Trimalchio's Blog : ergo vivamus dum licet esse bene

Friday, October 31, 2003

Food, yum!

(http://www2.carthage.edu/outis/food.html#daily)

I found an interesting site that outlines the most common eating patterns for most classes in the Augustan period of ancient Rome. The site primarily talks about the differences in eating habits between the lower and upper classes. Breakfast (ientaculum), so they say, might consist of bread dipped in watered down wine. Sometimes a little honey would be used, and perhaps a few dates or olives would be included. Lunch (prandium), if eaten at all, would probably be made up of bread, fruit, cheese, or perhaps some leftovers from dinner the night before. Dinner (cena) was the main meal of the day, generally served in the late afternoon. Cena could consist simply of vegetables with olive oil for those of the lower class, or a most elaborate several-course meal for the well-to-do (or anywhere in-between, depending upon the circumstances). The typical dinner, however, had three courses. This site was surprisingly well documented and used appropriate references to other scholarly works so it at least has the appearance of being a valid and reliable source.

I REMEMBERED!

Check this one out

http://www2.carthage.edu/outis/food.html#daily

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Kinda different than Brent's

http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FTFETCH?sessionid=sp04sw05-60254-dmfjz1og-8xhksr:entitypagenum=3:0:rule=100:fetchtype=fulltext:dbname=WilsonSelectPlus_FT:recno=1:resultset=1:ftformat=HTML:format=BI:i

Mine says that most Romans were malnourished. It also mentions on food and class in the ancient world and also alludes to the woman's role with food and meals.

Trimalchio Mentioned

http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=6800112&db=aph

This one focuses on roman gluttony, its cool because it discusses Trimalchio's feast at length and even estimates the cost of it to Trimalchio.

It's true!

http://members.aol.com/Donnclass/Romelife.html

This one's got all kinds of cool stuff. It discusses other aspects of Roman life as well!

Roman Dishes

http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/wchuang/cooking/recipes/Roman/Ancient_Roman.html

Finally found what I was looking for! Here is a list of recipes of Ancient Roman dishes with their names in Latin. Bon apetit!
This was amusing as well
Latin class from 2000

This site looked pretty cool because I like to cook, and it would be cool to actually cook something what would have been eaten in the Roman Empire. It also mentions some of the things that were native to the Roman empire that a person wouldn't necessarily be familiar with today. And all the dishes have cool latin names too. What more could you ask for?

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/ethnic/historical/ant-rom-coll.html

Dinner Time

The Roman society was very dichotomous. Both by means of gender and classes. The men would get lounge on couches and the women would sit in chairs. The lower class usually ate porridge, while the upper class had grand meals. Something I found interesting was that meat was rarely eaten. I always saw Roman men as these virile beings that would eat a lot of meat, but they usually only ate meat when an animal was sacrificed.

www.carthage.edu/outis/food.html

Roman Society

In the Roman days, many people today (including much of this campus) would be labeled as "barbarians" for drinking beer. Wine was the upper class Roman's drink of choice. Something I had not thought of before was the scarcity of good deserts. They did not have sugar, so sweets were made with honey or must (grape-juice); must have made for a dull finale.

http://www.roman-empire.net/index.html - information under "Society" - "Food and Drink"

-Jennifer

Monday, October 27, 2003

My favorite

I think I like the one about the "Blue Boy" the best. Poor little guy, why doesn't anyone just let him inside?

Good reading

These are great. Which story do you like best, and why? My favorite so far is the lady in black with the milk, maybe because I'm a mother but also because it scared the merdam out of me!

funny (sort of)

Last fall I went on a retreat with Alpha Phi Omega at Rowe Valley. Rowe Valley is in the middle of nowhere and it is a tradition to scare the pledges. During one of our activities, the actives came in to the room where we were and told us that there had been a murder in Taylor (15 minutes away). A few seconds later we heard police sirens drive away from Rowe Valley. All of us were scared and did not want to go outside for more activities. We all stayed close to one another for the rest of the night. In the middle of the night, all of a sudden we are awakened by this loud noise. It ended up being the actives trying to scare us with a leaf blower and a scream mask. The funny this is that by that time we were all so tired that only one of the pledges actually was scared. At the time they told us, we really were scared. It just ended up being a big joke that ended up on the actives because they did a horrible job of scaring us!!

More Ghost story

True story from somewhere in Texas, but I don't know which town it happened in. There is this shop (don't know what shop it is too, but its not a grocery store) and there are these 3 people working there. One day a pale lady in black garment came in with a bottle. She asked for milk. One of the guys said that they don't sell milk there and that she should go to a grocery store. She insisted that she needed milk; so the guy thought that she must really need milk and filled her bottle up with milk from the fridge. She took the bottle and left the shop. The next day she came and asked for milk again, and the guy gave her milk. She came back on the third day and asked for the same thing. By this time the guys were getting suspicious but gave her the milk anyway.
On the fourth day she came back for milk, they again gave her milk, but this time they trailed her as she walked out the shop. They walked for quite a bit and followed her into a grave yard. Here they went around for a bit and saw her walk up to a tombstone and disapear. The guys ran up to the tombstone to see what really happened. They couldn't believe that that lady disapeared in a blink of an eye. All of a sudden they heard a baby crying. They were freaked out because this crying came from under their feet. They quickly grabbed some shovels and started digging and digging hard. Eventually they got to the casket and they can hear the crying coming from inside. They cracked open the lid and there was a living, breathing, baby! Also in it was a skeleton of a lady in black garment. There was also 5 bottles inside. Apparently, she had been feeding her baby......

