Friday, February 16, 2007

Cleo Was A Bow-Wow




"That's the conclusion being drawn by academics at Britain's University of Newcastle from a Roman denarius coin that depicts the celebrated queen of Egypt as a sharp-nosed, thin-lipped woman with a protruding chin.

In short, a fair match for the hook-nosed, thick-necked Mark Antony on the other side of the coin, which went on public display Wednesday at the university's Shefton Museum."

This is far from new-news. Surviving depictions of Miss Cleo are far from flattering, and that most likely had more to do with the technology employed to strike the coin, as well as the ravages of 2000 years of fingering. But don't tell the Brits that because they do so enjoy poking fun at the remnants of Rome, when they aren't denying that folks named Britanicus and Merlinitus taught them everything from how to build a road to how to make a kickass sword. Also, the artists of the time were the ones who invented the caricature, but history is a soft-science at best and whenever opinion is needed to interpret a "finding" the Brits simply do not abide on the same planet as most.

And please now. There's coals-to-Newcastle, then there's a Brit offering a sentiment that someone is unattractive.

Since Cleo and Marky are so very similar in appearance on such coinage, next look for a UK "expert" to opine that they were in fact related.

UPDATE

A Salvatore Dali painting has been discovered, and British researchers have determined that the renowned artist had somehow redirected the temporal-space-time-continuum by finding the watch pictured.

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