Wednesday, August 21, 2002 6:03 PM

Is there a doctored greek in the house?

At the end of my very last Blarticle (I have come to call these little exercises in mind baloney, Blog Articles or (see above incautious appellation) for short, I took a great deal of time to find the correct Greek letters to write down an aphorism from Aristotle, just so I could look like a big deal guy who can read Greek in its most ancient and Attic form. I can’t, at least I can’t much more than that phrase from Aristotle and Sing Goddess, the wrath of Achilles… After the tedious work of picking the letters one by one from the Insert>Symbol menu in this version of Word office, I copied the whole blarticle and pasted it to the Posting section of my dot blogger dot com. It looked beautiful so I passed it on to dub dub dub the Blog. Went to sleep a satisfied smile on my face.

Upon awakening, middle of the night, fire in my belly, my brain unbalanced, I hastened virtually to the web page. My horror was full realized when I looked at my last beautiful reference. There were, instead of those crisp, full bodied, sensuous Greek letters, a hodge podge of German-English looking symbols with umlauts and grave accents far too horrible to contemplate. Especially at about 2 Ayem. ¼ Öéëüò åòôéí Üëëïò áìôïò.

I give you now the English letter version of Aristotle’s beautiful Greek, “ha philos estin allos autos.” Uninspiring, no? Even less inspiring is the translation. The friend is like another self. Man, how can you generate mystery and wonder with stuff like that?

So I called Dean today, who by the way knows the Bishop, but I’ll let him tell you that eye popping tale, and really he tried to help but through my obstinate opacity I still can’t figure how to make the Blog sing Greek, or at least not that easily. It has to do with Unicode and when I am able to understand the whole business, hell I might be writing in Arabic or Hindu or maybe even Christian HellsaPoppin Tongues. Of course, I will have to watch out for ever vigilant, lurking Home Land Security.

“Bailiff read the charge!”

“Mr. Coluccio of his own free will and accord, with malice aforethought and behind mast has transmitted the works of Aristotle in a foreign looking alphabet via hypertext protocol. Aristotle as you know taught Alexander the Great who afterwards conquered Persia which is now in the hands of some Ayatollah or other.

“Guilty as charged.”

And off I’ll go in manacles to write my great prison book. Say, maybe I’ll become a famous religio/political martyr and will eventually end up on prime time TV hawking prison garb. Less likely things have happened here in America. Little pink houses for you an’ me!

There is no real lesson (and far less reason) here. Just my bitter disappointment. I made an attempt (albeit lame, silly and of no consequence) to show a certain je ne sait quois (See you can write French with little trouble) (Pronounced for those in the know like jin say kwa, Was that Chinese? Nope you can’t write Chinese either), a small smattering of …I guess… intellect.

No wonder I stumbled!