Lick my...history or Why I love history.

I have a love of eccentric history because it usually is better and more unique than any fiction out there.  I have not had many converts that have learned to love history as I do but here is just a sample of what they/you are missing.

From Wired Magazine...  Wired Link

FYI one of the Mozart Cannons is Leck mich im Arsch and Difficile lectu

Prototype: Gotz of the Iron Hand—Fierce Knight, Fearsome Prosthetic

• By Chris Baker  
• June 28, 2011  |  
• 12:00 pm  |  
• Wired July 2011

Photo: Gemeinde Jagsthausen

The Six Million Dollar Man, Darth Vader, Robocop—we have a passion for badasses who restore their mortal bodies with machinery. One of the earliest and most badassy cyborg action heroes was born 500 years ago in Württemberg, Germany. Gottfried “Götz” von Berlichingen grew up to become a knight of the Holy Roman Empire who robbed nobles and merchants in his free time. In 1504, he was struck by a cannonball during the Siege of Landshut. The impact ripped off his right hand and blew shrapnel from his sword and armor clean through his arm. It’s a miracle he survived. A normal man would’ve retired to a farmhouse on the Danube. Not Götz. He had an armorer fashion an iron limb with articulated fingers controlled by gears inside the prosthetic. With the appendage, he was able to grip anything from a sword to a quill pen. The handicapable warrior went on to cut an unholy swath across the continent for another 40 years, pillaging, murdering, and basically flipping the metal bird to authority. Götz became a Robin Hood-like figure in Germany, and his pioneering prosthetic was a symbol of the nation’s mechanical ingenuity. Goethe wrote a play about his exploits, and his famous battle cry, “Leck mich im Arsch!” (Lick my ass!), was celebrated by Mozart in not one but two canons. (True fact, look it up.)

PS:Wired magazine a great magazine...was reading it in the wire room between calls.

Dragon software, a new experience posting by my voice.

I am dyslexic.  While this is not prevented me from going to Baylor University or getting my Masters from the Adler school of professional psychology, it has made school and homework a very time-consuming and laborious undertaking. As time has gone by I have found the effects of this dyslexia receding to the point where only when I'm extremely tired or stressed or emotional do they manifest themselves.

Fortunately for my younger daughter she is not dyslexic but for my son he is highly dyslexic. When we had him formally evaluated the psychologist who perform the evaluation told us that he was a nine point 9/10 in severity of the effect. His struggle in school and with the schoolwork have long reminded me of all the long nights that I spent working long past any of my classmates. So as an attempt to aid the learning process for him we picked up Dragon software, a voice to text recognition program. That is what I'm using to blog right now.

What I hadn't realized that after spending so much time trying to adapt myself to the printed word that I am finding it difficult to merely speak into the computer and formulate a coherent thought and get it into text.  Yet seeing that my words are being translated effortlessly into the computer and spelled correctly, the time-saving is immense.

When I left college and began working in the law enforcement field I had to step back into a lesser technology than what I had been used to. In that I've gone from computers that spell checked, grammar checked and instantly formatted my papers correctly,to being forced to take pen to paper in hand write everything that I observed into a report. I lived for the first 10 years of my career with a Franklin pocket speller and a bottle of white out.  If only I had had this software now, back then, I can even imagine how much I've could've gotten done that was wasted on trying to get everything onto the written page that would not make me ridiculed in the courtroom.

I have to say I am envious of my son and all the time he is going to save learning instead of writing. I know that I developed a lot of my personal discipline for the written word through the hours and hours and hours of attempting to figure out how to put it down on paper in such a way that it made sense to another reader but what could've been my knowledge base if I have been freed from that labor.

I will never know but the neat thing is my son will. To quote the song, "the future's so bright I have to wear shades."