feng_shui_house

Wiki walk- I answered an unknown phone call today because I was expecting the Orkin guy to call and they refused to tell me what number he'd use (it's against our policy to give out their private numbers! Which doesn't make SENSE because after the guy calls me I HAVE his number. I would have bought it if they'd said, we don't know which person will be sent to your home, but that's not what they said.)

ANYWAY, I got a phone call from someone trying to talk to me about energy and are you the home owner? I just said, "I do not want to receive calls of this nature. Remove me from your list." Of course she went on with 'oh, this isn't going to cost you anything' and kept talking, so I just ended the call.

A few minutes later I got a call from a different number, prefixed with 877. Which is a toll-free number SOMETIMES, and sometimes it's a number in Russia. I expect it was probably not Russia, but out of curiosity I googled- couldn't find who the number belonged to, but google also offered me a page on events taking place in the year 877.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/877

I LOVE the names history has assigned people. King Charles II (the Bald) died in 877 and was succeeded by his son, Louis the Stammerer, who died two years later.

Louis' realm was split between his sons, Carloman II and Louis III. Louis III was married twice. His second wife had a posthumous son, Charles the Simple. Simple at the time wasn't an insult, the Latin 'Simplex' meant 'Straightforward as in loyal or without guile', but the chroniclers didn't like him much. He was called Charles the Stupid by a later chronicler for an incident in 919 where he abandoned his men. Besides this, he was called stultus (fatuous), hebes (stupid), insipiens (foolish), parvus (small) and minor (inferior).

Simple Charlie didn't have a simple route to the throne, either. First a brother had it, and then his cousin, Emperor Charles the Fat. Fat Charlie was deposed by the Diet of Tribur in Nov. 887 after three years of incompetent government and died in Jan. 888. (What does it say about me that I'm amused that Fat Charlie was deposed by a Diet?) One group crowned Charlie in 893 but Odo, the hero of the siege of Paris (885-886) was crowned in 888 so Charlie wasn't king of everything, and then Odo died in 898.

So, anyway, scraping the bottom of the kingly barrel, in 898 Simple Charlie wound up monarch of West Francia in 898. Then there was a lot of giving land to Vikings to keep them loyal, with Vikings getting baptized and marrying kingly relatives.

In 911, Charles the Child (another king- this one of EAST Francia) died and Simple Charlie got some folks from East Francia to elect him king. More marriages and people got mad at Charlie because he had favorites and the nobles grabbed Charles in 920, and I guess yelled at him until an Archbishop made them let him go. 922 the nobles revolted again (one of them was mad because Charlie wasn't nice to his mother in law) and kicked Charlie out, getting a new King Robert, Count of Paris, brother of the late King Odo and father of Hugh the Great (Hey, Hugh had a good name!). Charlie came back and fought, losing the battle, but Robert got killed in it.

So Robert's son-in-law, Raoul of Burgundy, got to be king in 923. During the summer, another one of Robert's son-in-laws captured Simple Charlie and in Oct. 929 Charlie died.

And in 936, the current king died without heirs and the nobles talked a while and then said well, why not? And Simple Charlie's son, Louis IV of France got to be king.