The promulgation of gaffes

"He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed."

The story making the internet rounds today is about Palin's rather incoherent answer to a question about Paul Revere (quoted above -- from Sully, hence all the dropped 'g's and what-not). To her credit she doesn't just repeat the mythology of the Wadsworth poem [ED: D'oh, speaking of gaffes, that should be the Longfellow poem], but she certainly makes a hash out of her answer. Whatever her train of thought was, she lost track of it and the answer became a muddle. Let's be honest, if those words had flown out of Obama's mouth we would be happily snarking away about them.

In fact, it reminded me of the time when, while tugging at the heart strings over Little Billy needing his asthma medicine during a stump speech, Obama lost his teleprompter (above video). He tried to string the story out while waiting for it to be fixed, but for some reason the word "inhaler" wasn't on the tip of his tongue and he drifted into incoherence. He actually mimed squirting an inhaler into his mouth as searched for the right word. I remember it because I had great fun mocking him when the video came out.

The difference is that you had to search YouTube for Obama's derailed train of thought, while Palin's will no doubt be played again and again on the networks and the late night comedians will have a field day with it. Further, we all know she is going to be asked, again and again, stupid and condescending questions about Paul Revere. That's just the way it is -- the media is their megaphone and they use it. 

My suggestion is not to try to untangle her muddled paragraph to counter that megaphone. They won't much listen, and to the extent that they do you'll just end up sounding muddled yourself. Instead, the counter should be asking the media, again and again, why they budget so much print space and air time to carrying the Democrats' water. Why is Palin's stumbling answer on the evening news while Obama's gaffe about Little Billy's breathalyzer shunted directly to YouTube?

Slowly but surely chipping away at the media's editorial judgement has worked, and it is reducing the volume of their megaphone in the process. Keep at it.

Finally, speaking of Paul Revere, remember these goofballs?

An interlude in the record bins

This is going to be an odd post in my Music of Mali series in that it is going to feature no musicians from Mali. Please bear with me.

In 1969 Nonesuch Explorer, a record label that specialized in anthropological recordings of tribal and ethnic music, brought out Goro Yamaguchi's album A Bell Ringing in The Empty Sky (I'm pretty sure, but not 100% certain, the video above is a track from that record).

When it was released, it was difficult to find the album, much less hear it played on the radio. You might hear it late at night on the radio or find it randomly filed someplace in an off-beat record store, but the odds were against either. I found it in a large, and faintly eccentric, record store in downtown Milwaukee. It was the first non-American/European record I ever bought.

All of Nonesuch's records faced that problem, as well as music from Brazil, Ireland, Latin America, Spain, Greece, India (represented by Ravi Shankar, popularized by the Beatles) and a few other oddities -- like the amusingly ridiculous musical "archeologist" Elizabeth Waldo. There was no place for any of these records, and so they fell through the cracks if they were carried at all.

Meanwhile, as I've discussed in the earlier posts in this series (Father & Son, 14 years later, Torn from today's headlines, Ex-pats in Paris and Unscheduled comparison), West African music had been taken to the New World via the slave trade where it evolved in the relative isolation of the Age of Sail, eventually to return to Africa via American recordings and Cuban workers where it had a great impact on contemporary African musicians. 

Many of these same musicians then spent time in Europe where there was a music circuit they could tour. Of course, they also made recordings and -- like A Bell ringing in an Empty Sky -- they had difficulty getting airtime or placement of their albums in record stores. 

That problem persisted until 1987. In that year a group of promoters met and decided to bundle it together under a genre they called World Music. They planned festivals, awards, worked the radio stations and, most importantly of all, delivered browser cards to record stores so the music could easily be binned. While still a niche market, the ability to properly bin the records, and for customers to find it, greatly increased the reach of the new genre.

Today there is an increasing push-back against the genre's name. It implies a split, and to some a second class status, from European and American music. Also, large swaths of the world's music -- Bollywood, J-Pop and Chinese pop are conspicuously missing from the World Music library. 

I doubt it matters with the internet replacing record stores as the source of music. Searches can be more complex and focused, and besides -- as we've seen with M.I.A.  (or our much beloved Japanese emo screamo punk band Z for that matter)-- there are other avenues for musicians to market their work directly to their audience these days. 

As an example, I'll end with the following video I found on Youtube. I don't know who the band is, or the woman singer, or why a Peruvian group seems to be working with some French Canadians, but they're obviously promoting themselves in a new and different manner than from the days of scrambling to get air time and space in a record bin.

The Mysterious Package has been opened

Click to enlarge

I can report some further news about the Mysterious Package. Because of the incalculably high value of its contents, I had to open it with great care. After turning my spare bedroom into a clean room, and getting questioned by the FBI for several days over why I was buying a hazmat suit for personal use, I finally very carefully opened it in a properly sterilized environment. It deserved no less respect. 

Due to its wondrous nature, I fear that revealing it to you all at once might overload your nervous system and cause a temporary bout of catatonia, so I just exposed a corner of it in the picture above. 

There is a clue or two in the picture, still I doubt you'll be able to guess what it is. I promise -- I will reveal it in all its glory soon. 

Stratfor and Priyanka Chopra

Today's Stratfor article is one of a type that discusses personal security for businessman and dignitaries when they are overseas and might be a target of criminals or terrorists. 

It uses the ambush of a Mexican drug cartel convoy with a large security detail that was overwhelmed by careful planning by a rival. He then discusses security lessons drawn from the ambush.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe I decided to search for a female bodyguard. After conducting my usual extensive and in-depth search,  I settled on Priyanka Chopra, who played Sonia in in the Bollywood film Drona.

In the film, which is based on a Hindu legend, Aditya is an orphan who grows up in England. He doesn't know it, but he is the son of Drona, a hero who got killed by an Eeevil Overlord. Aditya is fated to fight the Eeevil Overlord, not only to avenge his father, but also to protect mankind, preserve goodness, and etc., etc.  

Sonia is the leader of a cult that thinks Drona is their messiah who captures Aditya and convinces him of his mission. She also accompanies him on his travels as he battles the Eeevil Overlord, acts as his bodyguard in the process and, perhaps most importantly, makes Priyanka's first big screen appearance in a bikini. 

As has become the custom, after the article is a bonus video. The video features the title song to Drona, with shots of the hero looking heroic while a scantily clad Priyanka Chopra and her contingent of equally scantily clad Drona Cult girls dance and sing.


