Monday Morning Memes, Special Highbrow Edition

Tab Clearing...

• Why is it so hard to produce good infantry?


• Afghan man arrested in Oklahoma, said to be plotting ISIS-inspired attacks on Nov. 5th.


• Why was Roman infantry weaponry so weird relative to other Mediterranean nations?

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Meme Dump

"True Crime" is a true crime.

Whether it's suburbanite Gladys Kravitzes reporting every unmarked white work van to NextDoor (or, as I call it, "Karens.com") or people who've listened to enough true crime podcasts to think they're the second coming of Hercule Poirot, this is a fad that's having real world consequences.

"In their attempts to fact-check innuendo, official investigators have faced that most powerful of foes: the trending topic. The murders—having very particular types of victims, and especially horrifying circumstances—quickly became matters of national interest. That made them, also, matters of incentive for content creators. On YouTube, Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai pointed out, the top news clips that address the murders have more than 1 million views each. On TikTok, videos claiming a connection to the murders—#idahocase, #idahocaseupdate, #idahokiller—now have, in total, more than 400 million views. These true-crime takes on the real crime have no obligation to fairness or evidence. Content, in the eyeball economy, is tautological. When attention is its own reward, the tantalizing take is more valuable than the true one. This is the dull tragedy underlying the acute one: The murders did numbers."

I like a whodunit as much as the next kid but c'mon, it's not a lifestyle...

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History Repeats Itself...Sorta

So the Arema FC soccer team in Indonesia was hosting its archrivals, Persebaya. Matches between the two teams apparently have a history of clashes between their fan bases.

The home team lost and their fans went nuts and stormed the field. Riot police were turned loose on the mob and began firing tear gas, causing a stampede for the exits, and at least a hundred and seventy people to be trampled to death in the ensuing mayhem.

We're 1,490 years past the Nika Riots, and the local chief of police probably isn't named Belisarius*, but man I got a twinge of history on hearing the news.

The Hippodrome probably seated twice as many fans as Kanjuruhan Stadium, though.

*Any excuse to put up one of the evocative Enlightenment paintings inspired by Bélisaire

Decade of Decadence

Say what you will about the supposed excesses of late-stage Roman imperialism, but there wasn't anybody in Ravenna deliberately crashing their vintage Taylorcraft into the Apennine foothills for YouTube views.

The FAA took one look at that video, decided they weren't buying homie's BS story, and yanked his pilot's license.

Before jumping out of the plane, the agency said, Mr. Jacob made no attempt to contact air traffic control on the emergency frequency, did not try to restart the engine by increasing airflow over the propeller and failed to look for a place to safely land, “even though there were multiple areas within gliding range in which you could have made a safe landing.”

After the crash, Mr. Jacob also “recovered and then disposed of the wreckage,” the F.A.A. said.

“You demonstrated a lack of care, judgment and responsibility by choosing to jump out of an aircraft solely so you could record the footage of the crash,” the agency said. “Your egregious and intentional actions on these dates indicate that you presently lack the degree of care, judgment and responsibility required of a certificate holder.”

This whole searching for fame on the internet thing has gotten completely out of hand.

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You might be a nerd if...

...the only thing in your recent Google history that starts with "superb..." is the Wikipedia article on the legendary last king of Rome.

Tab Clearing...

• The last gasoline-engined V-series Cadillac?


• A really cool photo essay about sheep ranching on the Russian steppe.


• The Glock carbine was a rumor when I was still a moderator on GlockTalk twenty years ago. It's still a rumor today, albeit a more concrete one.


• Adrianople: Twilight of the Legions.

Camelot Followup

So, having worked through the first three of Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles, I've realized that they contain all the parts of the story that have any re-read potential for me. 

I could sit through the tales of the legate Caius Britannicus and his buddy, the senior centurion Publius Varrus, and how they got out of the army and founded the colony of Camulod against the coming dark age any number of times. But after that...?

