Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were gunned down in Texas. News story courtesy of the New York Times.
This bit of work avoidance has been brought to you by the letters ‘t,’ ‘h,’ ‘e,’ ‘s,’ ‘i,’ and ‘s.’
In response:
In response to s33k3r’s post about parallels between Rome and America; I’m putting this in a separate post because LJ has a 4k limit on comments.
Thoughts on frontier regions
I’m taking a class this quarter on frontier Roman archaeology, and after reading through the first few chapters of the primary textbook (Whittaker’s Frontiers of the Roman Empire) and trying to come up with some framework questions for the course, some thoughts came to mind.
(Warning: Extremely meandering thoughts here on changing perspectives on frontiers throughout history. Probably not interesting to most people.)
Thoughts on ethnic violence
The following is very cynical, (even by my standards) and should probably be skipped by most people.
It also talks about racism and uses the names of specific groups, so someone will probably find a way to be offended by that. Please be advised that I’m trying to think about the root causes of racism, and that therefore means bringing up various nasty subjects. Those who dislike that, please skip this too.
Oh, bugger!
Well, I was reading Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, volume 3,(which is very much worth reading, by the way; it’s even more full of good stuff than the first few volumes, and has quite a few more dirty jokes) when I came across a discussion of the origin of the word “bugger.” Now, not many history books talk about this (it originates with the Albigensian heresy), but since Gonick doesn’t give the whole story, and since I’m avoiding work (I’m holding office hours right now, does it show?) I figured I would insert a discourse here on…
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 