All in a Don's Day Read Free Page B

we spent five minutes talking about the interesting way that these Roman jokes played on questions of disputed identity (which I’m particularly interested in).
    And I gave them my favourite joke.
    â€˜Three men – a
scholasticos
(an egghead), a barber and a bald man – were going on a long journey and had to camp out at night. They decided to take it in shifts to watch overthe luggage. The barber took the first shift, but got bored. So to pass the time, he shaved the head of the
scholasticos
– then woke him up to take his turn. The
scholasticos
got up, rubbed his head and found that he had no hair. ‘What an idiot that barber is,’ he said, ‘he’s woken up baldy instead of me.’
Comments
    Commenters couldn’t resist adding some more favourite
scholasticos (
or
scholastikos)
jokes from
The Laughter Lover …
    My favourite
scholasticos
joke is the one in which the
scholasticos
hears that one of a pair of identical twin brothers has died. When he meets the surviving brother, he asks, ‘So who died, you or your brother?′
    GILBERT L. GIGLIOTTI
    I like this one, which seems to me quite subtle. A
scholastikos
, having dreamt he had stepped on a nail, is bandaging his foot. His fellow
scholastikos
asks why and, on learning the reason, says ‘No wonder they call us stupid! Why ever do you sleep barefoot?’
    MICHAEL BULLEY
    â€¦
before moving on to the press
…
    Many of the sensational headlines are promoted by universities’ press offices. Sometimes I feel sorry for the press officers because it requires a good imagination and cross-cultural thinking to sell ideas in this way. My own esteemed seat of learning once regaled the papers with stories of how its evolutionary psychology bods had discovered that mammals with bigger brains had a betterchance of escaping predators. I saluted the free rag
Metro
when the latter reported this story ironically under the headline ‘No shit Sherlock!’
    SW FOSKA

Heston’s Roman feast
    25 March 2009
    Heston Blumenthal’s historic cookery series on Channel 4 took on Roman food this week (filmed, I guess, before his Fat Duck restaurant had its nasty brush with the norovirus). There was plenty of luxury and sex (almost) on display. The Romans, we learned, were ‘theatrical, deviant and orgasmic’ – and Heston set out to recreate their theatrical, deviant and orgasmic food for a group of celebs who had been hired to consume and comment on the finished product.
    There was a lot of library work going on in the background, and plenty of pictures of Heston scanning the Loeb edition of Petronius’
Satyricon
. But the fun came in seeing if he could actually make the dishes.
    He did rather well with the Roman staple of
garum
– their favourite sauce, made out of rotten fish, which, as Heston pointed out, they seem to have smeared over most things. It is this that usually defeats undergraduate Roman dinner parties (anchovy paste doesn’t quite get it). But even if Heston didn’t have the patience to rot his fish for the three months that the Romans did, he did manage to heat up and blend together a load of mackerel intestines, so that they ended up looking rather like a Thai sauce which was (so Heston insisted) really ‘delicious’.
    The most interesting bit for me was the recreation of the ‘Trojan pig’. This is a joking dish described by Petronius in the
Satyricon
, but known elsewhere in Roman literature. It’s a largeroast pig stuffed with sausages, so that when the flesh of the pig is slit, what looks like intestines tumble out.
    In Petronius, it is a neat joke played on the dinner guests, staged between the host, Trimalchio, and his cook. The pig is brought in to the banquet, and with it comes the cook – full of apologies that he has forgotten to gut the animal. Trimalchio feigns anger and orders the cook to strip for a whipping, until the other guests plead for