Okay, I concede that it's Monday. I have little to no excuse. (Actually, I do: not one but two papers. I love reading period!) But hey, Green Bay has two Monday night games next season. And my season lasts all year. (Kind of like baseball - it just won't stop, even when every event is unreasonably long and you could get to all the interesting bits in about five percent of the time.) So what follows is an unapologetically late edition of Sunday Nights on the Lam, following the theme of... no theme at all!

In semi-political news, an interesting court case has come up in Greece. Those of you vaguely conversant with queer history (or perhaps mythology?) will know that the term 'lesbian' comes from the island of Lesbos, home of the poet Sappho, who, despite the fact that very few of her works have survived to the present day, is widely considered perhaps the founding mother of lesbian poetry. (Representative sample:

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.

Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech

Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.

Not, in my opinion, the steamiest of love poems, but I guess that's enough to get you the rainbow letter in ancient Greece.) Anyway, the island continues to exist, in that persistent way that elements of founding myths do sometimes, and apparently some of the straight islanders are all upset about the term's present connotation. So a publisher from the island and various other offended citizens are suing the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece to prevent them from using the world 'lesbian,' on the grounds that being associated with the gays is so humiliating that it violates the islanders' human rights. Now there's the humanitarian crisis of the century.

For reasons I can't recall, although it's not on my usual blogroll, I was reading Boing Boing the other day and stumbled across this post about the newest frontier in what might be described as the New Yorker cartoon genre of consumer items: things that 95% of Americans, myself included, are just not cultured enough to get. Marjin van der Poll, a name I am reproducing here not because I have any idea who he is but rather because it's a sweet name, has designed a chair, of sorts: a cube of 0.04" thick steel that comes with a sledgehammer, which you use to bash the chair into any shape you like. (Or, to put it in artsier terms, you "hit and pound it into your own perfect piece of functional art.") The basic model (cube plus sledgehammer) costs $5924; for just $794 more, you can have the distinct honor of owning a chair "pre-formed" by van der Poll himself. (Who comes up with these prices, anyway?) There is also a video of the chair being customized. Sort of a modern, much more expensive, and infinitely less comfortable take on the old-fashioned art of sitting in a chair until it develops a groove the shape of your butt, I guess. I am reminded of the seventy-ninth thing that white people like: modern furniture.

I can't think of much else to add, so instead I'll just share the reason why I haven't found any actual content for this post: I've been going through Nerve's list of the 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time, a fabulous compilation that's a little SNL-heavy - but since SNL sort of dominates the genre, this is pretty fair. I'll leave you with something you might consider old, but since I haven't watched it in a while and it had me giggling tonight, I'll call it a classic: Robot Insurance.

That's all for this week's edition of Sunday Nights on the Lam. Watch out for those robots!