Happy Holidays!

 

 

Santa already left me one stocking-stuffer:

Little cheater bottle, probably 8 oz.

Friday night I went to the ER with my bronchitis. They put me in the UAB hospital until Sunday and made it a lot better. They did a pretty thorough workup on my old bones, and said aside from minor problems, I seemed to be okay. I thought, if I'm in such good shape, why the ____ do I feel so lousy.  One of the best things to come out of the episode, was that they prescribed me some nicotine patches, and I haven't smoked any since Friday. No major craving, just a sort of lonesome feeling. Awkward. Don't know what to do with my hands.

One of the doctors remarked upon my scoliosis. No one else has seemed to notice it since my college PE instructor noticed it, and a doctor in Huntsville diagnosed it. My right-side bones are bigger than the left side, which makes me walk crooked. When I walk. But you don't have to call me Richard.

Jed came over Saturday and stayed until yesterday. If he hadn't, I might not have made it through. He brought me a stack of the best Nero Wolfe books, and I'm reading the very best one, The Black Mountain.

The Last Plantagenet King

Last night I watched PBS's Secrets of the Dead program about the exhumation of Richard III's skeleton. The curvature (scoliosis) of his spine is almost exactly duplicated in the body of a modern young Englishman named Dominic who participates in reenactments of the battle of Bosworth Field.

Shakespeare's and others' portrayal of Richard as a hunchbacked, murdering monster was almost certainly born of propaganda by the Tudors, 15th-century usurpers of the British throne. Contemporary accounts of Richard's reign show him as a good king and brave soldier. This PBS program is worth watching, if they show it again.

I had two questions: 1) How did they know it was Richard? and 2) Where exactly is Bosworth? Contemporary accounts said that he was buried at a certain friary, and that's where the bones were found. And I found Bosworth on a Google map.

Josephine Tey's historic novel, Daughter of Time, debunks the Richard-as-monster myth, and is a very good read.

*

The LAC poetry group meets tomorrow night, and I'll probably read my Wizard poem.