Monday, October 10, 2011

4 Things I Bet You Didn't Know About Augustus



1) In 9 C.E., when Augustus was 72, he ripped his clothes and took to beating his head against a door. He refused to shave for months. Why? Because in September of that year German tribes ambushed and destroyed the three Roman legions sent to tame them. Never again would Rome attempt to permanently extend its power across the Rhine.

2) Augustus banished both his daughter Julia and his granddaughter Julia for sexual promiscuity.

3) Augustus's last words allegedly included this last question: "Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?"

4) After Augustus died more than a few people were surprised to discover that he had posthumously adopted his wife in his will.

8 comments:

  1. "Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?"
    Those seem like pretty good last words.
    I'm thinking if I had a tombstone it should say, "Anybody who claims I repented near the end is lying."

    P.S.
    Or maybe "The captcha was burds" would be more surreal.

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  2. Power is an addictive drug. And no matter what their station in life, the elderly can have bad side effects and drug interactions, particularly when Militiacide is taken with Seeallusnude. At least Augie was pithy in his wit.

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  3. I like those last words. I came here way back in the day when OD was thought to be going tits up but couldn't cope with doing the two, then there was a dallience with LJ. and now i can't cope with od only ... such is life huh (quine a hin the lens)

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  4. I bet Julia and Julia were hot--sexy, swarthy little princesses with Roman noses.
    Do any graven images survive?

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  5. For your postcard collecting pleasure...

    http://libraryhistorybuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/worlds-largest-collection-of-overdue.html

    Or, the world's most ephemeral items which have outlived their useful life.

    Holy crap. The Captcha is "praise". There oughta be a law against requiring mandatory prayer to comment on an atheist's blogs. What's next, "Eating His noodly appendage?"

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  6. On scrapping the ban on future monarchs marrying Roman Catholics, Mr Cameron said: "Let me be clear, the monarch must be in communion with the Church of England because he or she is the head of that Church. But it is simply wrong they should be denied the chance to marry a Catholic if they wish to do so. After all, they are already quite free to marry someone of any other faith."
    Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond welcomed the lifting of the ban but said it was "deeply disappointing" that Roman Catholics were still unable to ascend to the throne.

    "It surely would have been possible to find a mechanism which would have protected the status of the Church of England without keeping in place an unjustifiable barrier on the grounds of religion in terms of the monarchy," he said.

    "It is a missed opportunity not to ensure equality of all faiths when it comes to the issue of who can be head of state."

    ======
    Deve asks: Hey what about equality of non-faiths?

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  7. Tricker Treat. This seems pertinent.

    PALO ALTO--A team of Stanford University researchers has bad news to report about Captchas, those often unreadable, always annoying distorted letters that you're required to type in at many a Web site to prove that you're really a human.
    Many Captchas don't work well at all. More precisely, the researchers invented a standard way to decode those irksome letters and numbers found in Captchas on many major Web sites, including Visa's Authorize.net, Blizzard, eBay, and Wikipedia.
    Their decoding technique borrows concepts from the field of machine vision, which has developed techniques to control robots by removing noise from images and detecting shapes. The Stanford tool, called Decaptcha, uses these algorithms to clean up the image so it can be split into more readily recognized letters and numbers.
    "Most Captchas are designed without proper testing and no usability testing," Elie Bursztein, 31, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Security Laboratory, told CNET yesterday. "We hope our work will push people to be more rigorous in their approach in Captcha design." Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
    This is just an excerpt for your private study. The complete story is here:
    http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20127715-281/outsmarted-captcha-security-not-much-of-a-gotcha/
    And Dotcha wanna know what the Captcha is for this comment? It's coomanat, which is either a misspelled cosmonaut or an anticoagulat.

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  8. Are you writing somewhere else as the Blogspot Refugee?
    The captcha is charmfu. I can't let that pass unremarked.

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