Happy birthday Bob Grumman
Neuendorffer
61st birthday of Bob Grumman
120th birthday of James Joyce
------------------------------------------------------------------
On Christmas Day, 1584, the planet Mars goes into retrograde
hovering close to the star Regulus ("the little king").
Regulus marked the point summer solstice for ancient (2240 BC)
Egyptians who built the sphinx in the shape of Leo.
Forty days later (Feb.2, 1585) Shakspere's first-born male was
baptized and (supposedly) named for "neighbor" HAMNET Sadler
------------------------------------------------------------------
FEAST OF THE PRESENTATION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
<<Counting forward from December 25 as Day One, we find that Day Forty
is February 2. A Jewish woman is in semi-seclusion for 40 days after
giving birth to a son, and accordingly it is on February 2 that we
celebrate the coming of Mary and Joseph with the infant Jesus to the
TEMPLE at Jerusalem to offer sacrifice, both on behalf of Mary and
on behalf of Jesus as a first-born male.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
March 18, 1314 Jacques(pere) DeMolay burned to death.
March 18, 1564 Shaks(pere) born (250 years later.)
----------------------------------------------------------------
On March 18, 1564, the planets Jupiter & Saturn (in retrograde)
hover close to the star Pollux (in near conjunction).
William: MARCH 18, 1564 + 39 days => APRIL 26, 1564
APRIL 26, 1564 + 39 days => JUNE 4, 1564
On Corpus Christi June 4, 1564, there was a SPECTACULARLY close
clustering of Jupiter, Venus, Mars, & Saturn:
Saturn R.A. 121 1/2
Mars R.A. 123
Venus R.A. 123 1/4
Jupiter R.A. 127
Three planets within 3 degrees of R.A. 124:
one chance in (60 x 60 x 60 =) 216,000!
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http://www.jollyroger.com/library1/ThePhilobiblonofRicharddeBuryebook.html
The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
The Author of the Book. Richard de Bury (1281-1345),
so called from being born near Bury St. Edmunds,
was the son of Sir Richard Aungerville. He studied
at Oxford; and was subsequently chosen to be tutor
to Prince Edward of Windsor, afterwards Edward III. . .
It is noteworthy that during his stay at Avignon,
probably in 1330, he made the acquaintance of Petrarch,
who has left us a brief account of their intercourse. In 1332
Richard visited Cambridge, as one of the King's commissioners,
to inquire into the state of the King's Scholars there,
and perhaps then became a member of the Gild of St. Mary
--one of the two gilds which founded Corpus Christi College.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.corpus.cam.ac.uk/virtualtour/detour_biographies_parker.shtml
<<Parker holds a central place in the political and ecclesiastical
history of England and in that of the College. He was born in Norwich on
August 6th 1504 and came to Corpus as student, being ordained in 1527.
He became chaplain to Henry VIII in 1538, and was recommended to
Corpus as its new Master by Henry in 1544. The original letter of
recommendation in the King's own handwriting still lies in the Parker
library at Corpus. Having praised Parker's virtues, the Kings
recommendation was something few people would dissent from and Parker
was duly made Head of House. Both Corpus the University were in great
need of a capable administrative and politically sensitive talent at
this time, both of which skills Parker had in abundance; Henry had acted
wisely. He became Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1545 and again in
1549, but then under Queen Mary retired from public life to Norfolk and
was deprived of his livings, retreating for some time to Frankfurt in
Germany.>>
------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Bob Grumman
> 61st birthday of Bob Grumman
> 120th birthday of James Joyce
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the above, Art. And beware: yesterday's "If You Were
Born Today" segment of the astrology column said that I am
"dynamic and highly original. (I) can be very sophisticated
and classy when you want to be. Despite (my) worldly experience,
(I) identify strongly with (my) early cultural beginnings. (I)
attempt great feats and make them look effortless. The year
ahead is one of the most powerful years (I) will have had in
more than a decade. Power and wealth come to you." The
latter is exactly what I forecast MONTHS ago.
snip
The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
>
> The Author of the Book. Richard de Bury (1281-1345),
> so called from being born near Bury St. Edmunds,
which seems to be where some of the main strands of my family
originated from . . .
--Robert-Ready-to-Zow Grumman
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Neuendorffer
> > 61st birthday of Bob Grumman
> > 120th birthday of James Joyce
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> Thanks for the above, Art. And beware: yesterday's "If You Were
> Born Today" segment of the astrology column said that I am
> "dynamic and highly original. (I) can be very sophisticated
> and classy when you want to be. Despite (my) worldly experience,
> (I) identify strongly with (my) early cultural beginnings. (I)
> attempt great feats and make them look effortless.
And you read the astrology column!
> The year
> ahead is one of the most powerful years (I) will have had in
> more than a decade. Power and wealth come to you." The
> latter is exactly what I forecast MONTHS ago.
You're a veritable Nostradamus, Bob.
We'll have to Bury you stand up next to Pucksatawney Philobiblon:
Ken Kaplan
never refers to its solution by Kepler in 1605.
Ken Kaplan
Neuendorffer <ph...@erols.com> wrote in message news:<3C5CA0C4...@erols.com>...
John W. Kennedy
> Shakespeare refers to the problem of Mars in retrograde but strangely
> never refers to its solution by Kepler in 1605.
All the superior planets display retrograde motion, a fact almost as
elementary to common observational astronomy/astrology as that the Moon
has phases.
And Kepler only perfected Copernicus, and Shakespeare shows no sign of
accepting Copernicus.
--
John W. Kennedy
Read the remains of Shakespeare's lost play, now annotated!
http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Double%20Falshood.html
Neuendorffer
> > Shakespeare refers to the problem of Mars in retrograde but strangely
> > never refers to its solution by Kepler in 1605.
"John W. Kennedy" wrote:
>
> All the superior planets display retrograde motion, a fact almost as
> elementary to common observational astronomy/astrology as that the Moon
> has phases.
All the superior planets display retrograde motion which can be
adequately explained by Ptolemaic epicyclic motion . . . except for
Mars.
> And Kepler only perfected Copernicus, and Shakespeare shows no sign of
> accepting Copernicus.
Can you demonstrate this in a play in which a Copernicus system
reference wouldn't bave been anachronisitic?
Art Neuendorffer
Dr Peter Groves
news:81b80d38.0202...@posting.google.com...
> Shakespeare refers to the problem of Mars in retrograde but strangely
> never refers to its solution by Kepler in 1605.
> Ken Kaplan
Only you lot would expect the author of the plays to be reading technical
new (1609) research on mathematical astronomy -- AND attempting to work it
into the plot of the late romances.
Peter G.
Dr Peter Groves
Shakespeare nowhere speaks, of course, in <propria persona>, but in
'contemporary' plays he seesm to take the Ptolemaic system for granted, as
with Lorenzo in <MV>:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Peter G.
John W. Kennedy
> Shakespeare nowhere speaks, of course, in <propria persona>, but in
> 'contemporary' plays he seesm to take the Ptolemaic system for granted, as
> with Lorenzo in <MV>:
>
> There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
> But in his motion like an angel sings,
> Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Which, as Isaac Asimov points out, demonstrates that he didn't have the
Ptolemaic system clear in his head, either, according to which only the
seven planets have their own spheres.
Peter Farey
FAUSTUS. How many heavens or spheres are there?
MEPHISTOPHILIS. Nine, the seven planets, the firmament,
and the empyrial heaven.
"As for the celestial sphere of the stars, Copernicus held it to be a
vast distance from the earth, at least a thousand times as distant as
the sun."
(*Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology*
p.69)
Peter F.
pet...@rey.prestel.co.uk
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/index.htm
Bob Grumman
> >
> > Thanks for the above, Art. And beware: yesterday's "If You Were
> > Born Today" segment of the astrology column said that I am
> > "dynamic and highly original. (I) can be very sophisticated
> > and classy when you want to be. Despite (my) worldly experience,
> > (I) identify strongly with (my) early cultural beginnings. (I)
> > attempt great feats and make them look effortless.
>
> And you read the astrology column!
Only because it's where the only important stuff in the paper is:
the comics. Even then I don't read it often--but do find anything
to do with my birthday interesting, especially when it's as
undeniably accurate as the above is!
