Listening to LibriVox recordings of Evelina and Cecilia. Set in the late 18c. it makes me wonder how the sums referred to map to the present time. Measuring Worth suggests that a 1000 pounds at the time would, depending on the measure, have a value from 80K to 800K pounds now. Probably, given the context, more like 80K, but to consider that someone might lose that gambling in one night. Ugh. Clearly, if you want to revenge yourself on the rich, you should find a means of inciting them to gamble. It is a luxury to have stories read to one. Some of the readers are difficult to listen to, but some are delightful, so overall the mix is good: the contrast merely adds interest. Well, alright, some are actually unintelligible, mostly for their ill pacing. Accents I can deal with, but to stagger through the words with no sense makes it difficult to understand.

Pliny the Younger

I've a new toy, a 'nook' e-book reader. It allows me to read lots of books I might not otherwise get around to, as the commitment is the time it takes to download the book from Project Gutenberg and get it on my reader.

So, I read "The letters of Pliny the Younger." A roman statesman and general pal of Trajan.

He writes describing his villas, an eruption of Vesuvius, the demise of his famous uncle and advising and sometimes admonishing his friends. Also some more formal stuff with Trajan asking about how to deal with this or that problem.

The postal service was clearly quite developed, and fairly fast. I'm intrigued. How did it work? Who could use it? Could one just post a letter, or did one have to pay? No mention of stamps, 'franking' or any other detail was apparent.

The tidbits of life at the time fascinate me. Pliny describes several villas he owns in a 'walk through' form that suggests the use of the various spaces; the description of the death of his uncle makes the elder Pliny sound quite remarkable -- he was so curious about a volcanic eruption that he couldn't resist going as close as he might and consequently died of inhaling toxic gases emitted by the volcano. Favorite bits also include a leter to Calvisius, deploring the Circensian games.

They have no novelty, no variety to recommend them, nothing, in short, one would wish to see twice. It does the more surprise me therefore that so many thousand people should be possessed with the childish passion of desiring so often to see a parcel of horses gallop, and men standing upright in their chariots. If, indeed, it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the ment that attracted them, there might be some pretense of reason for it. But it is the dress they like: it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and contest, the different parties were to change colours, their different partisans would change sides,...

Not having much taste for team sports myself I find a peculiar satisfaction in an indictment of them so ancient.

Tea time

A little while back, L and I were talking about the merits of various tea urns, tea kettles and such for producing hot water. Being the nut I am, I made a spreadsheet to show how long an urn would take to heat up. Google gives me a way to share spreadsheets that's pretty convenient here. More or less, I calculate the number of milliliters, then estimate raising the water temperature by 90 degrees C. Then, based on simple conversions and the wattage of the kettle, I calculate how long it will take to heat up. For a 1000 watt urn heating 30 cups of water, it's about 44 minutes. I'm sure patience is a virtue, but it's one best enjoyed over tea, not waiting for it.

The Gilded Chain

I just read 'The Gilded Chain' by Dave Duncan, mostly aloud to my favorite audience (small but very rewarding.) I had a good time reading it and found the character politics interesting and amused myself mapping the characters and events to Henry VIII. While certainly not an exact mapping, there's enough there to make me wonder if the author intended it, or at least did use Henry as inspiration.

The tests of prowess and endurance drew a pretty good balance between being satisfying for me and not too tedious for my audience. If there's too little I'm left wondering "where's the swashing?" and if there's too much I get a "can we skip this?" from the gallery.

The narrative bounced back and forth a bit from history to the current time in the story line. The style didn't always pan out -- maybe it was my reading, but the transitions weren't always clear, so I usually added a remark about fading into the past or present. It worked OK, but I'm not sure the story was better for it.

It's a story with magic in it and I'm always curious about how authors make magic work. The idea of mixing the four Classical elements with four, er, other ideas (Love, Luck, Death, Time) is interesting. Magic works by mixing the 8 'elements' in different proportions. If you're going for that sort of thing, it would be nice to have more sense why or how things work the way they do. Love and Death oppose each other across the resulting 'octagram'¹. The opposition of the two seems to be a source of power in one enchantment, others seem to simply use lots of sources. Granted, it's not a story about magic itself, or a magician, but if you break it down into interesting components with relationships to each other it's a little let-down not to explore them a bit in the story. As it is, it's a distraction: interesting, but not important. The important parts of how magic works in the story don't seem to relate to the 'structure' of the magic at all. Maybe there's another story where it all relates.

¹Me, I was amused by the 'sex and death' motif, as popular in the 16th century as it is now. Anyone for a little Shakespearean double-entendre?

Dinosaur

If dinosaurs were anything like my parrot
I'm glad I don't have to clean up after any of them.
On the other hand
Imagine being snuggled by a T-Rex.