Yassou from Greece.
Thankfully, Poseidon granted me easier passage than he did to the original blogger, Homer. Hopefully, when I return to Ithaca -- which I trust will be sooner than twenty years -- my daughters won’t have completely trashed the place.
Unfortunately, I’m too late for the Olympics (the beach volleyball looked like the party of the summer!). But, looking the future instead of the past, it’s hit me that blogging would make for the perfect new Olympic sport of the 21st Century. Think of the possibilities: the 200-word post (fastest one to hit “Save” wins, with deductions for typos); the laptop clean and jerk; whitewater linking; and the always-popular, 24-hour marathon web surf.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t already someone out there with a blog obsessively devoted to pushing the IOC to make sport blogging a medal event in time for the 2008 Games in Beijing.
One of the great things about blogs is that, not only do they represent the democratization of the media in the U.S., it’s the same thing worldwide. I’ve already discovered a few cool blogs over here. One of my new bookmarks is Anatomy of Melancholy (how’s that for a title!) written by "Thomas".
Read it and you can learn the ins and outs of the Greek civil service system, about which Thomas says “nothing in Russian literature and Kafka can compare.”
…positions are usually obtained through an uncle, whose best friend's dentist plays cards with a guy who went to school with some Member of Parliament, and the positions are an easy way for politicians to get votes and to fill the public sector with "their people".
Hmm... I’m not sure that’s any worse than the pay-to-play system we have in Washington.
You can read more of Greece’s top blogs here, here, and here... but be forewarned, 99 percent of them are in my mother tongue (and -- even more daunting -- a good number of them are passionately devoted to baklava recipes). It’s nice to be in a place where the phrase “it’s all Greek to me” is a good thing.
More from the Aegean later...