PROTECTIVE INTELLIGENCE LESSONS FROM AN AMBUSH IN MEXICO
By Scott Stewart, June 2, 2011

On the afternoon of May 27, a convoy transporting a large number of heavily armed gunmen was  ambushed on Mexican Highway 15 near Ruiz, Nayarit state, on Mexico's Pacific coast. When authorities responded they found 28 dead gunmen and another four wounded, one of whom would later die, bringing the death toll to 29. This is a significant number of dead for one incident, even in Mexico.

According to Nayarit state Attorney General Oscar Herrera Lopez, the gunmen ambushed were members of Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel. Herrera noted that most of the victims were from Mexico's Gulf coast, but there were also some Guatemalans mixed into the group, including one of the wounded survivors. While Los Zetas are predominately based on the Gulf coast, they have been working to provide armed support to allied groups, such as the Cartel Pacifico Sur (CPS), a faction of the former Beltran Leyva Organization that is currently battling the Sinaloa Federation and other cartels for control of the lucrative smuggling routes along the Pacific coast. In much the same way, Sinaloa is working with the Gulf cartel to go after Los Zetas in Mexico's northeast while protecting and expanding its home turf. If the victims in the Ruiz ambush were Zetas, then the Sinaloa Federation was likely the organization that planned and executed this very successful ambush.

Photos from the scene show that the purported Zeta convoy consisted of several pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles (two of which were armored). The front right wheel on one of the armored vehicles, a Ford Expedition, had been completely blown off. With no evidence of a crater in the road indicating that the damage had been caused by a mine or improvised explosive device (IED), it would appear that the vehicle was struck and disabled by a well-placed shot from something like a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) or M72 LAW rocket, both of which have been seen in cartel arsenals. Photos also show at least one heavy-duty cattle-style truck with an open cargo compartment that appears to have been used as a troop transport. Many of the victims died in the vehicles they were traveling in, including a large group in the back of the cattle truck, indicating that they did not have time to react and dismount before being killed. [continued after jump]

Continuando

Some Jehro, to put you in a laid-back mood for the weekend.

 

They talk funny too

Not that I'm trying to pick a fight with our English visitors or anything, but... it turns out that not only do they have trouble spelling -- always sticking extra 'U's where they don't belong -- but they also don't speak the Queen's English as properly as us Americans.

Nick Patrick wondered if the colonists spoke with an English accent back in the Revolutionary days. He did some research and what he discovered was surprising:

I’d always assumed that Americans used to have accents akin to today’s British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.

Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.

What’s surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.

So, there you have it. Now, along with trying to get them to spell color correctly, we're going to have to work on their pronunciation of aluminum. 

For more details read his entire post: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
  

Earliest known photograph of a person

Detail of Boulevard du Temple showing a man

Sometime in 1838 or 1839 Louis Daguerre took a photograph called Boulevard du Temple. It was a picture of a street in Paris, and it required an exposure of over 10 minutes. Due to the length of the exposure the moving traffic is not visible. However, in the lower left-hand corner you can distinctly see the silhouette of a man. He stood in position as he got he boots polished. It is the earliest known photo of a person.

You can view the entire picture at How to Be a Retronaut which has an applet that allows you to pan and zoom the photo. Some viewers say you can see other people in the picture. There are some artifacts in the film that might be people, but none are so clear as the man getting his shoes shined. 

Because of the empty street with only the single blurry image of a man, to me it is a slightly eerie picture. His solitary presence reminds me of one of those old Twilight Zone episodes where an antisocial person ends up cursed and living in an empty world.

Another early picture, this one from 1848, shows two men standing next to the Ohio River in Cincinnati. You can view that picture and read about it at Very early photographic images of humans discovered. 

Oh no! I've been hacked too!

 

Antohny Weiner isn't the only one having dirty tricks played on him. I just discovered that I too have been hacked. Some scoundrel,  no doubt to besmirch my reputation and/or create a distraction, has been mailing the above postcards -- purported to be from me -- to various 18 year old coeds in my address book. 

I vehemently deny they were sent by me.

By the way, I can neither confirm nor deny that the hand writing on the cards matches mine, nor do I think, to the best of my recollection, that I ever drew the stick figure. Also, whether I reported this mail fraud to the FBI or not is none of your damn business! 
 

The start of hurricane season

June 1st is the start of the Atlantic hurricane season. Above is a time lapse video of Tropical Depression Nangka, taken from 7am to 9pm, passing over Hong Kong on June 26, 2009. The video's title identifies it as a Typhoon, but it had only been a Tropical Storm when it passed over the Philippines and it was downgraded to a Tropical Depression before making landfall in China.

Still, it gives a good view of how rain bands sweep through during tropical weather systems. As you can see, some of them can be quite torrential. Near the end of the video you can also see the direction of cloud movement shift as the center of the system passes Hong Kong.

Stratfor and Twiggy

In today's Stratfor article Friedman discusses strategic reason why he thinks the 1967 borders may be the best choice for Isreal. I didn't find his arguments convincing. In particular, his claim that because they won their earlier wars, but struggled in their later wars,  that meant that the 67 borders made more strategic sense seemed like a leap in logic to me. Still, it is an interesting read as always.

Shrinking Israel to that very narrow waist conjured up images of a sort of national anorexia. Of course, anorexia immediately brings to mind supermodels and so there would be the source of this article's Hot Stratfor babe.

Needless to say, I had a wealth of subjects to choose from and it was quite the task narrowing it down to just one.  After arduous research I selected Twiggy as the Hot Strafor Babe because she is  the first model I remember who marketed her skinniness as part of her appeal.

Twiggy was born Lesley Hornby in 1959 (a little over a year after the founding of Israel). Her big break came when, at the age of 16, a hair dresser cut her hair short and hung pictures of her in his salon to promote the style. A fashion photographer saw the pictures, took more, and they became her entrance into the modeling field.

Along with modeling, she's cranked out albums and done quite a bit of acting. As a bonus, after the Strafor article, I've embedded a video featuring a number of slides of her posing in various goofy mod outfits with I Feel Fine by the Beatles as the background music.


ISRAEL'S BORDERS AND NATIONAL SECURITY
By George Friedman, May 31, 2011

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said May 30 that  Israel could not prevent the United Nations from recognizing a Palestinian state, in the sense of adopting a resolution on the subject. Two weeks ago, U.S. President Barack Obama, in a speech, called on Israel to return to some variation of its pre-1967 borders. The practical significance of these and other diplomatic evolutions in relation to Israel is questionable. Historically, U.N. declarations have had variable meanings, depending on the willingness of great powers to enforce them. Obama's speech on Israel, and his subsequent statements, created enough ambiguity to make exactly what he was saying unclear. Nevertheless, it is clear that the diplomatic atmosphere on Israel is shifting.

