Emendation via Degustation“Petronius� depiction in the first century AD of a banquet at the house of the pretentious parvenu Trimalchio remains one of the great satires of gourmandise in Western literature. A cookbook of the time […] has survived in later copies under the name of Apicius, and I cherish the account I had many years ago from Barbara Flower, the translator of this work, about her efforts to establish a sound Latin text. She prepared each of the recipes herself in the presence of the great textual critic Paul Maas, who, when the preparation was obviously in trouble, would emend the Latin original on the spot until the dish appeared to be in order. This was editing of a kind such as not even that formidable editor of Latin authors A.E. Housman could have imagined, and it illustrates the unexpected consequences of culinary studies of the past.” there were three large woodpeckers in naung park when I was walking to the station in the morning: for some reason I have always thought woodpeckers would be smaller, like hummingbirds maybe, and red crested — that would be from cartoons — but these had vivid mustard plumage and were the size of large beer bottles and put me in mind of some kind of robotic and alien creatures, but full of insouciance. no photo, because i was running late for court.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird