They put the "Oy" in voyeurism

I ask myself, can it really be reality if they've got a camera strapped to their heads?

I don't think so. It's Life As Performance, despite their claim of documenting everyday life. Sure, it follows the minutiae of their existence, but with a camera always there—no matter how comfortable they are with it and how much they "forget it's there"—they are still engaging in a performance. As are all the people who see the camera and choose to interact with them.

I could be wrong, of course. I'm one of those Luddites who actually enjoys my privacy.

They're out to get me

Random quote of the day:





These books by Roberts are rather amusing and entertaining. Not the creamy prose of Steven Saylor or the emotional complexity, but fun. And they are interesting to read in tandem with Saylor's books as they cover the same time period in Roman history and often have very different takes on the same events. Roberts's MC, Decius, is a sarcastic, iconoclastic upper crust Roman, while Saylor's stories revolve around Gordianus, a common man with uncommon talent, who is trying to survive in the cutthroat world of the last days of the Roman Republic. And--they fight crime! Both of them.

The other thing I like about the Roberts books is the uncomfortable subtextual parallels between 1st century BC Rome and contemporary America. Or maybe that's just my reader's 50 percent. But I don't think it is.