No Friday Night Miscellany tonight - I'm just too wound up by the non-ending "news" about the election. Pray Goddess it all ENDS on Tuesday, I'm so sick of it all. The commercials are the worst - some are outright lies, others are blatant distortions, still others are almost relevant by pointing out differences in potential policy approaches (those are few and far between). I've had enough of both Presidential candidates in the U.S. running large frigging pep rallies all around the country. It's like - snore - so what? I'm tired of hearing John McCain's "My Friends," sick of Sarah Palin's phoney corn-pone accent, bored with Biden's too-wide smile (does he wear a toup???), and impatient with Obama's equanimity. I want to see a little PASSION, Mister!
And what if I'm one of the millions of people in this country who does NOT own a computer or have internet access? How do I find out about the candidates' stands on issues then, heh? Someone who wants to know will NOT generally find in-depth analysis of the candidates' respective stands in their local newspapers (unless one happens to subscribe to The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, or The Washington Post), and certainly not from political hack ads on television and radio being paid for by the campaigns, the respective national party organizations for the Democrats and Republicans, and various private organizations.
On the plus side, I have been extremely pleased to see as much as one-third of the potential electorate casting early ballots during this election. I did the same. I voted early in 2004 but I had to do so in person at City Hall - not a pleasant experience, as there were several hundred other people already standing in a snaking line in City Hall's small atrium when I got there at 4:00 p.m. after taking off work an hour early on purpose just to vote. It took hours! I didn't get home until 7:30 p.m. that night - I live less than a mile away from City Hall. I suppose I waited too long and I confess I had not educated myself enough on the process, so I don't know if it would have been possible THEN to send in an application for an "absentee ballot" (they don't call it "early voting" here) and vote by mail, which is exactly what I did this year - convenient, painless, easy. I downloaded the "application" from the internet from the City Clerk's website, filled it out and mailed it in. I could have faxed it but - call me old-fashioned - I felt uncomfortable with the idea of doing so. Yeah, I know, doesn't make sense - can't explain it, it was just one of those things, darlings!
In Wisconsin, one does not have to provide a "reason" for casting an early ballot, so one does not have to come up with a "dog ate my homework" type of excuse. I got my ballot a week ago last Thursday in the mail and mailed back to City Hall on Monday of this week. It's done, and I feel glad, happy - and relieved - to have done my citizen's duty. Only silly thing - you need a WITNESS! Yeah - I mean - how silly is that - as if one couldn't cheat about the witness? There was an enclosure with the official ballot along with a postage-paid return envelope (taxpayer dollars at work, finally an expenditure I benefit from!!!) explaining that I had to exhibit my BLANK ballot in front of my witness, then vote in secret (I made my witness cover her eyes and swear she wasn't peeking), I filled out the ballot in #2 pencil, folded it up, placed it in the envelope and sealed it. Then I signed and then my witness signed and provided her address as requested. I wonder - do they check those addresses of every "absentee ballot" witness to see if they're valid or not? How would they do it if, say, a person is a renter and not a property owner (so no property tax bill data base), not a driver, as I am not (therefore no drivers' license data base to check from), and not a person who has voted in the past several elections - or ever voted, for that matter (therefore does not show up in any state-wide canvass of local voter registration lists). Hmmmm...would that mean my absentee ballot would be thrown out?
Oh oh, now I'm getting paranoid.
Hmmm... At any rate, I am glad for the early voting opportunity and the ease of execution to vote early in Wisconsin. Thank you, Wisconsin! In other states the process has been much more problematic, and I'm worried about that. If people come to vote early and are confronted with long lines that will take hours to work through, will they be daunted and just go back home without voting? And if they do go home without voting from early voting, will they show up at the polls next Tuesday?
I live in a suburb of Milwaukee; Milwaukee has opened a large early voting center downtown, where a lot of people work and, I have to say, readily accessible by bus from any part of the city. I understand, on average, 1500 people a day have been voting since this center became available - but I don't know how long it has been available. But you know, any amount of congestion that early voting relieves from the polls next Tuesday is a triumph; as I understand it, "experts" are predicting the largest nationwide voter turnover - over 63%! - in more than 40 years. I suppose I'm being naive, though, in praying that there will be no legal challenges filed by partisans of Republicans and Democrats caused by legitimate and illegitmate reasons for discarding votes, or sending people home without voting, or mysteriously disappearing ballots or - oh Goddess, this is all giving me a headache. You'd think we were living in a third world country where stealing elections is commonplace! Geez!
I'm going to go relax in one of my comfy wing chairs now, with a glass of wine, and open up "The Fire" where I left off a few days ago. I'm doing my first pass through Neville's novel slowly, savoring every moment...
Friday, October 31, 2008
Review of Katherine Neville's "The Fire"
From the Sun Sentinel.com
Cult classic author Katherine Neville makes next move
By Oline Cogdill Mystery Fiction Columnist
11:18 AM EDT, October 31, 2008
Before The Da Vinci Code, there was Katherine Neville's The Eight. More than 20 years ago, this computer consultant's ambitious debut mixed a magical chess set dating back to Charlemagne with mythology, music and math. Set during 1972 and 1790, The Eight flitted from New York and Algeria back to the French Revolution. It featured more than 60 characters, including historical figures.
With such far-flung settings and a plot that at first blush would seem to be a mess, The Eight should not have worked. Yet, it became a cult classic, one of the finest, most original examples of historical thrillers, opening the door for novels steeped in mythology, before it all got tangled up with Dan Brown.
While Neville has written two other novels, The Fire is the long-awaited sequel to The Eight. Just as ambitious as its predecessor, Neville re-creates her fresh approach to storytelling.
In The Fire, the search for the chess set is now up to Alexandra Solarin, the daughter of The Eight's heroine Catherine Velis, and her mother's best friend, Lily Rad. The story smoothly moves from contemporary Colorado, Washington, D.C., Russia and Algeria, then back to the 1800s Rome, the Loire Valley and Morocco. Lord Byron, Keats and Napoleon make cameo appearances. A chess set has never been more exciting than this one created by Neville.
However, The Fire is even more complicated and it is easy to get lost in the story's various mythologies.
The plot lags in the middle before Neville gets her chess game back on track. A 20-year wait for a sequel is too long, though The Fire nicely wraps up some secrets and twists that were never solved in its predecessor. Readers will want to first learn what The Eight's fuss was all about before tackling The Fire.
Cult classic author Katherine Neville makes next move
By Oline Cogdill Mystery Fiction Columnist
11:18 AM EDT, October 31, 2008
Before The Da Vinci Code, there was Katherine Neville's The Eight. More than 20 years ago, this computer consultant's ambitious debut mixed a magical chess set dating back to Charlemagne with mythology, music and math. Set during 1972 and 1790, The Eight flitted from New York and Algeria back to the French Revolution. It featured more than 60 characters, including historical figures.
With such far-flung settings and a plot that at first blush would seem to be a mess, The Eight should not have worked. Yet, it became a cult classic, one of the finest, most original examples of historical thrillers, opening the door for novels steeped in mythology, before it all got tangled up with Dan Brown.
While Neville has written two other novels, The Fire is the long-awaited sequel to The Eight. Just as ambitious as its predecessor, Neville re-creates her fresh approach to storytelling.
In The Fire, the search for the chess set is now up to Alexandra Solarin, the daughter of The Eight's heroine Catherine Velis, and her mother's best friend, Lily Rad. The story smoothly moves from contemporary Colorado, Washington, D.C., Russia and Algeria, then back to the 1800s Rome, the Loire Valley and Morocco. Lord Byron, Keats and Napoleon make cameo appearances. A chess set has never been more exciting than this one created by Neville.
However, The Fire is even more complicated and it is easy to get lost in the story's various mythologies.
The plot lags in the middle before Neville gets her chess game back on track. A 20-year wait for a sequel is too long, though The Fire nicely wraps up some secrets and twists that were never solved in its predecessor. Readers will want to first learn what The Eight's fuss was all about before tackling The Fire.
Temple of Artemis (a/k/a Diana) To Be Rebuilt in Ephesus
If it's true, this is a major story and a major financial commitment. The English translation is a bit "iffy" in places, but generally very understandable.
From the Turkish Daily News
Temple of Artemis to revived once more in Selçuk
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Temple of Artemis was built in the seventh century BC. But according to myth a madman set it on fire 400 years later. But as Christianity began to spread throughout Anatolia, a Christian ecclesiast outlawed the cult of Artemis in the fifth century. The temple was destroyed during the early period of Christianity in Anatolia. Artemis, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, will be rebuilt in Selçuk in present day Turkey
The Temple of Artemis, or Artemision in Greek, recalled in both Greek and Byzantine anthologies for its magnificence, was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. After decades of vandalism, religious conflict and decay it is finally to be rebuilt.
Erected at the expense of the Lydian king, Karun, at Ephesus (modern-day Turkey) in the seventh century B.C., the Temple of Artemis was dedicated to the goddess Artemis, or Artemis of Ephesus, the daughter of Zeus and twin sister of Apollo. She was the Hellenic goddess of forests, hills, virginity and fertility.
Artemis of Ephesus is often thought to be a cult of Cybele, the fertility goddess worshipped in Anatolia. Historians say that Cybele came to be known as Artemis over time.
According to Christian literature, the Virgin Mary succeeded Artemis in receiving the devotions of the people of Ephesus.
Bank of the time
Numerous myths have existed surrounding the Temple of Artemis, the construction of which lasted a hundred years, and its plan belonged to prominent architects of the time. One of the myths tells of how the temple was burned down. According to the myth, an insane man named Herostratos set the temple on fire in 356 B.C. When people asked why Artemis could not protect the temple against a madman, certain wise men replied to them that Artemis had gone to help in the birth of Alexander the Great.
The Temple of Artemis was not only a religious structure; it was also the largest and richest bank of the time. According to Turkish writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı (the fisherman of Halicarnassus), it was not a madman that set fire to the temple, but the guardians of the temple, who got away with all the money kept inside. After the great fire, the temple was rebuilt.
Alexander the Great offered financial support for the reconstruction but the people of Ephesus rejected his offer, saying one god could not give votive offerings to another god or goddess.
The Temple of Artemis became less popular as Christianity became more widespread throughout Anatolia. The Temple of Artemis was pillaged, as Artemis was seen not only as the predecessor to, but also as a rival of the Virgin Mary.
In the fifth century, Johannes Chrysostomos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, outlawed the cult of Artemis. The roof, the altar and the columns of the temple were removed and disposed of. Narratives suggest many of the columns were taken to Constantinople and used in the construction of numerous buildings.
The first archaeological excavation of the site where the relics of the temple were located took place in 1869. It was during this excavation that the exact location of the temple was discovered on the western side of Ayasoluk Hill. Between 1965 and 1994, the area set the stage for a series of excavations led by Dr. Anton Bammer of the archaeology institute at the University of Vienna, Austria. During this period, experts searched for the techniques on how to rebuild Artemis.
New temple not an imitation
Dr. Atılay İleri, the founder of the Selçuk Artemis Culture, Arts and Education Foundation, met with Bammer 10 years ago to realize the reconstruction of the once magnificent Temple of Artemis.
With support from Austrian scientists, İleri had Swiss architects prepare a plan for the reconstruction of the temple. İleri, who has dreamed of reconstructing the temple for 10 years, said: “When completed, the temple will not be a copy or an imitation of the original Artemis but the Artemis itself. And its sisters of the past will set their eyes on it with pride and emulation.”
The original Temple of Artemis had 120 columns. Thirty-six of them were placed on cubic circles. If completed, the new temple of Artemis will be the third Temple of Artemis constructed in history. Its size will be the same as the original. A total of 25,000 cubic meters of solid marble, the original construction material of Artemis, will be used in the construction of the third temple. Sixty of the 120 columns of the new temple will have base plates.
To find the best sculptures to adorn the restored temple, a lottery will be held to form a selection committee chosen from representatives of 196 U.N. member countries. Each selected representative will then select two sculptors from the nation they represent. The selected sculptors will then take part in workshops run by the Artemis Culture, Arts and Education Foundation.
The sculptors will first begin work on the cubic bases for the columns, with sculptures to be inspired by either of two sayings attributed to Heracleitos of Ephesus: “War is the father of everything” and “Everything flows and nothing abides.”
An international jury will then choose two sculptures from all the pieces produced by artists to be featured in the temple. One of the winning sculptures will be displayed on one of the cubic circles and the other will be displayed in the temple's yard.
İleri said the project would rock the world of art. “When the temple is completed, the workshops will start serving as a school of sculpture. Selçuk will be the center of world sculpture,” he said.
Expected cost $150 million
The Artemis Culture, Arts, and Education Foundation was opened in Selçuk in September 2007. The foundation's mission is to reconstruct the Artemis Temple. The project is expected to cost $150 million. The foundation will complete the project with no financial assistance from the state.
İleri said the Culture and Tourism Ministry welcomes the project. The foundation applied to the ministry for the allocation of land via the Selçuk Municipality. The new temple will be constructed on an area called Kurutepe, 1,500 meters away from the temple's original location. Construction will begin when official permission is provided for land allocation.
From the Turkish Daily News
Temple of Artemis to revived once more in Selçuk
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Temple of Artemis was built in the seventh century BC. But according to myth a madman set it on fire 400 years later. But as Christianity began to spread throughout Anatolia, a Christian ecclesiast outlawed the cult of Artemis in the fifth century. The temple was destroyed during the early period of Christianity in Anatolia. Artemis, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, will be rebuilt in Selçuk in present day Turkey
The Temple of Artemis, or Artemision in Greek, recalled in both Greek and Byzantine anthologies for its magnificence, was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. After decades of vandalism, religious conflict and decay it is finally to be rebuilt.
Erected at the expense of the Lydian king, Karun, at Ephesus (modern-day Turkey) in the seventh century B.C., the Temple of Artemis was dedicated to the goddess Artemis, or Artemis of Ephesus, the daughter of Zeus and twin sister of Apollo. She was the Hellenic goddess of forests, hills, virginity and fertility.
Artemis of Ephesus is often thought to be a cult of Cybele, the fertility goddess worshipped in Anatolia. Historians say that Cybele came to be known as Artemis over time.
According to Christian literature, the Virgin Mary succeeded Artemis in receiving the devotions of the people of Ephesus.
Bank of the time
Numerous myths have existed surrounding the Temple of Artemis, the construction of which lasted a hundred years, and its plan belonged to prominent architects of the time. One of the myths tells of how the temple was burned down. According to the myth, an insane man named Herostratos set the temple on fire in 356 B.C. When people asked why Artemis could not protect the temple against a madman, certain wise men replied to them that Artemis had gone to help in the birth of Alexander the Great.
The Temple of Artemis was not only a religious structure; it was also the largest and richest bank of the time. According to Turkish writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı (the fisherman of Halicarnassus), it was not a madman that set fire to the temple, but the guardians of the temple, who got away with all the money kept inside. After the great fire, the temple was rebuilt.
Alexander the Great offered financial support for the reconstruction but the people of Ephesus rejected his offer, saying one god could not give votive offerings to another god or goddess.
The Temple of Artemis became less popular as Christianity became more widespread throughout Anatolia. The Temple of Artemis was pillaged, as Artemis was seen not only as the predecessor to, but also as a rival of the Virgin Mary.
In the fifth century, Johannes Chrysostomos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, outlawed the cult of Artemis. The roof, the altar and the columns of the temple were removed and disposed of. Narratives suggest many of the columns were taken to Constantinople and used in the construction of numerous buildings.
The first archaeological excavation of the site where the relics of the temple were located took place in 1869. It was during this excavation that the exact location of the temple was discovered on the western side of Ayasoluk Hill. Between 1965 and 1994, the area set the stage for a series of excavations led by Dr. Anton Bammer of the archaeology institute at the University of Vienna, Austria. During this period, experts searched for the techniques on how to rebuild Artemis.
New temple not an imitation
Dr. Atılay İleri, the founder of the Selçuk Artemis Culture, Arts and Education Foundation, met with Bammer 10 years ago to realize the reconstruction of the once magnificent Temple of Artemis.
With support from Austrian scientists, İleri had Swiss architects prepare a plan for the reconstruction of the temple. İleri, who has dreamed of reconstructing the temple for 10 years, said: “When completed, the temple will not be a copy or an imitation of the original Artemis but the Artemis itself. And its sisters of the past will set their eyes on it with pride and emulation.”
The original Temple of Artemis had 120 columns. Thirty-six of them were placed on cubic circles. If completed, the new temple of Artemis will be the third Temple of Artemis constructed in history. Its size will be the same as the original. A total of 25,000 cubic meters of solid marble, the original construction material of Artemis, will be used in the construction of the third temple. Sixty of the 120 columns of the new temple will have base plates.
To find the best sculptures to adorn the restored temple, a lottery will be held to form a selection committee chosen from representatives of 196 U.N. member countries. Each selected representative will then select two sculptors from the nation they represent. The selected sculptors will then take part in workshops run by the Artemis Culture, Arts and Education Foundation.
The sculptors will first begin work on the cubic bases for the columns, with sculptures to be inspired by either of two sayings attributed to Heracleitos of Ephesus: “War is the father of everything” and “Everything flows and nothing abides.”
An international jury will then choose two sculptures from all the pieces produced by artists to be featured in the temple. One of the winning sculptures will be displayed on one of the cubic circles and the other will be displayed in the temple's yard.
İleri said the project would rock the world of art. “When the temple is completed, the workshops will start serving as a school of sculpture. Selçuk will be the center of world sculpture,” he said.
Expected cost $150 million
The Artemis Culture, Arts, and Education Foundation was opened in Selçuk in September 2007. The foundation's mission is to reconstruct the Artemis Temple. The project is expected to cost $150 million. The foundation will complete the project with no financial assistance from the state.
İleri said the Culture and Tourism Ministry welcomes the project. The foundation applied to the ministry for the allocation of land via the Selçuk Municipality. The new temple will be constructed on an area called Kurutepe, 1,500 meters away from the temple's original location. Construction will begin when official permission is provided for land allocation.
Oldest Hebrew Writing Yet Discovered?
'Oldest Hebrew script' is found
Page last updated at 16:52 GMT, Thursday, 30 October 2008
Five lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says.
The shard was found by a teenage volunteer during a dig about 20km (12 miles) south-west of Jerusalem.
Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago - about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Other scientists cautioned that further study was needed to understand it.
Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king. The characters are written in proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
King David
Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel identified it as Hebrew because of a three-letter verb meaning "to do" which he said was only used in Hebrew.
"That leads us to believe that this is Hebrew, and that this is the oldest Hebrew inscription that has been found," he said.
The shard and other artefacts were found at the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa, overlooking the Valley of Elah where the Bible says the Israelite David fought the Philistine giant Goliath.
Mr Garfinkel said the findings could shed significant light on the period of King David's reign.
"The chronology and geography of Khirbet Qeiyafa create a unique meeting point between the mythology, history, historiography and archaeology of King David."
But his colleagues at Hebrew University said the Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, therefore making it difficult to prove it was Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time.
Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was "very important", as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found.
"The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear," he said.
Page last updated at 16:52 GMT, Thursday, 30 October 2008
Five lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says.
The shard was found by a teenage volunteer during a dig about 20km (12 miles) south-west of Jerusalem.
Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago - about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Other scientists cautioned that further study was needed to understand it.
Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king. The characters are written in proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
King David
Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel identified it as Hebrew because of a three-letter verb meaning "to do" which he said was only used in Hebrew.
"That leads us to believe that this is Hebrew, and that this is the oldest Hebrew inscription that has been found," he said.
The shard and other artefacts were found at the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa, overlooking the Valley of Elah where the Bible says the Israelite David fought the Philistine giant Goliath.
Mr Garfinkel said the findings could shed significant light on the period of King David's reign.
"The chronology and geography of Khirbet Qeiyafa create a unique meeting point between the mythology, history, historiography and archaeology of King David."
But his colleagues at Hebrew University said the Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, therefore making it difficult to prove it was Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time.
Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was "very important", as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found.
"The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear," he said.
Late Gallo-Roman Altar to Goddess Fortuna Found
30-OCT-08
Limestone altar Discovered at Dalheim Roman Dig
Following previous archaelogical discoveries at the Dalheim dig (see http://www.station.lu/newsDetails.cfm?id=21601, another artefact has been discovered.
The site of the former Gallo-Roman baths has now produced what is described as an "exceptional archaeological discovery". The National Museum of History and Art (MNHA), led by the young German archaeologist Heike Posch and overseen by the curator John Krier, has uncovered fragments of a large 1.3m high limestone altar. The discovery dates from the 3rd century AD and has a Latin inscription showing that the altar was dedicated to the goddess Fortuna.
The text over 10 lines mentions not only the people of Ricciacum vicus, but it also describes the return of the portico of the building baths, destroyed 'by violent barbarians', probably during an incursion by Germans. The curator of the work undertaken at that time was a soldier of the 8th Augusta legion stationed in Strasbourg.
The fragments have been transferred to the MNHA workshop in Bertrange where they will be restored.
Other major surprises are not excluded in further excavation work at the site.
Limestone altar Discovered at Dalheim Roman Dig
Following previous archaelogical discoveries at the Dalheim dig (see http://www.station.lu/newsDetails.cfm?id=21601, another artefact has been discovered.
The site of the former Gallo-Roman baths has now produced what is described as an "exceptional archaeological discovery". The National Museum of History and Art (MNHA), led by the young German archaeologist Heike Posch and overseen by the curator John Krier, has uncovered fragments of a large 1.3m high limestone altar. The discovery dates from the 3rd century AD and has a Latin inscription showing that the altar was dedicated to the goddess Fortuna.
The text over 10 lines mentions not only the people of Ricciacum vicus, but it also describes the return of the portico of the building baths, destroyed 'by violent barbarians', probably during an incursion by Germans. The curator of the work undertaken at that time was a soldier of the 8th Augusta legion stationed in Strasbourg.
The fragments have been transferred to the MNHA workshop in Bertrange where they will be restored.
Other major surprises are not excluded in further excavation work at the site.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Story That Will Not Die
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Ossuary hoax case may collapse
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, October 30, 2008
(10-30) 04:00 PDT Jerusalem - --
The high-profile trial of two Israeli antiquities experts accused of faking a burial box containing the remains of Jesus' brother and other priceless artifacts faced a humiliating collapse Wednesday after a Jerusalem judge advised the prosecution to consider dropping the proceedings after more than three years in court.
"After all the evidence we have heard, including the testimony of the prime defendant, is the picture still the same as the one you had when he was charged?" District Court Judge Aharon Farkash pointedly asked public prosecutor, Adi Damti. "Not every case ends in the way you think it will when it starts. Maybe we can save ourselves the rest."
The discovery of an ossuary or burial box inscribed "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus" created a sensation when first displayed at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2002. If authentic, it would be the only physical evidence ever discovered directly linked to the family of Jesus.
But the owner of the ossuary, Israeli engineer and collector Oded Golan, was arrested by Israeli police in 2003, and then charged a year later along with four others on 18 counts of forgery, fraud and damaging archaeological artifacts.
'Unholy Business'
In her new book on the case entitled "Unholy Business, A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land," author Nina Burleigh appears to believe that Golan is guilty, but suspects his lawyers have raised enough doubts to avoid conviction.
The often explosive testimony has given a rare insight into the shadowy world behind the apparently cultured facade of priceless antiquities. Witnesses have described furtive encounters with Arab grave robbers, international smuggling and transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars based on a handshake.
But the collapse of the prosecution's case would be a major embarrassment for the Israeli police and Israel Antiquities Authority. They maintain the defendants faked the burial box along with other biblical-era relics that were then sold for huge sums of money and sent to major collections and museums around the world.
"This was fraud of a sophistication and expertise which was previously unknown," said Police Comdt. Shaul Naim, who headed a two-year police investigation. "They took authentic items and added inscriptions to make them worth millions."
Scholars appointed to a special committee convened by the Israel Antiquities Authority accused Golan and his co-defendants of taking valuable ancient relics and adding inscriptions to increase their value.
Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, had described the charges against Golan as "the tip of the iceberg. These forgeries have worldwide repercussions," he said after the indictments were filed. "They were an attempt to change the history of the Jewish and Christian people."
But under cross-examination by defense attorneys, many experts recanted some of their findings. Judge Farkash's comments, which were excluded from trial transcripts but said in open court, came after more than 80 witnesses and 10,000 pages of testimony including evidence and cross-examination of Golan and leading archaeologists and scientists from around the world.
No definitive proof
"Have you really proved beyond a reasonable doubt that these artifacts are fakes as charged in the indictment? The experts disagreed among themselves. Where is the definitive proof needed to show that the accused faked the ossuary?" Judge Farkash asked prosecutor Damti. "You need to ask yourselves those questions very seriously, and if necessary consult with your superiors in the public prosecutor's office."
The two most important items said to be fakes were the James ossuary - a limestone burial box in use during the time of Jesus and a black stone tablet inscribed with 14 lines commemorating renovations to the Temple in Jerusalem by the biblical King Joash.
Golan, a 57-year-old world-renowned expert who started collecting antiquities when he was 8 years old, has consistently denied all charges during the more than three years of proceedings.
"The James ossuary and the Joash Tablet are 100 percent authentic. I have never faked an archaeological artifact in my life," he has said.
To date, witnesses have included antiquities dealers, museum curators, experts and professors of archaeology, history, epigraphy and chemical isotopes from leading universities and museums in Israel and around the world.
In four days of testimony, multimillionaire collector Shlomo Moussaieff described scenes where dealers, professors and even Israeli diplomats came to his home, produced rare antiquities from their pockets and negotiated sales worth thousands of dollars.
On one occasion, Moussaieff sent his personal banker with Golan to buy some rare seal impressions from a Palestinian villager. They parked their car on a dirt road near the border with the West Bank and when the Palestinian arrived they gave him a bag containing $150,000 in cash.
Charges dropped for 2
Charges against two of the defendants were dropped during the trial. Another man pleaded guilty to a minor charge unrelated to the main accusations, leaving Golan and antiquities dealer Robert Deutsch, who were alleged to have been the leaders of the supposed forgery ring.
"I have never faked anything nor committed any crime," said Deutsch. "The authorities have ruined my reputation and I have lost my university teaching position because of the baseless charges leveled against me. When this is over, I will sue them for slander."
