Saturday, April 28, 2007

Would you believe Austerlitz?

Hello internets. I've been away for a while now and for that I apologize. I've been incredibly busy with the new enterprise and things are going surprisingly well in that regard. I've had at least a couple of jobs a week. The hours are nice and I get to make fun of the boss all I want.

The other day I got to see Napoleon's hat. Pretty cool. Sure he had more than one, but how often do you get to see Napoleon's hat? Seriously.

The Museum of Art downtown was having a Napoleon exhibit and in typical last minute fashion we went the day before it closed. There we many cool nifty things but here were the highlights for me:

1. Napoleon's Hat.
Cool...just cool.












2. A regimental Eagle from Waterloo.

Each regiment used to carry an Imperial Eagle on top of its flagstaff. The Eagles were presented to each regiment by Napoleon personally and represented the might of the French army at the time. If you haven't read Sharpe's Eagle by Bernard Cornwell the climax of the book is when Richard Sharpe captures one of these and becomes a hero in the British Army.






3. Grapeshot.

Napoleon was of course originally an Artillery officer who appreciated the king of battle.Can you imagine a canister of this stuff being rammed into a cannon and shot at you. This things ranged in size from pellet-size to softball size pieces of lead. Yikes.

Anyway I'll promise that I'll try to keep up with the blog more these days.
Until then, au revior.