Boys " done good. " I feel ..however ...that they should wear
their uniforms ! That's how 99.999 % of the
fans ..Know them ! Hell It is not easy to ID some of the drivers in
street clothes !

"If you want the races on tv for free - Somebody has to pay for it"
<fastpitstops (AT) aol (DOT) com> wrote


I managed to pick each and every one of them out but thanks anyway.

--

Rob
"A disturbing new study finds that studies are disturbing"

Robert R Kircher, Jr. wrote:
Golly Rob ..did you really ?????? How about a sense of humor ....
did you pick that out ??? hmmmmm... very disturbing if u aks me

We need more CRANK IT UP wrote:
doesn't something have to be funny in order to use your sense of humor?

RES2CUE28 wrote:
This conversation is over ... as are any in the future ..dont
botther to post
in my thread you wont get read ...but here ..read this ...
o other texts in the Western imagination occupy as central a position
in the self-definition of Western culture as the two epic poems of
Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey . They both concern the great
defining moment of Greek culture, the Trojan War. Whether or not this
war really occurred, or occurred as the Greeks narrate it, is a
relatively unanswerable question. We know that such a war did take
place around a city that quite likely was Troy, that Troy was destroyed
utterly, but beyond that it's all speculation. This war, however, fired
the imaginations of the Greeks and became the defining cultural moment
in their history. Technically, the war wasn't fought by "Greeks" in the
classical sense, it was fought by the Myceneaens; the Greek culture
that we call "classical" is actually derived from a different group of
Greeks, the Dorians and Ionians. However, the Greeks saw the Trojan War
as the first moment in history when the Greeks came together as one
people with a common purpose. This unification, whether it was myth or
not, gave the later Greeks a sense of national or cultural identity,
despite the fact that their governments were small, disunified
city-states. Since the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the defining
moment in the establishment of "Greek character," they were obsessed
about the events of that great war and told them repeatedly with great
variety; as the Greek idea of cultural identity changed, so did their
stories about the Trojan War.


If the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the defining moment of
their culture, they did so because of the poetry of Homer. It would not
be unfair to regard the Homeric poems as the single most important
texts in Greek culture. While the Greeks all gained their collective
identity from the Trojan War, that collective identity was concentrated
in the values, ethics, and narrative of Homer's epic poems. Just as the
Greeks were obsessed about the Trojan War, they were equally obsessed
about the Homeric poems, returning to them over and over again,
particularly in times of cultural crisis. The Greeks didn't believe
that the Homeric poems were sacred in any way, or even flawless
history. For most of Greek history, Homer comes under fire for his
unflattering portrayal of Greek gods. The Greeks understood that the
poems were poetry, and in the Hellenistic period came to the
understanding that the poems had been deeply corrupted over the ages.
So unlike most ancient cultures which rooted collective identity in
religious texts of some sort, the Greeks turned to literature.

As the Trojan War was the product of Mycenean culture, the Homeric
poems were the product of the Greek Dark Ages. Whatever happened at
Troy, the events were probably so captivating, that the Greeks
continued to narrate the stories long after they had abandoned their
cities and abandoned writing. The history of the war was preserved from
mouth to mouth, from person to person; it may be that the stories of
the Trojan War were the dominant cultural artifact of the Greek Dark
Ages. These stories probably began as short tales of isolated events
and heroes; eventually a profession of story-telling was
established-classical scholars call this new professional a "bard."
This new professional began combining the stories into larger
narratives; as the narratives grew, the technique of story-telling
changed as well. Whereas early bards probably memorized their stories
with great exactitude, the later bards, telling much longer stories,
probably improvised much of their lines following sophisticated rules.
Maybe. We have evidence from the classical age in Greece of people
memorizing the complete poetry of Homer word for word (over 25,000
lines of poetry); it may be possible that the Homeric poems were
memorized with more exactitude than scholars believe. No matter what
the case, by the end of the Greek Dark Ages, these bards or
story-tellers were probably the cultural center of Greek society; their
status improved greatly as Greeks began to slowly urbanize.

On an average night in the late Greek Dark Ages, a community,
probably the wealthiest people, would settle in for an evening's
entertainment. The professional story-teller would sing the stories of
the Trojan War and its Greek heroes; these songs would be the Greek
equivalent of a mini-series, for the stories were so long that they
would take days to complete. The Greeks believed that the greatest of
these story-tellers was a blind man named Homer, and that he sung ten
epic poems about the Trojan War, of which only two survived (although
the Greeks seem to have known them). As a group these poems told the
entire history of the Trojan War; each poem, however, only covered a
small part of that history. Many classicists believe that the two
surviving Homeric epics (probably the only Homeric epics) were in fact
composed by several individuals; in the absence of any evidence to the
contrary, most classicists accept the overall Greek idea of a single
author. Whatever the compositional history of the poems, they were set
down into writing within a few decades of their composition; the
growing urbanization of Greek society led to the rediscovery of writing
(learned from the Phoenicians this time), and the Homeric poems were
committed to writing very quickly. Time and transmission added much
extraneous material to the poems, but in their basic character and
outline they seem to be the original compositions.