Meanwhile, Judge Farkash has advised the prosecution to think about continuing the case before reconvening the trial in January.
E-mail Matthew Kalman at foreign@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Ossuary hoax case may collapse
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, October 30, 2008
(10-30) 04:00 PDT Jerusalem - --
The high-profile trial of two Israeli antiquities experts accused of faking a burial box containing the remains of Jesus' brother and other priceless artifacts faced a humiliating collapse Wednesday after a Jerusalem judge advised the prosecution to consider dropping the proceedings after more than three years in court.
"After all the evidence we have heard, including the testimony of the prime defendant, is the picture still the same as the one you had when he was charged?" District Court Judge Aharon Farkash pointedly asked public prosecutor, Adi Damti. "Not every case ends in the way you think it will when it starts. Maybe we can save ourselves the rest."
The discovery of an ossuary or burial box inscribed "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus" created a sensation when first displayed at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2002. If authentic, it would be the only physical evidence ever discovered directly linked to the family of Jesus.
But the owner of the ossuary, Israeli engineer and collector Oded Golan, was arrested by Israeli police in 2003, and then charged a year later along with four others on 18 counts of forgery, fraud and damaging archaeological artifacts.
'Unholy Business'
In her new book on the case entitled "Unholy Business, A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land," author Nina Burleigh appears to believe that Golan is guilty, but suspects his lawyers have raised enough doubts to avoid conviction.
The often explosive testimony has given a rare insight into the shadowy world behind the apparently cultured facade of priceless antiquities. Witnesses have described furtive encounters with Arab grave robbers, international smuggling and transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars based on a handshake.
But the collapse of the prosecution's case would be a major embarrassment for the Israeli police and Israel Antiquities Authority. They maintain the defendants faked the burial box along with other biblical-era relics that were then sold for huge sums of money and sent to major collections and museums around the world.
"This was fraud of a sophistication and expertise which was previously unknown," said Police Comdt. Shaul Naim, who headed a two-year police investigation. "They took authentic items and added inscriptions to make them worth millions."
Scholars appointed to a special committee convened by the Israel Antiquities Authority accused Golan and his co-defendants of taking valuable ancient relics and adding inscriptions to increase their value.
Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, had described the charges against Golan as "the tip of the iceberg. These forgeries have worldwide repercussions," he said after the indictments were filed. "They were an attempt to change the history of the Jewish and Christian people."
But under cross-examination by defense attorneys, many experts recanted some of their findings. Judge Farkash's comments, which were excluded from trial transcripts but said in open court, came after more than 80 witnesses and 10,000 pages of testimony including evidence and cross-examination of Golan and leading archaeologists and scientists from around the world.
No definitive proof
"Have you really proved beyond a reasonable doubt that these artifacts are fakes as charged in the indictment? The experts disagreed among themselves. Where is the definitive proof needed to show that the accused faked the ossuary?" Judge Farkash asked prosecutor Damti. "You need to ask yourselves those questions very seriously, and if necessary consult with your superiors in the public prosecutor's office."
The two most important items said to be fakes were the James ossuary - a limestone burial box in use during the time of Jesus and a black stone tablet inscribed with 14 lines commemorating renovations to the Temple in Jerusalem by the biblical King Joash.
Golan, a 57-year-old world-renowned expert who started collecting antiquities when he was 8 years old, has consistently denied all charges during the more than three years of proceedings.
"The James ossuary and the Joash Tablet are 100 percent authentic. I have never faked an archaeological artifact in my life," he has said.
To date, witnesses have included antiquities dealers, museum curators, experts and professors of archaeology, history, epigraphy and chemical isotopes from leading universities and museums in Israel and around the world.
In four days of testimony, multimillionaire collector Shlomo Moussaieff described scenes where dealers, professors and even Israeli diplomats came to his home, produced rare antiquities from their pockets and negotiated sales worth thousands of dollars.
On one occasion, Moussaieff sent his personal banker with Golan to buy some rare seal impressions from a Palestinian villager. They parked their car on a dirt road near the border with the West Bank and when the Palestinian arrived they gave him a bag containing $150,000 in cash.
Charges dropped for 2
Charges against two of the defendants were dropped during the trial. Another man pleaded guilty to a minor charge unrelated to the main accusations, leaving Golan and antiquities dealer Robert Deutsch, who were alleged to have been the leaders of the supposed forgery ring.
"I have never faked anything nor committed any crime," said Deutsch. "The authorities have ruined my reputation and I have lost my university teaching position because of the baseless charges leveled against me. When this is over, I will sue them for slander."
Meanwhile, Judge Farkash has advised the prosecution to think about continuing the case before reconvening the trial in January.
E-mail Matthew Kalman at foreign@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Oh Those Randy Phoenicians!
Phoenicians Left Deep Genetic Mark, Study Shows
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: October 30, 2008
The Phoenicians, enigmatic people from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, stamped their mark on maritime history, and now research has revealed that they also left a lasting genetic imprint.
Scientists reported Thursday that as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor.
These men were found to retain identifiable genetic signatures from the nearly 1,000 years the Phoenicians were a dominant seafaring commercial power in the Mediterranean basin, until their conquest by Rome in the 2nd century B.C.
The Phoenicians who founded Carthage, a great city that rivaled Rome. They introduced the alphabet to writing systems, exported cedars of Lebanon for shipbuilding and marketed the regal purple dye made from the murex shell. The name Phoenica, for their base in what is present-day Lebanon and southern Syria, means “land of purple.”
Then the Phoenicians, their fortunes in sharp decline after defeat in the Punic Wars, disappeared as a distinct culture. The monumental ruins of Carthage, at modern Tunis, are about the only visible reminders of their former greatness.
The scientists who conducted the new research said this was the first application of a new analytic method for detecting especially subtle genetic influences of historical population migrations. Such investigations, supplementing the traditional stones-and-bones work of archaeology, are contributing to a deeper understanding of human mobility over time.
The study was directed by the Genographic Project, a partnership of the National Geographic Society and IBM Corporation, with additional support from the Waitt Family Foundation. The international team described the findings in the current American Journal of Human Genetics.
“When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians,” Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, said in an announcement. “All we had to guide us was history: we knew where they had and hadn’t settled.”
It proved to be enough, Dr. Tyler-Smith and Spencer Wells, a geneticist who directs the Genographic Project, said in telephone interviews.
Samples of the male Y-chromosome were collected from 1,330 men now living at six sites known to have been settled in antiquity as colonies and trading outposts of the Phoenicians. The sites were in Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, the West Bank, , Syria and Tunisia.
Each participant, whose inner cheek was swabbed for the samples, had at least three generations of indigenous ancestry at the site. To this was added data already available from Lebanon and previously published chromosome findings from nearly 6,000 men at 56 sites throughout the Mediterranean region. The data were then compared with similar research from neighboring communities having no link to Phoenician settlers.
From the research emerged a distinctive Phoenician genetic signature, in contrast to genetic traces spread by other migrations, like those of late Stone-Age farmers, Greek colonists and the Jewish Diaspora. The scientists thus concluded that, for example, one boy in each school class from Cyprus to Tunis may be a descendant of Phoenician traders.
“We were lucky in one respect,” Pierre A. Zalloua, a geneticist at Lebanese American University in Beirut who was a principal author of the journal report, said in an interview. “So many Phoenician settlement sites were geographically close to non-Phoenician sites, making it easier to distinguish differences in genetic patterns.”
In the journal article, the researchers wrote that the work “underscores the effectiveness of Y-chromosomal variability” in tracing human migrations. “Our methodology,” they concluded, “can be applied to any historically documented expansion in which contact and noncontact sites can be identified.”
Dr. Zalloua said that with further research it might be possible to refine genetic patterns to reveal phases of the Phoenician expansion over time — “first to Cyprus, then Malta and Africa, all the way to Spain.” Perhaps, he added, the genes may hold clues to which Phoenician cities — Byblos, Tyre or Sidon — settled certain colonies.
Dr. Wells, a specialist in applying genetics to migration studies who is also an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, suggested that similar projects in the future could investigate the genetic imprint from the Celtic expansion across the European continent, the Inca through South America, Alexander’s march through central and south Asia and multicultural traffic on the Silk Road.
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: October 30, 2008
The Phoenicians, enigmatic people from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, stamped their mark on maritime history, and now research has revealed that they also left a lasting genetic imprint.
Scientists reported Thursday that as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor.
These men were found to retain identifiable genetic signatures from the nearly 1,000 years the Phoenicians were a dominant seafaring commercial power in the Mediterranean basin, until their conquest by Rome in the 2nd century B.C.
The Phoenicians who founded Carthage, a great city that rivaled Rome. They introduced the alphabet to writing systems, exported cedars of Lebanon for shipbuilding and marketed the regal purple dye made from the murex shell. The name Phoenica, for their base in what is present-day Lebanon and southern Syria, means “land of purple.”
Then the Phoenicians, their fortunes in sharp decline after defeat in the Punic Wars, disappeared as a distinct culture. The monumental ruins of Carthage, at modern Tunis, are about the only visible reminders of their former greatness.
The scientists who conducted the new research said this was the first application of a new analytic method for detecting especially subtle genetic influences of historical population migrations. Such investigations, supplementing the traditional stones-and-bones work of archaeology, are contributing to a deeper understanding of human mobility over time.
The study was directed by the Genographic Project, a partnership of the National Geographic Society and IBM Corporation, with additional support from the Waitt Family Foundation. The international team described the findings in the current American Journal of Human Genetics.
“When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians,” Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, said in an announcement. “All we had to guide us was history: we knew where they had and hadn’t settled.”
It proved to be enough, Dr. Tyler-Smith and Spencer Wells, a geneticist who directs the Genographic Project, said in telephone interviews.
Samples of the male Y-chromosome were collected from 1,330 men now living at six sites known to have been settled in antiquity as colonies and trading outposts of the Phoenicians. The sites were in Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, the West Bank, , Syria and Tunisia.
Each participant, whose inner cheek was swabbed for the samples, had at least three generations of indigenous ancestry at the site. To this was added data already available from Lebanon and previously published chromosome findings from nearly 6,000 men at 56 sites throughout the Mediterranean region. The data were then compared with similar research from neighboring communities having no link to Phoenician settlers.
From the research emerged a distinctive Phoenician genetic signature, in contrast to genetic traces spread by other migrations, like those of late Stone-Age farmers, Greek colonists and the Jewish Diaspora. The scientists thus concluded that, for example, one boy in each school class from Cyprus to Tunis may be a descendant of Phoenician traders.
“We were lucky in one respect,” Pierre A. Zalloua, a geneticist at Lebanese American University in Beirut who was a principal author of the journal report, said in an interview. “So many Phoenician settlement sites were geographically close to non-Phoenician sites, making it easier to distinguish differences in genetic patterns.”
In the journal article, the researchers wrote that the work “underscores the effectiveness of Y-chromosomal variability” in tracing human migrations. “Our methodology,” they concluded, “can be applied to any historically documented expansion in which contact and noncontact sites can be identified.”
Dr. Zalloua said that with further research it might be possible to refine genetic patterns to reveal phases of the Phoenician expansion over time — “first to Cyprus, then Malta and Africa, all the way to Spain.” Perhaps, he added, the genes may hold clues to which Phoenician cities — Byblos, Tyre or Sidon — settled certain colonies.
Dr. Wells, a specialist in applying genetics to migration studies who is also an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, suggested that similar projects in the future could investigate the genetic imprint from the Celtic expansion across the European continent, the Inca through South America, Alexander’s march through central and south Asia and multicultural traffic on the Silk Road.
***********************
Fascinating article, and it goes to show that we still have a long way to go before we can really start talking nuts and bolts about DNA. Exciting times ahead in this developing area of research.
This Is Not Funny
Regardless of what your politcal stance may be, in this election and outside of it, this is not funny - and neither is the report mentioned in the article below that an effigy of Sarah Palin was hung. Pathetic, disgusting. I hope they ream the full force of the law up the butts of both of the a-holes.
2 Arrested for Hanging Obama Effigy on Ky. Campus
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 30, 2008
Filed at 8:40 p.m. ET
LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) -- Two men have been arrested for hanging a Barack Obama effigy from a tree on the University of Kentucky campus.
University police say 22-year-old student Joe Fischer and 21-year-old Hunter Bush turned themselves in Thursday afternoon. Both men were jailed Thursday on charges of disorderly conduct, burglary and theft.
Jail officials did not know who the men's attorneys were.
UK Police Interim Chief Joe Monroe says university police interviewed the men, who described the incident as a ''stunt that had gotten out of hand.''
The effigy was found hanging from a tree with a noose around its neck Wednesday morning.
Monroe says the men told police they decided to do it after seeing reports about a Sarah Palin effigy.
2 Arrested for Hanging Obama Effigy on Ky. Campus
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 30, 2008
Filed at 8:40 p.m. ET
LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) -- Two men have been arrested for hanging a Barack Obama effigy from a tree on the University of Kentucky campus.
University police say 22-year-old student Joe Fischer and 21-year-old Hunter Bush turned themselves in Thursday afternoon. Both men were jailed Thursday on charges of disorderly conduct, burglary and theft.
Jail officials did not know who the men's attorneys were.
UK Police Interim Chief Joe Monroe says university police interviewed the men, who described the incident as a ''stunt that had gotten out of hand.''
The effigy was found hanging from a tree with a noose around its neck Wednesday morning.
Monroe says the men told police they decided to do it after seeing reports about a Sarah Palin effigy.
Lingam
"Penis," Hindu symbol of any god, usually Shiva. The lingam-yoni is still the supreme symbol of the vital principle, representing male and female genitalia in conjunction.(1) Its verbal equivalent is the Jewel in the Lotus.
Sometimes the lingam appeared as a phallic pillar in the cella or Holy of Holies, the core of the temple which stands for the Goddess and is called "womb" (garbha-grha).(2) Shiva bore the name of Sthanu, "Pillar," and was shown emerging from a lingam-pillar with his "jewel" or phallic eye displayed in the center of his forehead, a graphic illustration of the transforamttion of the whole lingam into a man-shape.(3)
It was a Hindu custom to have brides deflowered in the temple by Shiva's carved lingam to make their firstborn children God-begotten (see Firstborn). Temple harlots were made "brides of God" by the same ceremony of the lingam, as was also the custom in the ancient Middle East, Greece, and Rome.(4) Besides these man-sized examples there were large pillars, which often became objects of pilgrimage. Many miracles were said to have taken place in the vicinity of Shiva's lingam.(5)
Notes:
(1) Rawson, A.T., 51.
(2) Zimmer, 127.
(3) O'Flaherty, 195.
(4) Rawson, E.A., 29, 88.
(5) Mahanirvanatantra, 335.
Sometimes the lingam appeared as a phallic pillar in the cella or Holy of Holies, the core of the temple which stands for the Goddess and is called "womb" (garbha-grha).(2) Shiva bore the name of Sthanu, "Pillar," and was shown emerging from a lingam-pillar with his "jewel" or phallic eye displayed in the center of his forehead, a graphic illustration of the transforamttion of the whole lingam into a man-shape.(3)
It was a Hindu custom to have brides deflowered in the temple by Shiva's carved lingam to make their firstborn children God-begotten (see Firstborn). Temple harlots were made "brides of God" by the same ceremony of the lingam, as was also the custom in the ancient Middle East, Greece, and Rome.(4) Besides these man-sized examples there were large pillars, which often became objects of pilgrimage. Many miracles were said to have taken place in the vicinity of Shiva's lingam.(5)
Notes:
(1) Rawson, A.T., 51.
(2) Zimmer, 127.
(3) O'Flaherty, 195.
(4) Rawson, E.A., 29, 88.
(5) Mahanirvanatantra, 335.
Lily
From Barbara Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets."
Lily
The flower of Lilith, Sumero-Babylonian Goddess of creation; the lilu or "lotus" of her genital magic. The lily often represented the virgin aspect of the Triple Goddess, while the rose represented her maternal aspect. The lily was sacred to Astarte, who was also Lilith; northern Europeans called her Ostara or Eostre, the Goddess of "Easter" lilies.(1)
Because of its pagan associations with virgin motherhood, the lily was used to symbolize impregnantion of the virgin Mary. Some authorities claimed the lily in Gabriel's hand filtered God's semen which entered Mary's body through her ear.(2) [Huh?]
Mary's cult also inherited the lily of the Blessed Virgin Juno, who conceived her savior-son Mars with her own magic lily, without any male aid.(3) This myth reflected an early belief in the self-fertilizing power of the yoni (vulva), which the lily symbolized and Juno personified. Her name descended from the pre-Roman Uni, a Triple Goddess represented by the three-lobed lily or fleur-de-lis, her name stemming from the Sanskrit yoni, source of the Uni-verse.
In 656 A.D., the 10th Council of Toledo officially adopted the holy day of Juno's miraculous conception of Mars into the Christian canon, renaming it the Festival of the Mother of God, or Lady Day, insisting that it commemorated Mary's miraculous conception of Jesus with the aid of a lily.(4) Christian artists showed the angel Gabriel holding out to Mary a scepter surmounted by a fleur-de-lis on a lily stalk. A scroll usually issued from Gabriel's mouth, with the words Ave Maria gratia plena, the seminal "Word," which made Mary "full." Aphrodite's dove, that other yonic symbol, hovered above the scene.(5)
Celtic and Gallo-Roman tribes called the virgin mother Lily Maid. Her yonic emblem appeared not only as the French fleu-de-lis but also as the Irish shamrock, which was not originally Irish but a sacred symbol among Indus Valley people some 6000 years before the Christian era. Christianized France identified the Lily Maid with the virgin Mary, but she was never completely dissociated from the pagan image of Juno. Among the people, Lady Day was known as Notre Dame de Mars.(6)
The Easter lily was the medieval pas-flower, from Latin passus, to step or pass over, cognate of pascha, the Passover. The lily was also called Pash-flower, Paschal flower, Pasque flower, or Passion flower. Pagans understood that it represented the spring passion of the god, like Heracles, for union in love-death with the Virgin Queen of Heaven, Hera-Hebe, or Juno, or Venus, all of whom claimed the lily. When Hera's milk spurted from her breasts to form the Milky Way, the drops that fell to the ground became lilies.(7) Sometimes, the Easter flower was not a white lily but a scarlet or purple anemone, emblem of Adonis's passion and called identical with his bride Venus.(8)
Notes:
(1) H. Smith, 201.
(2) Simmons, 103.
(3) Larousse, 202.
(4) Brewster, 146.
(5) Cavendish, V.H.H., 68.
(6) Brewster, 146.
(7) Guthrie, 71.
(8) Agrippa, 103.
Lily
The flower of Lilith, Sumero-Babylonian Goddess of creation; the lilu or "lotus" of her genital magic. The lily often represented the virgin aspect of the Triple Goddess, while the rose represented her maternal aspect. The lily was sacred to Astarte, who was also Lilith; northern Europeans called her Ostara or Eostre, the Goddess of "Easter" lilies.(1)
Because of its pagan associations with virgin motherhood, the lily was used to symbolize impregnantion of the virgin Mary. Some authorities claimed the lily in Gabriel's hand filtered God's semen which entered Mary's body through her ear.(2) [Huh?]
Mary's cult also inherited the lily of the Blessed Virgin Juno, who conceived her savior-son Mars with her own magic lily, without any male aid.(3) This myth reflected an early belief in the self-fertilizing power of the yoni (vulva), which the lily symbolized and Juno personified. Her name descended from the pre-Roman Uni, a Triple Goddess represented by the three-lobed lily or fleur-de-lis, her name stemming from the Sanskrit yoni, source of the Uni-verse.
In 656 A.D., the 10th Council of Toledo officially adopted the holy day of Juno's miraculous conception of Mars into the Christian canon, renaming it the Festival of the Mother of God, or Lady Day, insisting that it commemorated Mary's miraculous conception of Jesus with the aid of a lily.(4) Christian artists showed the angel Gabriel holding out to Mary a scepter surmounted by a fleur-de-lis on a lily stalk. A scroll usually issued from Gabriel's mouth, with the words Ave Maria gratia plena, the seminal "Word," which made Mary "full." Aphrodite's dove, that other yonic symbol, hovered above the scene.(5)
Celtic and Gallo-Roman tribes called the virgin mother Lily Maid. Her yonic emblem appeared not only as the French fleu-de-lis but also as the Irish shamrock, which was not originally Irish but a sacred symbol among Indus Valley people some 6000 years before the Christian era. Christianized France identified the Lily Maid with the virgin Mary, but she was never completely dissociated from the pagan image of Juno. Among the people, Lady Day was known as Notre Dame de Mars.(6)
The Easter lily was the medieval pas-flower, from Latin passus, to step or pass over, cognate of pascha, the Passover. The lily was also called Pash-flower, Paschal flower, Pasque flower, or Passion flower. Pagans understood that it represented the spring passion of the god, like Heracles, for union in love-death with the Virgin Queen of Heaven, Hera-Hebe, or Juno, or Venus, all of whom claimed the lily. When Hera's milk spurted from her breasts to form the Milky Way, the drops that fell to the ground became lilies.(7) Sometimes, the Easter flower was not a white lily but a scarlet or purple anemone, emblem of Adonis's passion and called identical with his bride Venus.(8)
Notes:
(1) H. Smith, 201.
(2) Simmons, 103.
(3) Larousse, 202.
(4) Brewster, 146.
(5) Cavendish, V.H.H., 68.
(6) Brewster, 146.
(7) Guthrie, 71.
(8) Agrippa, 103.
Padmini Rout Wins Under 14 Gold
Padmini Rout bags gold in World Youth Chess Championship
30 Oct 2008, 2307 hrs IST , PTI
BHUBANESWAR: Padmini Rout of Orissa has won the gold medal at Under-14 Girls' World Youth Chess Championship held in Vietnam, official sources said on Thursday.
The international master bagged the title with one round to go by beating Georgia's Jalabadze Natia in the tenth and final round, taking her points tally to 9.5 in the match held at Vung Tau on Wednesday.
Congratulating Padmini for her achievement, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said, "Her success has made not only the state but the entire country proud."
"Padmini would now be a source of inspiration for young chess players in the state," Patnaik added in a message, expressing hope that she would bring more such laurels in future.
According to sources, this was the fourth international title Padmini bagged. She had won Asian under-12 Girls' title twice and Asian under-14 title once before.
30 Oct 2008, 2307 hrs IST , PTI
BHUBANESWAR: Padmini Rout of Orissa has won the gold medal at Under-14 Girls' World Youth Chess Championship held in Vietnam, official sources said on Thursday.
The international master bagged the title with one round to go by beating Georgia's Jalabadze Natia in the tenth and final round, taking her points tally to 9.5 in the match held at Vung Tau on Wednesday.
Congratulating Padmini for her achievement, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said, "Her success has made not only the state but the entire country proud."
"Padmini would now be a source of inspiration for young chess players in the state," Patnaik added in a message, expressing hope that she would bring more such laurels in future.
According to sources, this was the fourth international title Padmini bagged. She had won Asian under-12 Girls' title twice and Asian under-14 title once before.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Lilith
From Barbara Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets."
Lilith a/k/a Lilit
Adam's first wife was a relic of an early rabbinical attempt to assimilate the Sumero-Babylonian Goddess Belit-ili, or Belili, to Jewish mythology. To the Canaanites, Lilit was Baalat, the "Divine Lady." On a tablet from Ur, c. 2000 BC, she was addressed as Lillake.(1)
Hebraic tradition said Adam married Lilith because he grew tired of coupling with beasts, a common custom of Middle-Eastern herdsmen, though the Old Testament declard it a sin (Deut. 27:21). [Not the most auspicious of beginnings for a marriage...] Adam tried to force Lilith to lie beneath him in the "missionary position" favored by male-dominant societies. Moslems were so insistent on the male-superior sexual position that they said, "Accursed be the man who maketh woman heaven and himself earth."(2) Catholic authorities said any sexual position other than the male-superior one is sinful.(3) But Lilith was neither a Moslem nor a Catholic. She sneered at Adams's sexual crudity, cursed him, and flew away to make her home by the Red Sea. [Note the wings - an allusion to the ancient bird goddesses].
God sent angels to fetch Lilith back, but she cursed them too, ignored God's command, and spent her time coupling with "demons" (whose lovemaking evidently pleased her better) and giving birth to a hundred children every day. So God had to produce Eve as Lilith's more docile replacement. [Note: according to one of the biblical accounts of the creation of Eve, she was made out one of Adam's ribs; so, every time he made love to Eve, was he really making love to a clone of himself? Yechy!]
Lilith's fecundity and sexual preferences show that she was a Great Mother of settled agricultural tribes, who resisted the invasions of nomadic herdsmen, represented by Adam [a/k/a man from the red earth - from the Bible, from dust you came and to the dust you shall return...]. Early Hebrews disliked the Great Mother who drank the blood of Abel the herdsman, after his slaying by the elder god of agriculture and smithcraft, Cain (Gen. 4:11) [Gen. 4:11: And now art thou {Cain} cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; - King James Version]. Lilith's Red Sea was another version of Kali Ma's Ocean of Blood, which gave brith to all things but needed periodic sacrificial replenishment.
There may have been a connection between Lilith and the Etruscan divinity Leinth, who had no face and who waited at the gate of the underworld along with Eita and Persipnei (Hades and Persephone) to receive the souls of the dead.(4) The underworld gate was a yoni, and also a lily, which had "no face." Admission into the underworld was often mythologized as a sexual union. The lily or lilu (lotus) was the Great Mother's flower-yoni, whose title formed Lilith's name.
The story of Lilith disappeared from the canonical Bible, but her daughters the lilim haunted men for over a thousand years. Well into the Middle Ages, the Jews were still manufacturing amulets to keep away the lilim, who were lustful she-demons given to copulating with men in their dreams, causing nocturnal emissions.(5) Naturally, the lilim squatted on top of their victims in the position favored by ancient matriarchs. [No doubt thereby triggering lots of control issues and deep psychological wounds in their male "victims."]
