Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.
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It's curious how everyone quotes Marshall McLuhan's famous insight as "The Medium is the Message." What he actually said--and it is the title of his book--is "The Medium is the Massage."
More than the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey, what makes me most fond of Homer was his tendency to get lost in his own thoughts; indeed, Homer even died because he slipped while trying to solve the riddle, "What we caught we threw away, and what we didn?t catch we kept." I wonder if he realized the answer is "fleas" before he died.
Boston University has worked hard to collect documentation of 20th century authors; for my personal tastes, I prefer Yale's collection of documentation of 18th century authors, and Harvard's of 19th century ones.
While smoking is seen by most as either a mere immediate pleasure or disgusting habit, it is the symbolism behind smoking that makes it so powerful: smoking has long been intertwined with our fundamental notions of freedom. Alexander II gave freedom to the smokers right before he gave freedom to the serfs, and almost any tyrant you can name, starting with Hitler, banned smoking outright or in practice; indeed, one of the sparks of the American Revolution itself was the right to smoke tobacco.
Although Herodotus is remembered today as the first historian, his strength was actually as a story teller; what he lacked in analytic rigor, he compensated for in his exquisite narrative prose.
