State Your Privations

When Homer and his pals wanted to remember long epics without the benefit of a Psion organiser, they used a sort of low-technology word-processing. Zeus's wife Hera was always cow-eyed, Odysseus was always wily, and the sea was always wine-dark. From which we deduce that pollution has done wonders to the hue of the Mediterranean, or that the guys were drinking some murkily noxious home-brew while on their extended vacation at that prototype Club Med on the beaches of Troy. Today, such epithets