Free Republic

Witches have had a long and elaborate history, even back to ancient Greece. Thanks to Homer and his epic adventure tale the Odyssey, we met Circe, who has often been identified as the first witch in Greek mythology. Circe was one of the most dangerous women a man could come across. She was known for seducing men, luring them to her island, and never letting them go. When men, driven mad by their desire to touch her, visited the island, she caught them off guard and used a spell to transform them into pigs, trapping them forever in their ignominious...

A soldier with broken time as a result of his love of bourbon whiskey could soon become the third man to hold the rank of General of the Armies. The proposed fiscal 2023 James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act would let President Joe Biden posthumously promote Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who retired with the rank of General of the Army, to General of the Armies -- a rank only held by Gen. George Washington, posthumously, and Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing of World War I fame. Grant became the country's first four-star general in 1866. For the past year,...

In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described...

The Ulysses Group says it has real-time access to 15 billion cars worldwide.. They monitor cars through GPS and sensors on equipment such as airbags.. The data may be from car makers and through manufacturers of individual parts.. The Ulysses Group has strong ties to the U.S. military and promotes its capability.. .... A South Carolina-based surveillance firm that has sold services to the U.S. military is promoting its ability to provide real-time location information about 15 billion cars every month. The company, called The Ulysses Group, says it can monitor vehicles in every country in the world, except North...

A 16-year-old Kansas boy will soon earn his high school diploma - and a few days later he'll travel to Harvard to collect his bachelor's degree. Ulysses High School senior Braxton Moral will attend both commencement ceremonies in May, becoming the only student to successfully pursue a four-year high school degree and a bachelor's degree from Harvard at the same time, The Hutchinson News reported .

Come, my friends, tis not too late to seek a newer world...  Some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men who strove with Gods. These immortal words from Alfred Lord Tennyson's masterpiece poem, Ulysses, echo today's epic struggle to save our country from corruption and make America great again. Ulysses (or Odysseus in Greek) was, of course, the hero and conqueror of the Trojan War that Homer wrote about in his Iliad tale of Greek mythology. Tennyson's Ulysses poem, however, is not about the Trojan War at all.  Rather it's about Ulysses' life as an...

I'm well into my 70s and checking off an item on my bucket list is finally getting around to reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It was never assigned reading in high school or college (I went to a Christian school, which may be one of the reasons). So, at my advanced age, I'm attempting at long last to tackle this work.I have a long attention span and am not easily bored nor discouraged. I've read long, involved books and have found most of them gripping, such as The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Faust by Goethe and Crime and Punishment...

Have you ever lied about reading a book? Maybe you didn’t want to seem stupid in front of someone you respected. Maybe you rationalized it by reasoning that you had a familiarity with the book, or knew who the author was, or what the story was about, or had glanced at its Wikipedia page. Or maybe you had tried to read the book, even bought it and set it by your bed for months unopened, hoping that it would impart what was in it merely via proximity (if that worked, please email me).

Milo O’Shea, an Irish character actor — recognizable by his black bushy eyebrows, tumble of white hair and impish smile — whose films included “Ulysses,” “Barbarella” and “The Verdict,” died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 86.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The Ulysses solar probe will cease operations around July 1 after nearly 18 years in outer space, NASA announced Thursday. The U.S.-European spacecraft has been suffering from a decline in its plutonium power for some time. Despite conservation measures by ground controllers, the power has dwindled to the point where thruster fuel soon will freeze up. Ulysses already has surpassed its expected lifetime by almost four times, traveling 5.4 billion miles since its launch aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1990. "When the last bits of data finally arrive, it surely will be tough to say goodbye,"...

Artist concept of Ulysses making a north polar pass. (Credit: NASA/JPL) The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a rare flyby of the sun's north pole. Unlike any other spacecraft, Ulysses is able to sample winds at the sun's poles, which are difficult to study from Earth. Ulysses has flown over the sun's poles three times before, in 1994-95, 2000-01 and 2007. Last week, solar physicists announced the first indications of a new solar cycle. Visiting the pole at this time may lead to new insights about solar activity. "This is a wonderful opportunity to examine the sun's north pole within...

During solar maximum, when the Sun's activity is at a peak in its 11 year cycle, the polarity of its magnetic field changes: the north pole takes on the polarity of the south pole and vice versa. Now, for the first time ever, a spacecraft has witnessed this process from a front-row seat high above the Sun's south pole... Andre Balogh, from Imperial College, London, who is Principal Investigator for the Ulysses magnetometer, says: ..."Clearly, a struggle is going on in the Sun's magnetic field, with freshly emerging new polarity regions racing towards the polar regions, encountering the slowly decaying...

Like many I was glued to the television in the days following the tragic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. As it happened, I tended to tune to FOX. In those first days when FOX finally started to insert commercial breaks, they introduced those breaks with a series of inspirational quotes. One blurb they used time and time again was: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. – Alfred Lord Tennyson” Most will recognize this as the last line of Tennyson’s masterful work “Ulysses.” The full thought is “. . . . and tho' we are ...