Saturday, May 23, 2009

random lines of poetry


I woke up early this morning around 6:30 thanks to Claritin-induced sleep deprivation. I started hacking on server code for automatically building "tables of contents" for very large database tables. I'm using a bunch of Yeats poems, and The Iliad as sample rows in the database. It makes debugging a lot more fun when the data is interesting. It's also a great way to read random lines of poetry. Here is a great stanza from the Iliad:

Generations of men are like the leaves.
In winter, winds blow them down to earth,
but then, when spring season comes again,
budding wood grows more. And so with men--
one generation grows, another dies away. (Iliad 6.181-5)



Did you know the phrase "another one bites the dust" is lifted from the Iliad?

"
Grant that my sword may pierce the shirt of Hector about his heart, and that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying round him."