Learning and entertainment, all in one...
I gotta say, I appreciate professors with a sense of humor and they're somewhat rare around here, but damn the last few lectures in our Egyptian history class have been funny. Here's a few fun quotes, some of which are funny only if you know the history of the period, but screw it, y'all don't have to read this:

"Yeah, so at least one scholar has described Akhetaten/Tell el-Amarna as the world's first insane asylum."

"The military was busy running the country while the Jim Jones wannabe (Akhenaten) hung out in his anti-capital utopia."

And the crowning glory to all of this: A slide of a Ramses condom followed by the comment: "I don't think this is such a good idea - the man had close to 100 children."

We also got into a very interesting discussion of personal bias in the reconstruction of history. The Amarna age is often painted as the result of a backlash or rebellion on the part of the king, Akhenaten/Amenhotep IV against the priesthood of the god Amen, who rose to great prominence in the 18th Dynasty. So, the basic picture is evil, excessively powerful priests getting the rug pulled from under them by Akhenaten as a reformer, only then they get pissed and kill him. Oddly enough, it seems like most Protestant scholars paint the "evil priesthood" picture to the extreme, especially British scholars, while Catholic scholars might lean toward that explanation, they tend to downplay it. We didn't talk about any other religious background as an influence, but it was really interesting to see such a clear-cut example of fairly recent history and the biases associated with it being projected on a phenomenon that occurred several thousand years in the past in an entirely different cultural context.
While I'll admit (hell, I'll scream it from the rooftops) that we all bring a certain amount of baggage and bias to our work, this is kind of extreme. I'd like to think that acknowledging and embracing our own context before trying to interpret an different context helps the problem, but who knows? (Obviously, I'd like to think that, otherwise my work is really really pointless...)
Anyway, I have no idea where I was going with that as I got interrupted by a phone call from someone wondering if they'd be shot and murdered or something if they came to visit the museum. Maybe I should have found a better answer than: "Well, no one's ever bothered me, and I wander around here looking weak and vulnerable."