Normally on a weekend I'd prefer to get some outdoor shots. But on this occasion, in part because I was still recuperating from last week's malady and in part because I just got carried away into the past, I didn't get out before the sun went down and didn't feel inclined to go night prowling. Accordingly, a still life it is, again. Now I grant you that these props are all anachronisms in terms of what I'd been reading on and off for a lot of the day. I was certainly further back in time than the 1957 100 Lire coin. And these weren't the books that I was reading; the one that I was reading is on the Kindle and one down side of the Kindle is that there are limits to how far it can be used as a photographic prop compared to old fashioned pulp books.

The book in question was in fact Scipio Africanus: Rome's Greatest General by Dr. Richard A Gabriel. Dr. Gabriel is a very smart man who not only knows the theory of the sword but has carried it in practice. Yet he has the down to earth appearance of someone who might, in another life, have been an avuncular street-wise foreman in a meat packing plant in the Bronx. Albeit a foreman who can read multiple languages. He's in many ways the military history equivalent of physics' Professor Walter Lewin. While you can certainly get value out of both of them by simply reading their words, it helps if you've seen them presenting and can imagine them reading their works out to you in that fashion.

Put simply they both rock, and it's hardly surprising that I missed the sun this day.

Last Year