Roman Empire-era stones, long thought to be gaming pieces, turn out to be ass-wipers.

Or that's the new theory in the British Medical Journal. It's not as if there's ancient poop on them. They've just decided to present them differently. Instead of hey, kids, the Romans played checkers, it's hey, kids, can you imagine wiping yourself with a rock. And the kids all go EEEWWW!!! which the adults take as a sign of gratitude for the trip to the Fishbourne Roman Palace museum in West Sussex, England.

The museum curator,  Dr. Rob Symmons, said: "I love the idea we've had these in the museum for 50 years being largely ignored and now they are suddenly engaging items you can relate to."

I wonder what other museum labels could be tweaked to pique the imagination of the younger generation.

"They would have probably been quite scratchy to use and I doubt they would be as comfortable as using toilet (paper)," Symmons said. "But in the Roman era it was that or very little else."

Like the Romans were cavemen! From Bill Bryson's wonderful book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life":

The Romans were particularly attached to the combining of evacuation and conversation. Their public latrines generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus. (To answer an inevitable question, a channel of water ran across the floor in front of each row of seats; users dipped sponges attached to sticks into the water for purposes of wiping.) 

Maybe the stones were for taking a first pass, and the sponging followed. But let's not picture this dry scraping. The Romans had water galore. They were up to their asses in water. Bryson writes:

The Romans loved water altogether—one house at Pompeii had thirty taps—and their network of aqueducts provided their principal cities with a superabundance of fresh water. The delivery rate to Rome worked out at an intensely lavish three hundred gallons per head per day, seven or eight times more than the average Roman needs today.

I'm going to posit that the Romans would find our reliance on paper pathetic and Symmons's sniffing untoward.

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"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."

Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:

I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....

And then:

We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.

A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman." 

Icepick advises:

Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).

Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."

That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing. 

ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"

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"Boston’s becoming a town devoid of nightspot fun as some bars in the city eliminate board games and water pong..."

"... fearful that city regulators will come crashing in and accuse the pubs of sponsoring drinking games."

“If two friends at a bar say, ‘I’ll buy your next beer if you make this shot on the dartboard,’ the bar may have to go before a board. It’s silly how arbitrary it can be,” said Chris Mitchell, general manager of the Better Off Bowling league, who has seen the bar crackdown firsthand.

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