Friendly Reminder That This Is Technically My Main Blog But I Am Actually Using And Reblogging On My

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

Passover

This potsherd from 475 BC was found on the island of Elephantine, close to the border between Egypt and Nubia, which was home to a small, close-knit Jewish community at the time.It reads; “To Hoshaya. Greetings! Take care of the children until Ahutab gets there. Don’t trust anyone else with them! If the flour for your bread has been ground, make a small portion of dough to last until their mother gets there. Let me know when you will be celebrating Pascha (Passover). Tell me how the baby is doing!”Besides a wonderfully evocative peek inside a daily conversation, the sherd contains one of the earliest non-biblical references to #Passover. Passover commemorates the liberation of the ancient Israelites from Egypt and is observed annually by Jewish people all over the world. This year, Passover begins tonight and ends on Thursday 16 April. You can find out more about this sherd and many other fascinating objects relating to Judaism in our collection in ‘The Jewish Journey’ by Rebecca Abrams, available online.

Hanukkah Puppy Hanukkah Puppy Hanukkah Puppy

First night concerned

Second night uninterested

Third night sleepy

Fourth night intrigued

Hanukkah sameach!

So I drew Keith in the same au as the last post! I went with the theory of him being half Galra and half Altean, which is why his ears are the way they are. Pidge calls him Night Kitty.

He’s not an orphan at the beginning but his father was a spy and his mother is eventually killed because of it. Keith wasn’t killed too because he was in the castle with the others.

*God slides it back* I don't take bribes.

*slides God two dollars* I want a girlfriend

pride month questionnaire.

Athenic you guys need to calm down. Persephonly I enjoy them.

i hate when people make too many greek and roman mythology puns. it really starts to

get on minerva

I cannot emphasize enough, museums/zoos/aquariums and the like are at an incredibly dangerous point right now, and it’s breaking my heart that not only is it happening, but it’s happening so much more quietly than it deserves. The main people I have seen sharing information about the crisis museums are in right now are others in the field, and while I know it’s not out of malicious ignorance, because people love these places and don’t want to see them gone, it’s scary that these places are dying with so much less fanfare than some of the other institutions threatened by the current situation in the US.

I came across an article from NPR the other day suggesting that unless something changes, ONE-THIRD of museums in the entire country (a loose term that includes certain places like aquariums as well) could be dead before the end of the year (source). A third! Can you even imagine the incalculable loss? And it goes so far beyond the services museums generally provide to the public, like field trips or a place to go on the weekends – not that those aren’t important. But museums do so much more than that. If these places die, where do their collections go? Often there’s no one else who can take them in, and as someone who has spent a significant amount of time in the bellies of museum collections, most people have no idea how many specimens or artifacts would become homeless and in danger of being lost forever. In the case of zoos and aquariums, what happens to their animals? Another friend of mine mentioned on Facebook the other day that the Aquarium of the Pacific is not only in dire need right now, but that a person they know who works with them has said that if they close, they’ll have to euthanize a significant number of their animals. And for the places that do survive, they won’t be unchanged. The science museum I used to work for isn’t in danger of permanently closing – yet – but still had make the incredibly difficult call to do a 39% reduction in staff positions, meaning that even when they reopen, the jobs that I and over a hundred and fifty people held before the pandemic – educating, running programs, engaging with visitors on an extra personal level – won’t exist anymore. Another friend of mine doing a museum studies degree has said that even the Smithsonian (the SMITHSONIAN) had to make a similar call and many of her friends doing work there are now jobless.

Your local museum isn’t getting help from the government. Museums, zoos, and aquariums have had to beg desperately for stimulus money that hasn’t manifested. These are non-profits, that rely on revenue from visitors and memberships for the most part, and as they are responsibly staying closed for everyone’s safety, they aren’t getting visitors. Without some form of help, they are going to drop off the face of the planet, or appear at the other end of this as gutted shells of their former selves. 

If you want to help, you have two options: get money into the hands of these places directly, or put pressure on your representatives to offer museums and other institutions like them some kind of federal stimulus money. If you can afford it, this is a great time to get a membership to a place you love – many of them are even offering special online programming for members, so it’s more than just a donation. Or you could make a donation, if that’s a more practical amount for you to spend, because at this point anything helps. And if you can’t do that (or even if you can), yell at your senators and representatives to do something. Many places even are offering guidelines for the sorts of things to talk about, like this script from the Monterey Bay Aquarium (although repetitive scripts are less likely to have an impact than individual e-mails, something is still better than nothing, and you could even read over it to figure out how to formulate your own message).

I’m not usually one to beg people to signal boost something, but it’s breaking my heart that this issue is being ignored. Every day it feels like I have to explain these places are struggling to someone else who didn’t know it was a problem, and while I don’t blame them for not knowing, I want people to know. I want people to be aware that we are at risk of losing some of our most valuable cultural and educational institutions, not find our after all this is over that they’re gone. Please talk with people you know about what’s going on. We need our museums. And right now, they need us too.

The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat

Newcomerstown, Ohio.

Built 1874.

4 bed, 3 bath.

$445,9000