The Los Angeles Times (I think it was them) reports that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have arranged with Comedy Central to keep paying non-writing (and therefore non-striking) staff members, at least through this week. Variety reports that Jay Leno has assured his staff he will pay them through the holidays. Apparently, Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel have also stepped up to the plate.

I feel all warm and fuzzy. This picture is from the BBC website--a series of photos of the strike dated November 14, 2007.

Rationalizations aside, this is Hollywood. It IS all about image.

Shame on Carson Daly. As for Ellen Degeneres, . . . maybe if writers had four feet and tails she’d show a little more backbone. OTOH—Daly’s feeble attempt at an unscripted monologue does show how vital writers are.

Roman Artefacts in London Well

Great picture of 4th century AD goblets and tableware, most made of copper alloy. They were found in a wood-lined well at Upper Walbrook Valley in London.

The 19 pieces include "a matching set of three bowls that nest together, buckets that were probably used to water down wine, a cauldron, jugs and a ladle.Despite being 1,700 years old, the swinging handles on some of the artefacts are still in working condition." according to the London Telegraph. The first two pictures were also copied from the Telegraph site.

The treasure is dated mostly by the coins that were found in the well with them.

The assumption is that the poor used wood or ceramics, so this belonged to rich Romans (were Romans the only class with money, then? The article isn't clear).

Why were these objects dumped in a well? Either they were being hidden during dangerous days, with the intention of being retrieved later--or, there was some ritual significance to their deposit in water, which sounds a lot more Celtic than Roman to me.

The well was under the Draper Company Gardens, and was excavated in advance of new construction. The Draper Company has donated them all to the Museum of London, where they've been put on temporary display. it's called (groan) "All's Well that Ends Well."

The last picture is of Museum conservator Nancy Shippey working on the vessels.

NAGPRA Threatened?

According to Physorg.com, and other science news websites, the Dept. of the Interior has drafted new regulations that "would destroy the use of cultural affiliation as the principle for repatriation decisions."

Some Background:
NAGPRA stands for Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. NAGPRA is a federal law passed in 1990 that requires all museums and institutions receiving federal funds to return human remains and cultural items from graves to tribes or tribal descendents. It also protects gravesites or suspected gravesites from digs--either archaeological or accidental.

This 1997 pictures shows NAGPRA in action. The box contains the rattle of a Sioux medicine man, Elk Head. The rattle is being returned to a descendent of Elk Head by the South Dakota State Historical Society Museum.

The National Park Service has a great chart explaining what NAGPRA covers.

The Dept of the Interior has a website on NAGPRA too, which is ironic because that Department now wants to change the rules.

“The Department’s proposed regulations have no basis in law or science and reflect an attempt to impermissibly legislate in a manner not prescribed by Congress. The adoption of the regulations as they stand would force the NAGPRA process back to square one,” said Dean Snow, who is president of the Society of American Archaeologists. His group says that the DoI doesn't have the authority to implement this change, which is flawed.

Here are the Federal Register summaries of the changes in pdf form. The SAA claims these changes destroy the use of cultural affiliation as the guide for who gets what artefacts.

I don't pretend to understand it, but NAGPRA was a hard-fought and much-needed law. Mucking it up is not wise.

ONE More Mailer Quote

Just One!

"A writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerve and marrow of a nation."

Wasn't that worth it?

Amazon.com: Protecting the First Amendment

According to an AP story, Amazon.com--unlike phone companies and other entities--balked when zealous law enforcement demanded a list of people who'd bought certain books online.

Wow--imagine standing by principles in today's scary world. Even more astounding--this is a business standing up for our rights! We can't even find Congressional representatives willing to do that!

This all came about because federal prosecutors are going after an official who sold used books online--from his official office. He didn't report the profits. Bad, bad man.

The feds figured his book customers would make good witnesses. They wanted Amazon to turn over records of who purchased books from this guy, so they could contact those purchasers. Honest, that's it.

"We didn't care about the content of what anybody read. We just wanted to know what these business transactions were," the prosecutor said.

But Judge Stephen Crocker said "No."

More specifically, he said: "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

Yay, Judge Crocker! Yay, Amazon!

Could this be a trend? Will we actually start demanding the protections developed under 200 years of Constitutional rule?

Gee. . . what a great country could spring from that!

Follow-up to Satellite Mapping of Egypt

Much more information about Dr. Sarah Parcak and her team at the University of Alabama's Birgmingham campus can be found in a local newspaper here. Apparently Discovery Channel is filming a segment about her work.

"Anytime you see a significant change in elevation, you are going to find an archaeological site,". . . . Soils from ancient settlements are detectable because they have a higher organic content, which tends to retain more water. "Archaeological soils are chemically different than other soils," Parcak said.

Using Satellites to Find Sites in Egypt

This had to happen--I only wonder why it took so long. Seems like satellite technology has been used to find sites in the Americas for a couple of years now.