--Bob G.
John W. Kennedy
>
> John W. Kennedy wrote:
> >
> > Dr Peter Groves wrote:
> > >
> > > Shakespeare nowhere speaks, of course, in <propria persona>, but in
> > > 'contemporary' plays he seesm to take the Ptolemaic system for granted,
> as
> > > with Lorenzo in <MV>:
> > >
> > > There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
> > > But in his motion like an angel sings,
> > > Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
> >
> > Which, as Isaac Asimov points out, demonstrates that he didn't have the
> > Ptolemaic system clear in his head, either, according to which only the
> > seven planets have their own spheres.
> >
> > --
> > John W. Kennedy
> > Read the remains of Shakespeare's lost play, now annotated!
> > http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Double%20Falshood.html
>
> FAUSTUS. How many heavens or spheres are there?
> MEPHISTOPHILIS. Nine, the seven planets, the firmament,
> and the empyrial heaven.
The firmament and empyrean _are_ spheres, they don't _have_ spheres. At
any rate, thanks for confirming Asimov's point that Marlowe, who knew
this stuff, couldn't possibly have been Shakespeare, who didn't.
> "As for the celestial sphere of the stars, Copernicus held it to be a
> vast distance from the earth, at least a thousand times as distant as
> the sun."
He had to; it was the only way to explain the apparent absence of
stellar parallax. At any rate, even Ptolemy said that the celestial
sphere was so large that the entire Earth had to be treated as a
geometric point.
Peter Farey
>
> Peter Farey wrote:
> >
> > John W. Kennedy wrote:
> > >
> > > Dr Peter Groves wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Shakespeare nowhere speaks, of course, in <propria persona>,
> > > > system for granted, as with Lorenzo in <MV>:
> > > >
> > > > There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
> > > > But in his motion like an angel sings,
> > > > Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
> > >
> > > Which, as Isaac Asimov points out, demonstrates that he didn't
> > > have the Ptolemaic system clear in his head, either, according
> > > to which only the seven planets have their own spheres.
> >
> > MEPHISTOPHILIS. Nine, the seven planets, the firmament,
> > and the empyrial heaven.
>
> The firmament and empyrean _are_ spheres, they don't _have_ spheres.
> At any rate, thanks for confirming Asimov's point that Marlowe, who
> knew this stuff, couldn't possibly have been Shakespeare, who didn't.
>
> > "As for the celestial sphere of the stars, Copernicus held it to be a
> > vast distance from the earth, at least a thousand times as distant as
> > the sun."
>
> He had to; it was the only way to explain the apparent absence of
> stellar parallax. At any rate, even Ptolemy said that the celestial
> sphere was so large that the entire Earth had to be treated as a
> geometric point.
Under the Ptolemaic system, each of the seven planets had its own
sphere, the stars had their own sphere and heaven has its own sphere.
That is what Marlowe was saying, and I see nothing in Lorenzo's words
that contradicts this. He is certainly not saying that every single
star has a sphere all of its own, an idea that would not have
occurred to anyone until 1718, when Halley found that the stars are
not 'fixed'.
But both Marlowe and Shakespeare nevertheless made the 'mistake' of
*writing* as if it were otherwise, as they both occasionally use the
word 'stars' to include other celestial objects, and 'firmament' to
mean the whole sky.
Here's Tamburlaine (1Tam 4.2), for example:
Smile, stars that reign'd at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of your neighbour lamps;
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia!
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send up fire to your turning spheres,
And cause the sun to borrow light of you.
In Shakespeare's case, he had Oberon, Hamlet's ghost,
Faulconbridge and Prince Hal all make the same 'mistake',
but (like Marlowe) he was also undoubtedly familiar with
the orthodox version.
He knew, for example, that the Moon had its own sphere
(MND 3.2.2-4):
And thou thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway.
And that the Sun did (A&C 4.16.9-10)
O Sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in.
And the planets (MND 3.2.60-1)
Yet you, the murderer, look as bright, as clear
As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere.
So when he has the Welsh Captain in *Richard II* (2.4.2-4) say:
'Tis thought the King is dead. We will not stay.
The bay trees in our country are all withered,
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.
And in *Lucrece* (lines 1523-6):
Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory
Of rich-built Ilion, that the skies were sorry,
And little stars shot from their fixed places
When their glass fell wherein they viewed their faces.
Just what do you think he means by the word 'fixed'?
Peter F.
Pet...@rey.prestel.co.uk
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/index.htm
Roundtable
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 61st birthday of Bob Grumman
> > 120th birthday of James Joyce
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Bob Grumman
Happy birthday to you!
>
the astrology column said that I am
> "dynamic and highly original. (I) can be very sophisticated
> and classy when you want to be. Despite (my) worldly experience,
> (I) identify strongly with (my) early cultural beginnings. (I)
> attempt great feats and make them look effortless. The year
> ahead is one of the most powerful years (I) will have had in
> more than a decade.
This year is supposed to be great for lots of people.
My birthday beig July 15th, my horoscope said I'd be hugely
successful if I worked like crazy.
That's what one would expect, somehow.
However hard work does not always lead to success,
so I'm glad the stars are good this year.
Hope you had a nice cake!
Roundtable
Bob Grumman
> My birthday beig July 15th, my horoscope said I'd be hugely
> successful if I worked like crazy.
> That's what one would expect, somehow.
Ha, according to MY horscope, I doesn't even
have to work hard! All I have to do is sit
back and let the power and wealth accrue!
But I plan to work hard, anyway.
Thanks for the greetings, Sir R-T. I did have
a piece of cake but the main item on the menu
was a pizza.
--Bob G.
John W. Kennedy
> Under the Ptolemaic system, each of the seven planets had its own
> sphere, the stars had their own sphere and heaven has its own sphere.
> That is what Marlowe was saying, and I see nothing in Lorenzo's words
> that contradicts this. He is certainly not saying that every single
> star has a sphere all of its own, an idea that would not have
> occurred to anyone until 1718, when Halley found that the stars are
> not 'fixed'.
It's certainly what he seems to be saying.
> He knew, for example, that the Moon had its own sphere
> (MND 3.2.2-4):
>
> And thou thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
> With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
> Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway.
>
> And that the Sun did (A&C 4.16.9-10)
>
> O Sun,
> Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in.
>
> And the planets (MND 3.2.60-1)
>
> Yet you, the murderer, look as bright, as clear
> As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere.
Any reasonably intelligent person knew that much.
> So when he has the Welsh Captain in *Richard II* (2.4.2-4) say:
>
> 'Tis thought the King is dead. We will not stay.
> The bay trees in our country are all withered,
> And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.
>
> And in *Lucrece* (lines 1523-6):
>
> Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory
> Of rich-built Ilion, that the skies were sorry,
> And little stars shot from their fixed places
> When their glass fell wherein they viewed their faces.
>
> Just what do you think he means by the word 'fixed'?
That, unlike the planets, they don't move relative to each other
(except, of course, that they do, but, as you observe, that was
discovered in 1718).
johncoot
> a piece of cake but the main item on the menu
> was a pizza.
>
> --Bob G.
Happy Birthday Bob.
This morning on the Today show,New England preist exposed for
pedophile!
I am elated that the tyranny of silence surrounding child molestation
is finally coming to light!
On the third day he rose again from the dead!
and ascended into heaven,from thence he shall come to judge the quick
and the dead.
he was taken up obscured from our vision, why do you marvel at this
asked the angel?He shall return in a like manner.
Obscured from our vision for the kingdom of heaven comes in such a way
as not to be noticeable!
surely everyone must realize by now jesus christ was the author and
finisher of our faith,and ..
I will give you a new name that only you know!
and that name will be William Shakespeare naturally!
They have a song only they can sing,others may try ,but they won't be
able to sing it.
it goes something like this!
(silly song optional)
I'm a yankee doodle dandee, yankee doodle do or die
when the saints come marching in...
from the halls of montezuma to the shores of tripoli
onward christian soldiers marching as to war.
etal.
mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord
he is trampling outthe vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
Then Micheal ,the arch angel rose up in heaven and summoned the host
of Israel.
144,000 warriors of the rainbow.prepared to slay the beast that lived
in our minds and hearts and ruled us night and day since the demise of
truth.
