Ancient Roman Revolving Restaurant

[Ghostman]

( LINK )

The purported main dining room, with a diameter of over 50 feet (16 meters), rested upon a 13-foot (4-meter) wide pillar and four spherical mechanisms that, likely powered by a constant flow of water, rotated the structure.

Pretty awesome

[Karro]

That's kind of a cool find, even if Nero was a colossal jerk.

[Turgenev]

That's a pretty cool find. As for Nero's reputation, I take it with a grain of salt. A lot of his reputation was based on Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius is known for using hearsay and political propaganda in his work (especially if an emperor was too Hellenized in his pursuits).

[ravells]

Don't ask about the thought progression, but I wondered what sort of sense of humour the Romans had... google of course knows all and the answer is that it's not too far from our own. LINK

I liked this one:

Beard's favourite joke is a version of the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman variety, with a barber, a bald man and an absent-minded professor taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it's the barber's turn, he gets bored, so amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says "How stupid is that barber? He's woken up the bald man instead of me."

[Turgenev]

Believe it or not, I once did a course on Ancient Humour (mostly Classical Greek stuff - at the time I was studying to be an archaeologist but life took me in a completely different direction). One style of humour was common back then now, was fart jokes. They show up in Aristophanes' comedy, The Frogs. The slave asks his master should he tell the usual jokes. His master says no and then the slave says, what about __insert joke here__ . The slave ends up going through the whole list and of course by mentioning them, he ends up telling the jokes anyways. We also covered the humour that was in The Odyssey. Fun stuff (pun slightly intended).