The moving finger rants

To understand who he was you have to go back to another time, when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now. Swept away. Without fuel they were nothing. They had built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped.

On the roads it was a whitelined nightmare. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max. The warrior Max.

I love me a bit of prophetic dystopia, I do.

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day, everyone, but the way things are going I'm starting to think we might all be better off if he'd just pushed that damn button.

Recently, there's been growing evidence to suggest that Edward II was not killed, by red-hot poker or otherwise, in 1327. Logically, then, he must still be walking around somewhere. Or not. That would be silly. But the concept raises some serious questions.

Crucial to Ian Mortimer's argument is the account of William le Galeys, ‘William the Welshman’, a hermit living in Lombardy, who turned up on Edward III's doorstep one day in 1338 and said: hi son, how's it going?, or at least something very similar in French. At that time, pretenders to the throne were hung, drawn, quartered, clubbed, struck, lifted, lowered, hurled, stretched, drowned, dragged, drugged, bashed, bonked, thudded, tweaked, walloped, and then... splugged on a gillikin spike. Instead of this, William le Galeys was entertained for several weeks at royal expense, and then went back to being a hermit in Lombardy. Gillikin spike makers were reported to be outraged. The obvious inference is that William le Galeys was in fact the deposed Edward II, travelling under an assumed name.

There is, as I say, a serious point arising here that many medieval scholars have missed, and I'm sure I'll get to it in the next paragraph or two.

A man officially declared dead, given a new identity, who roams the earth doing good works. (Becoming a holy man is how one did good works in the fourteenth century: they hadn't invented rationalism yet.) Logically, Edward II is Michael Knight. It remains to be seen whether Edward II had a sarcastic talking car, but given the lack of evidence to suggest that he didn't, we're forced to assume that he did.

Of course, given the time period, it was probably a talking horse. Logically, therefore, Knight Rider and Mr. Ed are the same show.

Frisky and Mannish were amazing, as ever. It being the finale for the School of Pop, it was a little melancholy, too. Still, The College Years is still on, and if anything it's better. Edinburgh people: go.

(Here's the trailer in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Then: stargazing! It was cloudy. We saw a single Perseid. One lousy meteor. It was a bloody good one though; a big chunky one with a trail of smoke following it, looking like the shooting stars you get in cartoons. Lovely.

Thus, since astronomy was a bit of a washout, I leave you with a snippet of medieval history:

Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror (known as William the Bastard before 1066), instigated his first insurrection against his father in 1077, aged about 24, when his younger brothers emptied a chamberpot over his head. Apparently they'd grown bored of playing at dice and decided that this would be a good way to liven up a dull afternoon. Yeah, and you laugh at what Harry gets up to in the tabloids these days.

Angry that William failed to punish his brothers sufficiently, Robert rode forth the next day and attempted to capture the castle at Rouen. Like you do. It didn't go well. Basically it's not a good idea to pick a fight with a man called the Conqueror, especially not if that man is also called the Bastard, and especially not if that man is also your dad. (Rumours that one of Duke William's other names was Lord Will-spank-the-shit-out-of-you-when-I-get-you-home remain unconfirmed.)

Anyway, bottom line, Robert didn't get to be King after William died. We got William II instead. On such matters as that tenth-century pisspot do the fates of empires turn.

(Lord Will-spank-the-shit-out-of-you-when-I-get-you-home would make an excellent character on Knightmare.)

Somebody has left a pamphlet in the office about the evils of caffeine. I'm very glad they did. It reminded me that I have a cup of tea brewing. Mmm, tea.

~

Today's constitutional crisis, threatening to rock the very foundations of the Scottish establishment^[0], is that Our Eck reckons that the Stone of Scone is a fake. I'm not sure what constitutes fake when we're talking about rocks. Is it secretly made of plastic? Is it just rock veneer on a cardboard facsimile? Is it somehow less rocklike that we've been led to believe?

I've always thought it was a pretty stupid national symbol in any case. Down south, they have the Crown Jewels in all their resplendent finery. Up here we have a chunk of rock, and we're proud of it.

Mind you, Edward I the Scots-Hammer went to the trouble, in 1296, to raise an army and come all the way up here in order to steal the same said chunk of rock. Who's looking foolish now?

And theories persist that instead of the historic throne of Scottish kings, he was given a toilet seat instead. Who's looking foolish now? I've often wondered how that would have worked. Let's imagine it together, in Braveheart-style glorious Technicolor™-o-vision:

From the article, Professor Ted Cowan says: How credible is it that you can just make a replica of something like that in five minutes because Edward I of England is coming to steal the real one? Actually, it's really very credible indeed. It's a rock. You can find them just lying around.

The Professor, we're told, is one of Scotland's most senior historians. And yet he doesn't seem to know the scarcity value of rocks. I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be.

--
[0] Pun not intended, I swear.