Lemony Snicket and the Great Fire of London

[Naga_Fireball]

"It made me weep to see it" ~Samuel Pepys


Last week, for some darn reason (maybe the fire we had locally) I got to thinking about the Great Fire of London.



I've researched it in the past (not too well but many times), but kind of lost interest/did a bad job/did other things.

Well someone went to town and totally refurbished the Wikipedia page on this subject.
They added a TON of great information about the role of Samuel Pepys as messenger and analyst/scribe, the idiocy and lying of the Mayor,
the virtue of the king, and the suffering of the immigrants/general distress of London at large.

HOWEVER -- for those of you into "gut feelings" -- the thing I was led to study was really strange.
I kept having the nagging thought, that although the fire started around midnight (when there is no sunlight to concentrate),
there is literally an entire story remaining untold here beneath the surface.
I started to wonder about some really outlandish things.
Things involving the astoundingly brilliant (and insane) Sir Isaac Newton.

Now, it's really difficult to approach a figure like Isaac Newton with anything other than the "awe and respect due to him" according to the establishment.
His image dominates the center of Westminster Abbey, even today. I've seen his monument in person, in high school.
We took a tour to London right before the beginning of my senior year.

Going into that abbey was one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me.
When I was standing near the Shakespeare and Handel monuments (one is kind of in the middle of one room and the other is on a facing wall),
I started crying like a baby and couldn't stop until I was outside the Abbey. I cried for like 30 minutes.
Normally my tears dry up within 5-10 minutes. LOL.
This was in year 2000.

Now, this week in 2015, the phenomenon some might call the small inner voice whispered something like, "yo chica, didn't that Lemony Snicket guy write this story?"

I was like, jeez, yes, he totally did. He wrote a bunch of them, and called them "A Series of Unfortunate Events",
which turn out not to be merely unfortunate, but willfully executed by a villain attempting to inherit property from his niece and nephew...
I guess you could say, it's a story about the old not being able to let go of material wealth long enough to value the potential and right-to-life of the young, and perhaps the foolish as well.



You might think I'm totally crazy at this point but that's ok.
Crazy people write interesting tales. And Lemony Snicket really nailed the essence of the tale to be told here in his character Count Olav,
played recently by the famous actor Jim Carrey in the film version of these stories.


I would like to compare Count Olav to the beloved Isaac Newton.
The reason being, there was a detail on the Wikipedia page regarding the London fire that I've been looking for literally for years.
Here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fir ... f_the_fire

Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose.

Foreigners were immediately suspects because of the current Second Anglo-Dutch War. As fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on the Monday, reports circulated of imminent invasion, and of foreign undercover agents seen casting "fireballs" into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches.[38] There was a wave of street violence.[39] William Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar.

Well in our previous threads on the blog and PA,
I talked about Fenian Fire. Fenian fire is the product of painting a wallpapered wooden wall with wet phosphorous.
As the paint dries, the phosphorous oxidizes and spontaneously combusts.

My theory was that although Fenian fire as known today is thought to have been invented in the late 19th century,
Isaac Newton and his circle of brilliant Illuminati friends, including one of the founders of modern Masonry, Sir Christopher Wren,
knew exactly how to start a fire using chemical means.

Isaac Newton was an extremely accomplished chemist and alchemist.

Not only this, similarly to Count Olav in the Lemony Snicket children's tales,
which are really quite gory and more suitable for history class than kids,
Isaac Newton knew all about optics and accordingly, he knew about spherical lenses,
and discovered that a fire might be started by using a round piece of glass or crystal.

It just so happens that people who owned a "looking glass" or globe, and ventured to leave it in a sunlit room,
risked starting a fire in their own homes.

