I'm not sure I trust such a youngun' to shepherd my anima vagula blandula in this world.

A pope with heart problems? Is it a requirement now that popes have built in obsolescence?

I just put up a new article in my study called Dolphin Armrests and the God of Good Health.

I have been accused on several occasions here and on my official website I-CLAUDIUS.COM of making ridiculous the very serious business of history, both ancient and more recent (see the pope entry here and the other article in the library, Elagabalus: I'm Too Sexy for My Toga).

Let me be clear on this: I understand your pain; nevertheless, since I was the guy in class who kept blowing raspberries whenever Greek philosophers were mentioned and who didn't wear anything under his graduation robes, letting them fall open as I received my diploma, you have to cut me some slack.

After all, when all is said and done, nearly everyone and everything is indeed ridiculous; so much so that I have created my own branch of philosophy, a heady brew of cynicism, nihilism, teenage scatological epithets, absurdist manifestos, and reruns of My Mother the Car.

This new philosophy is called Say What?, and you'll notice that there is no "-ism" tacked on to the end of it. And you want to know why? Well, because that would be completely ridiculous.

This article was originally published for a Kylie Minogue fansite. I thought it would be fun to reproduce it here, but I could be wrong.


I want to tell you a little about how I discovered Kylie Minogue. Everyone has their own story. For some it opens their eyes to something new and is therefore a landmark --- if they take their music as seriously as I do. For others it is a casual discovery which does not resonate as anything special, and life goes on as before. I write this for the former, for I not only discovered Kylie, but also a completely different way of looking at pop culture. It opened my eyes to the importance, or at least the significance, of that culture.

I am a snob when it comes to music. If a song does not exploit polyrhythms and complex extended harmonies, I tend to dismiss it out of hand and pop a Frank Zappa CD into the player. My heroes tend to be those shady, oblique artists who throttle their instruments in search of that apocalyptic industrial jazz chord resonating only in the souls of their tortured initiates. Ecstasy for me has always been that irretrievable moment in a King Crimson concert when Adrian Belew pinches off an infernal sonic artifact on his Roland 350 synth guitar, when Al Dimeola’s Gibson-Marshall-configured digits glide through 8 bars of 128th notes. I follow in the wake, proud to be a musical snob.

This snobbery is a function of something I call the “Sphincter of Youth”. It’s a doughnut-shaped muscle that closes tightly around the happy void of acceptance as you take on the prejudices of your teenage friends. They tell you that that singer is cool, that guitarist hot, that group over there as interesting as a sealed tuna sandwich. It never ceases to amaze me the capacity of young minds to be governed by the dominant baboon. I considered myself an individual, but all those long-haired monkeys monkeyed with my happy void of acceptance. I could not make a decision about what I liked without first consulting hipper primates.

Liberation came late one August afternoon in Rome after picking over the ruins of the forum. The heat was such that I had to go back to my hotel room, shower and throw myself on the stone-hard mattress. I lay there gulping less than frigid air from the substandard central air conditioning, trying to determine if the moisture dribbling down my body was from my pores or the shower. As torpor set in, I made one last effort worthy of an ancient Roman general to get up and grab the remote control for the vintage color TV. I flipped through the channels looking for something that vaguely sounded like English, because Italian gave me a headache and all I wanted to do was emulate an eggplant in exquisite repose.

Eventually, the greasy remote buttons landed on Italy’s version of MTV. I saw this blonde coming down the stairs banging on the walls. There were computer generated grids flying around her head and music playing in the background that sounded like someone’s three-year-old son had screwed around with the home equalizer. As the blonde reached the last step, the music equalized and she stuck her bobbing face in the camera and sang, “Thought that I was going crazy…”

You remember the Grinch with the heart two sizes too small? At the moment of the Grinch’s revelation when the sled full of goodies with the little Who girl perched on top started teetering over the edge, his heart suddenly grew five sizes, bursting through his Santa suit. That’s what happened to my Sphincter of Youth. It relaxed five sizes. I was hooked. I missed half the song waiting to read the title and artist flashing on the screen. KYLIE MINOGUE. Love at First Sight. Never heard of her, but the title of the song certainly described what I felt.

But this is silly, I kept telling myself. I had abandoned all hope of being enriched by pop music about the time Michael Jackson had his first dimple implant. Pop was as intellectually satisfying as a shuffleboard game and as intricate as a pattern of pale pink polka dots. It was a music born not of creative mysteries, but of marketing surveys and computer readouts graphically representing the catchiest hooks. It was a thing to be reviled, danced to, and disposed of like a designer iced tea bottle. Nothing more. In the relentless closing of the joyful aperture of acceptance, I had blocked out even the possibility that pop could be exciting, and a pop princess could catch my eye.

