Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River by Peter Heller

Yeesh, I have got to stop reading books about the Himalayas, they're packed with Classical references and items of niftyness to a Latin teacher.

Take, for example, Hell or High Water. Picked it up for the rip-roar-white-water adventure and then the guy had to go and make me THINK! How dare he. I mean, sure, I expect the odd reference to Scylla and Charybdis (p. 132) and then to Leda (p. 176), specifically, a (really freaking disturbing) poem by Yeats. But then, he has the following:

Modern-day adventurers do much of what they do in creation of story. The tales pour out at the fire; they are savored and added to.  One man's episode becomes part of another's repertoire, and the stories multiply and intertwine.  It seemed like a wonderful, archaic way to love.  Who lives like that anymore?  Hollywood subsumes more and more of that part our consciousness and lures us into the grey smog of routine, of consuming and producing, of a mass-produced narrative.  We need adventurers to create new and vibrant stories.  It's the blood of our humanity...   
He died to save us from a humdrum life... (p. 187-188)

Rag and Bone

I read weird books.  Picked up Rag and Bone, a book about relics, by Peter Manseau the other day and in the introduction, he makes an interesting point:

"Later, when I thought back on this first image of my daughter through the dark glass [ultrasound], I was surprised as anyone would have been that it called to mind Saint Anthony and all the other pieces of saints I had seen.  Prhaps it was a renewed interest in all that is implied by the word miracle; or perhaps it was the experience of seeing the component parts of a human being in a state of existence that was somewhere in between, not fully in this world and not fully out of it.  People are drawn to relics, I realized, because they make explicit what we all know in our bones: that our bodies tell stories; that the transformation offered by faith is not just about, as the Gospels put it, the "word made flesh," but the flesh made word.  Behind the glass of every reliquary is a life story told in still frame.  That was what I saw on the ultrasound screen as well.  What we were, what we will become, all there behind the glass." (pgs. 15-16)

Interesting.  What do you think about his idea?  Are stories, in our bones?

Submitted for your approval...

My SOAR got derailed this morning with, quite possibly, one of the most interesting impromptu mini-seminar sessions I've had this year.  I was reading the news and came across this article and, as I am wont to do, I shared it with my students for their opinion.  This time, I asked them whether or not (in their expert opinion) this weapon was the logical progression of firearms--as designed by Gen X/Y, the Video-Game Generation, etc--or is it a subtle manipulation of that demographic?  We went to the company's website for more info...

The students put forward the following:

1. The display of the scope, as well as the view you get when you look at it, is (in their words) "the same" as Call of Duty.

2. The company's logo is remarkably similar to one of the more renowned (I am informed) gaming clans--FaZeClan--out there.

3. The weapon itself resembles some unreal guns out there, the game Gears of War was cited, er, sighted...  Not sure what the proper terminology versus pun would be here.

And so, the question continues to beg.  

Some testing reminders

1. Remember that no cell phones or other electronics which connect to the outside world are allowed in the testing environment: leave them in your lockers or, if you prefer, I have the ever-so-handy lock-box on my wall.  
2. Leave your backpacks and bags behind.  For all these tests, you need a pencil and little else, so skip the weight and travel light.
3. Bring a book: as a faculty we have decided that free-reading books are acceptable following tests.  Yay!  
4. I will be handing out the note-cards you are allowed on the exams as and when I see students through the day.  If you check out at noon, make sure you swing by my room to get one. 

Togaeque stolae

Links to toga and stola how-tos:

I like this one for the diagram; I also have a vague recollection that we had the book this came out of as a child...  But no one cited the source!!!  (not that any of my students would do that)

Togaboy's website, also with a nice diagram, but what you'll probably be more interested in are all the pictures people have sent him over the years.  Good for ideas, perhaps?

A blog about toga making and, for those inclined, accessorizing!  Probably some of the most detailed instructions out there.

More food links

Some links recently found by students:

An ancient food blog; this guy not only makes the food, but will tell you what people wrote about it!

A more-or-less authentic cheesecake recipe from an...  Indian food blog?!

Another cheesecake recipie on an Indian food blog...  What's with these people; I mean, sure, contemporary cultures and all that, but...

A list of generic foods from Rome; what's nice about this list is that they tell you what early Romans would have eaten versus later imperial Romans with their massive trade routes et al.

"Iacta alea est!" (aka dicey links)

Obviously, if Julius Caesar liked a good game of dice, it was a big thing.  Augustus, too, was known to roll more than a few rounds.  The trouble, however, is that while we often have the dice and depictions of people playing dice...  A lot of the rules in the links below have been extrapolated.  So, be aware you may be finding contradictory rules.

