When in Rome . . .

This is going to be a sillier post than most, but it does have to do with my Blog title once again.  As I'm writing this it's Super Bowl Sunday, and I'm waiting for the big game to start in about, oh . . .  5 hours.  In other words, I have nothing better to do on this beautiful, sunny, 43-degree Sunday afternoon in Michigan.  I think this year's game is Super Bowl 46, or should I say XLVI, which gets me back to Rome.  What's up with the continued use of roman numerals?  I remember when the game was played at Detroit's Ford Field - it was Super Bowl XL and I kept thinking it meant extra large, like yeah, it's a really Big game.  When I was a kid, I started playing a little game at the end of a movie.  When the credits were scrolling I looked for the copyright year and tried to figure it out before it scrolled out of sight.  Imagine you have about 3 seconds to decipher MCMLXVI.  Could you do it?  Why do they do this?  What's the point?  Are they trying to hide something?  That one was 1966, by the way.  I continued to do this into adulthood, just to keep this useless skill sharp.  I remember when I first saw a film made in the current millennium.  It looked so weird I almost missed it - just a simple MM. 


There's a good joke about the Roman soldier ordering 5 beers in a bar by holding up 2 fingers in the form of V.  It's the only Roman joke I know.


Fortunately, the Romans no longer use their own numerals in everyday commerce.  I was in Rome in 1974, in the pre-euro days when the Italian lira exchanged at several thousands to the dollar.  Can you imagine seeing a souvenir priced at 750,000 lira written the Roman way?  If you can figure that one out, let me know.  Here's one for you engineers out there.  What kind of math do you need to build aqueducts, obelisks, temples, columns, arches and roads, and how did they perform that math?

Is there an App out there for you smartphone users to convert Roman numerals?  If not, you might create one and I'd like XV per C of the profits, please, for the idea.  That brings up another question someone might be able to answer for me, though I doubt I'd understand your explanation: How do they program computers for Chinese characters?  How do they even print a keyboard - aren't there really a lot of those characters needed?  But that's really a different topic.

I must admit Roman letters do look really cool on government buildings and monuments.  They look so official and eternal.  It slows me down, though, because I'm the guy who always has to stop and figure out the date, but maybe that's a good thing.  It makes me spend a little more time looking at something that is probably worth looking at, smelling the roses so to speak.  You know, I just realized that if I read this post out loud, I'd sound just like Andy Rooney, and that pretty much scares me into signing off.

So, I promised that this post was tied to the title of my page, and perhaps you've figured it out.  It should be easy to see by now: I = 1.

If you know any other Roman jokes, please post them here.  Also, I encourage any discussion on the topic of Roman numerals.  Do they annoy you?  Do you like them?  Do you have any interesting stories about your own experiences in the Roman numerical world?

Thanks for reading.