This is “300″ combined with, Hell, Michigan, picked mostly because the picture is sort of relevant to the book about ancient Greek and Roman war that I’ve been reading. Let’s see. . . discipline was always more important in the Roman army than in the Greek army, but Roman soldiers frequently disobeyed orders and did what they felt like doing in the field. Part of this was because in the mid-to-late Republic, the army was mostly made up of people who had some land and money, and Roman culture still said that killing enemies and taking their stuff was valued more highly than doing what you were told. Discipline became more harsh and more widely followed when the Roman army began to rely more heavily on non-Roman mercenaries and auxiliaries.

Also, lots of things in the Roman army were structured as competitions. Individual centuries tried to build fortifications or dig pits faster than other centuries, for instance. I could see how this might work, but I’ll bet individual soldiers got heartily sick of the practice.

Amazon makes a misstep with Orwell’s 1984. That could get interesting. They didn’t have the rights to offer the book, but once they’d sold the book, did they have the right to delete the book from people’s Kindles? Nah, what’ll probably happen is that no one will remember the events because {random celebrity death, Indonesian tsunami, political scandal} is easier to sell in the media.