The lie squirmed and wriggled in peril and fear as the light of
understanding began to ascend from the depths of our ignorances.
They were gathered at armeggedon ,for the apocalypse.
for in gods eye a day can be a thousand years ,or a second.
That is because God has a large library silly!
complete with archives.
Mikhail Bulgakhov wrote The master and Margeritte.
Tomson Hiway wrote the kiss of the fur queen.
But it was WS that gave us the courage to write such harrowing
accounts with humour and grace.
perhaps the military industrial complex now owns all of the publishing
venues in the free world,I'm not sure,and don't honestly care.So What!
if they do.
Using fiction to transport vital military informations from station to
station is an aged old form of communications.
It takes a scholarly approach to comprehend this,and it is doubtful
the legions of ignorance are scholarly!
therefore let the truth be known, it shall set you free,but remember
unless you can see with the eyes of a child, you will in no ways enter
into the kingdom of heaven.
in other words, much ado about nothing, keep your sense of humor and
may I recommend Taz. a cartoon character from warner brothers Bugs
Bunny.
For Taz is the whirlwind,and if you sew the wind you'll reap the
whirlwind.
the harvest is rich, come and reap what you have sewn!
Then I saw a whirlwind that was terrible and dark, blacker than a
black hole in space,darker than a sunless void.
And Good Ole Dad said, let there be light,and out of the confusion
came understanding!
obscure at first as the whirlwind raged and raged ,but slowly the
black behemoth of ignorance diminished first from darkness to dimness
still whirling like a hurricane,but then gradually from black
ignorance to blood red misery this leviathin of mystery began to
transform itself from horror and fear into a gentle whirlpool of
transluscent crystal clear water.
The whirlpool was still turning in full force ,but what had been
obscure suddenly became apparent,the monster of our human fears was
entering its rest.and god rested on the 7th day from all of his
labors,and there was peace in thevalley and happy ever after on the
horizons.
The whirlpool stilled and calm prevailed,and the deep pool of wisdom
opened gently unto the world.Like a library door opening its vaults
freely the treasures were dispersed amongst the hungry masses,starving
for understanding.
Suddenly the great horror that had awoken the need for action was
dispelled,and the confusion relented shamed back into its place
beneath the feet of creation ,where it is unearthed silently in awe
struck wonders of archeology and science slowly unveils the mystery .
The mountain of the lord became a radio station outy of the emerald
city, kmtt 103.7 on your radio dial,
the blind shall see,and the lame shall walk in that day.
Fear not for I am with thee sayeth the Lord of Hosts,and my name shall
be American ,and from the least to the greatest you all shall know me
for in as much as you have done kindness unto the least of my brethen
you have shown kindness unto me and here is my reward, understanding
plain and simple and everlasting life peace joy and happy ever afters
to you all and to all a good night1
then santa claus rode off on his sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer back
towards the tompson hiway and the land of the midnight sun.Quin the
Eskimo met Santa at the door to his glacial palace,and welcomed him
while Nanook ,his faithful Polar Bear went out to make war on the
ignorance that had surrounded santas house and caused such a great
stink round about!
I know this because I am Nanook, and Quin is my uncle Bill.(lol)
Now would you please pass the parmessan!My Pizzas getting cold!
Its not the truth that we fear,but the transformation from ignorance
to enlightenment that keeps us in the dark, its scary mommies!
The Marine honor gaurd raised the flag over Arlinton Cemetary,and thus
began another day inthe annals of American History.
what will be will be..doris day sang like a vision of long ago.
Nanook took his pen out of his quill,and began to assault the fortress
of heaven thatso greedily gaurded the understanding that the earth so
desperately needed to keep from annhilating herself .This story is
related in the mythology of the north american injun by franz boas,
father of anthropology.
In one version given by messenger James Tate (Teit) The spider lets
coyote down from the sun by a thread,..in any event,, the treasure
hidden in the vaults and archives of Rome, was ransacked and the truth
was set free.
The truth spread like a wildfire enflaming the world and burning up
2/3 of the human population, because they had not prepared themselves
for the truth.
The other 1/3 had prepared itself and was ready to recieve the
truth.They drank the cup of understanding with their eyes,and
swallowed it with their minds.
Digested in bowels of mercy, their hearts were opened and the captive
was released ,thereby Micheal went from prisoner of hope to his
everlasting rest in peace, from thenc he shall live in our memories
and fond recollections and the imaginations of our childrens children
even forever .. happy ever after grampa put down the book and placed
the sleeping child in her crib, Good night Amy he smiled down at his
grand daughter, for Amy is what he liked to call America.
Amy Marie.
Nanook roared from the mountaintops like Benjamin ravening over the
spoils.
And a great cloud came upon the world.
From the cloud which is humanity poured forth a torrent which is the
stream of life that led up to the great flood of understanding that
buried the world under a huge sea of confusion .
the flood subsided because America had not lost its scholars and
history books, it had keptthem,and the vaults and archives were opened
and the old stories were unearthed.
Then parents read stories to their children at bedtime,and filled
their tiny brains with wonder and this stilled the storm and caused
the sun to rise in the darkest hour of midnight!
the sun shone forth upon the clouds and a huge rainbow was seen in the
heavens of our minds eye, and a promise was unspoken ,heard through
the silence was a certainty ,as our minds were filled with
understanding and our hearts opened up to the truth of our mortal
presence here on this wonderous shore.
The laws of humility and kindness were writtern down in our hearts and
minds genetically encoded like dna ,and our arrogant conciets and
false asumptions vanished!
Finally FEAR was vanquished, with a test of time.It was another 1000
years before our descendants realized this, but in the meantime we
carried on as Crosby Stills and Nash played Teach Your children well,
..........
Peace fools, we are none of us gods,and it is about goddamned time we
stop trying to pretend we are.
from one fool to another..
if you count yourselfs wise become a fool for the wisdom of this world
is folly to the creator.(creation)
acts:?:?
romans:?:?
Thn I closed the little scroll called the holy bible which had become
cumbersome and wrote this
do unto others as you would have them do unto you.(be kind!I added!)
and the old world perished into our memories and evaporated like a
nightmare that faces the light of day, and the new day unfolded like
the book of life and it opened as life on earth amongst the living in
this creation without a clue.
I placed the holy bible on the shelf where dad had told me to, and
perused the library at my disposal.
I found many good books,but shant bother you with them suffice to say
this is America and I am entitled under law to read what I choose.
I read Ira Levins :"This Perfect Day!"
that was a long time ago. it wasn't bad, but in the mind of a teenager
or maybe even a preteen, it was spectacular.
The imagination of youth is a marvelous thing to behold.
Yet the security of adulthood with all of our skepticism keeps me sane
in an unsane world of delusions.
The wedding of night and day was held at dawn.and life was born.
happy ever after, can someone please tell those loud obnoxious
terrorists to shut up!I'm trying to get some sleep!
Though your ignorance is as black as coal ,scarlet as the red letter,
I will make your ignorance like snow.
my question for you what is snow?
like a snowjob, bs, or what
cold?
clear fresh frozen water?
I need my snow to melt so I can get a drink,I'm thirsty!
another liar in hell looking for a drink of water?
The snow began to melt and turned to rain.Dan Fogelberg sang ....
...my brothers lives were different for they heard another call,
one went to chicago(jesus)
one went to St.Paul(church)Diamond Colorado, when I'm not in some
hotel,
living out thisd life I've chose and drawn to not so well.
The leader of the band has died and his eyes are growing cold
but his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.
interlude..
did you ever know that your my hero and everything I would like to be
you are the wind beneath my wings.
The eagle rested on the highest sprig.surveying the skagit scene,he
plummeted to the river snaring a dieing coho with his visceral talons.
Come and feast on the blood of kings and cohos he urged his
brethen,and the eagles gathered and devoured the carcasses.
From the far bank we watched,my uncle and I, A fisher of men,hail
atlantis.
Conclusion:
Greg Gaines was singing on the mountain of the Lord.
In your eyes I feel the heat ,I am complete,I see the doorways to a
thousand churches,
and resolution to all my fruitless searches..
The freeway zoomed by my window at 70 miles an hour while I traversed
the road.
