Girolamo Savonarola

On Thursday, I gave a Toastmasters speech. Only one speaker had signed up to give a speech, so I figured I should step up. I chose to speak about Savonarola, the supposed mad monk of late fifteenth century Florence, responsible for the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which priceless art may have been destroyed, together with various luxuries and items of frivolity. I had read a bit about him, first in a children’s book, Tales of the Renaissance, and then in a history of Florence and some writings of Machiavelli. More recently, I read Jo Walton’s novel Lent, which makes an unlikely protagonist of Savonarola.

This led me to do a little more reading, and so I talked about the man, and made the point that while most of us today would not be comfortable with Savonarola, he was, for example, a friend of the scholar, humanist, and unorthodox religious thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and a more complicated man than one might think. He probably did have real sympathy and good intentions for the poor of Florence, for example.

The Red Queen’s Race

This past week, the last week of the fiscal year, I got one Expedited case (minor corrections to an allowed application), and two amendments on my Amended docket. I dealt with the Expedited case and wrote an Office Action on one of the amendments. This leaves me with one amendment on my Amended docket, and one Expedited case (an affirmance from the Board of Appeals, in which the applicant has now filed an amendment and Request for Continued Examination).

I also did a first action on a Regular New case, which, together with the amendment, made my production for the quarter and fiscal year adequate. After finishing my Office Action on the amendment Friday morning, I took care of some minor stuff, like a C* challenge on a case on my docket (I’m requesting that the classification of the case be adjusted), and two requests to the Electronic Information Center to do searches on cases on my docket.

I’m ready for a new Fiscal Year. One of my rejections is more than six months old, and may be abandoned (which is good for me, because I’ll get credit for that without having to write a full Office Action), but I’ll wait a little before trying to confirm abandonment with the applicant.