Accordion, Anitra, Jenn, Emily, Michelle, and Erinn. Tap to view at full size.
Last night, Anitra and I were joined by our just-on-the-other-block neighbor Jenn, and local friends Emily, Erinn, and Michelle on Southern Brewing’s lovely patio, which Erinn has cleverly described as “Mr. Miyagi’s yard, if he’d opened a bar instead of a car lot.” It’s an open, yet comfy space, surrounded by a wooden fence for Daniel-san to paint, and lots of palm and bamboo. It’s one of the many reasons I love living in Seminole Heights.
Every Tuesday from about 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., the Seminole Heights locals hold the “Tuesday Tipplers” event, where we gather at Southern Brewing and Winery to have some good beer, good food, and most important, good company.
Tuesday night is Locals Night, which means that if you can prove that you live in a local ZIP code (33602, 33603, 33604, and 33605), you get a free beer with a purchase of a beer. Combined with happy hour, this turns into a really good deal.
Red Hat BBQ provides the food on Tuesday, and their ribs are excellent. They even have vegetarian options, such as vegetarian “ribs”, and their collards are cooked without meat to flavor them, yet are still tasty.
Sure, they’re not for any kind of home repair, but anything that lets me develop a new, totally badass skill for under $25 is a home improvement, right?
The photo above should give you some clues. We’ve got a lot of green in our front yard and thought it could be improved with a little more color. We’re starting off nice and easy with a small assortment of plants and herbs. We’ll see if they thrive, after which we’ll add to their number.
For a guy from a party whose members talk a lot about so-called “Western Civilization”, Florida Rep. Anthony Sabatini (Republican member of the Florida House of Respresentatives, representing Lake County, just west of Orlando) seems happy to talk about it while knowing very little about it.
If Socrates was out philosophizing in American society today, he would be cancelled real quick
— Rep. Anthony Sabatini (@AnthonySabatini) May 20, 2021
His understanding of who Socrates was doesn’t seem to be any deeper that of Bill S. Preston and Theodore “Ted” Logan…
…and it’s quite likely that he doesn’t know that Socrates was, in fact, “cancelled”.
WHAT?! Socrates was cancelled?
Yup, and it was all written up by his student, whose name you should also have heard of: Plato.
If you ever go to the “Met” in New York, you can see what happened to Socrates in Jacques Louis David’s painting, The Death of Socrates, pictured below:
Let me give you the twenty-second version of what happened.
In his philosophizing, Socrates was a social and moral critic of his native Athens (in his time, your allegiance was to a city, not a nation), arguing against the city’s sociopolitical status quo and its “might makes right” ethos.
As a result, he was tried and sentenced to death for the crimes of:
Corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, and
Impiety, or more accurately, “not believing in the gods of the state”.
For his sentence, he was made to drink hemlock.
Well, that’s a really obscure historical footnote, right?
In case you think this is an obscure historical footnote, let me assure you that IT IS NOT. Socrates is pretty much the grandaddy of Western philosophy. His life, and especially his death, are a core part of the Western canon.
In fact, the story of Socrates’ “cancellation” is at least well-known enough for Steve Martin to have turned it into a skit in his 1980 TV special, Comedy is Not Funny (which may seem like a typical Adult Swim routine to today’s audiences, but was mind-blowingly weird back then):
Okay, okay. So an ignorant-pretending-to-be-erudite tweet is the one dumb public thing that Rep. Sabatini did, right?
and his receiving $7,500 in legal fees from Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector of Florida’s Seminole County, who was recently indicted on 33 charges, including 33 criminal counts, including theft, stalking, sex trafficking, cryptocurrency fraud, and Small Business Administration loan fraud.
Last night, Anitra and I were joined by our just-on-the-other-block neighbor Jenn, and local friends Emily, Erinn, and Michelle on Southern Brewing’s lovely patio, which Erinn has cleverly described as “Mr. Miyagi’s yard, if he’d opened a bar instead of a car lot.” It’s an open, yet comfy space, surrounded by a wooden fence for Daniel-san to paint, and lots of palm and bamboo. It’s one of the many reasons I love living in Seminole Heights.