There are many questions concerning this shift, ranging from the competing moral and historical claims of the Israelis and Palestinians to the internal politics of each side to whether the Palestinians would be satisfied with a return to the pre-1967 borders. All of these must be addressed, but this analysis is confined to a single issue: whether a return to the 1967 borders would increase the danger to Israel's national security. Later analyses will focus on Palestinian national security issues and those of others.

Early Borders

It is important to begin by understanding that the pre-1967 borders are actually the borders established by the armistice agreements of 1949. The 1948 U.N. resolution creating the state of Israel created a much smaller Israel. The Arab rejection of what was called "partition" resulted in a war that created the borders that placed the West Bank (named after the west bank of the Jordan River) in Jordanian hands, along with substantial parts of Jerusalem, and placed Gaza in the hands of the Egyptians.

The 1949 borders substantially improved Israel's position by widening the corridors between the areas granted to Israel under the partition, giving it control of part of Jerusalem and, perhaps most important, control over the Negev. The latter provided Israel with room for maneuver in the event of an Egyptian attack -- and Egypt was always Israel's main adversary. At the same time, the 1949 borders did not eliminate a major strategic threat. The Israel-Jordan border placed Jordanian forces on three sides of Israeli Jerusalem, and threatened the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor. Much of the Israeli heartland, the Tel Aviv-Haifa-Jerusalem triangle, was within Jordanian artillery range, and a Jordanian attack toward the Mediterranean would have to be stopped cold at the border, since there was no room to retreat, regroup and counterattack.

For Israel, the main danger did not come from Jordan attacking by itself. Jordanian forces were limited, and tensions with Egypt and Syria created a de facto alliance between Israel and Jordan. In addition, the Jordanian Hashemite regime lived in deep tension with the Palestinians, since the former were British transplants from the Arabian Peninsula, and the Palestinians saw them as well as the Israelis as interlopers. Thus the danger on the map was mitigated both by politics and by the limited force the Jordanians could bring to bear.

Nevertheless, politics shift, and the 1949 borders posed a strategic problem for Israel. If Egypt, Jordan and Syria were to launch a simultaneous attack (possibly joined by other forces along the Jordan River line) all along Israel's frontiers, the ability of Israel to defeat the attackers was questionable. The attacks would have to be coordinated -- as the 1948 attacks were not -- but simultaneous pressure along all frontiers would leave the Israelis with insufficient forces to hold and therefore no framework for a counterattack. From 1948 to 1967, this was Israel's existential challenge, mitigated by the disharmony among the Arabs and the fact that any attack would be detected in the deployment phase. [continues after jump]

Grinnin' In Your Face

For Americans, because of the holiday Tuesday morning is that start of the work week, so some blues are in order. As you stand around the water cooler swapping gossip, keep in mind Son House's song Grinnin' In Your Face 

Disaster strikes a backyard BBQ

A group of Sims demonstrate what not to do if you accidentally start your backyard on fire during a cookout. Hint: don't just hop up and down and scream for ages. Instead, get your fire extinguisher into action quick!

The song is Punches, Kicks, Trenches & Swords by Pint Shot Riot.
 

In remembrance

"The fallen lay three or four feet deep in some places, and, with but few exceptions, they were shot in and about the head. Arms, accouterments, ammunition, cannon, shot and shell, and broken foliage were strewn about. With much labor a detail of Union soldiers buried the dead by simply turning the captured breastworks upon them. Thus had these unfortunate victims unwittingly dug their own graves. The trenches were nearly full of muddy water. It was the most horrible sight I had ever witnessed."

Memorial Day is a day for Americans to remember their war dead. It was started in the aftermath of the American Civil War. For this post I'm going to return to a Civil War battlefield, if fact to just to a portion of a Civil War battlefield, to remember how much some have suffered and lost in defense of our Nation.

The Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania was the scene of the most ferocious fighting in that most brutal of all American wars. Early in the morning, under a thick mist, Union troops commanded by General Hancock attacked the Southern lines. They broke through and drove deep into the Confederate positions until finally the Southern troops stalled the advance.

The Bloody Angle was some earthworks the Confederates held in the middle of the Yankee advance. Union troops slid along both flanks of the position, creating a horse shoe shaped salient. As a heavy rain began to fall, both sides fed troops into the battle at the salient -- the Union troops to try completely shatter the Southern lines, the Rebels desperately holding as a fallback series of earth works were being prepared.

The two sides fought for nearly 24 hours over that rain drenched piece of land and both sent hundreds of men into its bloody maw. Many of them fired the single shot from their muskets and then stood upon the dead to fight hand-to-hand using their rifles as clubs, until they too joined the pile of dead and were replaced.

After the war, in the 1880s, Century Magazine published a series of articles about the Civil War written by veterans of the war. These articles were eventually published in the 4 volume set, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (the link takes you to an online version of the entire set).

Most of the articles were written by officers, but an enlisted man named G. Norton Galloway wrote the article regarding the fight at the Bloody Angle. I've reproduced it below. I've removed the footnotes, and a few of the typos, but no doubt many more typos remain.

If you're inclined, there is also a wealth of information about the battles of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania at the blog Mysteries and Conundrums. I recommend a visit to that site for those that like Civil War history, or are just curious to learn more.

(Hellooooo visitors from Instapundit)


Hand-to-hand Fighting at Spotsylvania
by G. Norton Galloway

GENERAL HANCOCK's surprise and capture of the larger portion of Edward Johnson's division , and the capture of the salient "at Spotsylvania Court House on the 12th of May, 1864, accomplished with the Second Corps," have been regarded as one of the most brilliant feats of that brilliant soldier's career ; but without the substantial assistance of general Wright, grand old John Sedgwick's worthy successor, and the Sixth Corps, a defeat as bitter as his victory was sweet would have been recorded against the hero of that day.

The storm which had set in early in the afternoon of the 11th of May continued with great severity, and but little rest was obtained during the night. Soon after dark, however, a remarkable change in the weather took place, and it became ed in small groups about half-drowned fires, with their tents stretched about their shoulders, while some hastily pitched the canvas on the ground, and sought shelter beneath the rumpled and dripping folds. Others rolled themselves up, and lay close to the simmering logs, eager to catch a few moments' sleep ; many crouched about, without any shelter whatever, presenting a pitiable sight.