This method of starting fire has been known to exist since the time of Archimedes.
It's used to light the Olympic torch and is thought to have been used to disable ships.
Also, a mirror used to kindle fires was known to be stored in the oracles' quarters at Delphi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Series_ ... ate_Events

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a series of 13 children's novels by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of American author Daniel Handler) which follows the turbulent lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire after their parents' death in a fire. The children are placed in the custody of their relative Count Olaf, who attempts to steal their inheritance. After Olaf's plan to steal the Baudelaire's fortune fails, Olaf begins to doggedly hunt the children down, bringing about the death of several characters. As the series progresses, the Baudelaires discover more and more about a mysterious organization known as V.F.D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Olaf

Count Olaf is a fictional character and the main antagonist in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events series. In the series, Olaf is an eccentric criminal[1] and is known to have committed many crimes as a member of the fire-starting side of V.F.D., a Volunteer Fire Department that eventually branched into a massive secret organization, prior to the events of the first book in the series.[2][3] Olaf is repeatedly described as extremely tall and thin and having a unibrow, a wheezy voice, gleaming eyes, and extremely poor hygiene.[4][5][6] He is often distinguished by the tattoo of an eye on his left ankle.

Along with his associates, Olaf would set fire to countless V.F.D. headquarters and members' homes over the years, murdering a majority of the individuals within the buildings and often abducting a survivor from a particular family to use to embezzle the massive inheritance left behind, as most of the members of the organization came from extremely wealthy and powerful stock. While never directly stated, it is hinted in the last two volumes that Olaf had a very troubling past and this may be the reason for his bitterness at the world. Olaf's past exploits to obtain the Snicket fortune, though whether he succeeded or not is not revealed, implicate that he may have been responsible for the Snicket fires as well and the death of most of family with the exception of Kit, Jaques, and Lemony Snicket. While Olaf never directly targeted Kit due to still having feelings for her, he never ceased to hunt down both Lemony and Jaques. Several instances of other fires and crimes he committed throughout his life are stated throughout the series:

A still from the film showing the great lens wielded by Olaf:



Let's look at that Wiki again re: the London Fire:

Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspects because of the current Second Anglo-Dutch War. As fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on the Monday, reports circulated of imminent invasion, and of foreign undercover agents seen casting "fireballs" into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches.[38] There was a wave of street violence.[39] William Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar.

Now, let's check out another type of lens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonian_telescope



Newton did all kinds of work with glass and crystal shaping.
He researched different types of lenses along with their properties.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... -risk.html

Warning over crystal balls causing house fire risk
Fire fighters have issued a warning over having crystal balls and glass ornaments being left on window sills after one caught the sunlight and caused a pair of curtains to catch fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_glass

A burning glass or burning lens is a large convex lens that can concentrate the sun's rays onto a small area, heating up the area and thus resulting in ignition of the exposed surface. Burning mirrors achieve a similar effect by using reflecting surfaces to focus the light. They were used in 18th-century chemical studies for burning materials in closed glass vessels where the products of combustion could be trapped for analysis. The burning glass was a useful contrivance in the days before electrical ignition was easily achieved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_lif ... aac_Newton

Isaac Newton's early fantasies of arson stemmed from abandonment issues

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (4 January 1643 Gregorian calendar)[1] at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. At the time of Newton's birth, England had not adopted the Gregorian calendar and therefore his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day, according to the Julian calendar.

Newton was born three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton, Sr. was described as a "wild and extravagant man." Born prematurely, young Isaac was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fitted inside a quart mug.

When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and held some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."[2] Later on his mother returned after her husband died.

The perpetual sacred fire in the classic temples as the Olympic torch had to be pure and to come directly from the gods. For this they used the sun's rays focused with mirrors or lenses and not impure triggers.[citation needed]

Archimedes, the renowned mathematician, was said to have used a burning glass (or more likely a large number of angled hexagonal mirrors[citation needed]) as a weapon in 212 BC, when Syracuse was besieged by Marcus Claudius Marcellus. The Roman fleet was supposedly incinerated, though eventually the city was taken and Archimedes was slain.[2]

The legend of Archimedes gave rise to a considerable amount of research on burning glasses and lenses until the late 17th century. Various researchers worked with burning glasses, including Anthemius of Tralles (6th century AD), Proclus (6th century)[citation needed] (who by this means purportedly destroyed the fleet of Vitalian besieging Constantinople), Ibn Sahl in his On Burning Mirrors and Lenses (10th century), Alhazen in his Book of Optics (1021),[3] Roger Bacon (13th century), Giambattista della Porta and his friends (16th century), Athanasius Kircher and Gaspar Schott (17th century), and the Comte de Buffon in 1740 in Paris.