Monopoly Ghost

Unfortunately(?) I haven't had any paranormal experiences so I went and found this one:

"It was my friend's birthday, and we were playing monopoly. There was only one piece left, and it was the car. As we played, the car suddenly just appeared on the board! We kept taking it off, but it would just reappear. It did not stop until it reached the jail space, when it reappeared in the box. We all had the same idea-a ghost. We decided to play Ouija, hoping to find out what was going on. We found out that two years before my friend moved into the house, a man lived there. He had been sent to prison for a month or so. When he was released, that night he was hit by a car. I've come to the conclusion that he was trying to tell us his story but making the car piece move, then disappear at the jail space. It was a spooky yet fun experience."

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Gettysburg Ghost

I heard about this story over the summer in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

After the Civil War was over many children were left as orphans, so a widow with three children started an orphanage in Gettysburg. The woman was said to be a wonderful caregiver and very loving to all the children who passed through her door, and every year she would let the children be in the parade that commemorated the war. Several years later the woman remarried and having to move away hired a new headmistress to run the orphanage. Unfortunately the new woman was very mean and would torture the children by locking them up in the basement or having them hang from their armpits in barrels. One year, in the winter time, a little boy ran away to the college across town and found refuge in a girls' dorm room. The dean of the school found out about what the girls were doing and ordered all rooms of the college to be searched. The girls told the boy to hideout on the ledge of the window and that they would get him as soon as the search was over. Well the dean searched their room and finding nothing, but knowing the girls were hiding the boy, sent them down to her office. As soon as the girls could they raced back to their room to rescue the boy but he couldn't be found. They looked everywhere and combed through the banks of snow under their window but there was no sign of him. Until... many years later.

A girl was sitting in her room studying when she heard something at the window. When she turned around to look,staring back at her was the face of a boy all blue from being cold. He kept tapping at the window and tried to open it. Frightened, the girl ran from her room and didn't come back for several hours afraid of what she might find. After finding a friend to come back with her, she entered her room. The Blue Boy (as he is now called) was no where to be seen, but there, written in the frost on her window, were the words HELP ME. The Blue Boy still has sightings to this day.

The Rogers Hotel

My boyfriend, Jarred, used to work at the Rogers Hotel in Waxahachie, Texas. It is a known haunted hotel that is about 100 years old. The hotel has been on Unsolved Mysteries and in the Texas Monthly Magazine. There have been several different accounts of encounters with what could be ghosts. Several customers staying in the hotel have said that when they were lying on their bed, they would get this feeling as if someone had just sat on the bed and then when they looked at the end of the bed a perfect indention would be formed. Another incident is that employees who work at the front desk would see figures walking down the stairs into the lobby, but when the figures got close enough where someone might be able to see their face suddenly they would disappear. A third account is that there have been times when doors that are unable to lock, such as, the swinging doors that enter into the kitchen, would suddenly become locked and then after a moment become unlocked and continue to swing back and forth as if someone walked through them. Honestly, I hate scary stories and especially Halloween, so I will never be caught dead staying in this haunted hotel.

Virgin Mary

This happened to my friend's Dad...
Dan grew up in Chicago, so one day when he was an early teenager he and his friends were walking home after a baseball game when they passed by an abandoned apartment building. They always passed by the building and dared each other to go in, but on this day they finally did. Turns out the building is empty, so they walk upstairs and into a bedroom. The walls are blank, bare boards except for a single framed picture of the Virgin Mary hanging next to an open window. Being raised a devout Catholic, Dan gets down and says the hail Mary. As he does this, a huge gust of wind blows through the room and the window suddenly slams shut very forcefully. Not all that scary, just peculiar.

scary train tracks

In San Antonio, there is a story about a bus full of children that was stopped on railroad tracks and was hit by a train. Now, it is said that if you park your car on those tracks the ghosts of the children will push your car off the tracks so no one else will suffer their fate. I don't really believe in ghosts, but one night my friends and I decided that it would be interesting to drive down there and see what actually happens. So, we parked the car on the tracks, got out, and waited. After a few minutes, the car started to roll off the tracks and we heard what sounded like kids laughing. Whether it was ghosts or just gravity at work, it was pretty creepy at 11 at night with a bunch of teenagers just trying to scare themselves.

story

this one time at band camp....well actually it was on a trip me and a few of my friends decided we would have a sayonce...or however you spell it ....in our room and we put tape down on the floor in a circle to do it. So then the next morning our chaperone came in and saw the tape on the floor and freeked out. Nothing really interesting happened. nothing really scary happened either, this is the closed thing to a scary story that I had so there.