Throughout the day some skirmishing and sharpshooting? had occurred, but this had been of a spasmodic character, and had elicited no concern.

About dusk the Sixth Corps moved to a position on the right and rear of the army. The stormy night was favorable to Hancock's movement, and about 10 o'clock he put his troops in motion, marching to a point on the left of the Sixth Corps' former position in the neighborhood of the Brown house, massing his troops in that vicinity. [See map, p. 167.]

General Grant's orders to Hancock were to assault at daylight on the 12th in cooperation with Burnside on his left, while Wright and Warren were held in readiness to assault on his right. The Confederate army was composed of three corps-Longstreet (now R. H. Anderson) on their left, Ewell in the center, and A. P. Hill (now under early) on the right. The point to be assaulted was a salient of field-works on the Confederate center, afterward called the "Bloody Angle." It was held by General Edward Johnson's division. Here the Confederate line broke off at an angle of ninety degrees, the right parallel, about the length of a small brigade, being occupied by General George H. Steuart's regiments. This point was a part or continuation of the line of works charged and carried by General Upton on May 10th, and was considered to be the key to Lee's position.

Just as the day was breaking, Barlow's and Birney's divisions of Hancock's corps pressed forward upon the unsuspecting foe, and leaping the breastworks after a hand-to-hand conflict with the bewildered enemy, in which guns were used as clubs, possessed themselves of the ithree thousand prisoners were taken, including General Johnson and General Steuart. Twenty Confederate cannon became the permanent trophies of the day, twelve of them belonging to Page and eight to Cutshaw.

Upon reaching the second line of Lee's works held by Wilcox's division, who by this time had become apprised of the disaster to their comrades, Hancock met with stern resistance, as Lee in the meantime had been hurrying troops to Ewell from Hill on the right and Anderson on the left, and these were sprung upon our victorious lines with such an impetus as to drive them hastily back toward the left of the salient.

As soon as the news of Hancock's good and ill success reached army headquarters, the Sixth Corps - Upton's brigade being in advance - was ordered to move with all possible haste to his support. At a brisk pace we crossed a line of intrenchments a short distance in our front, and, passing through a strip of timber, at once began to realize our nearness to the foe. It was now about G o'clock, and the enemy, reenforced, were making desperate efforts to regain what they had lost.

Our forces were hastily retiring at this point before the concentrated attack of the enemy, and these with our wounded lined the road. We pressed forward and soon cleared the woods and reached an insidious fen, covered with dense marsh grass, where we lay down for a few moments awaiting orders. I cannot imagine how any of us survived the sharp fire that swept over us at this point - a fire so keen that it split the blades of grass all about us, the minies moaning in a furious concert as they picked out victims by the score. [continues after jump]

Sunday Open Thread

I use these open threads to report on any site maintenance I've been doing.

Some of you may have noticed that about a week ago, for a brief period of time, there was a post rating mechanism under the posts. These interfered with the polls so I removed them. 

In thinking about it, I also realized that, since this blogging business is only a pastime to me, I didn't really want a rating system that might cause me to chase traffic rather than just posting whatever nonsense interested me.

At the same time I was fiddling with the rating system, I also replaced the icons that allow one to share a post on various social media sites. It always aggravated me when the box would pop up if you moved you mouse over one, so I switched to a version without that automatic pop-up feature. 

In the right rail I moved the 'Recommended' links under the 'Blogs of Interest' to group my links to other sites. This required me to move list of 'Contributors' to the far right rail so both they and the blog links would be visible without scrolling down the page.

The most ambitious thing I've done is add a 'By Category' list to the right rail (under the list of Contributors). This allows visitors to review posts in just their area of interest while ignoring topics that don't interest them. I don't know how much people really use things like that, but from time to time I have done that on other sites.

The problem with adding that feature is I've long used the labels to make cheesy jokes, so I'm having to sweep back through all of the posts to tag them properly. At the moment I'm working my way through 2009, and dreading the work 2006 is going to entail. 

Occasionally I am making minor edits to the older posts, but I am not changing their content, only cleaning up any malformed HTML that is causing problems with the site's template.

Grand Opening of Commentarama Films

Commentarama, one of the sites in our blog roll, has announced the Grand Opening of a new site: Commentarama Films - Conservative Film Talk. He'll be posting film reviews Wednesdays and Fridays, and eventually plans to expand to also posting a review on Sunday morning.

He's been working on the new site for some time. His film reviews used to be mixed in with his posts. A few months ago he started cross posting them on the new site as he was building it. His posts always have a lively comment thread, so be sure to visit Commentarama Films - Conservative Film Talk if you like talking about films.

Stories of the grill

"The story of barbecue is the story of America. Settlers arrive on great unspoiled continent. Discover wondrous riches. Set them on fire and eat them." -Vince Stanton

For many Americans the grilling season will kick-off with a Memorial Day cookout on Monday. For some reason a lot of people think that barbecuing is an art created in the New World and passed on to Europeans and settlers after the voyages of discovery.

A few moments of thought should reveal that to be a rather dodgy notion. While the New World contributed peppers for the sauce, cooking over an open fire obviously predates the discovery of America and the invention of suburban backyard grills.

In fact, at an archeological site in the Czech Republic called Pavlov VI, the remains of a fire pit used to cook mammoths was found. As reported in the MSNBC article Mammoths roasted in prehistoric barbecue pit:

While contemporaneous populations near this region seemed to prefer reindeer meat, the Gravettian residents of this living complex, described in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, appeared to seek out more super-sized fare.

"It seems that, in contrast to other Upper Paleolithic societies in Moravia, these people depended heavily on mammoths," project leader Jiri Svoboda told Discovery News.

Svoboda, a professor at the University of Brno and director of its Institute of Archaeology, and colleagues recently excavated Pavlov VI, where they found the remains of a female mammoth and one mammoth calf near a 4-foot-wide roasting pit. Arctic fox, wolverine, bear and hare remains were also found, along with a few horse and reindeer bones.

The meats were cooked luau-style underground. Svoboda said, "We found the heating stones still within the pit and around."

Boiling pits existed near the middle roaster. He thinks "the whole situation — central roasting pit and the circle of boiling pits — was sheltered by a teepee or yurt-like structure."

