Stonehenge May Have Been a Temple, say archaeologists

One of the advantages, or perhaps drawbacks, of being older than dirt is that I remember the newsflashes and stop presses of today from the first time they came around. Actually, I take that back. Some of them have probably been going around as New News since before I was born.

I had to literally stop reading New Scientist, which I'd read since I was a kid, when I swear to God it started having articles along the lines of "Stop Press DNA Might Be Genetic Material Says Controversial Scientist" and/or "Scientists Divided Over Ramifications of Carbon Based Life-forms Recently Discovered on Earth".

Of course I didn't take any notes, I just tossed them aside with a so-what, so I can't vouch for those being the actual headlines. They were equally earth-shattering, anyway.

I thought I'd keep notes the next time one of these Shock-Horror stories came up, and there's one today.

The headline is Stonehenge excavation may alter history which got my goat straight away, since of course an excavation can't alter history. Unless the thing they excavated was a time machine and they went back in time and caused the Allies to win WWII or something. But even if they did, when they got back, everybody would have grown up with it, so they wouldn't be impressed when they said they'd altered history. It would be the same old history to everybody else. I fully expect New Scientist to discover this blog post and write an article next month saying, "Time paradoxes may occur if time travel becomes reality, says controversial scientist".

Anyway, after the misleading title, the article says, and I quote,

A new excavation of Stonehenge may alter historians' concept of the British landmark site's purpose, researchers say. By studying a set of unusual stones linked to the historical site, a team of archaeologists are attempting to prove Stonehenge was not an ancient burial site, but actually a temple of healing, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

That's pretty earth-shattering, right? Stonehenge might be a temple, not a burial site. Stop the press!

But...wait, hasn't it always been understood to be a temple and not a burial site? Luckily the same article is standing by to clear up the inevitable fog of confusion. It says,

"I think the one thing everybody would agree on is that Stonehenge is a temple, which is easy to lose sight of in the kind of to-ing and fro-ing of ideas."

So, there you have it. Today's big controversy is that archaeologists are proving Stonehenge was a temple, completely overturning the previous theory that it was a temple.

It's no wonder people find the whirl of progress overwhelming these days. I can't keep up myself.

LOLSaturn

Gods are just big cats, really.



Click for larger picture.

Eating Octopuses

In my January post, Octopuses and my Douglas Adams-Style Theory Of Teh Intarwebs , I described a natural law, a corollary of sorts to Godwin's Law, which mainly concerned the plural of octopus.

About a particular thread, I wrote, "The comments section is fascinating. As all comments threads on Octopuses are required to do by Federal Law, it eventually breaks down into a gigantic argument about the plural of octopus. Variations vigorously defended include octopedes and octopii."

Combining my favorite hobby-horses of Led Zeppelin and molluscs, today I found this explanation of the lyrics of Sick Again: "[Name redacted] is right if he means that the members of Zeppelin were sex animals. Apparently they would exploit their groupies to the absolute max. Groupies have told of how Jimmy Page would often make them stick octupi in their vaginas.[...]Its one of the few Zeppelin songs with real lyrical depth, though it might not be apparent when you read the lyrics off the page like this. " [Emphasis mine]

I'm not sure where to start with this one, so I'll just give in and point to a few not safe for work pictures of octopus sex. Jimmy Page is not included, unfortunately. Hokusai, Teraoka, and Saeki.

Why oh why can't they use their super-powers for good?

I worked out today that my washing machine must have a device fitted for turning socks inside out.

I used to think it was the dryer, but careful statistical analysis shows that it's in the washing machine. I can see that this seemed like a good idea to Dr. Evil at the time, but you'd think at some point he would have gotten greedy and marketed the anti-sock-reverser for a large amount of money. Like the hidden device on my car that turns traffic lights to red. You should be able to pay a premium to have it reversed.

Fellowship of the Ring

I was playing Misty Mountain Hop in my car going to work this morning. When I shut off the engine, the CD shuts off too, ready to power up in the same place it left off. Dunno how it does that, but that's what it does.

