A terra
cotta head found in Mexico dates to about 1800 years ago. It was
buried in Mexico no later than 1510--before the Spanish invasion--and
is pretty clearly Roman. The
question is how much this implies about contact between Europe and
Meso-America before Columbus: an artifact taken from a shipwreck means
something very different from one given or traded by the ship's crew.
A
sample
chapter of Pat Murphy's novel There and Back Again.
The title should give you a good idea of the style and set-up,
but this is definitely science fiction, complete with steam-powered
rocketships and wormholes through space.
People
keep telling me that, now that it's 2000, we're living in
the future, but it looks
a lot like the
present
from here.
The
Onion presents a variety of opinions about the
First
Bank of Walmart.
Jon Carroll has something new to say about the
intrusive
media coverage of plane crashes and other public
tragedies.
These
people take
peaches
seriously!
Magician Doug Henning has
died
of cancer. He may not have been the greatest magician
of his time, but he's the one who made an impression on me: I
think his Magic Show was both the first professional
magic I saw live, and the first show I saw on Broadway. Theater has
proven to be a more enduring interest, but
the childlike pleasure of those illusions remains as well.
I could have started in many worse places.
For
some patients, a
glass
of water is an effective blood pressure drug.
A serious site and a silly one, this morning.
First, the serious: a massive collection of
links
related to alt.religion.scientology.
On the lighter side:
squirrel
hazing, and what you can do about it.
Freedom
of the press belongs to those who own one, and the people
who own one seem to be determined to
discredit
Vice President Gore, even if doing so requires them to
invent quotes and then accuse him of lying, while blithely
insisting that their own inaccuracies don't matter. [via Red
Rock Eaters]
Marylaine Block discusses the ways
drugs
make us stupid.
Salon has a good article about, and
interview
with, Daniel Pinkwater, including the importance of food in
his writing and why it's good to keep reading children's books.
For you
Moxy Fruvous fans, you can
Ask
Dave's head questions, and get (sometimes relevant) lyrics
in reply.
A US presidential
candidate nobody has ever heard of: Heather Anne Harder's
list of position statements includes one on
UFOs.
At least
it's not an architecture prize: the
World
Trade Center has been named Office Building of the Year
by an organization that is impressed by how well it's run. Okay, but
it's still a pair of ugly boxes.
A new theory of
ball
lightning suggests that it's not lightning at all: it's burning
silicon, generated from soil as an effect of lightning. Like previous
theories on the subject, however, this one awaits testing.
The basic problem is that nobody can generate ball lightning,
which makes it hard to analyze: it floats around when it feels
like, not when the researchers are there.
Animals can
harbor,
and pass on, viral diseases without having detectable virus
in their blood. This finding further complicates efforts to
control such diseases as dengue and Japanese encephalitis.
I'd just
like to note that Punxsutawney Phil, whose job is to tell us
whether there will be six more weeks of winter, is the world's
oldest groundhog, by about a century. Oh, and that if there
are only six weeks of winter after Groundhog Day in New York City,
let alone most of the surrounding region where they report on
this stuff, it would be a very early Spring,
Go
Taikonauts!" is an unofficial but thorough page on the
Chinese space program. Taikonaut is a half-Chinese, half-Greek
term that the author is promoting to refer to Chinese
space travelers. China has yet to launch a
spacecraft with humans in it, but taikonauts have been trained,
and may be launched (in a vehicle based on the Russian Soyuz)
to celebrate the Year of the Dragon. Gung hei fat choi!
I tend to assume my readers are looking at other Web logs,
but in case you haven't heard that DoubleClick is now tracking
people by name--or, for the suspicious, is now admitting that
it does so--here's the
Privacy
Forum that discusses it.
Doubleclick's Web page,
incidentally, bills it as "The Global Internet Advertising Solutions
Company, but it seems pretty clear that they are, in fact,
a large part of the problem.
The
Kansas City Star reports that Catholic priests
in the US are
dying
of AIDS at four times the rate of the general population. The
summary picked up by the AP made the statistic look dubious--it
focused on a survey of how many priests knew a priest who had
AIDS--but the Star looked at actual death rates among
priests and in the population as a whole. Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
says part of the problem is that
Gay priests and heterosexual priests didn't know how to handle their sexuality, their sexual drive. And so they would handle it in ways that were not healthy.How to be celibate and to be gay at the same time, and how to be celibate and heterosexual at the same time, that's what we were never really taught how to do. And that was a major failing.
We may soon be
planting
crabgrass in contaminated soil, not because there's no other use
for the land but because the crabgrass helps clean it up.
Anti-Slavery is working
to end slavery throughout the world.
A Web log is a clipping service without portfolio, in which someone collects things she (or he) finds interesting and passes them along. Sort of a primitive version of an anthology: none of the material is actually in the log, all you get is the pointers.
The inspiration for this Web log is Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log, which is well worth a look, and not just because Raphael has been doing this quite a bit longer than I have. Web loggers all seem to read each other's work, but I'm trying not to duplicate too much of what I see elsewhere.
YAWL is broken up into chunks based on size; at the moment that seems to be working out to about two weeks per section. The newest links in each segment are at the top of the page, of course. Stale links are in the nature of such a project, but please let me know if any new links appear broken. Note: dates given here are when I add an item to the log; items are added when I notice them, not necessarily when they first reach the Web.
YAWL is updated most weekdays (sometimes more than once a day) and occasionally on weekends. (For some reason, less of the material I'm interested in is posted on weekends.) However, this is purely an amateur project. If there are no updates for a few days, that might mean I'm traveling or otherwise busy, and not surfing the Web, or just that I haven't come across anything that seems to belong here.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.