Native American Ghost

The house I lived in when I was a child was built on top of an Native American Burial Ground and was said to be haunted. On three separate occasions, there were “sightings” of ghosts. The first time, my mother was all alone in the house and my older brother was a tiny baby still. No one else was home, and my mother had been cleaning and doing laundry all day. She went out to change a load of laundry and when she walked back in the kitchen, all of the drawers and cabinets had been pulled open. This was very strange because no one else was in the house and my father didn’t come home until later. Another time, my mother was sitting in the dining room with a family friend in sight of the open panty doors. In an instant, a bottle of mustard flew off the shelf towards the two women and rolled all the way to their feet. That’s not a coincidence either because it takes a lot of force to make a mustard bottle fly. And for the third incidence, my grandmother was visiting and one night while sleeping she felt something brushing her hair. When she awoke, she saw the face of a Native American very near hers with his braids brushing her face. All of these stories were published in a book about South Texas ghost stories.

Haunting in Hickville

Ok I'm not entirely sure this is true because my friends have been known to lie, or at least exaggerate things a bit, but anyway here it is....

Apparently there is a bridge in Granger, under which a man hung himself for reasons unknown, probably depressed or something silly like that..anyway, at halloween it is a fun tradition for some of the guys in Granger to park their cars over the bridge at around midnight, tell ghost stories, and dare eachother to go under the bridge to where the guy had killed himself. Nobody ever takes up the dare and nothing unusual ever happens. They usually just sit in their cars trying to scare eachother with made up tales. One halloween however, as they were getting ready to leave the bridge my friend's truck wouldn't start. The truck was fairly new, so it was odd that it would be having engine trouble. At this point, everyone in the truck was a little freaked, but it was just a little engine trouble, nothing to be too worried about. He pumped the pedals, tried the ignition, did all the normal things you do when your car won't start and was about to pop the hood and get out of the truck when apparently, according to him "My truck started shaking and then we were lifted up and dropped on the ground". After that he frantically tried to start the truck again and it finally started and they drove off. He hasn't been to that bridge since.

Frankly I think this story is BS. However there is a bridge in granger where a guy did kill himself, and I suggested that we go to this bridge this halloween just for kicks. He absolutely refused. He won't even go there in the daytime. What a weenie.

The Albino Man

This summer I worked as a counselor at an all girls' camp in Hunt, TX called Camp Waldemar. If any of you have been to Hunt (which I doubt), then you know that it is in the middle of NO WHERE. The only things around are summer camps. So there sits Camp Waldemar, surrounded by nothing but woods and fields for miles. Since this camp has been around since the late 1920s, it has its share of scary ghosts stories, but the scariest that I heard has to do with the albino man. Within Camp Waldemar are 10 sets of cabins all with a different name. The Bella Vista set has three different cabins and always houses girls of the age of 10. Every once in a while (at least once a term) and just after "taps" (10:30 - when all the electricity in the camp is turned off by a main switch in the office), a man is seen outside the Bella Vistas walking slowly around the three cabins. Not only is it a man, but he is said to be as white as a ghost!! The girls and sometimes counselors say they see him just behind a tree or lurking around the windows staring blankly at the cabins, but no one has been able to catch him. A good friend of mine at camp this year was the counselor in Bella Vista 3. Every night she would lie awake for hours on end, flashlight in hand and chair in front of the door, afraid that the albino man would, at any moment show his ghostly white face at her window. I don't know if I really believe in this albino man, but all I know is that when you are in a cabin, alone in the middle of the woods with no electricity, it's hard not to be a little scared.

Spooky

During the summer, I visited my friend Katy in Minnesota. She picked me up from the Grey Hound Bus station early one morning and proceeded to show me her favorite places around Minneapolis. She took me to a little coffee house and we sat down to catch up. We were having a pleasant conversation when suddenly a woman who had been sitting in the corner approached our table. She confronted Katy and accused her of giving the lady bad looks and being devious. The woman was overtly rude and stormed off to sit down again. It was such a fiasco that I thought the woman must have known Katy and was kidding around….but Katy said she had never seen the woman and hadn't even looked in her direction in the coffee shop. We stayed a bit longer then got up and walked out. The woman followed us. She yelled after us and I turned back to tell her to back off my friend. She continued to accuse Katy of being an evil person and I told her she must be confused and that she didn't even know us. She turned to me, gave me a piercing stare, and said, "We all know each other. It's all in the eyes." Katy pulled me away and we quickly got in her car and drove off. The woman remained standing in the street staring after us. The rest of the day Katy and I became unnerved again if we mentioned our experience. That woman was the spookiest person I have ever had the tragedy of meeting.

-Jennifer

If we click post and publish will everyone see it?

This is a test. I don't really know how to use this

Some random comments

Yes, if you click "post and publish," then everyone will see it.

Blogger.com has a lot of online help to offer, too. Why not check it out, if you are having problems?

Mummified cats aren't significant? %^(

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