Greeks adopted the lilim and called them Lamiae, Empusae (Forcers-In), or Daughters of Hecate. [The ancient Greek men would have hated and dreaded these Forcers-In because of their cultural preference at the time for homosexuality, copulating with females usually only to produce children.] Christians also adopted them and called them harlots of hell, or succubae, the female counterparts of incubi. Celebate monks tried to fend them off by sleeping with their hands crossed over their genitals, clutching a crucifix. It was said that every time a pious Christian had a wet dream, Lilith laughed. Even if a male child laughed in his sleep, people said Lilith was fondling him. To protect baby boys against her, chalk circles were drawn around cradles with the written names of the three angeles God sent to fetch Lilith back to Adam - even though these angels had proved incapable of dealing with her. Some said men and babies should not be left alone in a house or Lilith might seize them.(6)
Another common name for the Daughters of Lilith was Night-Hag. This term didn't imply that they were ugly; on the contrary, they were supposed to be very beautiful.(7) As with their brothers the incubi, they were presumed so expert at lovemaking that after an experience with a Night-Hag, a man couldn't be satisfied with the love of a mortal woman.
Notes:
(1) Graves & Patai, 68.
(2) Edwardes, 157.
(3) Graves & Patai, 67.
(4) Hays, 183.
(5) Graves, G.M. 1, 190.
(6) Cavendish, P.E., 99.
(7) Scot, 512.
Lilith a/k/a Lilit
Adam's first wife was a relic of an early rabbinical attempt to assimilate the Sumero-Babylonian Goddess Belit-ili, or Belili, to Jewish mythology. To the Canaanites, Lilit was Baalat, the "Divine Lady." On a tablet from Ur, c. 2000 BC, she was addressed as Lillake.(1)
Hebraic tradition said Adam married Lilith because he grew tired of coupling with beasts, a common custom of Middle-Eastern herdsmen, though the Old Testament declard it a sin (Deut. 27:21). [Not the most auspicious of beginnings for a marriage...] Adam tried to force Lilith to lie beneath him in the "missionary position" favored by male-dominant societies. Moslems were so insistent on the male-superior sexual position that they said, "Accursed be the man who maketh woman heaven and himself earth."(2) Catholic authorities said any sexual position other than the male-superior one is sinful.(3) But Lilith was neither a Moslem nor a Catholic. She sneered at Adams's sexual crudity, cursed him, and flew away to make her home by the Red Sea. [Note the wings - an allusion to the ancient bird goddesses].
God sent angels to fetch Lilith back, but she cursed them too, ignored God's command, and spent her time coupling with "demons" (whose lovemaking evidently pleased her better) and giving birth to a hundred children every day. So God had to produce Eve as Lilith's more docile replacement. [Note: according to one of the biblical accounts of the creation of Eve, she was made out one of Adam's ribs; so, every time he made love to Eve, was he really making love to a clone of himself? Yechy!]
Lilith's fecundity and sexual preferences show that she was a Great Mother of settled agricultural tribes, who resisted the invasions of nomadic herdsmen, represented by Adam [a/k/a man from the red earth - from the Bible, from dust you came and to the dust you shall return...]. Early Hebrews disliked the Great Mother who drank the blood of Abel the herdsman, after his slaying by the elder god of agriculture and smithcraft, Cain (Gen. 4:11) [Gen. 4:11: And now art thou {Cain} cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; - King James Version]. Lilith's Red Sea was another version of Kali Ma's Ocean of Blood, which gave brith to all things but needed periodic sacrificial replenishment.
There may have been a connection between Lilith and the Etruscan divinity Leinth, who had no face and who waited at the gate of the underworld along with Eita and Persipnei (Hades and Persephone) to receive the souls of the dead.(4) The underworld gate was a yoni, and also a lily, which had "no face." Admission into the underworld was often mythologized as a sexual union. The lily or lilu (lotus) was the Great Mother's flower-yoni, whose title formed Lilith's name.
The story of Lilith disappeared from the canonical Bible, but her daughters the lilim haunted men for over a thousand years. Well into the Middle Ages, the Jews were still manufacturing amulets to keep away the lilim, who were lustful she-demons given to copulating with men in their dreams, causing nocturnal emissions.(5) Naturally, the lilim squatted on top of their victims in the position favored by ancient matriarchs. [No doubt thereby triggering lots of control issues and deep psychological wounds in their male "victims."]
Greeks adopted the lilim and called them Lamiae, Empusae (Forcers-In), or Daughters of Hecate. [The ancient Greek men would have hated and dreaded these Forcers-In because of their cultural preference at the time for homosexuality, copulating with females usually only to produce children.] Christians also adopted them and called them harlots of hell, or succubae, the female counterparts of incubi. Celebate monks tried to fend them off by sleeping with their hands crossed over their genitals, clutching a crucifix. It was said that every time a pious Christian had a wet dream, Lilith laughed. Even if a male child laughed in his sleep, people said Lilith was fondling him. To protect baby boys against her, chalk circles were drawn around cradles with the written names of the three angeles God sent to fetch Lilith back to Adam - even though these angels had proved incapable of dealing with her. Some said men and babies should not be left alone in a house or Lilith might seize them.(6)
Another common name for the Daughters of Lilith was Night-Hag. This term didn't imply that they were ugly; on the contrary, they were supposed to be very beautiful.(7) As with their brothers the incubi, they were presumed so expert at lovemaking that after an experience with a Night-Hag, a man couldn't be satisfied with the love of a mortal woman.
Notes:
(1) Graves & Patai, 68.
(2) Edwardes, 157.
(3) Graves & Patai, 67.
(4) Hays, 183.
(5) Graves, G.M. 1, 190.
(6) Cavendish, P.E., 99.
(7) Scot, 512.
China: Now It's Bad Eggs!
I read a report yesterday morning at The New York Times about eggs being taken off the market in Hong Kong when it was discovered they were polluted with melamine. Now this report today:
Eggs recalled, exports halted as China's food crisis worsens
by Peter Harmsen Peter Harmsen – Wed Oct 29, 3:58 pm ET
BEIJING (AFP) – Chinese retailers pulled eggs off shelves Wednesday and a supplier was ordered to stop exports, amid fears the toxic threat of the chemical melamine was far more widespread than first reported.
Dalian city in northeast China said it had imposed an export ban on Hanwei Group, which sold to Japan and other parts of Asia, after some of its products were found to contain melamine.
"We have told Hanwei to immediately recall all problem eggs, and we have halted the company's exports for the time being," said a statement issued by the city government of Dalian, where Hanwei is based.
The problem emerged over the weekend when Hong Kong authorities said eggs from Hanwei were tainted with melamine, the same chemical that was mixed into China's milk products and led to the deaths of four babies.
Officials and China's state-controlled press reported on Wednesday that eggs from other suppliers had also been found to be contaminated with melamine, which can give food the appearance of higher protein levels.
Against this backdrop, some supermarkets in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities announced they were recalling various brands of eggs, although others appeared unsure what to do with the central government yet to give directives.
A staff member at the Parkson Shopping Centre's supermarket in Beijing said eggs from Hanwei were no longer on sale.
"We will not put them back until we receive test reports from the company that show the eggs we have do not have the same problems," she said.
In Shanghai, a spokeswoman for the Lotus Supermarket chain said all the Kekeda brand of eggs from Hanwei had been removed from all its outlets across the city.
"We are concerned about better protecting consumers' safety," spokeswoman Xiang Jun said.
Meanwhile, authorities in Hong Kong and the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou reported eggs contaminated with melamine had been detected in brands other than Hanwei, and that they came from different areas of China.
The discovery of melamine in eggs has raised concerns that the chemical could be infecting much of China's food chain.
Initially, the problem was believed to be isolated to milk and other dairy products. In a scandal that made global headlines last month, it emerged melamine, which is normally used to make plastics, had been routinely mixed into watered-down Chinese milk to give it the appearance of higher protein levels.
Four babies died of kidney failure and more than 53,000 others fell ill this year after drinking tainted milk powder and consuming other dairy products.
The scandal led to governments around the world banning or recalling Chinese dairy products after many of them were found to contain melamine.
The discovery of the chemical in eggs raised concerns that it could be in many other Chinese foods, with the suspicion that it was mixed into livestock feed to also give it the appearance of high protein.
Authorities in Dalian said Wednesday melamine may have been mixed into chicken feed and led to the contamination of Hanwei's eggs.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation in China told AFP on Tuesday that melamine may be present in a wide range of other farm-raised foods such as meat and fish.
FAO China programme officer Zhang Zhongjun said the organisation had asked China's agriculture ministry for answers on whether melamine had been mixed into farming feed. Premier Wen Jiabao pledged over the weekend that China's food exports would meet international norms and win the trust of people globally, as he promised lessons would be learnt from the milk scandal.
But the agriculture ministry and the body in charge of the nation's food quality have remained silent about the contaminated eggs, leaving some shoppers confused and angry.
"We are just helpless," Liu Lihe, a 70-year-old-retiree told AFP as she shopped in a Beijing supermarket.
"I don't feel completely safe whatever food I buy. I don't know what to buy."
Eggs recalled, exports halted as China's food crisis worsens
by Peter Harmsen Peter Harmsen – Wed Oct 29, 3:58 pm ET
BEIJING (AFP) – Chinese retailers pulled eggs off shelves Wednesday and a supplier was ordered to stop exports, amid fears the toxic threat of the chemical melamine was far more widespread than first reported.
Dalian city in northeast China said it had imposed an export ban on Hanwei Group, which sold to Japan and other parts of Asia, after some of its products were found to contain melamine.
"We have told Hanwei to immediately recall all problem eggs, and we have halted the company's exports for the time being," said a statement issued by the city government of Dalian, where Hanwei is based.
The problem emerged over the weekend when Hong Kong authorities said eggs from Hanwei were tainted with melamine, the same chemical that was mixed into China's milk products and led to the deaths of four babies.
Officials and China's state-controlled press reported on Wednesday that eggs from other suppliers had also been found to be contaminated with melamine, which can give food the appearance of higher protein levels.
Against this backdrop, some supermarkets in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities announced they were recalling various brands of eggs, although others appeared unsure what to do with the central government yet to give directives.
A staff member at the Parkson Shopping Centre's supermarket in Beijing said eggs from Hanwei were no longer on sale.
"We will not put them back until we receive test reports from the company that show the eggs we have do not have the same problems," she said.
In Shanghai, a spokeswoman for the Lotus Supermarket chain said all the Kekeda brand of eggs from Hanwei had been removed from all its outlets across the city.
"We are concerned about better protecting consumers' safety," spokeswoman Xiang Jun said.
Meanwhile, authorities in Hong Kong and the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou reported eggs contaminated with melamine had been detected in brands other than Hanwei, and that they came from different areas of China.
The discovery of melamine in eggs has raised concerns that the chemical could be infecting much of China's food chain.
Initially, the problem was believed to be isolated to milk and other dairy products. In a scandal that made global headlines last month, it emerged melamine, which is normally used to make plastics, had been routinely mixed into watered-down Chinese milk to give it the appearance of higher protein levels.
Four babies died of kidney failure and more than 53,000 others fell ill this year after drinking tainted milk powder and consuming other dairy products.
The scandal led to governments around the world banning or recalling Chinese dairy products after many of them were found to contain melamine.
The discovery of the chemical in eggs raised concerns that it could be in many other Chinese foods, with the suspicion that it was mixed into livestock feed to also give it the appearance of high protein.
Authorities in Dalian said Wednesday melamine may have been mixed into chicken feed and led to the contamination of Hanwei's eggs.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation in China told AFP on Tuesday that melamine may be present in a wide range of other farm-raised foods such as meat and fish.
FAO China programme officer Zhang Zhongjun said the organisation had asked China's agriculture ministry for answers on whether melamine had been mixed into farming feed. Premier Wen Jiabao pledged over the weekend that China's food exports would meet international norms and win the trust of people globally, as he promised lessons would be learnt from the milk scandal.
But the agriculture ministry and the body in charge of the nation's food quality have remained silent about the contaminated eggs, leaving some shoppers confused and angry.
"We are just helpless," Liu Lihe, a 70-year-old-retiree told AFP as she shopped in a Beijing supermarket.
"I don't feel completely safe whatever food I buy. I don't know what to buy."
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Fatricide for Property
Story reported at regionaltimes.com
October 28, 2008
Woman accuses brothers-in-law of killing her husband to occupy his property
By Younis Chandio
HYDERABAD: A woman namely Ms. Zaiban, widow of Manzoor Jat, resident of village Chak No.56 near Sanghar staged a protest demonstration outside the Hyderabad press club, alleging her two brothers-in-law of killing her husband to grab property and throwing her out of home after snatching her two children.
She told newsmen that she was married to Manzoor son of Nazir by caste Jat Punjabi and was living peacefully with her husband and 3 children. She said two brothers of her husband namely Naseer and Baseer wanted to grab the property of her husband that included also 32 acres agriculture land.
She alleged that on 5th October 2008 her husband’s elder brother killed her husband over a quarrel. She told that accused Naseer was arrested by police. The next day her husband’s another brother from Multan arrived at her home Sanghar and allegedly after torturing her involved her in her husband’s murder.
She said he took away her two children 8-year son Zulfiqar Ali and 3 and half years daughter Zunera and threw her out of her home.She complained that her brother in law has grabbed her and her husband’s all property which includes 32 acres agriculture land, two shops, 4 residential houses in Sanghar town, one plot at Hyderabad bus stand, cash in bank account, one motor cycle, 15 goats, 3 buffaloes, their home with furniture and fixtures.
She further alleged that Baseer also got prepared a false divorce paper (Talaq Nama) in her name.
Woman [notice, now she doesn't even have a name] said she has no place to live. She also expressed fear of life. She demanded action against her husband’s both brothers and recovery of her family’s land and other property from them. She also demanded protection to her life.
An human rights body Peace and Human Rights Trust wanted to help her but an official from women development center in Hyderabad took her to the center with promise to provide her required help.
For Shame, India. For Shame!
October 28, 2008
Woman accuses brothers-in-law of killing her husband to occupy his property
By Younis Chandio
HYDERABAD: A woman namely Ms. Zaiban, widow of Manzoor Jat, resident of village Chak No.56 near Sanghar staged a protest demonstration outside the Hyderabad press club, alleging her two brothers-in-law of killing her husband to grab property and throwing her out of home after snatching her two children.
She told newsmen that she was married to Manzoor son of Nazir by caste Jat Punjabi and was living peacefully with her husband and 3 children. She said two brothers of her husband namely Naseer and Baseer wanted to grab the property of her husband that included also 32 acres agriculture land.
She alleged that on 5th October 2008 her husband’s elder brother killed her husband over a quarrel. She told that accused Naseer was arrested by police. The next day her husband’s another brother from Multan arrived at her home Sanghar and allegedly after torturing her involved her in her husband’s murder.
She said he took away her two children 8-year son Zulfiqar Ali and 3 and half years daughter Zunera and threw her out of her home.She complained that her brother in law has grabbed her and her husband’s all property which includes 32 acres agriculture land, two shops, 4 residential houses in Sanghar town, one plot at Hyderabad bus stand, cash in bank account, one motor cycle, 15 goats, 3 buffaloes, their home with furniture and fixtures.
She further alleged that Baseer also got prepared a false divorce paper (Talaq Nama) in her name.
Woman [notice, now she doesn't even have a name] said she has no place to live. She also expressed fear of life. She demanded action against her husband’s both brothers and recovery of her family’s land and other property from them. She also demanded protection to her life.
An human rights body Peace and Human Rights Trust wanted to help her but an official from women development center in Hyderabad took her to the center with promise to provide her required help.
*********************************
What is most striking about this article is not the fact that such horrific acts are still being carried out with, basically, impunity, under the current local judicial system in this Indian state; it's that the rest of the article includes news about sewer charges and the celebration of Diwali; it's that this kind of horror story - the murder of a man for his property by his brother(s), the abduction of his children, the torture of his wife, the production of false papers to prove a non-existent divorce to further dispossess the wife of her widow's property - is nothing out of the ordinary! Just another day in the course of a poor woman's life in India.For Shame, India. For Shame!
Samhain: Pagan celebration honoring the dead
I was raised a Roman Catholic; I believe this holiday was incorporated into the RC Church as "All Souls Day" that used to be celebrated on November 1st. I was taught in Catholic school as a child - and literally spent half a day in church (not voluntary) - praying to God to release souls from Purgatory. I haven't been a RC for a number of years, so I do not know if this holy day is celebrated any longer.
From The San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com)
By Susan Fornoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Word on the street's been pretty kind to witches in recent years, what with kids embracing the sorcery of the Harry Potter novels and Broadway glorifying blond Glinda and green Elphaba in the fluffy "Wicked," loosely based on the smart and rather dark novel by Gregory Maguire.
Add to that the unblinking Bay Area acceptance of all that is different or outrageous, and this just may be the year to party with the pagans. The fast-growing community's biggest holiday - or sabbat, as holidays are also called - Samhain, arrives this weekend, mixing themes of harvest, renewal and communing with the dead.
The latter isn't all that wacky, and in fact sounds like a form of prayer, with the addition of a celebratory "spiral dance."
"I wouldn't know anyone who conducts a seance," said witch Deborah Oak Cooper, a member of the Reclaiming collective. "At the Spiral Dance (expected to draw more than 1,000 celebrants to Kezar Pavilion on Saturday), there's a trance journey, where you go to the Isle of Apples and visit your beloved dead. It's a meditation period: You go and look around and see who wants to visit."
"You might create an altar and make an offering," said Starhawk, a political activist and the Bay Area's best known contemporary witch. "Then you can sit down and talk: 'Hey, Mom, sorry I was such a hard teenager for you to deal with. Now I understand how that must have been for you, and I wish you were here so we could sit and talk about it.' "
Starhawk often represents paganism in mainstream media and events, but she admits that there are no definitive statistics on participation, partly because paganism covers many, many traditions. Imagine a religion with hundreds or even thousands of churches with congregations of no more than 13 (the number of full moons in a year, considered the maximum size for a coven).
Modern paganism defies not only quantification but even definition. Try this one, from the Pagan Educational Network: "a broad, eclectic contemporary religious movement that encompasses shamanistic, ecstatic, polytheistic and magical religions. Most of the religions termed Pagan are characterized by nature-centered spirituality, honoring of pre-Christian deities, dynamic personal belief systems, lack of institutionalization, a quest to develop the self, and acceptance and encouragement of diversity."
So there are Neopagans and Wiccans and Rosicrucians, Faeries, Druids, Gardnerians, Asatru, worshipers of the God, worshipers of the Goddess, worshipers of nature.
"There's no clearinghouse," Cooper said. "It's the most disorganized religion, and that's part of the appeal."
But negative stereotypes and stigma aren't. One pagan man who lives in Florida didn't want his name published because he said his neighbors surely would raise eyebrows; on the other hand, Bay Area witches said they don't need to hide their brooms in any closets. Several witches, in fact, stepped up eagerly to lay claim to the "pagan Martha Stewart" apron.
(That apron would surely be black. Said Starhawk: "Witches often do wear black because night is a time of power and mystery, and also because black is slenderizing and doesn't show dirt.")
"Martha and I both find crafty uses for herbs, flowers, home decoration and recipes," said Rabbit, proprietor of the Sacred Well metaphysical shop in Oakland and high priestess of the Come As You Are Coven. She added, rather craftily, "Our definitions of 'craft' might be different."
Indeed.
Starhawk was eagerly awaiting Dinner of the Dead, a feast that features food the participants' ancestors would like, creating a potentially global menu.
Cooper was making sugar skulls - symbolic of ancestral wisdom - and votive candles to memorialize her beloved dead on her altar; there'll be a martini set out for Dad on Saturday.
Astrologer Fern Feto Spring (wisestars.net) will pour a glass of wine and fix a plate of food for her grandfather. "I put flowers, usually marigolds and anything else that catches my fancy and seems like something my dead might appreciate," she said.
And Rowan Fairgrove was practicing Samhain songs for her pagan singing group, maybe even a "calling on" song or two for taking blessings to houses that are visited on the holiday.
Paganism sounds so much like other religions, and Samhain like so many other rituals, because, celebrants say, it is based on Celtic traditions and moon rituals. The celebration of the harvest sounds like Thanksgiving, the introspection brought by summer's end (technically, for pagans, when the sun reaches 15 degrees of Scorpio, or Nov. 7 this year) so much like New Year's Eve. And Saturday's festivities sound like the Day of the Dead celebrated elsewhere in Cooper's neighborhood, the Mission.
"A lot depends on the mythos of the tradition people follow," said Marilee Bigelow, renowned tarot reader at Ancient Ways in Oakland. "I always have an altar in honor of Persephone, and so I always have pomegranates out."
Last weekend, there were several spiral dances and dinners with the dead in the Bay Area, and also the Witches Ball in Santa Rosa. Rabbit's CAYA celebration Friday night will start with a potluck "dumb supper," based on an ancient tradition of dining silently with one's ancestors and beloved dead. Then priestesses and priests will "aspect" various gods and goddesses - high theater, said Rabbit.
"Typically, the priestess or priest enters into a light trance and offers prophesy, wisdom and advice in the voice of the deity being aspected," she said. "Costumes, props and other theatrical components complete the overall effect.
"After aspecting, our ritual will then move forward to the crowning of our winter king and queen. The premise is that when we appoint these individuals to represent the health, prosperity and safety of the community during the winter season, it is then the community's obligation to keep them safe, prosperous and healthy until they are relieved of their duties in May by the May king and queen. ... Finally, we complete the ritual with a spiral dance - an ecstatic, celebratory dance that serves to represent the turn of the Earth toward the next seasonal phase."
The big events on Saturday include a spiral dance at Kezar Pavilion, where there will be altars set up for air, fire, water and earth, as well as for guests to honor their dead. One might call it Bay Area paganism's annual coming-out party - except that here witches feel little need to hide.
"Mostly what I have experienced," Spring said, "is people making jokes of 'Wriggle your nose and make that traffic go away.' "
Pagan celebrations
Here are three local Samhain celebrations that welcome public participation this weekend. All are alcohol free and family friendly.
Friday
Come as You Are to Samhain: Potluck Dumb Supper (Dinner With the Dead) and ritual honoring deities of the Otherworld. 7 p.m. supper. 8 p.m. ritual. Bring a clearly labeled dish to share or your own brown-bag meal. $10-$20 sliding scale. Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Main Hall, 1924 Cedar St (at Bonita), Berkeley.
Saturday
NROOGD Public Samhain: Crafts, divinations, honoring the dead. 7:30 p.m. doors open. Ritual at 8. Suggested donation: $10-$20. No one turned away for lack of funds. San Mateo Unitarian Universalist Church, 300 E. Santa Inez, San Mateo.
Reclaiming's 29th Annual Spiral Dance Ritual: Reclaiming's largest ritual. 6 p.m. doors open. Ritual at 7:30 p.m. Admission: $20-$100, sliding scale; 60 and older and 15 and younger, $10 and up. No one turned away for lack of funds. Kezar Pavilion, 755 Stanyan St., San Francisco.
Take a closer look
There's no clearinghouse for all of the nation's covens, sects, affiliations and practitioners of paganism, and Google can take one on quite the meandering exploration. Search "spiral dance ritual" on YouTube, and try these resources to learn more.
AncientWays.com: Ancient Ways Book Store keeps a bulletin board and binder, and, in February, presents the annual PantheaCon, which brings together many practitioners of paganism in San Jose. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. 4075 Telegraph Ave., Oakland (at 41st Street).
Cayacoven.org: The Come as You Are coven of many cultures is an example of the many choices available for Bay Area pagans. This group of 250 is celebrating Samhain on Friday night, with a potluck Dumb Supper and ritual in Berkeley.
Cog.org: Covenant of the Goddess, a national umbrella for Wiccan congregations and practitioners, calls Berkeley home.
Communityseed.org: Community Seed is an active pagan center in Santa Cruz that is holding its Samhain celebration Saturday at the city's Masonic Lodge. It has events year-round.
NROOGD.org: The New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn, now in Berkeley, originated in 1976.
Reclaiming.org: Rooted in magic and Goddess worship, this San Francisco group seems to be one of the largest and most organized.
SacredWell.com: This is one of the newer metaphysical shopping spots, and the fledgling Web site has a blog about magic and other pagan issues. 536 Grand Ave., Oakland.
Starhawk.org: The author and political activist is the best-known witch in the Bay Area, and her frequently updated site contains information and events related to all of her passions.
Thespiralpath.org: The Fellowship of the Spiral Path brings Northern California neopagan groups together.
Witchvox.com: Perhaps the closest thing to a national directory for pagans, this site contains easily accessible listings by locale of groups and events, as well as lots of essays and information.
- S.F.
From The San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com)
By Susan Fornoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Word on the street's been pretty kind to witches in recent years, what with kids embracing the sorcery of the Harry Potter novels and Broadway glorifying blond Glinda and green Elphaba in the fluffy "Wicked," loosely based on the smart and rather dark novel by Gregory Maguire.
Add to that the unblinking Bay Area acceptance of all that is different or outrageous, and this just may be the year to party with the pagans. The fast-growing community's biggest holiday - or sabbat, as holidays are also called - Samhain, arrives this weekend, mixing themes of harvest, renewal and communing with the dead.
The latter isn't all that wacky, and in fact sounds like a form of prayer, with the addition of a celebratory "spiral dance."
"I wouldn't know anyone who conducts a seance," said witch Deborah Oak Cooper, a member of the Reclaiming collective. "At the Spiral Dance (expected to draw more than 1,000 celebrants to Kezar Pavilion on Saturday), there's a trance journey, where you go to the Isle of Apples and visit your beloved dead. It's a meditation period: You go and look around and see who wants to visit."
"You might create an altar and make an offering," said Starhawk, a political activist and the Bay Area's best known contemporary witch. "Then you can sit down and talk: 'Hey, Mom, sorry I was such a hard teenager for you to deal with. Now I understand how that must have been for you, and I wish you were here so we could sit and talk about it.' "
Starhawk often represents paganism in mainstream media and events, but she admits that there are no definitive statistics on participation, partly because paganism covers many, many traditions. Imagine a religion with hundreds or even thousands of churches with congregations of no more than 13 (the number of full moons in a year, considered the maximum size for a coven).
Modern paganism defies not only quantification but even definition. Try this one, from the Pagan Educational Network: "a broad, eclectic contemporary religious movement that encompasses shamanistic, ecstatic, polytheistic and magical religions. Most of the religions termed Pagan are characterized by nature-centered spirituality, honoring of pre-Christian deities, dynamic personal belief systems, lack of institutionalization, a quest to develop the self, and acceptance and encouragement of diversity."
