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Lesson #11 Microplastics

*organic!!! Sryy

Also I think Grace wouldn’t know about the new study’s bc well he was shot off into space but thank you to everyone for informing me!!

Rocky wouldn’t know what a credit card is I think… hope the joke isn’t to far fetched haha

Not so funfact: in the course of our life we intake roughly 20kg of plastics into our body! Yikes!

Also sorry if I’m missing some tumblr etiquette by not responding to the inbox! I’ll sort thru it someday, but I think you’d reach me better by dm me!

Have a good weekend and drink enough water!!

When I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey – where she made a point of keeping it the same length as the original text – I was shocked to realize that very little of it was about Odysseus’ famous journeys and adventures – the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus-Eaters, the Sirens, his men releasing the winds, Circe, and so forth. All of that is told in flashback, and all of that is 4 chapters out of 24. That’s right. They’re less than one-fifth of the text (in page count as well as chapter count). They take up a little less space that Telemachus’ journey to see Menelaus, which starts off the book and is not part of popular common knowledge of the Odyssey (when people talk about accuracy to the the text, the fact that this was included at all is probably one of the things they’re thinking of!)

The rest of the book – i.e. the majority of it – is the events that happen after Odysseys leaves Calypso. His meeting with the princess Nausicaa, getting help from her father, returning to Ithaca, everything with the suitors. Odysseus on Ithaca isn’t the conclusion (as it has been in most popular depictions and descriptions of The Odyssey that I’ve seen), it’s over half of the story!

You’re talking accuracy? You are never going to get an adaptation that distributes its time that way, and virtually everyone watching it would be disappointed if it did!

And the clincher, also the thing that made this translation really make an impression on me, is that Emily Wilson starts off Odysseus’ tale of his fantastical adventures, with:

Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies, answered:

This translation is implying that all the monsters and magic in his adventures could be Odysseus just making shit up. No adaptational divergences from the specifics of those adventures even comes close to the kind of earthquake that reading of the text is.

In terms of the history – other people with more knowledge have said this too, but it’s impossible to have a “historically accurate” adaptation of The Odyssey because the original wasn’t historically accurate! The most common estimates for when it was composed are around the 700s BC (though there’s certainly debate ). The original events that inspired it, if they occured at all (which is also debated) would most likely have been in the 1200s BC, and would have been far smaller scale in terms of number of ships, number of men, and length of time. Neither the logistics nor the technology nor the pooulation size of Mycenaean Greece would have been able to sustain a war of anything like the size of the one described in The Iliad. It’s transposing 700s BC-scale-wars (probably the scale of wars in the Middle East, like Assyria’s conquests; 700s BC Greece was only starting to have governments and writing again after the multi-century impact of the Late Bronze Age Collapse) into the 1200s BC.

So there’s no way to get historical accuracy. Put it in the Late Bronze Age, where it was set, and it’s out of step with the kind of war that could have existed at the time. Put it any time in the Iron Age, when that scale of warfare could exist, and it’s wildly discordant with actual historical events. It is fantasy. It’s kind of like the Arthurian mythos, whose faint historical roots are, if anywhere, in the early middle ages and whose knights-and-castles aesthetic is in the late middle ages.

Flint sickle, The Netherlands, 1200-800 BC

Miners working in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia who’ve had at least 25 years underground have the worst rate of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease. One in three — 32.5% — tested positive in X-rays conducted by NIOSH during the last five years.

The last time the rate of disease was that high for miners with the same work history was 1978. In 2018 when NIOSH last reported rates of the disease, the rate was 20.6%.

The new research shows that even miners with as few as 15 years underground have higher rates of black lung — rates not seen in nearly 40 years.

“I’m disgusted,” said Dr. Scott Laney, a NIOSH research epidemiologist who is the lead author of the research letter.

“This is not going to get better because of all the disease that’s already in the pipeline. These guys are being treated like disposable widgets, not human beings … We’re watching them die right before our eyes.”