African American National Biography

I'm in a publication I can't even afford to buy. How cool is that?

The African American National Biography: 8-Volume Set costs $795. I'll autograph your copy if you buy a set. I wrote the bio's on Andres Pico and Stephen Spencer Hill, if anyone is interested.

The glowing write-up in the Los Angeles Times talks about why the book is written and what it covers, but it isn't a review. It's actually a reprint of an article that ran in the Washington Post. Another piece about the series is in the Library Journal. Here's one from the History News Network.

In addition, here's the Oxford University page on AANB, but it can be bought through Amazon as well.

Neolithic Allee Couverte

The Allee Couverte Du Mouhau Bihan sits on private property in Finisterre Dept., Brittany, France. It wasn't put up by Celts (or Gauls), but by the Neolithic people that preceded them.

It's about 5,000 years old, and you get a sense of its size by the children climbing on the far end. The entrance is lined up with the north.

Some of the stones are carved inside with what could be spearheads, or shepherd's crooks...or may mean something else entirely.

Brittany is full of megalithic structures--from the rows of stones at Carnac to single menhirs, to allees couvertes like this. Legend says it was once the grave of a giant.

Very few guidebooks tell much about these archaeological wonders and I can't understand why; what could be more fascinating than to touch and enter a structure raised and carved 5,000 years ago? I've found one, priceless, thoroughly researched guide, though--not on the travel shelves, but something to request from academic libraries

The Archaeology of Brittany, Normandy and the Channel Islands: An Introduction and Guide by Barbara Bender. Only problem is that it's now 22 years old.

Writers and Paychecks

Every freelancer has probably been stiffed for work delivered, and even published. I recall two small magazines that went out of business right after September 11th. Neither was in New York, but the problem was advertisers. They pulled out and cut back, so magazines that had been on precarious footing just crumbled.

Writers and other creditors went unpaid. Does this happen so regularly in other industries? I think not.

These were small operations--one person, the owner, put in 16 hour days editing (badly), schmoozing, selling ads, and distributing the magazine. That person probably lost their proverbial shirt when forced to fold, so the $50 or $75 owed to little ol' me seems too trite to complain about.

I'm less sympathetic when I read about the woes of OverTime, a glossy that, as far as I can tell, is still soliciting work from writers even though it owes over $100,000 in unpaid fees to freelancers and others who've rendered services. This publication's fiscal woes are documented in a MediaBistro article here.

Do owners of magazines assume that freelancers must have day jobs, and therefore don't need the money? Or are all freelancers pictured as vagabonds with no strings, crashing on friends' sofas between gigs?

We need a real union. It's disgusting, ridiculous, and entirely inappropriate that people of real talent are abused this way. Most of us would make more money if we joined the line of men loitering outside the lawnmower-rental shop, hoping for day jobs.

I root for the WGA, even though I've never had the slightest inclination to pen a screenplay. At least some writers are getting respect. They have had and will eventually get a fair deal and a decent paycheck. The rest of us cling to the hope that--in our long-range plans--a miracle will occur.

Looting Archaeological Sites: It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

A front page story in the Los Angeles Times of Jan. 22, 2008 (where this photo appeared) tells of the looting going on at nearly 12,000 sites in Iraq.

What do the looters get? According to the times, "coins, jewelry and fragile clay tablets etched in wedge-like cuneiform script, recording myths, decrees, business transactions and other details of Mesopotamian life."

Professor Elizabeth Stone of SUNY estimates that looters have torn up 167 million square feet.

It's not my country, and I am more upset about the loss of life in Iraq than the looting--or I try to be. Still, this is appalling. 4000-year-old remains and detritus do not grow on trees.

Once dug up, the context is loss. Most of what we could have learned is destroyed. The vase/statue/seal/pot sat there for 4000 years, but some poor schmuck who keeps a shop by day digs a pit, takes what he can, and it's gone, along with the chance to know more.

Doris Lessing and Reading

Doris Lessing didn't travel to Sweden last December to personally accept her Nobel Prize for Literature, but her acceptance lecture was delivered and can be found online.

