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From the times of the Greeks and Trojans when they sang of arms and the man
This would be the post that isn't about Arisia.
1. R.I.P. William Duell, the reason I am disproportionately fond of Andrew McNair, Congressional Custodian. He can be heard for about thirty seconds as the Messenger in the original Blitzstein production of The Threepenny Opera (1954); I noticed him among all the other character actors in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). I would see him every now and then on Law & Order and be glad he was still working.
2. Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf's Orlando. "In my attic is a box containing two of the costumes Orlando wore in the film. One day, I know my son will find them and try them on. One day—soon, I expect—my poetry-writing daughter, his twin, will pick up Woolf’s book and try it on for size." Yes, I will buy that edition, thank you.
3. Roman brothel tokens! I love ancient erotic art. It's not that it's rare: it's just much more rarely displayed. One of the reasons I found myself grinning like an idiot through the MFA's Aphrodite and the Gods of Love when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I visited in November is that it's full of things like a beautifully carved hermaphrodite or a marble relief of a winged, bird-footed siren mounting a man while he sleeps. Trying to find an image of the latter online, I have just found one of the great blog posts about classical art.
4. I am incredibly amused that Badass of the Week has done a feature on the historical figure I generally think of as "the nice one from I, Claudius." (They did Arminius back in 2005. Their articles have gotten rather more comprehensive and more sweary since then.)
5. Impostor syndrome and how to get rid of it. I seem to have convinced myself that if I say more than three sentences on a subject together, I will bore the pants off the person I'm talking to. This despite the fact that I spent some time last night boggling that my 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T essay has been tweeted and possibly even retweeted—I don't even have a Twitter account. People I don't know have demonstrably been finding it interesting. But then of course that's Dr. Seuss, not me. [edit: Look, I said I was working on this!]
1. R.I.P. William Duell, the reason I am disproportionately fond of Andrew McNair, Congressional Custodian. He can be heard for about thirty seconds as the Messenger in the original Blitzstein production of The Threepenny Opera (1954); I noticed him among all the other character actors in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). I would see him every now and then on Law & Order and be glad he was still working.
2. Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf's Orlando. "In my attic is a box containing two of the costumes Orlando wore in the film. One day, I know my son will find them and try them on. One day—soon, I expect—my poetry-writing daughter, his twin, will pick up Woolf’s book and try it on for size." Yes, I will buy that edition, thank you.
3. Roman brothel tokens! I love ancient erotic art. It's not that it's rare: it's just much more rarely displayed. One of the reasons I found myself grinning like an idiot through the MFA's Aphrodite and the Gods of Love when
rushthatspeaks and I visited in November is that it's full of things like a beautifully carved hermaphrodite or a marble relief of a winged, bird-footed siren mounting a man while he sleeps. Trying to find an image of the latter online, I have just found one of the great blog posts about classical art.4. I am incredibly amused that Badass of the Week has done a feature on the historical figure I generally think of as "the nice one from I, Claudius." (They did Arminius back in 2005. Their articles have gotten rather more comprehensive and more sweary since then.)
5. Impostor syndrome and how to get rid of it. I seem to have convinced myself that if I say more than three sentences on a subject together, I will bore the pants off the person I'm talking to. This despite the fact that I spent some time last night boggling that my 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T essay has been tweeted and possibly even retweeted—I don't even have a Twitter account. People I don't know have demonstrably been finding it interesting. But then of course that's Dr. Seuss, not me. [edit: Look, I said I was working on this!]
no subject
Agreed on the occasional fact-checking, but I am still made unreasonably happy every time they decide to write about the ancient world:
Seriously, it seems like the only time you really hear any reference to the badassitude of the Persians is in the preface to a book about how Alexander the Great came in and conquered their asses without breaking a sweat. This is total bullcrap. Back before the Macedonian conqueror was a twinkle in his psychotic mother's evil, pulsating eye, ultra turbo hardasses like Darius of Persia were out there using their insane powers of colon destruction to lay waste to the countryside and exert their utter and complete dominance over the Middle East in the most violent and awesome ways imaginable.
—Darius the Great
Don't assume, however, that just because he was a theater mastermind Aeschylus wasn't a badass. If this guy were a real-life writer/director, he'd be like Clint Effing Eastwood, because while he won alot of awards forhis theatricalaccomplishments, he could also beat the holy living crapstick out of you without even blinking. For instance, when the Persian Emperor Darius II got a total hard-on for destruction and decided he was going to single-handedly burn all of Greece into cinders with a blowtorch and urinate on the ashes, Aeschylus was one of the first guys to grab his sword, strap on a thick suit of bronze body armor, and tell the most powerful Emperor in the world to go sodomize a set of lawn furniture.
—Aeschylus
Even before they were an ever-expanding empire hell-bent on world domination and the unconditional submission of anything they even remotely perceived as an enemy, the Romans were still pretty colossal jackasses. While this statement can confidently be broadly applied to almost every single dealing between the time that Romulus first suckled a she-wolf and when Mehmet the Conqueror's Turkish forces overran the last bastion of Constantinople nearly two millennia later, the Iberian peninsula is as good a place as any to focus on the good people of Latium and their crush-tastic propensity for violently ruining the lives of everyone in their general vicinity.
—Viriathus
Well, beating down the Numidians was great and everything, but by this point a new threat was brewing, and this one was just outside Rome's doorstep. Three major barbarian tribes from the North—the Cimbrii, the Teutones, and the Ambrones—were on the move. Four hundred thousand people, including men, women, and children, were wandering around Europe, tearing shit apart, searching for a place to settle, and presenting the Roman Senate with an immigration problem that would give Ron Paul a coronary. The sort-of-well-known Roman commanders Caepo and Manlius rode out to stop the barbarians' march towards the Alps, but not even a guy named Manlius could stop this horde of bloodthirsty warriors—in a series of epic beatdowns the Romans got their fucking asses hammered into the ground like tent pegs, losing 80,000 soldiers and leaving the door wide open for these angry Germans to rush in and pummel Rome into rubble with their nutsacks.
—Gaius Marius
Also, the Duke of Wellington:
One day, the dashing young officer asked this total hot giga-babe named Kitty Pakenham to marry him, but her brother told him that he was a pathetic nobody loser who should go fuck himself with a chainsaw and then smash his head shut in a car door. Getting epically cock-blocked only succeeded in making Wellesley sincerely fucking pissed, however, so he went and took all of that insane pent-up sexual frustration out on the Dutch.