Caffeine desensitisation

Years ago, I used to have a cup of coffee every day to get me going. I stopped when I realised it was not actually doing anything for me: I had become desensitised to the caffeine. Now I only have coffee when I need it, and it (normally) packs a punch (if I put enough of it in the cup!).

Initially, I would only permit myself one cup of coffee a week. Recently, though, it's crept up to two, and is sometimes edging towards three. I began to wonder how much coffee I would need to drink before my body began getting desensitised to caffeine again, and how much time without I would need before I became resensitised to it.

The latter question was easily answered by Prof. Google: After three days, the body is completely resensitised to caffeine. So a weekend without coffee, and (as I normally do anyway) drinking mint tea in preference to the caffeinaceous black tea (with milk, I mean, as opposed to green tea) I drink during the week would completely reset my caffeine sensitivity.

The former question, however, I have not been able to find an easy answer to on Googling. Does anybody happen to know what the answer is?

How to get lethargic_man's attention

This advert has been all over the London Underground for the last few weeks.

Those who know me, though, will know that its eye-grabbing quality for me is not the scantily-clad woman but the pineapples... :o)

Book review: The Jewish War (part 1 out of 2)

Antiquities of the Jews ends immediately prior to the outbreak of the First Revolt against the Romans, in 66 CE. I was going to take a break after reading this, but couldn't leave it on such a cliffhanger, so went on to read The Jewish War as well. However, though I studiously post-it-ed this book's bloggables too, I'm disinclined to put the effort into turning them into blog entries, due to the thin response of my blogging of Antiquities. ( Yadda yadda yadda. )

On the other hand, there's only about thirty post-its in the book (as the first third, outlining the background to the war, "precapitulates" material Josephus would later cover in Antiquities), so maybe I will make the effort. Demand voiced here might persuade me, though I will expect more feedback from you lot if I do, even if just reponses saying "Very interesting, I didn't know that!"

In place of detailed notes for the time being, here's an overview and book review. Here's the start of G.A. Williamson's introduction to my edition:

History, we are told, is the record of the crimes and follies of mankind. Anyone reading The Jewish War will certainly feel this to be true. It is a tale of unrelieved horror—of brutalities committed by Herod and other Palestinian kings, by provincial governors, by the most enlightened and reasonable of the Roman emperors, by the leaders of the Jewish insurgents, and by Josephus himself. It is a tale of hopeless revolts, of suicidal strife between rival gangsters and warring factions, of incredible heroism achieving nothing but universal ruin and destruction. It is a tale, too, of a country filled with such a wealth of architectural and artistic splendour as has perhaps never been seen elsewhere since the world began, and reduced by crimes and follies to a desert, a mass of shapeless ruins.

The book is half the length of Antiquities, and moves much faster; it therefore comes with a higher recommendation from me (unless of course you're interested in Josephus's take on all of Jewish history). The following passage, describing the outbreak of the Hasmonean revolt exemplifies the difference between War and Antiquities (I use Williamson's translation, for added drama, as it is generally more gripping than Whitston's):

Matthias (son of Asamoneus), a priest from the village of Modin, raised a tiny force consisting of his five sons and himself, and killed Bacchides with cleavers. Fearing the strength of the garrisons, he fled to the hills for the time being, but when many of the common people joined him, he regained confidence, came down again, gave battle, defeated Antiochus' generals and chased them out of Judaea. By that success he achieved supremacy, and in gratitude for his expulsion of the foreigners his countrymen gladly accepted his rule, which on his decease he left to Judas, the eldest of his sons.

This is told at almost eight times the length in Antiquities, and moreover Bacchides does not come into it at all! He only turns up on the scene later, after the death of Mattithyāhu, and far from being killed by Yehudhāh hamMaccabi, he subdues the Jews, and later kills Yehudhāh hamMaccabi himself!

( Read more... )

Josephus notes