Here's some literary criticism regarding my little essay above: Today's reading is finding relatively less of a direct Athena-Apollo tension as that's not her Python he killed. She had a twisted "son" (he'd have to be, given her virginity -- at least the story is twisted) who looked like serpent when Pandora opened the box, but that was a different monster. Or was it? As you read version after version you realize they're all just making it up (duh) so the temptation is to just join in.
The thing is: Monty Python is a serious bridge in British comedy becoming more edgy. We think about the BBC TV as innocuous but forget about 'Life of Brian', which George Harrison (of The Beatles fame) had to risk his personal fortune on (he mortgaged his favorite property, his castle), to see produced, after the original big name distributor got scared. But then it's not just "nasty snake stuff" after that, meaning the Python connotations are also rich and interesting, and I will be taking a peek at those my upcoming workshop, with lots of people signed up already (Chicago DjangoCon). So for Python the language, the PR prospects continue to look promising, even as a smaller minority keeps the Monty alive (and well I might add). Peter Seller's was part of the same network of British comics. I hold them in high regard (The Beatles too, though I cannot be regarded as a "serious fan"-- my scores on 'Beatle mania' quizzes 'd be too low). What we need is for humanities teachers to be less shy about this stuff, all this AJAX and JSON. Greek mythology is an orphaned topic right now, begging for relevance, whereas the anthropologists tell us we need shared stories to cohere our cultures. Do want to disconnect with the ancestors completely? Disney remade Hercules and otherwise flirted with parts of Classical Western Culture in Fantasia and so on. Now in the movies we're doing DC and Marvel Comic superheros on the big screen. But with all our new-found computer power ("special effects") why not do the Greek stuff again? But lets give it more mnemonic value by marrying it with the world of Tron, i.e. the landscape of "cyperspace" (or Cyberia). This invisible landscape has a need to be more concrete in peoples' thinking, as it comprises our global infrastructure, and is in constant need of upgrading and maintenance. There's already software called Python, and Athena. Lets reignite the Greek stage and teach our new Logic, still awesomely geometric. The stage is the screen, the browser, and the cartoons explain virtual machines, what they are and where they fit. Didactic cartoons needn't be boring. Interestingly, our mnemonics go even deeper than that. Asynchronous programming, ala Twisted, traces to older modules: asyncore and Medusa. The idea of a hydra-headed beast, a multi-processor or multi-tasker, need not be made to frighten. "Think of Medusa as gorgeous" say the cultural therapist mythographers. They're not so shy anymore. They've found a way to leverage their training in the humanities. They know Athena helped Perseus cope with Medusa, as a kind of interpreter of females to males and vice versa (she's good at that), and they now know Python is cutting new edges in the form of Tulip, a next take on generative / asynchronous programming (asynch i/o rebooted) http://docs.python.org/2/library/asyncore.html http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3156/ So were Apollo and Athena best of friends? Those who took liberal arts courses about Nietzsche or listened to a lot of Joseph Campbell probably remember the Apollo-Dionysus feud. The whole soap goes back to Delphi by Mt. Parnassus, where the Python once lived. There's a STEM (geology / chemistry) angle, in that they now think a kind of "laughing gas" maybe *did* steam up from beneath those tripods, where the women oracles sat. For a long period scholars said "no way" but at the moment the mountainous vapors school holds sway (says Google today). A lot of scholars say those hallucinogenic gases were the rotting Python smell and that "python" means "rot" in Greek. Others say there's a confusion of identities here and the Python actually lives on. So much depends on who is doing the telling. In any case, this was the institution Apollo took over, and in recent tellings I could swear it was Athena's own staff he was displacing. But today those links were not found. The Google god (or portal to a great engine) has other things on its mind today. Python's mommy was Gaia. You should learn a new vocabulary word while you're at it: "Chthonic" as in "the Python of the Pythians was chthonic" (not that easy to say). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic The practice of oracles making pronouncements at Delphi was officially squelched by a Byzantine dictator sometime in the first 500 years after Jesus. He was a Christian himself and the whole Greek spiel was just not getting the same traction. You could say he closed it, but in today's language it probably more just "ran out of money". Like Coney Island someday. The carnival was over. No cults last forever. Plus they say the laughing gas dried up. The whole infrastructure had become untenable and was allowed to crumble. Today, it's all tourist sites and museums, with skiing on Mt. Parnassus. Today we have PyLadies. Kirby
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