The Iliad is the story of a brief event in the ninth year of the war
(which the Greeks claim lasted ten years); the great hero Achilles is
offended when the leader of the Greeks, Agamemnon, takes a slave girl
Achilles has been awarded. Achilles withdraws from the battle and prays
to his mother, Thetis, a goddess, to turn the tide of battle against
the Greeks. The gods grant Achilles his prayer, and he does not return
to battle until his best friend is killed by the great Trojan hero,
Hector. Achilles throws himself into the battle, fights Hector, and
kills him; in a final gesture of contempt, he drags Hector's lifeless
body around the walls of Troy. If there is a "theme" to the epic (and
one should resist simplifying large and complex literature), it is
"Achilles choice." Achilles has been offered a choice: either he can be
a great and famous hero in war and die young (Achilles does die in Troy
when a poison arrow strikes him in the ankle), or the can live a long,
happy life without any lasting fame whatsoever. Although Achilles
initially chooses not to die young, the death of his friend forces him
to make the choice that will make him famous for all time, but
tragically dead at a young age.

The Odyssey is the story of the homecoming of another of the great
Greek heroes at Troy, Odysseus. Unlike Achilles, Odysseus is not famous
for his great strength or bravery, but for his ability to deceive and
trick (it is Odysseus's idea to take Troy by offering the citizens a
large wooden horse filled, unbeknownst to the Trojans, with Greek
soldiers). He is the anthropos polytropos , the "man of many ways," or
the "man of many tricks." His homecoming has been delayed for ten years
because of the anger of the gods; finally, in the tenth year, he is
allowed to go home. He hasn't been misspending his time, though; for
most of the ten years he has been living on an island with the goddess
Kalypso, who is madly in love with him. Odysseus, like Achilles, is
offered a choice: he may either live on the island with Kalypso and be
immortal like the gods, or he may return to his wife and his country
and be mortal like the rest of us. He chooses to return, and much of
the rest of the work is a long exposition on what it means to be
"mortal." If the Odyssey has a discernible theme, it is the nature of
mortal life, why any human being would, if offered the chance to be a
god, still choose to be mortal. This choice becomes particularly
problematic when Odysseus, in Book XI, meets the ghost of Achilles in
the Underworld; Odysseus remarks to Achilles how all the shades of the
dead must worship and serve Achilles, but Achilles replies that he
would rather be the meanest and most obscure slave of the poorest
landholder than be the most famous of the dead. If being dead is so
awful, what is it about being human that makes up for the infinite
suffering that attends our deaths? As part of this question concerning
the nature of human life, much of the book deals with the nature of
human civilization and human savagery. The question also deepens in the
latter half of the poem; while the first half of the epic deals with
the question of the value of a mortal life, the last half of the epic
introduces the question of the value of an anonymous human life. What
value can be attached to a life that will be forgotten at its
conclusion?

The Greeks in general regard Homer's two epics as the highest
cultural achievement of their people, the defining moment in Greek
culture which set the basic Greek character in stone. Throughout
antiquity, both in Greece and Rome, everything tended to be compared to
these two works; events in history made sense when put in the light of
the events narrated in these two works. As a result, then, these two
epics are the focal point of Greek values and the Greek world view
despite all its evolution and permutations through the centuries
following their composition.


Barbarians & Bureaucrats Polyphemos

Greek Glossary Areté
There are two very important words repeatedly used throughout the
Homeric epics: honor (timé ) and virtue or greatness (areté ). The
latter term is perhaps the most reiterated cultural and moral value in
Ancient Greece and means something like achieving, morally and
otherwise, your greatest potential as a human being. The reward for
great honor and virtue is fame (kleos ), which is what guarantees
meaning and value to one's life. Dying without fame (akleos ) is
generally considered a disaster, and the warriors of the Homeric epics
commit the most outrageous deeds to avoid dying in obscurity or infamy
(witness Odysseus's absurd insistence on telling Polyphemos his name
even though this will bring disaster on him and his men in the
Polyphemos episode). The passage from Odyssey XI discussed above
presents Achilles's final judgement on kleos and its value when he
tells Odysseus that he would rather be alive and the most obscure human
on earth than dead and famous.

WOW!!! you are killfiling me? You make it sound like it's my loss.


We need more CRANK IT UP wrote:

Speeed Racer! wrote:
Hee hee... Weird Al eh !!!!!! His stuff always cracks me up
......Another one Rides the Bus ...
" Havent been in a crowd like this ...since I went to see THE WHO