Tomor­row, I’ll be in Greece. I’ll be meet­ing my stal­wart friend, Fil­ip Marek, in Athens, and short­ly after, we’ll head for Crete.

Anyone who knows me is aware that, for most of my life, I’ve has per­son­al fas­ci­na­tion with ancient Minoan civ­i­liza­tion. My liv­ing room wall dis­plays a large framed print of the “palace” of Knos­sos, as some­what imag­i­na­tive­ly recon­struct­ed by N. Gou­vousis. The old­er ver­sion of this web­site was dec­o­rat­ed with an icon­ic Minoan mur­al. I’ve always pre­ferred the flu­id, sen­su­ous Minoan and Myce­naean art styles, with their domes­tic and nature-ori­ent­ed themes, to the more rigid and often mil­i­taris­tic styles of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The mytho­log­i­cal sto­ry of The­seus, defeat­ing a tyran­ny by enter­ing the labyrinth (a fair­ly obvi­ous metaphor for the search for knowl­edge), and fight­ing the mon­strous Mino­taur, finds its way into my writ­ing in var­i­ous forms. I would count myself a fail­ure in life if I did not at least once set my foot down on the site of the real Knos­sos. Now, for­tu­itous cir­cum­stances allow me to do this, and to spend some time explor­ing less pop­u­lar archae­o­log­i­cal sites, and the back coun­try of Greece. Read more »

Hugh Mar­low and Joan Tay­lor in the 1956 sci­ence fic­tion film Earth vs. the Fly­ing Saucers. While it was in a naive attempt to cash in on the new­born fly­ing saucer cult — a pseu­do­science which most pro­fes­sion­al sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers looked at with deri­sion — it nev­er­the­less had a fair­ly good script, decent per­for­mances, and superb spe­cial effects by stop-action ani­ma­tor Ray Har­ry­hausen. Those affects are the main rea­son the film remains pop­u­lar to this day. The final scene in which the fly­ing saucers demol­ish Wash­ing­ton D.C. is a delight.

This is what most teenagers the media labeled “hip­pies” actu­al­ly looked like most of the time — not much like the car­toon ver­sion that appeared in tele­vi­sion shows of the peri­od and sub­se­quent­ly became embed­ded in false cul­tur­al memory.

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