As long as we’re talking about Greek (see next post) we might as well mention an item from Washington University in St Louis which  mentions the recent identification of a number of books which once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Some excerpts: The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Washington University in St. Louis announced the discovery by [...]

Erstwhile Classics prof Ken Mayer sent along an interesting item last week … it’s a photo of a can of Kuang Chuan Mountain Coffee (the company is from Taiwan) and the inverted image shows that there’s some sort of Greek manuscript lurking on the label: What’s somewhat infuriating about this is that the company doesn’t [...]

Every now and then, it turns out the journalists get it right. An excerpt from an item in the Telegraph last week: Solar winds are plumes of electrically charged particles spewed out by the Sun that occasionally hit Earth. The planet’s protective magnetic field pushes these particles to the poles, where they react with oxygen [...]

A Toyota press release, via the fine folks at Engadget: Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), USA, Inc. today announced that the general public has selected ‘Prii’ as the preferred plural term for Prius. The Prius Goes Plural voting campaign was launched on January 10 at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and challenged the [...]

One of the reasons I like having days off — it’s ‘Family Day’ here in Ontario (which curiously matches up with President’s Day in the U.S.) — is that it allows me time to give items the time they deserve and also to catch up on things which I’ve been putting off posting for various [...]

As reviews of The Eagle seem to be tapering off (see the ‘Sword and Sandal’ section in our footer, e.g.) the Daily Mail comes out with a bit of hype for an upcoming television program on the ‘mysterious’ disappearance of the Roman legion portrayed in that movie (and, fwiw, also in Centurion). Tip o’ the [...]

Poor Boris Johnson … another Classicist trying to manage in an increasingly unclassical world. He uses a word which is common enough in our discipline — euergetism — and the Daily Mail feels a need to gloss the term for the teeming millions. Some excerpts: The super-rich must pay for schools and hospitals to stop [...]

Tantalizingly-brief item from Zawya: The Hama Archeology Department on Wednesday unearthed an ancient burial chamber dating back to the Hellenistic period. The burial chamber, which was discovered during maintenance work in the historic city of Apamea, contains 6 graves dug into the earth, one of which contains pottery fragments from a cone-shaped burial urn. According [...]

I can already hear my readers saying “Who?”. Willi Dansgaard was a climatologist who pioneered checking Greenland ice cores and the like for evidence of climate change. From a Classics perspective: Dansgaard later organised or participated in more than 19 expeditions to the glaciers of Norway, Greenland and Antarctica, and went on to develop ways [...]

While poking around Youtube yesterday, I came across a pile of videos from the Hauenstein Center, which apparently hosted a conference called Barack Obama and the Lessons of Antiquity in which a pile of big name Classicists made some interesting comparisons. Near as I can tell, all of the talks are available, so over the [...]

Adrian Murdoch approaches the end of the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’: Emperors of Rome: Vitellius