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- Thread starter Gutwrench
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I thought you’d have been watching the football. If you missed it, probably for the best.
No, Decent Brother phoned me just as the thing started; I like long phone calls/chats wth someone for whom you care, - maintaining and sustaining relationships need time, time when one is not distracted by other considerations, such as football.
Re football, perhaps I'm just Old School. In truth, I prefer my football at week-ends (and that means Saturday and Sunday; mid week stuff just doesn't do it for me).
Moreover, a Friday night Cup Tie will never thrill my bones, even though, traditionally, Arsenal have tended to do rather well in the FA Cup.
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Preferably 3 O’clock on a Saturday afternoon for me. Then checking ceefax in the TV shop window when you are out shopping.
Makes me feel old!
I don't like football at any other time apart from Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon and maybe a Wednesday evening game. I especially detest Friday and Saturday evening games. There's too much football on nowadays; I remember listening to the radio, waiting for the news of a goal to come through. "And now we have news of a goal from Old Trafford" (sharp intake of breath) "and over we go" (breath held) "well, the ball was played into the goal area and then passed to" (oh, for God's sake man get on with it!) "and Greenhoff scores!" YES!!. The Good Old Days as they say....
Same. Actually I remember how great it was when games were only on Sunday.
On my mind: Memphis. No further information is needed.
Wow, how long ago was that? Football has been a Saturday thing for longer than I can remember.
Weren't September, October, November and December originally the 7th to 10th months back when the calendar only had 10 months? Then Julius and Augustus happened and pushed them back 2 months, but nobody wanted to go back and rename those months. Or something like that.
That's the version I heard anyways.
deli ham suitable for a sandwich.
but i'd eat it with steamed white rice and kewpie mayonnaise.
I would say until mid 1990’s (in Italy). Cup games were on Wednesday. Serie A games were on Sunday, all at the same time, if memory doesn’t fail me they were at 3PM.
Then they added the Sunday evening game, then the Saturday game. Now it seems that they play every day.
One thing that I find good of the Major League Soccer deal with Apple is that all games start at 7pm, and if I am correct only on Saturday and Sunday, with some Wednesday exceptions.
Edit: just found it. The first time that a game was not played at 3pm on Sunday was in 1993, as they added a night game. In 2021, for the first time ever, no Serie A game was played on the same day and at the same time.
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No, not quite.
Actually, July and August had both existed in the (original, numbered) Roman calendar, but the months were re-named after two Roman military and political leaders, July after Julius Caesar, and August after Octavian, who later took the name Augustus, the name by which he is known to history.
Originally, the first of these two months, that is, July, had been called "Quintilis" (for it was the fifth month of the ten month Roman calendar), whereas the second, August, had originally been known as "Sextilis", the sixth month, of that ten month calendar.
The two later additions - additions which turned a ten month calendar into a twelve month one - came at the beginning of the year, and are January and February, two months which do not appear, or feature, in the Roman decimal calendar system.
March (named after Mars, the God of War, in Roman times, the actual month was known as Martius) was the original first month of the ten month Roman calendar, the month that ushered in the start of a numbered New Year, for the Romans clocked the years, and numbered them, just as we do, but, needless to say, they did not use the same means (which for us is the Christian Era - BCE, and CE) to define and describe the passage of time.
Instead, they used the founding year of Rome as the starting point (date) of their calendar.
@yaxomoxay will know this a lot better than I do.
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A loaded question. I wish Apple on their sleep routine, would enable a nap setting to gather data . I get bored and take a 2 hour or so nap, it would be interesting to see what is going on.
One thing to add is that the importance that the Roman calendar had on Roman life, and even in the Middle Ages, can’t be overstated.
The calendar completely regulated life and even political order. Romans were very attentive in making sure that no mistakes were made. We are familiar with the Ides, but they also took care to know about the Kalends (first day of the month), and the Nones (if I remember correctly based on the lunar calendar’s full months). More importantly, each month had Fasti (basically when people could work and assemble), Nefasti (when people could not work and assemble), Comititalis (some public function were allowed) and more. Each of those definitions were linked with good luck and bad luck… and being publicly recognized as someone with bad luck would’ve had dire consequences on your social life.
Romans also had a public calendar which carefully and methodically displayed political life, and who and when was elected, and they were very very careful in following religious rituals to the letter. Catilina and Caesar themselves got tangled in a messy religious scandal when one of their cohorts, Clodius, dressed as a woman and infiltrated the temple of the Vestal Virgins before a religious ritual that was only for women, allegedly because he wanted to approach Pompeia (Caesar’s wife), causing a complete political mess which involved even Cicero at the trial. Again, Romans were very serious about religious rituals (in the rare case a Vestal Virgin was found having lost her virginity she would’ve been buried alive as it was fairly common Roman practice).
