Taking the piss

If only reading were like exercising: the more you read the nicer your brain looked. I could walk into a room and people would think, "check out the guns on that guy's brain; his frontal lobes are really ripped". Instead, my brain remains flabby and out of breath. I spend hours on the treadmill and when someone asks me to explain something all I can usually muster is a blank look. Sometimes when I try to explain something I find that I only really remember odd fragments of the overall pattern and crucial pieces of the puzzle seem to escape me. One thing I have learned though: being able to tell a funny story about the topic gets you off the hook. What I don't know about the Roman Empire is a few volumes longer than the complete Hansard, but I can always divert people by telling them how the Romans washed their togas and brushed their teeth with urine. This trick saves you from answering the original question about Augustan tax policy and, curiously, makes everyone think you must be quite bright because you know obscure stuff about urine in Rome.