Emperors of Rome. Episode CX Anthology of Interest A triumvirate! Here Matt, Rhiannon and Caillan Davenport each have three minutes to talk about a topic of their own choice, three times over. So they discuss:
- The unfortunate demise of Cinna the poet
- Cicero’s reluctance to send panthers to those in need
- The sensitive subject of baldness
- PTSD bought on by the Carthaginian War
- Women donning a toga
- Claudius’ edicts and defending ‘stupidity’
- The last of the Ptolemys
- The hazard of regifting the world’s largest apple
I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist Episode 3: It’s the End of the World as We Know It Going back to the beginning with this podcast, Brian and Troy talk about the importance of ‘end-times’ talk in attracting them to fundamentalist pentacostalism. One of them (I’m not really clear who is who when I’m listening to this) was already primed for apocalyptic thinking because of dabbling in woo-woo thinking; the other one was already ensconced in the Assembly of God, where it was a mainstay. First there was the fear of nuclear holocaust, then when the Berlin Wall fell, it was fear of economic domination through the cashless society and the mark of The Beast as a computer chip or bar-code, and now it’s the prospect of a Muslim-Christian war. However, as they point out, the early Christians thought that they were living in the end-times too, and God didn’t turn up then either.
Being Roman (BBC) Episode 6: Love in the Borderlands Mary starts off this episode in Newcastle UK, close to Hadrian’s Wall, with a tombstone erected to Regina by her ex-owner and then husband Barates from Palmyra in Syria. Regina was a local Newcastle girl, and obviously there was slave-owning in Roman Britain although it is so late in the empire that she must have been sold into slavery rather than taken captive, as occurred earlier. When the Victorians uncovered the tombstone, they framed it as a love story where the local girl captured the heart of the foreigner, but we wonder just how much freedom Regina had. Mary finishes with a good reflection on the way that we read artefacts according to our own view of the world, but that this is not necessarily a fault- instead it’s a way of keeping questions alive in history.
The Daily The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System. Recorded on 15/5/24. I remember reading T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth years ago, where American society was drifting into neglect because no-one could afford insurance. I’m very much aware of how insurance is driving so much in society today: where you can build, what management policies a company has to cover their arse, the way that someone always has to be held liable. In this episode, they discuss the succession of weather ‘events’ (such dead language) that are making home insurance unsustainable when companies need to pay out more than they receive. Companies are starting to refuse to cover houses in certain areas, which has implications for future buyers who cannot get a mortgage on an uninsurable home, leading to a drop in home values. ‘The Government’ could step in (unlikely in America) but that just means that people would continue to build homes in areas prone to repeated disasters. At least after Black Saturday our government banned people building in certain areas. Interesting.
Three Million BBC Episode 4: The Tapes As part of the research for this project, a box of old cassette tapes was uncovered, recorded by Australian researcher Lance Brennan decades ago. Brennan interviewed colonial civil servants who were based in Bengal themselves, but answering to Whitehall and its demands. Britain’s attention was focussed on WW2 and they resisted declaring famine because it would divert resources from the war. Emergency food relief was provided, but ‘test work’ was required in exchange. Then, the British Govt said that it couldn’t spare the ships, and besides, other people were starving too. Even historian Max Hasting, a great fan of Churchill, admits that Churchill was racist, even by the standards of his time.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 