Apologies to all but I'm pretty much forced to update later today. I forgot the mouse for my laptop at school and I don't have the digital dexterity to cut and paste using the touchpad on this thing (it works differently in the different programs I run to put rogueclassicism together and it's driving me nuts). It's a lot like trying to write with your toes ...

Hopefully I'll be able to update later tonight ... if not, look for a big update tomorrow a.m.. Apologies!!!!!!

The Birmingham News has a 'scholar athlete of the week' feature in which this week's football-playing nominee shows his influences:

Favorite subject: Latin because of my teacher, Mrs. Plosser. Who has been a major influence on you? My parents, Joe Carley and Claudia Hanny. I was drawn close to them after some tough times during their divorce.

If you could dine with anyone of your choosing, who would it be? Either Virgil, Noah or the Gubernator, because of The Aeneid, the Ark and Terminator. Study secrets: Learn in school.

So what's the number two paperback being sold in Cleveland? Enquiring Classicists want to know:

Walk through bookstore or look at a best-seller list, and you know what you'll see stacked near the door or holding most of the top slots these days: politics, sex, diets, religion.

So it wasn't a shock recently to see that the No. 2 book on the paperback best-seller list for Greater Cleveland was a volume that has it all - murder, rape, beheading, incest, torture, war, cults, gender confusion and strange diets.
    
The only surprise was that it was a book published more than 60 years ago, by an author who died 41 years ago.

The book was "Mythology," by Edith Hamilton, who mined classic literature for tales of Greek, Roman and Norse myth. Drawn from the classics, it became a classic itself.

I rummaged around at home and found a yellowing paperback copy. The cover shows the heroic Perseus - naked except for his winged sandals and helmet of invisibility, which must be set on "off" - holding the severed head of Medusa and the sword of Hermes.

Hot stuff. Almost ripped from the headlines, except the paperback is at least 35 years old.

Was it some echo of current events that put "Mythology" back on the best-seller list? Did "Troy," the epic that opened the summer movie season, inspire interest in Homeric heroes? Did Hellenic culture get a boost from the Summer Olympics in Athens? Is Cleveland running against the trend in "Reading at Risk," the recent National Endowment for the Arts study that found a big decline in the reading of literature?

Nah. "Mythology" is a classroom staple. It made the best-seller list because it first made the list of assigned summer reading. [more] 

9.00 p.m. |DCIVC| Ancient Evidence: Who Killed Jesus?
dna

10.00 p.m. |HINT| Time Team: Papcastle, Cumbria
When Ray and Helen Buckingham started building work on an extension to their Cumbrian house in Papcastle, England, they found what looked like Roman pottery and building-stone fragments. Puzzled, they contacted Time Team--actor Tony Robinson (Baldrick in "Blackadder") and his team of archaeologists, historians and other experts. Was the couple's garden part of a Roman settlement or military staging post? Time Team has just three days to piece together the surprising story.  

2.00 a.m. |PBS| Tomb of Christ
At the very center of Christianity, in one of the holiest cities on Earth, a mystery as old as the Christian faith is closer to being solved. An archaeological team from Oxford University has been hard at work attempting to prove that Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the actual location of Christ's burial. After a decade of delicate probing -- using a careful balance of diplomacy, intelligence, traditional archaeological and architectural techniques, and state-of-the-art equipment -- Martin Biddle and his wife, Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, have unearthed some astonishing evidence. [check local listings]