This self-criticism forced me to deal with my newfound love in the only way an embarrassed convert can: I listened in my room late at night where no one could see the CD cover. I locked my door when I popped the DVD of the Live in Sydney tour into the player. I secretly bopped in back seats when one of Kylie’s songs came over scratchy cab radios. I kept MTV on in the background while writing, hoping to see a video of Kylie, and quickly switched the channel to CNN if my girlfriend came into the room. One close call was diverted when she walked in and said, “I’m confused. I thought I heard you playing that idiotic ‘Cheeky Girls’ song, but I see George Bush on the TV.” I answered, perhaps a bit too defensively, “What do you expect? He’s a Republican!”. I behaved like I harbored a secret perversion, perhaps one involving rubber underwear and sophisticated hydraulics, forced to indulge my damaged sexuality under cover of darkness.

Then my bi-monthly issue of Book Magazine arrived, which featured an interview with Umberto Eco, a literary hero of mine (yes, no pop bestsellers for Peter, the snob). In the interview he talked about the mythos of the hero, citing his love for Spiderman comics and American pop culture. More telling than his words, however, were his activities during the interview. While pontificating on Spiderman, the hero and villain archetypes, he took bites of a Big Mac and pensive drags on a Marlboro cigarette. My hero had embraced pop culture; indeed, he was eating it, making it a part of himself. And was no worse for it. Intellectually at least. Well if he had embraced it, so could I. Here was a higher primate worth the deference. I thought, well, if I could process the experience of watching and listening to pop, to Kylie, through the printed word I could somehow legitimize that voyeurism, kind of like the pimply adolescent who buys Playboy for the articles.

I joined the kylie-minogue.com forum several months ago, searching for a place to call home, and was asked to do this series of articles and reviews for the main website. I was reluctant at first because my real job involves writing and there’s nothing worse than doing for a hobby that which you do for a living. I came to realize that it would be fun to do it, a sort of literary drag show. Perhaps it may serve to open that joyful aperture of acceptance that closed tightly long ago.

Why did Caesar regularly pluck out all his body hair? Did this lend credence to the popular saying of his time, "Caesar is a man for all women and a woman for all men" ?

Did you know that dear old Uncle Claudius wrote a tract on the importance of breaking wind, and recommended this expulsion even at the dinner table? He even tried to get a law through the senate to the effect. I guess he wanted the senators to pass more than legislation.

History is full of the kind of gossip perhaps even the Enquirer would think twice about printing. Great writers of antiquity such as Suetonius, Polybius, Tacitus and Dio were also the major-league yentas of their time. Procopius, secretary of the Byzantine general Belisarius and author of the book The Secret History, wrote about the Emperor Justinian and his wife Empress Theodora in such terms as would rival the scandal mongering of a modern Hollywood exposé. Robert Graves took Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome as his model for the mayhem-riddled I, Claudius and Claudius the God. He also borrowed from Procopius for his lesser-known but no less exciting book Count Belisarius.

Most people avoid reading the ancient authors for fear of ponderous writing about forgotten places and events. It seems like a lot of investment just to get a little juicy information. Writers like Colleen McCullough, Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis research directly from the classics, wrap them up in an interesting package and deliver it to millions of fans. What many of us don't realize is that, in the realm of the classics, the events as reported by the old historians are in many ways stranger and more exciting than their interpretation by modern writers.

I was a member of Ancient Sites and at one point I even subscribed for a month or two. I don't remember many people, though, except maybe Calpurnia Caesar. Other names ring a bell, but that could be for reasons wholly unrelated to members. Does anyone out there remember me?

I do remember there being more activity, though. Scarcely would you log in than have messages from people you knew and as many as you didn't know pop up on the screen. It's a little different now. When communities get big they tend to aggregate in cliques and stop seeking out strangers for company.

For my part, as I don't remember anyone from the old site (or from this site when it had just started), I've set about looking for some groups to hang my hat on. I've found several, and most notably Arachne's web, with some very helpful and kind people. The thing is, there's not much activity, and I crave a little action.

But Spring Fest is coming up and I hope to find the archaeological thrills I crave with the activities some of the members have proposed.

I'm sure that everyone is wondering who's going to be the next pope and I have no idea why. It's quite clear it'll be the moldiest cardinal they can find tucked away in a zipper bag in the back of a vatican broom closet.

