In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s incomparable A Time of Gifts, he takes the occasion of his 1933 visit to Dürnstein castle in Austria as an opportunity to recount the story of Richard the Lionheart’s imprisonment there in 1193.

After lifting the siege of Acre in the Third Crusade, the story goes, Richard was offended by Leopold of Austria flying his standard too near to Richard’s.  They quarrelled and Leopold left for home.  Richard followed a year later, after reaching a truce with Saladin.

Travelling in disguise through Austria after being shipwrecked on a pirate ship at the head of the Adriatic, Richard was discovered by Leopold’s men either because of his good looks, his demand for roast chicken (supposedly a royal dish), or by the ‘careless splendor’ of his expensive gloves; accounts vary.

In any event, Richard was imprisoned in the castle at Dürnstein:

From the west barbican a long crenelated wall ran steeply up the mountainside to the tip of a crag that overhung both the town and the river… Lancets pierced the remains of the battlement walls, there were pointed arches and a donjon; but, except for the clustering stumps of the vaulting, all trace of a roof had gone and firs and hazel-saplings grew thick in the crumbing cincture.   This wreckage was the fortress where Richard Coeur de Lion had been imprisoned. (A Time of Gifts, pp. 184-185)

Leopold turned Richard over to his suzerein, Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, who demanded an enormous ransom of 150,000 marks (the equivalant of 65,000 pounds of silver, several times Richard’s entire annual revenue) for his return.  His mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, raised the ransom at the same time that Richard’s brother, John, offered the emperor 80,000 marks to keep him captive.

Legend says that Blondel, Richard’s minstrel, rescued him by “singing outside of every likely prison until his friend’s voice answered with the second verse.”  Another legend says that Richard’s place was taken by a substitute hostage, Hugo de Morville, the murderer of Thomas a Becket on Richard’s father’s orders.  Subseqeuently, that legend holds, he introduced Pervical, Tristan, Lancelot, and Yseult into German mythology.

In the 1980s, a Hungarian immigrant to the US claimed that he had seen what is now called the Cloisers Cross in the Cistercian monastery at Zirc in the 1930s.  This incomparable little Romanesque masterpiece, intriciately carved from walrus ivory, is one of the glories of medieval art.

The immigrant’s account formed the basis of Norman Scarfe’s conjecture that the cross was a part of Richard’s ransom, since we know that Samson, the Abbot of Bury St. Edmond’s from 1180-1212, “was instrumental in raising the ransom, went to Dürnstein with many gifts, and contributed significant treasures from his own abbey church.”  (Parker & Little, p.16 )

(Zirc is about 300 km. east of Dürnstein.)

Thomas Hoving, the Metropolitan Museum curator who bought the cross — a story memorably recounted in his King of Confessors — always ascribed it to Bury St. Edmond’s but was never able to explain how the Yugoslav art dealer Topic Mimara acquired it or where it had been for the intervening nine hundred years.

Did Samson take it to Dürnstein to ransom Richard?

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Hoving, Thomas. King of the Confessors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981)

McPhee, John. A Roomful of Hovings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969)

Parker, Elizabeth C. & Charles T. Little. The Cloisters Cross (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994)

Scarfe, Norman. Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1986)

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“Inland Empire” defined as the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario Metropolitan Statistical Area. Census data for 2000; 2001-2008 are Census Bureau estimates.

Wikipedia has a new capability to create books out of articles.  For example, a friend is on a trip this week to the Holy Land.  Based on her itinerary, I created a collection of articles that I thought might be relevant as background for her.

It’s quick and easy to do; you turn on the book creator function and then add links to your book.

There’s an option to export to .pdf, Open Office format (.odt), and even to a physical book publisher for a fee.  My book, which took only a few minutes to create, clocked in at over 500 pages and would have spanned two physical volumes.  I don’t think it’s worth it for the printed version — mine would have cost more than $50 — but for something like a Kindle or a netbook, an easy-to-read .pdf version would be a useful reference to have, I think.

He, like others in this genre — David Allen, Merlin Mann, the Four Hour Work Week guy, etc. — is enamored of this mystical idea of “Inbox Zero,” a pure land of bliss where every email is instantly answered and properly dealt with.

For a long time I accepted this as True and the Right Thing and felt bad that I always have thousands of emails in my inbox.

But, you know what?  They’re wrong: Inbox Zero is a pernicious, dangerous idea that creates more suffering than it relieves. It doesn’t conform to reality and it represents an outdated simplistic idea of what email is. My approach — which I suspect is your approach too unless you are either autistic or writing a book about productivity pr0n — is best described as Infinite Inbox.

That is, rather than thinking of my email inbox like a physical mailbox, which needs to be emptied daily, I think of it more like a newswire or some other kind of news feed. It just scrolls along, a never-ending stream of email.  My ‘inbox’  is a window into the stream, not a box that gets filled up emails.

Just in the same way that I don’t bother acting on most items in the AP wire or my Facebook updates page, so too I don’t bother acting on the majority of the email that comes streaming through. If I did, I’d go crazy; I have a family that needs my time, an old house to maintain, beer to drink.

