Stamp Grudges

Despite what the Italian government would have you believe, this is not the likeness of Archimedes of Syracuse:



However, in a grand gesture of the too little/too late variety, the Posteitaliane issued a stamp ("hooray for Archimedes and his water screw and hey what do you know, he was brutally murdered"), the geezers cynically stuck on the image of the Spartan king Archidamos III as if we would neither know nor care:



I say, just apologize for sending a Roman army to sack Syracuse already and be done with it. Stamps are poor recompense for running a guy through. Even the kind you don't have to lick.

And lest we get up on your high horses about the truthfulness of our own government, let me remind you: just as paleontologists were making real headway and our population began to reconcile itself to the apatosaurus, along comes a U.S. Postal Service issue featuring the long-since-Pluto'd brontosaurus:



Archimedes invented war machines that could do some serious damage to ships.

The apatosaurus was really big and stompy.

Sad.



Now cheer up and think of the screw!