It's lengthy, but reads like scenes from her novels. She begins with a trip to Zimbabwe in the 80's, where students (some who were adults) begged for books--they had none. She contrasts that with an immediate visit to a British boys school, very elite, where she learns that most of the students don't use the library and rarely read. Here's a quote:

"We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

I've worked with so many engineers and scientists--most with PhDs--who never, ever picked up a book for fun. Not all, of course--there were many who loved scifi or poetry, etc. But the idea of large numbers of well-educated men and women who never learned to enjoy reading, who use it only as a tool when information is necessary, is disheartening.

There's reason for optimism, though. Let's all kiss the ground J.K. Rowling walks on for getting kids (and some adults!) to read again. And how many people tackled Lord of the Rings because they couldn't wait for movies 2 and 3, after being entranced by the first film?

Mediabistro Plug

Argh . . . just learned you have to be a member to see the entire article referenced in the previous post. Sorry!

IMHO, the money spent for a Mediabistro membership is well-invested for any part or full-time writer--though I admit I live a major city where I can take advantage of their classes and get-togethers (including a short-lived bowling league). Check them out; they have dozens of in-depth "How to Pitch" guidelines for magazines and agents, as well as online how-to's, a job board, daily industry news, etc.

The article, btw, is full of advice from experienced, full-time writers whose work appears in major glossies and newspapers. The advice is about growing your business, marketing through both slow and busy times, diversifying, work discipline, and timing your pitches. That last covers two topics: both when to pitch (Christmas vacation? August? Should I avoid Monday mornings?) and how much lead time to allow on a pitch (6 months to a year for most magazines).

Good Freelance Advice

Mediabistro.com just epublished an excellent article on the boom-and-bust cycles of freelancing, and how to weather them. The piece (by Jenny Cromie) is titled "More Flow, Less Ebb: Breaking the Feast-or-Famine Freelance Cycle."

And there you have it. Ebb and flo, feast or famine, boom and bust. The three major cliches that describe freelancing, the US economy, and the California housing market, all in one.

Nothing else needs to be said, so I'll shut up.

The State of Journalism

What We Call the News | Funny Jokes at JibJab

One Friend's Humor is Another's Spam

I used to love getting email jokes, links, slideshows--as long as I hadn't seen them twice already.

Now my inbox is filled with emails beginning with the characters "FW: Funny. . . " because I just don't have time to read jokes. There may be some delightfully weird and unique gems in there--but I JUST DON'T HAVE TIME!

Why is that?

I suspect that such emails used to serve as a subversive break from my paid job. Now I don't have a paid job. There is no "man" to stick it to. No corporate Big Brother to sneak around. No fatuous stuffed shirt to hear "Take this job and shove it!"

There's just me and my PC.

This wise photo is from morguefile.com, courtesy of Scottliddell.net. A good reminder that not all my work ties me to my PC!

My world seems to have a tri-part division these days. There's work I love, work I'm not so crazy about, and there's looking for work.

If I take time from any of these, I have to pay it back or I may not have money for gas next month. Accurate or not, that's become my mindset.

People will warn you, when you go freelance, not to waste too much time or take too many days off. Yes, that's a real temptation, and a dangerous one.

The opposite can happen too: when you work at home, you never really clock out.

Winning the lottery would solve so many of these low-level problems. . . . I really should buy a ticket once in a while.

If Margaret Mitchell Wrote the Harry Potter Books. . .

If Margaret Mitchell (who wrote Gone With the Wind) had written Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book 1)the first line would be:

"Angelina Spinnet was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Weasley twins were.”

This is an email waiting to be created and flue'd through the ethereal world of spam jokes.

Someone take up the torch! Someone who can imitate Papa Hemingway, Robert James Waller (Bridges of Madison County), and all those writers with distinctive, stylized, unique voices.

Ray Bradbury on the Picket Line

This picture is from Mediabistro's Fishbowl LA Blog. But they give no caption other than the fact that, yup, Ray Bradbury is carrying a picket sign outside of Fox Studios.

