caesar novus

Listening to royalty free background music now, to accompany outdoor activities on my youtube channel. When they contain much wind noise, the peanut gallery tunes out instead of just lowering the volume and then the youtube algorithm gives it the kiss of dis-recommendation. So here are some either soft ones to replace the audio or lively ones to blend; I guess I get what I pay for... fragments verge boogaloo 70's summer fun retro motown

Wow, the famous author Adrian Goldsworthy makes a fantastic interviewee, even with a bit eccentric "er". https://youtu.be/O1kfuUltMDE He draws out all kinds of cultural context to soldiering, including what a posh assignment Britain could offer as a whitecollar admin role due to the locals not being literate enough to do that. Gosh they seemed to live long into retirement; I think the supposedly short lifespans should factor out infant deaths. Another great source is historian Gareth Harney who I cue up talking about the sometimes softer side of Roman slavery, gladiators protected by referees, and the amazing way they showcase the +- possibilities in our culture. He has a fabulous show and tell twitter account at https://twitter.com/search?q=OptimoPrincipi&src=typed_query

There are new claims for the "real" secret to Roman concrete durability. Not only magic ingredients that we seem to have heard before, but "hot mix" processing. Supposed to point the way to structures that self heal over time rather than pancake Miami-style according to MIT just now: https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106

I think they misidentified (and misspelled) that, and below is the racing stadium of KibYRa: BTW, if you are managing your own retirement or savings fund and suffering from all financial assets circling the drain, notice Turkish etf TUR would have doubled your money in less than a year. https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$SPX,tlt,efa,tUR now shows that vs sagging US stocks, bonds, and world stocks. Easy to invest in from US online brokerage, but it is said to be a risky bubble due to flight from Turkish currency, real estate, etc problems.

Here is a lecture with stunning info on european pre-history based on genes and analysis of graves, mostly turned up due to recent construction. I will give fractured teaser to motivate you to listen, maybe at bedtime but don't miss some jaw dropping visuals. Feel free to post other sources or your spin on it. Euro pre-history was more about migration rather than cultural evolution. Some parallels with history of the Americas, where hunters and gatherers were pushed to the fringes by denser groups of efficient agriculturists, in this case from Turkey area. The farmers health suffers a bit from density/diet, and then "the mother of all plagues" repeatedly hit a couple thousand years before the Romans, leading to both death and shortness of frail survivors. Next tall exclusively male warrior herders swoop in from Russian steppes to exterminate ALL Euro short farmer males (eventually even in UK) and enslave or marry short farmer women - gendercide! He breaks it down by country the present percent of hunter, short farmer, and tall warrior ancestry, but it entails tallness favoring northern europe. So if short men were wiped out, they were replaced by children often inheriting shortness from surviving farmer women. And Roman soldiers found even barbarian women tall because she often inherited height from bloodthirsty dads. There is more to the story which is still being researched, but plenty shockwaves so far! Above a good channel to subscribe to, often giving lectures in English from the Institute of Rome. On a personal note, now I feel a couple DNA tests were vindicated that showed I had at least 1 Sardinian female ancestor among 99% DNA from the most warrior infested country of Europe (a Sardinian once mocked the possibility).

I'm into interesting fragments of pop rock songs, extracted from their overplayed entirety now gone stale. The first couple I cue up to somewhere in the middle where I am interested. With a keyboard you can override by hitting "0" to restart at the beginning, or do a refresh to rediscover my cue point. First a memorable vocal fragment at second=116: Next an instrumental cued up to the middle of Muddy Waters guitar solo while at the same time a dazzling burgundy Alfa Romeo 4C is shown. Why did this affordable and fuel miserly 160mph car at second=147 not sell well, esp when priciest supercars tend to have limiters at 155? (recorded Chess Studio Chicago on 11 June, 1964. Bill Wyman bass guitar / Charlie Watts drums / Keith Richards guitar / Brian Jones *dazzling* harmonica / Mick Jagger tambourine / Ian Stewart organ / Guitar Solo(2'14"-3'07") Muddy Waters): Finally is a close resemblance to Brian Jones guitar track, but lacking some edge. Saw a quite persuasive documentary about him not really being distraught or under much influence when drowning after the Stones fired him. Instead had a fight with someone who he owed much money to accidentally escalate into violence.

