The Most Jewish Greek Myth:
The myth of Aegeus:
When Theseus set out to defeat the Minotaur on Crete, Aegeus made him promise to set white sails on the way back, so that he would understand if the mission had been successful. Theseus, however, forgot to do so, and when Aegeas saw the ship return with black sails, he committed suicide by throwing himself off a cliff into the sea. From that day, the sea was named after him: the Aegean Sea.
The Moral: Call your parents. Make sure they know you're OK. They worry, you know?
Moving her to school four years ago was hard. This is like OMG she's really going now. Only about an hour's drive away, but I will worry. I'll always worry. I know this, because my mother still worries about me.
(*Have you every tried eating Aethra's tsimmis?)
EV, you should modify that: do not call one's parents immediately upon arriving at one's destination if one has driven 85 mph there, because one's parents will still worry. There's no pleasing people, sometimes.
Bravo Zulu Prof Volokh!
But now that I'm the parent of teenagers, I'm thinking those real-time GPS trackers you can install in your car and activate on Junior's cell phone are a wonderful innovation...
No. At one time they were not allowed at all.
Then the wise Medusa decreed that no fleet could leave the harbor without a certain percentage of black sails....
Instead, Tristan hears a mournful tune, commits suicide, and everybody sadly dies, as is customary in tragedies.
But the best example literature has to offer of miscommunications is an angstful skit by Samuel Beckett. In the skit, an existential middle-aged man carefully explains the communications system he worked out with his mother who was deaf. One rap on the head was to mean "no", two raps "yes." The monologuist carefully explains that everything can be communicated with just "yesses" and "noes," given enough of them. Fortunately he doesn't mention Turing's Machine, which is taken for granted, I guess.
The monologuist looks at the audience with a pained look. He realizes that his carefully developed scheme isn't working. His mother, instead of relishing the communications, looks at him in terror everytime he approaches her. He explains that his mother couldn't count past one, which he hadn't realized. The poor woman, he says, thought everything he told her was "no."
When my brother was 3 or 4 he asked our grandfather, "what does it mean that we're Jewish?", to which Grandpa replied, "to be Jewish is to suffer."
So my grandfather says you're suffering. Are you calling him a liar?
Well, you are a Jewish parent, aren't you?
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