The third book, The Eagles' Brood, sees us through to the maturity of Merlyn and Uther, the endings of the last the original Roman viewpoint characters, and it finishes up with the birth of Arthur. The rest of the story just doesn't have a bunch of interest again once I've read it through for the second time. All but the first three books got carted to Goodwill yesterday.

I've started rereading The Hunt for Red October for the first time in a long time now. Some authors get better over time, and some never again repeat the magic fire of their first work. Clancy is somewhere between the two; he had several solid efforts in his early going and Clear and Present Danger may have been his peak, but he hit the "too big to edit" wall pretty hard after that one.

My copy of Clancy's breakout debut thriller is an original 1985 Berkley Books paperback printing and I was distressed to realize that, while I can sit on the porch and read it easily, it's a headache-inducing exercise in blurriness to try and read it by the 15W incandescent reading lamp over the headboard. Nobody warned me about this.

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Knowing Your Background

Among the great purging of books I'm doing, the filter for keeping a physical hard copy on the shelf is somewhere between "Am I going to read this again?" and "Is it of enough personal significance that I want the actual dead tree book as opposed to just a file on a device?"

The latest series to fall under scrutiny is Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles. I really love the premise and late Classical to early post-Roman Britain is a fascinating historical setting for me. In the early Fifth Century, Britain was a tranquil backwater of empire that had been Roman turf longer than there's been a United States, and within fifty years was dealing with increasing encroachment of Germanic raiders and settlers and the collapse of an urban civilization.

The first few books I really love, and it's probably ironic that they're basically a setup piece for the Arthurian stuff...which I've read through once and don't have any real desire to slog through again. I'm currently re-reading the first four books to decide whether I keep only the first three or hold on to The Saxon Shore as well.

The second book, The Singing Sword, has Merlin's uncle, Arthur's grandpa, forging Excalibur from meteoric iron, and it tickles me the way that Jack Whyte tortures himself to come up with a way to have the character "invent" the hand-and-a-half bastard sword while not realizing that the Roman cavalry already had spathas. 

He winds up trying to combine the properties of sword and spear to give the new mounted warriors (because we only have a few books to get to knights, right?) something long enough for a mounted man to hit an enemy foot soldier. Fortunately that bit is mercifully quick and doesn't throw me completely out of the story. Migration-period technology had already worked out how to smack a dude with sharp steel from horseback, and a real Excalibur probably would have looked like this, rather than a prop from the 1981 John Boorman film.

Completely gratuitous sword photo

I get that half the fun is trying to work our way to the Arthurian mythos from Romano-British roots and put some flesh on the legend's bones (Minor Spoiler: While waiting for swordly inspiration to strike, our protagonist keeps the metal stored in the form of the statue of a nymph, which statue he names "The Lady of the Lake",) but some more technical military study to accompany the historic stuff probably would have helped keep war nerds like me happy. 

He's got the Roman troops in late-4th Century Britain running around in lorica, with the shields and weapons of late-Republican/early-Imperial legionaries. A dude with a gladius, pilum, and scutum in a Roman legion of 400AD would look as out of place as a guy with a tricorn and a Brown Bess in a military formation today.

Anyway, I'm having fun with the reread, but I had to vent.

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Stewed in its own juices.

Bobbi has blogged up her recipe from last night's dinner, which was truly delicious.

I bought the fish sauce she mentioned when I was searching for garum, on one of my ancient Rome jags. It's enhanced several recipes lately with its yummy umami goodness.

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Tangentially related...

I've always been low-key fascinated by Albania. Any place with Roman ruins, centuries-old hillbilly feuds, and the Accursed Mountains can't help but hold my interest.

There's the distinctive-looking Albanian SKS which is, second only to the East German one, the crown jewel of the insular and lowbrow world of SKS collecting.

In fiction, young Lieutenant Otto Prohaska stumbles into a plot by Serbian anarchists and has to flee homeward across Albania on foot to warn the Archduke. It's one of the most memorable parts of the entire series of books.

