Check out this “Roman Army Knife” that has gone on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. It’s part of their newly-refurbished Greek & Roman antiquities gallery.
It’s not actually part of a Roman soldier’s kit; it dates back to the Third or Fourth Century, is made of silver, and was probably owned by a wealthy Roman, according to this Daily Mail article. I think it’s interesting that a fork is one of the implements, since forks were generally not used as eating implements by Europeans until the Renaissance, but maybe it wasn’t used for eating by whomever owned it. Or maybe he was just ahead of his time. The article says that folding knives were actually very common articles in the Roman Empire, usually made of bronze, since steel was difficult to produce in ancient times. In the picture above you can see that the knife blade of the tool has deteriorated to just a small rusty end.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
