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.

It took until Christmas to get the data off the hard drive of my deceased laptop, and until today to convince Hewlett-Packard that they do have to fix it, since I bought it a year ago today and it is therefore (just barely) covered by the original warranty. Thank you, nephew James, for interfacing the hard drive to a desktop for data retrieval. No thank you, HP, for trying to backdate the purchase date by two months so you wouldn’t have to pay for the repairs, sending FedEx to my work address when I was waiting for them at home, and not sending me the promised transcripts of my ‘chat with an HP technician online’ sessions.

More soon.

In checking my blog statistics yesterday, I found that I had gotten well over 100 hits from a link in The Scotsman last Monday. The author complains that the newspaper’s porn filters think that my Latin text of Juvenal’s 10th Satire counts as “nudity”. The article goes on to quote some mildly titillating classical bits available on the web that were not caught by the inept filter. I still don’t understand why a newspaper’s editorial offices would need such a filter at all. Surely the inhabitants are all adults?

The most recent (though not very recent) post on Gabriel Laguna’s Tradición Clásica is on Statius, Silvae 5.4, the ‘Ode to Sleep’. One of first things I put on the web here was ‘Sonnets to Morpheus’, with texts of Statius’ poem and three elaborate Renaissance imitations, by Jacob Balde and Janus Pannonius in Latin and Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas in Castilian Spanish. (None of them are sonnets: I just like puns.) It’s interesting that all three chose the shortest and (by common consent) best of Statius’ Silvae and then expanded it to lengths more typical of the rest of the Silvae.

I have now fixed the link, which was broken, and changed the background to a less intrusive pattern. One of these days I hope to add an apparatus to the Statius, plus a couple of more poems on the same theme whose authors and titles I have jotted down somewhere in my chaotic files.

That would be the PayPal button at the bottom of the left column.

My laptop suddenly went catatonic on Tuesday, leaving me with no computer except my 8 1/2 year old Pentium II desktop. Until today, I wasn’t even able to edit my websites, since I’d misplaced the WordPress passwords. They are now safely written down on a slip of paper tucked into a certain page of a book no one else would ever think to look in. Pocock’s translation of Statius’ Thebaid into Spenserian stanzas? No, that’s actually an interesting work both in theory and in small doses and might attract attention, plus I don’t own a copy. The edition of ‘Sext Properci’ by Balcells and Minguez with facing Catalan translation? That might well intrigue a Barcelonés, a Romance philologist, or a Propertian. Ciani’s Lexicon zu Lycophron? That would probably work, except that its presence on my desk in easy reach of the keyboard would itself attract suspicion. (Yes, I have a copy. No, I don’t know why I bought it. Yes, it must have been on sale. No, I’ve never opened it. Yes, I expect to do so once or twice before I die, probably a lot more than once or twice, once I get around to reading Lycophron. Satisfied?)

This has the makings of an interesting game:

What classical work, primary or secondary, would be least likely to attract the notice of an average cross-section of classicists and others browsing my shelves or yours? Suggestions may be placed in the comments. The question is not which is actually the most boring — that could cause unpleasantness if the author is still alive — but which has the least attractive title and subject. Narrowness of appeal would count for a great deal. The Manuscript Tradition of Cornelius Nepos? There are narrower and far more tedious titles than that.

To return to my computer problems . . . .

Fortunately, I have twelve more days until the laptop warranty expires. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be in the hard drive, and it contains a lot of files I can’t easily do without. I’m hoping to be able to hire someone this week to try to copy the data off it before I send the machine to HP for repair. Since money is very tight at the moment, I will be extremely grateful for any contributions (hence the PayPal button), as well as any suggestions for what I can do technically.

Since I’m in the ‘bargaining’ stage of my electronic grief, I can also promise more and better posts now that I have regained access. I’ve had plenty to say, with little time to say it, but two weeks off for Christmas solves that problem, at least for the moment.

Vulgi expectatio

Expectation of the Vulgar is more drawne, and held with newnesse, then goodnesse; wee see it in Fencers, in Players, in Poets, in Preachers, in all, where Fame promiseth any thing; so it be new, though never so naught, and depraved, they run to it, and are taken.

(Timber, or Discoveries, Oxford edition, Volume VIII, 576)