Viking dice games which is very similar to Roman antecedents. 

A link to a pdf file with some pretty detailed rules, not on dice, but board games.

For those of you who remember playing Iactus, this is where I got the rules from.

Another dice/board combo site.

Not a lot of info on this one, but some good images and comments about how the Romans didn't have a lock on these games.

Like one of the links in the chariots post, this link is to a re-enactment forum.

While this isn't a "real" Roman dice game...  I can't help but put it in because I do like the Iris Project.

I'm not advocating actually buying this die, but they do let you zoom in on the image, which is nice. 

And speaking of images of dice, here's a bunch more!

But then again, what's the use of seeing the dice when you don't know what the actual games looked like: mosaics. 

Fooooooood!

Unlike chariot racing, people are far more willing to try recreating Roman food.  A small selection:

NOVA, a PBS show (ergo, trustworthy), with a whole smattering of recipes, explanations and info. 

Very basic recipes in some very basic formatting but directly cites the first known Roman cookbook by Marcus Gavius Apicius.

Eight recipes from a scholarly book on the subject by Patrick Faas.

FOOD NETWORK?!

More recipes from Apicius but this time, there are links to other foodie sites. 

Not a very discerning collection of recipes, covers ancient Roman, medieval and modern...  Suss it out you must...

Another collection of ancient to modern, but certainly more polished.

And finally, recipes from the Roman Colosseum, sans gladiator parts.

Chariots!

Some links to get you started on building your chariots:

Apparently, Red Bull sponsors these...

Video of a chariot race sponsored by Red Bull at Arizona State.

The website of a company in Jordan which professionally races Roman chariots.

A re-enactment society devoted to Roman recreation; usually, I discourage such websites, but since we are attempting modern recreation...  Makes sense to go to the inspired amateurs. 

An otherwise dubious source...  But they list primary sources, so what the heck?

Video of two "equine extremists."

Another dubious source with primary sources.

How close is history?

I got a bit of a shock last night from a book.  I was reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and he mentioned that the aurochs, one of the last extant megafaunae from the Ice Age, was still kicking around Britain well into the Bronze Age.

Nooo...  Surely not.  I mean, aurochs went out with mastodons, cave bears, giant elk and the rest.  Right?

Wrong.  In fact, not only are aurochs mentioned in Caesar's Gallic Wars! He uses the Latin word urus, but they are there and he describes them as being a little smaller than an elephant (by elephant, he means the smaller African forest elephant rather than the larger savannah variety).  Wow...

Ok, but aurochs' horns were prized for hunting and drinking horns, to say nothing of their desirability as an object of a hunt or venatio (animal fight) and it's reasonable to assume then that Spanish bull fights came out of this.  So, along with the European lion this must be one of those extinctions which Classical Mediterranean culture ushered along.  Right?

Um.  No.  They were still kicking around Eastern Europe as late as the thirteenth century and the last known died in 1627.

Wow...  So, let's kick into some genealogical math here.  My father was born in 1941.  For our purposes here, let us assume that my grandparents were about thirty to mid-thirties.  Follow this line of thinking back and you'll come out (roughly) with the number twelve.  Twelve generations, twelve people between myself and someone who could have seen, touched, heard (smelt?!) and been in the presence of a creature which is commonly classified as "prehistoric."  I dunno.  Twelve people back seems pretty historical, almost contemporary, to me. 

How close is your history?

Why would a Latin teacher need to know Malay?

Anyone out there speak Malay?  Perhaps you are conversant in the Jawi script of Arabic which was used to transliterate it?

No.  Really.

I was looking through some IMDB lists, looking for good movies about Rome (y'know, in case there's one I've haven't seen) and a movie from Malaysia pops up on the radar?  Clash of Empires is (according to the blurb on IMDB), "... tells the tale of the journey of Merong Mahawangsa escorting a Roman prince to wed a beautiful Chinese princess during the 2nd century."  HUH?!

Ok, I got to check this out.  Dude's name was Merong Mahawangsa, and (according to Wikipedia anyway) a legendary hero who went on to found a dynasty on the Malay Peninsula...  And he was supposedly descended from Alexander the Great (of course)...  But ROME?!

Neither the Wikipedia entry on Merong Mahawangsa nor the annals he apparently appears in are very well sourced...  If at all.  But, as I tell my students, look at the References, Further Reading and External Links sections at the bottom.  Lo! A link! A palpable link to a translation published in 1849.  Yikes.  Scholarship--to say nothing of culture--has come a long way (we hope) in 160 years. 

I guess I'll have to find out.  ;)