Ray Bradbury, besides being a wonderful writer, speaks every May at the Southwest Manuscripters Club in Torrance, California--strike or no strike, stroke or no stroke. He's been doing it for 50 years. Why? Because that club invited him to speak when he was unknown.

So if you have a club and need speakers, take a chance. You may become famous for it.

Without Writers, They're Still Funny

Here's Stephen Colbert's take on the absence of writers in his first show back. No Writers? "How does that affect me?"

And on A Daily Show, (A, not THE. The Daily Show is produced with writers) Jon Stewart did his customary "W'sup, Stephen Colbert?" segment just before closing. Colbert spouted a long beard.

I demand credit, that was my gag!

OK, so it's the most obvious thing in the world. I still want credit. Just a little wink and a "Thanks, A Lot Of Gaul!" will do.

For being unscripted, both shows were extremely funny. I miss the biting and scathing one-liners that followed political sound bites, so there's still a reason to look forward to the settling of the WGA strike.

Bad Signs and a Gripe

Like most freelancers, I notice that my query letters and applications over the last couple of years merit fewer responses. Yay or nay doesn't matter--lately, there's just no answer at all.

There is no good excuse for this lack of professional courtesy--a form email would do. But let's face it, we get zilch, and get over it.

I do realize that editors are busier than ever, and wearing more hats than before.

When I compare the author names from front-of-the-book pieces and articles with a magazine's masthead, I see that more and more, editors and staffers are producing the stories. They're probably overworked already.

A month ago, I answered an ad for freelancers for an online publication. The editor who responded (bless him! he took the time to respond!) professed surprise at the writing quality of the applicants, and wondered why so much of what he read online was poorly written.

Well, criminy--his company was offering decent pay! A lot of what appears online is written for free or for very little pay.

Look at Wikipedia. Some of the articles are awful or inaccurate; others detailed and well-researched. But you can't bank on any of their so-called facts without verifying them elsewhere.

You get what you pay for. I wonder how long it's going to take for this iota of conventional wisdom to permeate through the internet.

Hats are available at StewartFerris.com or The Writers' Store.

Print Paper Readership Down in UK Too

According to this Guardian Unlimited story, readers of newspapers fell almost 20 % over 14 years.

Specifically, a government-sponsored readership survey found that adults reading at least one national print newspaper a day in the UK fell from 26.7 million in 1992, to 21.7 million in 2006. That's a drop of 5 million readers. In terms of adult population, the statistic went from 59% in 1992 to 45% in 2006.

There were a couple of exceptions: The Times and Daily Mail boosted their readership in that period. According to the story, the Times accomplished this by "an aggressive cost-cutting strategy in the mid-1990s." (Yeah, like that explains the boost in circulation. What newspaper hasn't tried to stop the bleeding by an aggressive cost-cutting strategy? But their readership doesn't usually go up, so there's got to be another bit o' information.)

Other stories (like this one) point to bumps in online readership for some papers. But does that mean people are reading the papers regularly? OTOH, does a subscription mean you read your paper regularly?

I hate that cliche 'paradigm shift' but I'd rather use it than wail and moan about declining circulation. Times are changing and writers need to do our best to keep up or even anticipate where the paying work is going to be. For the record, I'm proving abysmal at this--like many others!

Not Writing Causes Facial Hair!

Viewers of David Letterman and Conan O'Brien (and sort of Craig Ferguson) confirm that 8 weeks without writers has caused excess facial hair to grow on the well-known mugs of late-night TV hosts.

Finally, I understand why there are no late-night female hosts. It's just too dangerous.

I can't wait for The Daily Show and the Colbert Report to return, writers or no.

I'm lying. Without writers, who cares?

I just wanted an excuse to show off my expertise with a basic paint program.

How much more writing of all kinds: novels, book proposals, bio's, poetry, flash fiction, etc., is being done now that television has no newly-written shows to entice us from our desks?

And wouldn't it be nice if not just screenwriters, but all writers, started getting decent pay and contracts? Treated like contributors instead of pests? Maybe even had their emails answered?