(Satellites, schmatellites. In the 1920s, airplane pilots pointed out intaglios carved into the California and Arizona deserts. And Roger Agache began using aerial photography to pinpoint the locations and outlines of Roman and pre-Roman Celtic sites in the Picardie region of northern France in the 1970s.)

But to get to the point--Yahoo reports that satellite mapping has identified over 100 new archaeological sites in Egypt. The work was done by ten computers run by researchers in Birmingham. Yahoo puts them in the UK (Birmingham, England) but that may be a mistake. Dr. Sarah Parcak (right) , Egyptologist with the University of Alabama, Birmingham leads the project. The sites include:

". . . a lost temple buried beneath agricultural fields, a major town in the East Nile Delta dating to the time of the pyramids, a large monastery from 400 A.D. in Middle Egypt and a massive, largely buried city beneath a field on the East Delta dating to 600 B.C."

Googling reaveals that that LiveScience reported in June 2007 that the same researchers had rediscovered a forgotten 1600-year-old metropolis 200 miles south of Cairo. This picture , credited to DigitalGlobe, is of the Great Aten temple at Tell al-Amarna. It shows a temple enclosure wall in the north, buried under a modern cemetery.

A University of Toronto site shows and tells about satellite imagery along the Nile Delta and Sinai regions. That project is called SEPE (Survey & Excavation Projects in Egypt.) Most of its info dates from 2004, but it's still interesting.

Norman Mailer Quotes

More words of wisdom from Norman Mailer's The Spooky Art:

• A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, complacent, fearful, overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration will be revealed in his book. . . . no novelist can escape his or her own character altogether.
• Where indeed would England be now without Shakespeare? . . . If you ask who has had that kind of influence today in America, I'd say Madonna. . . . So far, she's had more to do with women's liberation than Women's Liberation.
• The young writer usually starts as a loser and so is obliged to live with the conviction that the world he knows had better be wrong or he or she is wrong. On the answer depends one's evaluation of one's right to survive.

Excavating Rome and the Lupercal

This picture is too beautiful not to pass along.

It comes from a probe sent into a cave on the Palatine Hill in Rome. This dome, decorated with shells and mosaic art, may have been erected over what the Romans considered most sacred: the cave where, their legend said, the twins Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. IOW, the cave where Rome began.

This picture comes from the BBC website, as did the diagram, which shows how deeply the structure is buried. The accompanying story is here.

An earlier story, with a few other details, is here.

The cave is near the ruins of the palace of Augustus Caesar, the first Emperor of Rome. The palace was built over 2000 years ago; the date of this dome has not been established.

Funny Videos by Striking Writers

These are links to entertaining videos. One of these days I will figure out how to embed videos on this blog--or (in the odd chance that my incompetence is not the culprit) blogger will provide a working methodology. But meanwhile:

• Heroes of the Writers' Strike: A quickie showing what day jobs writers like Paul Guay (Liar, Liar) are resorting to
• Not the Daily Show: 4 minutes and a moment of Zen from some familiar faces
• Tim Kazurinsky Explains it all for You on WGN, 3 minutes of morning show camaraderie with some visual aids

The Luckiest Archaeology Student in the World

What's more exciting than finding a Roman-era pot in the back yard of the house you just bought in Yorkshire?

Being an archaeology student and finding a Roman-era pot in the back yard of the house you just bought in Yorkshire.

Seriously. Read about it here.

What if he switches his major to Forensic Science? Will he dig up a dead body?

Better yet--Gender Studies!

The possibilities are endless.

Here's a quote from the article:

Holme-on-Spalding Moor [the location of the student's house] has a history of historic discoveries, including an Iron Age boat excavated on the banks of the River Foulness at nearby Hasholme in the 1980s.

The River Foulness?

Who named that? Gollum?

Investigative Journalism

I just did a piece on ProPublica, the new non-profit investigative journalism organization. It's starting up in January, with Paul Steiner, former editor of the Wall Street Journal at the helm. Read my article and get all the here, on HubPages.

Norman Mailer On Writing

I've had the book for two years but I'm finally reading The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, Mailer's book on writing. How edifying to learn that bouts of insecurity, financial panic, disillusionment, and disgust are normal . . . if Norman Mailer's experience could be considered normal. At least, they're not abnormal.

Here are Mailer quotes (and I'm only on pg. 57):

• when a writer can't find the nuance of an experience, he usually loads up with adjectives.


• Mega-best-seller readers want to be able to read and read and read--they do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations.


• if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a littel more, and looking for help a little less.

Peru, dateline 2000 BC

Here is a lovely picture of a deer hunt (yeah, I don't quite see it either but that's what the archaeologists say), found in Peru. What's significant is that this piece of rather sophistcated art is 4,000 years old.

I love these stories that start out with the idea that this new discovery indicates people were more "advanced" or "complex" than previously thought. Don't we ever get tired of our own pomposity?

