Firstshowing.net reveals that Jonathan Liebesman — of Texas Chainsaw Massacre ‘fame’ — has a project in the works. Ecce:

Liebesman revealed that it’s a project he’s working on with the producers of 300 that he hasn’t said anything about until now. The film is about “the story of Odysseus and basically it’s like a Clint Eastwood story where he comes back after 20 years at war and finds his island overtaken by bad guys and it’s sort of a little kinetic action movie of how this guy wins his island back.” Liebesman also added that aforementioned bit about how it’s like a western, but set in the time of ancient Greece instead.

Oh oh …

A piece in Tidbits — a blog for Mac types — turned up in the scan today with an article commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Mac with some interviews with some users … inter alia, “Matt” says:

As a programmer, I’d been working with computers since 1968, but as a Classics professor in the early 1980s, my immediate problem was typing Ancient Greek, or, more precisely, typing both English and Greek in the same document. I had an IBM Selectric typewriter with interchangeable typeballs, and later an Olivetti electronic typewriter that used interchangeable typewheels and had a tiny “memory” so that it was almost a miniature word processor. But the real solution was a personal computer: I got an Apple ][c clone called a Laser 128. This, together with an ImageWriter and a wonderful (now defunct) program called Gutenberg, gave me a full-featured word processor with the ability to alternate English and Greek letters at will.

While teaching at Cornell University in the late 1980s, I met Adam, who taught me to use the Macs in the computer labs; I remember us performing some clever tricks with Microsoft Word and QuicKeys (and swapping a lot of floppy disks). But the Mac still felt like a toy to me, and I didn’t actually want one.

Then, in 1990, I arrived at Swarthmore College and found that, like every professor, I was given an office Mac. It was one of those early squat all-in-one machines with a tiny monochrome screen – probably either a Plus or an SE. Naturally, since it was right there on my desk and hooked into something called the “Internet,” I started playing with it constantly. (Oh, the INITs! Oh, the bombs!)

But what turned me into a Mac person wasn’t the machine so much as the killer apps I got for it. Nisus, a fantastic word processor with amazing search-and-replace and macro features, along with LaserGreek, a gorgeous Ancient Greek font, allowed me to do all my multilingual scholarly writing. And HyperCard 2 made the Mac interface itself programmable, letting me create an Ancient Greek language lab for my students. By the end of that school year, I was a Mac convert, the proud owner of a brand new pizza-box Macintosh LC which, together with a StyleWriter printer, remained my workhorse machine for many years.

… hmmm … Matt at Swarthmore in the 1990s … can’t figure it out.

• The Mac Turns 25: Our First Macs

Akropolis World News (in Greek) has been updated (really wish they had an rss feed!):

• Woman delivers 8 children / Hamas offers truce for one year / John Updike dies

If you think you’re too old to take up Latin:

• Lifelong learner (Tribune)

An interview with the folks behind Brandeis Theater Company’s production of Hecuba:

• Q&A: Found in translation (Justice)

Greece is campaigning to erect a statue of Alexander the Great at the site of Gaugamela:

• Greece wants Alexander the Great statue in Iraq (Khaleej Times)

The headline says it all:

• GodsWar Online not ‘Greek enough’ (Examiner)

Graeme Clarke was made an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia:

• Classical scholar with an eye on the dollar

A while back I grew bored of the constant comparisons of Rome and the US, but Tom Ricks in Foreign Policy seems to be departing from the cliched ‘rise and fall’ approach. Worth a look (and apparently more to come):

• How would the Romans handle the financial crisis?