46 years of music and books,drunken revelry and painstaking sweat in
building a dream that I couldn't yet see clearly.
To be or not to be?That is the question..
Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord,I shall repay!
and for each sleight heaped upon him kindness was the reward,
for every arrow shot forgiveness the prize of the hunter
Finally the facade broke!
shattered bythe pressing needs of reality!
mY VENGEANCE WAS FORGIVENESS!
but I failed.And now mercy gives way to war.
yet there remains these 3,
hope ,faith and love.
IMHO William Shakespeare was the Pope.
I mean is the Pope Catholic?Do bears shit in the woods?
William Shakespeare was the Pope!
lol.
so what!
Peter Farey
John W. Kennedy wrote:
>
> Peter Farey wrote:
> >
> > Under the Ptolemaic system, each of the seven planets had its own
> > sphere, the stars had their own sphere and heaven has its own sphere.
> > That is what Marlowe was saying, and I see nothing in Lorenzo's words
> > that contradicts this. He is certainly not saying that every single
> > star has a sphere all of its own, an idea that would not have
> > occurred to anyone until 1718, when Halley found that the stars are
> > not 'fixed'.
>
> It's certainly what he seems to be saying.
And in the part that you snipped, I tried to explain why that was.
> > He knew, for example, that the Moon had its own sphere
> > (MND 3.2.2-4):
> >
> > And thou thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
> > With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
> > Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway.
> >
> > And that the Sun did (A&C 4.16.9-10)
> >
> > O Sun,
> > Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in.
> >
> > And the planets (MND 3.2.60-1)
> >
> > Yet you, the murderer, look as bright, as clear
> > As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere.
>
> Any reasonably intelligent person knew that much.
Then why on earth would a person of Shakespeare's intelligence not
know the rest of it?
> > So when he has the Welsh Captain in *Richard II* (2.4.2-4) say:
> >
> > 'Tis thought the King is dead. We will not stay.
> > The bay trees in our country are all withered,
> > And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.
> >
> > And in *Lucrece* (lines 1523-6):
> >
> > Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory
> > Of rich-built Ilion, that the skies were sorry,
> > And little stars shot from their fixed places
> > When their glass fell wherein they viewed their faces.
> >
> > Just what do you think he means by the word 'fixed'?
>
> That, unlike the planets, they don't move relative to each other
> (except, of course, that they do, but, as you observe, that was
> discovered in 1718).
The passage we are discussing (MoV 5.1.58-62) is:
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Peter Groves gave as an example of Shakespeare seeming "to take
the Ptolemaic system for granted", which is how I see it too.
You, however, think (along with Asimov) that it demonstrates that
he didn't have the Ptolemaic system clear in his head, since it
appears to suggest that every single star has a sphere all of its
own.
The difficulty appears to arise from the ambiguity of the word
'orb'. Is he using it to refer to the objects themselves or to
the spheres which were believed to hold them?
There are possible examples of both usages in the canon. For
example, of the first usage, there is probably Giacomo's
(Cym 1.7.33-8):
What, are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes
To see this vaulted arch and the rich crop
Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above and the twinned stones
Upon th' unnumbered beach, and can we not
Partition make with spectacles so precious
'Twixt fair and foul?
And, a less certain example, Lear (KL 1.1.109-12) swears:
.by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be.
It has to be said, however, that in neither case is it clear that
the stars would be included, and in the second it could just as
easily be referring only to the spheres.
The second usage appears quite clearly in the King's words to
Worcester (1H4 5.1.15-19):
Will you again unknit
This churlish knot of all-abhorred war,
And move in that obedient orb again
Where you did give a fair and natural light,
And be no more an exhaled meteor.
And (R&J 2.1.151-3) Juliet's:
O swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
So which one does Lorenzo have in mind?
For me, the answer is given by the words which Peter did not
actually include in his example:
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
In this image, the 'floor of heaven' can only be the firmament,
the 'orb' of the stars, which he portrays as being inlaid with
*shallow dishes* of bright gold. I find it highly unlikely that
he would switch the image of a star from flat disk to spherical
orb in the next line, so he must be saying that all of the orbs
(i.e the Ptolemaic spheres) and not just the firmament, "in his
motion like an angel sings".
And that shows no lack of clarity about the Ptolemaic system.
Nicholas Whyte
Yep. There isn't anyway a "problem" of Mars' retrograde motion - even
the Ptolemaic system was able to account for it, it's just that the
Copernican system was slightly more elegant.
Nor does Shakespeare refer to it in a serious way; it's not even a
definitive statement about himself made by Parolles, it's provocative
banter from Helena, and we have no idea if it is meant to be
mathematically true of the character (whereas if this was Chaucer, he
would have worked it out so carefully that there was no room for
doubt).
The plays are clearly written by someone who accepts astrology as part
of his world but has no deep technical knowledge of astrology. There
is a desperately unconvincing attempt to prove the contrary at:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/1903/shakesp.html
Nicholas
Nicholas Whyte
> The passage we are discussing (MoV 5.1.58-62) is:
>
> Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
> Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
> There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
> But in his motion like an angel sings,
> Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
>
> Peter Groves gave as an example of Shakespeare seeming "to take
> the Ptolemaic system for granted", which is how I see it too.
>
> You, however, think (along with Asimov) that it demonstrates that
> he didn't have the Ptolemaic system clear in his head, since it
> appears to suggest that every single star has a sphere all of its
> own.
>
> The difficulty appears to arise from the ambiguity of the word
> 'orb'. Is he using it to refer to the objects themselves or to
> the spheres which were believed to hold them?
> For me, the answer is given by the words which Peter did not
> actually include in his example:
>
> Look how the floor of heaven
> Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
>
> In this image, the 'floor of heaven' can only be the firmament,
> the 'orb' of the stars, which he portrays as being inlaid with
> *shallow dishes* of bright gold. I find it highly unlikely that
> he would switch the image of a star from flat disk to spherical
> orb in the next line, so he must be saying that all of the orbs
> (i.e the Ptolemaic spheres) and not just the firmament, "in his
> motion like an angel sings".
>
> And that shows no lack of clarity about the Ptolemaic system.
Whether or not the metaphor is mixed is one question; whether the
system Ptolemaic or Copernican another. I agree with you (and disagree
with John Kennedy) that the phrasing of the passage is entirely
consistent with the Ptolemaic system. Apart from anything else, the
stars in the firmament are moving with respect to Earth, because they
go round the earth once every sidereal day. Since they are at
different celestial latitudes that in itself can generate celestial
music as they move at different angular velocities, and of course
extra harmonies would be added by the planets in their
spheres/orbs/whatever. (Incidentally since Copernicus requires the
*earth* to rotate rather than the stars it's a strike against this
passage being Copernican.)
I disagree with you about the metaphor. "Patens of bright gold" is
clearly a metaphorical reference to the appearance of the stars.
However "the smallest orb which thou behold'st" in the next line is
clearly the dimmest star visible. It's not a metaphor at all, since as
far as was known the stars themselves actually were orbs, ie sperical
objects, though a long long way away. It also cannot possibly refer to
the orbs=spheres which hold the planets and fixed stars, since they
are invisible, and therefore Jessica could not be expected to behold
them. The metaphor is not mixed; the mood changes from speculative to
realistic.
I sense also - perhaps I am wrong - that you and John Kennedy both
expect Shakespeare's use of the word "stars" to be equivalent to our
modern usage of great balls of burning gas. But Shakespeare and his
contemporaries thought that all objects visible in the sky farther out
than the atmosphere were stars. The category of "stars" then divides
into "fixed stars", attached to the outermost sphere, and "planets",
including sun and moon, which have a related but different motion.
I am interested in Shakespeare's view of meteors. One *could* read the
Richard II reference where "meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven"
and particularly the I Henry IV reference to "meteors of a troubled
heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred" as somehow in
violation of the orthodoxy of the time, that meteors were atmospheric
phenomena. However there are two other quite explicit references to
meteors as atmospheric exhalations in I Henry IV, so I guess we must
take the other passages to be metaphorical, emphasising the alarming
and ominous nature of meteors without any particular regard to their
physical explanation.
Nicholas
John W. Kennedy
Because there is a difference between what everyone knew who was born
before Edison (and who was not actually feeble-minded) and what was
taught at the University level.
