(Roughly) Daily

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ– the Knights Templar– has filed a lawsuit in Spain demanding that Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain… 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by the Pope Clement V and Philip IV of France.

If the Holy See doesn’t comply, the warrior knights (renowned for liberating the Holy Land, protecting the Holy Grail, and animating the career of Dan Brown) will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish courts.

For more, click here.

As we do our best to de-code, we might wish a stealthy happy birthday to Margaretha Geertruida “Grietje” Zelle– better known by her stage name, Mata Hari– a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was executed by firing squad for espionage during World War I.  While she is remembered as a femme fatale and spy, she said of herself, “Harlot, yes, but traitress, never!”

Mata Hari

Paypal founder Elon Musk has reinvested some of his bounty in ventures to do with getting places.  He’s one of the forces behind Tesla, the sexy electric sports car start-up, and is the head of Space X, a private company that aims to “reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten.”

As readers may have seen, Space X recently suffered its third failed launch of its Falcon I spacecraft.  The flight was carrying three small satellites belonging to NASA and the DoD. Perhaps less seriously, but probably more noteworthy, the ashes of over 200 people were also on board, including a pair of well known astronauts, one real, one fictional– Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury 7, and  Star Trek’s James “Scotty” Doohan.

Source:  AP

As one observer noted, “totally wouldn’t have happened if Scotty was the engineer.”

As we reconsider our final resting places, we might compose a birthday rhyme for Alfred, Lord Tennyson, English poet laureate, and “the sage of Victorian poets,” who was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire on this date in 1809.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

-Locksley Hall (1842)

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

Brian May, in the day…

Longtime readers who  may recall that Brian May, guitarist for Queen since its formation (30 years ago), submitted his thesis for a Ph.D. in astrophysics will be delighted to know that the thesis has been published. One can now freely obtain and read May’s account of the population of tiny asteroids and space dust that cause the Zodiacal light.

The book, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008), is available at Amazon and other fine purveyors of print for $71.96.

May, who was awarded his Ph.D.last summer, and accepted a position as chancellor at a British university in November.  Happily, the position of Chancellor at a British university is largely honorary and mildly ceremonial…  May will be touring with Queen (Paul Rodgers having stepped in for the late Freddie Mercury) much of 2008-9…  the tour is dubbed, only too appropriately, “The Rock the Cosmos Tour.”

Brian May in robes

As we listen to the music of the spheres, we might recall that it was on this date in 1861 that the U.S. government enacted the first “Income Tax” as part of the Revenue Act of 1861. The tax, which was levied on incomes over $800, was aimed at helping fund the Civil War. But the measure was so unpopular that it was short-lived– the government rescinded it in 1872… it didn’t reappear for decades.

Readers may have relied, as your correspondent did, on the discerning commentary and trenchant criticism of the team behind (and for that matter, in front of) Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cinematic showcase that ran from 1988 through 1995 first on The Comedy Network (now Comedy Central), then The Sc-Fi Network.  Its creators have been for the most part wandering in the limbo of development deals since…

But just last week they unveiled the “proof of concept” of a new project, JollyFilter, which is, in keeping with the responsible repurposing ethic of our time, devoted to revitalizing old films…  and which you can see here.

As we consider our own reclamation opportunities, we might pen a birthday verse to Percy Bysshe Shelley, the lyric poet who was one of the leaders of the English Romantic movement… and who had a confident (if not to say exalted) sense of his role in society:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Defiant Dog

As we ponder the power of non-violent resistance, we might recall that it was on this date in 1900 that Harvey Firestone founded the eponymously-named Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio.  Though arch-rival Goodyear has stolen the march (opening for business in 1898), and had nabbed early contracts with Henry Ford, Firestone parlayed its mass-production techniques to become (in 1906) the specified tire for the Model T.

The first Firestone store