In which your roving correspon

My next two columns will be filed from the Mediterranean. On any given Tuesday, I tend to be flying somewhere. This Tuesday, I'm flying to Athens. Wake up in Bismarck, wind up in Athens. Even after a lifetime of flying hither and yon, I'm astonished that this is possible. One of the key markers of life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is profound mobility.

That phenomenon has dramatically changed life in North Dakota, made us much less the "blank spot" at the center of the continent that Eric Sevareid bemoaned 50 years ago. When I was growing up in the '60s, the big leap of our mobility had not yet occurred. I Baume & Mercier Diamant Two-Tone Diamond Ladies Watch 8738 flew for the first time when I was 16. My daughter has been on more than 30 flights and she's not yet 16. Modern mobility is the product of cheap oil and unprecedented first-world prosperity (i.e. cheap oil), and we cannot assume that this historical anomaly will continue forever.

See the world while you can.

Technically, the purpose of my two-week journey is work. I'm leading a cultural tour, a cruise, on the Mediterranean - Athens, the islands of Santorini and Patmos, Egypt, the Holy Land, the Greek city of Ephesus on the coast of Turkey, and finally Rome. It's a whirlwind tour. To call what I am about to do "work" is a pretty big stretch, but my assignment is to open my mouth and hope that intelligent words come out of it for 14 straight days. I've been to Greece a number of times in the course of my life, but as far as I'm concerned, you can never get enough. If I won the lottery, I'd go to Greece for two or three weeks every year for the rest of my life.

I've been to Ephesus and other places on the coast of Turkey (what historians call Asia Minor). In fact, I've been to Troy, up on the northwest coast of Turkey, at the entrance to the Dardanelles Strait, which connects the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy, of course, is the site of the war (1184 BCE) between Greek and Trojan armies over the abduction of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, by the Trojan prince Paris. "Abduction" is Replica Christian Louboutin Shoes not quite the right word, since she ran off with Paris willingly, but her departure really, really upset her husband Menelaos, who launched the world's most famous war to get her back.

It's a kind of Jerry Springer episode of the ancient world, but on a really big stage with thousands of causalities. Seldom, on Springer, does the aggrieved husband actually burn down the town of the man who seduced his wife. Not yet, anyway.

The story of the Trojan War is told in Homer's "Iliad," which is not only the first book in western civilization, but arguably still the greatest. When I lived in England, I did my best to read it in ancient Greek. My best wasn't very good, but I took more pleasure in that quixotic struggle than in any other intellectual endeavor of my life.

Menelaos got his wife back. By the time we catch Sexy Shoes up with them in Homer's "Odyssey," they are back home in Sparta (in Greece), and they have somehow worked out a kind of edgy marital reconciliation. Whenever "the incident" threatens to flare up (as, one would expect, it occasionally did in the Atreus household!), Helen puts a magic drug into the wine jar, and she and her still-a-little-miffed husband zone out into a kind of pharmaceutical bliss. It's a heavily medicated marriage.

As one of Shakespeare's characters says, "anything
Wow gold!:
Wow gold
Wow gold