The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London, from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666

I'm not sure of what the author of the Lemony Snicket series would say,
but it really is a remarkable thing, that the fictional arsonist Count Olaf and the very real scientist Isaac Newton shared a similar love, and hate...

http://jaysanalysis.com/2010/10/05/lemo ... -analysis/

The series of unfortunate events the children have undergone, then, exemplify the process of alchemical/mystical transmutation, but rather than accepting the Count’s tyrannical approach, they outsmart him, and use His own power of “converging light” to burn up His legal marriage decree. In so doing, they also expose the Count as the murderer who burned up their house with fire using His optical eye that focuses sunlight. In fact, Klaus is a kind of Prometheus, who steals the count’s firepower and turns it on him, burning up his “law” and exposing him as a fraud.

[Naga_Fireball]

(we don't want to leave out Christopher Wren's contributions to Isaac Newton's work, or the reason he dropped out of science:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wren

It was probably around this time that Wren was drawn into redesigning a battered St Paul's Cathedral. Making a trip to Paris in 1665, Wren studied the architecture, which had reached a climax of creativity, and perused the drawings of Bernini, the great Italian sculptor and architect, who himself was visiting Paris at the time. Returning from Paris, he made his first design for St Paul's. A week later, however, the Great Fire destroyed two-thirds of the city. Wren submitted his plans for rebuilding the city to King Charles II, although they were never adopted. With his appointment as King's Surveyor of Works in 1669, he had a presence in the general process of rebuilding the city, but was not directly involved with the rebuilding of houses or companies' halls. Wren was personally responsible for the rebuilding of 51 churches; however, it is not necessarily true to say that each of them represented his own fully developed design.

Wren was knighted 14 November 1673. This honour was bestowed on him after his resignation from the Savilian chair in Oxford, by which time he had already begun to make his mark as an architect, both in services to the Crown and in playing an important part in rebuilding London after the Great Fire.

...

Another topic to which Wren contributed was optics. He published a description of an engine to create perspective drawings and he discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors. Out of this work came another of Wren's important mathematical results, namely that the hyperboloid of revolution is a ruled surface. These results were published in 1669. In subsequent years, Wren continued with his work with the Royal Society, although after the 1680s his scientific interests seem to have waned: no doubt his architectural and official duties absorbed more time.

It was a problem posed by Wren that serves as an ultimate source to the conception of Newton's Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. Robert Hooke had theorised that planets, moving in vacuo, describe orbits around the Sun because of a rectilinear inertial motion by the tangent and an accelerated motion towards the Sun. Wren's challenge to Halley and Hooke, for the reward of a book worth thirty shillings, was to provide, within the context of Hooke's hypothesis, a mathematical theory linking the Kepler's laws with a specific force law. Halley took the problem to Newton for advice, prompting the latter to write a nine-page answer, De motu corporum in gyrum, which was later to be expanded into the Principia.[16]

Mentioned above are only a few of Wren's scientific works. He also studied other areas, ranging from agriculture, ballistics, water and freezing, light and refraction, to name only a few. Thomas Birch's History of the Royal Society is one of the most important sources of our knowledge not only of the origins of the Society, but also the day to day running of the Society. It is in these records that most of Wren's known scientific works are recorded.

Whoops!)

[Christine]

It fits! The ability you have to retain so much information and then connect dots is astounding.

Seriously, it is no wonder why you have been targeted. It has been my honor to work with some of the finest "in the field" and begin to actualize the emergent reality together. What you are demonstrating is in fact (ok, IMHO) an ability that we have lost (been methodically and purposely erased), to be able to penetrate a seeming disjointed data field and rejoin the dots. We do it unconsciously in a continuum, bringing to conscious awareness the hidden is the true awakening.

Thanking you sincerely.

[Naga_Fireball]

It fits! The ability you have to retain so much information and then connect dots is astounding.

Seriously, it is no wonder why you have been targeted. It has been my honor to work with some of the finest "in the field" and begin to actualize the emergent reality together. What you are demonstrating is in fact (ok, IMHO) an ability that we have lost (been methodically and purposely erased), to be able to penetrate a seeming disjointed data field and rejoin the dots. We do it unconsciously in a continuum, bringing to conscious awareness the hidden is the true awakening.

Thanking you sincerely.

Christine, that is very kind of you.
I'm not sure if this thread really shows us "what happened",
but it gives a couple more possibilities than the people may have realized.

We've looked at the Seattle Great fire too, because of the correlation with the Fenian uprisings,
it was easy to try to blame the scene on foreigners from China (who occupied waterfront) and Ireland (terribly persecuted people in America),
when phosphorous lights for anyone who knows how to apply it. If I am not mistaken, in the same decade as the Seattle fire,
the white people of Seattle did try forcibly deporting the Chinese by boat and train, but they were rescued I think by a local sheriff who was not racist.
So those who were racists, I think, decided to deal with the diversity of Seattle in a different and very sinister way.
If they could not make the people leave, their property could be destroyed.

Arson has occurred in many Chinatowns in American territories, and if I am not mistaken,
one of the worst had to do with rumors of Bubonic plague, for which the Chinese were wrongly blamed.
Also the plague was well contained by the time the fires were started, which is another tragedy.

Back to London and Westminster,

One of the biggest things I remember about looking at the Isaac Newton monument in year 2000,
is although it's large and 3D, I got no sense of personality or soul from it at all.
I know that sounds odds, but the rest of the place made me feel so emotional,
it was strange to have no reaction to the Newton monument other than wanting to be away from it.
Instead of coming back to the center of the church and looking again at Newton and Queen Mary (she was sad!) and all those,
I walked along the sidepaths where there was some grass and older stones from before those times.

It wasn't until I was in the old old old part of the churchyard that the tears abated. It was so strange..
I was only 17!
______

Also Christine, I thought you would be very interested to know,
when Handler writes these books, he assumes a persona that he named "Lemony Snicket",
and the Wiki on this character does describe a targeted individual:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemony_Snicket

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of many children's biographies, serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best-known work) and appearing as a character within the series. Because of this, the name "Lemony Snicket" may refer to either the fictional character or the real person.

As a character, Snicket is a harried, troubled writer and photographer falsely accused of felonies, and is continuously hunted by the police and his enemies, the fire-starting side of the secret organization Volunteer Fire Department (V.F.D.). As a child, he was kidnapped and inducted as a "neophyte" into V.F.D., where he was trained in rhetoric and sent on seemingly pointless missions while all connections to his former life, apart from his siblings Jacques and Kit (who were also kidnapped and inducted), were severed. In the organization, he met and fell in love with a peer named Beatrice, to whom eventually he decided to marry. After a series of unfortunate events (after which the real-world series is in some ways named), he was falsely accused of murder and arson. Eventually the fallacies grew so much that The Daily Punctilio reported his death. Beatrice eventually moved on and married Bertrand Baudelaire, becoming the mother of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, the protagonists of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Fourteen years thereafter Beatrice and Bertrand were murdered in a house fire, leaving the Baudelaires orphans. Feeling indebted to his former fiancée, Snicket embarks on a quest to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire children until they become old enough to face the troubles of the world on their own.

Snicket is the subject of a fictional autobiography, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (which contains an introduction from a fictionalized version of Daniel Handler). A pamphlet, 13 Shocking Secrets You'll Wish You Never Knew About Lemony Snicket, was released in promotion of The End. Other works by Snicket include The Baby in the Manger, The Composer Is Dead, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, The Lump of Coal and 13 Words. Snicket is currently writing All the Wrong Questions, a new children's series whose first book, Who Could That Be at This Hour?, was released in October 2012.

The name Lemony Snicket originally came from research from Handler's first book, The Basic Eight. Handler wanted to receive material from organizations that he found "offensive or funny", but did not want to use his real name, and invented "Lemony Snicket" as a pseudonym.[1] The name's similarity to Jiminy Cricket, whom Handler described as "exactly the kind of overly moralistic, cheerful narrator who I despise", was "likely a Freudian slip".[2] When writing A Series of Unfortunate Events, he and his editor thought that the books should be published under the narrator's name, rather than his.[1]

I know there are historians who have been TIs. It's sad because it really does take a huge memory to tackle that subject.
Only a few times per month could I even sit down and try to.



<3 to EE