A couple of hundred yards later I heard the familiar riff of Misty Mountain Hop and started back for my car, confused. A minute later I see someone take something out of his pocket, examine it carefully and put it tentatively to his ear and say, "Hello?"

He had a Misty Mountain Top ring tone! Why? Why, FFS? What's wrong with "Brring brring!"? If it was good enough for dear old dad it's good enough for you.

Anyway, since I'm the first person ever to have a beef with a cellphone, I shall rant on:

Why does the act of answering a cellphone, particularly in a meeting, concert, film or library, always, and I mean always, take the following form?

1. A sound like a strangled cat singing "America" or "Crazy" or "Cum On Feel the Noize" issues from someone's trousers.

2. Everyone looks at the man's trousers. Thirty seconds pass. The sound continues.

3. The trouser-wearer suddenly looks down, startled, pats his pockets and draws out a small black object now singing more loudly.

4. The man looks at it in dismay and wide-eyed lack of understanding for twenty seconds, while it continues to lie in the palm of his hand screaming like a newborn.

5. The man tentatively presses a button. Nothing happens.

6. The man presses another button and puts the device to his ear. He says "Hello?" in a disbelieving voice, as though he has been handed a Magic Genie Lamp by a Zoot-Suited Fairy. The sound stops.

7. The man shouts at the top of his voice, "YOU CAN'T CALL ME HERE! I'M IN A MEETING/CONCERT/MOVIE/LIBRARY!!!!11!

8. The man gets up, knocking over his chair, stands on two small women next to him, stomps to the door and slams it shouting, "I TOLD YOU MY SSN IS 555-55-6789! AND MY MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME IS HAREWOOD! AND DON'T GO ROUND TO MY HOUSE AT 41342 MODESKA DRIVE YET BECAUSE I HAVEN'T LEFT HERE AND MY WIFE IS THERE UNARMED. ALONE. NO, I DON'T NEED TO GO TO THE BANK BECAUSE I KEEP ALL MY SAVINGS IN SMALL BILLS UNDER THE BED!

9. The sound diminishes as he walks down the corridor.

Perhaps I exaggerate a little bit on the personal information people yell into these things, but not much.

Classical music update - teh Theraminz

Two different Theremin techniques -

1. Jimmy Page, Seattle, 77
2. A Japanese Cat

Jimmy Page is cuter and more fluffy, but the cat has nice eyes. The floor cat at the end - dubbed "WTF? Cat" on teh intarwebs, is just classic.

That's Neat, Really Love Your Gecko Feet

This is one of my geckos, Mooshu the Okay Tokay.



Geckos are in the news today because medical researchers need some grant money I mean have discovered that the sticky properties of gecko feet, if transferred to an inorganic material, would make nice bandages, or even internal sutures for laparoscopic procedures.

Since I'm convinced the star of this video is an anole, not a gecko, I hope it wasn't produced by the people seeking the grant announcing the breakthrough.

Here's the news report and video.

It is an anole, isn't it?





Thanks to Carroll for the news headline heads up!

Best Live Bands

Classic Rock Magazine has a list of the 50 best live acts of all time.

It's a poor showing for me; I've only seen

1. Led Zeppelin
8. Rolling Stones
18. The Clash
19. Thin Lizzy
26. U2
28. Ramones
33. Status Quo
44. Genesis
47. Grateful Dead

out of fifty! Of those, I'd rate The Ramones and Status Quo the best live bands I've seen, but it depends on what you mean - I had the best time at their gigs, but I wouldn't listen to a bootleg of either of them.

If you're wondering why Zeppelin doesn't make it, it's because I can't remember a note they played of either Knebworth or Earls Court. Not one single solitary semiquaver. It's possible they blew my mind so hard that I had to blank it out to protect myself, like the victim of an alien abduction, but...