Anyway, this 7000-foot square temple complex called Ventarron was discovered near Peru's northern desert coast, 400 miles north of Lima, according to the Yahoo/AP story.

Huffington Haiku

How did we share jokes before email? Anyone?

A friend sent me Haiku's by Ariana Huffington. She was asked by Atlantic Monthly to compose these (Why? she wonders in her blog entry. ." . . sadism, perverse sense of humor, the pleasure of hearing a Greek talking like the blind monk on Kung Fu [?]"

I copy only one here, but it's a gem:

American Idea

A fizzy mix of freedom

Are we the hiccup?

Scab Writers!

It had to happen. HollywoodScabWriter.com ("Helping Hollywood in its time of need") has short promotional videos that are well worth the few seconds of your time. Some suffer from lighting issues, but hey, he's a writer, not an electrician. They're funny, that's the main point, and how many times can we watch reruns and still laugh?

He looks familiar. . . . I think he may be up for adoption if the price is right.

News Hot, News Business Not

Catchy quotes from Tom Curley, President & CEO of AP, given during a November 1 dinner in New York and published by Editor and Publisher:

"The irony of the disrupted news economy of the 21st century is that the news is hot, but the news business is not ..."

"nothing has been invented to take the place of what reporters and committed news organizations do. Above all, it is about speaking truth to power when power most needs to be told."

"We are approaching an amazing point in the history of media. Quality will rule. With traffic to destination websites flattening and new distribution making all content accessible, we’re entering a new era of brutal competition. The best will stand out because they will be sought out. Newsrooms need to be reorganized around new content needs ..." [This seems unjustifiably rosy to me, but I willingly bow to the superior wisdom of the guy who runs AP]

"The perfect paper or newscast is becoming possible -- at least in the reader’s or viewer’s eyes. What is it you really want to know? We can personalize content now ..."

"Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs"

. . . the Mother of Invention

According to The Wooden Horse ezine, a new service called Maghound hopes to 'Netflixize' magazine readers. For about $5, you get three mags a month. $8 gets you five, and $10 gets you seven. The service will start in September '08, and is run by Time Consumer Marketing--but will offer Time's competitors too. Subscribers can change their desired magazines as often as they like, online.

You can sign up to be notified of Maghound's launch at their website.

Anything that slows the agonizing death-throes of so many (but not all!) magazines is fine with me. Why don't they just get on with rolling out the collapsible viewscreen that we will all be using in the future--you know, the one that fits in our pocket, to which all of our subscriptions will be broadcast? If we can all have Iphones, and we'd all like to "save a tree," I really wonder why this has not happened yet.

And then, magazines will have healthy readerships once more and they can start paying their freelance writers a decent rate. Would it be loverly?

Another Winner for Gall!

Another winner of A-Lot-of-Gaul Award!

This may become a regular event . . . but not just yet. I'm too lazy to design a statuette. Still, attention must be paid.

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France (Gaul) has just been voted a salary increase of 140%. He's only been in office six months and the French economy va à l'enfer, so it can't be a merit raise.

Presidential Two-steps

Being leader of the free world (do we still use that phrase?) is fine, but the important issue is--can the candidate move with panache?

Here's a link to CNN's Jeanne Moos' two-and-a-half minute video on Obama & Guiliani's dance efforts. It's cute, but you have to endure a 15-second commercial first

It must be said, however, that prowess on the dance floor is hardly a determinant for presidential ability. George Washington danced well and was a sought-after partner, according to biographers. Abraham Lincoln, otoh, was a terrible dancer.

In the movie Young Mr. Lincoln, Mary Todd (played by Ruth Gordon) tells Abe, "You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you’ve kept your word!”

WGA: Damned if you do, damned if you don't

A friend sent me the latest deliniation of writer/directorial responsibilities in the event of a WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike, from Variety.

Here are a few gems, as I read it.

• Writers who direct are screwed. If they change so much as a stage direction on a script, they can be disciplined by the WGA. If they don't change what must be changed, they can be sued for breach of contract by their producers.


• Since the DGA (Directors) has a no-strike clause, they must cross picket lines. . . but they can and should ask their producers to indemnify them as they do so, in writing. (presumably, writing such a contract would not be breaching the writing strike)


• About 1400 people belong to both unions--the WGA and DGA

I have a new appreciation of my lackluster freelance status. As far as I can tell, I cannot be sued by anyone for writing or not writing anything.

Branding

"Not too long ago only the giants of the mainstream media world—the Tom Wolfes and the Joan Didions—were bona fide media personalities. It was a class you aspired to, and few reached. "

So says an article by Doree Shafrir, "Fame and Obscurity at the New York Times," published in the New York Observer. "That was before anyone with a blog and a Flickr account could burrow into a writerly niche and, if all went according to plan, come out burnished by the soft glow of Internet fame. "

Oh, sigh, for that soft glow! But enough about me; the article goes on. To summarize the last century of journalism: "First came work, then came the brand."