> > > So when he has the Welsh Captain in *Richard II* (2.4.2-4) say:
> > >
> > > 'Tis thought the King is dead. We will not stay.
> > > The bay trees in our country are all withered,
> > > And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.
> > >
> > > And in *Lucrece* (lines 1523-6):
> > >
> > > Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory
> > > Of rich-built Ilion, that the skies were sorry,
> > > And little stars shot from their fixed places
> > > When their glass fell wherein they viewed their faces.
> > >
> > > Just what do you think he means by the word 'fixed'?
> >
> > That, unlike the planets, they don't move relative to each other
> > (except, of course, that they do, but, as you observe, that was
> > discovered in 1718).
>
> The passage we are discussing (MoV 5.1.58-62) is:
>
> Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
> Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
> There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
> But in his motion like an angel sings,
> Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
>
> Peter Groves gave as an example of Shakespeare seeming "to take
> the Ptolemaic system for granted", which is how I see it too.
Yes, he took it for granted. But he was vague about the details.
> You, however, think (along with Asimov) that it demonstrates that
> he didn't have the Ptolemaic system clear in his head, since it
> appears to suggest that every single star has a sphere all of its
> own.
> The difficulty appears to arise from the ambiguity of the word
> 'orb'. Is he using it to refer to the objects themselves or to
> the spheres which were believed to hold them?
That, I concede, is a thoroughly valid objection. (The infamous line in
"Guy Mannering" about planets "rolling in their liquid orbits of light"
illustrates that genuinely respectable authors cannot be really trusted
even to make sense when it comes to astronomy.)
Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius Caesar
refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy knows (and
knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
John W. Kennedy
> Whether or not the metaphor is mixed is one question; whether the
> system Ptolemaic or Copernican another. I agree with you (and disagree
> with John Kennedy) that the phrasing of the passage is entirely
> consistent with the Ptolemaic system.
I'm not raising the issue of Copernicanism at all. The question is
whether he has an educated knowledge of the Ptolemaic system or whether
he "picked it up on the street".
Nicholas Whyte
<jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>Nicholas Whyte wrote:
>> Whether or not the metaphor is mixed is one question; whether the
>> system Ptolemaic or Copernican another. I agree with you (and disagree
>> with John Kennedy) that the phrasing of the passage is entirely
>> consistent with the Ptolemaic system.
>
>I'm not raising the issue of Copernicanism at all. The question is
>whether he has an educated knowledge of the Ptolemaic system or whether
>he "picked it up on the street".
Fair enough. In that case it's clear that his knowledge is
insufficiently detailed (confused use of "orbs", ambiguity of location
of meteors) to be described as expert.
Nicholas
Nicholas Whyte
<jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius Caesar
>refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy knows (and
>knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
Up to a point. That celestial longitude changed over time was known; I
suspect however that the implications for the pole star were not
widely appreciated even by experts.
In any case Shakespeare made no attempt to set "Julius Caesar" in an
identifiably Roman-era environment (see long discussion about clocks
last summer) so the point is moot.
Nicholas
John W. Kennedy
>
> On Wed, 06 Feb 2002 18:54:21 GMT, "John W. Kennedy"
> <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
> >Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius Caesar
> >refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy knows (and
> >knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
>
> Up to a point. That celestial longitude changed over time was known; I
> suspect however that the implications for the pole star were not
> widely appreciated even by experts.
I don't see how they could not be. Alpha Ursa Minor has a celestial
latitude of N66.
> In any case Shakespeare made no attempt to set "Julius Caesar" in an
> identifiably Roman-era environment (see long discussion about clocks
> last summer) so the point is moot.
He's inconsistent that way. I believe there was some sort of attempt at
identifiably "Roman" costume, and, while Christian oaths tend to creep
into the dialog, he normally remembers whether or not characters are
supposed to be Christians for serious purposes. And he generally
remembers not to say "England" in pre-Saxon Britain. On the other hand,
there's T&C's famous "Aristotle" boner.
Mark Steese
<jwk...@attglobal.net> that wrote news:3C61A670...@attglobal.net, on
the day of 06 Feb 2002:
> Nicholas Whyte wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 06 Feb 2002 18:54:21 GMT, "John W. Kennedy"
>> <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>> >Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius Caesar
>> >refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy knows (and
>> >knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
>>
>> Up to a point. That celestial longitude changed over time was known; I
>> suspect however that the implications for the pole star were not
>> widely appreciated even by experts.
>
> I don't see how they could not be. Alpha Ursa Minor has a celestial
> latitude of N66.
>
>> In any case Shakespeare made no attempt to set "Julius Caesar" in an
>> identifiably Roman-era environment (see long discussion about clocks
>> last summer) so the point is moot.
>
> He's inconsistent that way. I believe there was some sort of attempt at
> identifiably "Roman" costume
Not in *Julius Caesar*. The first scene features a cobbler who says "As
proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork."
In the second scene, Cassius instructs Brutus to "pluck Casca by the
sleeve"; Casca says "You pull'd me by the cloak; would you speak with me?",
refers to the "sweaty night-caps" of the the rabble, and says Caesar
"plucked me ope his doublet." We are pretty clearly in Elizabethan London
here, not pre-Christian Rome. "Many a time and oft/Have you climb'd up to
walls and battlements,/To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops..."
> and, while Christian oaths tend to creep into the dialog, he normally
> remembers whether or not characters are supposed to be Christians for
> serious purposes. And he generally remembers not to say "England" in
> pre-Saxon Britain. On the other hand, there's T&C's famous "Aristotle"
> boner.
And worse besides, from a modern point of view. I think it may fairly be
taken as given that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater-goers were not
expecting historical accuracy or naturalism. I believe the idea that a
play should create an illusion of reality arose no earlier than the 19th
century.
-Mark Steese
--
"I'm an impulse buyer. The primitive little *knot* at the top of my
*spine* says I'll have *all* this stuff." -Max, "Beast from the Cereal
Aisle"
John W. Kennedy
> And worse besides, from a modern point of view. I think it may fairly be
> taken as given that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater-goers were not
> expecting historical accuracy or naturalism. I believe the idea that a
> play should create an illusion of reality arose no earlier than the 19th
> century.
But even if the famous "Titus Andronicus" sketch isn't a sketch of
Shakespeare's play, it is a sketch of _a_ play. Which seems to indicate
that there was a certain degree of Romanitas expected.
Richie Miller
<41cc586764380fdb78e...@mygate.mailgate.org>
, bobgr...@nut-n-but.net says...
> 61st birthday of Bob Grumman
Jeez Bob I thought you were my age. Now I feel like comin'
back here and kickin' some ass. Not.
Happy Birthday and All the Best.
Richie
Nicholas Whyte
<jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>Nicholas Whyte wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 06 Feb 2002 18:54:21 GMT, "John W. Kennedy"
>> <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>> >Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius Caesar
>> >refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy knows (and
>> >knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
>>
>> Up to a point. That celestial longitude changed over time was known; I
>> suspect however that the implications for the pole star were not
>> widely appreciated even by experts.
>
>I don't see how they could not be. Alpha Ursa Minor has a celestial
>latitude of N66.
As with all neat ideas, someone has to sit down and think of it first.
Precession was originally identified as a phenomenon happening to
stars on or near the ecliptic and to the invisible equinoctial points.
Copernicus correctly identified the cause, ie the shift over time of
the earth's axis and nothing to do with the stars, but thought that
precession might actually be a back-and-forth movement rather than a
complete rotation (and he was in company with several Islamic
astronomers here). I don't know when someone first sat down and said,
gosh, precession means that the Pole Star was not always the Pole
Star, but I suspect it was in the last 250 years.
I have a copy of "The Orbs of Heaven" by Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, one
of the best-known popular astronomy books of the middle of last
century (my copy published 1868), in which he discusses precession
purely in terms of the shift of the equinoxes without mentioning the
Pole Star. My 1886 copy of "Brinkley's Astronomy" as revised by Stubbs
and Brünnow, an undergraduate level text, however does mention that
alpha Lyrae will be the Pole Star "about 10,000 years hence". So does
Sir Robert Ball in "The Story of the Heavens", another even more
popular astronomy book, my edition published in 1893.
