Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been wasting his time away listening to old Metropolitan Opera Performances of Verdi he’s put onto his iPod and playing Rome: Total War. Indeed, if there has been a waster of your Maximum Leader’s free time lately it has been Rome: Total War. The Smallholder and he have been exchanging ideas on strategeries that make for different game-play. Your Maximum Leader hasn’t had the success that Smallholder has had, but he’s learned that the reason for this is that he is playing a different faction (the Scipii not the Brutii) from the Smallholder. (Your Maximum Leader is partial to the Scipii actually. This is probably due to two reasons… The first is your Maximum Leader’s fondness for Scipio Africanus. The second is because he finds that in the game the Scipii family faction crest (a wild dog’s head on a blue field) is more appealing to look at than the Brutii faction crest (a lime green colour with a stylized faces). For those of you who care (which frankly is probably one or two of you at the most - and here your Maximum Leader is thinking Smallholder and the Foreign Minister - and even the Foreign Minister is a stretch) the other playable Roman faction is the Julii faction, who’s family crest is a laurel crown on a red field. (The non-playable faction of Romans, the Senate and People of Rome, is represented by the familiar letters SPQR on a purple field.)

Anyhoo…

That paragraph when on much longer than anticpated…

Your Maximum Leader sees on the news wire that King Herod’s tomb may have been discovered at the site of Herod’s city of Herodium. The article says that it was long assumed that Herod was buried at Herodium. For some reason now passing your Maximum Leader’s understanding, he always assumed that Herod was buried outside of Jerusalem. (It seems a likely place.)

Your Maximum Leader always has associated King Herod with a number of different things… The slaughter of the innocents. The building of the wall around the Old City of Jerusalem. The renovation of the Second Temple. And the building of Masada and Ceasarea. Did you know that Masada was besieged by the Roman 10th Legion? That legion was orginally raised by Julius Ceasar and was a key force in Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul and victory in the Civil War? A long and storied history to the 10th Legion. Your Maximum Leader is reading all about it now.

Anyhoo…

Did you also know that a team of scientists and archeologists are trying to trace the decline and fall of Inca civilization by using fossilized mites found in Llama dung? Strange but true…

Carry on.