For a more factual view, albeit just as darkly humorous, P.J. O'Rourke spends a chapter of Eat the Rich looking at the Albania of the early 21st Century, recovering from a 1997 civil war triggered by an economy that collapsed under a tottering pile of pyramid schemes.

Finally, the Wikipedia entry on "Hoxha's Mushrooms" is a heck of a jumping-off point for a wikiwander in its own right.

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Tab Clearing...

• Operation Eagle Claw


• Canon EF 135mm lens


• Stilicho

Classical Nerdery

Interesting Twitter thread if you're into Ancient Rome or Victorian art...or both.

In Disney's Hercules (1997), after Herc and Meg ditch Phil to go on a date, they stroll through a statue garden. They talk a bit, things are awkward, Meg trips down the stairs, and Herc catches her before carrying her over to a bench. But it's much, much more than a bench! (1/9) pic.twitter.com/fsT5gseww4

— Christopher Polt (@CBPolt) May 10, 2020

Tab Clearing...

• Domitian


• Kurgan hypothesis


• Canon L lens

The Name of the King

Worth the watch.

Of note near the beginning is the constant flicker of consul's names across Republican Rome.
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This was a rabbit hole...

...down which I fell for most of a day.

Dude posits that contemporary Western culture, the lifestyle we find on this side of the "Hajnal line", is caused by a technicality in Roman inheritance laws.

He has a blog where he waxes prolific, too.
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That Old-Time Religion...

So, in Georgia...the country, not the place with the big airport...there's this rock formation called the Katskhi pillar.

By G.N. - Katskhi stone column, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

And on top of this pillar are the ruins (now reconstructed) of a dinky little church dating back to the 9th or 10th Century. There were three hermit cells for if you wanted to get your asceticism on and a little wine cellar carved out of the rock if you didn't, and one can only imagine the hair-raising process of getting up to and down from the place.

Inscriptions indicate the place was still a going concern as recently as the 13th Century, but by then Georgia was a pretty exciting corner of the world, what with Mongols and Khwarazmian Persians and so many varieties of Turkomans that they had to be color-coded. Oh, and then the Black Death came to Georgia, probably brought by the returning troops of King George the Brilliant, and killed literally half of everybody. No doubt peaceful monasteries accessible only by primitive dumbwaiter were on the decline in such an environment.

Anyhow, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the place is dedicated to a dude named Maximus the Confessor. For those of you not hip to your saintly terminology, a "Confessor" is different from a "Martyr" in that they weren't directly killed for their faith, but probably wished they had been.

So, this Maximus dude was a bureaucrat in the Byzantine Empire who apparently had religion as a hobby, as did everybody in Constantinople back then. All the Byzantines did was watch chariot races, debate arcane theological matters, and riot and/or kill each other over differences of opinion on chariot races or arcane theological matters. (Oh, and they engaged in so much intra-governmental intrigue that they went in the dictionary for it.)

At some point, Maximus dropped out of government service and took up religion as a full-time occupation, leaving the city of Constantinople for a monastery in Anatolia. Skipping town ahead of the invading Persians, he landed in Carthage, in Eastern Roman hands for the nonce, thanks to Justinian and Belisarius's ruinously expensive Mediterranean campaigns. It was in Carthage that he rose to theological prominence, after understudying with some of the philosophical heavyweights of the time.

The big argument in the Church (there was just the one, back then) in those days was between guys who thought Jesus had two natures, human and divine, but only one divine will, and other guys who thought that Jesus had not only two natures, but also a human will and a divine will. Seriously. This was a very big deal and dudes were killing each other over it.

Well, the first view, Monothelitism, was the official view at the time, but Maximus was a believer in the second, or Dyothelitism. And he and the new Pope, Martin I, called a religious council in Rome to debate on the matter without bothering to ask the Emperor's permission, which was a pretty serious faux pas. When the council turned out a Dyotheletic verdict, Emperor Constans II (a Monotheletist) had both Pope Martin I and Maximus arrested.

