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Recent News... Just for Pope Gregory... |
2003-08-21 - 7:52 p.m. The Company of the Pelican The Northeast may be trembling under the threat of rolling blackouts, but at my desk I�m having my own power distribution problems. First, the systems team tasks me to deliver a PCB (printed circuit board) that can add many extra needed switches because a spacecraft, just like your home, never has enough outlets. Then, they decide no, we�re having one team design an LVPC (points for translating that acronym yourself) and a switch card and all electronic box designers will get a set of this power conditioning/switching cards. Groovy. Then, the propulsion system (thanks to me opening my mouth and pointing out how they could open their design trade space) gets to happily change their propellant to something that (skipping mumbo jumbo here) requires even more power from my team�s electronics interface. Makes you regret being helpful. Can my electronics box provide the power distribution needed? I don�t know cause �they� have decided to change the LVPC/Switch card specs and not tell me what the new services are rated for. At least that�s easy. We�ll get that all fixed next week when we catch up with each other. But now the propulsion guys have gone hypergolic (look it up yourself) and want to add circuits to energize various explosive devices that need triple redundant safe and arm circuit. My electronics designers are in revolt, don�t even get me started on cPCI master, backplane and target specs cause my whiteboard is already full enough of stuff I barely understand. Those last three paragraphs had no purpose except to make my husband - a long suffering electrical engineer who had to tutor his wife through �Electrical Engineerings dumbed down for non-believer aerospace engineering scum� - laugh like a cat. Right. I was talking about books found at Pennsic. I ran across a new series of E.E.T.S. books � Early English Text Society published by Oxford University Press. This series included a reprint of William Caxton�s 1484 translation of Raymond Llull�s �Book of the Ordre of Chivalry.� So I now have that in Middle English as well as the recent translation by Brian Price you�ve all listened to me babble about before. I don�t think I�m going for the original Catalan, cause Llullism is interesting enough in translation. That and I can�t pretend to speak any form of Spanish. Took a risk on another EETS reprint of William Caxton�s called the �Book of the Knight of the Tower,� but passed on the Babes books cause it was so expensive. We�ll see how this publication series pans out. My favorite buy was The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe 1325-1520, which I give a thumbs up after only two chapters cause it got kudos from Maurice Keen (opened this chivalric field of study in the 80s) and because the Appendix describes the Order of the Pelican. No, seriously. The Company or Order of St. George with the Pelican was founded by Ludwig IV �the Good� von Wittelbach, Duke of Upper Bavaria and Elector-Count Palatine of Franconia � �to the praise and honour of Almighty God, of Mary Queen of Heaven, and the holy knight George, and also to the greater good and honour of us, our principality, nobility and knightage.� The order lasted five short years (1444-14449), until it�s founder�s death, and the scanty information is mostly from the statues of the order. The insignia of the Company was a collar of clasped hands with a pendant jewel of a Pelican in it�s piety. Why a Pelican? It�s really not clear. Certainly didn�t have anything to do with the patron St. George. (Hundreds of saints and all the monarchial chivalric orders, from the Garter to the Golden Fleece, seem to pick George. Love me, hug me, call me George.) The Company was limited to thirty members of the order, selected only by the Prince-Elector and head of the order � but there was a fine amount of wiggle room in the statues where he could appoint honorary members, with less privileges and less obligations. Very useful for foreign diplomacy, picking up members from handy and powerful countries like France and England. The membership was actually in three classes: counts and barons; knights; and noble squires. Including undubbed squires continues the Germanic states trend of being less concerned with knightly status and more concerned with noble ancestory and knightly capability, with an unusual emphasis on sportive prowess. The statues require Order members on the opposite side of a conflict to withdraw from the field; there are special previsions for arbitration of disputes amongst the companions (except when it involved real estate � then it went to the courts); and (how like SCAdian life is this?) companions were required to maintain absolute silence concerning order business. Companions would gather each year on St. George�s Eve to hear a corporate (someone more Catholic than me needs to explain this term) mass sung in the Order chapel. The saint�s day was spent attended masses honoring members who had died in the previous year. They also had an officer who collected fines for skipping meetings. (Glad we don�t do that.) The only way out of the Order was to resign with the permission of the Prince-Elector, and that was only allowed if you were joining a religious order. Nothing more is really known about the Company of the Pelican. There are the surviving statues and three treaties from the founding year, 1444, that mention the Order. From this dearth of documentation, researchers infer that the Order dissolved upon Ludwig�s death in 1449 How *does* a cat laugh? asks Roland. It's sort of a superior snicker and murph noise made before the cat sashays away, assured of feline superiority. � � � 
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