Day 72/99 (barely): NYC

Only a couple things of interest in the last couple of days - I had another column published, for one. I'm becoming deliciously controversial! Comments on my article include "From his writing, I really like this Rob Day kid", "Please refrain from contributing to our newspaper again in the future" and "Stop giving the real Rob Day a bad name" (the 'real' Rob Day edits the Princeton Tory*, the most recent issue of which was entirely devoted to criticism of the new gender-neutral housing policy which Princeton instituted to help make the LGBT population, particularly the transexuals, feel more comfortable - but it would be entirely uncharitable of me to suggest that he's doing quite well enough at giving himself a bad name).

I also went to a talk by Bryan Ward-Perkins on his latest research project. The photo below includes two of the greatest scholars on Late Antiquity, namely Bryan himself and Peter Brown:

Today was pretty fun - I went to NYC as part of my Roman Portraiture class to look at items in the Metropolitan Museum, funded by the Art History department and my professor (who paid for lunch and ice-cream!). It was quite cool - I like New York, and we got to walk back through Central Park - and I bought the cufflinks I linked in my last post (only £30!). A sample of photos (from top to bottom: the train station, the outside of the Met, the modern art installation on the roof, Central Park, one of my new and awesome cufflinks):

 

For those who are interested: the cufflink is a replica in antiqued 24-carat goldplate of the reverse (i.e 'tails') side of a real coin of this basic type, and the lettering is AΘE (ATHE in English lettering), rather than AOE as it might appear at first glance. It looks closest to the third type on that page, so perhaps third quarter of the fifth century BC?

I also got invited to my friend Janice's room (one of the exchange students who'll be at Oxford when I go back) for birthday cake, which was fun - everyone fawned over my British accent. Also, I signed up to spend Thanksgiving (i.e. this Thursday) helping at a Princeton-sponsored soup kitchen in Manhattan - I don't know whether it'll be fun, but it'll definitely be an experience.

It's currently 5:34am UK time - in just four weeks, three hours and thirty minutes, I'll be touching down at Heathrow. My time here's gone so fast - and I have so much left to do! I'm going to try and get the first 1,000 words of my JP written tomorrow, if I can.

* It was presumably on account of this coincidental name that I received a Facebook message on Friday asking if "my organisation" would like to sponsor a talk by Walid Shoebat, a Palestinian-American who claims to be a former PLO terrorist (but who a lot of people suspect wasn't, due to minor inconsistencies in his story like being the wrong age and claiming to have bombed a bank that wasn't bombed) and who now gives speeches on how great Israel and Chistianity are, and why 'Islamofascism' is the same as Nazism. I politely declined.