It is the birthday of Chuck Babbage, creator of the analytical engine.
Yet even more fascinating to me the life of
Lady Ada Lovelace, who was his valuable assistant. She was perhaps the first person to envision AI.

When I was a sophomore in college, Matt Vavrock was my roommate. He had a Gibson, loved Star Trek, had a burning passion for Full Moon straight-to-videos, slept with the TV on.
His dad was a nearing-retirement mail carrier who became afflicted with Bells Palsy–parallysis on one side of the face. You can’t bat one of your eyes and you literally talk out the side of your mouth. This gave Matt’s dad a vague manner of speaking and resemblance to a latter day Brian Wilson.
Mr. Vavrock is a veteran, and was trained as a morse code correspondent. I asked him if those guys ever “knock” in their sleep, thinking myself oh so clever. He answered no, matter of factly. But sometimes a guy would wake with a start, sit up in his bunk and begin to go ” da daa da da daa ” in a panic. Creepy.

Little Wee to the Dee to the Eye to the A to the Ree
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Lil Wee Diary Xmastide
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I left the house to take in the third Lord of the Rings. A great film as long as there were some orcs to kill with a chunk of trebucheted masonry. The rest of the film was pure Schmalz. And two words for the misties: Rock Climbing, Joel. Rock Climbing. Just about every scene with Frodo was like the climax of Rocky II. Get up, Rocky! Grab onto the ropes and get up! The internal dynamics worked well in the book, but in the film gave me a hernia.

Lil Wee 13
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Hey Seamonkeys.

Sad news. The Inventor who gave us seamonkeys, and was apparently a klansman, has died.

Antibubbles?

Lil ole Wee Diary Day twelve
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Joseph Stalin

Benjamin Disraeli

Frank Zappa

These three men all have one thing in common: they’re dead. But I’m not, and so I was the only one who got presents. I now have a lemony-scented bar of glycerine soap with a spider embedded in it. The rule is that whosoever gets down to the spider has to eat it.

Lil’ Wee Diary Day ‘leven.
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Little Wee Diary Day ten
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Yesterday dusk marks the beginning of Hanukkah. Garrison writes:

In 168 BCE, the Greek king Antiochus IV had
conquered the area around Jerusalem, and he demanded that
all the people under his rule worship Greek gods. He
outlawed Jewish rituals, seized the holy temple of
Jerusalem and turned it into a temple for Zeus. Torahs were
burned in the streets, and Jews were forced to bow before
idols and eat forbidden foods or be tortured to death.

A group of Jewish rebels called the Maccabees [hammer --Daev] fought back,
and after three years of guerilla warfare they defeated the
Greek soldiers and reclaimed the temple. In order to
rededicate the temple to God, they had to relight the holy
lamp, which they had traditionally kept burning to
symbolize the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish
people. They could only find enough consecrated oil to burn
the lamp for one day, and they knew it would take eight
days to make more. They lit the lamp anyway, and according
to legend it burned miraculously for eight days.
...
Some historians believe that if the Jews had
not fought back and reclaimed their temple, monotheism
might have been stamped out, and the monotheistic religions
of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam might not exist today.

Shudder to think! No Judaism, Christianity or Islam? What would this world have come to?!!
Well, maybe in that case, two days ago there really and truly wouldn’t have been anything going on in the world worth reporting other than the Centenial of the Kitty Hawk flights.