caesar novus

Some software (firefox?) keeps urging me to patronize their "VPN" or similar feature to bypass firewalls or regional restrictions imposed for copyright restrictions or whatever. But I haven't been able to even get a local archeo lecture by zoom to work, or at least don't want to grant them requested permissions.

May be some ambiguity on definition of a martyr. I faintly recall a professor characterizing many christian deaths as like modern suicide bombers, that is killed more by their own agency. The Romans might give christians every out to avoid punishment for their "crime", which was refused. Like just go thru motions of traditions without even needing to believe in them, but many christians seemed drawn to being martyred. The professor depicted some Romans dreading having to bring numerous christians to "justice". Digression alert: This reminds me of similarly ambiguous types of suicide. Who is and isn't a kamikaze in the case of admiral Ugaki, who didn't know how to fly. He heard the emperor declare surrender on the radio, so asked the pilots he commanded to fly him as a passenger into an enemy ship. No ships were recorded as attacked that day, and in fact his diary depicts the kamikaze gig as quite safe under his command. This because most of their ramshackle aircraft would leak oil or otherwise fail halfway to a target and glide to a nearby island or friendly ship. P.S. coincidental to your profile. Can you believe Dmitri Shostakovich jr once phoned me with a blur of Russian words? I remembered the words for goodbye "do svidaniya", which he thought was a funny response. Turned out he had met a relative of mine and was skeptical of their claim I had studied russian. I was invited to Maxim's house once later on, and saw him conduct.

Last observation. I thought I would demonstrate how you can investigate a pet hypothesis, so put "doctor" in kathryn's search box. Instead of a tidy list of recent cases I had followed, it randomly dredged up old reports in a wordy forrmat with freakish doctor pilot deaths, such as in jail or by suicide. It would take me forever to page to the newer more data filled stuff. So I fell back to conventional google to check for where this stereotype came from. It dredged up several articles by doctor pilots about how their death rate used to be 4 times higher than other pilots, but not so much any more. They mentioned the classic stereotype of a "doctor killer" favorite airplane (V tailed Bonanza), and even whether it was an "overconfident surgeon" issue. Well the articles blather on and on about factors without hard statistics. The best I found was from old FAA Office of Aviation Medicine "Physician P.I.C. Fatal Flight Accidents" which covers 4x deaths getting worse 1966-70 while non doctors trending for the better https://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/1970s/media/AM71-09.pdf Alternatively I wanted to research frequency of crashes from circling back to the runway in the wrong direction, but I've run out of ideas to set up keywords. Anecdotally it seems you are supposed to turn away from the side of your dead engine, which is counterintuitive since the good engine yaws you the other way. Apparently the good engine overpowers a turn into the dead engine and it is very hard to level out and quit the turn rather than spin and crash. I give up...

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ has absolutely amazing ways to break down global historical crashes, such as by body count or maps or wacky causes. https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/monthly.aspx US gov't tabulation by month. https://aviation-safety.net/statistics/ has much the same, but I land you on a page of re-assuring graphics on almost vanishing death rate for airlines altho small planes have a much worse rate which seems to be increasing over time: Here I will riff a bit on anecdotal impressions I got from months following Kathryns; your's may wildly differ. The easy rupture of fuel tanks can turn a minor crumple crash into a delayed action horror. A rough landing can crimp the exits closed, and if you can't get out eventually that leaking fuel can blowtorch you into a Pompeii like figure. Another good reason to start flight lessons with a no-fuel sailplane. Also you will learn how to unexpectedly land almost anywhere safely if your lift disappears. No more oops my engine quit so we gotta crash; you will be used to spotting potential landing sites with a confident feeling of how far you can glide. Sailplanes do break a lot of backs on rough landings because they have little springiness, so maybe use an extra cushion. A lot of young women are appearing in crashes recently, often as instructors. This seems to be due to a huge demand for airline pilots in the light of mass retirements, and women are an under-tapped demographic. In the US a brief phase of small plane instruction is the norm on the path to becoming an airline pilot, so they are more present to show up in incidents. There are some cases where small stature or body strength or fighting experience could have been an issue. Take the case of a large student freezing up on the controls in a spin. You might think that an instructor could simply beat the students skull with fists or a cabin fire extinguisher to regain control. But it seems that males confide with one another that the cockpit doesn't have room for the windup/backswing to apply much force. You have to go for their throat or eyes (don't try this, I am leaving out details). In some areas spin training is banned because of the hypnotic freezeup issue; I was lucky I did it in a sluggish forgiving aircraft. Oh, here is my completely novel idea for the famous problem of doctor crashes ('another day, another doctor" was the comment on a crash log). It is thought their lack of time to get muscle memory on expensive new aircraft comes to a crunch in unexpected bad weather. But our now easy ability to listen or read transcripts of their radio chat up to the moment of crash gives thought to another factor. They actually have training and certificates for the conditions and unforgiving planes they fly, but I detect they aren't assertive enough under the micromanagement that air traffic control imposes in cloudy weather. Docs are collegial and unused to challenging authority/bosses. The atc has little knowledge of the doctor's snazzy aircraft abilities, but rather airliners and modest little planes. The atc bullies them over mountains and out of airliner ways, when the doc needs to assert noncompliance with legally recognized keywords like "unable". In other words give me the priority I need in this very work-overloaded condition.

