things my impossibly young looking Roman history lecturer has said
‘listen to your seminar tutors over the booklet, but only for seminars - in lectures i am king. unless you have me as a seminar tutor as well, in which case i am your king and god.’
‘has anybody played Rome: Total War? no?’
‘Cataline tried to burn the city and everyone he hated but he failed because, in short, nobody liked him.’
‘the mediterranean diet didn’t include tomatoes in the ancient world. i know. oh my god. i know.’
‘so of course when Hannibal turns up, the senate goes ‘sod it, lets kick his arse’.’
‘one man’s optimates is another man’s silver-spoon bearing prick.’
‘we don’t have much information about the 70s BC, largely because Plutarch doesn’t care.’
‘i’m not saying Rome: Total War is entirely accurate, but its battle campaigns are surprisingly historically informed.’
[hand drawing a map in chalk because the projector is broken] ‘i’ll give it a go, this is why i hate technology, and oh. well. that’s not italy.’
‘every army needs bakers and prostitutes, this is just a fact of life.’
‘Sulla. He’s a bit of a badass, but also a bit of a prick.’
‘yes, that is a slide from Spartacus. The film, not the series, which is more accurate and less like soft porn.’
‘the Romans liked Campania because its very fertile. they didn’t know this was because of its proximity to a volcano - poor buggers found THAT out later.’
‘Crassus gets given command of Syria and high fives everyone in the senate.’
‘Catullus was very pithy, very hellenistic in style. unlike the Iliad, which is 24 books of tedium.’
‘An Afternoon at Carrhae: the Romans being shot at repeatedly by Parthian cavalry because if there’s one thing the Romans aren’t good at, it’s having a cavalry.’
‘It’s good to have fast legs in war. Caesar moves very fast, not unlike Napoleon. The Usain Bolt of ancient warfare. I’m not sure why I said that, it’s an atrocious analogy.’
‘Athens is the Edinburgh of the ancient world; it has nothing to offer but education and pretty buildings.’
‘Shout out to those of you who spent your teenage years playing Rome: Total War.Which is what I did.’
‘The senate go into a panic and they decide to flee Rome at dawn, but some idiot forgets the treasury. I know. Ridiculous.’
‘Again: don’t use elephants during warfare. They’re not as cool as they look. And given they’re now endangered, it’d just be mean.’
‘I had to use this meme, I’m sorry. You’re all aware of the one does not simply walk into mordor meme right? I’m sorry, we’ll move on.’
‘I put this photo in for dramatic effect but I realise that it’s just a field. I don’t know why people bother going to see battle sites, they’re all really boring. I saw bones once, they were quite interesting. But most battle sites: boring.’
‘Caesar doesn’t tell Rome anything while he’s away in Egypt for a year, so they have no idea Pompey’s dead. All they know is that Antony is being a pain in the ass, which is, in all honesty, not unusual for Antony.’
‘Caesar is very good at one liners. You always draft a pithy one liner before a battle so you have something to say when you win. You don’t want to win and then just be like ‘whoo, thank god for that.’’
I want to be this professor except with Shakespeare
(Source: sqvalors)
EXACTLY
(via johanirae)
Public bathrooms are such a godless place. Ppl do the most bizarre stuff
one time i walked into a mcdonalds bathroom and their was shit on the wall with actual hand prints like a scat version of the shining and it took everything i had not to vomit after the immediate 180 i did
Last week I really had to pee walking home from the bus stop so I jumped into the park bathroom a few blocks from my house (in a pretty upscale area) and there was a chick in goth lolita dress smoking crack in the men’s room.
after i saw the remake of annie, i went into the bathroom and this guy at the urinal was whipping his dick back and forth while singing uptown funk and his friend was urinating beside him and laughing the entire time
My dad and I stopped at a truck stop in Northern California (or Southern Oregon, it was a long time ago and I don’t remember) when I was 12 or so and I ended up needing to go to the bathroom while we ate, so I was directed towards the back of the building. I walked in and saw a woman laying in a clawfoot bathtub, immediately shreiked and turned around apologizing, to be greeted with 10-15 truckers, including my dad, laughing their asses off.
…It was a blowup doll.okay that story beats the ones i had
Let me tell you a story about Dairy Queen and the time I closed an Allsup’s.
With my ass.
Many moons ago, when I was but 14, I, my father, and several others were going on a fishing trip to southern Colorado. Now, like good Texans, we loaded up at 5:00am to make the twelve-hour trip in a single day because, you know, that’s what you do in Texas.