So there are Neopagans and Wiccans and Rosicrucians, Faeries, Druids, Gardnerians, Asatru, worshipers of the God, worshipers of the Goddess, worshipers of nature.
"There's no clearinghouse," Cooper said. "It's the most disorganized religion, and that's part of the appeal."
But negative stereotypes and stigma aren't. One pagan man who lives in Florida didn't want his name published because he said his neighbors surely would raise eyebrows; on the other hand, Bay Area witches said they don't need to hide their brooms in any closets. Several witches, in fact, stepped up eagerly to lay claim to the "pagan Martha Stewart" apron.
(That apron would surely be black. Said Starhawk: "Witches often do wear black because night is a time of power and mystery, and also because black is slenderizing and doesn't show dirt.")
"Martha and I both find crafty uses for herbs, flowers, home decoration and recipes," said Rabbit, proprietor of the Sacred Well metaphysical shop in Oakland and high priestess of the Come As You Are Coven. She added, rather craftily, "Our definitions of 'craft' might be different."
Indeed.
Starhawk was eagerly awaiting Dinner of the Dead, a feast that features food the participants' ancestors would like, creating a potentially global menu.
Cooper was making sugar skulls - symbolic of ancestral wisdom - and votive candles to memorialize her beloved dead on her altar; there'll be a martini set out for Dad on Saturday.
Astrologer Fern Feto Spring (wisestars.net) will pour a glass of wine and fix a plate of food for her grandfather. "I put flowers, usually marigolds and anything else that catches my fancy and seems like something my dead might appreciate," she said.
And Rowan Fairgrove was practicing Samhain songs for her pagan singing group, maybe even a "calling on" song or two for taking blessings to houses that are visited on the holiday.
Paganism sounds so much like other religions, and Samhain like so many other rituals, because, celebrants say, it is based on Celtic traditions and moon rituals. The celebration of the harvest sounds like Thanksgiving, the introspection brought by summer's end (technically, for pagans, when the sun reaches 15 degrees of Scorpio, or Nov. 7 this year) so much like New Year's Eve. And Saturday's festivities sound like the Day of the Dead celebrated elsewhere in Cooper's neighborhood, the Mission.
"A lot depends on the mythos of the tradition people follow," said Marilee Bigelow, renowned tarot reader at Ancient Ways in Oakland. "I always have an altar in honor of Persephone, and so I always have pomegranates out."
Last weekend, there were several spiral dances and dinners with the dead in the Bay Area, and also the Witches Ball in Santa Rosa. Rabbit's CAYA celebration Friday night will start with a potluck "dumb supper," based on an ancient tradition of dining silently with one's ancestors and beloved dead. Then priestesses and priests will "aspect" various gods and goddesses - high theater, said Rabbit.
"Typically, the priestess or priest enters into a light trance and offers prophesy, wisdom and advice in the voice of the deity being aspected," she said. "Costumes, props and other theatrical components complete the overall effect.
"After aspecting, our ritual will then move forward to the crowning of our winter king and queen. The premise is that when we appoint these individuals to represent the health, prosperity and safety of the community during the winter season, it is then the community's obligation to keep them safe, prosperous and healthy until they are relieved of their duties in May by the May king and queen. ... Finally, we complete the ritual with a spiral dance - an ecstatic, celebratory dance that serves to represent the turn of the Earth toward the next seasonal phase."
The big events on Saturday include a spiral dance at Kezar Pavilion, where there will be altars set up for air, fire, water and earth, as well as for guests to honor their dead. One might call it Bay Area paganism's annual coming-out party - except that here witches feel little need to hide.
"Mostly what I have experienced," Spring said, "is people making jokes of 'Wriggle your nose and make that traffic go away.' "
Pagan celebrations
Here are three local Samhain celebrations that welcome public participation this weekend. All are alcohol free and family friendly.
Friday
Come as You Are to Samhain: Potluck Dumb Supper (Dinner With the Dead) and ritual honoring deities of the Otherworld. 7 p.m. supper. 8 p.m. ritual. Bring a clearly labeled dish to share or your own brown-bag meal. $10-$20 sliding scale. Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Main Hall, 1924 Cedar St (at Bonita), Berkeley.
Saturday
NROOGD Public Samhain: Crafts, divinations, honoring the dead. 7:30 p.m. doors open. Ritual at 8. Suggested donation: $10-$20. No one turned away for lack of funds. San Mateo Unitarian Universalist Church, 300 E. Santa Inez, San Mateo.
Reclaiming's 29th Annual Spiral Dance Ritual: Reclaiming's largest ritual. 6 p.m. doors open. Ritual at 7:30 p.m. Admission: $20-$100, sliding scale; 60 and older and 15 and younger, $10 and up. No one turned away for lack of funds. Kezar Pavilion, 755 Stanyan St., San Francisco.
Take a closer look
There's no clearinghouse for all of the nation's covens, sects, affiliations and practitioners of paganism, and Google can take one on quite the meandering exploration. Search "spiral dance ritual" on YouTube, and try these resources to learn more.
AncientWays.com: Ancient Ways Book Store keeps a bulletin board and binder, and, in February, presents the annual PantheaCon, which brings together many practitioners of paganism in San Jose. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. 4075 Telegraph Ave., Oakland (at 41st Street).
Cayacoven.org: The Come as You Are coven of many cultures is an example of the many choices available for Bay Area pagans. This group of 250 is celebrating Samhain on Friday night, with a potluck Dumb Supper and ritual in Berkeley.
Cog.org: Covenant of the Goddess, a national umbrella for Wiccan congregations and practitioners, calls Berkeley home.
Communityseed.org: Community Seed is an active pagan center in Santa Cruz that is holding its Samhain celebration Saturday at the city's Masonic Lodge. It has events year-round.
NROOGD.org: The New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn, now in Berkeley, originated in 1976.
Reclaiming.org: Rooted in magic and Goddess worship, this San Francisco group seems to be one of the largest and most organized.
SacredWell.com: This is one of the newer metaphysical shopping spots, and the fledgling Web site has a blog about magic and other pagan issues. 536 Grand Ave., Oakland.
Starhawk.org: The author and political activist is the best-known witch in the Bay Area, and her frequently updated site contains information and events related to all of her passions.
Thespiralpath.org: The Fellowship of the Spiral Path brings Northern California neopagan groups together.
Witchvox.com: Perhaps the closest thing to a national directory for pagans, this site contains easily accessible listings by locale of groups and events, as well as lots of essays and information.
- S.F.
Update
Hola!
The Showgirls have been sending me updates from Bonn, but none of them make much sense. It seems they are up to their beautiful ears in intrigue. Bambi seems to be claiming responsibility for GM Kramnik's win in Game 10 yesterday to bring the score to Anand 6/Kramnik 4. Play resumes tomorrow. Kramnik would have to pull off a nearly impossible feat - winning the last 2 games, just in order to force a play-off with Anand (rapid chess and then blitz and then - the dreaded Armageddon game if it comes to that), and he would have to win in the forced play-offs in order to reclaim the title from Anand. Depending upon what further reports I get (or not) from the Girls, I'll cobble a report together soon. Things will reach a climax - one way or another!!! - if it comes to a Game 12 in any event.
We'll see, darlings.
Meanwhile, good news is - I finally lost that blasted 10th pound! Weighed myself this morning and it was gone, vanished! Hopefully, forever! I'm a week behind schedule - target date for losing the next 10 pounds is November 25th.
In celebration of my 10 pound weight loss, tomorrow I'm treating myself to an exclusive spa haircut - but since I'm pinching my pennies just like everyone else seems to be these days, it's only because I got a 50% off coupon. I haven't gone to this place before, but the hairdresser seems very sweet - young enough to be a daughter and outside today handing out coupons without a scarf or gloves on! She took my half-kidding scolding in good course so I made an appointment practically on the spot. I'm going for a "Posh" Beckham layered, angled bob (with bangs). Will let you know how it turns out, darlings!
The Showgirls have been sending me updates from Bonn, but none of them make much sense. It seems they are up to their beautiful ears in intrigue. Bambi seems to be claiming responsibility for GM Kramnik's win in Game 10 yesterday to bring the score to Anand 6/Kramnik 4. Play resumes tomorrow. Kramnik would have to pull off a nearly impossible feat - winning the last 2 games, just in order to force a play-off with Anand (rapid chess and then blitz and then - the dreaded Armageddon game if it comes to that), and he would have to win in the forced play-offs in order to reclaim the title from Anand. Depending upon what further reports I get (or not) from the Girls, I'll cobble a report together soon. Things will reach a climax - one way or another!!! - if it comes to a Game 12 in any event.
We'll see, darlings.
Meanwhile, good news is - I finally lost that blasted 10th pound! Weighed myself this morning and it was gone, vanished! Hopefully, forever! I'm a week behind schedule - target date for losing the next 10 pounds is November 25th.
In celebration of my 10 pound weight loss, tomorrow I'm treating myself to an exclusive spa haircut - but since I'm pinching my pennies just like everyone else seems to be these days, it's only because I got a 50% off coupon. I haven't gone to this place before, but the hairdresser seems very sweet - young enough to be a daughter and outside today handing out coupons without a scarf or gloves on! She took my half-kidding scolding in good course so I made an appointment practically on the spot. I'm going for a "Posh" Beckham layered, angled bob (with bangs). Will let you know how it turns out, darlings!
Goddess Diwali: Prayer - It Can't Hurt!
Diwali: Can Goddess of wealth help plunging market?
2008-10-28 10:20:00
By Radha Kant Bharati
Light is the symbol of prosperity and joy. In the Indian sub-continent a great tradition coming down from centuries is Deepavali i.e. festival of lights. It is celebrated after twenty days from Dashahara on Amavasya 15th Day of dark fortnight of Kartika month of Indian calendar.
Diwali or Deepavali signifies different things to different people of our Indian society. Popularly it is believed that on this day Lord Rama returned back to Ayodhya after completing period of 14 years in exile. Thus the occasion of Diwali is the celebration of victory of Lord Rama.
Side by side it is also celebration of Naraka Chaturdashi, the day when the Demon of Darkness and Dirt Narakasura was destroyed by Lord Krishna.
According to another popular believe the festival is linked with Laxmi Goddess of wealth and prosperity. On this day Goddess Laxmi goes around visiting clean, lighted and decorated houses during the night and distributes gifts and blessings. The festival of lights is celebrated in different ways in different regions of Indian sub-continent. On this pious occasion feasting, merry making and joyful get-togethers are main features. Nowadays, all over India the festival of Diwali is celebrated with pomp and show and with bursting crackers well past midnight. All our festival seasons coincide with an increase in air, water and sound pollution levels.
Noise levels have been a matter of concern as they are harmful to health and welfare of all. Noise pollution can cause both physiological and psychological problems.
Subjected to 45 decibels of noise, an average person cannot sleep. At 120 decibels the ear registers pain, but hearing damage begins at a much lower level, about 85 decibels. Apart from hearing loss, noise can cause lack of sleep, irritability, heartburn, indigestion, ulcers, high blood pressure, and possibly heart disease. Noise-induced stress creates severe tension in daily living and contributes to mental illness.
Keeping in view the increasing trend in noise levels, various regulations have been issued from time to time to control noise pollution in ambient air, at source and at manufacturing stage.
The Supreme Court has literally put a cap on ‘noise’, crackers can emit. It is 125 decibels on an average. The ruling has had a salutary effect. In pursuance of the judgement and to collect bench mark data, all the regulatory agencies of the State Government/ Union Territories have been advised to comply with stipulated norms and to draw an Action Plan for ensuring the compliance of the directions.
The concerned agencies have also been advised to strengthen/establish environmental cells at the State and District levels to check noise pollution and also to undertake survey in major cities specially before and after the festivals to ensure compliance. Intensive campaigns are also launched in print and electronic media about deleterious effects of noise pollution.
For creating awareness, most of the State Governments sent their monitoring reports of survey undertaken before and on Diwali day and the reports so far have revealed that there has been a reasonable success in arresting the menace of noise pollution.
The conflict between competing interests in society - safety, health, and calm on the one hand, and tradition on the other hand, has evolved over time, and the health effects are receiving greater attention. There has been a concerted effort over the past few years to reduce noise pollution by opting for light based fireworks as-well-as maintaining the spirit of Deepavali.
Courtesy: Press Information Bureau
2008-10-28 10:20:00
By Radha Kant Bharati
Light is the symbol of prosperity and joy. In the Indian sub-continent a great tradition coming down from centuries is Deepavali i.e. festival of lights. It is celebrated after twenty days from Dashahara on Amavasya 15th Day of dark fortnight of Kartika month of Indian calendar.
Diwali or Deepavali signifies different things to different people of our Indian society. Popularly it is believed that on this day Lord Rama returned back to Ayodhya after completing period of 14 years in exile. Thus the occasion of Diwali is the celebration of victory of Lord Rama.
Side by side it is also celebration of Naraka Chaturdashi, the day when the Demon of Darkness and Dirt Narakasura was destroyed by Lord Krishna.
According to another popular believe the festival is linked with Laxmi Goddess of wealth and prosperity. On this day Goddess Laxmi goes around visiting clean, lighted and decorated houses during the night and distributes gifts and blessings. The festival of lights is celebrated in different ways in different regions of Indian sub-continent. On this pious occasion feasting, merry making and joyful get-togethers are main features. Nowadays, all over India the festival of Diwali is celebrated with pomp and show and with bursting crackers well past midnight. All our festival seasons coincide with an increase in air, water and sound pollution levels.
Noise levels have been a matter of concern as they are harmful to health and welfare of all. Noise pollution can cause both physiological and psychological problems.
Subjected to 45 decibels of noise, an average person cannot sleep. At 120 decibels the ear registers pain, but hearing damage begins at a much lower level, about 85 decibels. Apart from hearing loss, noise can cause lack of sleep, irritability, heartburn, indigestion, ulcers, high blood pressure, and possibly heart disease. Noise-induced stress creates severe tension in daily living and contributes to mental illness.
Keeping in view the increasing trend in noise levels, various regulations have been issued from time to time to control noise pollution in ambient air, at source and at manufacturing stage.
The Supreme Court has literally put a cap on ‘noise’, crackers can emit. It is 125 decibels on an average. The ruling has had a salutary effect. In pursuance of the judgement and to collect bench mark data, all the regulatory agencies of the State Government/ Union Territories have been advised to comply with stipulated norms and to draw an Action Plan for ensuring the compliance of the directions.
The concerned agencies have also been advised to strengthen/establish environmental cells at the State and District levels to check noise pollution and also to undertake survey in major cities specially before and after the festivals to ensure compliance. Intensive campaigns are also launched in print and electronic media about deleterious effects of noise pollution.
For creating awareness, most of the State Governments sent their monitoring reports of survey undertaken before and on Diwali day and the reports so far have revealed that there has been a reasonable success in arresting the menace of noise pollution.
The conflict between competing interests in society - safety, health, and calm on the one hand, and tradition on the other hand, has evolved over time, and the health effects are receiving greater attention. There has been a concerted effort over the past few years to reduce noise pollution by opting for light based fireworks as-well-as maintaining the spirit of Deepavali.
Courtesy: Press Information Bureau
Monday, October 27, 2008
16th North American FIDE Invitational
One of the USA's promising young female chessplayers, WFM Alisa Melekhina, participated in the 16th North American FIDE Invitational in suburban Chicago October 18 -24, 2008, put together by the North American Chess Association. Here are the final standings:
1st - IM Valay Parikh - 7/9
2nd - IM Ben Finegold - 6.5/9
3rd - IM Angelo Young - 5.5/9
4th-5th - FM Peter Bereolos & FM Florin Felecan - 5/9
6th-7th - FM Dale Haessel & IM Emory Tate - 4/9
8th - FM Mehmed Pasalic - 3.5/9
9th - WFM Alisa Melekhina - 3/9
10th - FM Aleksander Stamnov - 1.5/9
1st - IM Valay Parikh - 7/9
2nd - IM Ben Finegold - 6.5/9
3rd - IM Angelo Young - 5.5/9
4th-5th - FM Peter Bereolos & FM Florin Felecan - 5/9
6th-7th - FM Dale Haessel & IM Emory Tate - 4/9
8th - FM Mehmed Pasalic - 3.5/9
9th - WFM Alisa Melekhina - 3/9
10th - FM Aleksander Stamnov - 1.5/9
2008 Cap d'Agade
Two teams facing off. The ladies are having a tough time of it, while young Fabiano is running away with the thing! Here are the results through the first game of Round 5 - second game of Round 5 and further is tomorrow:
Leaderboard
Groupe A Group A
- --
Le classement Leaderboard
Fabiano Caruana (2640) : 4,5 4.5
Vassily Ivanchuk (2786) : 3,5 3.5
Maxime Vachier Lagrave (2716) : 3,0 3.0
Ivan Cheparinov (2696) : 2,5 2.5
Bu Xiangzhi (2704) : 2,5 2.5
Alexandra Kosteniuk (2525) : 2,0 2.0
Katerina Lahno (2488) : 1,5 1.5
Marie Sebag (2533) : 0,5 0.5
Average Elo 2636
- --
Groupe B Group B
Magnus Carlsen (2786) : 3,5 3.5
Teimour Radjabov (2751) : 3,5 3.5
Hikaru Nakamura (2704) : 2,5 2.5
Anatoly Karpov (2651) : 2,5 2.5
Hou Yifan (2578) : 1,5 1.5
Humpy Koneru (2618) : 1,0 1.0
Sebastien Feller (2526) : 1,0 1.0
Almira Skripchenko (2455) : 0,5 0.5
Average Elo 2634
Leaderboard
Groupe A Group A
- --
Le classement Leaderboard
Fabiano Caruana (2640) : 4,5 4.5
Vassily Ivanchuk (2786) : 3,5 3.5
Maxime Vachier Lagrave (2716) : 3,0 3.0
Ivan Cheparinov (2696) : 2,5 2.5
Bu Xiangzhi (2704) : 2,5 2.5
Alexandra Kosteniuk (2525) : 2,0 2.0
Katerina Lahno (2488) : 1,5 1.5
Marie Sebag (2533) : 0,5 0.5
Average Elo 2636
- --
Groupe B Group B
Magnus Carlsen (2786) : 3,5 3.5
Teimour Radjabov (2751) : 3,5 3.5
Hikaru Nakamura (2704) : 2,5 2.5
Anatoly Karpov (2651) : 2,5 2.5
Hou Yifan (2578) : 1,5 1.5
Humpy Koneru (2618) : 1,0 1.0
Sebastien Feller (2526) : 1,0 1.0
Almira Skripchenko (2455) : 0,5 0.5
Average Elo 2634
Essent 2008
GM Marie Sebag, who earned the GM title in early summer playing in the "Open" section of the Individual European Chess Championships, was the sole chess femme in this event (held in Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, I just love that name), and she had a rather rough time of it, taking some lumps, scoring 2/6, earning a sub-par performance rating. Sokolov ran away with the tournament this year.
1. Sokolov, Ivan NED g NED 2650 5 2847
2. Adly, Ahmed g EGY 2586 2½ 2538
3. Smeets, Jan g NED 2604 2½ 2532
4. Sebag, Marie g FRA 2533 2 2488
1. Sokolov, Ivan NED g NED 2650 5 2847
2. Adly, Ahmed g EGY 2586 2½ 2538
3. Smeets, Jan g NED 2604 2½ 2532
4. Sebag, Marie g FRA 2533 2 2488
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Ancient Carved Stone Discovered in Denmark
This is a really interesting discovery.Sensational Stone Age discovery
October 20, 2008
An ancient stone with a phallic motif provides new information on Stone Age art and symbols.
A young couple walking along Horsens Fjord in August this year made a sensational discovery – a 5-7,000 year old stone with a scratched motif. The 13x10x4 cm. limestone shows a man with an erect phallus and two fish.
Archaeologists at Horsens museum were taken aback, and immediately passed the stone on the National Museum to determine whether the motif was indeed from the Stone Age or simply a later work of art using an ancient style.
Ertebølle Culture
“But now we’re sure. We believe the stone to be from the Ertebølle Culture between 5,400 and 3,900 BC. It’s the sort of discovery that is only made once a decade,” says Horsens Museum Archaeologist Per Borup.
Apart from its phallic representation, the man in the motif seems to have some form of head dress with animal ears – possibly in the tradition of an Indian shaman.
Edited by Julian Isherwood
Hatshepsut: Pharaoh of Egypt
AUB president sheds light on female pharaoh
Daily Star staff
Friday, October 24, 2008
BEIRUT: The American University of Beirut's (AUB) new president, Peter Dorman, who is also a professor of archeology and an expert on ancient Egypt, gave a presentation Wednesday about Hatshepsut, the only woman to reign as a male pharaoh over ancient Egypt.
Organized by the Society of the Friends of the AUB Museum and held at the AUB Archeological Museum, the illustrated lecture was titled "Gender Trouble in Ancient Egypt: The Case of King/Queen Hatshepsut." It attracted a large audience, including Culture Minister Tammam Salam and his wife.
In his talk, Dorman highlighted the uniqueness of the reign of Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, who assumed the role of male king of ancient Egypt, through her garb and title, as depicted in the hieroglyphs contemporary to her time of rule.
Hatshepsut is the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty (1500 BC) of Ancient Egypt and wife of Thutmose II - also Hatshepsut's half-brother - who died a few years after becoming king without a direct heir to the throne. Thutmose III, Hatshepsut's stepson and nephew, was too young to assume kingship at the time. As a result, Hatshepsut claimed power as queen regent, and then usurped it, by claiming to be the legitimate heir, by virtue of being the daughter of a king. Seven years into her rule, she also assumed the role of male king.
"Hatshepsut holds a unique place in ancient Egyptian history since she is the only woman to rule in the guise of a male ruler," said Dorman.
While surveying the circumstances that led to her becoming queen then assuming legitimacy for rightful heir for kingship, Dorman supported his observations with archaeological evidence - mostly derived from her funerary temple in Dayr al-Bahri on the banks of the Nile - that showed the evolution of her role from queen to king.
"Hatshepsut no longer claimed legality for being wife of a deceased king; rather, by being the eldest surviving heir to the throne, and tracing legitimacy to her father in life and death," said Dorman.
In conclusion, Dorman noted that Hatshepsut's images were intentionally and meticulously desecrated and destroyed after her death by Thutmose III, and experimented with possible reasons for this fact.
"Hatshepsut may have been forgotten, but with research we have been able to recover important aspects of her life," Dorman said.
Dorman is an international leader in the study of the ancient Near East, and in particular the field of Egyptology, in which he is a noted historiographer, epigrapher and philologist.
He is the author and editor of several major books and many articles on the study of ancient Egypt and is probably best known for his historical work on the reign of Hatshepsut and the Amarna period.
His most recent monograph, "Faces in Clay: Technique, Imagery, and Allusion in a Corpus of Ceramic Sculpture from Ancient Egypt" (2002), examines artisanal craftsmanship in light of material culture, iconography, and religious texts. In 2007, he and Betsy M. Bryan of The Johns Hopkins University came out with an edited volume titled "Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes."
Since 2002 Dorman has chaired with great success the distinguished department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at one of the world's top research universities, the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he spent nine years (1988-1997) heading the epigraphic efforts at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt.
From 1977 to 1988, he worked in curatorial positions in the department of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. - The Daily Star
Daily Star staff
Friday, October 24, 2008
BEIRUT: The American University of Beirut's (AUB) new president, Peter Dorman, who is also a professor of archeology and an expert on ancient Egypt, gave a presentation Wednesday about Hatshepsut, the only woman to reign as a male pharaoh over ancient Egypt.
Organized by the Society of the Friends of the AUB Museum and held at the AUB Archeological Museum, the illustrated lecture was titled "Gender Trouble in Ancient Egypt: The Case of King/Queen Hatshepsut." It attracted a large audience, including Culture Minister Tammam Salam and his wife.
In his talk, Dorman highlighted the uniqueness of the reign of Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, who assumed the role of male king of ancient Egypt, through her garb and title, as depicted in the hieroglyphs contemporary to her time of rule.
Hatshepsut is the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty (1500 BC) of Ancient Egypt and wife of Thutmose II - also Hatshepsut's half-brother - who died a few years after becoming king without a direct heir to the throne. Thutmose III, Hatshepsut's stepson and nephew, was too young to assume kingship at the time. As a result, Hatshepsut claimed power as queen regent, and then usurped it, by claiming to be the legitimate heir, by virtue of being the daughter of a king. Seven years into her rule, she also assumed the role of male king.
"Hatshepsut holds a unique place in ancient Egyptian history since she is the only woman to rule in the guise of a male ruler," said Dorman.
While surveying the circumstances that led to her becoming queen then assuming legitimacy for rightful heir for kingship, Dorman supported his observations with archaeological evidence - mostly derived from her funerary temple in Dayr al-Bahri on the banks of the Nile - that showed the evolution of her role from queen to king.
"Hatshepsut no longer claimed legality for being wife of a deceased king; rather, by being the eldest surviving heir to the throne, and tracing legitimacy to her father in life and death," said Dorman.
In conclusion, Dorman noted that Hatshepsut's images were intentionally and meticulously desecrated and destroyed after her death by Thutmose III, and experimented with possible reasons for this fact.
"Hatshepsut may have been forgotten, but with research we have been able to recover important aspects of her life," Dorman said.
Dorman is an international leader in the study of the ancient Near East, and in particular the field of Egyptology, in which he is a noted historiographer, epigrapher and philologist.
He is the author and editor of several major books and many articles on the study of ancient Egypt and is probably best known for his historical work on the reign of Hatshepsut and the Amarna period.
His most recent monograph, "Faces in Clay: Technique, Imagery, and Allusion in a Corpus of Ceramic Sculpture from Ancient Egypt" (2002), examines artisanal craftsmanship in light of material culture, iconography, and religious texts. In 2007, he and Betsy M. Bryan of The Johns Hopkins University came out with an edited volume titled "Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes."
Since 2002 Dorman has chaired with great success the distinguished department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at one of the world's top research universities, the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he spent nine years (1988-1997) heading the epigraphic efforts at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt.
From 1977 to 1988, he worked in curatorial positions in the department of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. - The Daily Star
Saturday, October 25, 2008
The Rich Cheat on Their Taxes - NO!
