Curer

Velcro Cigarette lighter Casio watch Safety pins? (penannular fibulae work pretty well) Ball point pen, graphite pencil, or paper, really Corn Tequila Water balloons or latex condoms Sharpie marker Panty hose Superglue certain shades of Ritz dye, like you get at the grocery store Playboy magazine Spray paint Rubber bands Duct tape Legos Sea monkeys Binoculars/telescope/field microscope A globe, or heck, an atlas An inflatable pool toy (though I realize they sometimes inflated animal bladders) A laser pointer A Wooly Willy toy (it's that thing with a picture of a bald man where you draw hair on him with iron shavings using a magnet) A plastic sack (the things are amazing, if you think about it) A tape measure Alka Seltzer Mentos and a bottle of soda This is fun. I could do this all day. I think of that one scene in Labyrinth where Sarah Connoly trades her bracelet to Hoggle. Hoggle wavers for a minute, "What's that made of, anyway?" She shrugs. "Plastic." Hoggle's eyes go wide and he gets excited.

I've often wondered how the roman's managed their daily lives after slathering themselves with oil, even if they tried scraping it off. It's difficult for me to imagine ever being able to completely rid your skin of the residue. I can only imagine their clothing and bedsheets and furniture all must have had oily stains and everything from door knobs to lamp posts just felt greasy. The bath house laundry load must have been amazing. I can see how a thin layer of oil would reduce parasites like lice, as a lot of people today use a dab of olive oil when removing ticks, but how did everyone not have constant, terrible break outs of acne? On that note, I found a website. http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2011/12/wash-your-face-with-oili-dare-you.html Apparently, it's called the OCM, Oil Cleansing Method, a modern facial regime for better skin. You're not supposed to use just olive oil, but some mixture of other oils as well, depending on your skin type. And if you read down in the comments, someone pointed out that unrefined oils, (such as the Romans would have had), don't clog pores even when the refined version will. With steam and a little gentle scrubbing with water, it seems as though the author of the site actually had to cut back on the method because it made her skin too dry. It's supposed to be better for acne than Proactive and prevents wrinkles. Now, I admit to having been curious enough about this Roman oil thing enough that several years ago, before I knew about this OCM facial treatment, I tried washing with a little olive oil. I'm sure I did it all completely wrong and if I recall, ended up at such a loss as to how to go about it I ended up soaping it all off. I didn't have a strigil and I tried using the edge of a pair of tweezers. And I simply tried rinsing the tweezers directly into the bath, which made the bath oily and made it impossible for me to not get it all back on me. If I ever get curious enough to try this again, I'll try slinging the oil off onto the floors and walls, like a true Roman, and then toweling off a bit before I hop in the tub. But the point is that I ended up with a terrible break out, even after using the soap. I remember that my face was all itchy for days. Maybe I was just allergic, but seeing as the OCM website also points out that you shouldn't use olive oil by itself, it does make me wonder if they mixed something else in. They have a lot of pine nuts in Italy. Who knows, maybe they cut the olive oil with pine nut oil, and we do know that some fragrant essential oils were used during the bath routine. Here's an excerpt from a website about aromatherapy. "One of the oldest and crudest forms of extraction was known as enfleurage. Raw plant material (usually stems, foliage, bark or roots) was crushed and mixed with olive oil or animal fat, although other vegetable oils were also used. In the case of cedar, for example, the bark was stripped from the trunk and branches, ground into a powder, soaked with olive oil and placed in a wool cloth. The cloth was then heated. The heat pulled the essential oil out of the bark particles into the olive oil, and the wool was pressed to extract the essential oil. Sandalwood oil was also extracted in this fashion. Enfleurage was also used to extract essential oils from flower petals." (http://www.doterra-aromatics.com/info/history.html) So, if they were using olive oil to extract essential oils anyway, and we already know that they were using fragrant oils during some part of the bath, then it's not much of a stretch to assume that they were steeping things like flower petals and cedar bark into their bathing oil before they used it, too.