One common misconception is that when pope Gregory released the Gregorian Calendar - which we use - everyone complied. In reality it took several centuries for the world (even just the west), to adapt. As a matter of fact, even within the Church itself the basis reference remained the Roman calendar, as shown by this picture of my Monastic Breviary. You can notice that on the third column, under days of the month) the Roman calendar is still used (Ides, Nones, Kalends etc).
You see?
Terrific and wonderfully informative post.
You were (and are) able to bring an awful lot more to this discussion - which I, for one, find absolutely fascinating.
Now, I do recall my Latin teacher explaining the significance of how the Roman calendar functioned within each calendar month, and what the terms Kalends and Nones (and indeed, the Ides, with which we were already somewhat familiar) actually meant.
However, much of the other material in your post is entirely new to me; wonderful.
Yes, years ago I had read about (but had entirely forgotten) the religious scandal, with Caesar and Catalina, (and Clodius infiltrating the temple of the Vestal Virgins), but, as just mentioned, I had entirely forgotten about it.
History is just beautiful… full of intrigue, love, pain, and also happiness. I just wished that it was taught better at middle school/high school level.
As a matter of fact, I find very sad that tv series like Rome, which was very precise, are canceled while at the same time The Learning Channel (!!!) decides to green light “MIlF Manor” in which alleged good looking 50+ year old women want their kids to copulate with the other women on the show, while being hit by the other ladies’ kids. Tells me a lot about the direction.
As for the scandal, I am lucky because it’s a chapter of the book I am reading now. I remember reading about it a long time ago, but I had forgotten about it until recently.
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Yes, your remarks about how long it took much of the western world to adapt to the more accurate Gregorian calendar x(in place of the Julian calendar) are well worth noting, and that, too, is an absolutely fascinating tale.
Precisely because of when it was introduced - 1582 - and where it came from - Rome - rather than being seen as an advance in the accurate reckoning of and calculation of the passing of time - instead, it became something of a contentious issue, (for it was seen by some Protestant countries as a Popish plot to compel their return to the Catholic fold) in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation wars that raged across Europe. The Orthodox communion (which had split with Rome, centuries earlier, in 1054) also rejected the calendar reforms.
Thus, for example, the British only reformed their calendar - to come into accordance with measured time as set out in the Gregorian calendar reforms - in 1752. Russia didn't carry out this step until after the Russian Revolution, in 1918, (which is why you read about the February/March revolution and the October/November Revolution of 1917) when their version of time was almost a full fortnight adrift from what was measured in most of the rest of Europe.
Agreed.
I used to teach history and could never understand how it was possible to actually murder such an interesting subject, not just in the classroom, but also in some of the set texts, and worse was the reputation it had acquired, for it was a subject that, in the eyes of some students, was deemed to be "boring". And, of course, it was nothing of the sort. Even now, there is almost nothing I would rather do to curling up with a well written history book.
This is compelling stuff, yet some texts were the proverbial dry as dust, and dull to boot, and it took a rare skill to render such rivetting raw material into pure tedium.
However, at least at third level, people chose to study history, - they weren't compelled to do so - and, therefore, I could assume some level of interest from my students when I taught a course.
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Sorry to interject, and quite late at that, but I am old and my attention span is shorter than my expected life span at this point, but:
One of my fav JB tunes.
Not just history. Science and Biology in particular. Kittens are biology. How can people make kittens boring? It takes a special skill.
I used to teach Biology in University (what was called Preliminary Year, to help students who hadn't done Years 11 & 12 in school to catch up). I took over from a previous teacher, and class attendance went from 30~40% up to 95%. And I didn't have to use kittens...
I have just been reading "The Abacus and the Cross" by Nancy Marie Brown. It talks a lot about the level of mathematical and astronomical knowledge around western Europe around the turn of the first millennium. But, she gets so tied up in the constant back-stabbing and vendettas that much of the important information just gets lost. Like how popes were selected at that time. I need to finish the book to get at all the important knowledge, such as the fact that Archimedes was using methods of calculus. This is vital stuff!!!, yet is only covered in one sentence, without any acknowledgement of the importance of that statement. Archimedes invented calculus, not Newton.
Anyway, I'll be finished soon, and be able to start "The Light Ages" by Seb Falk. Hopefully he will be a lot better, with more science and less back-stabbing.