Why do popes have to be so old? Is that a guaranatee that all the idealism and youthful pluck will be drained out of them? Why not be different this time? Get with it, Catholic Church! Modernize. Here is my candidate for the next Pope:

Angelina Jolie

Think about it: When was the last time we had a pope that could physically beat the crap out of a demon? Not to mention, Angelina is a girl and we know for sure that demons are guys, so we've got the added embarassment to the demon world of having a female whip their sorry split-tailed buttocks. And she's got Tattoos! She's got, like, the Da Vinci Code tattooed on her ass, so she's prepared with graphic representations of arcane wisdom.

Here's another thing: Calendar sales. Has there ever been a pope that could sell a few calendars, get a little money for the Church other than the humid dollar bills old ladies stuff in the collection basket on Sundays? Have you ever seen a pope that would look good in a Prada bikini? I think not, and don't try to imagine it or you'll wind up scarred for life. Angelina, however, could rake in the bucks for the Holy City with a lovely twelve page, full color, month by month tribute to our savior, and blessed by the Popess herself.

So write to your diocese. It's time for a change.

I've had quite a busy week at work. Here in Spain, the natives take practically the whole week off for Easter, so last week I had time to write and update my site. This week is another story: I've been up to my eyeballs with work.

I wanted to mention a great new program that I picked up on the net the other day. It's called Color Impact from www.tigercolor.com. It's a virtual color wheel. You pick a base color and Color Impact will decide what colors go with it.

I'm a little color blind. Some colors punch me in the eyes while others are barely visible in the glowing haze of a green or red background. Every time I design a web page or set lights in one of my 3D programs I need heavy feedback and assurances that everything isn't clashing. I'm like a blind man asking 15 of his friends if a particular woman is good looking and then giving up and jumping on anything that smells good.

Color Impact is the perfect solution. It even has a color blind simulation so you can make sure that poor schmucks like me don't get headaches while reading your webpage.

Color Impact is available for a trial download, so check it out if you want to. I've got no stock in the company, so do what you want, I just thought you'd like to know.

When you think about food and Romans, the Roman orgy comes immediately to mind: hundreds of hairy Mediterraneans in one-sleeved summer dresses gnawing on beef bones, lying around with naked buttocks, or sticking feathers down their throats while legging it to the vomitorium. There is surely quite a lot of evidence to support this conception.

Vitellius, one of the emperors who succeeded Nero, according to Suetonius, "banqueted" (read "he stuffed himself") three or four times a day, the last time drinking excessively. To make matters worse, he usually invited himself over to someone's house for these banquets, costing his hosts 4000 gold pieces each meal to feed him.

He dedicated a particularly elaborate dish to the goddess Minerva which he called "Shield of Minerva, Proctectress of the City". The recipe called for:

peacock brains
pike livers
pheasant brains
flamingo tongues
lamprey milk

This stuff he had captains of ships and military personnel collect from all over the empire. Then he ate the entire thing himself.

At sacrifices and other religious gatherings he would rescue stuff thrown onto the sacred flame, or pilfer cakes or lumps of meat off the altar and bolt them down. When he rode around town in his litter he had runners whom he frequently dispatched to pick up tidbits at cookshops.

The truth is that Nero, Vitellius and other portly Romans really weren't representative of the norm. A normal Roman rarely ate much during the day. Yes, many kept the three or four meals that doctors prescribed for a healthy disposition, but few took it to the extremes our abovementioned purple-striped hippopotami most famously did. Pliny the Elder, for example, ate three meals a day, but two of them consisted of no more than a few crusts of bread, olives, some cheese and watered wine. Caesar was the quintessential finicky eater, rarely eating to satisfaction, preferring the hard rations of the troops to the general's sumptuous dinner table.

There were in fact three named meals during the day celebrated at least during the classical period: jentaculum, prandium and cena.This seems to have been the regular habit of most Romans. The jentaculum and prandium were so quickly dispensed with that it wasn't even necessary to lay a table. Only the cena at the end of the day seemed to carry the burdon of nourishment for the average Roman. Here the style varies widely; to assume that all cenae were the orgiastic glutton-fests mentioned in the first part of this series would be wrong. It would be like saying that all modern dinners are like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. The Roman cenae ran the gamut from frat-house food-barfing contests to elegant and frugal refections with fingerbowls between the courses.

The cena began around the eighth or ninth hour of the day for most Romans, reckoning from sunrise, after sports and a bath. Nero and Vitellius began theirs around noon. Dinner was served in the triclinium, the name taken from the couches which had room for three recliners. Diners reclined on couches, the mark of comfortable and elegant dining. They each wore a light muslin synthesis suited to the closeness and warmth of the triclinium,which they frequently changed between courses.