Digressions At The Gate

Mount Etna recently started blowing its top again. This reminded me of when I was a kid and I heard that when volcanoes erupted, they only belched up lava on one side, so I figured if I were ever near a volcano and it started to erupt, I could just run around to the other side. Heck, I thought, I might even stick around and watch. Then I learned that volcanoes are a lot bigger than I originally thought, and there’s not always a lot of warning. Thanks to bad Hollywood movies and so-called educational programming, I now know that some volcanoes erupt fast-moving clouds of hot ash and rock called pyroclastic flows. Knowing this won’t do me a lot of good if I’m ever near an erupting volcano, but could come in handy if I ever meet a volcanologist at a party. The coversation will probably go something like this:

Me: Seen any pyroclastic flows lately?

Volcanologist: Actually I’ve been doing tephrochronology on some trachyte material in a caldera rim.

Me: Um…boy, these little egg rolls sure are good, aren’t they?

Mount Etna is one of two active volcanoes in Europe. The other is Mount Vesuvius. It’s most famous for burying the city of Pompeii in 79AD. The Latin author Pliny the Younger, who was apparently standing on the right side of the volcano, saw the eruption and described it in letters to friends, adding, "Hey, do you think I could pitch this as a movie idea to Hollywood?" The eruption buried several hundred people, as well as a large collection of pornography. Fortunately today, thanks to the magic of technology, any pornography produced around Vesuvius, Etna, or any other volcano, can be transmitted immediately to computers anywhere in the world, thus saving it from almost-certain destruction.

Like many web entrepreneurs, the Romans really liked pornography. Some people think this contributed to the collapse of Rome. Actually Rome’s collapse was a result of several factors, including barbarians breaking through the borders and pipes made from lead. Well, I’m not so sure about the lead pipes having anything all that much to do with it. We’ve got radon in our basements, asbestos in our schools, and practically every household owns the board game "Clue" which comes with a lead pipe, and we’ve gotten along just fine. Efficient Roman plumbing did provide an excuse for the barbarians, though. They’d come knocking on the border doors and ask to be let in. The conversations would go something like this:

Barbarians: <Knock knock.>

Romans: Who is it?

Barbarians: It’s Frank. I’ve come to fix the sink.

Romans: Oh, come in!

Not all the barbarians were Franks. Some were Visigoths and Vandals, but they found that when they said, "It’s Vandal. I’ve come to fix the sink," the Romans would get suspicious. Of course the Romans should have known better than to let anybody in. After all, their ancestors the Trojans had been defeated after they accepted a gift of a large wooden horse from the Greeks whom they’d just defeated, and didn’t bother to look inside to make sure it wasn’t full of Greeks.

Fortunately we have their example to learn from. Specifically, we’ve used their example to name a special type of computer viruses–Trojans. That’s also the name of a brand of condom, which raises the question, Why name a condom after people who weren’t smart enough to keep their gates closed? And isn’t it ironic that condoms–which are supposed to prevent the spread of viruses–share a name with a kind of computer virus? Of course the condoms sell quite well, while original Trojans were defeated, not unlike the computer viruses that were supposed to cause a complete Internet meltdown earlier this week. Really the only thing melting down is the suburb built on the wrong side of Mount Etna, which just proves that, while history may repeat itself, it’s never in ways you expect.