The Pope got de-Poped and banished to the Crimea, where he died. Maximus was tried and sentenced to exile. However, he would not shut up about Dyothelitism and wound up having a great big show trial a few years later, following which he got his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off so he couldn't tell people that Jesus had two wills anymore or even write it very legibly. Then he got banished to Georgia. (The one on the Black Sea, not the one you drive through on the way to Florida.)

He died in exile there in 662 AD. Nineteen years later, at the Third Council of Constantinople, the Church (still just the one) decided that maybe Jesus did have two wills after all. Maximus received a posthumous pardon, sort of a more official version of "Whoops! Hey, sorry about the tongue and the hand and the whole exile-and-dying-in-prison thing. No hard feelings, okay? Here, have a feast day."

I told you they took their religion seriously in Constantinople, didn't I?
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Today in History: Pax No More

So, people tend to confuse the Pax Romana with the period of history during which the Roman Empire existed, but that's not really how it worked.

The late days of the Republic and the period of civil wars that ended with Octavian as Augustus were anything but peaceful. The salad days stretched across most of the first two centuries AD, when transfers of power were mostly peaceful and when they weren't, they were at least brief and disrupted the life of the ordinary people of the empire very little. What wars there were happened out on the frontiers and Rome was generally victorious. The rule of law more or less functioned properly, and the aqueducts ran on time.

Omens of future problems came with the reign of emperor Joaquin Phoenix who (after going crazy and arranging for the murders of a bunch of senators) was not actually stabbed in the Coliseum by Russel Crowe, but rather was strangled in the tub by his wrestling coach and personal trainer.

There was a brief period of semi-stability under the increasingly silly and neurotic Severan Dynasty before the wheels came off in the Year of the Six Emperors, which kicked off the Crisis of the Third Century, a period when two centuries' worth of chickens came home to roost in Rome.

The crisis began when Maximinus Thrax, a "Barracks Emperor" who completely lived up to his anime villain name, got folks fed up. Some younger, well-to-do Romans in North Africa stabbed the local tax collector to death and talked the provincial governor into declaring himself emperor. Since the dude was an octogenarian, he nominated his son as his co-augustus.

Unfortunately the governor of the next province over not only remained loyal, but was a better general. The rebel army got crushed in the field at Carthage, killing the son (Gordian II), and on hearing the news, the dad pulled an Aaron Hernandez to avoid capture and execution.

On this date in 238AD, the senate then appointed a couple of elderly senators, Pupienus and Balbinus, with good military histories and prominent committee memberships (most importantly, both were ranking members of the What the Hell Do We Do About Emperor Maximinus Thrax Committee) as co-emperors.

This proved about as popular with the general populace of Rome as would the Senate suddenly appointing John McCain and Lindsey Graham as co-presidents to unseat Trump. The PR problem became apparent when the new co-emperors couldn't appear in public without people throwing stuff at them, and so the senate named the Justin Bieber-looking 13-year-old grandson of the recently-hanged Gordian I as Gordian III.

Anybody with a room temperature IQ could see that Balbinus and Pupienus were still in charge and the barely-pubescent Gordian was a figurehead, but the populace of Rome was mollified by this move, which doesn't speak much for their collective smarts.

Meanwhile, Maximinus Thrax was making his way from his home base in the Balkans toward Rome. He arrived at the city of Aquilea but, rather than welcoming him and resupplying his troops, the city shut its gates and forced a siege. With the senatorial army led by Pupienus closing in from Rome and supplies growing short, Maximinus Thrax wound up getting shanked by his own troops, along with all his family and staff.

With the guy with the anime villain name dead, McCain and Graham naturally started quarreling and plotting against each other. Before it could come to open war, the Praetorian guard killed them both and left Justin Bieber lookalike Gordian III sole emperor at the end of the year.

Presented Without Context...

Interlocutor: "Something I heard once was something to the effect of 'If you ever read about an ancient war and one side uses elephants, that's the side that loses.'"

Me: "Rome's biggest success was in emulating Alexander by sending intelligence operatives posing as war elephant salesmen to plague the procurement bureaus of their foes."