Perhaps you can point me to an earlier text which considers the
consequences of precession on the Pole Star, but for me, Ormsby
McKnight Mitchel's silence on the matter is compelling evidence that
he hadn't ever heard about it.
>> In any case Shakespeare made no attempt to set "Julius Caesar" in an
>> identifiably Roman-era environment (see long discussion about clocks
>> last summer) so the point is moot.
>
>He's inconsistent that way. I believe there was some sort of attempt at
>identifiably "Roman" costume, and, while Christian oaths tend to creep
>into the dialog, he normally remembers whether or not characters are
>supposed to be Christians for serious purposes. And he generally
>remembers not to say "England" in pre-Saxon Britain. On the other hand,
>there's T&C's famous "Aristotle" boner.
If we are being specific about "Julius Caesar", we have not only the
clocks but also the hats and doublets to deal with! Perhaps "no
attempt" is too strong, but it certainly was not his top priority.
Nicholas
Nicholas Whyte
Whyte) wrote:
>I have a copy of "The Orbs of Heaven" by Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, one
>of the best-known popular astronomy books of the middle of last
>century (my copy published 1868), in which he discusses precession
Er, that should be, "the century before last" not "last century"!
The Orbs of Heaven was first published in 1851. As far as I can tell,
the linkage between precession and the pole star was first made by Sir
John Herschel in the context of the alignment of the Great Pyramid in
1836, but not really popularised until Charles Piazzi Smyth published
his book on the Pyramid in 1867. Piazzi Smyth had close personal links
with the Dublin social world of Stubbs, Brünnow and Ball. So that's
one possible route of transmission. (I am conscious that this
information will probably provoke lengthy posts on pyramidology from
Art Neuendorffer.)
In any case I think we agree that Shakespeare probably didn't know
that the Pole Star was not there at the time of Julius Caesar, and
that he certainly didn't care.
Nicholas
Email to this address will be treated as SPAM.
My real address is explorers (at) whyte (dot) com
Northern Ireland elections site: http://explorers.whyte.com/
Peter Farey
>
> Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius
> Caesar refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy
> knows (and knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
Where were you when Rob and I were discussing this last year?
He had said:
"There is no chance that an Elizabethan university cosmology
class wouldn't cover the topic of precession. Any student who
attended such a class should have learned that in Julius Caesar's
time, there was no pole star. (Polaris given its name much much
later.)"
to which I replied:
"Whether it was called Polaris or not, there certainly was a
'Northern Star' which was used for navigation long before
Caesar's time. The Greek explorer Pytheas, who had explored
Britain some 250 years earlier, for example, referred to it.
Where 'Caesar' was wrong, however, was in saying that it was
'true-fixed and resting', which Pytheas himself had shown to
be untrue. Me, I'd guess that Shakespeare would have known
this too, but was allowing himself a little poetic licence?"
and added to this a bit later:
"...it did occur to me shortly after writing this that there
could have been intentional irony here. Here is Caesar banging
on about how constant he is, and that no pleas are going to
change his mind when, less than a couple of hundred lines
earlier, the pleas of first Calpurnia and then Decius Brutus
had succeeded in doing exactly that."
Peter Farey
This is a fair point. But are you sure that the stars *were* seen
as spherical at that time? Do you have any evidence for this?
Bruno had followed Nicholas of Cusa in suggesting that the stars
were in fact suns, of course, and look where that got him!
> I sense also - perhaps I am wrong - that you and John Kennedy both
> expect Shakespeare's use of the word "stars" to be equivalent to our
> modern usage of great balls of burning gas. But Shakespeare and his
> contemporaries thought that all objects visible in the sky farther out
> than the atmosphere were stars. The category of "stars" then divides
> into "fixed stars", attached to the outermost sphere, and "planets",
> including sun and moon, which have a related but different motion.
Well I did actually say, and you must have missed it, that "both
Marlowe and Shakespeare ... occasionally use the word 'stars' to
include other celestial objects, and 'firmament' to mean the whole
sky".
> I am interested in Shakespeare's view of meteors. One *could* read the
> Richard II reference where "meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven"
> and particularly the I Henry IV reference to "meteors of a troubled
> heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred" as somehow in
> violation of the orthodoxy of the time, that meteors were atmospheric
> phenomena. However there are two other quite explicit references to
> meteors as atmospheric exhalations in I Henry IV, so I guess we must
> take the other passages to be metaphorical, emphasising the alarming
> and ominous nature of meteors without any particular regard to their
> physical explanation.
That's the way I would see it. Marlowe did much the same in fact.
Compare Tamburlaine's:
I will persist a terror to the world,
Making the meteors (that, like armed men,
Are seen to march upon the towers of heaven)
Run tilting round about the firmament,
And break their burning lances in the air,
(2 Tam 4.2)
with his:
So burn the turrets of this cursed town,
Flame to the highest region of the air,
And kindle heaps of exhalations,
That, being fiery meteors, may presage
Death and destruction to the inhabitants!
(2 Tam 3.2)
Nicholas Whyte
> John Kennedy wrote:
> >
> > Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius
> > Caesar refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy
> > knows (and knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
>
> Where were you when Rob and I were discussing this last year?
> He had said:
>
> "There is no chance that an Elizabethan university cosmology
> class wouldn't cover the topic of precession. Any student who
> attended such a class should have learned that in Julius Caesar's
> time, there was no pole star. (Polaris given its name much much
> later.)"
I half agree with his first point, that precession would certainly
have been mentioned in any cosmology class. (I half agree because I'm
not aware that universities taught cosmology at the time, and in any
case it was not clear whether precession went back-and-forth or the
whole way round.) I don't agree with his second point; as I said
elsewhere, it seems to me unlikely that the implications of precession
for the pole star were realised much before John Herschel wrote about
it in 1836.
> to which I replied:
>
> "Whether it was called Polaris or not, there certainly was a
> 'Northern Star' which was used for navigation long before
> Caesar's time. The Greek explorer Pytheas, who had explored
> Britain some 250 years earlier, for example, referred to it.
> Where 'Caesar' was wrong, however, was in saying that it was
> 'true-fixed and resting', which Pytheas himself had shown to
> be untrue. Me, I'd guess that Shakespeare would have known
> this too, but was allowing himself a little poetic licence?"
So, as with the clocks: Shakespeare probably did not even think about
whether or not things were different (be it striking clocks, or the
existence of the Pole Star) in classical times compared to now. In the
unlikely event that he did a little research he might well have come
across the account of Pytheas navigating using the "North Star" or
Vitruvius' descriptions of striking water-clocks, and taken this as
evidence that the pole-star and clocks were the same in antiquity as
in his own time. Exploring these matters bring us to interesting
issues in the history of science, but not much further into the
reasons why he wrote the plays the way he did!
Nicholas
Nicholas Whyte
"Suns" of course in the sense that they might be systems with their
own planets inhabited by beings which might (or worse, might not) have
souls, and raises all kinds of questions about the Creation which
people didn't want to think about.
Aristotle wrote that the stars were spherical: see parts 7-12 of
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html . I'm not aware
that anyone in the scientific tradition between him and the
Renaissance thought otherwise.
> > I sense also - perhaps I am wrong - that you and John Kennedy both
> > expect Shakespeare's use of the word "stars" to be equivalent to our
> > modern usage of great balls of burning gas. But Shakespeare and his
> > contemporaries thought that all objects visible in the sky farther out
> > than the atmosphere were stars. The category of "stars" then divides
> > into "fixed stars", attached to the outermost sphere, and "planets",
> > including sun and moon, which have a related but different motion.
>
> Well I did actually say, and you must have missed it, that "both
> Marlowe and Shakespeare ... occasionally use the word 'stars' to
> include other celestial objects, and 'firmament' to mean the whole
> sky".
I was pedantically objecting to your characterisation of this use as a
"mistake". It seems to me to be an unfair reading of our definitions
onto their worldview.
Agreed. Actually there it seems a bit clearer, if anything. While
meteors may be "seen" to march upon the towers of heaven, they
actually *are* exhalations!
Nicholas
Andrew Ness
"Mark Steese" <mst...@home.com> wrote in message
news:Xns91AD9D2DE675...@209.249.90.101...
