15th February

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.

4th January

Back to school - another day, another dollar. Wednesdays aren't too bad as I have no contact whatsoever with the class from hell, Nine Zed Are, so this is as good a start as can be wished. So, in other times, what happened on this day?

I've always found it rather odd that Isaac Newton, who was born on this day 369 years ago, should be regarded as one of the most brilliant minds in history. All right, he was passably competent at mathematics and gravitational apples, but his chemistry was far below that of the average Year 7 kid. He believed in elixirs of life, alchemists' stones and long-leggity beasties. His Principia Mathematica has been hailed as one of the Most Important Books of All Time - which is equally odd because it was written in Latin and only about six people in Britain at the time could read it.
Today, nobody can.
P.S, (That's Post Scriptum to you) this was also the day another great scientist, Galileo Galilei died. But curiously, he and Newton never met.

In other news, Jakob Grimm, one of the famous Brothers, was born in 1785. The importance of these guys is that their collection of folk tales told it like it was - a nasty world of rape, murder and terrifying demons. This is what kids want to read about - not the schmaltzy stuff of Mother Goose and Walt Disney.