Weird fact - I may or may not be related to Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance philosopher who met an untimely end at the hands of the Italian Inquisition in 1600, a family fact that I picked up from a very-inebriated great uncle at a wedding when I was eleven or twelve years old. I haven't been able to verify this tidbit one way or the other, although someday I plan to go to Italy and do a little sleuthing, but since that childhood revelation Giordano has loomed large in my imagination, and has inspired me on more than one occasion to take the road less traveled by. It isn't easy to be a heretic, even when they're not burning your kind at the stake anymore, but I look to "Uncle G.", and whether or not his blood flows in my veins literally, it does metaphorically. Here's a fantastic site dedicated to the man (with music!), and another, more minimalist tribute. Although Giordano was more of a mystic than anything else, he's remembered chiefly today for his heresy of infinite worlds, in which he speculates that if space is infinite, then there must be an infinite number of planets out there, replete with an infinite number of civilizations, and, so goes the logic, an infinite number of Incarnations. What would later become the kernel of a pretty nifty Star Trek episode was a blasphemy punishable by death back in the 16th Century, so Uncle G. found himself on the run for most of his life, lecturing at Oxford, showing off his "Art of Memory" in Paris and Geneva, and writing a series of theological/philosophical tracts and mystical poems until he was ultimately betrayed by one of his students (the ungrateful wretch!). Taken into custody by the Venetian authorities and brought to Rome for his trial and execution, Giordano was burned in the Campo dei Fiori, where a statue of him stands today. I was in Rome once, at the Campo dei Fiori no less, but I didn't realize at the time that the hooded figure staring at me was in fact my possible ancestor! Next time I'll come with an offering...