Alpha is out of town until the end of the week which means I had a great opportunity to get some quality time in with the girls. Low point was the circus, although I managed to get out of there without spending more than 27 Euro including popcorn and a pony ride for Gamma (stupidly I tried to be polite and wait in line for that while all the other parents took cuts and so my kid was the last one to ride a pony, sheesh. The high point of the circus was a chubby 11-year old girl doing something with a bunch of hula-hoops; the five-foot tall 200-pound lady in a glittery off-the-shoulder evening dress doing animal tricks was entertaining, though, especially when her doves got loose.

The high point was the Roman festival in a nearby town. The town was founded a couple millennia ago, give or take a couple centuries, by Roman forces as a military base and they still have Roman ruins around. The fest featured an authentic Roman encampment where they demonstrated the various uniforms and equipment including a catapult (narrowly missing some audience members when a large arrow they fired bounced off some pavement) and a bunch of archers (who shot a bunch of arrows despite kids sitting in the line of fire – obviously the liability laws here in Austria are not quite as strict as in the United States). The best part, though, were the gladiators.

The gladiators were a group of people from Hungary, men and one woman (“Enya”) who staged “mock” battle (I use the quotation marks because all of them had bruises and welts from getting hit with real, but dull, swords, tridents, shields, and other stuff) wearing authentic equipment. There were different types of gladiators, you know, and they represented the most common ones. Enya was a retarius, for example. That’s the one without a shield or helmet, with a net and a trident. They also had a secutor, a murmillo, a hoplomachus, a provocator, and I forget what else.

According to an article I read this weekend, they used their shields a lot. The article was about errors in gladiator movies, such as “Gladiator” with what’s-his-face from Australia. Judging from that article, these Hungarian gladiators were rather authentic, because they whaled on each other with their shields a lot.

When we got home, we had dinner (grilled chicken on curly hollow noodles, which are most delicious) and various other things. No, wait, that was lunch. For dinner we had cheese and stuff, which Gamma refuses to eat, so she had left-over noodles. And I had a glass of wine, or two. Then, to get the girls calmed down for bed, we had a little gladiator fighting in the kitchen and living room. Since we have a new cabinet in the living room — with glass doors — (assembly was easy this time, it came in only two pieces) I tried to concentrate fighting in the kitchen, though.

Gamma was a pillatrix, which is a lot like a retarius (i.e. no shield or helmet) except with a sofa pillow instead of a net. Beta was a spoonatrix, which is like a provocator only with a long wooden spoon instead of a sword, and a pot lid for a shield. And I was the spatulator, with a spatula for a sword, and a small round cooking pot lid and first a large pot for a helmet, which was soon traded in for a large plastic mixing bowl which had the advantage that it didn’t entirely cover my eyes, and didn’t make so much noise when hit with a spoon.

After they were all calmed down, I put them to bed where they of course fell right to sleep. This single-father stuff is a cinch.

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“…we don’t feel like we were doing things that we weren’t supposed to, because we were told to do them.”

“the order was issued by superior authorities,”he said, “the question of illegality could not arise … for they had sworn obedience to the people who had issued the orders.”

Once upon a time I had a photo, clipped from a newspaper, taped to my PC monitor. It was a picture of a young entrepreneur in some conflict region, former Yugoslavia I guess, sitting behind a big stack of open cannisters of black-market gasoline, a lit cigarette dangling rakishly from the corner of his mouth.

I threw it out along with a bunch of other crap when I moved offices, but I’ve been thinking about that picture a lot lately.

Also, complete change of topic, I’ve been wondering when we stopped calling them “mercenaries” and started calling them “contractors”. My mistake, I know, but when I first read that expression, I imaged guys with shovels, bulldozers and cement mixers, rebuilding Iraq, you know? And it turns out they’re mercenaries. Why does the US military need mercenaries all of a sudden? And what are they doing in US-run “prisons”? Rhetorical questions, I guess.

I try instead to think about the decent young soldiers who reported the abuse to their COs.