Too busy reading

to post much.

The Road to Surfdom has a brand new look and lots of good gen on the government's mishandling of the Pvt. Kovco fatality, the slow response of Aussie RWDB bloggers to the call of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists aka Chickenhawks, and the nation's reaction to the trapped miners in Tasmania.

More at Larvatus Prodeo on the miners.

And I'm reading the book that gave rise to possibly my favourite TV miniseries, I CLAVDIVS. It's a chilling read in the current political times, as Caesar after Caesar abrogates more of the traditional Roman freedoms to the Imperial family alone. I've been surprised to see quite how many liberties the BBC adaptation took with the source material: although most changes were to conflate several characters into one for the sake of simplicity, they do appear to have gone back to Suetonius and inserted a few of the more sensationalist incidents that Graves actually left out of his story. Still, considering that Graves was embroidering Suetonius and Tacitus, and that Suetonius in particular is probably as trustworthy a source as your average British "royal columnist", it matters little.

Just yet another warning sign about the novelisation of history, and that dramatised history of a sensationalist sensibility is no substitute for actually learning the real thing. Anyone planning to go and see The Da Vinci Code, (definitely not me) should keep that in mind.