Naturalism and realism in theatre certainly didn't arise until the 19th
century (after similar trends had begun in literature) and only with the
work of Ibsen, Chekov and Stanislavski do you start to see the 'fourth wall'
attempts to make theatre appear to be 'real'.
Fortunately, film soon came along and took over this, leaving theatre to get
back to more interesting areas.
NSY
John W. Kennedy
> This is a fair point. But are you sure that the stars *were* seen
> as spherical at that time? Do you have any evidence for this?
> Bruno had followed Nicholas of Cusa in suggesting that the stars
> were in fact suns, of course, and look where that got him!
Ptolemy says the heavenly bodies are spherical, in so many words.
John W. Kennedy
> As with all neat ideas, someone has to sit down and think of it first.
> Precession was originally identified as a phenomenon happening to
> stars on or near the ecliptic and to the invisible equinoctial points.
No, Ptolemy is quite clear that the entire sphere of the fixed stars
partakes of precession as a unit. He sees it as an additional rotation
(with a period he estimates at 36,000 years) of that sphere about an
axis at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic.
> Perhaps you can point me to an earlier text which considers the
> consequences of precession on the Pole Star, but for me, Ormsby
> McKnight Mitchel's silence on the matter is compelling evidence that
> he hadn't ever heard about it.
No-one accustomed to thinking in terms of spherical geometry could
possibly be unaware of it.
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
On 7 Feb 2002, Nicholas Whyte wrote:
> "Peter Farey" <f...@rey.prestel.co.uk> wrote in message news:<a3tm02$cfi$1...@phys-ma.sol.co.uk>...
> > John Kennedy wrote:
> > >
> > > Of course, there are other points. For example, he makes Julius
> > > Caesar refer to the North Star, which anyone trained in astronomy
> > > knows (and knew) did not exist in Caesar's time.
> >
> > Where were you when Rob and I were discussing this last year?
> > He had said:
> >
> > "There is no chance that an Elizabethan university cosmology
> > class wouldn't cover the topic of precession. Any student who
> > attended such a class should have learned that in Julius Caesar's
> > time, there was no pole star. (Polaris given its name much much
> > later.)"
>
> I half agree with his first point, that precession would certainly
> have been mentioned in any cosmology class. (I half agree because I'm
> not aware that universities taught cosmology at the time, and in any
> case it was not clear whether precession went back-and-forth or the
> whole way round.)
Looking at what Bartleby.com has to say on the subject of 16th
century English schools:
"Elizabeth's advisers found little to alter in them, and they stood till
the Laudian era. Philosophy - in humanist fashion - was held specifically
to include politics, ethics and physica: Plato and Pliny were prescribed
alongside of Aristotle. Dialectic covered not merely the text of
Aristotle, but, also, that of Hermogenes and of Quintilian -- implying
that interrelation of logic and rhetoric which was the very core of humanist
doctrine. Mathematics included cosmography; Euclid, Strabo, Pomponius Mela
and Cardan were the authorities. The Greek professor had to interpret
Homer, Euripides, Demosthenes and "Socrates." To civil law, to be read,
like medicine, in the original texts, was added a study of "the
Ecclesiastic Laws of this Kingdom." For undergraduates, the first year
course was mainly in mathematics (Elizabethan statutes substituted
rhetoric); the second year in logic; the third in rhetoric and philosophy.
The master's degree required three years' residence, with reading in
Greek, philosophy, geometry and astronomy."
> I don't agree with his second point; as I said
> elsewhere, it seems to me unlikely that the implications of precession
> for the pole star were realised much before John Herschel wrote about
> it in 1836.
Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes in 130 BC and that
information was never lost. I don't know of anyone who put forward the
proposition that instead of going the whole way around it went
back-and-forth. (By the 16th century astronomers would have known that
precession had continued in one direction without reversal for nearly two
millenia, so I doubt back-and-forth would have been considered likely.)
Personally, I think a man would have to be pretty stupid to know about the
precession of the equinoxes and not understand the implications concerning
the pole star.
FWIW, in the early Ptolemaic system, I believe the eighth sphere was
supposed to wobble. Later astronomers decided there must be a ninth
sphere responsible for the precession. (Frequently referred to as the
Crystalline sphere.)
<snip>
Rob
John W. Kennedy
> I half agree with his first point, that precession would certainly
> have been mentioned in any cosmology class.
It is the main subject of Book VII of the Almagest.
> So, as with the clocks: Shakespeare probably did not even think about
> whether or not things were different (be it striking clocks, or the
> existence of the Pole Star) in classical times compared to now. In the
> unlikely event that he did a little research he might well have come
> across the account of Pytheas navigating using the "North Star" or
> Vitruvius' descriptions of striking water-clocks, and taken this as
> evidence that the pole-star and clocks were the same in antiquity as
> in his own time. Exploring these matters bring us to interesting
> issues in the history of science, but not much further into the
> reasons why he wrote the plays the way he did!
Pytheas, in fact, observes that the "North Star" of his day did not
coincide with the celestial pole.
John W. Kennedy
> Naturalism and realism in theatre certainly didn't arise until the 19th
> century (after similar trends had begun in literature) and only with the
> work of Ibsen, Chekov and Stanislavski do you start to see the 'fourth wall'
> attempts to make theatre appear to be 'real'.
> Fortunately, film soon came along and took over this, leaving theatre to get
> back to more interesting areas.
Actually, just about every change in theatrical style before WW1 or so
was hailed as "realism". The last generation's "realism" was always the
next's "artificiality" (in the modern, dyslogistic sense of the word, of
course).
Bob Grumman
> Jeez Bob I thought you were my age.
Thanks, Richie. Glad to hear a bit of immaturity
still shows through!
> Now I feel like comin'
> back here and kickin' some ass. Not.
>
> Happy Birthday and All the Best.
Thanks, again. Nice that sumbody is remembering wot
this thread's supposed to be about!
--Bob G.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Neuendorffer
>
> > Jeez Bob I thought you were my age.
Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> Thanks, Richie. Glad to hear a bit of immaturity
> still shows through!
The Goon Squad has the maturity level of a 14/15-year-old boy and is
falling all over itself with laughter at its success in defending the
Stratford case on HLAS.
> Richie Miller:
>
> > Now I feel like comin'
"Shakespeare replied that William the Conqueror came before Richard the
Third,"
Art N.
Greg Reynolds
Neuendorffer wrote:
> > Richie Miller:
> >
> > > Jeez Bob I thought you were my age.
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > Thanks, Richie. Glad to hear a bit of immaturity
> > still shows through!
>
> The Goon Squad has the maturity level of a 14/15-year-old boy and is
> falling all over itself with laughter at its success in defending the
> Stratford case on HLAS.
But, Art, a 14/15-year-old is turning 1 in 25 days.
Way too EARLy for Orazio.
> > Richie Miller:
> >
> > > Now I feel like comin'
>
> "Shakespeare replied that William the Conqueror came
> before Richard the Third,"
>
> Art N.
Greg Reynolds
Of this discourse we more will hear anon.
AMND IV i
Roundtable
news:3C6323A7...@erols.com...
>
> The Goon Squad has the maturity level of a 14/15-year-old boy and is
> falling all over itself with laughter at its success in defending the
> Stratford case on HLAS.
You are unfair! I'm pushing forty but my mental age and maturity
level is definitely at least 16. Maybe 18 on a good day.
You know that after 18 we don't grow up, we just grow older. I'm one
of those wrinkled teenagers that likes to go disco-dancing to house
and trance music.
Well, one has to be versatile, after all. One can't think about
Shakespeare and the anti-Strats ALL the time!
Roundtable
Geralyn Horton
>
> Not in *Julius Caesar*. The first scene features a cobbler
I think people conceded too easily, Mark. None of these
details would yank the historically-minded out of the
narrative, and the analogies -- I see them as analogies, as
"clock" is -- pull the portion of the populace that doesn't
know Rome from ravioli into it. The Romans had craftsmen
who made sandals and boots and were therefore like cobblers;
they wore something like cloaks and doublets-- at least they
were more like cloaks and doublets than like anything worn
today-- and all these terms imply relationships to the
mind's ear. If by some miracle S had a wardrobe of authentic
Roman dress, and a mountain of Roman props, how could he use
these unfamiliar objects and/or their names to communicate
meaning? "Realism" would result in a stage world stripped
of common reference points and key emotions like that evoked
by sleeve-plucking. Even without sleeves, surely the Romans
plucked.
