Dear Pringles,
I have always loved you.
Now I love you more.
-Jackie
19 January 2013
17 January 2013
BC is...better?
Okay okay, so I complain all the time about the health insurance here, (it's $60/month!!) (well, it would be except I'm WAY under the poverty line so personally I don't pay) and how nothing is covered under health insurance anyway. And I miss the pretty Ontario drivers license. And insurance is more expensive here b/c the province runs it. BUT omg BC actually got one thing right that Ontario can't ever do (because they sell everything off that was provincially run e.x. drivers licensing) is that I just, on one website, changed my address for my license, AND health insurance. THEN they were like "click here to forward this information to the voter registry system" and I was like "whaaaaaat?!?" that is way to efficient. I think now that maybe it was a scam website and I just gave some random people my new address and DL number and the last half of my SIN. Hmmmm...
06 January 2013
Book Review: Through the Eye of a Needle Part 2
The next section of the book discusses where the churches began accumulating their wealth from. Brown compares early Christian churches with Synagogues. Many commoners who could afford it made donations to the churches, often through sections of mosaic or small pieces of statuary or even just the pavement outside. These sections would be small and not significant on their own, however "middle class" people of the time gave as much as they could and frequently. Brown says that donating to churches or temples was seen as equal to giving to the poor. You were making an offering to God. Of course most of the money came from bigger sources like the super rich who offered patronage. Once Constantine declared for the Christian faith he began giving donations as well, but in return, he expected that the Christians would continue their at that time 300 year old tradition of giving to the poor, and essentially to provide services to the poor of the empire. Of course about halfway through the 4th century people started taking more noticeable advantage of the church and the power it's positions offered. Senators became bishops for the wealth and privilege without previous training or knowledge, and as the religion grew in popularity it became important to become Christian in order to be in the "in" circles or the powerful political circles. This is especially true as all but one of the emperors after Constantine were Christians. Kind of like how nowadays to be a conservative or republican you need to be super religious, even though those parties initially were based on a totally different set of beliefs.
04 January 2013
Book Review: Through the Eye of a Needle Part 1
Peter Brown, "Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West 350-550AD"
This book review will in parts because I'm only done Ch.1 and there's lots of material.
So, as a writer, strictly as far as writing is concerned, Brown's kind of annoying. He's got that journalistic style where he gives you odd one liners and weird phrases that don't really sit well with me in history. you can be funny and clever and all those things when you write history, but the way he does it seems to take away from the facts sometimes.
The intro is kind of boring, i guess he's trying to set up for the reader an idea of what class structure was like in the late Roman empire and the reality of being stuck in one class/difficulty of moving between classes. So he starts off by talking about this guy they call the harvester of Mactar. He's called the harvester because he wrote a big thing about his life and how he got lucky and worked really hard and moved up the social ladder. he ended up owning some farmland and just making the cut to be a town leader, which just means you need to be a free man, landowner, and have a certain amount of liquid assets. he went from a farmhand to a town councillor, rare and difficult, so he wrote a big thing about it that they found in his tomb i think it was. anyway he's called the harvester rather than his name because there's no name on the inscription. Brown doesn't say whether the harvester forgot to sign it or it wore away over time.
Anyway the point of this book is to explore wealth in late Rome, who had wealth, how they acquired it, what the levels of being rich were like--being a town councillor, for ex, is good because you now have more legal rights, but it's not being rich. rich is you have a ton of gold at your disposal. so it's supposed to explore what vast wealth was like and how christianity and wealth became intermingled and what effect this wealth had on the development of the religion.
Some cool facts, and i'm not going to list who he cites because it's too much work:
-the eco footprint left behind from this era of Rome is the bottom of the mediterranean is littered with more shipwrecks than any other era produced before or since excepting modern times.
-also the lakes in sweden and icecaps in greenland show deposits of lead dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries due to an unprecedented amount of emissions from mining and purifying silver in Roman Spain.
-granaries were a symbol of wealth. it meant you could afford to store your grain and didnt need it immediately. this meant you could wait until a few months before the next years harvest to sell it, by which point everyone else was out of food. so you could sell it for 2x the original price.
The rest of the chapter is more background, how the economy worked, how 80% of the people were labourers, 60% of the wealth came from harvests. Thus obviously a good harvest was important, and in the odd years of bad weather famine struck.
What did you do then? Jews, christians and followers of the old gods all had religious ceremonies and tried to please their gods in order to bring good weather and good harvest and keep the locusts away.
Later when Constantine was emperor he invented the gold coin called the solidus. soldiers and high officials were paid in this currency. soon the bureaucracy demanded taxes be paid in gold rather than grain. this created a greater class gap-many flourished, many couldn't keep up. the average person could only barter with food or bronze coins, and the wealthier middle class might have had silver. i guess here his point was how even among the rich there were giant class gaps if some could have their assets in gold and others dealt grain.
anyway that's it for this instalment!
This book review will in parts because I'm only done Ch.1 and there's lots of material.
So, as a writer, strictly as far as writing is concerned, Brown's kind of annoying. He's got that journalistic style where he gives you odd one liners and weird phrases that don't really sit well with me in history. you can be funny and clever and all those things when you write history, but the way he does it seems to take away from the facts sometimes.
The intro is kind of boring, i guess he's trying to set up for the reader an idea of what class structure was like in the late Roman empire and the reality of being stuck in one class/difficulty of moving between classes. So he starts off by talking about this guy they call the harvester of Mactar. He's called the harvester because he wrote a big thing about his life and how he got lucky and worked really hard and moved up the social ladder. he ended up owning some farmland and just making the cut to be a town leader, which just means you need to be a free man, landowner, and have a certain amount of liquid assets. he went from a farmhand to a town councillor, rare and difficult, so he wrote a big thing about it that they found in his tomb i think it was. anyway he's called the harvester rather than his name because there's no name on the inscription. Brown doesn't say whether the harvester forgot to sign it or it wore away over time.
Anyway the point of this book is to explore wealth in late Rome, who had wealth, how they acquired it, what the levels of being rich were like--being a town councillor, for ex, is good because you now have more legal rights, but it's not being rich. rich is you have a ton of gold at your disposal. so it's supposed to explore what vast wealth was like and how christianity and wealth became intermingled and what effect this wealth had on the development of the religion.
Some cool facts, and i'm not going to list who he cites because it's too much work:
-the eco footprint left behind from this era of Rome is the bottom of the mediterranean is littered with more shipwrecks than any other era produced before or since excepting modern times.
-also the lakes in sweden and icecaps in greenland show deposits of lead dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries due to an unprecedented amount of emissions from mining and purifying silver in Roman Spain.
-granaries were a symbol of wealth. it meant you could afford to store your grain and didnt need it immediately. this meant you could wait until a few months before the next years harvest to sell it, by which point everyone else was out of food. so you could sell it for 2x the original price.
The rest of the chapter is more background, how the economy worked, how 80% of the people were labourers, 60% of the wealth came from harvests. Thus obviously a good harvest was important, and in the odd years of bad weather famine struck.
What did you do then? Jews, christians and followers of the old gods all had religious ceremonies and tried to please their gods in order to bring good weather and good harvest and keep the locusts away.
Later when Constantine was emperor he invented the gold coin called the solidus. soldiers and high officials were paid in this currency. soon the bureaucracy demanded taxes be paid in gold rather than grain. this created a greater class gap-many flourished, many couldn't keep up. the average person could only barter with food or bronze coins, and the wealthier middle class might have had silver. i guess here his point was how even among the rich there were giant class gaps if some could have their assets in gold and others dealt grain.
anyway that's it for this instalment!
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