It's unclear if seafood was added to create a surf-and-turf meal, but multiple decorated shells were unearthed. Many showed signs of cut marks, along with red and black coloration. The scientists additionally found numerous stone tools, such as spatulas, blades and saws, which they suggest were good for carving mammoths.

Let's face it, in terms of manliness, clobbering a mammoth over the head and dragging it to your fire pit beats the hell out of standing in front of your Coleman wearing a "Kiss the Chef" apron. Regardless, in spite of now wallowing in shame because you're cooking burgers instead of mammoth ribs, I hope you all enjoy your barbecues tomorrow.

Man as an Industrial Palace

A German film visualizing our innards as a machine.

Embroidered fashion magazines

 

Inge Jacobsen is a student at Kingston University, London who is just about to graduate after having studied studying Fine Art Photography. Interestingly, she has received attention, not for her photography, but for a series of embroideries of covers of fashion magazines and pornography. On her blog Inge Jacobsen she has this to say about her work:

Another theme and concept I’m exploring in my work is the ‘objectness’ of a photograph. By bringing the surface of the image to the attention of the viewer I want them to acknowledge the pieces as objects rather than just images. It seems appropriate to do so using fashion magazines as women are often objectified within them. I believe the same is also true of porn, and I try to explore this using sewing and embroidery which is largely seen as a feminine craft. The work has political connotations whilst allowing the viewer to decide whether the work is a critique of the fashion industry or pornography or something more celebratory. I would also hope that the viewer might see an element of humour in the work.

It is quite evocative how she transforms something as photographically based as a fashion magazine cover into something that is manifestly not a photograph. Of course we've all seen paintings and drawings done from photos, but their origin is often not obviously apparent. However, Ingre's Vogue covers done in thread are unmistakable transformations from one media to another that are clearly done intentionally to contrast the two.

Along with her blog, she also has what I suspect is the the beginnings of  her professional and commercial web presence at the site ingejacobsen.com.  I think she bears watching.

Something wonderful this way comes

I've been waiting for some time for it to arrive, and there it was today, propped against my door when I arrived home. I nearly wept for joy. I can't tell you what it is yet, only that it is something wonderful.

Oh, you might try to guess -- a page from a long lost Leonardo Da Vinci notebook? An original copy of the Declaration of Independence? Nude pictures of Bea Arthur? 

Trust me, try as you might, you'll never guess what sort of magnificent thing is inside the package. You'll just have to be patient and watch this space for further details.
 

Stratfor and Mata Hari

Today's Strafor article is a long piece that discusses, in light of the U.S. locating and eliminating Bin Laden in Pakistan, the importance of human intelligence assets. It covers the history of the rebuilding of the CIAs  human intelligence network in the wake of 9/11, the difficulties with the liason between the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, and possible scenarios as to how Bin Laden was located.

Normally I select a model or actress as an article's Hot Stratfor Babe, but all the talk of spies immediately brought Mata Hari to mind. Hence, and no doubt greatly mitigating her reputation as a seductress and German Spy, she has been selected as this article's Hot Stratfor Babe.

She was born Margaretha Zelle and at the age of 18, after a family bankrupcy, she answered a newspaper ad and married a much older Dutch army officer. They moved to Java where she studied the local culture. The husband was an alcoholic and abusive, so when they returned to Europe she left him.

She took up performing to support herself, and eventually drifted into exotic dancing where she claimed she was a Java princess of priestly Hindu birth and other such malarkey. She was extremely successful and also extremely promiscuous, which led her into a number of affairs with wealthy men.

It is not clear that she actually was a spy in WWI. Being a neutral she could freely travel, and she ended up being questioned in Britain where she claimed she was a French spy. Meanwhile the French had intercepted a poorly coded radio message which led them to believe she was a German spy.

In spite of the sketchy evidence against her, and perhaps hurt by her own tendency to spin yarns, she was convicted of espionage by the allies and executed by firing squad in 1917.

As a bonus, at the end of the article, I've included a video clip of from a 1931 movie of Greta Garbo vamping it up as Mata Hari as she seduces some poor sap. You'll have to watch it to see if he falls for her charms, and what dastardly deed he will have to do if he does.


THE BIN LADEN OPERATION: TAPPING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
By Fred Burton, May 26, 2011

Since May 2, when U.S. special operations forces crossed the Afghan-Pakistani border and killed Osama bin Laden, international media have covered the raid from virtually every angle. The United States and Pakistan have also squared off over the U.S. violation of Pakistan's sovereign territory and  Pakistan's possible complicity in hiding the al Qaeda leader. All this surface-level discussion, however, largely ignores almost 10 years of intelligence development in the hunt for bin Laden.

While the cross-border nighttime raid deep into Pakistan was a daring and daunting operation, the work to find the target -- one person out of 180 million in a country full of insurgent groups and a population hostile to American activities on its soil -- was a far greater challenge. For the other side, the challenge of hiding the world's most wanted man from the world's most funded intelligence apparatus created a clandestine shell game that probably involved current or former Pakistani intelligence officers as well as competing intelligence services. The details of this struggle will likely remain classified for decades.

Examining the hunt for bin Laden is also difficult, mainly because of the sensitivity of the mission and the possibility that some of the public information now available could be disinformation intended to disguise intelligence sources and methods. Successful operations can often compromise human sources and new intelligence technologies that have taken years to develop. Because of this, it is not uncommon for intelligence services to try to create a wilderness of mirrors to protect sources and methods. But using open-source reporting and human intelligence from STRATFOR's own sources, we can assemble enough information to draw some conclusions about this complex intelligence effort and raise some key questions.

The Challenge

Following the 9/11 attacks, finding and killing bin Laden became the primary mission of the U.S. intelligence community, particularly the CIA. This mission was clearly laid out in a presidential "finding," or directive, signed on Sept. 17, 2001, by then-U.S. President George W. Bush. By 2005 it became clear to STRATFOR that bin Laden was deep inside Pakistan. Although the Pakistani government was ostensibly a U.S. ally, it was known that there were elements within it sympathetic to al Qaeda and bin Laden. In order to find bin Laden, U.S. intelligence would have to work with -- and against -- Pakistani intelligence services.

Finding bin Laden in a hostile intelligence environment while friends and sympathizers were protecting him represented a monumental intelligence challenge for the United States. With bin Laden and his confederates extremely conscious of U.S technical intelligence abilities, the search quickly became a human-intelligence challenge. While STRATFOR believes bin Laden had become tactically irrelevant since 9/11, he remained symbolically important and a focal point for the U.S. intelligence effort. And while it appears that the United States has improved its intelligence capabilities and passed an important test, much remains undone. Today, the public information surrounding the case illuminates the capabilities that will be used to find other high-value targets as the U.S. effort continues.

