It was a busy day in the past, was 3rd January. Martin Luther (who was absolutely no relation to the black Civil Rights leader of nearly the same name, as I keep telling Ten Bee Four) really blew it 591 years ago today when the Pope finally lost patience and excommunicated him. In a long story cut short, Luther was a Dominican monk, a guy on the inside who knew exactly how corrupt the Catholic church was. Today, he would set up his blog and his twitter and get himself on Andrew Marr's Sunday TV chat show and tell us all about it. Then, he nailed his 95 theses (bullet points) to the door of Wittenburg cathedral because anybody who was anybody passed that way.
Astonishingly, having implied the Catholic church was a waste of time and that priests were pointless, he got off Scot (or rather, German) free and spent the rest of his life throwing ink-pots at the Devil and suffering appallingly from constipation.
And serve him right.
In other news ... Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC. I used to think he was ancient Rome's greatest orator. Then I read a book on Cleopatra and found that he whinged about her because she forgot to lend him a book. Bearing in mind she had the biggest library in the world (at Alexandria) and was kept kind of busy ruling a vast empire and keeping the avaricious, thuggish Romans at bay, it's hardly surprising that she overlooked the loan of a book. Cicero didn't see it that way and said nasty things about her in letters to friends.
Eventually, somebody cut his head off and sent it as a present to Marc Antony's wife (not Cleopatra - the other one). Who wouldn't be delighted to receive a present like that: she stuck a hat pin in the dead orator's tongue, making her point.
