Apologies for the long absence, and the lack of CSS. My hosting service changed servers and I’ve been too busy at work to get together with them and make the necessary changes. Posts with actual content should begin appearing in the next day or two.

Update (half an hour later): Now all I have to do is figure out why the comments aren’t working.

The last of the January jokes is now up, and I suppose I will go ahead and start a February PDF file tomorrow night. I won’t have time to test HTML Greek display before the weekend.

While you wait for the jokes to appear, please visit my Books for Sale page. I have added 57 titles, in more than a dozen different categories, just in the last 48 hours. New listings are marked in red so repeat visitors can spot them easily. Prices range from 50 cents to $1,200, and even the latter is a bargain, since the title in question (Works of Francis Bacon in 14 volumes) sells for $2,150 new.

I’m putting the finishing touches on the six jokes necessary to bring Ioci Antiqui up to date. They should be up in an hour or so. I’m still mulling over how and when to make the transition to posting jokes as ordinary blogposts. That mostly depends on how easy it will be to display accented Greek correctly on all of your monitors without asking any of you (or me, for that matter) to spend any money or do anything at all complicated. Further experiments are likely. I’m also thinking of adding MP3 recordings of at least some of the Greek and Latin originals, though I can’t promise much in the way of quality, either vocal or technological. More in a little while.

Update: (11:45 pm)

The jokes are now up. Feel free to comment on them here.

Spam comments on my two weblogs combined have increased from 400 per day only a month ago to over 800 now. I’ve been told that Spam Karma will solve the problem, and it certainly looks like just what I need, but there are serious obstacles to installing it:

1. Spam Karma requires WordPress 1.5 and recommends 2.0, while I’m still on 1.2, though I installed it only a year ago.
2. The WordPress site tells me that the upgrade from 1.2 to 2.0 cannot be done as a single step, but requires a complex upgrade (4+ pages of instructions) from 1.2 to 1.5 and a second upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0.
3. In over an hour of searching, I was unable to find the 1.5 software download anywhere on the WordPress site: when I go to the 1.5 page, the only download link takes me to the 2.0 file, which the upgrade instructions show quite clearly will not work.

I think the word for my situation is ‘Kafkaesque’.

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, I inadvertently deleted the last four comments made on this site while bogged down slaughtering huge batches of spam comments this morning. Please don’t take it personally if you wrote one of them, and feel free to recreate it. I’ll try to be more careful in the future. Now I think I’ll go to bed without posting a joke: I’ll post two tomorrow night to catch up again.

I spoke wrote posted too soon. The Ioci Antiqui page is again behind, though by only one day, since I have deleted the epigram of Martial that I’d already used for November 23rd. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.

As promised, January’s Ioci Antiqui are now caught up through tomorrow (Monday), with five new jokes for the 19th through the 23rd, of which one or two are actually funny — opinions may differ as to which one or two. I hope to shift the jokes to HTML blogposts soon, most likely February 1st. That will allow comments on each individual joke.

Sorry about the missed days: I’ve been under the weather and bogged down in end-of-semester grading. I will post five more ancient jokes by midnight tonight to make up the deficit. These will be in the usual PDF file. At some point, I will also post one or two of the Greek jokes as HTML here to see if I can solve the problem of displaying the Greek with all the accents.

I hadn’t planned to start posting these as ordinary posts, but Filezilla is refusing to upload my PDF file. Is 118k too big? I’ll try again in the morning — or perhaps the afternoon, since it’s the first day of the second semester. In the mean time, I will shortly post today’s joke in HTML so you can judge whether it is better or worse than PDF. (I think Filezilla fried my January PDF file while trying to overwrite it, but November and December are still there for comparison.)

Coming up shortly, an English translation of the Younger Pliny on the murder of Larcius Macedo (Epistle 3.14). This is a private letter, but no doubt polished up, since Pliny published it himself in his own lifetime. I have tried to translate it fairly closely. For instance, like other Latin authors, Pliny makes much use of the historical present for vividness, and I have translated these as presents whenever possible.

Questions, comments, and objections will be most welcome. These may be on the substance of the letter or the obscurities and infelicities in my translation.

I hope to post a similar text once a week, starting with more letters of Pliny. These will be posted on Sunday afternoons whenever possible, though this one is obviously rather late. I will also be posting these readings on my non-classical site for non-specialists, since I am curious to see how the comments from the two different sets of readers will differ.

Now that I have my laptop back and have found a temporary and partial fix for my spam-comment problem (more on that soon), it’s time to start posting more regularly. But first I have a question for my readers. I’m wondering whether I should make my ‘Ancient Jokes of the Day’ (Ioci Antiqui) ordinary blog-posts instead of (or as well as) adding them to the monthly PDF files. There are various pros and cons to consider:

1. Pro: Most readers find HTML a lot more pleasant to read than PDF. Category archives make it easy for (un)interested readers to read the jokes and skip the rest of the site. I could even have separate categories for Greek and Latin jokes, so readers could read either or both.
2. Con: Individual jokes could not be printed out so easily for classroom use. Perhaps I should continue to collect them in PDF files even if the HTML version is primary.
3. Pro: Comments could be posted on each joke.
4. Con: Greek could be transliterated, but making it appear as accented text is not so easy. Does anyone know a relatively foolproof method of doing this? It would have to work on various hardware using various browsers and with various fonts installed. I find it frustrating that Greek does not appear the same on the same site using different machines or the same machine viewing different sites.