In the second scene, Cassius instructs Brutus to "pluck
Casca by the
> sleeve";
Geralyn Horton
http://www.stagepage.org
g.l.h...@mindspring.com
Mark Steese
<g.l.h...@mindspring.com> that wrote
news:3C64AF28...@mindspring.com, on the day of 08 Feb 2002:
> Mark Steese wrote:
>
>> Not in *Julius Caesar*. The first scene features a cobbler
>
> I think people conceded too easily, Mark. None of these details would
> yank the historically-minded out of the narrative, and the analogies -- I
> see them as analogies, as "clock" is -- pull the portion of the populace
> that doesn't know Rome from ravioli into it. The Romans had craftsmen
> who made sandals and boots and were therefore like cobblers;
That doesn't quite jibe with the scene itself. The first commoner
questioned by Flavius and Marullus is a carpenter; Marullus says "Where is
thy leather apron, and thy rule?" The cobbler says "Truly, sir, all that I
live by is with the awl: I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor women's
matters, but with awl. I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they
are in great danger, I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon
neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork." Whereupon Flavius asks "But
wherefore art not in thy shop today?"
If I went to a production of *Julius Caesar* expecting historical
verisimilitude, this would indeed yank me out of the narrative, as would
Marullus's reference to people climbing "up to walls and battlements,/To
towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops." But what would the groundlings
make of Marullus's reference to Caesar's and Pompey's chariots, the banks
of Tiber, and the feast of Lupercal? Why draw your audience in only to
throw them out a few lines later?
I see no grounds for assuming that Shakespeare knew deliberately inserted
anachronistic details to make the play more appealing to the ignorant.
That strikes me as much less plausible than assuming that neither
Shakespeare nor his audience expected a play to present an accurate
recreation of history. Thus Shakespeare felt free to put turkeys in *Henry
IV*, cannon in *King John*, spectacles in *King Lear*, etc.
It also seems to me that Shakespeare was not interested in drawing the
audience into the narrative. My guess is that he was interested in
impressing them with magnificent speeches, making them laugh with low jokes
and topical references, scaring them with talk of graves yawning and
yielding up their dead -- in short, provoking a reaction. The story was
just a framework on which he could hang his beautiful verbal creations.
Nicholas Whyte
> On 7 Feb 2002, Nicholas Whyte wrote:
>
> > it seems to me unlikely that the implications of precession
> > for the pole star were realised much before John Herschel wrote about
> > it in 1836.
>
> Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes in 130 BC and that
> information was never lost. I don't know of anyone who put forward the
> proposition that instead of going the whole way around it went
> back-and-forth. (By the 16th century astronomers would have known that
> precession had continued in one direction without reversal for nearly two
> millenia, so I doubt back-and-forth would have been considered likely.)
Right. I am going to "brandish my academic credentials" here. I
actually translated a medieval astronomical/astrological instruction
manual for my M.Phil. dissertation, so I suspect that I have read more
about the history of astronomy than you have.
Most histories of astronomy blithely state that "Hipparchus discovered
precession" as if this means that he worked out the complete rotation
of the celestial coordinate system in a 26,000 year period. He did
not, of course. We cannot be completely sure what he did write,
because we have onlmy Ptolemy's word for it. This is Noel Swerdlow's
summary of Chapter 7 of the Almagest:
"[Hipparchus] offered various hypotheses, all quite tentative. He
considered the possibility that only zodiacal stars, or perhaps bright
zodiacal stars like Spica, move with respect to the equinoxes (as
though they were very slow, distant planets). Ptolemy calls this
Hipparchus's "first hypothesis." He also considered the possibility
that the fixed stars were not fixed at all, but had independent
motions, and he left many descriptions of stellar alignments that
could later be checked to see if any changes had occurred. Ptolemy
used them to show that none could be detected. Hipparchus may also
have proposed that the sphere of the fixed stars might oscillate back
and forth over a short arc of eight degrees, a theory doubtless
related to the Babylonian location of the equinoxes at the eighth
degree of Aries and Libra. This is the so-called "trepidation of the
equinoxes" described by Theon of Alexandria (late 4th cent.) in his
shorter commentary on Ptolemy's Handy Tables. Finally, one of his
suggestions was a motion of the sphere of the fixed stars through not
less than one degree per century with respect to the equinoxes-- the
very motion later confirmed by Ptolemy; but it is evident from
Ptolemy's account that this too was highly tentative, something that
"Hipparchus too seems to have suspected" in his book On the Length of
the Year."
The idea that the motion of the equinoxes might be back-and-forth was
quite widespread among pre-Copernican writers. Modern astronomers
prefer to forget this which is why I am not surprised that you are not
aware of it. The most famous writer to espouse this idea was, oddly
enough, Copernicus.
My own research on the late twelfth-century astronomer/astrologer
Roger of Hereford led me to conclude that he was utterly confused
about the problem, and he was certainly the best informed astronomical
writer in the country at the time. If you would like to read my
dissertation I will happily send it to you. I think it is probably
going a bit far to post extracts tot he newsgroup (unless specifically
requested to do so).
> Personally, I think a man would have to be pretty stupid to know about the
> precession of the equinoxes and not understand the implications concerning
> the pole star.
Well, the concept of precession was not really clear until well after
Shakespeare had died. And as I said before, someone always has to
think of these things, however simple they may appear in hindsight. If
you can find a popular astronomy book published before 1850 which
discusses the motion of the pole star in those terms, I'll admit I was
wrong. But I'd be willing to bet, oh, $10 in Amazon vouchers that you
can't.
Nicholas
Paul Crowley
> Xr...@pXcr8.pXcr.com wrote
> > Personally, I think a man would have to be pretty stupid to know about the
> > precession of the equinoxes and not understand the implications concerning
> > the pole star.
>
> Well, the concept of precession was not really clear until well after
> Shakespeare had died. And as I said before, someone always has to
> think of these things, however simple they may appear in hindsight. If
> you can find a popular astronomy book published before 1850 which
> discusses the motion of the pole star in those terms, I'll admit I was
> wrong. But I'd be willing to bet, oh, $10 in Amazon vouchers that you
> can't.
From A.L. Rouse "The Elizabethan Renaissance - The Cultural
Achievement" page 227 -- about the work of Thomas Hariot.
"The chronicle he wrote of the crucial early voyages of 1584—7 has
vanished. So has the Arcticon, the manual of navigation he wrote for
instruction for Ralegh’s voyages. He applied himself to constant and
continuous observation, and his mathematical knowledge to correct
conclusions. He compiled the first table of amplitudes for sea, i.e. of
the angle wide of due east or due west at which the sun rises or sets,
given its height and declination, calculated by spherical trigonometry.
He made continuous observations on the Pole Star, concluding that
‘owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the figure [polar distance]
altered by about 24’ in a century.’ He prepared correction tables for
every tenth degree of latitude, to obtain the true height of the Pole
Star, from different observation points. "
(Rouse quotes E.G.R. Taylor "The Haven Finding Art" page 219 ff
as his source.)
The correct figure for the movement of the Pole Star
was about 34' per century (around 1580) -- as far as
I can work out. So the 24' above could be a misprint,
or Hariot could have got it wrong.
This is not exactly what you asked for, of course, but
it does indicate the state of astronomical knowledge
since the 1580s. Such information was of vital
importance to navigators, and would have appeared,
and been incorporated into tables for navigation,
from then on.
Paul.
--
Email: pebj...@ubgznvy.pbz (apply ROT13)
Nicholas Whyte
It's pretty close to what I asked for, I must admit. I am happy to
concede that the motion of the pole star as a result of precession was
known to navigators and to anyone who had cause to look into it at
least as early as 1584. I'm still inclined to believe that Sir John
Herschel was among the first to bring it to the attention of the wider
public (if only because O.M. Mitchell doesn't mention it) but that's
pretty much a secondary issue. It would be interesting to know when
this worked its way into the university curriculum - not as early as
1584, anyway.
Nicholas