site banner

Friday Fun Thread for December 23, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I discovered a fascinating thing.

There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome had a Secret Name. It's that secret.

Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from the pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting out some property in Hawaii?

But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm

Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):

How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.

Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.

Excellent find, I wish there was a subreddit for obscure quality rabbit holes like this.

or ya.ru

I appreciate the mention of yandex, it is something that is easy to forget but google only shows a chunk of the internet, unfortunately I don't speak russian but yet I was able to find a unique find, inexistent on google, the roadmap towards the VVER supracritical nuclear reactor, coming this decade (IIRC) and that will disrupt nuclear fission economics.

BTW

how did you find this website?

Did you notice the main page?

https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ENIGMAS.HTM#TOC

The author has made a whole book apparently

here's his (was?) email address hlabadJr@aol.com

I wonder what Horace W. LaBadie, Jr. is doing nowadays, would love to see him go on substack :)

Also one might be interested in using a "website auto explorer", a tool which automatically find sub-URLs on a website.

how did you find this website?

By googling "secret name of rome".

The author has made a whole book apparently

That's another enigma (within an enigma): if you google Horace W. LaBadie, you find his books on technical subjects such as building a laser printer from scratch, but no "On the Roman Religion", which, it seems, exists only as a (partial?) transcription on that website. Maybe it's not a real book at all.