Giving a speech will never be my favorite thing to do...

[x_cable]

But it's not so bad, I guess. Helps when the audience is actually interested in what you're saying. I'm one of the few people from an aid organization who actually saw the riot break out in Smichov back in November. I guess that makes my impressions worth hearing, although I was relieved there weren't any... voyeuristic questions afterwards, for lack of a better explanation.

Damn, I was wound up, though. Came home and crashed, and now I'm watching some bizarre news segment about this archaeological site on the Iraq/Syria border. There's at least one latter-day Schliemann claiming it's the Tower of Babel. What is it with the need to have a historic Babel, or a historic Troy, or a historic King Arthur? Maybe it's the history degree talking, but I don't get the popular urge to verify legends. Takes some of the mystery out of life, to have everything explained and pinned down...

Comments

[x_cable]

x_forge
2007-03-09 04:27 am (UTC)
Tower of Babel? As in the Biblical myth about the prehistoric attempt at building a space elevator?
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x_cable
2007-03-09 04:35 am (UTC)
Yes indeed. Next thing you know they'll be discovering the Ark of the Covenant.
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x_forge
2007-03-09 04:37 am (UTC)
Oh! I saw this one! It's in a warehouse after it got used to melt a bunch of Nazis, right?
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x_scarletwitch
2007-03-09 05:05 am (UTC)
*laughs* Maybe space aliens...

I doubt I know anyone on the dig team but it is interesting to watch. I doubt they will find anything like the Tower of Babel but it will be interesting to see what they will turn up.
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x_cable
2007-03-09 05:19 am (UTC)
I have this strange urge to start wearing a fedora.
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x_polarisstar
2007-03-09 06:39 pm (UTC)
Resist that urge. No, really.
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x_cable
2007-03-09 08:39 pm (UTC)
Moira likes me in hats.
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x_tarot
2007-03-09 05:38 am (UTC)
Only you could describe the Tower of Bable as a space elevator...
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x_cypher
2007-03-09 05:52 am (UTC)
I think you have extremes in practically every realm of human thought and endeavor. Yin and yang. For every right-wing Ann Coulter, a left-wing Howard Dean. For every Mother Teresa, a Jeffrey Dahmer.

And for every person who has to have a rational scientific explanation for everything, a strict Biblical literalist who says "Naw, God just went 'click'" when asked if the beginning of Genesis couldn't maybe be an allegory.

Really, either extreme looks pretty foolish in the long run.
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x_wytchbrat
2007-03-09 05:53 pm (UTC)
"Naw, God just went 'click'"

Huh. When I go 'click', I wind up with a demented glo-ball zooming around the room...
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x_emplate
2007-03-09 07:05 pm (UTC)
So the logical conclusion drawn from this is that you are as unto God. Strange, one would think His particular subset of skills would see Him placed above a clerical position. He hasn't nearly the facial hair I'd envisioned.
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x_wytchbrat
2007-03-09 07:32 pm (UTC)
I'm a research assistant, thank you very much. That's much higher than your usual clerical position. ;) And if I'm God, there definitely needs to be some changes around this whole religion thing. The dress code for a start...
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x_wildchild
2007-03-10 05:53 am (UTC)
Man, someday you're gonna get lightening bolted for stuff like this, and knowing you, you'd be like "Crikey. Lightening. I've never quite encountered that before. Could you mind terribly doing it again?"
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x_forge
2007-03-09 05:01 pm (UTC)
Wait, you're a lawyer with a history degree? What kind of secret mutant assassin were they trying to make you into?

"Give us a super-powerful telekinetic mutant soldier... but make sure he knows when the Battle of Hastings was, and can argue for tort reform!"

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x_cable
2007-03-09 05:11 pm (UTC)
Oh, hah. Had I never explained this to you? I suppose maybe I hadn't. You got privileges based on performance, at Mistra. Most of my fellow operatives wanted to do things like vanish for six weeks to Thailand to... do things I probably don't need to be talking about on the journals.

I wanted to go to school. Once they got over the "You want to do what?" reaction, I suppose they probably saw the value in it. They'd been grooming me for a leadership role early and critical thinking skills were not such a bad thing.

Of course, I took to it a little too well for their tastes, but the rest is history. Pardon the pun.
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x_forge
2007-03-09 05:14 pm (UTC)
Huh. You know, aside from the whole massive wrongness of the whole concept of training mutant children to be obedient soldiers, it sounds like it was rather well-organized, from an educational point of view.

Sort of like a mirror-universe Xavier's, I guess. Now I'm going to go spend some time in my office laughing at the concept of the Professor with an Evil Goatee.
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x_cable
2007-03-09 08:42 pm (UTC)
Well, think about it. Intellectually stunted and totally unsocialized operatives wouldn't have been able to do half of what we were required to do. But their efforts to address that tilted the balance in the other direction - for which I'm personally grateful, don't get me wrong. Also rather amused that they basically wound up doing their own program in, at the end.
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x_polarisstar
2007-03-09 05:46 pm (UTC)
You would really like Fr. Morgan. He likes to get all ranty about how what we think of history and what people who wrote the history thought of history are completely different.

Historians are freaks.
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x_cable
2007-03-09 08:44 pm (UTC)
But they're a fun kind of freak.
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x_polarisstar
2007-03-09 08:47 pm (UTC)
Whatever helps you get through the day, Nate.
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x_rahne
2007-03-09 06:19 pm (UTC)
After the business with Asgard, I'm not sure I'd be surprised to meet King Arthur.
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x_cable
2007-03-09 08:53 pm (UTC)
See, though, that's exactly what I mean about keeping a little wonder in the world... I think Askani might have turned me into a bit of a mystic.
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x_jeangrey
2007-03-10 12:47 am (UTC)
Just a bit of one?
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x_cable
2007-03-10 01:34 am (UTC)
Okay, fine, she left me with a severe mystic streak. It was either that or go stark raving insane with the implications of just what on earth she thought she was doing.