Viggen

happy birthday! :=)

New record low since i started to check on this! 112,4 kilograms = 247,799583 pounds Just got back from the gym, 20 minutes cross trainer, 25 minutes with cardio bike and some weightes, feels good to be alive... let see if we can get below 112kg this week...

It has been over six years since King Arthur first premiered in the theaters. Given its generally negative reviews I was in no hurry to see it. But I recently found a rather cheap copy of the "Director's Cut" DVD on Amazon and decided to give it a try. Yeah, it sucked just about as much as I thought it would. It is neither especially historical nor entertaining, and comes across as little more than a vehicle for the lead actor and actress to chew some scenery with their speech making.... ...read the full review of King Arthur - The Director's Cut (2004) by Antoine Fuqua

Unheilig (German for "Unholy") is a German industrial rock band with various pop and electronic influences. They are around since 2000 but only last year they had theire breakthrough, impressive dark voice by lead singer Bernd Heinrich Graf (only known as Der Graf (The Count)...

...great story about how mainstream media is making a town angry being called "dying" and the way how they responded... largest lypsinc, and everyone knows now Grand Rapids, well done! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391867/Grand-Rapid-responds-declining-city-charge-lip-dub-YouTube-Internet-video.html

When you are 187cm (6.1 ft) tall and reach 117.2kg (258,38 pounds) than you know you have a (weight) problem, i didnt like it at all, so about a month ago i started to eat less and better, and 4 weeks later i am down now to 112,9 kg (248,90 pounds). While this is cool and all i realised that eating habit change alone is not going to make me feel better and there will be not much room for a little sin here and there, so i walked yesterday to a gym, signed up and today i already had my first hour there... I am a early bird, its not unusual for me to wake up at 4 in the morning, but on average i wake up between 5 and 6, so it was to my great excitement when i saw that this particular gym has opening hours from 6 in the morning, which has the added benefit that there is no crowd of muscle packed hunks and super slim barbie dolls, and Mr. 249 pound in the middle... Had this morning first session and well who would have thought, but muscle packed hunks and super slim barbie dolls apparently work out already at 6 on a sunday morning. They were all pretty cool helpful and well more busy with themselves than with me, so yeah, feels good to have some work out early in the morning, i hope to shed now weight on a bit faster rate... ....i keep you up to date..

...this is an incredible important site, here are many pictures Rick Schulting of the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford hopes additional research will clarify exactly what took place in the Tollense Valley"What perhaps surprises me most is the claim (made in the research paper) that some individuals survived their injuries for up to weeks," Schulting told Discovery News. "This would be unusual in the context of a battle at this time, which we would expect to be more of the nature of 'hit and run,' though of course we may be wrong about this, or the Tollense case may be an exception. The presence of young infants also requires some explanation." Nick Thorpe, head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Winchester, raised an interesting question: Why isn't there more evidence for bronze weapons, given that this was the Bronze Age? "Instead," he told Discovery News, "most of the evidence is of people being dispatched with wooden clubs, which may imply that the dead are mostly victims of a post-battle massacre. Perhaps those who surrendered were not deemed to be worthy of being killed like warriors." http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/bronze-age-battle-warriors-110527.html

Time to introduce some music from the german speaking world to the rest of the planet.... one of my favourites is Xavier Naidoo (south african indian roots, but grew up in Germany and calls himself son of the city Mannheim), ...one of the best songwriter in Germany...

I am now just over a year without cigarettes, i stopped from a packet a day to zero from one day to the next. It is possible therefor i am one hell of a guy that i am able to manage that... this success story was brought to you by the mighty awesome Viggen, stay tuned till the next one comes.. cheers chris

...back to the ancient Romans, ...if this should stay in this forum than please focus... regards viggen

In the modern world, time is not something we can easily escape. Most people carry wristwatches and clocks are everywhere, from the digital readout on a computer to the tower on the town hall. Yet as Robert Hannah reminds us, there was a time before men were slaves of the clock. A time when one's stomach was 'the best and truest' timekeeper (Plautus) and people slept and ate when they felt the need... ...read the full review of Time in Antiquity by Robert Hannah

This week's early view of Archaeometry brought yet another interesting article: "Gambling with Etruscan dice: a tale of numbers and letters" (Artioli et al., in press). In this short paper, the authors present an elegant solution to the longstanding question of Etruscan numerals, namely whether the Etruscan words huth and sa represent 4 and 6 or 6 and 4, respectively. The wikipedia article on Etruscan numerals (which I assume is based on the work of Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante, although no attribution is given), notes that most Etruscologists agree that huth is 4 and sa is 6... via powered by Osteons

...and the winner has now been chosen by Adrienne Mayor;

The Silver Eagle, by Ben Kane, is the second novel in the Forgotten Legion trilogy. It picks up right where the previous novel left off and follows the fortunes of the main cast of characters introduced to us in the first instalment. The opening chapter takes us to Margiana, a desolate outpost on the eastern border of the Parthian Empire. The three friends Romulus, Tarquinius and Brennus are marched there with another ten thousand legionaries who survived a brutal defeat while fighting the Parthians under General Marcus Licinius Crassus at Carrhae... ...read the full review of The Silver Eagle by Ben Kane

We asked questions and Adrienne Mayor answered them -- Ask the expert - Adrienne Mayor, I want to thank her for taking so much time and effort to answer them in such toughful way, if you want to discuss them here is the place...

I have not fully understood why the Romans weren't able to do with Germany what they did with Gaul, ...if you compare Gaul with Germania some things were very different; the level of urbanisation and the make up of the hierarchy for example, while gaul was more top down ruled, the germanic aristocrats were constantly challenged by their own people, (voting them off was not uncommon) so Rome didnt really had a clear cut opponent like they had in Gaul, and not really big towns, settlements they could attack and once they had conquered them, the area was freed... cheers viggen

..i would like to add to the discussion a work from forum member Wotwotius on some of the mentioned writers http://www.unrv.com/academia/intrusive-ideology.php cheers viggen

...i couldnt find an article in english, sigh, (sleepy brits?) The European Museum of the Year is the Gallo Roman museum in Tongeren (Belgium), congratulations! http://www.standaard...8b-9ea546e9a859 (dutch) http://orf.at/stories/2059600/ (german) here the link to the museum http://www.gallorome...um.be/index.php ...has anyone been there? I find it pretty cool that a roman themed museum gets that award, defenitley now on my list of places to see... cheers viggen

Ben, we did a review of this book a while back http://www.unrv.com/book-review/romes-greatest-defeat.php and i am very happy that the author,Adrian Murdoch, will do a review of Eager for Glory by Lindsay Powell... p.s. and yeah the AWM special edition is a real treat! cheers viggen

Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a provocative new book which charges that the Apostle Paul authored only a fraction of letters attributed to him, and the Apostle Peter just wrote nothing. Written by Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian and now agnostic professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the book claims to unveil "one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition:" the use of deception to promote the truth... ...read the full article at Discovery News