June 26, 2007: Pied Piper Day

On this day in 1284 A.D. one hundred and thirty children born in the city of Hameln, Germany were lead out of the town by a piper dressed in fancy colours and were never seen again. Seven hundred and twenty three years later we are still wondering what happened to the children.

Anno 1284 am dage Johannis et Pauli war der 26. junii Dorch einen piper mit allerlei farve bekledet gewesen XXX kinder verledet binnen Hamelen gebo[re]n to calvarie bi den koppen verloren.

The University of Pittsburgh maintains a page with literary tellings of related tales from nearby villages. The Pied Piper was known as an historical event until the Brothers Grimm made the tale famous in the early nineteenth century. Later Robert Browning made the event even more famous in his poem “Pied Piper of Hamelin“.

In my “Forgotten English” calendar for today is the word chimble. It is roughly “to break into small pieces as would a mouse.” Another form of the same word was chibble. Small bits could be known as chimbling or chibbling. It is obvious that this is the root or shares a root with the modern work kibble.

This morning I discovered that I didn’t know my own strength when while attempting to separate a yogurt from the group in the fridge I accidentally tore the entire container of yogurt in half. What a mess that was. Dannon definitely messed up and failed to perforate the top of the yogurt containers making them nearly impossible to separate. I was unable to separate the destroyed yogurt container bits from its neighbouring containers even after the disaster.

Yesterday I started reading the book Self Service Linux: Mastering the Art of Problem Determination which is available in print at your favorite bookstore or you can read it online for free as a PDF.

Today was a really busy day at work. I got into the office and there was already a ton of stuff going on. And they kept me hopping right up until lunch. I decided that I needed lunch today. I needed energy to get me through the afternoon.

Dominica got out of work today around four in the afternoon – an hour and a half early – because her building lost power and they do not have backup power systems to allow them to keep working like we do. So she got to go home and already had picked up Oreo by twenty after four when she called me.  I left work just after five so that I could spend some extra time with her.

I did some additional work on the new server that I have been working on.  Dominica cooked dinner and we watched the final three episodes of <em>Angel</em>.  I’m not really sure what I thought of the ending of the series.  The series started off very light and happy but the last two seasons went rapidly downhill into a spiral of bizarre story twists and just got darker and darker.  I feel that the show lost direction in addition to cast.  In the end I think that the final “battle” had some really good stuff but for the most part was just blah and tacked on.

I played a little Pirates! and went to bed early.

Weight Lost So Far: 20lbs

Leave a comment