Several hours later, we found ourselves in Childress, the very gateway to the Texas panhandle, a surreal place a thousand Tumblr posts could be written about. There, we had a proper breakfast at Dairy Queen, certainly a Texas institution. I recall quite clearly having a basket of disappointing chicken strips and unpleasantly greasy fries. It was a bland, unsatisfying meal, but I was 14, still sleepy, and really quite hungry, so I ate it regardless.
Not long after, I felt a sensation like one my young body had never felt before.
To say that I was in discomfort would be putting it mildly. I was cramping, I was sweaty, I was fairly sure I was one hard bump in the road away from shitting my pants and forever ruining not just my pants and my pride, but the back seat of my father’s friend’s harvest gold metallic 1999 Ford F350 Super Duty.
This day, the prairie tan upholstery of the harvest gold metallic 1999 Ford F350 Super Duty would be spared.
Mercifully, as we entered one of the many smallish towns on the way through the panhandle, we stopped for gas at an Allsup’s. Then and there, I was making my final stand. Every muscle in my body clenched desperately, holding in the terrible burden foisted upon it by a meal of grease, batter, and regret.
Like all Allsup’ses, it was a liminal space, a place that had no real business in the real world and was, instead, a small, dingy realm within its own flimsy walls, a pocket dimension with a spinning rack of country music cassettes and CDs from artists I’d never heard of and a Blue Bell freezer that was likely only ever 1/3 full no matter how long the early days of that Texas summer might drag on.
It was here, in this space between spaces, an outpost in the first real steps into the panhandle, that I would commit one of the gravest crimes of my life.
Stealthily, as though smuggling some secret only slightly less terrible than the grim truth my life had become, I made my way to the back of the dingy, unpleasant gas station. Thankfully, it had an indoor restroom that didn’t force me to ask for a key, one of the few saving graces of the little mess of a place.
I would, in short order, rob it of even that marginal virtue.
With my stealthy power-waddle into the lav, I locked the door behind me, my body and mind already relaxing, knowing that relief was at hand and soon my suffering would be over though I didn’t know at what could that relief would come, I couldn’t have known. The restroom was not overly dirty, but just the same I mouthed a hushed “fuck” as a churning growl from ominously low in my gut warned me there was no time for the gossamer security of a paper ass gasket, this was happening then and there, the process had already begun, the die had been cast.
Hurriedly fiddling with my belt buckle as I approached the toilet, the promise of relief quickly gave way to desperation. In seeing the finish line so close, my body was quickly losing the will to struggle across. The time of choosing had come, and it was not mine, not my body’s, this was Dairy Queen’s battle; it had been from the moment that overly-dense, overly-greasy shadow of a meal had touched my lips.
With no small desperation, I threw myself at the seat, and it was perhaps in that forced desperation that the morning came to a head. The sound my body made was unreal as a daisycutter of shit blasted out of me, still several inches above the seat. In that moment, time itself lost all meaning, I became part of the liminal space of that Allsup’s and the forsaken dungeon that I had doomed its lavatory to be. I couldn’t bring myself to straighten out enough to actually sit down, in part for knowing the seat had been lost to what had poured out of me and in part because the pain of my cramping gut wouldn’t allow it.
When it was over, I felt a mixture of emotions that seemed wholly fictive, like something no true human could ever experience. In the immediate aftermath, relief ruled over all other sensation, the pain was gone, the fear was gone, I was left purified… And then I saw at what cost.
Indeed, I was purified, but what I was purified of had found its way into the world and found, in turn, terrible purchase. It had not just dominated the toilet. It was on the walls, it was on the floor, it was even on the underside of the sink. The spread was so wide, so even, and so dense that it seemed no human ass could have created it, it seemed the work of evil, and yet there I stood, staring at it in horror, at my creation.
Amazingly, as though shielded by Providence itself, I was saved from a similar fate. Somehow, miraculously, I was no more sullied than had it been a regular, uneventful trip to a restroom. As I transferred every bit of evil within me into that Allsup’s restroom, it lost whatever dignity it had that I might retain my own, something I am grateful for to this day. Careful to avoid touching any, you know, shit, I tidied myself up and debated for a moment trying to clean the restroom with the minimal tools at hand, but I knew it was a lost cause, there was no way a damp bit of single-ply could solve anything I had done.
Leaving that forsaken lavatory to stew in my misdeeds with a similar stealth, I made my way out of the restroom and out of the Allsup’s together, finding my way back to the renewed security of the prairie tan and harvest gold metallic Ford F350 Super Duty. Shortly thereafter, my father found me, asking if I’d gone in to use the restroom yet, if I’d seen its unbelievable horror.
