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Eighty-six years ago tomorrow — well, techinically today on Cairo time, where it’s already 26 November — Howard Carter struck a candle through a tiny hole in an ancient wall and stared by its flickering light at perhaps the greatest buried treasure discovered in modern history. Lord Carnarvon, who’d financed his dig in the Valley of the Kings, grew anxious at Carter’s stunned silence and asked him if he could see anything. “Yes,” Carter replied. “Wonderful things.”

Carter and Carnarvon thus became the first people in some three millennia to enter King Tut’s tomb — site KV62 for those desiring technical details of the excavation — and they thus hurtled archaeology into new understandings of our distant past.

Makes a fellow feel rather unaccomplished, I must say.

I have no class.

At least not this week. It’s Thanksgiving Furlough (that’s “Break” to you and me) here at The Citadel, which means a quiet five days overall. I’m very glad for it, being tired out and far behind on several projects.

On the plus side, this weekend has been decently productive, which I hope carries over into the rest of the week. I should get a couple more stories out onto the market, most of the Christmas business taken care of, and a good chunk of editing done.

Here’s hoping, anyway.

I needed a dose of Pink Panther just now.

Admit it. You did, too.

I was fortunate to meet a clever fellow in graduate school named Kevin Cryderman. Very clever. Dauntingly clever, in fact.

And then I found out he’s also a terrific musician and a hell of a nice guy (the show-off).

Here he is singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the tune of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-changin’.” Go, Kevin!

The monitor that came with our creaky ol’ Dell desktop so many years ago still works, but I’ve been growing increasingly annoyed with its lack of screen space and its abundance of physical space. Ours was a tube-based monitor, you see: all clunky, heavy box, with a relatively wee little screen perched up front. In addition to such problems, it was an energy sink.

The news that a friend needed a monitor prompted us to replace our monitor at last. After some research, I identified a Samsung T220HD as the one I wanted. Found a great deal on Amazon, and the beauty arrived today. All I can say is Wow. 22″ of HD landscape is a gorgeous thing!

Especially great is that I can now have a facsimile of a medieval manuscript up on one half of the screen while I work on the edition thereof in the other. That’ll be wonderful.

Now to run that Dell monitor to the friend…

I really must stay away from YouTube. It’s the greatest time sinkhole ever invented. Indeed, I’m of a mind that if we truly want to take on another nation — I’m not naming names, but I’m looking at you, Liechtenstein! — our best weapon of mass destruction in the fight is to give them unfettered access to YouTube servers. Video by video, minute by minute, it will destroy their national efficiency, slowly bringing them to their trembling, fattening knees.

Anyway, I mention this because I was considering buying myself a few songs for my just-passed birthday — G.I. Joes and Transformers just don’t cut it anymore — and on a lark punched up some old Michael Martin Murphey songs on iTunes. That sent me to YouTube, where one can often find videos that will allow the sampling of more than 30 seconds of a tune.

And that, in turn, led me to this clip from a 2007 David Letterman show. Talk about bringing home memories . . . this is one of my favorite MMM tunes. I daresay the man’s still got it:

I’m going to go do some work now. Really.

We all have hopes and dreams for what our 44th president might do to help restore our country’s honor both at home and abroad. I’ve been reading a lot of proposals of one kind or another in this regard, but I’ve found one of the most succinct and well-considered to be Michael Grunwald’s, from Time Magazine.

Among my personal favorites among this proposed agenda are some of the items under the heading “Repeal Bush,” including this sequence:

And while he’s at it: No more timber lobbyists running the Forest Service, oil lobbyists editing climate reports, Wall Street lobbyists running the sec or Arabian-horse commissioners running anything. (Sorry, Brownie.) No more T-ball in the Rose Garden either. It’s cute, but it might bring back memories.

The Do Not Call Registry and that marine reserve in Hawaii can stay.

Underlying these suggestions is the habit of making political appointments to oversee federal agencies, which reached wider and deeper and more costly than ever under the Bush regime administration: its estimated that he has made an unprecedented 3,000 of them across the government (ah, a true small-government man!). Simply put, it makes zero sense to have political friends overseeing the day-to-day operations of entrenched federal agencies; it reeks of the kind of Christmas-stocking handing out of ambassadorships to big campaign donors that is also an old Washington habit. It prevents progress at every level.

So let’s get some leadership into these positions that’s honorable, intelligent, non-partisan, and — preferably — already respected in the agencies they’re appointed to oversee.

My birthday is Thursday. Looks like I got an early gift. I’d say more but, well, I just don’t know what words would fit.

OBAMA WINS.

It’s history in so very many ways.