I had wanted to take my students to Athens, being the birthplace of philosophy and all. I changed my mind when I spoke with some of the students last semester who went to Athens on their own. It was the one trip they would not have taken if they knew then what they know now. So next month, we’re going to Sicily! More on that later. Today I discovered another reason to be glad we’re not going to Athens: cannibalism. If that doesn’t give some sense of how bad things must be there, I don’t know what would.

In other difficult-to-believe news, the last Victorian in Britain died on Friday. It’s difficult to imagine that someone who could have met Friedrich Nietzsche or Oscar Wilde among others just died. The cannibal thing is notably more difficult to imagine, however.