Because all the cool kiddies are doing it!

David Meadows shows off his desk here. I'm fairly certain I have the rogueclassicist beat for messiness, and to prove this, I have TWO pictures of my desk and desk-area (which really just translated into my ROOM) for you.



I have a little honour still yet, so I refrained from taking the picture from above and instead took it from below, thereby hiding some of the mess. However, you can see my laptop (opened to this site, just for kicks--I suppose I could have showed off my geeky self-made Tolkien desktop wallpaper instead) with my cell phone on top of it. To the right is a glass I should've taken down, a half-finished bottle of the infamous cherry soda that half of my profs have mistaken for something else (wine and soy sauce were the two most amusing), a mini globe-thingy from my cousin, a little Roman senator figurine that a friend gave me, and a half-empty Borders cup. Yeah.

Right next to my laptop is my advair, a koala phone holder, a Linda Eder CD, Charlotte Brontë's Villette (with the receipt-as-bookmark hanging out), the book catelogue I was talking about the other day, and some other junk. On my wall is an Earth: Final Conflict poster that I randomly won on the official website's sweepstake maybe five or six years ago, back when the show aired. Am I geek? Yes. Do I care? No.



In this next picture, we have the view from my computer, mostly because I wanted you all to see my books. To give you an idea, most of the books visable on that bookshelf are ones I've acquired approximately in the last year (with a few exceptions in some of my more important Classical texts), and that's probably not even half of them. The rest of my books are in piles on the floor (which I have enough dignity NOT to show you), waiting to be shelved when I have time to actually reorganise everything. On the top shelf, you can see my OLD, full Liddell & Scott, OCD, Oxford English/Hebrew Dictionary (for the record, I know absolutely no Hebrew--I bought it "just in case" because it was on clearance...), Oxford Companion to Classical Lit, Concise OED (I obviously can't afford the real one :-P), another Latin dictionary, Turabian (which I dispise--my MLA is hiding somewhere over there too), and some Greek flash "cards."

On the second shelf, we have some of the Ecce Romani books, my Ovid reader, various Penguin books, other Latin books you can't see, some Loebs, Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine GRINCHUS Christi Natalem Abrogaverit (upside down for some reason), and a bunch of other books.

The third shelf has some of my older books, including complete Plato and Greek tragedies. It also has my DVD player.

The fourth shelf shows more Loebs (Greek this time), David McCullough's John Adams, and some other stuff.

There is a huge pile of books on the fifth shelf, but it's not visible in this picture. For a good reason--the floorspace in front of it is covered with books too.

In the foreground, the part I was trying to cut off, you can see a pile of stuff, including Ecce Romani III and Ilium. You may also make out my Darth Vader light sabre peeping out from between the TV and the bookshelf, and yes, that is a picture from Paestum over my TV. To the right of my TV (which is only a recent development, so I forget to watch it most of the time) are lots of CDs and DVDs.

In less embarrassing news, my class has been going well, if rather busy. But I know I've been at this for quite a while, because one of our textbooks, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experience by Anthony Snodgrass, seems extremely familiar to me. I can't figure out if it's because I've read exerpts in other classes or if it's because a lot of it is familiar material.

Lastly and completely unrelated, I heard the phrase "Gladiator of [insert cause]" the other day. Does this bother anyone else the way it bothers me? Now, I enjoy the movie Gladiator, but it seems to me that people are walking away this mistaken impression about gladiators. The only cause of a gladiator was to stay alive in the arena--why have they become synonymous with freedom fighters or some such these days?