It seems like a lot of successful people throughout history were rogues and bastards. The main reason why they’ve reached the top is because they’ve shit on people on the way up, whether it be family members, employees, or enemy countries and regimes.
I want to read more about the knights. By this, I mean people who’ve lived happy, rewarding lives and didn’t have to crush anybody under their heels to do it. I realize their histories aren’t as interesting, and everybody has a skeleton in their closet somewhere. I just want to be reassured that not everybody who’s trying to be a decent person is going to be a patsy for the shitters.
It strikes me as ironic that we usually revere the rogues and tear down the knights. The knight is disgustingly perfect, but at least the rogue has flaws.
So if anybody has any idea what I’m talking about, could you put up a link to your favorite knight? I’m not talking about boy scouts and bible toters. I want the decent people who didn’t have to trained or prodded by those who sought to get their belief systems validated.
See, there are two kinds of knights. Day-knights always tell the truth during the day and lie during the night. Night-knights always tell the truth during the night and lie during the day.
So, if it’s very overcast and you want to know whether it’s night or day, and you meet a knight, the trick is to ask him what kind if knight he is. During the day, a day-knight will truthfully claim to be a day night, and a night-knight will lie and claim to be a day-knight. Conversely, both types will claim to be night-knights during the night.
I think you’ve been reading too many romantic novels about knights. In the middle ages, a knight was pretty much anyone who could afford a war horse, the weapons and the armor.
Which meant you had to be pretty rich in the first place. The Chivarlic code, to my knowledge, was pretty much an ideal more then anything else. Knights could be just as nasty as anyone else, particulary to worthless peasents.
Yes, indeedy, knights were kind of a problem sometimes. What they knew was pillaging and fighting, and if there wasn’t any fighting going, they would jolly well make some up. Barbara Tuchman says in A distant mirror (IIRC) that they were so much trouble that the Church came up with all sorts of rules–they couldn’t fight on Sundays, or Wednesdays, or Fridays, or feast days. Knights were still making trouble for everyone, so they thought up the Crusades partly in order to get rid of all of them for a while and get some peace and quiet.
Anyway, I dunno. Books about good people…I’ll have to think about that one.
Tesla is an interesting fellow. If he’d had his way, you would have unlimited free power just by sticking a metal pole in the ground no matter where you are.
You could also read Atlas Shrugged or such. True it is fiction, but certainly her goal is to idealise the knight (as you’re describing him) even if that’s not how she is often portrayed.
and there are the 2004-2005 london knights, (ohl) who pretty much destoyed all of the major-junior hockey records, and will be regarded by all honest future sports historians as the greatest hockey team ever assembled, at any level.