How the Rich Cheat On Their Taxes
by Janet NovackThursday, October 23, 2008
A new study based on unpublished Internal Revenue Service data shows the rich are different when it comes to paying taxes: They hide more of their income.
The previously unreported study estimates that taxpayers whose true income was between $500,000 and $1 million a year understated their adjusted gross incomes by 21% overall in 2001, compared to an 8% underreporting rate for those earning $50,000 to $100,000 and even lower rates for those earning less. (The "net misreporting rate" as the IRS calls it, includes both underreported income and inflated deductions.)
In all, because of their higher noncompliance rates, those with true incomes of $200,000 or more received 25% of all income, but accounted for 40% of net underreported income and 42% of underreported tax in 2001, the new analysis finds.
The study was written by Joel Slemrod, an economics professor and director of the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan's business school and IRS economist Andrew Johns. It has not been officially endorsed or even released by the IRS and seems sure to add fuel to the election season debate over whether those earning $250,000 or more should pay higher tax rates, as Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, has proposed.
The Slemrod/Johns analysis uses unpublished data from special research audits the IRS conducted on a sample of 45,000 individual returns filed for 2001. It was the IRS' first such research effort since 1988, and it led the agency to estimate the 2001 gross "tax gap" at $345 billion.
The main reason for the income-related cheating disparity: Higher income folks receive more of their income from sources that are easier to hide, including self-employment earnings; income from rents, partnerships and S corporations; and capital gains.
"The distribution of noncompliance lines up pretty closely with who gets income that's hard (for the IRS) to keep track of,'' Slemrod says. Still, he notes, the distribution of income by source doesn't explain all the increased noncompliance at higher income levels.
In its 2001 tax gap study, the IRS estimated that individuals underreported business income by 43% overall. Sole proprietors, who report self-employment income on schedule C of their tax returns, underreported their income a stunning 57%.
By contrast, the IRS found, 99% of all wages were reported by individual tax filers. The obvious explanation is that workers have no choice--their employers report their earnings to the IRS and withhold taxes on them.
Meanwhile, net capital gains for 2001 were underreported by 12%, the IRS estimated. The IRS receives reports from brokers of taxpayers' gross sales of stocks and bonds, but not of their initial costs or profits--therefore it has no way to easily check their reported capital gains. (Last month, as part of the $700 billion bailout bill, Congress mandated that brokers report the basis of any stocks bought in 2011 or later.)
The new study seems to show that the really rich are more tax compliant than the merely well-off, although not nearly as compliant as middle- and working-class wage slaves. Those earning $2 million plus had an 11% underreporting rate. But Slemrod told Forbes that he was "less comfortable" with that finding, noting that the very rich may have made use of techniques that IRS research audits didn't detect.
"I just don't know whether these audits were able to track down really sophisticated noncompliance or Swiss bank accounts. They may underestimate it (noncompliance) at the top,'' he says.
Indeed, in the past several years, the IRS has collected billions in back taxes from wealthy taxpayers who used dicey tax shelters to manufacture huge phony losses in the late 1990s, 2000 and 2001. But the IRS didn't get a handle on the nature or extent of these shelters until years later and relied on tax shelter promoters' customer lists and special self-disclosure programs, not audits, to find most of the taxpayers involved.
Currently, the government is suing UBS for the names of 18,000 wealthy Americans it believes may have had unreported Swiss bank accounts.
Copyrighted, Forbes.com. All rights reserved.
by Janet NovackThursday, October 23, 2008
A new study based on unpublished Internal Revenue Service data shows the rich are different when it comes to paying taxes: They hide more of their income.
The previously unreported study estimates that taxpayers whose true income was between $500,000 and $1 million a year understated their adjusted gross incomes by 21% overall in 2001, compared to an 8% underreporting rate for those earning $50,000 to $100,000 and even lower rates for those earning less. (The "net misreporting rate" as the IRS calls it, includes both underreported income and inflated deductions.)
In all, because of their higher noncompliance rates, those with true incomes of $200,000 or more received 25% of all income, but accounted for 40% of net underreported income and 42% of underreported tax in 2001, the new analysis finds.
The study was written by Joel Slemrod, an economics professor and director of the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan's business school and IRS economist Andrew Johns. It has not been officially endorsed or even released by the IRS and seems sure to add fuel to the election season debate over whether those earning $250,000 or more should pay higher tax rates, as Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, has proposed.
The Slemrod/Johns analysis uses unpublished data from special research audits the IRS conducted on a sample of 45,000 individual returns filed for 2001. It was the IRS' first such research effort since 1988, and it led the agency to estimate the 2001 gross "tax gap" at $345 billion.
The main reason for the income-related cheating disparity: Higher income folks receive more of their income from sources that are easier to hide, including self-employment earnings; income from rents, partnerships and S corporations; and capital gains.
"The distribution of noncompliance lines up pretty closely with who gets income that's hard (for the IRS) to keep track of,'' Slemrod says. Still, he notes, the distribution of income by source doesn't explain all the increased noncompliance at higher income levels.
In its 2001 tax gap study, the IRS estimated that individuals underreported business income by 43% overall. Sole proprietors, who report self-employment income on schedule C of their tax returns, underreported their income a stunning 57%.
By contrast, the IRS found, 99% of all wages were reported by individual tax filers. The obvious explanation is that workers have no choice--their employers report their earnings to the IRS and withhold taxes on them.
Meanwhile, net capital gains for 2001 were underreported by 12%, the IRS estimated. The IRS receives reports from brokers of taxpayers' gross sales of stocks and bonds, but not of their initial costs or profits--therefore it has no way to easily check their reported capital gains. (Last month, as part of the $700 billion bailout bill, Congress mandated that brokers report the basis of any stocks bought in 2011 or later.)
The new study seems to show that the really rich are more tax compliant than the merely well-off, although not nearly as compliant as middle- and working-class wage slaves. Those earning $2 million plus had an 11% underreporting rate. But Slemrod told Forbes that he was "less comfortable" with that finding, noting that the very rich may have made use of techniques that IRS research audits didn't detect.
"I just don't know whether these audits were able to track down really sophisticated noncompliance or Swiss bank accounts. They may underestimate it (noncompliance) at the top,'' he says.
Indeed, in the past several years, the IRS has collected billions in back taxes from wealthy taxpayers who used dicey tax shelters to manufacture huge phony losses in the late 1990s, 2000 and 2001. But the IRS didn't get a handle on the nature or extent of these shelters until years later and relied on tax shelter promoters' customer lists and special self-disclosure programs, not audits, to find most of the taxpayers involved.
Currently, the government is suing UBS for the names of 18,000 wealthy Americans it believes may have had unreported Swiss bank accounts.
Copyrighted, Forbes.com. All rights reserved.
Happy Squirrels!
Today I ventured forth to do a list of errands: (1) ice melt (2) mulch (3) birdseed and sunflower seed (4) gasoline (5) wine - lots of wine.
Mission accomplished!
When I got home, I put out some sunflower seeds for the squirrels, along with some fresh peanuts, and whistled for my furry little buddies to come eat. They appeared within seconds. It never ceases to amaze me. My whistling leaves much to be desired - I'm sure a bird can't hear me from 6 feet away. Still, they come.
Check out this little guy or gal - photo from Bishek, Kyrgyzstan. The hair around the ears - how cute is that? Sort of reminds me of GM Alexander Khalifman's hair back in 1999, when he won the FIDE World Chess Championship in Las Vegas.
Mission accomplished!
When I got home, I put out some sunflower seeds for the squirrels, along with some fresh peanuts, and whistled for my furry little buddies to come eat. They appeared within seconds. It never ceases to amaze me. My whistling leaves much to be desired - I'm sure a bird can't hear me from 6 feet away. Still, they come.
Check out this little guy or gal - photo from Bishek, Kyrgyzstan. The hair around the ears - how cute is that? Sort of reminds me of GM Alexander Khalifman's hair back in 1999, when he won the FIDE World Chess Championship in Las Vegas.
Antique Chess Set Stolen
Some questions: Were the thieve really after the set and just took the other stuff to cover their tracks? Are the thieves chessplayer? Would your run of the mill thieves (ahem) understand the value of a hand-carved 17th century ivory chess set??? Is this actually some insidious plot to gather some pieces of the legendary Montglane Chess Service in an attempt to recreate the Elixir of Eternal Life?
Story from The Australian.news.com
Thieves steal 17th century chess set
October 25, 2008
BRAZEN thieves have made off with an antique hand-carved chess set after breaking into a Brisbane home.
Police say the home on Franklin Way, Wakerley, in Brisbane's east, was robbed on October 13.
"Thieves brazenly removed palings from the front wooden fence of the ... home to gain access to the yard,'' Queensland Police said.
"They then broke into the house and stole a quantity of personal items, including jewellery, a laptop computer and the antique chess set.''
Police said the 17th century chess set was a much-loved family treasure and its 32 black and white pieces were made from hand-carved ivory.
The chess pieces are also distinctive because they are each made up of eight individual sections of ivory.
Story from The Australian.news.com
Thieves steal 17th century chess set
October 25, 2008
BRAZEN thieves have made off with an antique hand-carved chess set after breaking into a Brisbane home.
Police say the home on Franklin Way, Wakerley, in Brisbane's east, was robbed on October 13.
"Thieves brazenly removed palings from the front wooden fence of the ... home to gain access to the yard,'' Queensland Police said.
"They then broke into the house and stole a quantity of personal items, including jewellery, a laptop computer and the antique chess set.''
Police said the 17th century chess set was a much-loved family treasure and its 32 black and white pieces were made from hand-carved ivory.
The chess pieces are also distinctive because they are each made up of eight individual sections of ivory.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Friday Night Miscellany
No Showgirls tonight, darlings! They're putting a wrap on their report - yes, I know - there are still 4 more games scheduled, but all GM Anand has to do is garner 1.5 points from those games in order to win the WCC Match outright. The Girls aren't bucking the odds and yes, they are hearing the Fat Lady Sing.
Now, down to the business of the ridiculous and the sublime. There's lots to choose from, but I'm tired and Katherine Neville's "The Fire" is calling out to me, along with the fireplace and a glass of wine. Tomorrow it's running errands to get ready for the winter here, which may visit us with the first snow of the season Sunday evening, eek! It's buy mulch, bulk ice melt, bulk bird seed, bulk sunflower seed, bulk dog food (for the crows and other critters), one last 2 gallon container of gasoline (which optimistically looks forward to at least 1 more warm enough weekend where the grass can be cut before winter descends), bulk wine time, cuz I don't want to be lugging this stuff home once it drops below zero and the blizzards blow like they did last year!
In the sad but sublime column, Barack Obama quits the campaign trail for a day or so during a crucial time period to visit his gravely ill grandmother.
The generation that fought in and were adults during WWII is fast dying off. Obama's grandmother worked in an airplane factory during WWII and his grandfather fought in the war. My own dear father, a WWII Marines veteran, died at the age of 80 in November, 2002, just a few days before Veteran's Day. He was wounded in action and was awarded a Purple Heart. It wasn't until years later, as we all grew up that we realized he also suffered other lingering injuries from frostbite suffered in 1944. He had other medals and ribbons too, but I don't know what they were - he never talked about them.
Dad's funeral was featured in a Journal/Sentinel article in 2002 close to Veteran's Day, that talked about the decreasing number of veterans available to play taps at Vets' memorial services. Now, many veterans have a taped "Taps" played at their memorial services. We were fortunate, we had a live bugle player, and as a Vet, Dad received a 21-gun salute. Dad is buried in a Veterans' Cemetery in southeastern Wisconsin, and there is a place for mom next to his grave.
I have a rose carefully preserved from that service, in a glass-enclosed bookcase that houses my most precious mementos and books. I see it every day and remember the man it represents.
Mom, who has had a few health scares over the years but takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', is either 85 or 81, depending upon which date of birth she uses :) I think she'll live to be 100, at least. That's what I plan for myself, by the way. Mom is from tough Polish stock, stubborn as hell, and while I got my coloring and build from my father's French-mixed ancestry, I sure got more than my share of mom's unbending neck!
My oldest brother went into the Army out of high school in the mid 1970's and served his time in Germany, was honorably discharged, and went into the Wisconsin National Guard. He eventually earned the NCO rank of Seargent - don't ask me what level because I don't know, it's not something we've talked about.
My brother was still in the Guard when his unit was called up in 1991 to go serve in Desert Storm. My brother did not, however, travel with his unit, though he threw a big fit about it! He wanted to go but, you see, he was recovering from chemo- and radiation-therapy for a certain form of cancer that often strikes young men in the prime of their lives. While the cancer was pronounced eradicated, his lungs had been severely weakened by the treatments he received and his doctor refused to release him to go overseas to a desert climate which, so the doc said, would probably kill him. My brother would have gone anyway, but the government said no.
So, he swallowed his disappointment and continued to serve at home. He married his long-time girlfriend, who was already a sister-in-law de facto if not de jure! She was one of the family even if there was no wedding ring. She's black, we're white. Oh, pardon me, she's African-American (she'd laugh if I ever called her that to her face, LOL!) Another mark against us, I suppose. My brother continued in the Guard until a few years ago; I'll have to check with him for the exact number of years, I believe he served 25 years in the Guard before retiring.
It really yanks my chain when Sarah Palin stands up and implies in her speech that because I am a Democrat from a family of Democrats, that because I - and my family - support ideas that she doesn't agree with - we are not REAL Americans, we are NOT patriotic, we are somehow LESS than human and beneath contempt. She has crowds cheering her when this filth and calumny flows from her mouth. That tells me all I need to know about Sarah Palin, John McCain and the party and people who support this kind of "campaigning." Are we living in Germany during the 1930's - geez!
Let's move on to the ridiculous, shall we?
How about getting yourself and your family a brand new wardrobe to the tune of $150,000 courtesy of the Republican National Committee? (Notice the source - a British newspaper, lol!) We're not talking Walmart, baby, nosiree! Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom's, Designer Labels and exclusive designer boutiques. I want to know what happened to the hockey mom from Alaska. Oh, I forgot - she's the one caught out charging the state of Alaska for per diem expenses when oops, she was actually at home and, oops, her kids traveled on the state's dime as part of "official business" and oops, she's got a $500,000 house on a reported income that doesn't support the mortgage payment. Hmmmm.... Oh, maybe she doesn't have a mortgage. Maybe she and First Dude came up with $500,000 in cash to pay for the house in full. Gee, maybe we should all move to Alaska and cash in too!
Darlings, I'm in the wrong profession. I should have gone into MAKE-UP. The McCain Campaign has paid a make-up artist over $22,000 for TWO WEEKS WORK on Sarah Palin. That's just about half of what I make in a YEAR. Nice work if you can get it. But what the hell, the McCain Campaign is funded by OUR TAX DOLLARS (public campaign financing) - Mr. McCain has made a BIG POINT of that, like he took the High Road. What's the difference between Sarah Palin dipping into taxpayer dollars to cloth herself and her family so they all look good while traipsing around the country trumpeting a bigoted, narrow-minded campaign that seeks to divide the country along racial, economic and religious lines, and the dudes who master-minded the taxpayer financed bail out Wall Street to the tune of $700 million and counting, the bail out AIG to the tune of $122 million and counting, the bail out of various large financial institutions to the tune of $250 million and counting. So who cares if Palin spends a measely $150,000 for clothes the likes of which 99.5% of Americans will never be able to afford, right? Chump change. But, John McCain says that Obama's proposed tax cuts for the working poor and middle class are SOCIALISM and modest tax increases to the wealthy and rich - in reality, just peeling back the gigantic giveaways to the rich and richer given out during the Bushite years - is well, gaddummit, just plain wrong! We've got to balance the budget! We've got to pay off them Commies over in China, hell, we owe them $500 billion.
You want soup lines darlings? The Great Depression ain't got nothing on what will happen in this country if McCain wins the election. The rich will eat their cake and continue to quaff their French champagne, while setting up trusts that protect their millions and billions from any liability while putting their handicapped and mentally ill children on the public dole (it's only against the law for the increasingly disappearing middle class in this country to "divest" assets when a spouse has to go into a nursing home; it's not illegal for a billionaire to put his mentally incompetent or physically handicapped child into state-funded Medicaid programs once they reach the age of majority in their state), and everyone else will just starve to death while McCain fiddles in the White House during intermittent bouts of hysteria and Sarah impatiently taps her $400 shod foot, waiting for him to croak. Gee, a great prospect, aina hey?
Just remember, the guys who are bitching about SOCIALISM are the same guys who want to put your Social Security taxes to work in the "Free market." These are also the same guys who are the first with their hands out to collect their Social Security when they hit 62, and the first who try to find a way to prevent the Social Security benefits payable to their moms and dads drooling away in nursing homes from going to the state, while mom and dad are on Medicaid (taxpayer funded) because son and daughter can't be bothered to part with their parents' hard-earned millions to pay for their care. Let the stupid frigging taxpayers do it, the say! It's all legal too, and all rigged for the rich and uber-rich to get away with this kind of b.s.
Irony of ironies, working class and poor people actually BELIEVE that McCain and Palin have their best interests at heart. If nothing else, this definitively demonstrates the abject failure of "No Child Left Behind", one of the shining examples of legislation left behind by the Bush Years. Cough cough. P.T. Barnam sure was right. Anyone earning less than $250,000 a year in income in this country who votes the Republican ticket is voting against his or her own self-interest, and yet they're happy to do it! Just goes to show - there are suckers born every minute, boooyah! Or brain-washed Borg. How sad. Why not just take a big knife and slit your own throats while your at it. I'm sure the Wall Street guys will get a big kick out of that.
From the sad but true department, a white female campaign worker for the McCain campaign was caught out in a big lie when she said that a big black man (BOOOO!) attacked her and carved a backwards "B" on her cheek when he discovered she was a McCain supporter. I'm surprised she didn't also say he sported a turban and flowing "Arab" robes. Turns out the lady carved up her own cheek. She's not sure why...
Unfortunately, I'm sure that some folks read the initial reports but have not seen the follow-up reports - and will go away thinking -- well, you can fill in your own blanks about what they'll be thinking. Pathetic. And really Pathetic.
Time to go read Katherine Neville.
Now, down to the business of the ridiculous and the sublime. There's lots to choose from, but I'm tired and Katherine Neville's "The Fire" is calling out to me, along with the fireplace and a glass of wine. Tomorrow it's running errands to get ready for the winter here, which may visit us with the first snow of the season Sunday evening, eek! It's buy mulch, bulk ice melt, bulk bird seed, bulk sunflower seed, bulk dog food (for the crows and other critters), one last 2 gallon container of gasoline (which optimistically looks forward to at least 1 more warm enough weekend where the grass can be cut before winter descends), bulk wine time, cuz I don't want to be lugging this stuff home once it drops below zero and the blizzards blow like they did last year!
In the sad but sublime column, Barack Obama quits the campaign trail for a day or so during a crucial time period to visit his gravely ill grandmother.
The generation that fought in and were adults during WWII is fast dying off. Obama's grandmother worked in an airplane factory during WWII and his grandfather fought in the war. My own dear father, a WWII Marines veteran, died at the age of 80 in November, 2002, just a few days before Veteran's Day. He was wounded in action and was awarded a Purple Heart. It wasn't until years later, as we all grew up that we realized he also suffered other lingering injuries from frostbite suffered in 1944. He had other medals and ribbons too, but I don't know what they were - he never talked about them.
Dad's funeral was featured in a Journal/Sentinel article in 2002 close to Veteran's Day, that talked about the decreasing number of veterans available to play taps at Vets' memorial services. Now, many veterans have a taped "Taps" played at their memorial services. We were fortunate, we had a live bugle player, and as a Vet, Dad received a 21-gun salute. Dad is buried in a Veterans' Cemetery in southeastern Wisconsin, and there is a place for mom next to his grave.
I have a rose carefully preserved from that service, in a glass-enclosed bookcase that houses my most precious mementos and books. I see it every day and remember the man it represents.
Mom, who has had a few health scares over the years but takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', is either 85 or 81, depending upon which date of birth she uses :) I think she'll live to be 100, at least. That's what I plan for myself, by the way. Mom is from tough Polish stock, stubborn as hell, and while I got my coloring and build from my father's French-mixed ancestry, I sure got more than my share of mom's unbending neck!
My oldest brother went into the Army out of high school in the mid 1970's and served his time in Germany, was honorably discharged, and went into the Wisconsin National Guard. He eventually earned the NCO rank of Seargent - don't ask me what level because I don't know, it's not something we've talked about.
My brother was still in the Guard when his unit was called up in 1991 to go serve in Desert Storm. My brother did not, however, travel with his unit, though he threw a big fit about it! He wanted to go but, you see, he was recovering from chemo- and radiation-therapy for a certain form of cancer that often strikes young men in the prime of their lives. While the cancer was pronounced eradicated, his lungs had been severely weakened by the treatments he received and his doctor refused to release him to go overseas to a desert climate which, so the doc said, would probably kill him. My brother would have gone anyway, but the government said no.
So, he swallowed his disappointment and continued to serve at home. He married his long-time girlfriend, who was already a sister-in-law de facto if not de jure! She was one of the family even if there was no wedding ring. She's black, we're white. Oh, pardon me, she's African-American (she'd laugh if I ever called her that to her face, LOL!) Another mark against us, I suppose. My brother continued in the Guard until a few years ago; I'll have to check with him for the exact number of years, I believe he served 25 years in the Guard before retiring.
It really yanks my chain when Sarah Palin stands up and implies in her speech that because I am a Democrat from a family of Democrats, that because I - and my family - support ideas that she doesn't agree with - we are not REAL Americans, we are NOT patriotic, we are somehow LESS than human and beneath contempt. She has crowds cheering her when this filth and calumny flows from her mouth. That tells me all I need to know about Sarah Palin, John McCain and the party and people who support this kind of "campaigning." Are we living in Germany during the 1930's - geez!
Let's move on to the ridiculous, shall we?
How about getting yourself and your family a brand new wardrobe to the tune of $150,000 courtesy of the Republican National Committee? (Notice the source - a British newspaper, lol!) We're not talking Walmart, baby, nosiree! Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom's, Designer Labels and exclusive designer boutiques. I want to know what happened to the hockey mom from Alaska. Oh, I forgot - she's the one caught out charging the state of Alaska for per diem expenses when oops, she was actually at home and, oops, her kids traveled on the state's dime as part of "official business" and oops, she's got a $500,000 house on a reported income that doesn't support the mortgage payment. Hmmmm.... Oh, maybe she doesn't have a mortgage. Maybe she and First Dude came up with $500,000 in cash to pay for the house in full. Gee, maybe we should all move to Alaska and cash in too!
Darlings, I'm in the wrong profession. I should have gone into MAKE-UP. The McCain Campaign has paid a make-up artist over $22,000 for TWO WEEKS WORK on Sarah Palin. That's just about half of what I make in a YEAR. Nice work if you can get it. But what the hell, the McCain Campaign is funded by OUR TAX DOLLARS (public campaign financing) - Mr. McCain has made a BIG POINT of that, like he took the High Road. What's the difference between Sarah Palin dipping into taxpayer dollars to cloth herself and her family so they all look good while traipsing around the country trumpeting a bigoted, narrow-minded campaign that seeks to divide the country along racial, economic and religious lines, and the dudes who master-minded the taxpayer financed bail out Wall Street to the tune of $700 million and counting, the bail out AIG to the tune of $122 million and counting, the bail out of various large financial institutions to the tune of $250 million and counting. So who cares if Palin spends a measely $150,000 for clothes the likes of which 99.5% of Americans will never be able to afford, right? Chump change. But, John McCain says that Obama's proposed tax cuts for the working poor and middle class are SOCIALISM and modest tax increases to the wealthy and rich - in reality, just peeling back the gigantic giveaways to the rich and richer given out during the Bushite years - is well, gaddummit, just plain wrong! We've got to balance the budget! We've got to pay off them Commies over in China, hell, we owe them $500 billion.
You want soup lines darlings? The Great Depression ain't got nothing on what will happen in this country if McCain wins the election. The rich will eat their cake and continue to quaff their French champagne, while setting up trusts that protect their millions and billions from any liability while putting their handicapped and mentally ill children on the public dole (it's only against the law for the increasingly disappearing middle class in this country to "divest" assets when a spouse has to go into a nursing home; it's not illegal for a billionaire to put his mentally incompetent or physically handicapped child into state-funded Medicaid programs once they reach the age of majority in their state), and everyone else will just starve to death while McCain fiddles in the White House during intermittent bouts of hysteria and Sarah impatiently taps her $400 shod foot, waiting for him to croak. Gee, a great prospect, aina hey?
Just remember, the guys who are bitching about SOCIALISM are the same guys who want to put your Social Security taxes to work in the "Free market." These are also the same guys who are the first with their hands out to collect their Social Security when they hit 62, and the first who try to find a way to prevent the Social Security benefits payable to their moms and dads drooling away in nursing homes from going to the state, while mom and dad are on Medicaid (taxpayer funded) because son and daughter can't be bothered to part with their parents' hard-earned millions to pay for their care. Let the stupid frigging taxpayers do it, the say! It's all legal too, and all rigged for the rich and uber-rich to get away with this kind of b.s.
Irony of ironies, working class and poor people actually BELIEVE that McCain and Palin have their best interests at heart. If nothing else, this definitively demonstrates the abject failure of "No Child Left Behind", one of the shining examples of legislation left behind by the Bush Years. Cough cough. P.T. Barnam sure was right. Anyone earning less than $250,000 a year in income in this country who votes the Republican ticket is voting against his or her own self-interest, and yet they're happy to do it! Just goes to show - there are suckers born every minute, boooyah! Or brain-washed Borg. How sad. Why not just take a big knife and slit your own throats while your at it. I'm sure the Wall Street guys will get a big kick out of that.
From the sad but true department, a white female campaign worker for the McCain campaign was caught out in a big lie when she said that a big black man (BOOOO!) attacked her and carved a backwards "B" on her cheek when he discovered she was a McCain supporter. I'm surprised she didn't also say he sported a turban and flowing "Arab" robes. Turns out the lady carved up her own cheek. She's not sure why...
Unfortunately, I'm sure that some folks read the initial reports but have not seen the follow-up reports - and will go away thinking -- well, you can fill in your own blanks about what they'll be thinking. Pathetic. And really Pathetic.
