The Billings Gazette has, inter alia, an interesting little section for folks looking for 'modern' examples of epithets in a religious context:

While we're on the subject of religion, more or less, I was researching some story or other when I learned, via the online Catholic Community Forum, that the Virgin Mary is known by 333 titles, including "Undug Well of Remission's Waters," "Unwatered Vineyard of Immortality's Wine" and "Our Lady of the Milk and Happy Delivery."

She is also the patron saint of news dealers, yachtsmen, Spanish architects, Canadian harness makers, Bolivian Navy builders, ribbon makers, distillers, blood donors, coffeehouse owners, fishmongers and the Venezuelan National Guard, to name but a few.

::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:55:01 AM::
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A piece in the Times Argus on brick ovens brings up a perpetual question:

Brick ovens are universal tools that go back centuries. They certainly go back to Roman times, for – when ashes were uncovered from Pompeii – archaeologists in one probe found a beehive oven full of loaves of bread.

Is this true? I've never understood this claim about bread (or pizzas) being found at Pompeii. The flesh of the victims all 'decayed' with time, wouldn't the same happen to 'bread in the oven'?

::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:49:47 AM::
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Maggie Martin writes the Living column for the Shreveport Times ... she certainly can make the world of Classics sound glamourous:

Caddo Juvenile Court Judge Paul Young rubbed shoulders with Ivy League academia of Columbia University, New York, when he jetted up for a reception for his son, John-Paul Young, a 2001 Caddo Magnet grad. (His mom couldn't make it for the reception but dashed up a few days later.) They included no less than Gareth Williams, a professor and chair of the classical studies department. John-Paul is making waves himself in the hallowed halls. He graduates with honors from Columbia in May, with a major in classical studies and is heading to Cambridge University, England, on a Lionel Pearson Fellowship for 2005-2006. He will work on a master's there before pursuing a Ph.D. in classical studies.

The fellowship is granted annually to only one student from North America, according to information from the American Philological Association. "It allows me .... to study at Cambridge with David Sedley, the world's foremost expert in Epicureanism and a renowned scholar of ancient philosophy," said John-Paul.

Meaningful words came from Katarina Volk, a professor and his thesis adviser: "John-Paul is a true Renaissance man. Although he is a Latinist, he is equally comfortable with Greek and has a strong interest in ancient philosophy." "Wow!" is all we have to say about that.

::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:46:19 AM::
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From the Free Internet Press comes the latest Atlantibabble:

The images appear slowly on the video screen, like ghosts from the ocean floor. The videotape, made by an unmanned submarine, shows massive stones in oddly symmetrical square and pyramid shapes in the deep-sea darkness.

Sonar images taken from a research ship 2,000 feet above are even more puzzling. They show that the smooth, white stones are laid out in a geometric pattern. The images look like fragments of a city, in a place where nothing man-made should exist, spanning nearly eight square miles of a deep-ocean plain off Cuba's western tip.

"What we have here is a mystery," said Paul Weinsweig, of Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), a Canadian company that is mapping the ocean bottom of Cuba's territorial waters under contract with the government of President Fidel Castro.

"Nature couldn't have built anything so symmetrical," Weinzweig said, running his finger over sonar printouts aboard his ship, tied up at a wharf in Havana harbor. "This isn't natural, but we don't know what it is."

The company's main mission is to hunt for shipwrecks filled with gold and jewels, and to locate potentially lucrative oil and natural gas reserves in deep water that Cuba does not have the means to explore.

Treasure hunting has become a growth industry in recent years as technology has improved, allowing more precise exploration and easier recovery from deeper ocean sites. Advanced Digital operates from the Ulises, a 260-foot trawler that was converted to a research vessel for Castro's government by the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

Since they began exploration three years ago with sophisticated side-scan sonar and computerized global-positioning equipment, Weinzweig said they have mapped several large oil and gas deposits and about 20 shipwrecks sitting beneath ancient shipping lanes where hundreds of old wrecks are believed to be resting.

