11111010

Two hundred and fifty. A quarter of a thousand. CCL, if you're an ancient Roman. A whole bunch of one's and zeroes in binary (see title). If you're a fan of counting in hexadecimal, the answer is FA.

Which is nice, if a little open to misinterpretation.

The purpose of all this counting is to mark the 250th post here on Make Lard History. I know, it's nothing short of scary. So this is my semiquincentennial, apparently.

Oh. I just checked. That would make me 250 years old. And unless I've been moisturising extremely well, that's a little unlikely.

So in honour of all this 250-ness, I went and had a look at what happened in the year 250AD.

According to Wikipedia, in the year 250:

A group of Franks penetrated as far as Tarragona in Spain - and a whole bunch of Juans and Oliveras told them to jolly well sod off.

The Goths invade Moesia - before too long Moesia was all lager & blackcurrant, dark clothing and Jesus & Mary Chain records.

The Alamanni drive the Romans from the modern area of Donau-Ries - the Romans said thanks but was there any chance the Alamanni could drop them off at the bottle bank next time?

An epidemic of the Plague begins in Egypt and spreads throughout the Roman empire - in Herculaneum, men spend their days lying down and coughing weakly, leaving their wives to look after the kids. "You don't understand," they argue, "this is man-plague."

Teotihuacán is rebuilt as a four-quartered cosmogram by Zapotec architects brought from Monte Albán in Oaxaca - which everyone thought was very nice, but they'd actually only wanted the bathroom knocking through and an extension to the kitchen.

Diophantus writes Arithmetica, the first systematic treatise on algebra - and a whole bunch of readers go, "What's this crap? Where's the plot? Bit short on laughs, isn't it?"

Saint Denise and Pope Fabian die - and never more would we get any saints named after someone's aunt, nor popes named after interior decorators.

Yes, colour me tenuous. But I bet you can't wait for my 1,066th post.