Bands not on the list that I a) can remember and b) were great live - Frank Zappa/Mothers and Hawkwind. Got to give a nod to T.Rex too, but that was in the "not a dry seat in the house" days, so I was more easily impressed.

Worst was Faust. My friend and I walked out after the first chord. To be fair, the first chord had been playing for 35 minutes at that point. I think they may have hated Leeds Uni as much as Leeds Uni hated Faust.

Skynet postponed.

From Gizmodo:

The army's machine-gun wielding, insurgent-slaying robot SWORDS is no longer spraying foes with hot doom in Iraq. Actually, it never got the chance to notch a single frag, and never will. Apparently, there was an incident where "the gun started moving when it was not intended to move," meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn't supposed to—like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might've set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army's Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.

Phew. I'm having enough trouble with the lizard overlords to deal with the robot masters as well.

Let's hear it for the DJ!

Bob Lefsetz, music insider, has a blog, and he often makes points that seem obvious until you realize you'd never actually thought about it that clearly. He makes one this week, about radio. Growing up, I could never stand the DJs, obvious exceptions like John Peel apart.

Now, a DJ with a personality and knowledge and his or her own playlist is essential to distinguish the radio from your iPod. And yet radio owners are doing the exact opposite, programming streams of bland music designed to be seamless and unobjectionable. If that's what you want, you've already got it, on your own iPod. If you want to hear something new, or an opinion, or a juxtaposition of two interesting tracks... well, actually you can't have it. But if Bob Lefsetz had his way, you'd have it on your radio. He says:

Your only hope of surviving in the terrestrial world is to serve your location, a paradigm given up when Clear Channel started broadcasting the same tripe in every market. It’s the era of personalities. The music is secondary to the CLUB! Make me feel like I belong, in the era of social networking isn’t it hilarious that terrestrial radio has abdicated its power! We’re not in a heyday of music innovation. The music shouldn’t come first, the deejay should. He should guide and inform. With useful information. He should show his rough edges and his smooth ones.

It's an interesting idea, and one I heard recently somewhere else. In a conversation about Jamaican music, I was told that musicians made special mixes with the sound systems, with the DJ's name and slogan and specially chosen music. The reason for this is simple - the music is not the message. The party, the gathering, the friendship, is the point of the sound system.

Welcome to 21C, music. You just joined writers as content providers for someone else's party.

LA Times (again): Why Googling is more than just creepy.

What is it with the LA Times and the internet? Just a month ago I wrote a post about their strange fear that the internet might lead to people who dislike each other saying bad things about each other. (Behavior which ought to be BANNED, of course.)

Yesterday, the Op-Ed columnist Meghan Daum wrote an article Are you a stalker too? : How Facebook, MySpace and Google have changed and spread its practice. (That's the subtitle. I didn't write that second bit myself.)

So, looking at people's Facebook profiles is equated with stalking? Is she mad or something? No, it isn't the same. People put their Facebook profiles on-line so you can look them up, Meghan. It's no more stalking than reading an ad about a new car is the equivalent of industrial espionage. One is a creepy crime, the other is an everyday act of normal people. Get a grip, LA Times!

I am, of course, talking about the kind of stalking that involves not restraining orders but Internet search engines. It is often referred to as cyber-stalking, Web-stalking or Google-stalking. It usually means just typing someone's name in a search box and uncovering such juicy bits as his finish time in a 10K charity run or an article about strategic brand management that he wrote for a company newsletter in 2005.

Well, if that's all it means then … then I should panic?

This is how we've come to live in a world where average citizens have random and often inappropriate information about [other people].

Yes, it's shameful how far we've sunk, knowing other people's 10K times. I weep for my country. By the way, if I read my co-worker's 10K time in the local newspaper (which happens to the be the LA Times) is that stalking as well, or is that all right? I gotta ask.