Pass the other tequila bottle, por favor. I themptied vis one.

Battle of the Sabis

Seems like a thousand years (or a bit over 30 generations) since I had occasion to actually write about Gaul. Here, though, is Livius' marvellous website devoted to the Battle of the Sabis, the 57 BC fight between Julius Caesar's legions and the Nervian Confederacy of Northern Gaul (Belgium, they called it--but it was a much broader swath of land that what we call Belgium today.)

The pictures on that site--including my favorite here, which belongs to Livius & is © Marco Prins and Jona Lendering--are of the Selle River. As I understand it, other locations have their adherants, and no discoveries have settled the matter. No battlefield remnants have been found, IOW. I think the Escault River is another possible site.

Still, these pictures are great, very well researched, and fit all that is known about the Sabis River site. Except . . .

. . . well, the picture right above is, according to the site, a hill called Le Quesnoy, and the spot where Caesar's 10th Legion had parked. A hill? Seriously? The "slope" to the right leads down to the river.

Here is what Caesar says, according to my copy of The Conquest of Gaul:

"2:18 At the place that the Romans had chosen for their camp a hill sloped down evenly from its summit to the Sambre. Opposite it, on the other side of the river, rose another hill with a similar gradient, on the lower slope of which were three hundred yards of open ground. . ."

Sambre was the Roman's name for the river.

The Livius site says this last picture looks from the Nervian side of the river, looking toward where the 12th and 7th legions of Rome assembled. Here, yes, I do see a hill. However, most of the landscape in the pictures (and there are over a dozen) show land I consider pretty flat.

In fact, I will throw in the small version of a last picture, showing the Nervian campsite. Remember, this is supposed to be a similar hill, with 300 yards of open ground on its lower slope.

I guess the jury's still out.

Battle of the Top Tens

National Geographic now has a top ten archaeological stories of 2007. Were the Archaeology Magazine picks (previous post) not good enough?

Apparently not, since NG doesn't agree. Their list has stories about Hatshepsut (you can see my hubpage on that), Stonehenge settlements, plague graves on a Venetian island, the Lupercal cave in Rome--in fact, not one story matches Archaeology's top ten.

Which is, actually, really cool. That means 2007 was a great year for discoveries and new info, and there's double the reading for us armchair history lovers.

The picture is of a large Stonehenge house, one of two big buildings out of eight excavated. Either it belonged to someone important, or was used for ritual purposes.

Archaeology's Top Ten of 2007

Archaeology Magazine lists the top ten discoveries for 2007 online and in its Jan-Feb issue. They include new dating on Clovis points, discoveries at Tell Brak, Syria, Chankillo, Peru (& the squash seeds in Peru), Anghor, Cambodia, and Lismullin, Ireland, where a big Iron Age settlement was found within a mile of Tara.

That last one is pictured at right.
Highway workers found a henge--a ceremonial enclosure--dating back 2000 years.

People are irate over this: Lismullin is scheduled for demolition, like other towns along the M3 path. The EU is actually taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice over this! Yay! Here's the magazine link, and here's the Save Tara website.

In late November, those highway workers made another significant find: a carved stone probably dating back to the time that Newgrange was constructed, some 5000 years. Here's the story.

And here's the picture.

Also in the past few weeks, in Collierstown in the same vicinity, 60 bodies were unearthed, buried in a concentric circle. At another village, Roestown, a prehistoric game board, beads and jewelry--including gold torcs--were excavated. Here's a really interesting website that charts information of all the discoveries made in the area. Those discoveries include graves, mounds, filled-in ditches, homes and work areas that date back to the Bronze Age and before, all the way up to Medieval era.

Right. Who wouldn't want to run a highway through that?

That last website is maintained by the highway authorities. They state that the point of the excavation is: "should you so want to you could recreate the site. "

Recreation, not preservation. That's sad.

Site at Risk? Buy it Yourself!

Love this: a 33-acre archaeological site north of Austin, TX has been bought by one of the professors fighting to preserve it. The prof, one Michael Collins, then gave the parcel of land to the Archaeological Conservancy.

