Chatterbox Wednesday

Couldn't you just get fish that eat mosquito eggs?

Lunch blog! Day off the diet today so I plugged for a large sausage and chips with curry sauce (from Barnacles) followed by a toffee danish. Afternoon nap seems a dead cert.

Keeps me out of trouble once retired. I expect the misses to do the weeding etc...

Fence to Fence concrete, barbecue, old sofa, paddling pool to keep the beer cold

In a prevent road death kind of way, not a weird dog Fritzl way.

Ugh.

Wooden house/shed thing at bottom of garden with electrics & internet. Lockable. Basically somewhere to go vape weed. Yes, I'm that shallow and needy.

Interesting! Battering rams in the Ancient Near East were often used in combination with siege towers (πυvργος in Greek sources). There's an Assyrian relief that shows how the defenders are using a long chain to catch the battering ram and pull it up, something the attackers are trying to prevent by clinging on to it. Other techniques illustrated include tunnelling under the city walls or setting fire to the gates. Students were always asking how the siege engines were moved, as one can clearly see the wheels but no-one pushing it (a bunch of cyclists inside??? Only kidding. Who knows?). The excavations at Lachish have yielded excellent evidence which one can compare with the depiction of the siege on Sennacherib's reliefs. The Assyrians built a siege ramp for their battering rams whilst sling stones and burning torches were raining down on them, the defenders inside the city built a counter-ramp to get ready for the breach.

I've been looking at Israel Eph'al's The City Besieged, but he had a short article some years before that is downloadable from his university page huji.academia.edu/israelephal. You need to scroll down, it's the one called Ways and Means to Conquer a City, Based on Assyrian Queries to the Sungod. The text he alludes to was later edited by our much missed friend, the great W.G. Lambert, and fortunately the relevant pages are available on Google Books: books.google.co.uk/books?id=V3oVjSRYikEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. The text I was talking about can be found p. 25ff. (Nobody thought of asking about a wooden horse. Gotcha!)

Something that has always irked me when Late Bronze Age cities like Troy are concerned is the presence of postern gates. I've been to Hattusha and Ugarit, and both have postern gates right next to the main gates. Supposedly they are there to facilitate a surprise sortie in case of a siege, but in reality they look to me as if they are a serious flaw in the defence (and I know that I'm not alone in that opinion, though I've never seen it expressed in writing).

The child was upstairs with her pal. So I decided to do some deliveries in GTA. They of course came downstairs halfway through.
What you doing?
Err, I'm being a postman.
Oh..

And off they went.
Luckily the screen says deliver the parcel. Not deliver the cocaine. And I was in a post office van.

Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebed to Tent hen for stating what needed to be said. I am particulary glad that these lovely children are here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed the courage little seen in this day and age.

We can't leave all the authentic frontier gibberish to Wee and Crank discussing The Division, can we?

What's that? Cobblers is badly back into Elite? Lord help us.

Last night found a system with, amongst other things, binary ringed planets between two ringed stars, one of which was a blue giant the binary system was in the corona of. The planets both had around 2g, so looting the degraded wreckage of another ship which was sitting between the binary planets, in fact between the rings themselves, whilst fuel scooping, was a pretty tricky job. Many Shubs and Zulls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of a Sloar that day, I can tell you.

How do guests like their own comments? Socky! Help a brother out.