Now, however, we must all be branded--an idea Shafrir traces to the 1997 article "The Brand Called You" by Tom Peters. And that includes journalists and writers.

Until the 1970s, the NY Times used bylines for only a few, front-page story reporters. Today, young tyros are hired and positioned because of their names and the following they've built up through blogs and networking sites.

I've been hearing agents and editors talk about branding and platforms since I started going to writing conferences six years ago. I keep hoping such talk will become passe. It seems to have gone mainstream and become part of the conventional wisdom that all writers must now learn. . . surely that's the last step before obsolescence?

The article is thought-provoking and touches on many elements of our me-culture. This quote stuck out:

"Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, who wrote in 2000 that personal branding is “distasteful for being blatantly ambitious, sneaky and superficial.” . . .

"Today, being “blatantly ambitious” has different overtones; we live in an era in which we’ve convinced ourselves that nearly any behavior is okay, as long as we’re up front about it. The only thing worse than blatant ambition, after all, is false modesty."

American Heritage Re-Birth

American Heritage is coming back!

Of course, that doesn't mean that it'll be the same magazine. The old American Heritage, after all, was not making money. That's why it suspended publication, right? So it stands to reason that the new owner, Edwin S. Grosvenor, will make some changes.

According to a NY Post story, those changes include hiring John F. Ross, formerly of the Smithsonian Magazine, as editor.

The Forbes family will retain 25% ownership in the magazine, which will resume publication in December 2007/January 2008.

Words o' Wisdom

You just never know when a bit of brilliance will strike.

I've never heard of Carolyn Hax, advice columnist--not surprising, since I don't read advice columns. But my eye fell on this yesterday, while skimming the articles in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section:

This is how people work: They do what they want. Consciously or not. Don't be distracted by all the colorful stuff they do or say to rationalize it.

That must either be a Zen coen or an AA maxim.

And doesn't it explain a lot about friends/family that we tend to rationalize?

Strike? Doesn't that Imply Steady Employment to Begin With?

Funny op-ed piece by Rob Long in the Los Angeles Times, about what types of writing might actually be forbidden if there is, in fact, a writer's strike. Not being a screenwriter, I usually just skim both the daily updates in the Times Calendar section and the editorials, but this made me laugh during jury duty. (the lovely patio is at the 18th St. Coffee Shop in Santa Monica, which is mentioned in Long's essay.)

As a professional writer, I've always been pretty good at not writing. Not writing, in fact, is one of my chief skills. I can not write anywhere -- on a plane, in a coffee shop, in my office -- and I often feel that a day spent without not writing is a day wasted. I even keep a notebook by the side of the bed, in case I wake up with an idea at 3 in the morning and don't want to write it down in case I don't forget it.

That first paragraph sounds a lot like 17 different advice articles I read about writing in my subscription magazines last month. Advice articles generally suck (even mine).

So, obviously, the prospect of a writers strike puts me in a curious position. Among the many proclamations and communiques issued by the leadership of the Writers Guild of America, as it marches its membership to glorious and pointless suicide, is an alarming list of things we're not supposed to do if there's a strike. Mostly, these involve some form of writing, which is something I tend not to do anyway. . . .

Read the rest here.

(Let's face it, if you want today's news on the writer-corporate studio negotiations, you must turn on the TV or computer. The paper will only tell you what sticking point were they haggling over yesterday.)

First Edition Hobbit

Here is a literary anniversary I missed last month.

On September 21, 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit: There and Back Again was published in London in a limited edition of 1500 copies, with illustrations by the author. The publication was announced in the New York Times.

One of the 1500 copies is for sale at Biblio.com, for 8,500 pounds, or $17,288. That's where I got this picture.

Wonder if it comes with pipeweed?

Congress Acts . . . on a 1915 issue

The only issue on which Congress--or at least the House--is showing consensus and dynamism is the resolution that declares Turkey's actions against Armenia a genocide.

That's true; it is. Was. in 1915, when it happened.

It's fine that Congress wants to make a grand, ethical statement.

Do they have to dig back 92 years to find something they can all agree on?

Do they have nothing else to posture over, besides deaths that occurred 92 years ago?

Will we have to wait till 2099 to see action on global warming or the defense budget?

Congress' lack of attention to the many pressing matters that threaten this country is an embarrassment. Do our representatives think we won't notice if they point a finger at the Ottoman Empire?

Should I be glad that they're not picking on gays, for once, or trying to keep women barefoot and pregnant?

Please tell me there's something better I can do with my voting rights than to support these bozos.

Ann Coulter: Give her enough rope . . .

Ooooh.

Here is what she said on CNBC, with Donny Deutsch. I'm taking this from the Editor and Publisher website, which has the transcript of the interview.

columnist/author Ann Coulter suggested that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren't any Jewish people and that they had "perfected" themselves into -- Christians."
Asked by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like "the head of Iran" and "wipe Israel off the Earth," Coulter stated: "No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. ... That's what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament."