Here is the Italian Guide experience with some unique perspectives. Suitable for small screens due to tragically low resolution. Poor audio quality benefits by turning CC on. https://youtu.be/EiDVvxXCmQ8 (less interesting) Or you can just subscribe, and various old items will now and then sprinkle into your recommended list.

That and several other eye popping stories seem to have been removed from the above site. Even some youtube accounts have been hacked in order to delete the story. An amateurish version is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ixX9KOBQIU which depicts a diet pill empire crashing with an unqualified ex Tarzan actor at the controls of the cult church jet. Much data on Katherine's site is factual in the sense that air traffic control conversations with any particular plane is now immediately downloadable, as is their exact flight paths and altitude. This is archived automatically, and no need for any gatekeeper to ask for it. So that is indexed by tailnumber NXXXX, and with the pilot name you can download all sorts of certification info from gov't sites. By cross checking folks can often detect fraud, and check for repeat patterns of misbehavior and accidents. Hmm, someday much the same info may be available for car drivers, for better or worse.

We've often seen coverage of airliner crashes, but what happens almost every daylight hour are small plane crashes. There is a site http://www.kathrynsreport.com/ that tabulates these for US and maybe Canada almost the day it happens. Then it sort of crowdsources amazing info over a week or two, months or years before dry gov't reports are released. The backstories are often extreme and worthy of a TV docudrama. We see patterns unfold, like the doctors who get themselves killed in the first family flight outing in their brand new airplane and new license. Over and over with an unforgiving snazzy plane into sketchy weather. At least they tend to be legal, but another common wildman segment has no license or registration or insurance and kills innocent passengers or folks on the ground. An amazing example of this emerges in the far-down pages of http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2021/06/fuel-exhaustion-piper-pa-22-160-n9227d.html where a ne'er-do-well in debt for a million takes a million life insurance on his girlfriend and kills her but not him on an avoidable forced landing. He had her sell her house to buy the plane of course, and on goes the hollywood ready plot. There are various tricks to navigate, such as the "most read: today" column which hits the major fatal stories, or click on todays date archive to view them all together (probably too new for comments). Sometimes the site hides a lot of stuff for a while probably due to complaints from victim families, but even unkind but informed speculation can be a lifesaver. Sometimes the exact same kind of accident repeats because the gov't reports are waiting years to dot the i's, like parking brakes that don't fully release in a certain bizjet. I can't pick out by eye the most epic story of a church owned bizjet recklessly crashing to make many kids orphans, which is already in process of I think an HBO series.

Those statues are wonderful; I love the signature dispassionate expression. Hopefully they can do a test to ID original stone quarry. I bet many similar finds in other countries went straight to the black market.

Here goes a bunch of mostly thumbnailed videos introducing Roman archeology visitation sites. Find ones you like, then you can hunt videos in more depth. As this can be ungainly to load, I have an alternate list version in perhaps a more fitting location at https://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/19385-list-version-favorite-archeo-tour-videos/. One really remarkable series on youtube that includes Roman sites is https://www.youtube.com/c/ProWalks/videos . Put it on a big screen in 4K and turn on closed captions which has a lot of historical footnotes. See his Hadrian's Villa, Appian Way, Pompeii, Herculeum, etc and feel free to post comments there. I think he gets the low level details right but not the background context, which folks here would know better. There are a bunch of similar, really copycat, channels that I think don't quite measure up. https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone/videos has a more scholarly slant, and more channels which I will try to recall and append here. Maybe it would be better to post each good video.

I thought the would-be queen now is the greatest actress who ever lived, Marisa Alassio. You enjoyed a Dutch segment/copy of her with Mario Lanza "seven hills of rome". I lost track of a great article proposing she was the first feminist actress, but in an elegant and more subtle way than later became the norm. She was a close counterpart to Sophia L, but high IQ and EQ.

