The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 96,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.
Okay, so I think I’m mostly done fooling around with formatting and the theme of my blog. So, what do you guys think? I’ve created a poll below.
Also, I finally updated things like my ‘About’, ‘FAQs’ and ‘My Reviews’ pages. So hooray for that! Getting a new theme spurned me on to keep the rest of my blog relatively up-to-date. I’m hoping to keep things a little more current in the new year but we’ll see. I haven’t been so good at that lately.
Over the next few hours or so, possibly into this evening I’ll be fiddling around with some formatting stuff here on my blog. I’ll probably use a new theme and that means I’m going to be moving widgets around. Things will disappear, random things will appear, etc. I’ve done this pretty much every single year so for my older readers this is pretty normal.
It’s going to be a little chaotic but in the end I hope everything will be much better for the new year. Thanks for your patience.
Of all of the people to cross paths (and swords) with the Romans during their thousand year empire, Zenobia of Palmyra in particular stands out. She has long been overshadowed by the more famous women who took on Rome: Cleopatra and Boadicea. However, as you’ll see, she was every inch the political genius and warrior queen that her predecessors were. If Emperor Aurelian (who we covered last time) had been a weaker man, she may have even succeeded in her venture.
Background
Palmyra was a desert city along the all-important trade routes to the east that would become the Silk Road in later years. As such, it could have protection monopolies and charge tolls on the incoming and outgoing merchants. It was a wealthy city nominally conquered by Rome but really the Romans let them govern themselves quite readily—not that they had a choice as you’ll see in a moment.
Rome of the third century A. D. was not the powerful imperial Rome of its glory days. Rather, the empire was in chaos due to a game of musical chairs with Emperors, economic chaos as inflation ran unchecked and barbarian hordes seemingly coming from every direction. Did I mention there was also a plague going around killing everyone too? It was a tough time to be a Roman and eventually because of it, the emperors ruling in Italy just could not handle things. The empire split into three sections, essentially. Odaenathus in the east, Postumus in Gaul and Britain and Gallienus in central Italy. Due to the revolving door of emperors during the third century, this situation would not last long though. Continue reading
Yes, it’s the end of 2014 already and so the end of my reading challenge is also nigh. That means it’s also time to announce how I’ll be verifying the challenge entries as well as what the winners of the draw will receive. I’ll start with the latter.
Here are the prizes for this year since last year’s prize distribution was really an unmitigated disaster (and I really do apologize to the winners last year for all of that):
If you have finished The Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge 2014, comment below with a link to your reviews or email me through my Contact page. Even if you didn’t reach your goal, as long as you reached at least 12 books (the lowest level) you can still get entered. The rules are here if you want to look. And unlike last year, I am not chasing people around to see if they finished the challenge. If you finished the challenge, please take the time to comment or contact me in some way or you won’t be entered into the draw for 12:00am MT on SUNDAY, JANUARY 4.
If you need a refresher, here are the different levels and the number of entries they get you:
1. Mad Reviewer: 104 books in one year. (4 entries.)
2. Crazy Reviewer: 52 books in one year. (3 entries.)
3. Slightly Sane Reviewer: 26 books in one year. (2 entries.)
4. Sane Reviewer: 12 books in one year. (1 entry.)
And yes, as I said at the beginning of the challenge, they all have to be reviewed! Continue reading