If Ann Coulter represents Christians, I'll take the fires of Gehenna any day.

Literature Awards and Nominees

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature!
At last, someone whose work I've read! Someone I like! (especially her sci-fi)

And National Book Award Finalists include Christopher Hitchens (betcha he won't thank Jesus in his speech!) (yeah, I know, everyone else made that joke too), Sheman Alexie, and the author of a biography on Ralph Ellison, Arnold Rampersad.

Other finalists are in the AP Release. I'm gonna try to make Amazon links now.

My favorite Doris Lessing:Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 (George Sherban Emissary)
But there's also:The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition (Perennial Classics)
Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Sherman AlexieThe Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Arnold Rampersad: Ralph Ellison: A Biography

50 Best Breasts in Movie History

It's to celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It's . . . noble!

Another motivation might be to see how many pseudonyms and catchphrases the writers could find for "Bodacious Tatas."

Don't give up before the end; the last pair's the best!

At filmthreat.com.

Nobel Prizes

Men whose names I can't pronounce have won Nobel Prizes for manipulating mouse genes in ways I cannot fathom. Why would I blog about that?

Sucker for sentimentality. Here's what Yahoo says about one of the winners, Mario Capecchi:

The Nobel is a particularly striking achievement for Capecchi, (pronounced kuh-PEK'-ee). A native of Italy, he was separated from his mother at age 4 when she was taken to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner during World War II.
For four years, Capecchi lived on the street or in orphanages, "and most of the time hungry," he recalled in a University of Utah publication in 1997. Malnutrition sent him to a hospital where his mother found him on his ninth birthday. Within two weeks they left for the United States, where he went to school for the first time, starting in third grade despite not knowing English.

Queries, Emailed

Many magazines accept emailed queries nowadays--which means, they're often getting swamped with them.

I have heard that some editors, in an effort to sift the chaff, delete those queries that use free email addresses, like yahoo, gmail, sbcglobal, earthlink, verizon, and especially aol.

I can't verify this. (hey, if I could call up editors to chat and ask if this is true, why would I need to send queries out?) But it's definitely something to think about, and another good reason to get that website you've been promising yourself.

If there's any way to improve the odds of getting your queries read, do it!

Who is John Galt?

If Wikipedia and the Los Angeles Times can be believed (especially as they agree), October 12 is the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

The first time I read it, a well-meaning friend told me to "skip the philosophical parts--they go on for pages and pages." I never heard worse advice in my life! One can criticize or argue the book on many levels (bearing in mind, I hope, how groundbreaking and unprecedented it was in 1957) but don't skip a word. It is brilliant.

Everyone should read it, if only to get over it.

Radio Fatheads

O'Reilly makes racist remarks & refuses to apologize!

Limbaugh insults U.S. soldiers!

On and on . . . these blowhards live to upset you . There's only one way to shut them up--don't listen. Turn them off. Period

Wired: "Cue the Scream"

I love Wired Magazine. 95% of it goes over my head, and 3% is gorp, but that 2% that's left . . . . priceless.

A timeline in the current issue tells of all the times that a particular scream, originally dubbed into the 1951 movie Distant Drums, has been reused in films. The audio gag is called the wilhelm scream, and you can hear it here. You can also follow the timeline, as the Wilhelm scream made it into Them, the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lethal Weapon movies, Lord of the Rings, and Toy Story.

There's a compilation video at the site. Apparently over 130 movies have used it!

Rice in China, 7700 years ago

History never stays the same.

A couple of years ago, scientists and archaeologists were quite certain that people began cultivating rice in China at a certain date . . . but new discoveries have pushed that date back to 5700 B.C. (7700 years ago).

Turns out the sediments 9 to 12 feet deep, at the mouth of the Yangtze reveal that folks were building dams, burning fields to clear them, and flooding rice paddies. They may have been doing it long before the date mentioned, but by that time, the scientists say, those farmers had driven out other, older, trees and vegetation and were planting rice and cattails.

Cattails? Yuck.

The site is called Kuahuqiao, and the report is in Nature. This picture is of Kuahuqiao in 2001. Here's a transcription of a podcast, and an article in the Los Angeles Times.

Sleep-Deprived Congress

Bill Clinton (on the Daily Show) , speaking of the "sheer, physical strain on all these members of Congress.:"

"I think it makes them more edgy, I think it makes them more irritable, I think it makes them more vulnerable to being pulled back and forth by interest groups that want more conflict and less cooperation . . . I do believe sleep deprivation has a lot to do with some of the edginess of Washington today."

This comes during the last minute or so of the 6-minute video. Best reason I've heard for some of the shot-myself-in-the-foot behavior of certain Reps. They melt down, break laws, blow up, or mouth off in career-ending dramas. . . . what other explanation is there?

History Quotes

From Ken Burns, on the Daily Show:
"History is a set of questions we in the present ask of the past."