So I do what all normal people do; we fish in the stream of the Infinite Inbox. I’ll read email from my boss and close colleagues or if the subject line seems important, but I don’t sweat emails I don’t read. They’re there anyway to be searched.

I used to maintain elaborate folders of email sorted by project and topic but I eventually noticed that I never looked inside of those folders. The way we find information, on the Internet or in our email, is by searching. If I’m on a conference call and someone refers to a spreadsheet they sent, I search for their name, sort by date and attachment and pull it up.  It takes no time and I didn’t waste any time earlier trying to decide what to do with it. I don’t mark messages with little flags or colors or tags or whatever.  If I’m really worried about it, I’ll print it out and put it on my desk so I don’t forget it.  Gasp!  That’s what people actually do.

There’s all kinds of flaws to this system and we really need smarter email assistants to sort and prioritize our email streams but Infinite Inbox is the way things are, unlike Inbox Zero which is for most of us an impossible and ultimately frustrating ideal.

Sometimes I feel the need to view subsets of my email stream, so I have views for “this week’s mail” and “messages addressed only to me” and other filters. But the idea that I could have, or even want, no messages at all in my inbox seems a little silly to me.

I guess I could drag everything into an archive folder to achieve that, but why bother?  There’s always going to be email piling up and the world continues to revolve on its axis.  When I come back from (unplugged) vacations, I’m always surprised by the twin observations of how much email I have piled up and how little has really happened; now I just spend less time worrying about keeping my inbox at zero and accept that it, like the world, is boundless.

In Redlands, heart of the citrus belt of Southern California, night raiders broke into Chinese camps on September first [1893]; Chinese were robbed in the streets of the town; and a mass meeting was called to protest further lawlessness. The disturbances soon became so acute in Redlands that, on the following day, the National Guard was summoned to the town and two hundred special deputy sheriffs were sworn in. The large growers protested loudly against the rioters calling them “hoodlums” and “anarchistic agitators,” and swore that they only hired Chinese labor because “we cannot pay the wages demanded by the whites.” But the rioting continued. On September third anti-Chinese raiders swooped down on Redlands, Chinatown, broke into houses, set fire to several buildings, looted the tills of Chinese merchants, and generally terrorized the Chinese. The Chinese protested that they were being beaten and robbed and called attention to the fact that although eleven rioters were arrested, not one was convicted. Under the Geary Act, any citizen could file a complaint against a Chinese laborer for non-registration. Hundreds of complaints were filed under this section, and the Chinese fled from the fields, trying to escape arrest and deportation, while the local press, witnessing the exodus, crowed loudly about “the purple-coated celestial-heathens” fleeing from the wrath of an “aroused citizenry.”

*  The quote above is from his Factories in the Field: The story of migratory farm labor in California (Archon Books, 1969), but that was the easiest online reference I could find; my original source is his excellent Southern California Country: An island on the land (Duell, Sloan & Pearce: 1946), p. 90.

It came with Windows XP, which ran okay. I tried hackintoshing it but it was too nerdy for me and Windows 7 came out in RC around then and I put that on it instead, which works great.  I’ve upgraded the RAM and the HD on it and one thing that’s nice about the machine is how easy it is to work on.

But lately I’ve been running Moblin on it and, after some jiggering to get the wireless working, I think I’m in love. Moblin is a new netbook operating system from the Linux Foundation that Novell is working on along with Intel. It’s based on Linux (Mobile + Linux = Moblin, see?) but the UI has been completely redesigned. It’s different than the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is a version of Ubuntu designed for smaller screens; instead, Moblin is different, in the way that the iPhone UI is different than Mac OSX.

Moblin assumes you’re using your netbook for web browsing, checking email, maintaining a calendar, IM’ing, blogging, listening to music or watching videos — doing those social media things that the kids are all into. It’s a recognition that a 9″ screen is not suited for all desktop applications; they’re there, if you need them, but the new UI puts these other activities front and center and hides the others. It’s very well done and worth checking out.

I really think that these very small netbooks are a different category of thing; they’re not just small laptops. I have an old IBM Thinkpad x40 that I’ve used for many years now on consulting projects and it works fine as a real working computer. (Going back to it from the Dell is a revelation; the keyboard, especially, feels huge, which is absurd for a 13″ machine.) At netbook size, you need something different than a remixed desktop operating system, which is what Moblin aims to do.

Plus, these netbooks are cheap; at $200, I’ve started to wonder about using one as a Skype phone instead of buying another cordless phone system or trying to figure out how to use VOIP at home.  And there must be a lot of other uses for a cheap little netbook running Moblin besides DVD player and Skype phone.

HP “Create Amazing” – Director’s Cut byKeith Loutit from Bob Gifford via Andrew Sullivan.

[09 Nov 2009: well, this video got pulled until the director clears rights with HP et al.  -- too bad; it's very cool, and I was providing free advertising for HP]