The Iliad has many central heroes: Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Diomedes, Achilles, Priam, Hector, Paris, the list goes on. Then there are hundreds of named characters who get introduced in the Catalogue of the Ships or the Trojan Battle Order , and then meet a quick death at the hands of a central hero.

Pandarus is a character that falls between these two extremes. He’s a nobleman fighting on the side of Troy who we’re first introduced to in the Trojan Battle Order of Book II. …

As an: engineer at a large tech company how might the engineering work I propose get implemented?

Individual Contributor (IC) Engineers are the experts of the systems they develop and operate. They often propose what I’m calling IC Initiatives: units of work that take typically one to four weeks to complete, generally focused on improving the technical quality of the system. Examples include upgrading major versions of languages and libraries, significant code refactoring to reduce …

I shall die one day I suppose
In this old Turkish house I inhabit:
A ragged banana-leaf outside and here
On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose.

Perhaps a single pining mandolin
Throbs where cicadas have quarried
To the heart of all misgivings and there
Scratches on silence like a pet locked in.

Will I be more or less dead
Than the village in memory’s dispersing
Springs, or in some cloud of witness see,
Looking back, the selfsame road ahead?

By the moist clay of a woman’s wanting, …