Some of my other favorite quotes on history:
Stuart Piggott: "Archaeological evidence in itself consists of the accidentally durable "
Gary Nash: "Do not try to skirt the dark, tragic episodes. If you do, you will only produce cynics. "
Arthur Schlesinger: "History is to the nation rather as memory is to the individual."

AWOL

Other commitments will keep me busy this week (Yay! That means I can buy groceries in November!)

So for anyone who wonders if I have lost interest in blogging--ix-nay, no way. In fact, I am so dedicated to writing that even though Viggo is waging the good fight nightly (au buffo, except for tattos) directly across the street, I have not invested the time or $10.50 to watch. Such dedication borders on obsession. I not only have no life, but even fantasyland is a bit dry.

Profanity censored, but not headless corpses

I may be the only squeamish person in the galaxy, but I find this weird:

Broadcasting & Cable reports that:

[Re: The War ] " PBS is feeding both an edited and unedited version of The War to stations for each of seven two-hour debut broadcasts over seven evenings, which began Sunday night. It feeds only the edited version -- minus four swear words that crop up in episodes two and five -- to stations for weekend "stacking," when some stations will run all four of the first week's episodes back-to-back, which means that they will start airing in the afternoon or even the morning.

"Why? "Because conceivably, a four-year-old could watch it,” PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan said, "and it would be going right into the teeth of the FCC." "

Umm . . . would a four-year-old not balk at the pictures of beheaded or gutted bodies, especially the ones with flies clustering over them? Would said four-year-old be oblivious to verbal descriptions of torture and mayhem?

The War is an excellent show and I hope it wins a passel o' Emmys. It is also engaging history. But cutting out four swear words and leaving in gore because "conceivably, a four-year-old could watch it" is just plain silly, and indicates that PBS--or, in truth, the FCC, to whom PBS must answer--thinks we have very distorted sensibilities.

Love, War and Sexuality

A new exhibition in Paris--Amours, Guerres, et Sexualite--shows how World Wars I and II affected the sex lives and amours of ordinary soldiers and civilians in Europe.

One review tells of engagement rings made of shrapnel, photographs and diaries, Mata Hari's travel documents, pinups, propaganda, and sex crimes--at turns touching and sentimental, or lewd, crude, and disgusting.

"Love, War and Sexuality" runs through Dec. 31 at Les Invalides in Paris and will not travel elsewhere. Here's the program in French. The website seems to be undergoing some changes and does not have the description up in English yet.

Seriously Skewed Priorities

Americans need to refocus and decide what's important.

There are no politics behind that statement. It's inspired by a new survey of over 1000 Americans in September, done by an advertising agency. The responses indicate that:

• 28% of us sacrifice time that we would have spent talking or being with freinds and family, to surf the internet


• One out of five of us--20%--has let the internet cut into our sex life.
  

Read the article here. Or go have sex. It's up to you.

Robert Ballard Talk

Dr. Robert Ballard gave a talk, showed slides, and signed books in L.A. last night. Fascinating evening if you are at all into underwater archaeology, the Black Sea, shipwrecks, WWII, or the Titanic. If you don't find those things interesting . . . why would you be reading my blog?

Dr. Ballard is the guy who found the Titanic. And the Bismarck. And the remains of PT-109 (JFK's ship). And a whole lotta other shipwrecks, including a Byzantine ship in the Black Sea, which constitutes his latest project.

The Black Sea, lacking oxygen below a certain level, preserves the wood of shipwrecks. Check out this website for more info on the most recent research trip.

Lucky me! Here's himself, signing my book (this explains why Dr. Ballard wears a baseball cap in most pictures.)

First Ever ALotOfGaul Award

How can I not bestow this? It involves both Gaul and gall!

Alexis Debat, a "self-proclaimed expert on terrorism. . . [and] regular contributor to the foreign affairs reviews Politique Internationale and National Interest, . . . a consultant for ABC News and an analyst of the prestigious Nixon Center attending conferences with the cream of the crop of American foreign policy circles. . ." (a media mover and shaker, iow) faked interviews with people like Senator Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Microsoft uberlord Bill Gates.

He also pretended he had a PhD that he never earned . . . but that's small potatoes, compared with fabricating comments from world leaders.

Read all about it at Rue89.com! The scam is highly entertaining & a bit humbling. I'm sure a screenplay is in the works. . . . I can see Gaspar Ulliel (right) as Debat. You can't get any more charmant than that.

The Gaul tie-in? He's French, of course, and folks at ABC call him "Pepe le Pew." Additionally, Debat submitted the bogus Obama interview to French Political Review Politique Internationale, who published it. Ma foix. He's also written for Figaro, presented himself as being an officer with France's Defense Ministry . . . .

BTW, the pictur of Debat (above left) is from a Nov. 7, 2005 online transcript of Jim Lehrer's NewsHour on PBS. Lehrer introduces the talking head as:

"Alexis Debat, a contributing editor to the National Interest and a consultant for ABC News. He was a French defense ministry official and social worker before moving to the U.S.."