Having her cake and eating it too, she then mumbles a bit about "cyber stalking" not actually being violent enough to deserve the name. Then in a rousing finish, she takes that back and hits us with the big one. Reading Google hits is at least as bad as throwing rocks:

After all, Googling John Cusack turns up close to 3 million search results. We know that reading every one of them is less potentially dangerous than loitering outside someone's gate, but who's more obsessed -- the person who spends countless hours wading through Web entries or the person who tosses a bag of letters, rocks and screwdrivers over the fence and calls it a day?

Um, nobody reads three million of them, of only for the reason that there aren't three million unique ones. Clearly she's never even thought about how this all works. I'm sure she has a researcher who looks up all the facts she needs to know for her purposes. (Though I think she gave him the day off yesterday.) But even if I did read every web comment about a celebrity – and I think I have, with at least one group and at least one actor – I would call that "fandom". Whereas, if I went to the group's, or actor's, house and threw a bag of implements over the wall, I'd call that very, very strange, probably criminal, behavior.

Is she really suggesting differently? What is it with the LA Times and the internet?

Edit to add: See also part II.

A little behind on my movie viewing

I like the 21st Century. The movies they make today may be crap, but I can actually watch the movies they made when they weren't making crap. I can guarantee you if I was actually living in, say, 1970, I wouldn't be able to see the movies they made in 1970, unless I flew to Cannes or lived with a cinema-owner or something.

Courtesy of Netflix, I've been catching up on the groovy movies.

First, Two Lane Blacktop (1971). This is a road movie, a genre in which (apparently) the landscape is a character, and the humans characters go on a journey to find themselves. Often they find themselves in the Mojave desert in a diner shaped like a cigar, and if they do, this would be where the scenery would get its big Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actor. In general, road movies are all very much like looking out of a car window, except the car isn't in lane 4 of the I-405, which my car usually is.

In the grand tradition of road movies, nothing actually happens in Two Lane Blacktop. (I think I once went to an all nighter of road movies, and I remember nothing happening being an important theme.) However, it was continually interesting to watch James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson as the leads in the movie. For some reason I like watching video of people I only know from music and still photos, though I still would have preferred it if something had occurred. Perhaps, for instance, they could have gone to a 'haunted house' and found out the 'ghost' was a man who coveted his uncle's inheritance, and at the end the man could have said, "I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

I jest, of course. The Philip Glass-like minimalism hides a complex substructure, evidenced mainly by the choice of fantasy the GTO driver spins as he talks to his hitchhikers. There's a 2001-style stateliness to it that rewards someone with the patience to watch carefully. Me, I just prefer to have my complex substructure macaroni'd with daleks, trebuchets and clever puns. I guess that's why I like The Road Warrior; Mad Max's road journey to find himself used the de rigeur tropes of nitrous oxide injection, souped-up Fords, masculine angst and long deserted roads but... also involved hundreds of bisexual leather-clad wrestlers on motorcycles fighting with crossbows and sawn-off shotguns! Perfect!

The President's Analyst (1967). A feast of paranioa, spy vs. spy, shrink humor and tremendous sight gags. Certainly the funniest 'hippie-freak-out' scene on film. (The hippies come tumbling straight outta Cafe Wha' - the movie certainly knows its counterculture.) The president's analyst, of course, knows all the president's secrets. Russians and American Secret Servicemen - and British MI6, and even the Canadians - try to capture him. Or, kill him. Not surprisingly, the analyst becomes paranoid - and, because of National Security, he's the only man in America who can't see a shrink about it.

In amongst all of this, there's Barry (Eve of Destruction) McGuire as Old Wrangler. And there's a crazy Cyberpunk ending. Yes, I know cyberpunk wasn't invented until 1982. The movie really was before its time. The ending is still in the process of coming true. It reminded me of Top Secret! but is far less innocent. And James Coburn is always cool.

Swallows Day

Yesterday was the Swallows Day Parade in San Juan Capistrano.



