The opening narration of 1960’s Spartacus refers to the Christian faith overthrowing the pagan “tyranny” of Rome, implying that all that was wrong with ancient Roman society was due to paganism. Except as the narrator makes clear a moment later, slavery wasn’t abolished for another 2,000 years. That’s right, Christianity did nothing to abolish slavery; when … Continue reading A Real Gladiator Never Says I’m Sorry
Books
Alex North and the Ancient Lowly
I’ve always been just a bit absent minded, and sometimes I’ve had to think a moment or two to recall a name or a word, but as I progress into late youth those tendencies have accelerated and now it’s often far more than a moment that I have to struggle to recall a name. But … Continue reading Alex North and the Ancient Lowly
Freedom!
Howard Fast’s novel Spartacus is told in a non-linear fashion. It begins after the Servile War has concluded and three Romans are traveling along the Via Appia which is dotted with the signa poenae or “tokens of punishment” as the Romans slyly refer to the “six thousand, four hundred and seventy-two corpses hanging from crucifixes”, the … Continue reading Freedom!
A Common Enemy
In 1959 a story was published that described three mysterious stores that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, in Tokyo, Paris, and New York City. The shops called themselves Martian Shops and displayed technology that was far in advance of anything heretofore known on earth. The stores were staffed by salespeople wearing skin-tight face masks and … Continue reading A Common Enemy
Isaac Meets a Fan
In the second volume of his autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Isaac Asimov relates a story of meeting a fan at a convention while he was suffering from a kidney stone. I was going alone, by train, and I had made arrangements to room with Harry Stubbs. Harry made the ideal roommate (if one overlooks the … Continue reading Isaac Meets a Fan
They’ve Got a Secret
July, 1943. Mussolini, Il Duce, has just died, and Fabio is rushing to the tiny village of Santa Vittoria in Italy to spread what he expects will be good news. So opens Robert Crichton’s 1966 best selling novel The Secret of Santa Vittoria. I had a copy of the book back in 1966, probably from … Continue reading They’ve Got a Secret
The Fine Art of Seduction
One of the books that I received very early on from the Science Fiction Book Club when I was thirteen was A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was an anthology of stories originally published in the 1950s in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s long since been out of print, but … Continue reading The Fine Art of Seduction
The October Game
I’ve previously written about the days when we did a morning show over the PA system during our Elco junior year. We called ourselves the Irregulars because we were supposed to be a rotating group, but in truth it was mostly the same kids for most of the year with very little change in personnel. … Continue reading The October Game
An Ax Murder Addendum
It’s rather curious that neither of the mini-series about the Candy Montgomery case acknowledges the book Evidence of Love, even though each of them quotes copious amounts of dialog verbatim from it. I realize that the murder of Betty Gore is a public news item and now a piece of history, and therefore not subject to … Continue reading An Ax Murder Addendum
The Ax Murderer Cometh
On June 13, 1980, 30 year old Candy Montgomery stopped in at Betty Gore’s house in Wylie, Texas, to pick up a swim suit for Betty’s young daughter who was doing a sleepover that night with Candy’s daughter. While the two women weren’t best friends, they had gotten to know each other from all the … Continue reading The Ax Murderer Cometh