Time to go read Katherine Neville.
Possible Age of Chinese Writing Pushed Back
New archaeological discovery rewrites earliest Chinese characters dating
www.chinaview.cn 2008-10-25 00:05:06
JINAN, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- Inscribed animal bones and jade pieces unearthed in Changle County of eastern Shandong Province are earliest examples of Chinese characters dating back 4,500 years ago, the latest archaeological studies show.
The discovery broke the record for the previous earliest known examples of Chinese characters, the inscribed animal bones and tortoise shells, known as the oracle bones, of the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC-1100 BC), by more than 1,300 years. The oracle bones were major discoveries at the Yinxu in Anyang of central China's Henan Province.
The Shandong discovery was first made in 2004 by Xiao Guangde, the Changle Culture and History Committee director and an amateur collector. He noticed many sub-fossil bones were being thrown away when local peasants were digging at the Yuanjiazhuang relic site in the county.
After carefully cleaning some of the unearthed bones, Wang found they bore obvious inscriptions. He also bought other samples, often at high prices, from local people. Over a period of four years, his collection grew to about 100 inscribed bones and two jade relics also with inscriptions.
Lined up in order, the inscriptions bear resemblance to drawings and characters, and show objects such as a bird, a crab, a triangle and the sun. Some inscriptions emerge repeatedly.
"This kind of repeating proves the inscriptions are carved by human beings," Wang Yuxin, the China Yinshang Association of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences president, noted.
Li Laifu, the Shandong Oracle Scripts Association president, said the inscriptions may be left by the Dongyi people who lived in what is today's Shandong Province as early as 8,300 years ago. They made birds as their totem.
However, archaeologists speculated from the bones' color, structure, and degree of their petrifaction, that the scripts had existed for about 4,500 years.
"Unlike other inscriptions dated earlier than the oracle bones, these scripts are in a considerable number and are systematic," said Wang. "Their structures also follow certain rules."
He reckoned the oracle bones found in Henan may inherit some characters from the newly-found scripts. However, he denied they were for divination use.
"The bones and jade don't bear deviation marks such as drills, or chisel and burn traces, so the writing maybe for keeping records of events."
The discoveries were named the "Changle bone scripts" after the place where they were found. Though they could not be translated at present, archaeologists believed they may provide valuable evidence in the studies of the evolution of ancient Chinese characters, and to reproduce a picture of an ancient society that was barely known.
Oracle bones were first unearthed in the late 19th century at the ruins of Yin (Yinxu) in Anyang, capital of the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC-1100 BC). Yin was the ancient name for the Shang Dynasty. The ruins were listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.
Editor: Yan
www.chinaview.cn 2008-10-25 00:05:06
JINAN, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- Inscribed animal bones and jade pieces unearthed in Changle County of eastern Shandong Province are earliest examples of Chinese characters dating back 4,500 years ago, the latest archaeological studies show.
The discovery broke the record for the previous earliest known examples of Chinese characters, the inscribed animal bones and tortoise shells, known as the oracle bones, of the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC-1100 BC), by more than 1,300 years. The oracle bones were major discoveries at the Yinxu in Anyang of central China's Henan Province.
The Shandong discovery was first made in 2004 by Xiao Guangde, the Changle Culture and History Committee director and an amateur collector. He noticed many sub-fossil bones were being thrown away when local peasants were digging at the Yuanjiazhuang relic site in the county.
After carefully cleaning some of the unearthed bones, Wang found they bore obvious inscriptions. He also bought other samples, often at high prices, from local people. Over a period of four years, his collection grew to about 100 inscribed bones and two jade relics also with inscriptions.
Lined up in order, the inscriptions bear resemblance to drawings and characters, and show objects such as a bird, a crab, a triangle and the sun. Some inscriptions emerge repeatedly.
"This kind of repeating proves the inscriptions are carved by human beings," Wang Yuxin, the China Yinshang Association of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences president, noted.
Li Laifu, the Shandong Oracle Scripts Association president, said the inscriptions may be left by the Dongyi people who lived in what is today's Shandong Province as early as 8,300 years ago. They made birds as their totem.
However, archaeologists speculated from the bones' color, structure, and degree of their petrifaction, that the scripts had existed for about 4,500 years.
"Unlike other inscriptions dated earlier than the oracle bones, these scripts are in a considerable number and are systematic," said Wang. "Their structures also follow certain rules."
He reckoned the oracle bones found in Henan may inherit some characters from the newly-found scripts. However, he denied they were for divination use.
"The bones and jade don't bear deviation marks such as drills, or chisel and burn traces, so the writing maybe for keeping records of events."
The discoveries were named the "Changle bone scripts" after the place where they were found. Though they could not be translated at present, archaeologists believed they may provide valuable evidence in the studies of the evolution of ancient Chinese characters, and to reproduce a picture of an ancient society that was barely known.
Oracle bones were first unearthed in the late 19th century at the ruins of Yin (Yinxu) in Anyang, capital of the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC-1100 BC). Yin was the ancient name for the Shang Dynasty. The ruins were listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.
Editor: Yan
More on Gobekli Tepe, Turkey
Prior post.
Coverage and insight of why this is an earth-shaking discovery from Smithsonian.com:
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?
Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
By Andrew Curry
Photographs by Berthold Steinhilber
Smithsonian magazine, November 2008
Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery.
The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.
"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward.
The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.
Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.
From this perch 1,000 feet above the valley, we can see to the horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asks me to imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today.
Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."
With the sun higher in the sky, Schmidt ties a white scarf around his balding head, turban-style, and deftly picks his way down the hill among the relics. In rapid-fire German he explains that he has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.
Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. In 1994, Schmidt was working on his own survey of prehistoric sites in the region. After reading a brief mention of the stone-littered hilltop in the University of Chicago researchers' report, he decided to go there himself. From the moment he first saw it, he knew the place was extraordinary.
Unlike the stark plateaus nearby, Gobekli Tepe (the name means "belly hill" in Turkish) has a gently rounded top that rises 50 feet above the surrounding landscape. To Schmidt's eye, the shape stood out. "Only man could have created something like this," he says. "It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site." The broken pieces of limestone that earlier surveyors had mistaken for gravestones suddenly took on a different meaning.
Schmidt returned a year later with five colleagues and they uncovered the first megaliths, a few buried so close to the surface they were scarred by plows. As the archaeologists dug deeper, they unearthed pillars arranged in circles. Schmidt's team, however, found none of the telltale signs of a settlement: no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. The archaeologists did find evidence of tool use, including stone hammers and blades. And because those artifacts closely resemble others from nearby sites previously carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C., Schmidt and co-workers estimate that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age. Limited carbon dating undertaken by Schmidt at the site confirms this assessment.
The way Schmidt sees it, Gobekli Tepe's sloping, rocky ground is a stonecutter's dream. Even without metal chisels or hammers, prehistoric masons wielding flint tools could have chipped away at softer limestone outcrops, shaping them into pillars on the spot before carrying them a few hundred yards to the summit and lifting them upright. Then, Schmidt says, once the stone rings were finished, the ancient builders covered them over with dirt. Eventually, they placed another ring nearby or on top of the old one. Over centuries, these layers created the hilltop.
Today, Schmidt oversees a team of more than a dozen German archaeologists, 50 local laborers and a steady stream of enthusiastic students. He typically excavates at the site for two months in the spring and two in the fall. (Summer temperatures reach 115 degrees, too hot to dig; in the winter the area is deluged by rain.) In 1995, he bought a traditional Ottoman house with a courtyard in Urfa, a city of nearly a half-million people, to use as a base of operations.
On the day I visit, a bespectacled Belgian man sits at one end of a long table in front of a pile of bones. Joris Peters, an archaeozoologist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, specializes in the analysis of animal remains. Since 1998, he has examined more than 100,000 bone fragments from Gobekli Tepe. Peters has often found cut marks and splintered edges on them—signs that the animals from which they came were butchered and cooked. The bones, stored in dozens of plastic crates stacked in a storeroom at the house, are the best clue to how people who created Gobekli Tepe lived. Peters has identified tens of thousands of gazelle bones, which make up more than 60 percent of the total, plus those of other wild game such as boar, sheep and red deer. He's also found bones of a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. "The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site," Peters says. "It's been the same every year since." The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.
But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.
To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies."
What was so important to these early people that they gathered to build (and bury) the stone rings? The gulf that separates us from Gobekli Tepe's builders is almost unimaginable. Indeed, though I stood among the looming megaliths eager to take in their meaning, they didn't speak to me. They were utterly foreign, placed there by people who saw the world in a way I will never comprehend. There are no sources to explain what the symbols might mean. Schmidt agrees. "We're 6,000 years before the invention of writing here," he says.
"There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today," says Gary Rollefson, an archaeologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, who is familiar with Schmidt's work. "Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."
Still, archaeologists have their theories—evidence, perhaps, of the irresistible human urge to explain the unexplainable. The surprising lack of evidence that people lived right there, researchers say, argues against its use as a settlement or even a place where, for instance, clan leaders gathered. Hodder is fascinated that Gobekli Tepe's pillar carvings are dominated not by edible prey like deer and cattle but by menacing creatures such as lions, spiders, snakes and scorpions. "It's a scary, fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts," he muses. While later cultures were more concerned with farming and fertility, he suggests, perhaps these hunters were trying to master their fears by building this complex, which is a good distance from where they lived.
Danielle Stordeur, an archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, emphasizes the significance of the vulture carvings. Some cultures have long believed the high-flying carrion birds transported the flesh of the dead up to the heavens. Stordeur has found similar symbols at sites from the same era as Gobekli Tepe just 50 miles away in Syria. "You can really see it's the same culture," she says. "All the most important symbols are the same."
For his part, Schmidt is certain the secret is right beneath his feet. Over the years, his team has found fragments of human bone in the layers of dirt that filled the complex. Deep test pits have shown that the floors of the rings are made of hardened limestone. Schmidt is betting that beneath the floors he'll find the structures' true purpose: a final resting place for a society of hunters.
Perhaps, Schmidt says, the site was a burial ground or the center of a death cult, the dead laid out on the hillside among the stylized gods and spirits of the afterlife. If so, Gobekli Tepe's location was no accident. "From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view," Schmidt says as the sun casts long shadows over the half-buried pillars. "They're looking out over a hunter's dream."
Coverage and insight of why this is an earth-shaking discovery from Smithsonian.com:
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?
Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
By Andrew Curry
Photographs by Berthold Steinhilber
Smithsonian magazine, November 2008
Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery.
The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.
"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward.
The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.
Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.
From this perch 1,000 feet above the valley, we can see to the horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asks me to imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today.
Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."
With the sun higher in the sky, Schmidt ties a white scarf around his balding head, turban-style, and deftly picks his way down the hill among the relics. In rapid-fire German he explains that he has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.
Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. In 1994, Schmidt was working on his own survey of prehistoric sites in the region. After reading a brief mention of the stone-littered hilltop in the University of Chicago researchers' report, he decided to go there himself. From the moment he first saw it, he knew the place was extraordinary.
Unlike the stark plateaus nearby, Gobekli Tepe (the name means "belly hill" in Turkish) has a gently rounded top that rises 50 feet above the surrounding landscape. To Schmidt's eye, the shape stood out. "Only man could have created something like this," he says. "It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site." The broken pieces of limestone that earlier surveyors had mistaken for gravestones suddenly took on a different meaning.
Schmidt returned a year later with five colleagues and they uncovered the first megaliths, a few buried so close to the surface they were scarred by plows. As the archaeologists dug deeper, they unearthed pillars arranged in circles. Schmidt's team, however, found none of the telltale signs of a settlement: no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. The archaeologists did find evidence of tool use, including stone hammers and blades. And because those artifacts closely resemble others from nearby sites previously carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C., Schmidt and co-workers estimate that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age. Limited carbon dating undertaken by Schmidt at the site confirms this assessment.
The way Schmidt sees it, Gobekli Tepe's sloping, rocky ground is a stonecutter's dream. Even without metal chisels or hammers, prehistoric masons wielding flint tools could have chipped away at softer limestone outcrops, shaping them into pillars on the spot before carrying them a few hundred yards to the summit and lifting them upright. Then, Schmidt says, once the stone rings were finished, the ancient builders covered them over with dirt. Eventually, they placed another ring nearby or on top of the old one. Over centuries, these layers created the hilltop.
Today, Schmidt oversees a team of more than a dozen German archaeologists, 50 local laborers and a steady stream of enthusiastic students. He typically excavates at the site for two months in the spring and two in the fall. (Summer temperatures reach 115 degrees, too hot to dig; in the winter the area is deluged by rain.) In 1995, he bought a traditional Ottoman house with a courtyard in Urfa, a city of nearly a half-million people, to use as a base of operations.
On the day I visit, a bespectacled Belgian man sits at one end of a long table in front of a pile of bones. Joris Peters, an archaeozoologist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, specializes in the analysis of animal remains. Since 1998, he has examined more than 100,000 bone fragments from Gobekli Tepe. Peters has often found cut marks and splintered edges on them—signs that the animals from which they came were butchered and cooked. The bones, stored in dozens of plastic crates stacked in a storeroom at the house, are the best clue to how people who created Gobekli Tepe lived. Peters has identified tens of thousands of gazelle bones, which make up more than 60 percent of the total, plus those of other wild game such as boar, sheep and red deer. He's also found bones of a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. "The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site," Peters says. "It's been the same every year since." The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.
But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.
To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies."
What was so important to these early people that they gathered to build (and bury) the stone rings? The gulf that separates us from Gobekli Tepe's builders is almost unimaginable. Indeed, though I stood among the looming megaliths eager to take in their meaning, they didn't speak to me. They were utterly foreign, placed there by people who saw the world in a way I will never comprehend. There are no sources to explain what the symbols might mean. Schmidt agrees. "We're 6,000 years before the invention of writing here," he says.
"There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today," says Gary Rollefson, an archaeologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, who is familiar with Schmidt's work. "Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."
Still, archaeologists have their theories—evidence, perhaps, of the irresistible human urge to explain the unexplainable. The surprising lack of evidence that people lived right there, researchers say, argues against its use as a settlement or even a place where, for instance, clan leaders gathered. Hodder is fascinated that Gobekli Tepe's pillar carvings are dominated not by edible prey like deer and cattle but by menacing creatures such as lions, spiders, snakes and scorpions. "It's a scary, fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts," he muses. While later cultures were more concerned with farming and fertility, he suggests, perhaps these hunters were trying to master their fears by building this complex, which is a good distance from where they lived.
Danielle Stordeur, an archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, emphasizes the significance of the vulture carvings. Some cultures have long believed the high-flying carrion birds transported the flesh of the dead up to the heavens. Stordeur has found similar symbols at sites from the same era as Gobekli Tepe just 50 miles away in Syria. "You can really see it's the same culture," she says. "All the most important symbols are the same."
For his part, Schmidt is certain the secret is right beneath his feet. Over the years, his team has found fragments of human bone in the layers of dirt that filled the complex. Deep test pits have shown that the floors of the rings are made of hardened limestone. Schmidt is betting that beneath the floors he'll find the structures' true purpose: a final resting place for a society of hunters.
Perhaps, Schmidt says, the site was a burial ground or the center of a death cult, the dead laid out on the hillside among the stylized gods and spirits of the afterlife. If so, Gobekli Tepe's location was no accident. "From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view," Schmidt says as the sun casts long shadows over the half-buried pillars. "They're looking out over a hunter's dream."
Thursday, October 23, 2008
2008 European Club Cup
Final ranking of women (from various Women's Teams) according to Performance Rating:
1 IM Ovod Evgenija 2429 Spartak Vidnoe 2859 3,0 3 100,0 4
2 IM Dzagnidze Nana 2503 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2707 6,0 7 85,7 2
3 GM Stefanova Antoaneta 2548 Spartak Vidnoe 2694 5,0 6 83,3 1
4 IM Harika Dronavalli 2462 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2689 4,0 5 80,0 2
5 IM Muzychuk Anna 2508 T-com Podgorica 2649 5,5 7 78,6 1
6 GM Koneru Humpy 2618 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2646 4,5 6 75,0 1
7 IM Ushenina Anna 2496 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2541 4,5 7 64,3 1
8 GM Chiburdanidze Maia 2489 MIKA Yerevan 2523 3,0 5 60,0 1
9 GM Lahno Kateryna 2488 MIKA Yerevan 2519 4,0 6 66,7 2
10 IM Kosintseva Tatiana 2513 Spartak Vidnoe 2507 4,5 6 75,0 3
11 WGM Sharevich Anna 2322 EPAM 2504 3,5 4 87,5 4
12 IM Maric Alisa 2405 T-com Podgorica 2494 4,5 7 64,3 2
13 IM Zatonskih Anna 2440 EPAM 2485 3,5 6 58,3 1 (US Women's Champion)
14 GM Hoang Thanh Trang 2483 EPAM 2482 3,0 6 50,0 1
15 IM Khurtsidze Nino 2417 MIKA Yerevan 2479 3,5 5 70,0 4
16 GM Zhao Xue 2518 Spartak Vidnoe 2475 3,0 5 60,0 2
17 IM Korbut Ekaterina 2459 Finek St. Petersburg 2471 3,0 6 50,0 1
18 IM Cmilyte Viktorija 2512 Finek St. Petersburg 2469 3,5 6 58,3 1
19 IM Matveeva Svetlana 2411 EPAM 2462 2,5 5 50,0 3
20 IM Mkrtchian Lilit 2443 MIKA Yerevan 2460 3,5 5 70,0 3
21 IM Kovalevskaya Ekaterina 2439 T-com Podgorica 2458 5,5 7 78,6 4
22 WGM Motoc Alina 2313 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2452 6,0 7 85,7 3
23 WGM Hou Yifan 2578 Spartak Vidnoe 2448 2,0 4 50,0 1
24 WIM Cherenkova Kristina 2245 Aspropirgos Attikis 2423 4,5 7 64,3 2
25 IM Skripchenko Almira 2455 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2422 3,0 4 75,0 4
26 IM Foisor Cristina Adela 2365 Radnicki Rudovci 2419 5,5 7 78,6 2
27 GM Cramling Pia 2550 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2414 3,0 6 50,0 1
28 WGM Kovanova Baira 2379 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2413 4,5 7 64,3 3
29 IM Atalik Ekaterina 2432 EPAM 2407 3,5 7 50,0 2
30 IM Ciuksyte Dagne 2339 Panevezys Chess Club 2405 4,5 7 64,3 1
31 IM Socko Monika 2434 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2386 2,5 5 50,0 3
32 WGM Zhukova Natalia 2488 Finek St. Petersburg 2384 3,0 6 50,0 2
33 IM Danielian Elina 2513 MIKA Yerevan 2383 3,5 7 50,0 1
34 IM Paehtz Elisabeth 2471 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2375 3,5 7 50,0 2
35 WGM Stojanovic Andjelija 2357 Rudar Ugljevik 2368 4,5 7 64,3 1
36 WFM Congiu Mathilde 2230 Vandoeuvre Echecs 2341 3,5 7 50,0 1
37 IM Gaponenko Inna 2473 T-com Podgorica 2327 3,5 7 50,0 3
38 WFM Fakhretdinova Margarita 2147 Aspropirgos Attikis 2311 4,0 7 57,1 3
39 WGM Voicu Carmen 2239 SK Gross-Lehna 2285 3,5 6 58,3 2
40 WGM Demina Julia 2357 Finek St. Petersburg 2268 2,5 4 62,5 3
41 WGM Chelushkina Irina 2360 Radnicki Rudovci 2266 3,0 7 42,9 1
42 IM Kosintseva Nadezhda 2468 Spartak Vidnoe 2263 2,0 4 50,0 3
43 WGM Cosma Elena Luminita 2340 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2262 4,5 7 64,3 2
44 IM Peptan Corina-Isabela 2430 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2252 3,0 7
42,9 1
45 IM Turova Irina 2381 Finek St. Petersburg 2251 4,0 6 66,7 4
46 WFM Botvinnik Irina 2239 Herzliya Chess Club 2251 3,0 7 42,9 1
47 WGM Pitam Ella 2295 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2234 3,0 7 42,9 1
48 WFM Steil-Antoni Fiona 2166 Vandoeuvre Echecs 2229 3,0 7 42,9 2
49 Porat Maya 2167 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2202 5,0 7 71,4 4
50 WIM Daulyte Deimante 2278 Panevezys Chess Club 2196 3,0 7 42,9 2
51 WIM Papadopoulou Vera 2196 Aspropirgos Attikis 2172 1,5 7 21,4 1
52 WIM Boric Elena 2292 Rudar Ugljevik 2153 3,5 7 50,0 2
53 WFM Vujic-Katanic Branka 2107 Rudar Ugljevik 2147 4,0 7 57,1 3
54 Genzling Sylvie 1936 Bischwiller 2140 2,0 7 28,6 1
55 WGM Karlovich Anastazia 2256 SK Gross-Lehna 2138 2,5 6 41,7 1
56 IM Petrenko Svetlana 2285 SK Gross-Lehna 2135 2,0 6 33,3 1
57 WFM Limontaite Simona 2197 Panevezys Chess Club 2105 4,5 7 64,3 4
58 Klipper Rebecca 2023 Vandoeuvre Echecs 2101 2,5 7 35,7 3
59 WGM Olarasu Gabriela 2297 Radnicki Rudovci 2099 3,0 7 42,9 3
60 Iordanidou Zoi 2110 Aspropirgos Attikis 2096 2,5 7 35,7 4
61 WIM Makka Ioulia 2220 Panevezys Chess Club 2089 3,0 7 42,9 3
62 WGM Igla Bella 2254 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2087 2,5 7 35,7 2
63 WIM Paulet Iozefina 2307 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2083 4,0 6 66,7 4
64 Nagel Verena 2052 SK Gross-Lehna 2023 2,0 5 40,0 3
65 Len Irina 2091 Herzliya Chess Club 2016 2,0 7 28,6 2
66 Grapsa Georgia 2121 Galaxias Thessaloniki 2006 1,5 7 21,4 1
67 Vovinkina Natalia 2147 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2002 2,0 7 28,6 3
Annotation: forfeit points are ignored
1 IM Ovod Evgenija 2429 Spartak Vidnoe 2859 3,0 3 100,0 4
2 IM Dzagnidze Nana 2503 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2707 6,0 7 85,7 2
3 GM Stefanova Antoaneta 2548 Spartak Vidnoe 2694 5,0 6 83,3 1
4 IM Harika Dronavalli 2462 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2689 4,0 5 80,0 2
5 IM Muzychuk Anna 2508 T-com Podgorica 2649 5,5 7 78,6 1
6 GM Koneru Humpy 2618 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2646 4,5 6 75,0 1
7 IM Ushenina Anna 2496 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2541 4,5 7 64,3 1
8 GM Chiburdanidze Maia 2489 MIKA Yerevan 2523 3,0 5 60,0 1
9 GM Lahno Kateryna 2488 MIKA Yerevan 2519 4,0 6 66,7 2
10 IM Kosintseva Tatiana 2513 Spartak Vidnoe 2507 4,5 6 75,0 3
11 WGM Sharevich Anna 2322 EPAM 2504 3,5 4 87,5 4
12 IM Maric Alisa 2405 T-com Podgorica 2494 4,5 7 64,3 2
13 IM Zatonskih Anna 2440 EPAM 2485 3,5 6 58,3 1 (US Women's Champion)
14 GM Hoang Thanh Trang 2483 EPAM 2482 3,0 6 50,0 1
15 IM Khurtsidze Nino 2417 MIKA Yerevan 2479 3,5 5 70,0 4
16 GM Zhao Xue 2518 Spartak Vidnoe 2475 3,0 5 60,0 2
17 IM Korbut Ekaterina 2459 Finek St. Petersburg 2471 3,0 6 50,0 1
18 IM Cmilyte Viktorija 2512 Finek St. Petersburg 2469 3,5 6 58,3 1
19 IM Matveeva Svetlana 2411 EPAM 2462 2,5 5 50,0 3
20 IM Mkrtchian Lilit 2443 MIKA Yerevan 2460 3,5 5 70,0 3
21 IM Kovalevskaya Ekaterina 2439 T-com Podgorica 2458 5,5 7 78,6 4
22 WGM Motoc Alina 2313 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2452 6,0 7 85,7 3
23 WGM Hou Yifan 2578 Spartak Vidnoe 2448 2,0 4 50,0 1
24 WIM Cherenkova Kristina 2245 Aspropirgos Attikis 2423 4,5 7 64,3 2
25 IM Skripchenko Almira 2455 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2422 3,0 4 75,0 4
26 IM Foisor Cristina Adela 2365 Radnicki Rudovci 2419 5,5 7 78,6 2
27 GM Cramling Pia 2550 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2414 3,0 6 50,0 1
28 WGM Kovanova Baira 2379 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2413 4,5 7 64,3 3
29 IM Atalik Ekaterina 2432 EPAM 2407 3,5 7 50,0 2
30 IM Ciuksyte Dagne 2339 Panevezys Chess Club 2405 4,5 7 64,3 1
31 IM Socko Monika 2434 Cercle d'Echecs Monte Carlo 2386 2,5 5 50,0 3
32 WGM Zhukova Natalia 2488 Finek St. Petersburg 2384 3,0 6 50,0 2
33 IM Danielian Elina 2513 MIKA Yerevan 2383 3,5 7 50,0 1
34 IM Paehtz Elisabeth 2471 Economist SGSEU Saratov 2375 3,5 7 50,0 2
35 WGM Stojanovic Andjelija 2357 Rudar Ugljevik 2368 4,5 7 64,3 1
36 WFM Congiu Mathilde 2230 Vandoeuvre Echecs 2341 3,5 7 50,0 1
37 IM Gaponenko Inna 2473 T-com Podgorica 2327 3,5 7 50,0 3
38 WFM Fakhretdinova Margarita 2147 Aspropirgos Attikis 2311 4,0 7 57,1 3
39 WGM Voicu Carmen 2239 SK Gross-Lehna 2285 3,5 6 58,3 2
40 WGM Demina Julia 2357 Finek St. Petersburg 2268 2,5 4 62,5 3
41 WGM Chelushkina Irina 2360 Radnicki Rudovci 2266 3,0 7 42,9 1
42 IM Kosintseva Nadezhda 2468 Spartak Vidnoe 2263 2,0 4 50,0 3
43 WGM Cosma Elena Luminita 2340 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2262 4,5 7 64,3 2
44 IM Peptan Corina-Isabela 2430 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2252 3,0 7
42,9 1
45 IM Turova Irina 2381 Finek St. Petersburg 2251 4,0 6 66,7 4
46 WFM Botvinnik Irina 2239 Herzliya Chess Club 2251 3,0 7 42,9 1
47 WGM Pitam Ella 2295 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2234 3,0 7 42,9 1
48 WFM Steil-Antoni Fiona 2166 Vandoeuvre Echecs 2229 3,0 7 42,9 2
49 Porat Maya 2167 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2202 5,0 7 71,4 4
50 WIM Daulyte Deimante 2278 Panevezys Chess Club 2196 3,0 7 42,9 2
51 WIM Papadopoulou Vera 2196 Aspropirgos Attikis 2172 1,5 7 21,4 1
52 WIM Boric Elena 2292 Rudar Ugljevik 2153 3,5 7 50,0 2
53 WFM Vujic-Katanic Branka 2107 Rudar Ugljevik 2147 4,0 7 57,1 3
54 Genzling Sylvie 1936 Bischwiller 2140 2,0 7 28,6 1
55 WGM Karlovich Anastazia 2256 SK Gross-Lehna 2138 2,5 6 41,7 1
56 IM Petrenko Svetlana 2285 SK Gross-Lehna 2135 2,0 6 33,3 1
57 WFM Limontaite Simona 2197 Panevezys Chess Club 2105 4,5 7 64,3 4
58 Klipper Rebecca 2023 Vandoeuvre Echecs 2101 2,5 7 35,7 3
59 WGM Olarasu Gabriela 2297 Radnicki Rudovci 2099 3,0 7 42,9 3
60 Iordanidou Zoi 2110 Aspropirgos Attikis 2096 2,5 7 35,7 4
61 WIM Makka Ioulia 2220 Panevezys Chess Club 2089 3,0 7 42,9 3
62 WGM Igla Bella 2254 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2087 2,5 7 35,7 2
63 WIM Paulet Iozefina 2307 CS Cotnari-Politehnica Iasi 2083 4,0 6 66,7 4
64 Nagel Verena 2052 SK Gross-Lehna 2023 2,0 5 40,0 3
65 Len Irina 2091 Herzliya Chess Club 2016 2,0 7 28,6 2
66 Grapsa Georgia 2121 Galaxias Thessaloniki 2006 1,5 7 21,4 1
67 Vovinkina Natalia 2147 Madatech Haifa Chess Club 2002 2,0 7 28,6 3
Annotation: forfeit points are ignored
Discovery of "Tantric University" Baffles Archaeologists?