The Swallows live in Argentina over the winter, and return to the town every year on March 19th. They supposedly take up residence in the SJC Mission, the Jewel of the Missions. I happen to know - because it's my office, and it has windows - that many of them build their nests in the eaves of a wooden building about ten miles away. Since the Mission is more famous, having been in town longer by a couple of years, the city celebrates the return of the Swallows with a big parade past the Mission. This is the largest non-motorized parade in America; there are hundreds of entrants. Most of them are horse-drawn vehicles or horse riders, although I saw a few llamas and donkeys here this year. In this parade, even the Shriners abandon their little cars and pull their giant fez by hand.

San Juan Capistrano is a cowboy town, and many people here remember when there were more horses than cars. There are still horse trails everywhere, and in the winter, the smell of stables drifts over the town as thick as molasses. There are two Indian bands in the town who are regularly in the parade, the Juanenos and the Acjachemen; over the last few years, as more and more Mexicans come to live in SJC, the ratio of Indians to Cowboys has changed remarkably, and the bright-feathered costumes of the Mexicans now outshine the drab black of the bolo-tie'd cowboys on their austere brown horses and their long-skirted cowgirl women with Derringers in their boots.

Of course, I didn't take any pictures of any of that. (There are some on the websites linked above.) Instead here's a view from north of the parade route where the parade entrants park their horse trailers before riding to the staging area.

I can hear trumpets!

One of the stranger things found in Tutankhamun's tomb - at least from my point of view, which regards canopic jars and amulets as perfectly ordinary - was a trumpet. The Egyptians left us many pictures of musical instruments, often guitars or a percussion instrument called a sistrum, but I don't recall seeing many trumpets. It's probable that the item was actually a signalling device used in battles, rather than a musical instrument. If so, that'll make what's coming up next sound a little less weird.



There were actually two found in the tomb, a silver one and a bronze one. They were tuned differently. People being what they are, they were determined to play them to see what they sounded like. The silver trumpet was played on BBC radio in 1939, using a modern mouthpiece, whereupon it promptly split apart. The bronze trumpet survived being played in 1939 and in 1941, the last time without a mouthpiece inserted. Of course, there's no available recording of the 'real' trumpet. The general consensus was that the trumpets made poor musical instruments are were probably used rhythmically in their mid-range for signalling purposes.

In the folder named trumpet here, you can listen to or download an mp3 of Bandsman Tappern sounding the crap out of the silver one, just before it split. Unfortunately, being a bandsman, melody is not his strong point. Since that may be what the instrument was originally intended for, I suppose I can't complain. Shame we don't have one of the guitars.

Freedom Fries with that?

When the Americans decided they weren't going to like the French any more they renamed French Fries Freedom Fries. Everyone had a good laugh at that. Except the Americans, that is. Some of them clearly think that tactics which worked in Junior High are going to work against sovereign nations. Anyway, amongst those having a good laugh were the British.

So here's a story. Once upon a time, there was a breed of dog called the German Shepherd. It was very popular in Britain – and remains popular to this day. But you won't find many people there who would call one a German Shepherd. In England, the breed was renamed the Alsatian.

The British did not want a dog with the word "German" in its name after World War I.

In 1919, when the English Kennel Club gave the breed a separate register, some 54 animals were included, but by 1926 the ranks had swelled to 8,058, such was the unprecedented success of the dog. At the end of the War it was thought that the breed would not flourish were the word German to appear in its name and it was therefore decided to call the breed the Alsatian Wolf Dog after the German-French border area of Alsace-Lorraine.

Dog breeders seem to have quite a few little peculiarities. The Nazis, for instance, did not like White German Shepherds, and had them removed from the register. The white dogs, they argued, were weaker. The Nazis, including Hitler, saw the white coat as an undesirable trait, and further assumed that the white coated dogs' genes paled the darker coated dogs' colors. With little knowledge of science, they blamed the whites for many diseases as well. Germany soon barred white German Shepherds from the conformation ring and the breeding pool. America, always happy to do a bit of Eugenics whenever they get a chance, followed suit.