"Lysistrata" — the ancient Greek play about women withholding sex to stop a war — made the news twice this week.

1. Withdrawing from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the setting of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Leadership Forum, Lincoln Chafee said: "Since today is all about women’s leadership it reminds me of one of my favorite Greek plays; Lysistrata, a comedy from about 400 BCE by Aristophanes. In that play, a group of women, fed up with the war mongering of their husbands, agree to withhold their favors until peace returns. And it worked!"

2. Spike Lee is squabbling with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The subject is Lee's new movie, "Chi-Raq," which, Hollywood Reporter tells us, "is an update of the classical Greek play Lysistrata and stars Teyonah Parris as a woman who protests the city's black-on-black gun violence."

Here's the full text of the play at Project Gutenberg, which flaunts this jaunty frontispiece:



ADDED: Here's a full set of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations for "Lysistrata." They're even jauntier. NSFW.

"To top it off, in the seventh inning, a trumpeter stood on the sidewalk at Waveland and Sheffield and played 'Taps.'"

"Musical arrangements — as well as the body language of dejected fans — took queues from a scoreboard that went lopsided early and completed a four-game Mets sweep of the Cubs..."

Cubs fan Scott Jastram... got a tear in his eye when, as the game concluded, fans chanted: “Let’s go Cubbies!” “I’d say 70 percent of the fans stayed to the end,” said Jastram, 48, who attended the game with Tom Pirone, a pal from New York who supports the Mets.

“I just texted a buddy back in Queens: ‘Classiest fans I’ve ever been around,’ ” Pirone said after the game.

"Rahm Emanuel reaps the whirlwind of Democratic rule."

It's a column by George Will. I don't know why Meade just IM'd me the link to this... maybe because we've been following Rahm Emanuel and once had the notion he'd emerge as the Democratic nominee for President in 2016, but things haven't gone so swimmingly.

It is not Emanuel’s fault that Chicago’s three largest employers, after the federal government, are the public school system, the city government and Cook County’s government...

Emanuel’s task — condign punishment for any Democrat — is to salvage the blue model by making the private sector dynamic enough to generate tax revenues sufficient to fund improvident public contracts and their pension promises. ...

Maybe it's Meade's fascination with George Will. I mean, "condign"... who talks like that?!

Later in Will's column:

The world is indeed wonderfully out of joint when Emanuel, the embodiment of pugnacious progressivism, is proud, and properly so, of the booming market for downtown residences.

The man is poet.

"Out of joint" is a phrase from "Hamlet":

The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

"Wonderfully" is used by Will — not Will Shakespeare, George Will — as just another intensifier like "very" or "really." I think! As in: My dislocated shoulder is wonderfully painful.

Obama's wan approval of the Cubs.

Congrats @Cubs - even @whitesox fans are rooting for you!

— President Obama (@POTUS) October 14, 2015

Wow. I can't believe a Chicagoan isn't thrilled about the Cubs. Once your favorite team is eliminated, don't you just lock on to a post-season team to love? We've adopted the Cubs from up here in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin normally regards Chicago as the enemy. By "we," I mean, Meade and me. I haven't talked to everyone. I have heard at least one person say that the Cubs winning is shaking up his world. The Cubs are supposed to be ever the losers. I'd thought, that's why it's so cool when they win at long last. (Did you notice the sign in the crowd last night that read "Party like it's 1908?" (1908 was the last time the Cubs won the World Series.)) But apparently some people want the Cubs to retain their lovable-loser vibe. It's a theme in the music of the Midwest.