Hmmmm, I think perhaps something got lost in translation here. Why would archaeologists be "baffled" by this discovery, when the "university" itself was evidently well attested-to in Indian sources?
From The Times of India
Archaeologists baffled by tantric varsity
23 Oct 2008, 0232 hrs IST, Pranava K Chaudhary, TNN
PATNA: The recent discovery of forgotten ancient tantric university - Oddantapuri Mahavihara near Biharsharif, district headquarters of Nalanda, has baffled archaeologists here. Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) claims to have discovered the location of this forgotten university which was set up in 730 AD somewhere near Biharsharif hill.
"I have made frequent visits to the site which is located on Biharsharif hill to locate the exact location of the ancient tantric university," said superintending archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) , Patna circle, P K Mishra.
"On the basis of various ancient texts I found a settlement on the top of Biharsharif hillock," he said.
Mishra told TOI: "At least a dozen-member ASI technical team, including archaeologists, would visit the site on Friday to authenticate existence of the university. On the basis of various ancient texts and records I have come to the conclusion that the univeristy is located somewhere around this site."
A large number of seals, sealings and images of Buddhist and Hindu cult, were found at Biharsharif during 1910, Mishra said. They are preserved in the Indian Museum, Kolkata.
During research, Mishra procured a model of Oddantapuri from Tibet. The model must have been imported from the original Oddantapuri, Mishra said. Interestingly, in 775 AD, the king of Tibet had established a `Sarmaya Vihara' on the model of Oddantapuri at Lhasa. It is also mentioned in the Rahul Sankritayana collection which is preserved in Patna Museum. The Tibet model of Oddantapuri is still alive, Mishra said.
Ancient texts say that the tantric university was destroyed in 1199 AD when Turk Afghan Mohd Bakhtiar Khilji invaded it. Quoting various ancient texts, Mishra said that Gopala, the first king of Pala dynasty, founded a great monastery at Oddantapuri. Laksmana Sena was then the king of Bengal.
"The discovery of Tantric university at Biharsharif as a major seat of learning would add a new dimension to the field of ancient Indian history. Already we have two ancient universities - Nalanda and Vikramshila in Bihar. Now a third university in Bihar would be a new dimension to the study of tantricism," Mishra said.
From The Times of India
Archaeologists baffled by tantric varsity
23 Oct 2008, 0232 hrs IST, Pranava K Chaudhary, TNN
PATNA: The recent discovery of forgotten ancient tantric university - Oddantapuri Mahavihara near Biharsharif, district headquarters of Nalanda, has baffled archaeologists here. Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) claims to have discovered the location of this forgotten university which was set up in 730 AD somewhere near Biharsharif hill.
"I have made frequent visits to the site which is located on Biharsharif hill to locate the exact location of the ancient tantric university," said superintending archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) , Patna circle, P K Mishra.
"On the basis of various ancient texts I found a settlement on the top of Biharsharif hillock," he said.
Mishra told TOI: "At least a dozen-member ASI technical team, including archaeologists, would visit the site on Friday to authenticate existence of the university. On the basis of various ancient texts and records I have come to the conclusion that the univeristy is located somewhere around this site."
A large number of seals, sealings and images of Buddhist and Hindu cult, were found at Biharsharif during 1910, Mishra said. They are preserved in the Indian Museum, Kolkata.
During research, Mishra procured a model of Oddantapuri from Tibet. The model must have been imported from the original Oddantapuri, Mishra said. Interestingly, in 775 AD, the king of Tibet had established a `Sarmaya Vihara' on the model of Oddantapuri at Lhasa. It is also mentioned in the Rahul Sankritayana collection which is preserved in Patna Museum. The Tibet model of Oddantapuri is still alive, Mishra said.
Ancient texts say that the tantric university was destroyed in 1199 AD when Turk Afghan Mohd Bakhtiar Khilji invaded it. Quoting various ancient texts, Mishra said that Gopala, the first king of Pala dynasty, founded a great monastery at Oddantapuri. Laksmana Sena was then the king of Bengal.
"The discovery of Tantric university at Biharsharif as a major seat of learning would add a new dimension to the field of ancient Indian history. Already we have two ancient universities - Nalanda and Vikramshila in Bihar. Now a third university in Bihar would be a new dimension to the study of tantricism," Mishra said.
Oh Those Showgirls! Kramnik! Anand!
Thursday, October 23, 2008, Bonn:
Candi: I can't believe it - I just can't believe any of this is happening. Anand played (1) d4 again! Oh, Bambi, it's, it's - well, I just can't think of the right word at the moment - I'm sure it will come to me.
Bambi: Candi, it's perfectly reasonable that Vishy would play (1) d4 again, since it's clear by now that is a line of play he's concentrated his home prep on for months. He's been successful with it too - unbelievably successful. Why mess with success?
Candi: You've been reading the commentators again, haven't you.
Bambi: Yes, and so have you.
Candi: I can't believe that Vlady only managed a draw.
Bambi: Well, he was playing black.
Candi: Yes, but he had our secret weapon moves! Honestly, is it too much to ask the man to at least play them correctly? All that effort - down the toilet!
Bambi: Candi, you did deliver the letter containing our moves to Vlady, didn't you?
Candi: I gave the envelope to Leaky. He's the one who answered the door at Vlady's suite.
Bambi: WHAT! Ooooh noooo! But you realize what this means - what must have happened!
Candi: What? What happened? All I know is that Vlady didn't play the knight moves we sent him.
Bambi: Exactly! That's because Leaky didn't give Vlady the letter, he read it himself but HE DIDN'T KNOW THE CODE!
Candi: Ohmygoddess! I forgot! THE CODE!
Bambi: He gave Vlady the moves, but he played them out of sequence! Ohmygoddess!
Candi: Oh, oh, I think I feel faint again, Bambi.
Bambi: Don't you faint on me again, Candi. Pull yourself together. We've got to think about what to do!
Candi: Two days ago you were telling me to read your lips, that nothing could be done. Now you're thinking about what we can do?
Bambi: I'm only trying to mitigate the damage that's already been done. You studied law - remember the concept - "Mitigation of Damages?" Anyway, you were the one who suggested "Knight Moves."
Candi: Oh - right.
Bambi: Candi, are you in love with Vlady?
Candi: WHAT! Good Goddess, no. Absolutely not! Bambi! How could you think such a thing?
Bambi: You've been acting strangely ever since we got here. You didn't know Vlady was married; and you fainted when you saw the wedding pictures! Were you carrying on with him?
Candi: I have not been carrying on with Vlady here in Bonn. I fainted when I saw That Woman! And you know, Bambi, something has been knocking on the door of my brain ever since I saw her photograph. She reminds me of somebody, somebody we both know, only - I can't think of who it is she reminds me of! But I know we both know her. I'm surprised you haven't recognized her.
Bambi: Before you told me that those photographs of Vlady's wife were of Olga Villiers, I had no idea what she looked like. I can't say I've seen that face before. And she would have been -
Candi: I want to talk about The Hex. You said we were The Hex eight years ago in London.
Bambi: Yes - I'm certain of it. The only thing that makes sense is that not only did Frogius blackmail me into doing his bidding, he blackmailed you, too!
Candi: WHAT? Frogius blackmailed you too?
Bambi: A ha! I see it all now! Frogius must have bet heavily against the line, and in order to reap the big pay-off, he had to make sure Kaspy lost to Vlady in the 2000 Brain Games Match. Oh Goddess, and there we were, ripe pickings to do his evil bidding. I cannot believe I was so incredibly stupid! I swear I'll hunt him down if it's the last thing I do -
Candi: Oh please! You're upsetting me, Bambi. I hate to see you so - so - vengeful! Vengence is Mine, Sayeth the Lord. I Will Repay! So let's let the Lord do his vengence thingy, and we get out of Dodge while the getting is good. Sounds like a plan to me! I'll start packing -
Bambi: Absolutely not. I'm not leaving here until we get to the bottom of this. Tell me this, Candi. Just what hook did Frogius use on you?
Candi: Oh - I don't think I want to talk about it.
Bambi: Tell me, it's vitally important!
Candi: Bambi! Let me go, you're hurting me! Your acrylics are digging into my arms!
Bambi: Oh, sorry. Just tell me how he forced you to having an affair with Kaspy.
Candi: Well, oh - I can see now just how silly I was to believe him. But at the time, he was soooo convincing. Anyway, he told me that if I didn't do what he wanted, he'd make sure not only that The International Chessoid was wiped off the face of the internet, he'd get rid of Goddesschess, too! And Bambi, I just couldn't let that happen. I just couldn't!
Bambi: Now, now, that's all right, Candi, that's all right. No need to get so emotional. My goodness, you really have been uber-emotional lately. Are you sure you're not -
Candi: BAMBI! Gloria Belanova! GLORIA BELANOVA!
Bambi: Who?
Candi: Oh, don't tell me you don't remember her! She was the Riktonator's Personal Assistant for 21 years - his faithful everything! She was to Frogius what Della Street was to Perry Mason! She's the person I had the brain knocking on, the one I couldn't remember. Only now I do. It was Gloria, Gloria - I think I've got your number, Gloria -
Bambi: Ohmygoddess! Now I remember!
Candi: Look at their pictures side by side - I think - Bambi! I'm having a brain flash - they're Mother and Daughter!
Bambi: Ohmygoddess! Frogius sent his own daughter to London to interview Kaspy after that disastrous tournament! And - and --
Candi: Yes? And - and --
Bambi: I haven't got that far in this narrative yet, give me a night to sleep on it, I'll dream something up --
Wait a minute - what is this "Code" business, anyway? And just what were those "Knight Moves" the Girls put in that letter delivered to GM Kramnik's suite, into the hands of GM Peter Leko (one of a team of Seconds)?
Will Vishy play (1) d4 tomorrow, in Game 8?
Will the Girls put together the rest of the story behind the story of what really happened in London eight years ago? And what is really happening behind the scenes in Bonn today?
Will Vlady, er, GM Vladimir Kramnik, have a miraculous epiphany, and suddenly begin playing absolutely brilliant chess, winning the match (wins in 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, for good measure)? Okay, probably not.
Candi: I can't believe it - I just can't believe any of this is happening. Anand played (1) d4 again! Oh, Bambi, it's, it's - well, I just can't think of the right word at the moment - I'm sure it will come to me.
Bambi: Candi, it's perfectly reasonable that Vishy would play (1) d4 again, since it's clear by now that is a line of play he's concentrated his home prep on for months. He's been successful with it too - unbelievably successful. Why mess with success?
Candi: You've been reading the commentators again, haven't you.
Bambi: Yes, and so have you.
Candi: I can't believe that Vlady only managed a draw.
Bambi: Well, he was playing black.
Candi: Yes, but he had our secret weapon moves! Honestly, is it too much to ask the man to at least play them correctly? All that effort - down the toilet!
Bambi: Candi, you did deliver the letter containing our moves to Vlady, didn't you?
Candi: I gave the envelope to Leaky. He's the one who answered the door at Vlady's suite.
Bambi: WHAT! Ooooh noooo! But you realize what this means - what must have happened!
Candi: What? What happened? All I know is that Vlady didn't play the knight moves we sent him.
Bambi: Exactly! That's because Leaky didn't give Vlady the letter, he read it himself but HE DIDN'T KNOW THE CODE!
Candi: Ohmygoddess! I forgot! THE CODE!
Bambi: He gave Vlady the moves, but he played them out of sequence! Ohmygoddess!
Candi: Oh, oh, I think I feel faint again, Bambi.
Bambi: Don't you faint on me again, Candi. Pull yourself together. We've got to think about what to do!
Candi: Two days ago you were telling me to read your lips, that nothing could be done. Now you're thinking about what we can do?
Bambi: I'm only trying to mitigate the damage that's already been done. You studied law - remember the concept - "Mitigation of Damages?" Anyway, you were the one who suggested "Knight Moves."
Candi: Oh - right.
Bambi: Candi, are you in love with Vlady?
Candi: WHAT! Good Goddess, no. Absolutely not! Bambi! How could you think such a thing?
Bambi: You've been acting strangely ever since we got here. You didn't know Vlady was married; and you fainted when you saw the wedding pictures! Were you carrying on with him?
Candi: I have not been carrying on with Vlady here in Bonn. I fainted when I saw That Woman! And you know, Bambi, something has been knocking on the door of my brain ever since I saw her photograph. She reminds me of somebody, somebody we both know, only - I can't think of who it is she reminds me of! But I know we both know her. I'm surprised you haven't recognized her.
Bambi: Before you told me that those photographs of Vlady's wife were of Olga Villiers, I had no idea what she looked like. I can't say I've seen that face before. And she would have been -
Candi: I want to talk about The Hex. You said we were The Hex eight years ago in London.
Bambi: Yes - I'm certain of it. The only thing that makes sense is that not only did Frogius blackmail me into doing his bidding, he blackmailed you, too!
Candi: WHAT? Frogius blackmailed you too?
Bambi: A ha! I see it all now! Frogius must have bet heavily against the line, and in order to reap the big pay-off, he had to make sure Kaspy lost to Vlady in the 2000 Brain Games Match. Oh Goddess, and there we were, ripe pickings to do his evil bidding. I cannot believe I was so incredibly stupid! I swear I'll hunt him down if it's the last thing I do -
Candi: Oh please! You're upsetting me, Bambi. I hate to see you so - so - vengeful! Vengence is Mine, Sayeth the Lord. I Will Repay! So let's let the Lord do his vengence thingy, and we get out of Dodge while the getting is good. Sounds like a plan to me! I'll start packing -
Bambi: Absolutely not. I'm not leaving here until we get to the bottom of this. Tell me this, Candi. Just what hook did Frogius use on you?
Candi: Oh - I don't think I want to talk about it.
Bambi: Tell me, it's vitally important!
Candi: Bambi! Let me go, you're hurting me! Your acrylics are digging into my arms!
Bambi: Oh, sorry. Just tell me how he forced you to having an affair with Kaspy.
Candi: Well, oh - I can see now just how silly I was to believe him. But at the time, he was soooo convincing. Anyway, he told me that if I didn't do what he wanted, he'd make sure not only that The International Chessoid was wiped off the face of the internet, he'd get rid of Goddesschess, too! And Bambi, I just couldn't let that happen. I just couldn't!
Bambi: Now, now, that's all right, Candi, that's all right. No need to get so emotional. My goodness, you really have been uber-emotional lately. Are you sure you're not -
Candi: BAMBI! Gloria Belanova! GLORIA BELANOVA!
Bambi: Who?
Candi: Oh, don't tell me you don't remember her! She was the Riktonator's Personal Assistant for 21 years - his faithful everything! She was to Frogius what Della Street was to Perry Mason! She's the person I had the brain knocking on, the one I couldn't remember. Only now I do. It was Gloria, Gloria - I think I've got your number, Gloria -
Bambi: Ohmygoddess! Now I remember!
Candi: Look at their pictures side by side - I think - Bambi! I'm having a brain flash - they're Mother and Daughter!
Bambi: Ohmygoddess! Frogius sent his own daughter to London to interview Kaspy after that disastrous tournament! And - and --
Candi: Yes? And - and --
Bambi: I haven't got that far in this narrative yet, give me a night to sleep on it, I'll dream something up --
**********************************
Holy Pawn! What new revelations will the Showgirls next uncork on us, I ask you? Wow! I'm hyperventilating, darlings, I can't keep up! Intrigue! Romance! Sex? Chess - only Vlady can't follow directions, only he didn't know, because Leaky kept the letter from him, and didn't know The Code!Wait a minute - what is this "Code" business, anyway? And just what were those "Knight Moves" the Girls put in that letter delivered to GM Kramnik's suite, into the hands of GM Peter Leko (one of a team of Seconds)?
Will Vishy play (1) d4 tomorrow, in Game 8?
Will the Girls put together the rest of the story behind the story of what really happened in London eight years ago? And what is really happening behind the scenes in Bonn today?
Will Vlady, er, GM Vladimir Kramnik, have a miraculous epiphany, and suddenly begin playing absolutely brilliant chess, winning the match (wins in 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, for good measure)? Okay, probably not.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Oh, She's Just One of Us - B. Frigging S.
The Republican National Committee spends $150,000.00 - ONE HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND AND 00/100 DOLLARS - on clothes for Sarah Palin. And she's supposed to be a female version of Joe the Lying Ass, Tax Dodging Plumber, an Average American. Well, I don't know any Average Americans like Joe the Plumber, and I sure as hell am glad I don't - I might be arrested as a criminal accesory after the fact!
Here I am, one of those EVIL COMMY UNAMERICAN LIBERALS. I earn $45,000 a year gross. My clothing budget is around $300 a year. Last year I really splurged and spent nearly $90 (on sale) buying a pair of water-proof Sorels guaranteed to keep my feet warm to 20 below zero. That was in addition to my $300 for other clothing purchases. This year I'm only shopping for new shoes to get me through the winter, as my clothing budget has otherwise been eaten up by the double-digit increases in my electric and gas bills, my real estate taxes, and what I pay for groceries. I expect to pay a total of perhaps $50 for two, hopefully three, pairs of shoes at Payless. Woooo hoooo!
Now you tell me, darlings, just who is more representative of the average American, heh? Fifi the Alaskan Attack Dog from Alaska, or yours truly from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, whose feet do not sport $400 a pair designer stilletto heels. Sarah, Sarah, how can you be so frigging stupid? You are letting these Republican a-hole duds (I'd call them dudes but actually, they are just duds) ruin your future career in politics to serve their selfish short-term goals. Sarah, you are thereby proving every single negative perjorative the Janus-faced "neo-con" Nazis who are now running the Republican party in this country have ever foisted upon the female sex.
Sarah, you should know better.
Here I am, one of those EVIL COMMY UNAMERICAN LIBERALS. I earn $45,000 a year gross. My clothing budget is around $300 a year. Last year I really splurged and spent nearly $90 (on sale) buying a pair of water-proof Sorels guaranteed to keep my feet warm to 20 below zero. That was in addition to my $300 for other clothing purchases. This year I'm only shopping for new shoes to get me through the winter, as my clothing budget has otherwise been eaten up by the double-digit increases in my electric and gas bills, my real estate taxes, and what I pay for groceries. I expect to pay a total of perhaps $50 for two, hopefully three, pairs of shoes at Payless. Woooo hoooo!
Now you tell me, darlings, just who is more representative of the average American, heh? Fifi the Alaskan Attack Dog from Alaska, or yours truly from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, whose feet do not sport $400 a pair designer stilletto heels. Sarah, Sarah, how can you be so frigging stupid? You are letting these Republican a-hole duds (I'd call them dudes but actually, they are just duds) ruin your future career in politics to serve their selfish short-term goals. Sarah, you are thereby proving every single negative perjorative the Janus-faced "neo-con" Nazis who are now running the Republican party in this country have ever foisted upon the female sex.
Sarah, you should know better.
Hmmm, sounds rather like Chekov on Star Trek back in the '60's bragging about all the things that the Russians did (not!):
Russians the first potters on earth?
Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:50:16 GMT
Russian archeologists claim that the Russians were the first people on the planet to cultivate land, breed cattle and make earthenware.
Russian tribes [how do they know they were "Russian" tribes?] inhabited Khabarovsk Region in the Stone Age, the archeologists said after finding a 15,000-year-old hunters' settlement on the bank of the Amur River in Khabarovsk.
Stone axes, knives, scrapers, arrowheads and baked earthenware have so far been unearthed in the area.
"It was the first earthenware on the globe, and though it was primitive, with plain decoration, and poorly baked, yet it was a significant landmark in the history of mankind," said Andrei Malyavin, an employee of Khabarovsk Archeology Museum. [Not necessarily the "first earthenware on the globe", but to date it's the oldest preserved evidence discovered.]
Firing shaped clay is among the possible first steps toward social organization, or society. The production of earthenware shows that the group had moved beyond simple farming, and into some specialization.
Khabarovsk is the administrative center and the largest city of Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, located some 30 km from the Chinese border.
HRF/JG/RA
More intriguing to me is the question of whether these ancient Amur/Jomon people are related to the people who crossed over into the Americas sometime before? It seems to me that most people have an image in mind that the people who settled the Americas were primative savages who crossed over the Bering Strait during the last interglacial period while they were following the last of the giant game. This ignores the reality of the fact that, to date, we haven't found any older evidence of pottery-making anywhere on earth - not in Egypt, not in Mesopotamia, not anywhere in the Fertile Crescent, not in Southeastern Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania), not in the Anatolian Peninsula. We know that people were in South America 13,000 years ago, and in eastern United States even earlier than that!
So, perhaps all the concentration on the Middle East, etc. looking for the origins of civilization is mistaken, and we need to look along the far Pacific coastline of Europe and Asia.
Russians the first potters on earth?
Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:50:16 GMT
Russian archeologists claim that the Russians were the first people on the planet to cultivate land, breed cattle and make earthenware.
Russian tribes [how do they know they were "Russian" tribes?] inhabited Khabarovsk Region in the Stone Age, the archeologists said after finding a 15,000-year-old hunters' settlement on the bank of the Amur River in Khabarovsk.
Stone axes, knives, scrapers, arrowheads and baked earthenware have so far been unearthed in the area.
"It was the first earthenware on the globe, and though it was primitive, with plain decoration, and poorly baked, yet it was a significant landmark in the history of mankind," said Andrei Malyavin, an employee of Khabarovsk Archeology Museum. [Not necessarily the "first earthenware on the globe", but to date it's the oldest preserved evidence discovered.]
Firing shaped clay is among the possible first steps toward social organization, or society. The production of earthenware shows that the group had moved beyond simple farming, and into some specialization.
Khabarovsk is the administrative center and the largest city of Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, located some 30 km from the Chinese border.
HRF/JG/RA
********************************************
Take a look at the map that is in the article. The Jomon Culture is in the area - across a narrow straight on the islands that today comprise the nation of Japan. Jomon dates back to approximately 14,000 BCE, verified by updated carbon-14 readings. Those "Russians" who created the earliest known pottery (to date) along the Amur River could just as easily have been Jomon Culture people. Thing is, we don't know, and never will know, unless we find flash-frozen bodies or well-preserved human remains and can do extensive DNA analysis! However, I doubt we are talking about blonde-haired blue-eyed Russians, the only kind of Russian the Kremlin likes to showcase.More intriguing to me is the question of whether these ancient Amur/Jomon people are related to the people who crossed over into the Americas sometime before? It seems to me that most people have an image in mind that the people who settled the Americas were primative savages who crossed over the Bering Strait during the last interglacial period while they were following the last of the giant game. This ignores the reality of the fact that, to date, we haven't found any older evidence of pottery-making anywhere on earth - not in Egypt, not in Mesopotamia, not anywhere in the Fertile Crescent, not in Southeastern Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania), not in the Anatolian Peninsula. We know that people were in South America 13,000 years ago, and in eastern United States even earlier than that!
So, perhaps all the concentration on the Middle East, etc. looking for the origins of civilization is mistaken, and we need to look along the far Pacific coastline of Europe and Asia.
Oh Those Showgirls! Kramnik! Anand!
We last left Candi gracefully passed out on the bear skin rug in front of the fireplace in the Library of the cushy Villa the Girls rented in Bonn during their assignment for Goddesschess:
A little while later -
Bambi: Candi! Oh, Thank Goddess! You scared the life out of me, collapsing like that! You've never ever fainted before! Don't you ever do that to me again!
Candi: Ooooh, ooooh, I feel so strange, Bambi. I think I need something to drink.
Bambi: Here's some Boobie Beer -
Candi: No, Chivas Regal. Please. With a cherry.
