When Greece won independence from Turkey, romantic foreigners set about reshaping it to a Classical ideal; among other things they destroyed any nonclassical buildings on the Acropolis, which was most of them, because the Acropolis was once a living town. languagehat has the sad story.

A year later I find that Hat wrote three more entries on the same subject.

Eighties Trivia – without looking, I’m sure of the answers to 27 of the 106 questions. It might help if I had watched television.

Some public-spirited person has posted [and soon thereafter removed] all of Playboy’s centerfolds from Norma Jean to Miss October 2002. (I can’t resist a complete series of anything at all interesting.) It’s not without interest to compare the earlier and the later. The pseudo-candid style was established very early on; often a narrative is suggested, though sometimes a puzzling one:
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Teller doesn’t talk, but he writes. His story A Memory of the Nineteen-Nineties, a sequel to Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” (which I read sometime in the Eighties), almost makes me wish I’d thought of making the same pilgrimage.

Teller’s account is now behind the subscribers-only gate, so I’ll summarize. Enoch Soames “was” a minor writer who sold his soul for an opportunity to see what his reputation would be after a hundred years. The Devil brought Soames to the British Library on a specified date in 1997, then returned him to his friends in 1897. Teller (and a few others, independently) went to the Library on that date to see if anything would happen. Something did.

Soames reported that everyone in 1997 wore numbered yellow jumpsuits, if memory serves; but Teller did not touch on that point.

Bellesiles goes down. Lighten up Clayton, you’re entitled to gloat a bit.

Andrew Bulhak observes:

(The identity of heroes/villains in films can be telling; for example, there’s Four Feathers, which glorifies the British Empire (which can be seen as a rather prestigious model to proponents of a a global American empire) and its doings in the Middle East, only a few years after pre-9/11 film The Patriot painted the British as the original Nazis (somewhat slanderously, apparently). I wonder whether we’ll see any metaphorical films about straight-dealing, heroic apple-pie Romans (played by Ben Affleck or Brendan Fraser) doing battle with treacherous, Taliban-like Visigoths.)

Also from Andrew, a link to Earth Erotica, worth a chuckle

George Byrd, who has contributed to this space before, comments on the urine item below:

I recall reading somewhere that during the last years of the Civil War, some southern cities instituted regular collection of urine from chamber pots, from which they extracted nitrates for gunpowder manufacture.

I don’t know whether it is true or not, but if true, it would be “a use for the stuff”.