February 2009
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While most of the news this past week about the auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s extensive collection focussed on some possibly-purloined Chinese items, I did search to see if there was anything genuinely ancient in the collection (plenty of stuff from the 17th and 18th century with Classical themes, to be sure) but all I…
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The Standard Freeholder ponders the meaning of pH and Rh … the latter is of interest to us: The technical “Rh factor” refers to a protein characteristic of blood. The blood of about 85 percent of the world’s population is Rh positive while that of the other approximately 15 percent is Rh negative (lacking the…
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We’ve heard about this one before and it’s back (coincidentally, so is the piece which is below this one). Excerpts from a piece in the Guardian: Some of the world’s most exciting sunken treasures could soon be on view after Egypt confirmed plans to build a giant underwater museum in the Mediterranean. But as preparation…
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The incipit of a piece in TopNews suggests: Discovered under centuries-old layers of dirt in 1948, then submerged under 20 metres of water, the ancient city of Seuthopolis is to emerge once again in a bold rescue project. The magnificently preserved city, founded by the Thracian king Seuthes III in 323 BC, was discovered in…
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In a piece about the sorts of folks who hound celebrities for autographs, Barry Koltnow writes in the Orange County Register, inter alia: After all, autograph-collecting (philography) has been practiced since the ancient Greeks, although I doubt whether any Greek would have asked Paris Hilton for an autograph. Unlike most of our ‘origins’ commentary, this…
rogue classicism 