I want to ghostwrite his bio. But what does he need ghostwriters for?

Archaology News--Guilt-free and Time-Consuming!

The news is often so demoralizing that I enjoy most the keyword feed on my Yahoo home page--and my keyword happens to be "archaeology."

Today, for example, there's the BBC announcement that the 3,500-year-old remains of a child were found "at Pode Hole Quarry, in Thorney, near Peterborough," which is apparently near the edge of the Fens. This makes it Bronze Age, about 1500 B.C. Jewelry and a mat show it to be a formal burial, but beyond that there's not too much to say until a lot of tests are done.

Finding ancient remains--in bogs, salt fields, or ancient graves--must be a fascinating occupation. To paraphrase some bon vivant: I like my men like I like my whiskey: aged and fermented.

Also, there is a detailed obituary about Gene Savoy, the "real Indian Jones" who died last week. Savoy located over 40 stone cities of the Incas, and made discoveries about the Aztecs and transportation.

"Scientists thought the existence of these cities and settlements in the Peruvian rainforest was all a myth until my father found them," his son Sean Savoy said. "His discoveries opened up a whole new area of jungle archaeology that didn't exist before."

He also had some pretty wild religious theories.

It's much more interesting than who won the Emmys (since I rarely watch sitcoms!) and less depressing than the tales of mayhem from Iraq or Darfur.

And safer and guilt-free. After all, archaeological finds involve the long-dead, whether bodies or civilizations. They're gone. They've been gone for centuries. They can't make you wonder if maybe you could've done more.

Unavailable and Proud of It

Do you remember where you were the first time that you realized the person talking into thin air was not crazy or addressing you? Unless you're in middle school, you should.

My first time was in a bathroom stall at a store. I knew there was only one other woman in there, and she was close enough that when she said, "Hello? How you doing?" I thought: Well, this is odd, but there's no call to be rude.

So I said, "Fine, thank you."

And she said, "What? Hold on just a minute, honey, someone is saying something to me. What?"

And suddenly, I was the loony one, talking to a stranger in the bathroom stall.

Now I think nothing of people talking, giggling, and even shouting to themselves. I know that just out of sight is a phone. We all walk around like novice Borgs with our bluetooths embedded, trying to carry on a face-to-face while never really certain that we have even a fourth of the other person's attention.

We are a funny group of clowns.

Thank you, Geoff Fox, for having a picture of a non-model, bluetooth-wearing driver on your blog.

American Native Spirits

Say "America's Native Spirit" to anyone who studied history on the college level, and they will think of Indian religiosity. Clearly, we've been spending too much time in the library.

In this case, the US Senate used the phrase while declaring September to be National Bourbon Heritage Month. (No, it has nothing to do with the French family. Get your mind out of the study carrels. )

According to TheLiquidMuse, The US Senate invested the time from their packed schedule in order to:

"reinforce bourbon as “America’s Native Spirit.” In doing so, it celebrates the family heritage, tradition and deep-rooted legacy that the bourbon industry contributes to the United States."

Clever Senate. . . turning bourbon swilling into a family value. I'll drink to that!

Out of patriotism, I offer these other sites to learn about the history of bourbon:

• About.com's Bourbon History


• Rip VanWinkle Distillery's History of Bourbon


• CocktailTime's History of Bourbon (these pages are probably starting to all sound alike)


• R. T. Shawhan's History of Bourbon Whiskey (with quite a lot of family lore thrown it. Have another shot ready while you read)

You can read more about the Kentucky Bourbon Festival in mid-September here.

In Praise of Mosquitoes

Wisdom from the late Anita Roddick, eco-conscious and socially responsible founder of The Body Shop:

If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.

The Infomaniac was good enough to post that, with a small testimonial.

So of course I had to find a picture of a cute mosquito to adorn the post, which was surprisingly easy. Dr. Seuss, thank you. This drawing of Ann the mosquito was part of a service document on malaria done for the troops during WWII.

Where Does the Cardinal Live?

According to the Catholic Reporter, the Los Angeles archdiocese sponsored a Religious Education Conference in February 1998. One of the speakers was Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, MI, who “met with roaring applause . . . when a presenter described Untener’s decision to sell the bishop’s residence and live from parish to parish in his diocese.”

Bishop Untenor had sold the residence in 1980. From then on, he worked from his car and office, staying in parish rectories for weeks or months at a time. He did this for 24 years, the entire time he was Bishop of Saginaw, until he died in 2004.

Here's another story, from the Los Angeles Times.

Three nuns in a small convent in Santa Barbara, owned by the archdiocese of Los Angeles, are being evicted. They are 69, 55, and 49 years old. Their home is being sold to help pay for the $660 million pedophile priest settlement agreed to by the archdiocese of Los Angeles. At least $250 million of that must come from the archdiocese itself; insurance will pick up the rest.