The official story on the intelligence that led to bin Laden's Abbottabad compound has been widely reported, leaked from current and former U.S. officials. It focuses on a man with the cover name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a Pakistani Pashtun born in Kuwait who became bin Laden's most trusted courier. With fluency in Pashto and Arabic, according to media reports, al-Kuwaiti would be invaluable to al Qaeda, and in order to purchase bin Laden's property and run errands he would also need to be fluent in Urdu. His position as bin Laden's most trusted courier made him a key link in disrupting the organization. While this man supposedly led the United States to bin Laden, it took a decade of revamping U.S. intelligence capabilities and a great deal of hard work (and maybe even a lucky break) to actually find him. [continued after jump]

Dead Disco

After possibly traumatizing you last weekend with the emo screamo punk of Z, 

this week I'll go easy and offer some Metric to get you ready for the weekend.

Knock me over with a feather

For her next act, Judge Sumi plans on
picking out the china pattern for the
Governor's mansion

If you've been following the Wisconsin fiasco at all you'll know that the unfortunately named liberal County Judge Sumi had, prior to a collective bargaining law being published, exercised her hitherto unknown veto powers by issuing a temporary restraining order forbidding the law being put into effect. 

Today she issued her final ruling and to nobody's surprise she ruled that the law, or what would have been a law had the governor been able to get it published, was dead, kaput and invalid. You can read more about her rather unusual decision at Legal Insurrection and The Volokh Conspiracy. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court will take up the issue in a couple of weeks.

When asked a simple question,
Kloppy demonstrates the classic
"Deer in the Headlights" look

Speaking of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Sumi's meddling in the procedures of the legislative branch is not all the zaniness taking place in the Dairy State, they recently held an election for a Supreme Court seat. On the night of the election, based on AP reports of the votes total, JoAnne "Kloppy" Kloppenburg declared that she had an water-tight, insurmountable victory based on a 204 vote lead. 

Unfortunately for her, the Clerk of Elections in Waukesha County couldn't save an excel spread sheet properly, and it turned out that Kloppy's opponent actually had a 7500 vote lead. Oooops. 

Obviously, unlike 204 votes, 7500+ votes is a slender lead so she requested a recount. The recount is over and she picked up a little over 300 votes. However, not one to shy away from looking stupid, she has made all sorts of dodgy claims that there are a lot of anomalies in the election and it just may be tainted. She has until Friday, May 27th to file a court challenge. My guess is she'll tilt at the windmills and file her challenges. 

Fleebagging Democrat Senators, mobs occupying the capitol building, death threats, union intimidation, county judges vetoing laws, recall elections, lawsuit after lawsuit to subvert governance -- Wisconsin has it all. Let's hope this doesn't become the national blueprint.   

Just a throwaway post

Chateau Le Dumpe's majestic front porch

 Sorry, but there's nothing of much of real interest about this post. I'm just experimenting. I bought a new camera, a Cannon ELPH 300 HS Powershot, which is just a simple point and click. I wanted to step through the process of uploading a photo, and to see if it its picture quality was good, bad or indifferent when viewed via the web.

If you're curious, it is a picture of my front porch. You can see the iPod on the foot stool, During daylight I frequently sit out there and visit my regular haunts on the internet.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Whistling Past the Graveyard, brought to you by Screamin' Jay Hawkins and the Democratic Senate.  On Wednesday Ryan's budget bill was defeated as expected, Obama's budget was also shot down 97-0. Think about that, Obama couldn't scrounge up a single Democrat to give him a token aye vote. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats in the Senate, after two years, still haven't proposed a budget. As John Hinderaker at Powerline said:  

The Democrats have no budget; no plan; no path out of the fiscal disaster into which they have led the United States. They are bystanders and political opportunists, utterly unfit to govern.

That about sums up my feelings, although I would probably toss in a couple of cuss words for good measure. I shudder at the thought of the demagoguery we're going to have to endure this election cycle.

Budget Vacations - Questionable Medical Devices Collection

Phrenology machine

As a public service, during these cash strapped times, I've been suggesting budget vacation destinations. Of course, I always strive to provide attractions that are of great historical or educational value. 

For that reason, today's recommendation is the  "Questionable Medical Device" collection of the Science Museum of Minnesota. It is a comprehensive overview of medical quackery and mechanisms of dubious therapeutic value. 

It includes phrenology machines, curative devices that squirted out cancer-causing doses of radiation, various contraptions that futilely harnessed the wondrous powers of magnetism, foot powered breast enlarging pumps and more. 

The exhibit originally assembled by Bob McCoy who started the collection when he bought a few phrenology machines and for a small fee demonstrated them in a shop in Minnesota. Soon he began to acquire other devices 

For a while he moved his collection to its own museum, but it was eventually donated to the Science Museum of Minnesota where it now resides. So, if you're in the area drop by and check it out and, as always, pack yourself a picnic lunch. 
 

Dramatic reading of A Hard Day's Night

Peter Sellars doing a reading of the Beatles 'A Hard Day's Night'
in the Shakespearean style.

(via Open Culture) 
 

Stratfor and Evangeline Lilly

In this Stratfor article Friedman discusses Obama's speech in context of how he may have been using it to try to reassemble, or at least hold together, the Muslim component of the Coalition of the Willing in light of the Arab Spring demonstrations and uprisings.

Like Friedman I don't think Obama's speech was quite as inimical as a lot of people do. That said, Obama is clearly not a friend of Israel and as a result its tone was, as usual with Obama, off-kilter. He simply can't avoid shining the spot light where he thinks Israel has to compromise, while being vague about the obvious steps the Palestinians have to take. That made it sound worse than it actually was in my opinion.

Also,  giving it immediately before Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington was a political mistake. I imagine he expected Netanyahu to be in the same sort of box he put the Supreme Court Judges and Boehner in earlier, where Netanyahu would have to be polite during the lecture for appearances sake. Instead he ended up ceding the ground to Netanyahu, who turned tables on Obama by lecturing him during the press conference and strongly laying out Israel's position in the process.  

Finally, I'll bang one of my favorite drums again -- the speech should have slid the Israel/Palestine issue into the background and swung around to pressuring Syria. I believe events will show that the Palestinians made a grave error in aligning themselves with the Iranian proxy Hamas. I doubt the arabs, who already have a low opinion of the Palestinians, will long tolerate that. I believe that Iranian tentacle could be leveraged by American diplomats to influence events in the region. Prying Syria away from Iran should be the aim of American diplomacy at this time. 

