Okay, it’s official. I’ve found my favourite historical anecdote of all time.
So in ancient Rome they had this tradition where they had to consult the gods and check they had divine approval before they went into battle. They did this by bringing forth a flock of sacred chickens and throwing grain at them. Their behaviour would then determine whether or not the gods were on your side. If the hens didn’t eat or wouldn’t leave their cage, it was a Bad Omen and you had to postpone battle and ask again the next day. If the chickens ate happily it was a Good Omen and you could go and chop up some Gauls or Carthaginians or whoever you happened to be fighting.
Now, there are lots of little stories about these chickens, but I just found one I hadn’t seen before. In 137 BC, the consul C. Hostilius Mancinus tried to take auspices before battle, but:
the chickens once released from their cage fled into a nearby wood and even though they were sought with the greatest diligence, they could not be recovered.
Can you fucking believe that. Can you actually believe that happened. The Romans have a reputation for being so stern and sensible and stoic and that happened. Like… everyone’s ready for battle, so you turn to your assistant and say “BRING FORTH THE CHICKENS” and you throw down the grain and open up their cage and the chickens just. run. they fucking run. those tiny velociraptor bastards abscond screaming into the woods like there’s no tomorrow. Blinking in disbelief, you send soldiers into the woods to recover them but those feathered bandits are gone. Vanished. The gods have deserted you. You’re beating bushes and following the sounds of triumphant clucks. The soldiers are frantic. The chickens are gone.
He lost the battle. It was a Bad Omen.
That sounds like the ultimate Bad Omen like at that point you go home and start drawing up an armistice bc the gods told you to go fuck yourself with chickens
That’s… pretty much what happened. The chicken omen, along with a few other Bad Omens, resulted in:
infelici pugna, turpi foedere, deditione funesta
“a lost battle, a shameful peace treaty, and a calamitous handover.”
so yeah, he lost the battle and had to go home and sign an embarrassing peace treaty that the Romans complained about years later, and when they talk about him they curse him for his praecipitem audaciam – “reckless audacity” – and vesana perseverantia “insane obstinacy” because NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU’D LISTENED TO THE CHICKENS AND POSTPONED BATTLE LIKE THEY TOLD YOU.
Don’t forget naval commander Claudius Pulcher, whose sacred chickens refused to eat anything before the battle of Drepana. He tossed the chickens overboard, saying if they won’t eat, then let them drink, and went into battle where he promptly lost almost all of his ships and crew. I forget if he died or returned to Rome in disgrace, but it was a freaking disaster and the sacred chickens called it.
I’m not sure which phrase in this post is my favorite, “bring forth the chickens” or “this would have never happened if you listened to the chickens.”
What about Pulcher’s line: “Bibant, quoniam esse nolunt!” – They can drink if they won’t eat! – after which the sacred chooks went swimming.
I bet the spreading news of what he’d done ruined the morale of his entire fleet and went a long way towards why he lost the battle. Men who think their commander has offended the gods aren’t going to fight well on his behalf, in case the gods spread their offended wrath around. (If I remember my “Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome” correctly, the Olympian lot tended to do that a lot.)
AFAIK when Pulcher* returned to Rome in disgrace the Senate immediately tried him for impiety (a Senatorial message to the gods that they didn’t approve of him either) then banished him to exile where he died soon after.
Moral: don’t be horrid to the holy hens.
(*For the second time in this post, spell-checker wanted me to spell his name as “Pucker”. Appropriate, I suppose. Go figure.)
So, I have an American friend named Jane who married this English guy about 7 years ago. They live in Sussex together (god rest their souls), and they had a little boy pretty much right after they got married. As he grew up, they figured he would have a mix of their accents with a heavy lean towards English (because he’d go to school with English kids and teachers and the like.)
That’s not how it fucking worked out at all though. Instead, he says individual words with either an American or an English accent. Like, one second he’ll be like, “Daddy, I’m knackered” and the next he’ll be like, “AY YO MA WHERE YOU AT???” Every time they send me a video I just fucking piss myself listening to this kid.
aka “A attempt at resolving/achieving something with less effort than is required for success, & a high probability of it proving merely futile & faintly unpleasant’
Did I ever tell yall about the time I had a really vivid dream that I overheard some dudebros talking about sucking dick and one of them said “I’d suck a dick” and his bros were like “but bro you’re straight” and the response was “It doesn’t have to be a guy’s dick. Don’t be a transphobe, Chad” because I just remembered the phrase “Don’t be a transphobe, Chad” and now I’m laughing
I’m reblogging this because I just remembered “don’t be a transphobe, chad” again
The Holy Trinity:
Don’t be a transphobe, Chad, People are gay, steven and they’re lesbians, harold
susie grits her teeth and grinds her jaw and spends the entire spring of their fourth grade year plotting how to get back at calvin for stealing mr. bun and dropping him in a mud puddle.
(it involves putting hobbes into a dress and taking polaroids; she still has the photos, even thirty years later)
she does her homework. does his homework too, sometimes, because mrs. wormwood gives them different math problems to discourage cheating, and susie likes math. his mom finds out when they’re in sixth grade, and offers her four times the going rate to tutor calvin in math. she agrees, because even at twelve she knows college isn’t cheap (not the ones she’s eyeing, anyway).
she has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because calvin won’t listen unless there’s at least one. she has her own opinions of aliens (real, but not the tentacled fanged monsters calvin draws in the margins; her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon), and dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so it’s only superheroes she lets him go on about.
this turns out to be a mistake. though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers on the back sides of his homework, he has a whole thing built up around stupendous man. she’s seen the costume, but didn’t know there was lore. she doesn’t want to know the lore.
it’s stupid. no one can just fly. that’s not how the world works. capes are dumb. she can’t believe his mom made him another costume after he hit a growth spurt.
she still tutors him, but they drift apart in high school. calvin and moe somehow become friends, become even bigger assholes together, and susie discovers calculus and girls. she gets into harvard and yale and stanford and others, chooses to go to california. he waves at her from his driveway while she drives away in the moving truck.
“you were never stupid,” she tells him on the phone when they’ve drifted back into each other’s lives her senior year. “you just didn’t care.”
“yeah,” he laughs, and she pretends she can’t hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and he’s now in the unfortunate position of acknowledging that his father was right and education was important. she has two finals to study for, the nasa interview next week, and a grant application to finish, but he’s had a rough week. she can take an hour to listen.
“the community college isn’t bad,” she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate stanford with honors.
“you mean i can’t just put on my stupendous man costume and live off the media attention?”
susie snorts. “not spaceman spiff? there’s a tv show there, i’m sure.” she’s been watching a lot of star trek in what little spare time she has.
“nah,” he says, “spiff’s always been your territory.”
they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosity’s landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; she’s in the middle of a move down to chile for a three-year stint at atacama.
a package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.
it’s a comic book. spaceman spiff, volume one. hardcover, full color. one of his signature tentacled fanged aliens takes up most of the entire cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. he’s gotten much better, but it’s still unmistakably calvin’s art.
except – she squints at the astronaut. she flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages.
spiff isn’t the calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.
it’s her.
mousy brown hair, button nose, mr. bun tucked away in the back of her rocket ship.
I also love how this bill doesn’t follow the ableist agenda that’s been going around lately that demonizes mentally ill people. The bill carefully specifies that the ban is for convicted domestic abusers. Good job Oregon.
“You have the burden of proof backwards when you insist that other people need to prove you wrong. You made the claim, therefore you are responsible for providing evidence to support the claim. No one is obligated to discredit the claim or take it seriously until you have provided evidence.”
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 