TRAJAN IS NOT EMPEROR OF THE ROOFTOPS! This is what I would scrawl on the forum walls if I were a rebellious Roman teenager in 100 AD. Assuming I wasn’t busy getting stabbed or dying of dysentery. Archeologists recently discovered first-century cat prints made on a drying Roman rooftop tile. The offending feline was Octavianus Viridius Tertius, a loyal servant of the gods and Rome. Ok, so I don’t know the cat’s name or loyalties, or even if the charming beast was domesticated. But I love seeing evidence that cats have walked across our metaphorical keyboards for thousands of … [Read more...]
Bad Bunnies
A scene from my childhood: A frightened rabbit gazes across a field. Blood flows toward him from the horizon, corrupting everything in its wake, a prescient vision of coming death. “The field! The field!” he cries. “It's covered with blood!” This happened early in the animated film adaptation of Richard Adams’ Watership Down. It still haunts me. I was five or six when I saw this movie. My parents brought home the VHS rental, unaware of the horrors inside. They thought it was a simple cartoon about rabbits. It wasn’t. A few other images stick in my mind: rabbits tearing the … [Read more...]