we can't help but giggle. So even though they may be spicy, they still put us in a pawsitive mood. For all of you who just can't get enough spice in your life, please enjoy these spectacularly spicy felines below. We're sure they'll make your Caturday purrfectly pawsitive (and peppery).
For some people, we know that flying is easy. Second nature. Like taking a cab. But not for us. We struggle a little bit. And we can only imagine, if it's hard enough for us to get through a flight on a regular basis, how difficult it is to fly with your cat. We understand that in some situations, it kind of has to happen. What if you have to move? Will you not move with your feline? Of course you will. And you will take the cat on the plane with you if you must.
Of course, as passengers, it's a whole different experience. There is nothing that we love more than seeing people with their cats on a plane. We don't like flying, but we love cats, and if there is an adorable cat on the plane, well… the flight will pass a whole heck of a lot faster. Would we have been miffed if they told us we had to move seats because a "giant cat" needs extra space? Yes, absolutely. But mostly because we would have wanted to sit next to the cat.
Title:Gut Instinct Author: Tarlan (tarlanx) Fandom: Word of Honor (TV 2021) Pairing/Characters: Gu Xiang & Wen Kexing, Wen Kexing/Zhou Zishu Rating/Category: PG13 GEN Word Count: 993 Summary: He relied upon his gut instinct to keep him and the ones he loved alive.
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