Thus Spoketh Terje

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1. Loki

   Everything is impregnable until it has been, er, you know, penetrated. It’s all very relative and zen.

   22. November 2008 @ 23:17 ( Permalink )

2. Dread Pirate Terje

   Yeah…

   As I’m currently engaged in this fall’s second round of West Wing, I’m reading it as a kind of an American thing, too. Interpreting it in light of Jed Bartlet’s nice statement about people having phenomenal capacity, it can be read as a race of ingenuity, between those trying to, er (no, plagiarising you is not beneath me), penetrate and those trying to maintain the status of impregnability.

   On a different note, while it is true that Constantinople was impregnable for a very long time (in fact, until the commercial power of Venice combined with the military might of the Normans (which, by the way, was a rip-off of the Byzantines’, ironically enough) and then again pretty much until the Ottoman Turks arrived with their gunpowder, the cheats), it was an unfortunate fact that the only real natural boundary between the city of Constantine and the barbarous and war-like tribes to the north was the Danube, so that once that barrier was overcome, the barbarian hordes could pretty much freely rape and pillage their way through the Byzantine heartland of Thrace to said impregnable city. Which was a bit boring for the Byzantines, of course, as the Bulgars and others usually invaded when the army was busy repelling Sassanides, Ummayads or Abbasides in Asia Minor, and the ravaging of the barbarian hordes from the north and west tended to upset the army, many of whose soldiers were Thracians or Balkanites. Also, it got even more tiresome after some renegade or captive Byzantine engineer taught the barbarians how to build trebuches. (Eastern POW engineers, on the other hand, at least had the decency to give the ratio between the short and the long arm as 1:5 rather than as the actual one of 1:6, thus rendering the first Arab trebuches hopelessly useless. Until, of course, they figured out what was wrong.)

   Ah, but I ramble.

   4. December 2008 @ 22:40 ( Permalink )

3. Loki

   “(Eastern POW engineers, on the other hand, at least had the decency to give the ratio between the short and the long arm as 1:5 rather than as the actual one of 1:6, thus rendering the first Arab trebuches hopelessly useless. Until, of course, they figured out what was wrong.)”

   That. Is. Awesome. The original trebuches came from Byzantium, then? Or did you mean they got them from further east?

   Your rambling is much appreciated as long as they’re this fun and educational. And even when they’re not.

   5. December 2008 @ 21:19 ( Permalink )