1. Lately I’ve been learning some about the 5th-7th century in Italy, which is really a criminally under-discussed time period. Most popular histories more or less just jump from “sack of Rome” to “Dark Ages,” as if nothing happened in between. But boy, did it ever! Like how we have a rare instance of one political leader personally murdering another (Theodoric kills Odoacer with his own hands), or the Machiavellian figure of Theodoric himself, or the whole war to reconquer Italy from the Ostrogoths, which started out so well and concluded more or less in the end of the world. See, the bubonic plague swept through and wiped out about a quarter of the population of the Empire, leaving them basically without the manpower or infrastructure to keep it going.

Anyway, it’s a fascinating time, and again, one that is hardly ever talked about.

2. As an illustration of the demographic collapse of the time: in Constantine’s day, about the early 300s, the city of Rome (then no longer the capital) had a population of about a million people. By Theodoric’s time, that had fallen to about 5-600,000. A century and a half later, after the war and the plague and all the rest, it was maybe 20,000.

3. I finally finished Love is War last week. I will say that they did manage to pull off some nuance in the evil family, though I still think that whole element was a misfire. It feels like a pet issue of the author’s introduced to lend the story more weight, but which actually ended up throwing the whole thing off balance.

Anyway, the ending was fine, though since I feel like the main plot had been long since wrapped up and the whole premise of the climax was heavily flawed, I didn’t feel particularly satisfied by it. Not that it really left much out or was disappointing, just that it felt as though the emotional weight had been misdirected, so that the denouement was less a bittersweet farewell then a long-expected and overdue conclusion. Best I can say is that the denouement would have been more or less perfectly satisfactory if it had followed on from a better climax.

4. Ultimately, my conclusion on Love is War is that the parts are better than the whole. There are some extremely funny and extremely heartfelt episodes in the course of the story, and it’s well worth reading for the sake of these moments, but the overarching plot doesn’t work very well at all and I mostly found myself wishing they would just cut it out entirely.

5. I explained the electoral college to my students today, and about how really the whole process isn’t at all what the authors of the Constitution intended (their idea was that voters would choose the electors, who would then choose the President and Vice President based on their own best judgment, not based on what the voters thought. Sort of single-shot Congressmen for the purposes of the election). It continues to amaze me how little consideration the founders seem to have given to the idea of political parties arising in the United States, or how that would affect the dynamics of government.

Oh well, at least it still works to avoid a straight popular vote.

6. My sixth graders (who are 80% girls) were absolutely delighted by the sheer amount of relationship drama in the Old Testament (we just learned about Jacob’s marriages). There really is a lot of it. The Old Testament basically has every way someone can screw up their own lives and that of the people around them shown at some point or another. I guess that’s sort of the point when you think about it.

God works with what He’s got.

7. Election day’s coming up. So how about some suitable music?

And, of course, the Democracy Song: