Wet Dream--python to native compiler

[Laura Creighton]

> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:48:15 +0100, Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com> wrote:
> >
> [OT] Does your name sound like 8 in the middle, or is it like that guy on Red
>  Dwarf?
> 
> Regards,
> Bengt Richter
> -- 

I don't know Red Dwarf, but all the Creightons and the Crichtons on this
planet eventually trace their roots back to one valley in Scotland.  The
name means 'from the Happy Valley'.  But the Valley was none-too-happy
for the Creightons.  The Crichtons were literate and were running the
show, and the Creightons weren't.  All this changed when the English
conquered the land and introduced medicine, ship-building, the merchant
marine, education in small doses, and above all LAW.  (This was very
important, because before then everybody had to take the law into their
own hands all the time because that was the only law there was.  So you
had to spend your whole life getting ready to avenge the most trivial
of insults by feuding with your neighbour and cutting off his head,
raping his wife, and destroying all his livestock.  Being a full time
terrorist-in-training was the only job for a man, and it left you no
time to hack on your macro system, er, get any useful work done).

These things take money, so with law came taxes.  The regular sort as
opposed to the old model where anybody could threaten you and rob you
at will.  And tax rolls.  My ancestors, the ones that were illiterate,
got the English tax guy's preferred spelling of the Scottish 'ch' which
is just like the 'ch' in loch.  Creighton.  Our betters, who did their
own spelling, picked 'Crichton'.

Cr-ay-ton is what you get when generations of you live among people who
cannot pronounce 'ch'.  So all over the English speaking world, I am
Crayton, except in Scotland and Nova Scotia (especially when speaking
dialect in the latter, which I do as well).

You don't want to know what Swedes do to it :-)

[cc'd to Alex who asked me this question once, and I forget it I answered]

Laura Creighton