Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable History Breaching Space and Time.

Happy Newtonmas!! Of course, Newton was long dead by the time the British switched over to the Gregorian system, and it is largely his biographers who have held out so persistently in using his old birthday so as to construct that Romantic narrative in which Galileo’s ghost goes out and turns into the baby Newton. But it’s more fun this way, isn’t it?
It is Christmas Eve as I type this, and my hopes on tomorrow’s loot are pinned on a shiny accordion that Geoff and I might be able to serenade future convention goers with Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs while they wait in line or mill about waiting to take pictures with various and sundry Slave Leias. I don’t think I’ll in fact get it, but if you all close your eyes and BELIEVE, then maybe, just maybe, beautiful things will happen!
– Count Dolby von Luckner

Before getting to some hot Walpole action, here is the Eigenpower’s first appearance, for those who weren’t around 110 episodes ago when Geoff’s mighty arc started! Enjoy!
I have been reading, here and there in the nanomoments allowed to me by a jealous world, Edward Pearce’s Robert Walpole biography, and it’s been generally speaking among my favorite history book experiences ever. I can’t help but quote my thus-far-favorite passage, though really any random page would do, as it’s all pretty much this delightfully snarky:
On Sacheverell, who had effectively gotten away with light treason:
“He would proceed to a round of celebratory Tory dinners, to a positive progression via an Oxford which had never actually liked him very much but now hung out its flags, on through sympathetic Midlands shires, where, amid bonfires and more dinners, he enjoyed all the pleasures of a platonic martyrdom with the advantage of being floridly alive.”
Ah, I love it.
– Count Dolby von Luckner