Before this thread dies a deserved death, I will point out that during the holiday lull youtube is offering umpteen Pink Panther movies free (no ads at least for me). You may have avoided these when rerun on TV since they are slow paced from an earlier time, but try at 1.5x speed. Wonderful deadpan slapstick, such as the police inspector who was given a replica pistol cigarette lighter and always wrongly picks up that or his real gun for cross purposes. Here is a search link that mostly gets the old 90min classics https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pink+panther+peter+sellers&sp=EgIYAg%3D%3D

5) Tigersugar frozen dessert: I occasionally fall off the vegan wagon for ice cream. Still egg-less tho; I lived next to Ben and Jerry's sole original store and got heavy due to their gross eggy richness. The food store I patronize now offers "healthy" diet fudgesicles or Taiwanese tigersugar which seems like a tea ice cream cone. Has a nice lite flavor due to some dairy substitutes, altho with apparent side effects of nuking taste buds so nothing tastes normal long afterward (good for diet?). I include ingredients for full disclosure of a some vaguely anti-freeze sounding stuff:

I included a Jerash intro vid on both of my Roman Ruin lists under Colosseum and my signature playlist. I guess this Archeo category is a better place for them, but I had wrongly concluded it was for non Roman active digs. I will post the vid here in playlist form cued to Jerash, but navigateable to other amazing Roman ruins in the mideast. On a laptop you can back up with upper-P to go to previous sites or upper-N for next (clik on vid first to shift focus):

Roman truss bridges get such little appreciation, built of biodegradable triangles of timber, so let me try to remedy with half remembered fun facts. Have you ever seen a railroad bridge that WASN'T a truss? Trains almost always need the rigid strength of triangles rather than fooling with those pretentious cable monstrosities for vehicles. Do you know that famous suspension bridges like in Tacoma and San Francisco had to be retrofitted with underside trusses to avoid whipping in the wind? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggxeuFDaDU I didn't fully understand this until the video below. A simple beam construction, whether for bridge or temple or aqueduct is fragile because it bends in proportion with the CUBE of it's length. Double the length makes it one eighth as strong. You can address this with a very expensive stone arch bridge. Or make a truss bridge which oddly has NO bending stress at all if built correctly. BTW a bridge building class I took claimed that many modern designs would be cheaper as intricate truss bridges if labor for public projects stayed at fair market levels.

Really fine and thorough Via Appia again 85m from Still Wanderer | Italy in 4K (enable CC)

Volubilis, Morocco 8m from BZ Travel More Via Appia, Rome 11m from Ancient Rome Live

Rare slow version

If I post the 3 here then I can clean out my watch later list. First a singer increasingly liked by those in mopey moods, maybe because her voice reflects the wine she says she chugs to get courage to sing. She apparently never went to school, but when becoming band leader's GF, out went the old songstress and eventually most males in the band died of unspecified cancers. So don't cross her? Then 2 videos with exceptional dancing (one a redo).

Palmyra, Syria 8m from Amazing Places on Our Planet

OK, after this 200th post of this thread, I will try to leave it to others to continue. I just find myself listening to a "lesson" version of "Monkey Man" because it wallows in luscious riffs without the strangled sounding vocals. Too bad it omits the piano accents too, which were really nice: P.S. I restored full movie link in prev post - don't miss it!

I fact checked myself and found the studio in question is just across the border into Alabama and consists of the "birthplace of R&B" Muscle Shoals studio. Not too far from Nashville but a tiny alcohol-banned settlement and subject of various anecdotes in Keith Richards bio, which he may recount in this great documentary with amazing music clips: Here is one of many Muscle Shoals sound playlists; skip thru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y8Q2PATVyI&list=PLDuMhhYHE7i8Yr3ACbHm7GKb4kEFteWAR OR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqK1NF5m4bc&list=PLlq27sZziU8kCmvpN4I208K7LnLbVWJv3 . One of these songs I never heard of has a quarter billion views and hundreds of thousands comments! BTW I can accept the SE accent even for Bakersfield artists because most were transplants from TX, MS, AL, etc.

Satirical songs that pick up on above souring west coast theme: Isn't Jagger misplacing his exquisite mimic of a US persona in LA suburbs? He is using a rural SE US accent that doesn't survive into urban west. He maybe heard live broadcasts from those superchurches in the humid south. The band lives bunkered in hotel rooms and can't get much sense of place while touring. They did record one (double?) album in a hideout studio in Mississippi backwoods where that persona would fit: P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield_sound explains this style of music including this performance, but I don't accept the accent unless it comes from Nashville transplants to Bakersfield CA

The west coast vibe of "turn on, tune in, drop out" shown here before it soured a bit:

Linking things to climate change, sometimes dishonestly, has become key to getting funding, tenure, and attention.

Old Norse and old English may have been mutually intelligible, and more words probably have Viking origin than previously thought:

I was worried some of my picks were idiosyncratic, but this topic is what am "I" listening to. And the view and comment counts of the following are stratospheric, so why aren't "you" listening too? Following is a mashup(?) of Brubeck's Take 5, the most popular jazz recording ever made. The sound has been warped into more contemporary song vs the old one being legendary but too familiar to some. This has almost 8M views and 8k comments! That derived from the 26M views and 13k comment video https://youtu.be/tT9Eh8wNMkw which has a long pleasant meandering take at https://youtu.be/G27qErb6R-k . Brubeck did not fall into typical jazz player addictions, but was a WW2 vet with 6 kids brought up in a 70 year marriage. Died not too long ago in his 90s.