No doubt there are other pros and cons to consider. As always, advice is welcome and may be placed in the comments or delivered by e-mail.

Starting Monday, I will continue my Ioci Antiqui series, begun five years ago and interrupted after two months by press of other work. For the first time in five years I have means, motive, and opportunity all at the same time: motivation has been there all along, but my current job is very pleasant and provides some free time (opportunity), and all my books are finally out of storage (means).

Each day I will post an ancient joke, with Greek or Latin text, English translation, and (when necessary) brief explanatory notes. The original series, which ran from November 1st, 2000 through January 1st, 2001, can be found under Ioci Latini in the left margin, and new jokes will be added there. In order to make the accented Greek readable on any machine, I put the texts into PDF files, with a separate file for each month and a single page (or sometimes two) for each joke. Each day’s joke will be posted just after midnight Eastern U.S. time. I may also try posting them right here as ordinary WordPress posts, but that depends on whether I can come up with some easy way of displaying Greek so that all my readers can read it.

I’ve added a dozen or so titles (all in Classics) to my list of Books for Sale (link in the left margin). Several seem to be rarities — at least no one else is offering copies on ABE. Please take them off my hands so I can buy more.

Now that I have my library mostly unpacked, I will posting more frequently on various topics. Some of these will be classical blogules: ideas interesting enough to write up, but too small to send off to a journal. Of these blogules, some will be categorized as Ζητηματα, questions worth asking for which I have no answer — perhaps my readers can answer them –, while others will be Λυσεις, proposing new answers to existing questions. One of the latter will be posted shortly.

Posting should be more frequent now that I’ve settled the categories. WordPress doesn’t make it easy. The category archives are displayed in the order in which the categories were added. Since I want them to appear in a particular logical order, so I had to decide exactly what categories I wanted and in what order, and then reset the categories for all existing posts. I now have 96 categories, though only a few have any posts yet. More tomorrow.

It’s too early to party, but I have uploaded the first e-fascicle of an electronic text of the complete epigrams of Martial: Book IV, with a few textual novelties, an original selection of variants and conjectures, and an apparatus criticus fuller than Shackleton Bailey’s Teubner but not so full as Lindsay’s OCT. The index file is so far only a prototype. There will be a few adjustments to Book IV, but it is 99% finished. Book I will be next, and is nearly ready. I plan to post questions here about specific possible improvements to the text and format, but comments may also be volunteered here.

1. It’s been more than five years since I first posted a Greek crossword puzzle, so I’ve made up another one. This one is bigger and better: 16 x 12 instead of 9 x 6, and using the entire Greek alphabet, not just those letters that happen to be identical to English letters. (I recently learned how to do that.) It will be posted tomorrow, June 9th, at 12:00 noon Baltimore time. (I thought I ought to post it at the time when the maximum number of my readers will be awake, and that should cover at least 90% of my readers. Those in East Asia and Oceania are welcome to get up very early or stay up very late to compete.) The prize for the first correct entry is a laudatory mention on this site, $20.00 worth of free books from my sale pages or a 15% discount on however many you would like to buy, plus (in either case) a Cupid and Psyche postcard and a Latin Pan Am pamphlet (see below).

2. I have added a few dozen books to the ‘Books for Sale’ list, including some Classics titles. First come, first serve. If you don’t like the prices, make me an offer. I’m moving in August, and willing to bargain. If no one else makes a better offer and it seems reasonable, I’ll take it. As a bonus to the first six orders, no matter how large or small, I will throw in an official PanAm Latin-language instruction pamphlet from 1962. It is titled ‘Ad Clericos et Religiosos Viros Iuvandos per Terrarum Orbem Peregrinantes’. Click here for a small picture, here for a large one (190 K). Please note that these pamphlets were apparently used as teaching tools at some point, so there is a small amount of underlining or similar marks, in pen, on one page of each, as you can see on the larger picture (near the bottom of the page with the airplane on it).

The categories will be completely reworked in the next few days. For teachers, the new ones will be partly by subject, partly by level, so that all posts likely to be of interest to middle-school, high-school, college, or graduate school teachers will be in separate archive files. Of course, many posts will fall into more than one of these categories, and will therefore be archived in more than one file.

It looks like the transfer of this site and domain to their new host (Hosting Matters) is complete. Welcome again to anyone who got here by using the domain name rather than the complete numerical address (http://138.247.138.2/~curculio). If you have a link to the latter, you can update (or backdate) it to http://www.curculio.org. Coming up in a few minutes: a couple of handy meter handouts. But first, I think I’ll change the color of my curculio logos (signa?). More format changes will follow.

Welcome to the new improved WordPress Curculio. The overall appearance will change frequently, perhaps drastically, over the next few weeks, but I’m eager to start posting again, so here it is. No need to update your blogrolls: as soon as my domain is transferred, the old URL will bring you straight here. At that time, the links to other pages of this site will also start working. Until then, anyone desperate to read some Juvenal or Claudian can try substituting 63.247.138.2/~curculio for www.curculio.org in the URLs of the linked pages. That should work, though I can’t promise that I have everything in the same (relative) place as on the old site yet.

Comments are open, but moderated (the WP default). Please behave if you want me to loosen the comment rules. In the mean time, comments left between midnight and 8am Eastern time (later on weekends) will languish until I get out of bed.