With every full bi-monthly issue of this year's ACTA we will be inviting a special reporter to bring us an editorial on whatever topic they choose. This issue I asked Senex Caecilius to grace us with our first guest editorial and he's done a fantastic job. Look for similar installments by other members in future issues. Enjoy!

In a previous life, Senex Caecilius taught high school biology in Texas. One of his students turned him on to Latin and the on-line game called S P Q R; the rest is history. Are you curious about the name? In Roman times, any man over age 45 was a senex, and since the Cambridge Latin Course textbook dealt with the Caecilius family, the name seemed to be an apt one.

AncientWorlds provides a perfect place for Senex to live and to play almost daily. Here he is able to pursue old interests and to discover new ones. Here he is able to teach in a playful way and to learn in a stimulating environment. Here he is able to hone old skills and to learn new ones. Here he is able to meet new people and to interact with them in meaningful ways. What follows is a typical day for him.

At A Games World, Senex enjoys the word game puzzle that changes periodically, and that activity suggests a new challenge which he incorporates in the Ludi Seniles, a collection of games dealing with the Latin language and Roman culture.

A new group called Mathematics from the Beginning piques his curiosity about the mathematician named Leonardo Pisano, otherwise known as Fibonacci, and results in a post to share what a Google search returned and a poem to accompany it.

Now, about those double-dactyls and other poems... In his previous life, Senex used a variety of writing-to-learn activities in his biology classes. He found that a variety of poetic forms lent themselves to his purposes. The limerick, cinquain, diamante, double-dactyl, haiku, clerihew, tanka, sijo, et cetera ad nauseum provided simple structures to practice skills that are important in any discipline: observing, describing, defining, comparing, contrasting, summarizing, synthesizing, and communicating.

At the Schola Lingvae Latinae he checks to see if Calpurnia has been able to use his hint to solve the rebus he posted about a Latin motto. At Arachne's Web, he posts the formula for hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) to respond to a query and to illustrate the HTML code for subscripts and superscripts.

At The Tenth Muse, he reads a rejoinder to his poem about feudalism and the plague in medieval times, the Black Death.

A telegram from Laurels Curius solicits this report for the Acta Diurna. An entry in his journal and an update of his domus round out the day's agenda, then he's off to explore other worlds. Will it be a festival in Celtia, a tour of the Orient, a city state in Greece? The possibilities are endless, and it's barely noon!

So there you have it... a typical day in the life of Senex Caecilius, and it is centered in Rome. However, his story is only one of sundry others here at AncientWorlds, and he hopes to hear yours one day soon.

(Thank you Senex!) Now on with our Global News..

Things have changed a bit since then!