A Lost Classic - Aeschylus' Proteus - Reimagined From Homer

I spent the night reading Aeschylus' Eumenides, Oresteia part 3. What a letdown. I guess the lost 4th play Proteus was the thing to catch the king.

I googled "Aeschylus Proteus" yesterday afternoon, but for once Homer's Odyssey is a better bet than the world wide web. Menelaus tells Telemachus the story directly, and I can easily imagine how Aeschylus would change it.

Homer brings Menelaus home for a tragic grief scene. In the satire play, Aeschyus would make Menelaus visit Athens. Menelaus, deluded by Proteus to imagine Athens to be his native Argos, shows how absurdly pompous Athenian leaders are in comparison with the returning hero. Then he meets Orestes his nephew, still living in Athens, now a sophist and teacher of youth, who tells him the tragic tale, and ends the four plays on a bizarre note of Menelaus realizing that he has got everything wrong. The home coming hero returns to the wrong home.

Monkey Business Time Management

Inspired by the efforts of GTD (Getting Things Done) time management cultists to mucho laughter, I wrote a pisstake time management system and surprised myself by learning something new.

Well, a LOT new.

I call it Monkey Business. I discovered it in three parts:

Just playing around for fun, I wrote an expose and critique of time management's implicit hidden Protestantism.

Then I got curious what time management would look like without the crap religiocultural baggage.

So I created a time management process with several new features and a crapload of benefits. My system needed:

- Explicitly stated values.
- Verifiable, testable propositions.
- Complete scaleability from a intellectually disabled child to a strong artificial intelligence.
- Viability in the context of the known facts about human nature.

Once I created it, which basically involved applying the Socratic method to the past time management systems, I had before my eyes the first time management system based firmly in the known fact of human nature, and it revealed to me a rather startling discovery:

I had accidentally discovered a revolutionary new time management paradigm firmly based on the explicit and demonstable values of evolutionary and developmental psychology.

The Monkey Business Time Management Paradigm (chuckles to self) proposes the following:

1. Time management without long inactive periods of reflection is just monkeying around.

2. Just try to unleash monkey business - which is to say, wild playful joyous creative silly hyperproductive innovative work - try to unleash monkey business WITHOUT long inactive periods of reflection and you will bust like a helium balloon in a needle factory. You will go mad, crack up, burn out, fall away. You will suffer long teeth and pointy ears and all manner of high strangeness.

I am quite serious. Monkey Business appears to be the genuine voodoo. After a bit more reflection and playing around I will put it up here and see how it goes.