ANTONIO | 2006-03-15
On my historical stuff, Antonio writes:
Hey Bob, give my countrymen a break. We did build that famous tower that looks like its about to fall over.
REPLY:
*** Italy did a lot. It is NOT in the Middle East.
*** It's too bad your folks didn't dig caves instead of build towers.
*** A leaning tower is interesting, but a leaning cave would have been spectacular!
As for Columbus, I think his life shows that in the grand scheme of things sheer boldness goes farther than mere intellectual brilliance. He died thinking he landed on the east coast of India. But no Columbus- no Plymouth Rock.
REPLY:
*** Plymouth Rock was where the Pilgrims landed because they couldn't get to Virginia. They landed in November of 1620. If we had had better immigration laws, there would have been no Yankees.
*** By 1619 Jamestown had been settled twelve years. The Virginia Legislature, then the House of Burgesses, sat for the first time in 1619.
*** My own ancestor was the son of a Cambridge professor. He wrote the first book in English from America, which inculded quotations in Latin, Greel and Heberew and is on the web.
*** He converted Pocahontas and baptized her, which came in handy for John Smith.
*** And he DIED in Virginia.
*** All this happened BEFORE the Pilgrims first settled America.
*** I have known Harvard grads who did not know that.
*** But that is no excuse for a Bob's Blogger to be as ignorant as a professional historian.
Incidentally, Galen was a Greek hired to keep the Emperor and his family healthy.
*** He probably actually wrote in Greek, too. It was the upper class language in Rome.
*** As you know, the Latin Bible is called the Vulgate, related to "vulgar." It is a translation from the Greek -- not the Hebrew -- in which Hellenic Jews, before and after they became the Christian Church -- wrote.
Comment by Antonio Fini