Oh, I thought Rome was famous for an actual sub Saharan emperor or two, who was technically of another race and wide culture gap. Maybe the case for some generals, but if we are talking only of Berber-ness for a couple of emperors I am less impressed with that as proof of Roman broad mindedness. Today (or for me, a few decades ago) if you travel deep south into Berber speaking areas it seems like you are getting more into a Euro comfort zone than the Arab coast. The Berbers are proud and distant, but are every visitor's favorite companions. Like guides who deign to lead you and feed you rather than engage in the banality of talk, but there is somehow an easy cultural compatibility. In contrast there is a jolting cultural transition for instance entering southern Egypt. Not a negative thing - it is way more friendly and less hard sell to Euro visitors than the coastal north. But now and probably 2000 years ago the sub Sahara would seem a less likely cultural seedbed for a leader of Roman life. The draft of my previous post tried to include map of Berber settlement areas in northern Africa with no luck, maybe png not supported? Anyway I stripped that out, along with accompanying caveats... EDIT: now it works:

Portraits look Berber to me, with past experience of traveling north and south Algeria. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers#Antiquity sez: Smells like another case of trying to diversify historical figures to suite modern tastes, against (admittedly sparse) evidence, like Macedonian Cleopatra was a few years ago.

And another direction to seek are hi-res videos of Roman museums. These typically are not so available or done very well, but are getting increasing acceptance from museum directors. Take for instance the National Museum of Rome, an oddly quiet, cool collection of ancient stuff handy to the central train station. I see a long video with Greek narration that pans too fast, and a too short video below by a travel book writer who misled me by saying Hadrian's Villa wasn't worth visiting. Here is a web site with more virtual tours - I think I will seek one of the Roman subsection of the Vatican museum: https://joyofmuseums.com/museums/europe/italy-museums/rome-museums/national-roman-museum/

Wow, I tried routing prowalk and other videos to my 4k TV with youtube app and it is stunning. Didn't try this earlier because I thought I would have to leave my google password sitting in the TV, but they allow me as anonymous for free. For some reason I can run 4k at double speed that would cause jerkiness on my laptop, which helps for instance on a 6 hour video walk thru Jerusalem. Sitting really close gives great immediacy as if folks might bump into you, altho I have to reduce over vividness with TV settings. Some really good vids to look for are Hadrian's Villa and also the Appian Way. I didn't find great ones, but will post a teaser that lets you imagine how good an Appia Antica one could be if they would just walk or bike continuously without a lot of chit chat:

I think "Corporate" just had their season finale, but about half of their shows really hit the mark with rare insights of looney aspects of being a white collar drone, so seek reruns. This is on Comedy Central channel which just now did the most shameful censoring of their "The Office" reruns. They had been butchering it a bit to allow longer commercials, but now brought cancel culture to bear in bleeping out words like "gay". In the closed captions it shows up as asterisks half the time, along with some other mildly non PC words. I noticed the Paramount Network will resume putting out a couple "The Office" reruns out per week - I hope uncut. We are back in hardcore shutdown with outrageous crimes in my neighborhood due to released prisoners, and mismanaged situations and catch 22s everywhere you look for law abiders, but it is just too tedious to recount. Been watching some Mary Beard about Romans on Youtube. She can be a loose cannon, so best to look for the more focused BBC produced ones.

We are reverting back to lockdown with dire penalties for not wearing masks. I made a rare stroll outside for a swim and increasingly gasped for air in the overheated effort. At the shore there were 3 police overlooking pretty much only me and I nearly fell down and passed out before daring to unmask. Same routine on return. Reminds me of another case of gov't zeal for safety. Large parts of the Fukushima mandatory evacuation was not justifiable based on radiation science, and some large number of elderly died from the disruption. Wiki: "Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not neccesary for the most part", "The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration.". Back to a closer example was yesterday's Autopsy tv show with a cautionary tale of Marlon Brando dying from self sequestering himself in a house with hidden black mold. LA media watched outside that same house where his son had killed his daughter's boyfriend. That daughter later killed herself in Tahiti, where the police wanted to grill Marlon if he ever returned to his getaway house (island) there. So superstar Marlon died in agony from a known lung-attacking mold condition at home, maybe due to not getting out for enough swims?