Like most college professors, Collins is not extravagantly wealthy. He cashed out his personal savings to close the sale.

The Gault site, as it's called, "was one of the major areas of activity for the Clovis people in North America and contains relics that are as many as 13,500 years old." That quote is from the American-Statesman web article. The Gault site was first worked over 1929 by University of Texas archaeologists, who loved the place so much they kept coming back. Here's a link to the UT website about Gault.

Even more spectacular--don't you agree that a site, used for several centuries some 13,000 years ago by mammoth hunters is spectacular?--is that in 2002, the University of Texas archaeologists found artefacts that predate Clovis.

(Clovis is defined by certain types of arrow and spearheads, originally discovered in Clovis, NM. The pictured points are from the Gault site, according to an About.com article. For a long time, archaeologists insisted that Clovis people were the first in North America, and nothing could predate them. But excavations elsewhere--like Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania--are chipping away at this belief.)

UI Profs find Captain Kidd's Last Ship!

Newspapers and AP, ScienceDaily, and all other outlets would have you believe that the big news is that buccaneer Captain Kidd's ship has been found!

No. The big news is that Captain Kidd's ship was found and Robert Ballard had nothing to do with it. :->

The finders are an underwater archaeology team from Indiana University. They say that:

"The barnacled cannons and anchors found stacked beneath just 10 feet of crystalline coastal waters off Catalina Island [part of the Dominican Republic] are believed to be the wreckage of the Quedagh Merchant, a ship abandoned by the Scottish privateer in 1699."

The sunken ship is unlooted, but it wasn't holding treasure when it was sunk. The Quedagh Merchant was intentionally scuttled and burned after Kidd left it. He was on his way to New York to try (unsuccessfully) to clear his name. He was hung for piracy in 1701.

It was holding gold, silver, satin, and silk when Kidd siezed it south of the Indian coast a year earlier, however. Kidd had plenty of time to sell off some of its riches and bury the rest.

That's Dr. Charles Beeker, director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs in IU Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, in the photo.

The plan is to explore it for the historical record, then set up an underwater preserve, accessible to snorkelers and divers. According the news story, the Dominican government has done this with other shipwrecks in its waters. Much more on the collaboration between the government and university is in the ScienceDaily story.

Plagiarism: OK if You've Already Got the PhD

The Washington Post, citing 02138 Magazine as its source, exposes the practice of celebrity professors at Harvard, who produce an unbelievable number of books while fulfilling their teaching responsibilities. . . . and while keeping their face in the press with interviews, tours, and talking head appearances.

(You have to scroll to the second story on the WaPo page, btw. )

F’rinstance Alan Deshowitz, Law Professor, has published a dozen books since 2000.

Now, I couldn’t write a dozen books in 7 years if I did absolutely nothing else but work on them day and night. Most authors couldn’t. (a million monkeys, maybe.)

Jacob Hale Russell (of 02138) says Dershowitz pays a couple of full-time researchers and 3 or 4 part-timers $11.50 an hour to churn these books out. Dershowitz also repackages his own published text and chapters under new titles. It's legal.

Another Harvard Law Prof, Charles Ogletree,was not too disturbed when others found that his book contained several uncited paragraphs of another author's published text. Ogletree used the old “my research assistant copied text verbatim from another source and another assistant accidently left out the attribution while typing” excuse. That's gotten a lot of mileage lately, but the academic community doesn't seem to mind.

As Peter Carlson of WaPo observes, students get expelled for such antics. It’s called plagiarism, and you’d think law professors—especially as their value lies in their rep—would put themselves above suspicion. You'd think that their peers, at least, would demand that.

Of course, you’d think historians like Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin would review the text from their books as well, removing passages lifted whole from other authors. But they used the same excuse—my research assistants wrote it and forgot the attribution.

Look, if your research assistants are writing your books, their names should be on the spine.

The practice of sending out underpaid grad students to compile books that will sell because a noted scholar—honest or not—is listed as the author has apparently become acceptable. I find it vile and shameful.

For the record, none of my professors ever did anything like that.

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.