Also on this fateful day
Guy Fawkes, just seconds before his execution, slipped away from his captors, jumped and fell to his death , thus escaping the fate of being hung, drawn, disemboweled alive, then having his limbs cut off, then finally beheaded.

Traditionally, Guy has been burned again and again in effigy for his crime; yet in the eyes of modern man, he is somewhat of a hero, the motivations given him being the truly grevious realities facing the English Catholics of his day. Be Guy a hero or monster, that moment of history is as timely now as it was then.

And remember, folks

Regardless of your test grade today, you are still cleared to enroll into next semester’s class. And If you scored a 3.7 or lower, you can still take the test again next semester! We’ll get it this time!

An interesting developement in last year’s eminent domain tango:

BB&T, one of the largest banks in Washington area, announced Wednesday it will no longer lend to development commercial projects that involved the seizure of private property under eminent domain rules.

"It's a philosophical decision consistent with our values," said Ken Chalk, BB&T's senior executive vice president and chief credit officer. "We think this is just not good public policy."
Link

Could this be filed under “capitalism sometimes really does work for the good of the folk — even if just for the sake of not making us look bad”, perhaps?

Below is a link to a most adorable gutenberg ebook about camping in the 19th century. The dated, stiffly elegant writing style, and its somewhat quaint, sometimes chauvenistic tone are very nicely balanced by its well-meaning attitude and its museum-like information. I included some nice quotes here because it is a lenghty read.

Guide To Camping — 1877

You can dispense with the knapsack altogether in the same way that soldiers do,?by rolling up in your blanket whatever you have to [Pg 17]carry. You will need to take some pains in this, and perhaps call a comrade to assist you. Lay out the blanket flat, and roll it as tightly as possible without folding it, enclosing the other baggage[3] as you roll; then tie it in a number of places to prevent unrolling, and the shifting about of things inside; and finally tie or strap together the two ends, and throw the ring thus made over the shoulder, and wear it as you do the strap of the haversack,?diagonally across the body.


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Today’s Weather:
Cold as a witch’s tit in a brass bra doing pushups in snow (-13 C)

—

So I’ve switched over to burning more wood than coal for the time being. My little Allesbrenner gets hot fast, but –or so I’ve read– loses half the heat straight up the “chimbley”.

Wood burns up much faster than coal, maybe fifty times faster even, but the upside is that it burns much hotter. Adding too much coal to a nice hardwoody fire is almost like a waste of coal altogether. And even as cold as it is outside, a woodfire just seems so nice. The heat radiates better at once and seems to linger longer in the air.

The Kachelofen heats much more efficiently. Unfortunately, {{popup oven1.jpg oven1 662×1432}}the one in the living room is out of commission until the oven repairman is back from vacation. The downside of that is that rehearsals are a might chilly; even after preheating the room for hours with a 2000 watt radiator. The upside is that my roomate is staying somewhere else in the meantime, so I can go into his room and try on his clothes without fear of being caught. And presumably the rent is cheaper until it gets fixed.

Biking down to the TU was a lovely experience this morning. The Elbe is swarming with beautiful icefloes. Standing on the Prague-side of the bridge, you can listen to them crunch against the stone arches. Then I ate it on the way home. That is, I brashly decided to try to pedal hard uphill on an icy slope just for the sake of spinning my wheels. Then, the sky was below me, the hard ice above me, and my dynamo fell off. “Goodness” said and elderly man to his elderly wife about 35 meters away, “he like totally busted his ass.” I could hear them quite well because they were rather old. I jumped up and proclaimed, “I’m okay!” and he said something like, “dude, be more careful, like, bro.”

Which brought me to the purchase of a new dynamo, and I’m glad I finally shelled out the four bucks. I was having so much trouble getting the old one to work properly, and now the difference is like night and day –albeit not quite literally, ha– seeing as the new one works like a charm. There is something magical indeed about making a lamp light up not with a battery but with ones own physical exertions, especially when it is so late and you are so far from home.

It’s the birthday of Jerome Kern, composer and gambler.

He and his wife survived the sinking of the Lusitania because he overslept and missed the boat.

He once raised over two million auctioning off his massive book collection, invested most of it in stocks and then lost it all in the crash of 1929.

And he composed one of my favorite standards, which goes:

They, asked me how I knew,
My true love was true,
I of course replied, something here inside,
Can not be denied.

Now laughing friends deride,
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes.

"The increment of harm in this case bears no rational relationship to
the increment of punishment that I must impose," Hurd said at a
sentencing proceeding last week in Utica, N.Y. "This is what occurs when
Congress sets [a] mandatory minimum sentence which distorts the entire
judicial process... . As a result, I am obligated to and will now impose
this unfair and, more important, unjust sentence."

here

Test Results

I’ve gotten about 2/3rds of the tests graded from today and all I can say is this:

Good job, monkeys. No fails so far. Most tests scored quite well. No curve needed.

I’m pretty happy.

I really can’t get enough of Pandora.

The coolest thing about it, I now realize, is that you can just type in a band name–something you’ve never heard of–and chances are you’ll get a song of their’s to listen to lickety-split.

That sounds very mundane, I know. Still, consider your options: Muck around with bullshit like Yahoo Music and register, login, etc…; try Amazon, get a crappy quality 15 seconds…; try file sharing software (still not a bad option) and risk breaking the law, having to wait for who-knows-how-long for something that might not be what you were looking for…

Check it out. I put in queries for “Joanna Newsome” and “The Books”–both acts familiar to me but both also signed on rather obscure labels. They got it on tap. Yow! The caveat is that it doesn’t always work. “Sonny Sharrock”, for example, can only get you results of stuff that resembles Sonny–presumably due to licence issues.

And of course, don’t bother looking for the likes of Dude Dude Chick, Lord Bishop, the Beatsteaks, Robert and the Roboters, or Face about Face. None of us are signed on a label with any decent distribution as of yet.

It’s cold as balls outside. Minus 16 degrees (9 F).

Which brings us to our idiom of the day, “brass monkey”.