I am Sparticus!

So, as promiced, here is what my friends had to say about the link:

Sonje: Guy modded car to look like chariot with horse. or was it a motorcycle.. i can't tell. 
Me: Yea. I would totally do that.
Don: You mean, that wasn't you?
Amanda: I think you should go for it. I'll bet Phil would help.Amanda... 
Me: Dear Amanda... You forgot to carry the wife in your equations.
Sonje: If Phil does it for free, and she doesn't have to ride, and you wear a disguise, then what's the problem?
Amanda: I'm sure there's room in that chariot for two. She could go with a whole Boudicca outfit....it'd be great.
Summer: I call event manager. Tickets start at $45. Somebody come up with some merch?
Don: I can just see her standing on the curb, shouting, "Remember, thou art mortal!" at you as you go by.

Catiline chronotes

·    66 BCE—Cataline returns to Rome from Africa

o   First Cataline conspiracy

·        Summer 64—Cicero defeats Cataline for the consulship

·        1 Jan 63—Cicero enters office

o   Economic crisis with Pompy’s war in the East

o   Land reform proposed

§  The “Ten Kings”

·        Spring 63—Cicero proposes raising penalties for election fraud and bribery

o   Second plot begins

·        Summer 63—Cicero informed of plot by Terentia

o   Denounces Cataline in the senate

o   Cataline loses election for consol and widens the plot from just a political party to an outright coup

·        20 October 63—Crassus betrays the plot to Cicero

o   Manlius’s revolt in the countryside

·        6 November 63—Cataline calls meeting of the conspirators

o   Actually makes a list of those to die and how to burn the city

·        8 November 63—Cicero denounces Cataline AGAIN

o   Cataline exiled—Goes to Manlius

§  Both declared public enemies

·        2 December 63—Remaning conspirators trapped in a manufactured plot

·        3 December 63—Five remaining conspirators executed

o   “They have lived!”

o   Cicero declared Pater Patriae

·        January 62—Forces of Marcus Antonius (senior) overwhelm Cataline and Manlius

                                              

Annotated bibliography

I have been getting a lot of questions about what the heck an annotated bibliography looks like.  I will be passing out examples tomorrow, but here is a sample from a paper I wrote some years ago in graduate school:

McGinn, Bernard.  “Introduction: John’s Apocalypse and the Apocalyptic Mentality.”  In The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn, pp. 3-19.  Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Bernard McGinn’s chapter provides the reader with a three-fold introduction to the book.  First, McGinn deals with the Jewish eschatological tradition of the Second Temple period that John emerges from.  He describes how most Jewish Apocalypses fall into either a vertical (cosmic) or horizontal (historic/temporal) revelatory models.  Second, McGinn describes how John both couches himself in and breaks from this tradition.  Third, how John and his work have been received and analyzed.  McGinn details the three major modes of apocalyptic exegesis in the middle ages: linear-prophetic (details history between John and the End), non-linear theological treatise favored by Augustine, and the cyclic or repetitive (a series of complex and repetitive patterns before the End) forwarded by Joachim of Fiore.  McGinn closes on the note that these were an attempt to domesticate the Apocalypse to fit a more spiritual model of the Early Church.

Extra credit and how to find it

Many students come to me frustrated with my standing extra credit offer or unacceptable material.  Here's an easy way to find some: Keep up with the news.  E.g. (exempla gratis just in case you were curious) It's no secret that National Public Radio is my chosen news source, but you do not need to be an info junkie like me.  Here are two blog posts/articles posted to my Facebook feed in the last two weeks.  I didn't even have to listen!

Boo!  Chinese and European Monsters...

Linnaeus Shlinnaeus!

So, you could follow Fox, CNN, NBC, Reuters or any other reputable news source and find stuff.  Even if you don't use Facebook, you could just check every day for a news item.  Another hint I'll give you is that these kinds of articles will be small, and usually off to the side instead of being the big splashy article you see when you first load the page.

Closer to home is the free weekly Independent.  Here is the political cartoon from this week, oh look!  A reference to Hannibal crossing the Alps.  So, believe me, it's out there.

Homework for 2 November, 2010

Latin 1--Design your own Roman style tomb and remember to flip the Death figure with the Trickster figure on your project.