The most historically important so far has been the USS Maine, which exploded and sank in Havana harbor in 1898, an event that ignited the Spanish-American War. In 1912, the ship was raised from the harbor floor by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and towed out into deeper water four miles from the Cuban shore, where it was scuttled. Strong currents carried the Maine away from the site, and its precise location remained unknown until Ulises's sonar spotted it two years ago.

Then, by sheer serendipity, on a summer day in 2000, as the Ulises was towing its sonar back and forth across the ocean like someone mowing a lawn, the unexpected rock formations appeared on the sonar readouts. That startled Weinzweig and his partner and wife,Paulina Zelitsky, a Russian-born engineer who has designed submarine bases for the Soviet military.

"We have looked at enormous amounts of ocean bottom, and we have never seen anything like this," Weinzweig said.

The discovery immediately sparked speculation about Atlantis, the fabled lost city first described by Plato in 360 B.C. Weinzweig and Zelitsky were careful not to use the A-word and said that much more study was needed before such a conclusion could be reached.

That has not stopped a boomlet of speculation, most of it on the Internet. Atlantis hunters have long argued their competing theories that the lost city was off Cuba, off the Greek island of Crete, off Gibraltar or elsewhere. Several Websites have touted the ADC images as a possible first sighting.

Among those who suspect the site may be Atlantis is George Erikson, a California anthropologist who co-authored a book in which he predicted that the lost city would be found offshore in the tropical Americas.

"I have always disagreed with all the archaeologists who dismiss myth," said Erikson, who said he had been shunned by many scientists since publishing his book about Atlantis. He said the story has too many historical roots to be dismissed as sheer fantasy and that if the Cuban site proves to be Atlantis, he hopes "to be the first to say, 'I told you so.' " [more ... worth checking out just to see who the author of the piece is]

::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:43:34 AM::
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For some reason, when this one crossed my screen this a.m., I thought of Vergil, Eclogues 9 (and its Theocritean predecessors):

Toss Tuuganba Abdiyev a word to riff on and he gets all jiggy, if the lexicon of hip-hop can be applied to a 68-year-old Kyrgyz musician who used to ad-lib verse in honor of the Communist Party and right now, to a storm of laughter, is singing about Bush, Putin and noodles.

Abdiyev is an akyn, a title given to the masters of a form of musical improvisation that dates back more than a millennium. It was usurped by the communists, nearly died after the fall of the Soviet Union, and is enjoying a revival as young Kyrgyz and Kazak musicians discover their own, ancient form of rapping.

In one of its most popular forms, called aitysh, the music is a contest between two performers who sit several feet apart and duel in sung verse, each cuing off the other's words and ideas in a mixture of rhythmic singing, chanting and exclaiming.

"It's all about improvising on whatever topic comes up," said Alagushev Balai, who co-authored a book on the music. "Who has the sharpest verses with the most musicality and rhythm and wisdom and wit?" [more from the Washington Post, including photo]

::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:40:09 AM::
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::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:37:35 AM::
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::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:34:06 AM::
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::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:31:29 AM::
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I've set up a forum to discuss matters posted in Rogueclassicism (and other matters related to Classics) called Classics Central (possibly a bit hubristic, but it aims to centralize a pile of stuff related to Classics ... e.g., that will be the place where I will now be posting job listings, conferences (it has a calendar feature), etc..). There is also a section for discussion of Classics in general and the like. Please check it out and feel free to give it a run through its paces ... it's still in the 'beta' stage (I've never understood the use of 'beta' as a penultimate release term ... wouldn't psi be more appropriate?) and I'll be posting the official rules for each of the forums in the next day or two. All posts are moderated to ensure they are on topic (no politalk here) and not spam. To get there, click on the little 'comment' thing below.

P.S. Thanks to AK for his help in the 'alpha' testing stage ...

::Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:16:40 AM::
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