Madison

I considered titling this something like "What I Did on My Summer Vacation", but that would grow tiresome after only a few iterations, so....

I arrived in Madison for MathFest 2008 on the 30th. There was nothing on the schedule that looked all that interesting - opening ceremonies and suchlike - so I gave gryphons_lair a call and we agreed to meet for dinner at 5:00. She had previously given me a list of sights to see, so, with several hours to kill, I wandered out.

Naturally, they hadn't fed us on the flight out, so my first stop was a Mexican kiosk, Burrito Loco. The burrito I bought was unexpectedly large ("Ma'am, that's not a burrito; that's a burro!"), and took me a longish time to finish. (gryphons_lair later pointed out that kiosks like that cater to the college crowd and their outsize appetites.) Looking at the list of sights, I went on to the History Museum. (My first stop, once inside, was the restroom, to wash my hands. Big, juicy burrito....) I'm afraid I slightly embarrassed myself by not recognizing the local celebrity whose life was celebrated on the first floor. (I eventually managed to remember the name, associating it with "Saturday Night Live", but it's escaped me again.) The second floor was devoted to the history of Wisconsin Indians; since I was, at the time, in the middle of reading 1491, it seemed a bit dated to me, but it was interesting enough. The third floor covered the later history of Wisconsin, where, again, I encountered acquaintances from recent reading - this time, Seymour Lipset's It Didn't Happen Here, which devotes considerable space to the relative success of socialism in Milwaukee and to Victor Berger in particular.

After the museum, I took a stroll down State Street, still hoping to walk off the burrito. The ambience took me back to Isla Vista and my UCSB days: unconventionally dressed people, buskers, earnest young People With Causes... Edwardsville, though as much a college town as Madison, isn't like that. At All.

gryphons_lair came by my hotel at about 5:00, and we headed off for dinner at the local Afghani restaurant, Kabul. En route, she led me to "her favorite used bookstore", Avol's, and we spent some time there. I picked up Chinua Achebe's novel Arrow of God, a translation of Francis Bacon's New Organon¹, and Thomas Burns' A History of the Ostrogoths². (Book count for trip: 3.)

Dinner at the Kabul Restaurant was quite good. At gryphons_lair's suggestion, I ordered the lentil soup, which was delicious, and a lamb curry, likewise. We chatted about this and that - sadly, I've forgotten most of the topics, though I seem to recall that Smart People Doing Stupid Things occupied a fair bit of time - and finished with Turkish coffee, which I'd never had. I will make disparaging comments about hotel and restaurant coffee later on; they do not apply here, as Turkish coffee is not to be judged on the same criteria as the varieties more standard in this country.

(gryphons_lair and I weren't able to meet again during my stay, but still, it was good to visit with her for the first time since - was it the signing party for Komarr?)

And that was the first day of My Summer Vacation.

[1] I sometimes refer to the book in my History of Math class, but I've never actually read it, so....

[2] Why? Because I didn't have any books on the Ostrogoths, of course. More seriously, most of what I knew about the Goths came from de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, Poul Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth", and R. A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome, none of which is all that reliable a source (being, after all, fiction). I managed to find time to read the book before my return home, and I will make a brief post on that topic later.

Theodoric

I suspect that most people would find Thomas Burns' A History of the Ostrogoths rather dry, and I confess that some parts of it seemed that way to me, too. However, there was one anecdote that I want to reproduce, about the Ostrogothic King Theodoric of Italy (and adjoining territories as far away as Marseille and Dubrovnik).

History knows him as "Theodoric the Great". I have a longstanding problem with that epithet, since a) it doesn't really convey anything specific and b) most of the "Greats" don't even qualify as "good", in my judgment. "The Just" strikes me as a far higher compliment for a ruler. From what Burns writes, Theodoric might have merited that epithet; both his Ostrogothic and Roman subjects were impressed with his passion for justice and his impatience with lawyerly obstruction.

It seems that a certain Roman matron had been pursuing a lawsuit against a patrician for some thirty years. At last, fed up with the delays, she appealed directly to Theodoric. The king responded by issuing an ultimatum to the involved lawyers, giving them two more days to settle. They did so; the matron then came again to Theodoric to thank him for his intervention. After seeing her out, he summoned the lawyers to his presence and asked: "Why were you able to achieve in two days what had been impossible for thirty years?" Finding their response unsatisfactory, Theodoric had them put to death.

I believe the phrase is "pour encourager les autres"....