Then again, I really don't know what I'm talking about, so you can take my diplomatic master-minding with a huge grain of salt. All I've got to say is... thank God for blogs, everybody can be an expert.

At any rate, the Middle East is a mess, the Arab Spring is a mess, and the Israel/Palestine situation is a mess; so the notion of messes was on my mind as I pondered the article's Hot Stratfor Babe possibilities. Naturally this turned my mind towards mud wrestling, and for that reason I selected Evangeline Lilly for the honor.

Evangeline Lilly played Kate on TV's Lost which, come to think of it, had a plot about as complex, nonsensical and pointless as Middle Eastern diplomacy. In Season III there was an episode where Kate was handcuffed to her mortal enemy Juliet. Juliet lipped off one too many times, Kate got hopping mad, and they ended up in a fight which led to the two of them flopping into a mud puddle to do some wrestling. 

The picture of her above is from later in the episode, when the now mud-covered Kate was hopping mad over something else. She was hopping mad a lot in that episode. As a bonus, after the Strafor article I've embedded a video of another fight between the two, this one in the rain, from earlier in the episode (as I said, Kate got hopping mad a lot in that episode).



OBAMA AND THE ARAB SPRING
By George Friedman, May 24, 2011

U.S. President Barack Obama gave a speech last week on the Middle East. Presidents make many speeches. Some are meant to be taken casually, others are made to address an immediate crisis, and still others are intended to be a statement of broad American policy. As in any country, U.S. presidents follow rituals indicating which category their speeches fall into. Obama clearly intended his recent Middle East speech to fall into the last category, as reflecting a shift in strategy if not the declaration of a new doctrine.

While events in the region drove Obama's speech, politics also played a strong part, as with any presidential speech. Devising and implementing policy are the president's job. To do so, presidents must be able to lead -- and leading requires having public support. After the 2010 election, I said that presidents who lose control of one house of Congress in midterm elections turn to foreign policy because it is a place in which they retain the power to act. The U.S. presidential campaign season has begun, and the United States is engaged in wars that are not going well. Within this framework, Obama thus sought to make both a strategic and a political speech.

Obama's War Dilemma

The United States is engaged in a  broad struggle against jihadists. Specifically, it is engaged in a war in Afghanistan and is in the terminal phase of the Iraq war.

The Afghan war is stalemated. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Obama said that the Taliban's forward momentum has been stopped. He did not, however, say that the Taliban is being defeated. Given the state of affairs between the United States and Pakistan following bin Laden's death, whether the United States can defeat the Taliban remains unclear. It might be able to, but the president must remain open to the possibility that the war will become an extended stalemate.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops are being withdrawn from Iraq, but that does not mean the conflict is over. Instead, the withdrawal has opened the door to Iranian power in Iraq. The Iraqis lack a capable military and security force. Their government is divided and feeble. Meanwhile, the Iranians have had years to infiltrate Iraq. Iranian domination of Iraq would open the door to  Iranian power projection throughout the region. Therefore, the United States has proposed keeping U.S. forces in Iraq but has yet to receive Iraq's approval. If that approval is given (which looks unlikely), Iraqi factions with clout in parliament have threatened to renew the anti-U.S. insurgency.

The United States must therefore consider its actions should the situation in Afghanistan remain indecisive or deteriorate and should Iraq evolve into an Iranian strategic victory. The simple answer -- extending the mission in Iraq and increasing forces in Afghanistan -- is not viable. The United States could not pacify Iraq with 170,000 troops facing determined opposition, while the 300,000 troops that Chief of Staff of the Army Eric Shinseki argued for in 2003 are not available. Meanwhile, it is difficult to imagine how many troops would be needed to guarantee a military victory in Afghanistan. Such surges are not politically viable, either. After nearly 10 years of indecisive war, the American public has little appetite for increasing troop commitments to either war and has no appetite for conscription.

Obama thus has limited military options on the ground in a situation where conditions in both war zones could deteriorate badly. And his political option -- blaming former U.S. President George W. Bush -- in due course would wear thin, as Nixon found in blaming Johnson.

The Coalition of the Willing Meets the Arab Spring

For his part, Bush followed a strategy of a coalition of the willing. He understood that the United States could not conduct a war in the region without regional allies, and he therefore recruited a coalition of countries that calculated that radical Islamism represented a profound threat to regime survival. This included Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Pakistan. These countries shared a desire to see al Qaeda defeated and a willingness to pool resources and intelligence with the United States to enable Washington to carry the main burden of the war.

This coalition appears to be fraying. Apart from the tensions between the United States and Pakistan, the unrest in the Middle East of the last few months apparently has undermined the legitimacy and survivability of many Arab regimes, including key partners in the so-called coalition of the willing. If these pro-American regimes collapse and are replaced by anti-American regimes, the American position in the region might also collapse. [continued after jump]

Inside the chocolate factory

Looks like it would be a complete mess to cleanup.

Nutshell studies of unexplained death

Red Bedroom - the crime scene of a murdered prostitute (click to enlarge)

From Erin Hooper Bush's website Death in Diorama: "In the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress to the International Harvester fortune, built the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. These macabre dioramas were purpose-built to be used as police training tools to help crime scene investigators learn the art and science of detailed forensics-based detection."

The site has information about "Mother" Lee, the woman who conceived of the idea of building crime scene dioramas to teach proper crime scene investigation. She, and her carpenter Ralph Mosher, are believed to have constructed 20 of the dioramas. although only 18 survived. They are currently housed by the Maryland Medical Examiners Office and are still used for training tools. They are not available for public viewing.

Each diorama was meticulously designed and based on composites of real crimes. The decor emulated the flop houses and seedy rooms these crimes occurred in, and featured working lights, doors and other details. Mother Lee fashioned the dolls that served as corpses, realistically painting them to show the degree of mortification they were found in. Students would examine them with flashlights and magnifying glasses to learn how to comprehensively search for clues.  

The site has pictures of four of her dioramas: the Kitchen, Dark Bathroom, Red Bedroom (shown above) and the Parsonage, each  with hotspots to details in them showing clues.  

Drop by the site, see if you can spot the clues, and read up on an amazing woman who did a lot to revolutionize and promote crime scene investigation.