Latin 2--Scale wall cheat sheet.

Homework for 1 November, 2010

Latin 1--Organize your notes on the fourteen dii consentes!
Also, flip the due dates for the Trickster and Death figures in your project outlines.

Latin 2--What would you have for a cheat-sheet on the wall?  Third period has nouns, fifth has verbs.

Remember, you have one week from quiz passback to turn in corrections...  This could save a lot of grief later on for some.

Homework for 26 October, 2010

First things first, the homework for tonight:
~Latin 1--Work on your second draft and make sure your notes are ready to present tomorrow
~Latin 2--Have a tentative title in mind
~Latin 3--

And now to two questions from the afternoon Latin 2s.  First, Dante's question about 'How can we really know what the chicken-fried-steak is really going on in history if half the stuff doesn't exist anymore and the other half is potentially miss-copied.  To wit, I present a blog entry dated 10 November, 2007 when I was still in Scotland.
"Last night I was talking to the Gypsy [my then soon-to-be fiancee] and I was complaining about how hard it is to find the sources I want. She asked a simple, innocuous question and it got me thinking; roughly it was "what is it, exactly, that you do when you are working?"

And NPR came to my rescue. Couple days back, there was an interesting story on Morning Edition where David Greene went back to a two people who had encounters with Democratic candidates in Iowa. One was a waitress and met Hillary Clinton while on shift; she mentioned that Clinton's campaign people had not left a tip that day. Fast forward through the hyper-inflated importance of the blogosphere and other pundits and you've the brewings of a fairly acrimonious story. Bear with me, this background is important. Yesterday, after watching the story take on a life of it's own, Morning Edition brought David Greene back on to try and iron out the kinks in the story. Bottom line is that the Clinton campaign said they had left a tip, $100.00 via credit card, and produced the receipts to prove it.

Now, let us say you are looking to write a chapter or article on this and it's some hundred plus years from now. But through negligence at NPR, the original story has been deleted; you've only the second story. You may or may not have access to some of the internet chatter but what you really want are the statements made by the Clinton campaign and those receipts as well as, if possible, corresponding receipts from the restaurant. What you have to do is, first, read as much of the secondary lit you can find on the Democratic primary elections of 2007/08 and see if anyone has identified these documents or other documents you've not thought of. If they have, great! You can go to that library, archive, whatever and look at them yourself. If not... Well, if it wasn't hairy enough we're about to move into Mammoth territory.

Let's just take the receipts produced by the Clinton campaign. They produced photocopies for NPR. Right there, you've two possible and identical documents. You also know that, receipts in this period, being what they are and how they are made, were not designed to be archived and will fade over time so you can be pretty confident you're not going to be looking for the originals. The photocopies then. Were they faxed? If so, there will be a copy with NPR and with the Clinton campaign. NPR’s archive was destroyed in the great Zombie Uprising of 2082 and there is little chance that document survived. Now, where are the Clinton records?

It is irrelevant whether or not Clinton actually won her bid here, it does not really change how you’re looking. If she did, it’ll probably be in her presidential library, if not, it’ll be lodged with the rest of her campaign documents. Right? No.

Library of Congress, Bill Clinton Presidential Library, some of her documents are held by her alma mater Wellesley College which, I might add, is notorious for its hard to access archives. Could they be in Iowa’s state archives, some archive of American elections established later.

You have to rely on your own body of knowledge, the knowledge of colleagues, advisers and maybe even someone you don't actually know but met at a conference and have been corresponding with professionally. Maybe, if you're very lucky, some of these archives have been indexed well, or not, and there is a list of what is there. More often than not, however, these lists will contain entries like "Documents; Clinton primary campaign; March 2007-November 2007." Are they in there? Who knows, no one has touched it in thirty years and you've got to go and find out unless you've built a rapport with that library, or a single archivist within it, who will go and check for you.

(gasp, pant wheeze) And that's just for one, single, blessedly damned piece of paper! And the above also assumes the document is A) Intact, B) Undamaged and C) Legible.

So, the long and the short of it is that I spend quite a bit of time in the library very, very frustrated. ;)"

Ok, so that was Dante's question and to answer Ian's question on 'Why six minutes and forty seconds?'  An article on pecha-kucha.