Back in 1999 Chris Dickinson posted a fine piece of Internet performance art to the Usenet discussion list soc.genealogy.medieval. Beginning with the sentence “We are all descended from Charlemagne,” he funneled it through Babelfish dozens of times, bouncing among the various Western European languages. By the twenty-seventh line the sentence was twisted strangely:
All the goings protection for the lower section give Charlemagne.
This bit of nonsense masks the value of the original hypothesis, which is almost certainly true: we are all descended from Charlemagne—at least, all of us with any European descent at all.
It is difficult to trace the history of this assertion (Continued)
I pull into Goshen Methodist Church, outside Beaver Dam, in Ohio County, Kentucky. It’s the first desination on a whirlwind, one-day excursion to the home county of my great-grandfather, who left about a hundred and ten years ago to find a better life in the big city—Louisville, sixty-five miles away. (Continued)
Tuesday, February 20, 1996
In his autobiographical letter, the Historia calamitatum or ‘story of my problems’, the famous twelfth-century educator and rake Peter Abelard identifies his and Heloise’s love child as a boy by the name of Astralabe.[1] Nothing is known for certain of Astralabe’s life, although it is possible that he became a clergyman, and two attestations of an Astralabe as clergyman survive in the ensuing years, in addition to an obituary notice for him in the necrology of Abelard’s monastery of the Paraclete. (Continued)
