More Greek than a salad with olives and feta...

In more, "Why didn't I ever think of that before?" news:

Olympia sits in the middle of a dense pine forest, which provides plenty of kindling for a fire. (Some ruins have wooden scaffolding to support ancient walls; these can also be set ablaze.) To protect the site from fire during the dry Greek summers, engineers had installed 50-foot metal fire towers in the hills to the north.

I found this last night, and noticed that this morning's New York Times contained the headline "Greek Government Faces Political Fallout from Fires".

I don't know why but it never occurred to me that these ancient ruins could be seriously damaged by fire. Perhaps, because they have been there so long they have the quality of being indestructable. Incidentally the limestone does not run the risk of burning, but the heat can cause crumbling, which is why the concern.

and since I must be on a Greek kick of some sort:
Once a common possession of the well educated, classical knowledge now bobs like flotsam amid the wreckage wrought by a century of educational scuttling.

Now I must confess, I am a geek and I have a love of antiquity. A Classics major however, would have been even less marketable than my current English degree.

So, I certainly see the value in knowing this stuff, but I hate it when people try to say the world is not as good a place because more people aren't learning Latin and reading Aristotle.

Would the world be much cooler? Yes.
Is Aristotle still relevant? Yes.
Is society crumbling because few people are reading him? No.

In short don't tell me what I need to know to be educated, (Harold Bloom!) just educate me. The rest, I believe, will fall into place.