Ch-ch-ch-changes

Hm. I was made somewhat bluntly aware today of a considerable paradigm shift in my personality. I am considerably more invested in the state of things, and also more vociferous about it. Or, put another way, I have become an impotently ranting politico.

One wonders if this shift is all for the good, however. I scanned the BBC headlines earlier, and noticed it was surprisingly full of stories of nutjobs killing people, and also the tedium about Tiger Woods and Avatar. I caught myself feeling relieved and thinking 'Thank God that the morons in power haven't done something newsmakingly revolting today'. Concerning, on multiple levels. (And I still found some things to rant about.)

Things I need to blog about:

Hat Time

Dragon Age

Banning of slang

Why I want Avatar to flop

Just A Snippet

Had a few ideas buzzing around lately after a discussion book recommendations. Possibvly something to come of it. Here's a very un-polished introduction to something that could be nothing.

By 1193, King Monaghan had been on the throne of Felin for seven years. The kingdom was one of prosperity and law, though admittedly with more prosperity for the rich, and more laws for the poor. The most significant product of Monaghan's seven year's work was a kingdom that worked. Felin was cohesive. And Monaghan had accomplished this by having a single, clear vision, and being its sole executor. Each word of the law was set down by him alone. Oh, he took advisement and petitions and amendments and pleas for changes this way or that, but he alone heard them, and he decided what of it was incorporated, and in what form. And similarly, he was advised on phrasing and terminology and reference by a counsel of law scholars and judges, the Captain of the Watch and other significant figures; yet he was the final arbiter of every word written, and no single sentence was set without his explicit assent. Thus it was true to say that Monaghan was very much the author of the ordinances of Felin. Of course there had been laws already standing when Monaghan came to power, which could not simply be discarded and replaced overnight. Plus it would have been redundnant to so, as Monaghan would only be replicating much of the terms himself. So it was that for the first year of the King's reign, a counsel of advisors was convened almost continuously to guide the King as he assessed every point of the existing law and amended, excised, retained or refined. And of course, whilst all of this was going on, new laws were constantly being written. Inadequacies in the existing law (as compared to the King's vision) were always being exposed in need of filling. And the whole process was slowed not inconsiderably by the King's unyielding insistence that he would not put his seal to any law whose precise phrasing he had not, at the least, reviewed and validated himself. For three years, the Kingdom was caught in a complicated cat's cradle of legislation. A steadily growing corpus of legal texts emerged which amended and replaced one another until the law attracted comparisons among the court to the obscure and arcane legal system of Ervane and the Lecturers at the University found it as much a headache as their students. Finally, however, the fruit of Monaghan's endeavours emerged. Toward the close of the third year of his reign, the King produced a single, unified text which detailed the entire legal system of the Kingdom, much to the relief of judges and law scholars throughout the cities. It was notable not only as the first time that all the laws had been gathered into a coherent whole, but also as the first time some of those laws had been explicitly committed to text.

With this in mind, it could be said that the King was in a very real way responsible for the fact that, in a few moments time, Theodore Flavet was going to die.