Nemo me impune lacessit

I used to use that as my email signature. I believe I even had that as my favorite quote in my employee profile at Netscape. Now, they are not just pretty words... actually, they are quite ugly. They really do not roll off of the tongue. Besides that, I no longer can read Latin.

I used to be able to read in over 10 Human Languages (and a few artificial ones, not count the myriad of computer ones), and was able to write in most as well. Speaking was always my trouble, a disconnect between my speech center and visual center. This has made it hard for me to retain any of the language skills I had spent time acquiring. Imagine: "I think I will go to Japan, since I read/write Japanese (Kanji). Excuse me sir, I need to find my hotel, hold on while I write all of this down and show it to you, then you can write down your answer so that why I can understand what you are saying." Not really a winning strategy. And, if one doesn't use it, one loses it. I have stacks of papers and quite a few old text documents on floppies that I wrote, but can not longer read. I started throwing them away when I find them, since they have no use to me now.

This reminds me of something I read a long time ago about The Dark Ages. If one goes to some places in Europe, I hear that they have buildings built back in the Roman/Greek times that are still standing. And people are still living in some of them! Do you know what that means? During The Dark Ages, people lived in these buildings as well. Buildings over a thousand years old. And yet, no one at that time knew how to build such buildings. These people were surrounded many things from past generations, and yet they could never understand them nor recreate them nor repair them. Surrounded by the works of gods from the past.

Can you imagine what that would be like? To see a building or writing or something else, creating so long ago, and yet with all of our "modern technology" we couldn't make something just like it? I can imagine that. Because it is here right now. We call them The Pyramids, and they are even older than the Romans/Greeks and we are more advanced than the people living in The Dark Ages. What does that tell you?

The Edward