By now, you may have seen announcement of another Istanbul museum converting to a mosque. Another populist/nationalist blow to globalism and Unesco. Instead of posting links to the news stories which have a bunch of intrusive video ads, I will post one of the most interesting youtube video I have seen about the "why" of nationalism. Nationalism brings some crude accountability that may be missing not only in today's globalism but for those from the past who served distant empires. The lack of any nationalist connection at all can not only make war sacrifices seem pointless but promote worse behavior. Atkinson's "The Day of Battle" details WW2 atrocities against Italian women and children by troops from one corner of of the French empire, and other sources claim this continued into Germany. They had no altruistic stake in the war and expected plunder in exchange for their risks. Anyway, a bunch of documents from attics in the US fell into the hands of professor Weber that illuminated early mental development of Hitler. He thought OH NO, I don't want to be known as a Hitler historian, but the documents from Jews who were very early acquaintances of Adolph (then fled to the US) were just too important and newly explanatory of ultra nationalist impulses. I may be misremembering a few things since I first encountered this material, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmDK2VC53XY

I never found hot, crowded Rome enjoyable until I focused on the outskirts. Besides Ostia Antica which is more shady and less crowded than Pompeii, I adore taking a long Sunday morning walk on the Appian way when vehicles aren't allowed. It has major uncrowded archeo sites (in good shape) on the end closer to Rome. The outer part has tons of humble monuments with the sober lifelike sculptures that I love, apparently tombs of freed slaves showing how they made good. Near dawn there are no tourists - I alone got off the train miles outside of Rome at a military base near the way. No danger of getting lost because the one path out is lined with graphic pictures of a sentry about to shoot anyone straying out of bounds. The actual Roman road is lined with umbrella pines and you mainly encounter dog walkers from the discrete set back mansions. The temperature is dewy sweet, but the paving stones are chariot-pounding rough on poor footwear. I encounter typical Italian eccentricities, like they fail to unlock the on-way entrance to a major site so I have to bushwack an endless trail to the back entrance. I try the closest deli to the way, which you would expect to be a tourist trap but makes a sublime sandwich to my specifications that I can still taste in my mind. I continue the walk into southern Rome which is pedestrian unfriendly, but has for instance lesser known unpatronized museums like a power station newly converted to ancient Roman displays. The ProWalk guy is fairly knowledgeable, but misses some of the less crowded and serendipitous routes which I sometimes post in his comments. In some cases I can see places and visitors are gentrifying into a wealthier, more crowded, and less interesting mode since I visited. There are quieter periods than shown, like the long end of day when Pompeii stays open quite late. ProWalk has recent competition with just unbelievable technical qualities like 4k and better resolution. It pays to go into youtube settings to ensure it is giving you the max res of your device, and maybe bump up the speed to 1.5x or whatever is the most your modem can handle. I don't have a Roman themed one handy, but check out this unbelievable one on Norway Fjords https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhVOvt2teCs

A local museum used to have a few shelves of Roman glass, often a bit wonky and asymmetrical. Later I chatted with the top glass expert at Corning Museum of Glass about whether that glass may have looked less amateurish when made, and pointed out claims how glass may flow in extremely slow motion over centuries. He said glass doesn't change shape at all, and the wavy pioneer windowpanes you see thicker at the bottom were oriented that way to be more stable. I talked about the weird iridescent amber look of our pieces, yet draw a blank whether he said that stays stable thru time too.

Gosh, I see how that Pompeii series goes on at least to part 6, then there are ones on the Roman forum, Capua amphitheater, etc. If you want a change of pace to something both Roman and super scenic, try his new drone channel with: and then follow up with his highly worthwhile walking version of Capri's notorious Tiberian palace. I have youtube run these a bit fast, but stay ready to pause at the best bits. Again, this seems almost better than real visits where you arrive quite winded from the climb (documented on his other videos):

Ideas for activities: 1) Get some teflon for your resp. system in the form of pneumococcal shots. Covid supposedly kills mainly thru pneumonia as does a lot of other conditions, so it is my uninformed reasoning to splurge on the very expensive pair of shots prevnar13 and ppsv23. Insurance only covers it once for oldsters. I got the first which targets the 13 most common pneus, and it seemed to transform my resp system from frail to semi bullet proof. I am too familiar with pneu choking breathing capacity to thimble size, but cannot find anyone willing to poke me with the 23 followup. 2) Local library expanded digital offerings. They hate physical books, and won't even check mine back in until after 2 week sitting in a return bin. But newly offer for instance Kanopy streaming videos which offer Great Courses in rotation. I want to see their lecture series of life of the Roman commoners, if it isn't too much of a Marxist victimology fest. Also they offer ancestory.com for a while. I had 650 years of family tree done by a relative, and am plowing thru a digital confirmation effort. More than just a chain of parentage, you can view various records with revealing sidelights. 3) Try to not let a day go by without knocking out some unpleasant chore normally put off.