Using my exhaustion to my advantage, I looked up from my book, undoubtedly looking tired and befuddled.
“Nnno? I was gonna go in, but I used the restroom at breakfast and I just want to get through this chapter, why?”
It was an expert lie and, by God, somehow it worked. Somehow.
Other parts of the story go on from there, but they don’t relate to public restrooms, where this story does pick up though is a year later.
By sheer coincidence, my father and I were making another trip through that part of Texas. By sheer coincidence, our journey took us through the same town in the panhandle. As I saw familiar scenery move past the window, I felt a hot wash of guilt work up through me from below.
And that’s when I saw it.
The Allsup’s.
Not just closed, but boarded up, plywood over its windows, black plastic covering its door. My stomach dropped and my eyes went wide.
It was then that I told my father the terrible truth of that day a year before.
He was strangely proud I had closed a gas station with my ass.
that had me enthralled from start to finish and i am determined to get everyone on tumblr to read the story of how your ass is responsible for the closure of a business.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
[video]
nothin softer than a horse nose
have you touched a horse nose? touch a horse nose now. get in your car and drive to the nearest horse nose. and touch it.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Found this at my doctor’s office, just in time for Autism Freakout Month… seriously!? I’m too tired to come up with a good snark for this, anyone got a good one?
[Image: A whiteboard decorated in red and green handwritten text. It is titled, “Know about your cell phone”, and it reads, “Did you know that cell phones emit RF (Radio Frequency) Radiation? This cell phone radiation is not being linked to Autism, Infertility, brain tumours, and breast cancer. Did you know that you should keep you cell phone at least 0.98 inches from your body to be safe from harmful radiation?”]
If I tape my cellphone to my forehead, will I achieve SUPER AUTISM? Because I want the maximum allowed number of autisms. The highest possible level of autism.
And furthermore. Jesus Christ people. That’s just…not how radio waves work. It’s not. What the fuck. Like. Okay. You’ve got your electromagnetic spectrum and radio waves are one of the most harmless things on there. Like, visible light could blind you. UV light can cause DNA mutations leading to cancer. Anything north of that (X-rays to gamma, for example) is some Bad Shit. Radio waves…uh, I mean, maybe don’t build yourself a shed of cell phones and sit in it while they’re all making a call, but even if all you had were Nokia phones and you used them as bricks, I’m pretty sure you’d be fine. At least until your Nokia kingdom fell down and crushed you.
…also, 0.98 inches is…awfully specific? What…do you think that’s going to do? If we pretend for a minute that cell phones ARE giving off harmful radiation, literally two seconds of thought should be enough to tell you that an inch ain’t gonna do shit. Nothing. Jack diddly squat. “Oh, you have a radioactive piece of uranium? Hold that puppy a little farther away from your skin, it’ll be fine.” No. Just no.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
History wants so badly for Cleopatra to be beautiful. Like they can’t conceive of Rome being intimidated by anything less
because being a linguist, fleet commander, and powerful ruler doesn’t matter, only her looks
Her Arab contemporaries raved about her being very interested and knowledgeable in the sciences.
She completely reformed the system in Alexandria, and Egypt at large; making it much more of a functional powerhouse.
She did what 300 years of her ancestors couldn’t: Managed to get the support of both the Greek AND Egyptian subjects she ruled.
There is a sculpture that has been identified as her, through comparisons to coins minted under her rule, that proves beyond a doubt that she wasn’t particularly beautiful.
It isn’t that people just happen to believe it by mistake. Rome was fucking terrified of her and painted her as a vapid, scheming, beautiful, sex obsessed queen to discredit her to their people. She was a threat, and that was how they handled it. The unfortunate thing is that that is the most surviving record of her. A smear campaign against one of the smartest, most powerful women in human history.
(via yea-lets-do-this-shit)
I guarantee you, the woman has packed all her stuff, plus her kids’ stuff, plus all the shit her husband forgot to pack. Five minutes into their vacation, dude will be cursing because he forgot something important, and his wife will be like, “Here it is. I thought you’d need it, so I packed it, along with all of your underwear, socks, swimsuit, toothbrush, and deodorant because apparently you confused our family trip to Disney World with an overnight couple’s stay at a nudist colony. You’re welcome.”
Laugh it up, assholes. Without us, you’d be wearing the same underwear three days straight, including poolside.
Fucking right
Who tf uses a Walmart bag for a 3 day vacation honestly
(Source: atx-nerd-mom, via yea-lets-do-this-shit)
[video]
poetry man
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)