Today, 448 years ago, Mrs Galilei gave birth to a healthy bouncing baby boy. She and Mr Galilei spent hours thinking of what to call him - Rainbow, Moon Unit, Zabaglione - but in the end plumped for something nearer to home and called him Galileo. How's that for the power of the imagination?
Incidentally, he was born in 1564, the same year as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, but they never met Spooky, isn't it?
In other news ...
Somebody else born today (in 1748 in fact) was Jeremy Bentham, the radical philosopher who gave the world Utilitarianism. This basically means the greatest happiness of the greatest number when applied to politics, although the phrase itself was Joseph Priestley's and Bentham pinched it. He invented a sort of clapometer to measure happiness - the Felicifi Calculus - but since he didn't know about, for example, sadism or masochism, his results were always going to be flawed.
He also founded University College London - the working man's college - and in his will insisted he be able to continue to watch over the students. I'm not sure if he's still there, but I remember seeing the great man in a glass case at the end of the main corridor. He's sitting on a chair with his thigh bones poking out of his worn breeches. His head is a wax copy, but the real one is in the hat box between his feet. The cleaners of course will tell you that every night, he gets up and has a stroll around the old place.
Yeah, as Nine Pee Pee would have it, right.