We are back under lockdown, mainly due to one obscure tiny subculture here that doesn't follow precautions and creates almost 40% of new cases. When they were cited for violations, the ACLU sued for disproportionate enforcement. Not needed, because the citations absurdly allow a jury trial, so will be dropped as a practical matter. When state health dept tries to give pre-emptive assistance, the too comfortable bureaucracy can only organize 5 ready contact tracers for the whole state. Anyway, what about hunting and gathering under this regime? I just tried one grocery run after senior hours, and it was still a zoo with emptying shelves. I think seniors here are not online or aware of the very civilized senior hour experience with no crowds and mostly full shelves. The non-Costco warehouse club I use would probably discontinue it, but once an entitlement is granted it becomes awkward to withdraw. BTW their premier membership has been a godsend, with free air shipping of everything from heavy home gyms to crates of industrial toilet paper. Industrial TP has almost always been in stock, since few office workers to use it. What I want to stockpile for every main meal of the day is my invention of pesto jalapeno toasted sandwich made with naan bread. It is so decadently satisfying with the fiery peppers modulated by a coating of luxurious pesto, wrapped in crispy thick naan. You need a long slot toaster for the naan, such as from Amazon; at dark setting it will puff up even frozen naan. My warehouse store sells jumbo packs of these, affordable pesto, and sliced pickled jalapeno. If you make your own pesto, substitute another nut for the ridiculously pricey pine nuts. Coat one side of toasted naan thinly with pesto, carpet one half with jalapeno, and fold over. You can support the whole thing with a fork thru the rounded ends at an angle which pins it together and supports it horizontally, like a pizza slice on a stick. That dish is easily eaten in front of a TV, as long as excess oily pesto isn't squeezing out. Nice to accompany it with some of the better sitcom reruns like The Office and 2.5 Men. Due to construction noise I have been displaying captions, and found stealth jokes there that I missed earlier. There is a new comedy called "Corporate" that tries to carry on office satire, but it is very hit and miss. I suppose humble pursuits like this could be my life story for a while.

Gopro vlogging on youtube now extends to walkabouts of Roman sites in amazing detail with even surround sound, such as the Prowalk Tours series. I find these play best at youtube's 1440p setting on any laptop. If it has poor speakers then some stereo headphones will pay off, and of course hit the youtube button to expand into fullscreen: I haven't fully watched these 2 but usually they are even better than being there live in some ways, with drone segments and good weather, etc. He has several versons of each of these, depending on your preferences, and there are similar series by others. https://www.youtube.com/c/ProWalks/videos

I am puzzled by the tornado of profile photo updates comprising the majority of the "all activity" page https://www.unrv.com/forum/discover/ . That is the logical page to seek new posts on this forum, yet is clogged by possibly phantom actions in zombie accounts that have no posts and no real activity except perhaps their first day 5 years ago. Is there some software glitch mistakenly tickling these photos, or is there some scheme that benefits from having stored photos ever changing?

I've been surprised to see first the survival of Roman based measurements in the modern world, and more recently a driving out of metrics in favor of feet. This in the world of tech and for utilitarian, not ideological reasons. First a reminder of a Roman foot being 12 thumbs or 16 fingers wide, and a tad smaller than modern feet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measurement#Length A big move back to feet came to my attention from an airline pilot who said the metric system for flight level assignments is vanishing, now limited to North Korea and some backwaters of China. Surely this must be due to the elegant way you can allocate altitudes based on odd or even thousands of feet for going east vs west without interference. It turns out a perfect round numbered separation distance, which turns out very messy in meters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_level#Semicircular/hemispheric_rule The above reference shows umpteen exceptions, but in the pilots global experience the foot is back in charge. I suppose the exception for Italy and New Zealand may persist, which still uses thousands of feet, but applies even and odd for north vs south flights due to the elongation of those countries. The UK had a fancy 4 direction rule, but standardized to the norm 5 years ago. Another area of feet is catamaran length. France dominates the world large catamaran yacht market due to a drastic tax favoratism/shelter scheme. But using round meters on these represents a colossal jump in size, due to the way width and capacity scales. So they use more granular feet, like a Lagoon 42 vs a Lagoon 45. Other yachts often seem to be labeled in decimeters, but that seems too fussy to remember distinctions of every 4 inches. I first noticed this oddity when I used to buy French tablets. Inches persist as a diagonal screen measure, I guess for TV's as well. Rome had very useful divisions of measure based on a scale humans could relate to. Having things divisible by ten is good, but the metric units can seem odd. Who thought of a tiny gram as standard, so that any useful amount of things have to start with kilograms. Let's remake metrics with Roman units, like kilofeet or centifeet?