The specific link doesn't seem to work, but in her last post on August 6th, Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk refers to "misogynistic and zenophobic hatred and violence". Fear of foreigners is 'xenophobia', with an X. Zenophobia would be 'fear of Zeno', very rare outside philosophy departments. Even inside them, it could mean fear of Zeno of Elea, who proved (or 'proved') that motion is impossible using the parable of Achilles and the Tortoise, or Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Personally, I can see being a little queasy about either or both, but a full-blown phobia is overdoing it.

Zeno is one of the few ancient author names that always has a qualifier attached, since the two Zenos are equally famous, or close enough to cause confusion. The only similar name I can think of offhand is Apollonius: to distinguish them, the Hellenistic epic poet is generally called Apollonius of Rhodes (or Apollonius Rhodius), the mathematician who wrote on conic sections Apollonius of Perga (or Perge). There are actually quite a few other Zenos and Apollonii, but two of each are distinctly more famous than the rest.

Nomenclatural ambiguity affects Roman authors in a different way. Most Romans had three names, which should have reduced the possibilities for confusion. The first (praenomen) was the personal name, like a modern first name, the second (nomen) the family or clan name, and the third (cognomen) was used to distinguish branches of the same family. Thus Marcus Tullius Cicero and Quintus Tullius Cicero were brothers, members of the Cicero branch of the Tullius family, while Titus Livius (the historian Livy) only had two names, since he came from a small town where there were only a few other Livii. The same cognomen was routinely used in more than one family, so both nomen and cognomen might be needed to avoid confusion. When the number of people with the same nomen and cognomen grew too large, a father could give his sons new cognomina, thus starting new subfamilies of the greater clan.

This brings us back to the famous names. Scholars refer to eminent Romans by nomen or cognomen, whichever is more distinctive. Some have two uncommon names, so Publius Vergilius Maro could be either Vergil or Maro, Publius Ovidius Naso either Ovid or Naso, and Marcus Tullius Cicero either Tully or Cicero. For the last few centuries, they have been Vergil (or Virgil), Ovid, and Cicero, respectively, but older books often called them by the other names, especially Tully.

Some authors had less distinctive names. The two Varros are usually called by their hometowns, like the Greeks already mentioned. Marcus Terentius Varro ('Varro of Reate') was an antiquarian polymath and satirist, Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus ('Varro of Atax') an epic poet, who, as it happens, did a Latin version of Apollonius of Rhodes' epic on Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece, the Argonautica. Too bad very little of either's works survives. On the other hand, Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus) and Martial (Gaius Valerius Martialis) are always called by their cognomina, since they have the same nomen (and were therefore distant cousins), while Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) and the satirist Persius (Aules Persius Flaccus) are called by their nomina, since they have the same cognomen. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Poor Gaius Valerius Flaccus, who wrote yet another Argonautica, is always called Valerius Flaccus, because it's the only way to tell the difference between him and the various other Valerii and Flacci.

Perhaps I'd better stop here: I think I've gone over my pedantry quota for the day.

A few days ago, Power Line reported on a potential First Lady's unusual taste in sandwiches:

On their way to a late appearance in Dubuque, Iowa, Kerry and his wife stopped at Baumgartner's tavern in Monroe, Wis., where Teresa Heinz Kerry ordered a Limburger cheese sandwich with raw onions and mustard on rye bread.

Limburger is well-known to cartoon-watchers as the foulest-smelling cheese know to man, which makes it an unusually pungent choice for someone in the middle of a political campaign. Raw onions don't exactly help when you're meeting new people by the hundreds and trying to get them to like you and your husband. There seem to be only three possibilities to explain THK's choice of sandwiches:

1. Billionaires have access to unusually effective brands of toothpaste and mouthwash, and perhaps to other oral hygiene technology unknown to ordinary mortals.
2. She wasn't planning on getting close to -- much less kissing, on the cheeks or elsewhere -- any other human being that day.
3. She just didn't care who might be offended, as long as she could eat what she wanted. Who would dare criticize the breath of a billionaire and potential First Lady? (Other than pseudonymous bloggers, I mean.)

I once bought a hunk of Limburger in Bowling Green, Ohio, where the cheese selection was severely limited. It was the only kind the grocery store had that I hadn't already tried. Knowing that Gorgonzola is like Blue cheese squared, I foolishly imagined that Limburger would be something like Gorgonzola squared or even cubed, that is, an extremely concentrated version of an otherwise acceptable flavor, and was looking forward to trying it. When I got home and opened the package I learned that the problem with Limburger is not the quantity of the flavor so much as its quality. It smelled like something you might find between your toes after you had been bathless for a week and dead for three days after that, "truly, absolutely and irrevocably foul", as a this amusing page puts it. I will gladly eat almost any kind of cheese, including St. Felicien, whose bright orange mold looks exactly the same as the stuff growing in the corners of the bathtub in my 4th-to-last apartment, but I had to throw the Limburger away -- wrapping it in several resealable baggies first. My kitchen still stank for days afterwards. And I didn't even have onions with mine.

Thanks to a post by Tacitus on Red State, I've finally seen the picture of Glenn Reynolds in his Celebrate-Diversity-by-Buying-All-Kinds-of-Guns T-shirt -- the one that has Dumb and Dumber (Atrios and Steve Gilliard) all riled up. Here is a copy:

(Blogspot links often don't work and I prefer not to link to Atrios or Gilliard, but their posts are dated 8/3 at 7:22 PM and 8/4 at 12:00:12 AM, respectively.)

Gilliard quotes Atrios with approval:

The colors of the caption are commonly used pan-African colors: red, yellow, and greeen.

Both claim that the supposed color scheme represents a symbolic urge to kill black people. Of course, neither of these bozos seems to have noticed that the picture, which Gilliard posts on his blog, does not in fact have a red, yellow, and green (or 'greeen') caption. The colors are white ('celebrate') and yellow ('diversity'), and the combination of white and yellow has nothing to do with Africa.

Press 'More' to see the sinister secret meaning of these two colors.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine notes that one of the proposed new internet domain names is .blogs. He's against, as am I, but it did make me think. Consider these three facts:

1. The internet is looking to add more domains to relieve nomenclatural congestion.
2. One reason for the congestion is the huge percentage of crap on the internet.
3. European soccer leagues ('football', if you prefer) periodically promote the best minor-league teams to the majors, and demote or 'relegate' the worst major-league teams to the minors.

Putting these three facts together, I wonder whether we need a new .crap domain, with some method of relegating the worst websites to it, so they won't keep cluttering up .com, .net, .org, .edu, and the various national domains. I don't imagine many site-owners would move voluntarily.

Note: I'm kidding, though it is fun to think of candidates for relegation.