Smokestack Lightning

Monday morning is upon us and so the blues are in order. Enjoy a video of Howlin' Wolf  in a live performance of Smokestack Lightning.  

Illustrations of a different sort

 

Not all drawings are done by starving artists with tortured souls. Before the advent of cameras naturalists had to draw their subjects to record them. Even with cameras some views: sectional cut-aways, internal structure, and extinct species to name a few, are often best illustrated by drawing them.

The site Scientific Illustration has a wonderful collection of these types of drawings. Each has some notes about the drawing, as well as a link to the source of the drawing. 

This page has three examples of their collection. There are more examples after the jump. 

Cracker Jack

The Food Police are an endlessly annoying lot. In Texas they're taking before and after shots of kid's lunch trays. The purpose? As explained in the article Food police target Texas schools with cameras, "The cameras will allow officials to track who eats what, how good it is for them and what it means for their overall diet. Reports will be printed out that reveal serving sizes, calories, fiber counts, and sugar and protein counts."

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the The U.S. Department of Agriculture wants potatoes, aside from sweet potatoes, banned from school breakfasts and greatly cut back in school lunches. There is also the move afoot to make restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, convenience stores and coffee chains all clearly post the calorie count for each item on their menus.

Ronald McDonald, that pied piper of childhood obesity, has also recently been in their cross-hairs. Through newspaper ads and other pressure, activist groups are demanding that the Clown stop marketing Happy Meals to children. Of course, Happy Meals have long been a target of the Food Police. I doubt that there is anything that drives them crazier than those toys that accompany burgers and fries in a colorful box.

When I was a kid the closest equivalent to a Happy Meal was a box of Cracker Jack. I liked the carmel corn and peanuts, but most of all I liked those little paper wrapped "prizes" that came in each box. They were simple things: little plastic figures, airplanes and cars, toy rings, miniature comic books, maze puzzles with tiny ball bearings, spinning tops and the like.

I collected them in a shoe box. When you opened a Cracker Jack box you didn't get right to the prize, you always had to impatiently eat your way down until the little paper bag with the prize was reachable. Then you had to hope for the best. If unlucky you would get a girl's ring. I most liked the ones with several pieces you had to click together to make a little mechanism -- a bicycle or something like that.

The Grandmother who gave me the Cracker Jacks was a Slovakian lady with a thick accent. She had immigrated to the States when she was 13 years old. She spent her adult life during first the Great Depression and then the rationing of WWII. Still, to her she was living in the Land of Milk and Honey. Far beyond the "Streets Paved with Gold" mythology of the U.S., she loved the freedom of America and the dignity it conferred.

She used to write to the relatives back in the Old Country and send them packages. At the end of WWII, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Bratslavia, my distant cousins decided discretion was the better part of valor and joined the Communist Party. They would irritate her by singing the praises of Communism in their letters, while asking her to include this or that in her next package to them. Finally, in one letter to her, after the usual Soviet panegyrics, they asked for a refrigerator. Disgusted, she wrote back that,  "if they wanted a damn refrigerator they could ask Uncle Joe Stalin for one." That was the last letter she ever wrote to them.   
 
I always think of her when I read the latest antics of the Food Police. She would have been spitting mad at another's presumption that she did not know how to feed a child. She had her fill of the grim life and she did not begrudge a child the taste of candy and cheap plastic toys. And besides, what she put on a table or in a lunch bag was nobody else's business.

That's the problem with the food Police and other Nanny-Staters, they're so fixated on their imagined wrongs of the world that they will not leave a person breath. They don't understand that there is more to life than a perfectly balanced diet. There are things you cannot measure, like a shoebox full of prizes or a shared meal of hamburgers and salty fries. Life is too short to never taste these things.

Because he says it better than me, I'll end with an except from Richard Fernandez's old post All the streets were dark and bare:

My grandmother always gave me a present for Christmas until the year she died.  She was living with my parents by then, and without a source of income. I remember her saving coins for some purpose no one could guess until on Christmas day we found out what it was for. She gave me a chocolate bar.

It was days before I could bring myself to eat it. When I finally did, I stared for a long time afterward at the foil and paper, wondering as many of us probably have at such gifts, on how so little a thing could carry so great a weight of human love.  

  

Lest we laugh too hard

Fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh

We know it now, the world did not end today as Harold Camping warned us it would. He read the signs and portents wrong, and did so in a spectacular and public manner, but at least he provided us with a lot of merriment in the process. Regardless, I imagine a good bit of his flock will continue to follow him. Funny how those things work.

As for the rest of us -- perhaps we're just more discrete and humble in our predictions. He's hardly the first person to get things of this nature wrong. Below is a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh translated into English.

Gilgamesh said to him, '...I have wearied myself with travelling; my joints are aching, and I have lost acquaintance with sleep which is sweet. My clothes were worn out before I came to the house of Siduri. I have killed the bear and hyena, the lion and panther, the tiger, the stag and the ibex, all sorts of wild game and the small creatures of the pastures. I ate their flesh and I wore their skins; and that was how I came to the gate of the young woman, the maker of wine, who barred her gate of pitch and bitumen against me. But from her I had news of the journey; so then I came to Urshanabi the ferryman, and with him I crossed over the waters of death. Oh, father Utnapishtim, you who have entered the assembly of the gods, I wish to question you concerning the living and the dead, how shall I find the life for which I am searching?

Utuapishtim said, 'There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure? It is only the nymph of the dragon-fly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory. From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death. What is there between the master and the servant when both have fulfilled their doom? When the Anunnaki, the judges, come together, and Mammetun the mother of destinies, together they decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose.'

Then Gilgamesh said to Utnapishtim the Faraway, 'I look at you now, Utnapishtim, and your appearance is no different from mine; there is nothing strange in your features. I thought I should find, you like a hero prepared for battle, but you he here taking your ease on your back. Tell me truly, how was it that you came to enter the company of the gods and to possess everlasting life?' Utnapishtim said to Gilgamesh, 'I will reveal to you a mystery, I will tell you a secret of the gods...'

Goodbye cruel world

It's been all over the news. Today, May 21, 2011 at 6 p.m. (Eastern time) the world is coming to an end according to Harold Camping of Family Radio Worldwide. It is going to start with an earthquake in Fiji and lead to the Rapture.

Well, who knows, maybe God is talking to him, maybe not -- either way I figure a little End of the World soundtrack music couldn't hurt, so enjoy the above exquisite cover, by Antony & the Johnsons, of Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door".