The archdiocese, which five years ago completed the building of a $189.7 million cathedral on a downtown site that cost an additional $10.85 million, is selling off other properties. The 12-story administration building it occupies is for sale, for example. But it is the home of these nuns, who were in no way involved in crimes, lawsuits, or settlement, that has caught the public's attention.

Putting the elements together, I cannot help but wonder where Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who refers to himself as the "Chief Shepherd of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles," lives.

I don't want his home address, of course (I'm sure that secret is as sacred as the confession of a . . . no, never mind.)

But I do wonder if the Cardinal is setting the example for the nuns and others who must give up their homes to pay for the crimes of others. Is he downscaling? Has he considered doing as Bishop Untener did?

Such a gesture might go a long way to restoring credibility and respect to his office.

As a well fills in darkness from forgotten rains . . .

That's a line from the poem Ever Since by Archibald MacLeish. Or rather, a bit of two lines:

What do you remember thinking back?

What do you think of at dusk in the slack

Evening when the mind refills

With the cool past as a well fills in

Darkness from forgotten rains?

Beautiful images--it goes on for 6 more stanzas.

I don't think writers' minds refill with the cool past in the slack evening.

What refills my well is exposure to beautiful, imaginative sights. I went to an art museum today, heard a bagpipe player last night, and have spent an hour or so each evening enjoying the super-deluxe expanded version of Lord of the Ring, with all its glorious appendices.

My mind is flooding, thank you!

Paris, Je T'aime . . . but I can't commit

Movie critics, beware: I am flexing my opinion.

Paris, Je T'aime is 18 shorts, directed by 18 different people, featuring 18 different casts and writers. Each is set in a different arrondisement of Paris, and the idea (I think) is to celebrate the city.

Some succeed nicely--like the vampire romance on the bank of the Seine, starring Elijah Wood.

Remember the Highlander TV show, when Duncan McLeod (Adrian -sigh- Paul) lived on a barge on the Seine, which just had to be the coolest digs, ever? Believe it or not, this gothic, funny bit with its long stairs and blue-black night conjured up the same wanna-be-there aura.

Mostly though, the movie evoked the overwhelming, alienating isolation of a huge city. Sometimes it was poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes gallicly obscure, but in the end, I did not love Paris as much as my poor romantic self used to. It's a harsh, big world.

My Kingdom for a Time Machine

If I had a time machine, I could go back to the 1920s and make a ton of money investing, then hold onto it by pulling out of the stock market before it crashed in October 1929. Or I could invest in little start-ups like that company Henry Ford ran, or Microsoft, or even Starbucks Coffee.

So I wonder what a future generation would do with us, if they develop a time machine. What opportunities am I missing right now?

Here are some headlines from Mediabistro that make me wonder:

• NBC in Deal With Amazon to Sell Shows on the Web (NYT) NBC Universal significantly deepened its relationship with Amazon's digital video download service after a dispute with Apple over the pricing of television shows on iTunes. . . .


• Yahoo! to Buy BlueLithium for $300M (AdWeek)Yahoo! became the latest large Internet player to buy an ad network . . .


• Babelgum's Contrarian Approach to Web TV (BusinessWeek)Take a look at how the Internet TV market is developing and you can bet that Babelgum, a free, global Internet TV and video-on-demand service, will be taking the opposite approach . . .

Huh? I have no clue what any of these stories are about. In twenty years, will I be saying "Yeah, I coulda bought inta BlueLithium back before it really took off, . . . 'cept I didn't know BlueLithium from boba back then."

I feel very, very old. Kinda like the Amish guy in the carriage, being passed by all those fancy cars . . . except, without the comfort of moral certitude.

Reclusive Authors

This article in the Los Angeles Times gives an overview of what we know or guess about famous reclusive authors--like Harper Lee, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon.

Why do they avoid the limelight?

"Smug, sensitive, too cool. . . " the paper wonders. ". . . arrogance, sensitivity, or a noble dissent -- a high-minded refusal to engage with America's culture of celebrity, erosion of privacy and self-promotion. . . ."

Book editor Arthur Salm provides wisdom:

"Reclusive writers are living perfectly reasonable lives," he said. "The fact that they're reclusive isn't the phenomenon: The phenomenon is our reaction to the fact that they're living normal lives. "

With a Name Like Jason Ur . . .

. . . How could he NOT be a noted Archaeologist? Ur? Jason? That's cosmic.

As WhyFiles and other news sites note, Professor Ur of Harvard has published an article in Science titled "Early Urban Development in the Near East."
This pictures shows the suface of Tell Brak in Syria, site of Professor Ur's study, covered with pottery pieces. These pieces help date and locate ancient villages.

Three or four thousand years ago, cities emerged in the Middle East. The logical assumption has always been that a few huts grew into a village, which over the years grew bigger until it could be called a city.

Professor Ur says that in come cases, a set of villages that formed a ring simple filled in the empty spaces between them (again, over many years) and grew inward to form a city.

It's a brilliant and innovative idea, and it must be true because the author has such a cool name.