Bambi: Are you kidding me? Where do you expect me to come up with some Chivas Regal in the middle of Bonn?
Candi: Suitcase - secret compartment.
Bambi: Oh - okay, hold on --
Candi: Don't forget the jar of cherries...
-- a few minutes later Bambi emerges from the Candi's bedroom with a velvet-covered bottle in one hand and a jar of marischino cherries in the other --
Bambi: Okay, here we are. Over ice? Soda?
Candi: Neat, please. I feel just like Patricia Neal!
Bambi: Now you're being historical.
Candi: Don't you mean hysterical? I feel a bit screamy, actually, and I think I'm seeing pink elephants, too.
Bambi: No, I said historical and I meant historical. Patricia Neal, indeed. I've seen that movie too, you know. It's one of my favorites! Now, what was this fainting all about. Candi - tell me true - are your expecting an interesting event?
Candi: No, I've been very regular this trip, but thank you for asking. I think it's the grapefruit --
Bambi: That wasn't what I was asking about - oh, never mind. What made you faint?
Candi: It was That Woman!
Bambi: What woman?
Candi: Bambi - are you blind? That Woman! Olga Villiers! The one who interviewed Kasparov for that story in The International Chessoid's December, 2000 End of the Millennium Mega-Edition! The one where he kept saying "Bambi...Bambi..." Oh, it was horrid!
Bambi: Please! Get control of yourself, Candi! Olga Villiers? Are you certain? Where did you see her?
Candi: Oh honestly, Bambi, you are blind! She's right there on your laptop, those photographs from Chessbase. She married Vlady on December 31, 2006!
Bambi: WHAT?
Candi: It's true! Did you never meet her at TIC headquarters?
Bambi: No - no, I never did. That horrid Riktor Frogius fired us shortly after the 2000 Brain Games Championship, and I haven't been back to TIC since. Ohmygoddess, are you sure it's her?
Candi: Sure I'm sure. I forget names all the time, but I never forget a face. That's her!
Bambi: Oh, oh - I've got to think about this for a minute - my head hurts! Goddess!
Candi: Oh, Bambi! I believe you are discombobulated! Here, sit down, have some of my Chivas Regal with a cherry on top.
Bambi: Thank you, Candi. Ohmygoddess! Well, you said something strange was going on, and it certainly is! Only think - Olga Villiers is married to Vlady; Vlady beat, no, he not only beat, he humiliated and destroyed Kaspy, he crushed him, in the London match; Olga Villiers does that embarrassing interview with Kaspy and Mig. Now here is Vlady eight years later married to That Woman! Coincidence?
Candi: Are you asking me or telling me?
Bambi: That was a rhetorical - oh, never mind. Candi, I smell a rat!
Candi: Or a skanky beaver...
Bambi: Ohmygoddess! I feel so used! The Hex!
Candi: Oh yes, you were going to tell me all about that. What was The Hex?
Bambi: Candi - use your brain! It was us! We were The Hex!
Candi: Ooooh - er, okay.
Bambi: That dirty rotten filthy Communist Nazi Frogius - oh, I could just kill him! I'll strangle him with my thighs - I'll strangle him with one thigh tied behind my back!
Candi: Bambi, please! Control yourself. Underage people read the columns at Goddesschess, you know!
Bambi: Well, they aren't supposed to! I can't control the Entire Universe, Candi. If underage people are reading our columns at Goddesschess, they'll just have to suck it up and get over it!
Candi: Never apologize, never explain.
Bambi: Oh, you are so right, Candi! I smell Frogius all over this Operation, his filthy fingerprints are everywhere! Ha!
Candi: Ha! Okay, how do we get him?
Bambi: Oh Candi, you are my very best friend in the entire world, but I wouldn't ask you to undertake this desperately dangerous mission with me. You could get hurt.
Candi: Oh! Er, well, okay. I'm all for fun, but not much for danger -
Bambi: Candi! I was only kidding, of course!
Candi: Oh! Er, well, of course! A horse is a horse, of course, of course, unless of course, the horse is hoarse, la la la la, la la la La, la la La LAAAAAHHHHH...
Bambi: Candi! Oh, you are sooooo brilliant! That is exactly the answer -
Candi: Oh! Er, well, of course! A Knight Move?
Bambi: Precisely!
Candi: Oooooh, I can hardly wait. I just love Knights and Their Moves! But Bambi, won't you please explain to me just how we were The Hex?
Bambi: Not now, Candi. We've got lots of work to do -
A little while later -
Bambi: Candi! Oh, Thank Goddess! You scared the life out of me, collapsing like that! You've never ever fainted before! Don't you ever do that to me again!
Candi: Ooooh, ooooh, I feel so strange, Bambi. I think I need something to drink.
Bambi: Here's some Boobie Beer -
Candi: No, Chivas Regal. Please. With a cherry.
Bambi: Are you kidding me? Where do you expect me to come up with some Chivas Regal in the middle of Bonn?
Candi: Suitcase - secret compartment.
Bambi: Oh - okay, hold on --
Candi: Don't forget the jar of cherries...
-- a few minutes later Bambi emerges from the Candi's bedroom with a velvet-covered bottle in one hand and a jar of marischino cherries in the other --
Bambi: Okay, here we are. Over ice? Soda?
Candi: Neat, please. I feel just like Patricia Neal!
Bambi: Now you're being historical.
Candi: Don't you mean hysterical? I feel a bit screamy, actually, and I think I'm seeing pink elephants, too.
Bambi: No, I said historical and I meant historical. Patricia Neal, indeed. I've seen that movie too, you know. It's one of my favorites! Now, what was this fainting all about. Candi - tell me true - are your expecting an interesting event?
Candi: No, I've been very regular this trip, but thank you for asking. I think it's the grapefruit --
Bambi: That wasn't what I was asking about - oh, never mind. What made you faint?
Candi: It was That Woman!
Bambi: What woman?
Candi: Bambi - are you blind? That Woman! Olga Villiers! The one who interviewed Kasparov for that story in The International Chessoid's December, 2000 End of the Millennium Mega-Edition! The one where he kept saying "Bambi...Bambi..." Oh, it was horrid!
Bambi: Please! Get control of yourself, Candi! Olga Villiers? Are you certain? Where did you see her?
Candi: Oh honestly, Bambi, you are blind! She's right there on your laptop, those photographs from Chessbase. She married Vlady on December 31, 2006!
Bambi: WHAT?
Candi: It's true! Did you never meet her at TIC headquarters?
Bambi: No - no, I never did. That horrid Riktor Frogius fired us shortly after the 2000 Brain Games Championship, and I haven't been back to TIC since. Ohmygoddess, are you sure it's her?
Candi: Sure I'm sure. I forget names all the time, but I never forget a face. That's her!
Bambi: Oh, oh - I've got to think about this for a minute - my head hurts! Goddess!
Candi: Oh, Bambi! I believe you are discombobulated! Here, sit down, have some of my Chivas Regal with a cherry on top.
Bambi: Thank you, Candi. Ohmygoddess! Well, you said something strange was going on, and it certainly is! Only think - Olga Villiers is married to Vlady; Vlady beat, no, he not only beat, he humiliated and destroyed Kaspy, he crushed him, in the London match; Olga Villiers does that embarrassing interview with Kaspy and Mig. Now here is Vlady eight years later married to That Woman! Coincidence?
Candi: Are you asking me or telling me?
Bambi: That was a rhetorical - oh, never mind. Candi, I smell a rat!
Candi: Or a skanky beaver...
Bambi: Ohmygoddess! I feel so used! The Hex!
Candi: Oh yes, you were going to tell me all about that. What was The Hex?
Bambi: Candi - use your brain! It was us! We were The Hex!
Candi: Ooooh - er, okay.
Bambi: That dirty rotten filthy Communist Nazi Frogius - oh, I could just kill him! I'll strangle him with my thighs - I'll strangle him with one thigh tied behind my back!
Candi: Bambi, please! Control yourself. Underage people read the columns at Goddesschess, you know!
Bambi: Well, they aren't supposed to! I can't control the Entire Universe, Candi. If underage people are reading our columns at Goddesschess, they'll just have to suck it up and get over it!
Candi: Never apologize, never explain.
Bambi: Oh, you are so right, Candi! I smell Frogius all over this Operation, his filthy fingerprints are everywhere! Ha!
Candi: Ha! Okay, how do we get him?
Bambi: Oh Candi, you are my very best friend in the entire world, but I wouldn't ask you to undertake this desperately dangerous mission with me. You could get hurt.
Candi: Oh! Er, well, okay. I'm all for fun, but not much for danger -
Bambi: Candi! I was only kidding, of course!
Candi: Oh! Er, well, of course! A horse is a horse, of course, of course, unless of course, the horse is hoarse, la la la la, la la la La, la la La LAAAAAHHHHH...
Bambi: Candi! Oh, you are sooooo brilliant! That is exactly the answer -
Candi: Oh! Er, well, of course! A Knight Move?
Bambi: Precisely!
Candi: Oooooh, I can hardly wait. I just love Knights and Their Moves! But Bambi, won't you please explain to me just how we were The Hex?
Bambi: Not now, Candi. We've got lots of work to do -
**********************************
Oh oh! What are those Showgirls plotting? Will it have an impact on Vlady's - er, GM Vladimir Kramnik's, play during the second half of the Match? Will a Knight Move come into play (hint hint)? And just what was The Hex, exactly? Stay Tuned for MORE LAS VEGAS SHOWGIRLS!
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Golden "Spindle-Shaped" Objects Discovered in Bulgarian Tomb
I'll post the article first and comment later:Amazing Archaeological Discovery in the South of Sakar Mountain
Updated on: 20.10.2008, 18:27
Published on: 20.10.2008, 12:17
Author: Diana Stoykova
A sensational golden discovery was made in the South of Sakar Mountain by a team of archaeologists under the governance of Ph.D. Borislav Borislavov from Sofia University "Climent Ohridski" and Nadezhda Ivanova - vice-chief (National Institute Of Archaeology And Museum - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
The excavations were sponsored by the Ministry of Culture through the National History Museum, the sum amounting of 22 000 leva, announced NHM director Bozhidar Dimitrov.
The expedition explored a mound in the surroundings of Izvorovo village, Harmanli Municipality.
The mound is 31 m in diameter, 2, 9 m in height. Two stages of heaping were determined.
The first dates back to the second half of the 2nd millennium B.C. (middle bronze age) and the second - to the 2nd century A.C. (Romanian period)
During the Bronze Age a rubble and stamped clay platform was shaped, over which a funeral device was built. It is in fact a mould of quartz with a clay foundation, 8 m in diameter and 2 m in height.
At its foundation a crematory funeral was performed. The remains were put in a richly decorated clay pot and dispersed around the stones.
At the same level treasures which of extreme importance were found having in mind the period - a golden jewel, consisting of 320 beads: small spherical (2 mm) taking turns with big barley-shaped beads (7 mm), 1, 5 m all, two golden spindle-shaped objects, with a solar decoration, a golden and a silver tile, tied together with a sliver knit, a silver ring and a bronze knife with a stone hone.
Golden finds of the same kind have been found only on Crete - these finds, however, outnumber them almost 15 times.
Ph.D. Borislavov suspects that it is the mould of a man of utmost importance - a ruler or a high priest.
The number and the master's workmanship can be explained by the fact that this region was a major trading road, connecting Asia Minor,the Balkans and Central Europe.
These treasures, however, can be the work of a local culture. It is know that Sakar mountain is the home of a mysterious stone culture -the dolmens.
The mound was preserved as a cult place, when during the 2nd century A.C. a village was built around it.
It is surrounded by a circle of big stone blocks, 22 m in diameter, and heaped by red soil and three levels of stones, which helped its perseverance through the centuries.
This discovery is unique not only for Bulgaria and it will shed light on long kept secrets about far forgotten ages.
Tomorrow- Tuesday at a press-conference in NHM minister Danailov will personally present the finds to the public.
After that they will be exhibited in hall 1 of the National History Museum.
***********************************
Okay, first of all, the article (and archaeologists) totally slighted the discovery of TWO SPINDLE-LIKE OBJECTS in this tomb. Now darlings, everyone knows that spindles do not appear in men's tombs; they only appear in women's tombs because they were used - say it all together now - in spinning wool and flax for the weaving of cloth! Duh! Compare the previous posted article about the portion of a stone spindle discovered in Iceland.
Second, it is premature, without more to go on, to just assume that the mound was the burial spot of a MAN of "utmost importance" - a ruler or a priest. Why not the tome of a female ruler - or a priestess? The TWO GOLDEN SPINDLE-LIKE OBJECTS would seem to point more toward a female burial than a male burial. In the absence of remains that could be analyzed anatomically - only ashes from a cremation - it is totally presumptive, and unfortunately typical - to assume that the burial was male. Can the ashes be analyzed for male or female DNA?
Third, I don't know about you, darlings, but the style of that gold bead necklace found in the mound certainly reminds me of necklaces worn by women and not those worn by men, even in the bad old days! In fact, it has a very modern ambiance to it, doesn't it!
I think the archaeologist dudes made a big mistake...
Ancient Inscribed Spindle Found in Iceland
From IcelandReview.com
20/10/2008 11:42
Ancient Spindle with Runes Discovered in Reykjavík
A fracture of a spindle with a runic inscription was discovered in an archeological excavation near the Althingi parliament building in Reykjavík last week. It is believed to date back to the 11th century and may be the oldest runic inscription in Iceland.
Archeologist Vala Gardarsdóttir, who is in control of the excavation, told Fréttabladid that the discovery is of great significance. “What makes it so special is that it is the only runic inscription from that time that has been found in Iceland.”
“This find could tell us a lot about the development of runes in Iceland because it can prove to be an important piece of the puzzle. One could even say that we’ve discovered the missing link,” Gardarsdóttir said.
Thórgunnur Snaedal, a professor with expertise in runes, has examined the spindle and decoded the inscription. “The female name Thórunn is probably inscribed to the fraction and the words ‘owns me’.”
The spindle is made from green sandstone which indicates that it was made from a stone from Esja, the mountain which towers over Reykjavík.
Relics of the oldest inhabitation in Reykjavík have been discovered near the Althingi building, the most important of which is the settlement lodge on Adalstraeti 16.
Gardarsdóttir said various objects have been discovered which indicate that during the settlement era this was an industrial area and such operations were probably undertaken inside or next to the lodge.
20/10/2008 11:42
Ancient Spindle with Runes Discovered in Reykjavík
A fracture of a spindle with a runic inscription was discovered in an archeological excavation near the Althingi parliament building in Reykjavík last week. It is believed to date back to the 11th century and may be the oldest runic inscription in Iceland.
Archeologist Vala Gardarsdóttir, who is in control of the excavation, told Fréttabladid that the discovery is of great significance. “What makes it so special is that it is the only runic inscription from that time that has been found in Iceland.”
“This find could tell us a lot about the development of runes in Iceland because it can prove to be an important piece of the puzzle. One could even say that we’ve discovered the missing link,” Gardarsdóttir said.
Thórgunnur Snaedal, a professor with expertise in runes, has examined the spindle and decoded the inscription. “The female name Thórunn is probably inscribed to the fraction and the words ‘owns me’.”
The spindle is made from green sandstone which indicates that it was made from a stone from Esja, the mountain which towers over Reykjavík.
Relics of the oldest inhabitation in Reykjavík have been discovered near the Althingi building, the most important of which is the settlement lodge on Adalstraeti 16.
Gardarsdóttir said various objects have been discovered which indicate that during the settlement era this was an industrial area and such operations were probably undertaken inside or next to the lodge.
Oh, Those Showgirls! Kramnik! Anand!
Hola!
Things have been developing so quickly in the Kramnik/Anand WCC match in Bonn that the Showgirls can't keep up! But trust me - they's been writing reams of materials and emailing/texting/faxing it to me 24-7. Oy!
Rather than waiting until the weekend to assemble all of their reports into one harmonious (or not) whole, I've decided to publish some of their reports as they come in.
You can read the Girls' coverage of the first 4 games, published at Goddesschess late Sunday, October 19th - it will give you some much-needed background too on the Girls' rather complicated relationship with Vladimir Kramnik and some of what really happened behind the scenes at the 2000 Brain Games World Chess Championship match in London between Kasparov/Kramnik.
Tonight I'm publishing the Girls' bulletins from yesterday and today, as hot off the presses as I can get them up and running here, given the time differential and my work schedule (out the door at 7:30 a.m., in the door at 6:30 p.m.)
Even the Girls cannot believe what has been going on - it's almost like a novel what's been happening in Bonn! But it's all true! Kramnik lost again today, once again falling victim in Game 6 to Anand's (1) d4!!!!! I couldn't even make this stuff up if I tried - and neither could the Girls!
Anand now leads at the half-way mark 4.5/1.5. Kramnik has only 6 games to frame and forge a comeback -- if he can. Can he? Bambi doesn't seem to think so. Candi seems to think the Girls can concoct some sort of Plan to help Vlady, er, Kramnik, out of his funk.
Here, without further ado, are the Girls' reports from Monday October 20 and today, October 21:
Monday, October 20, 2008, Paris:
Bambi: Okay, this should do it - Candi, tell me what you think of this report to Jan:
Dear Jan:
White (1) d4 has struck again - this time with disastrous results for Vlady! Unbelievably, in Game 5, Kramnik behind the white pieces played the move Vishy had played in Games 2 and 4! Well, he should have known - copycats always get short shrift! What was he thinking???
While the game involved some intriguing complications (oooh, we just love complications), it was clear after move 29.Nxd4?? that Vlady was lost - and lose he did, to go down 2 full points to Vishy by move 35! Everyone and his uncle is now saying what Vlady should have done was play 29.Ne3 and not swallowed the poison pawn!
It is obvious that this former World Champion is not himself - will he be able to recover? The match is only 12 games and in order to avoid a brutal play-off Vlady must win the match outright. So far, he hasn't proven that he can do anything behind the black pieces, and he only has white 3 mores times!
What will Vlady do for a come-back tomorrow? More importantly, will Vishy once again uncork (1) d4?
Bambi and Candi, Live from Bonn!
Candi: Bambi, that's a great report, but it sounds so professional - not quite like us. Do you think Jan will suspect something?
Bambi: Oh, I hope not! She can't possibly be reading every single word on the internet about this match - there are millions and millions of them. You know she doesn't care much for men's chess, but then, she is a Goddess and she always seem to know things in a most uncanny way...
Candi: Writing from others' internet reports like Polgar and Mig isn't quite the same as being in Bonn live. Poor Vlady! You know, I feel guilty. I think we should go back to Bonn and actually cover the match live, like we promised we would. Maybe we could do something to help Vlady?
Bambi: Hmmmm, I've been feeling a bit guilty too. We can always come back to Paris for shopping once Vlady loses - I'm sure it won't take all 12 games!
Candi: Bambi! You are not - you are not rooting for Vlady to lose, are you?
Bambi: Of course not! I don't wish any ill-will on Vlady.
Candi: Bambi - I just have the eeriest feeling that something spooky is going on!
Bambi: Hold that thought - we'll talk about it when we get back to Bonn...
Tuesday, October 21, 2008, Bonn:
Candi: Bambi, oh Bambi, this is a DIS-ASTER!
Bambi: Calm down, Candi. Breathe, in ---- out ---- in ---- out ----. That's it. Now sit down, please. Have some Boobie Bottles Tea - here.
Candi: Oh, thank you! I feel much better. I think I was cyberventilating! But what are we going to do about this?
Bambi: Candi, please, there isn't anything we can do! We can't very well play the games for Vlady, after all, at least - not without cheating. And I would never ever do that in a millions years. And neither would you.
Candi: Well, all right, if you say so. But honestly - I told you yesterday - there's something really spooky going on here, and this proves it! Who could possibly have imagined Vishy playing (1) d4 yet again today in Game 6! Unbelievable! I've got chills running up and down my spine just thinking about it. Vlady is doomed, I tell you, doomed! He's hexed - it's come back to haunt him hasn't it - that hex he put on Kaspy back in London. Ohmygoddess! What are we going to do?
Bambi: Candi, read my lips - there-is-nothing-we-can-do.
Candi: I refuse to believe that. We always come up with a plan, don't we? Remember that time we were cornered in the Casbah in Algiers? And remember that time the pilot had a heart attack on our Cesna and yet we managed to land the plane without a scratch? And remember that time you painted the Black Putin's black labrador white and we had to improvise our escape at the last second because you'd gained so much weight you couldn't get your leg over the wall of the dacha?
Bambi: Candi! Don't tell our readers I was too heavy to climb over a brick wall! What will they think? Anyway, I've lost all of that weight and more. Imagine, Jan has started a weight loss plan too, without any prompting from us, and I never thought she'd do that! I think she's planning something spectacular for 2009 and will unveil her new svelt and sexy self in Las Vegas!
Candi: Hmmmm, maybe we can find a spot for her in the show -- oh, there you go, dissecting me again. I'm on to your tricks, though, Bambi. You can't fool me again! I am intending.
Bambi: Distracting, Bambi, not dissecting, and it's attending, not intending. Yes, you are too sharp for me.
Candi: My studying a ten-new-words list every day has vastly improved my vocalibation. Occasionally wearing my glasses helps, too. So - no more dissections! I think we can come up with A Plan.
Bambi: Hmmmm, Candi - take a look at this blog entry at Mig's:
Bartleby October 21, 2008 12:55 PM Reply
That's not him.Instead of playing the slow, quiet position slowly and patiently, he went for dubious activity.Does anyone know if he has fallen in love or something?
Candi: Bambi! Do you think it's true - Vlady is in Love!?
Bambi: Candi! Control yourself! He is a married man!
Candi: WHAT? Oh no he isn't. I KNOW he isn't!
Bambi: What are you talking about? For goddess sake, he's been married since December 31, 2006. Chessbase did a big spread on the wedding, photographs and everything. They even got a piece of the wedding cake. Here - look, I've got the website on the laptop -
************************************Oh my! What drama! Candi fainting - she never faints (trust me, I know, wink wink). What could possibly cause her to faint? Why was she sinking into the "abyss of despair"??? Why was she so certain that Kramnik was not married? Okay - enough telegraphing the story line (har!) No - wait! There's a big surprise coming - Jan, don't give everything away!
And at long last, the real truth about the Bambi/Candi/Kaspy/Vlady quadrangle will be revealed! As well as lots of other interesting stuff but all subsidiary to Sex! Shopping! Sex! Scandal! Sex! Sleeping! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Things have been developing so quickly in the Kramnik/Anand WCC match in Bonn that the Showgirls can't keep up! But trust me - they's been writing reams of materials and emailing/texting/faxing it to me 24-7. Oy!
Rather than waiting until the weekend to assemble all of their reports into one harmonious (or not) whole, I've decided to publish some of their reports as they come in.
You can read the Girls' coverage of the first 4 games, published at Goddesschess late Sunday, October 19th - it will give you some much-needed background too on the Girls' rather complicated relationship with Vladimir Kramnik and some of what really happened behind the scenes at the 2000 Brain Games World Chess Championship match in London between Kasparov/Kramnik.
Tonight I'm publishing the Girls' bulletins from yesterday and today, as hot off the presses as I can get them up and running here, given the time differential and my work schedule (out the door at 7:30 a.m., in the door at 6:30 p.m.)
Even the Girls cannot believe what has been going on - it's almost like a novel what's been happening in Bonn! But it's all true! Kramnik lost again today, once again falling victim in Game 6 to Anand's (1) d4!!!!! I couldn't even make this stuff up if I tried - and neither could the Girls!
Anand now leads at the half-way mark 4.5/1.5. Kramnik has only 6 games to frame and forge a comeback -- if he can. Can he? Bambi doesn't seem to think so. Candi seems to think the Girls can concoct some sort of Plan to help Vlady, er, Kramnik, out of his funk.
Here, without further ado, are the Girls' reports from Monday October 20 and today, October 21:
Monday, October 20, 2008, Paris:
Bambi: Okay, this should do it - Candi, tell me what you think of this report to Jan:
Dear Jan:
White (1) d4 has struck again - this time with disastrous results for Vlady! Unbelievably, in Game 5, Kramnik behind the white pieces played the move Vishy had played in Games 2 and 4! Well, he should have known - copycats always get short shrift! What was he thinking???
While the game involved some intriguing complications (oooh, we just love complications), it was clear after move 29.Nxd4?? that Vlady was lost - and lose he did, to go down 2 full points to Vishy by move 35! Everyone and his uncle is now saying what Vlady should have done was play 29.Ne3 and not swallowed the poison pawn!
It is obvious that this former World Champion is not himself - will he be able to recover? The match is only 12 games and in order to avoid a brutal play-off Vlady must win the match outright. So far, he hasn't proven that he can do anything behind the black pieces, and he only has white 3 mores times!
What will Vlady do for a come-back tomorrow? More importantly, will Vishy once again uncork (1) d4?
Bambi and Candi, Live from Bonn!
Candi: Bambi, that's a great report, but it sounds so professional - not quite like us. Do you think Jan will suspect something?
Bambi: Oh, I hope not! She can't possibly be reading every single word on the internet about this match - there are millions and millions of them. You know she doesn't care much for men's chess, but then, she is a Goddess and she always seem to know things in a most uncanny way...
Candi: Writing from others' internet reports like Polgar and Mig isn't quite the same as being in Bonn live. Poor Vlady! You know, I feel guilty. I think we should go back to Bonn and actually cover the match live, like we promised we would. Maybe we could do something to help Vlady?
Bambi: Hmmmm, I've been feeling a bit guilty too. We can always come back to Paris for shopping once Vlady loses - I'm sure it won't take all 12 games!
Candi: Bambi! You are not - you are not rooting for Vlady to lose, are you?
Bambi: Of course not! I don't wish any ill-will on Vlady.
Candi: Bambi - I just have the eeriest feeling that something spooky is going on!
Bambi: Hold that thought - we'll talk about it when we get back to Bonn...
Tuesday, October 21, 2008, Bonn:
Candi: Bambi, oh Bambi, this is a DIS-ASTER!
Bambi: Calm down, Candi. Breathe, in ---- out ---- in ---- out ----. That's it. Now sit down, please. Have some Boobie Bottles Tea - here.
Candi: Oh, thank you! I feel much better. I think I was cyberventilating! But what are we going to do about this?
Bambi: Candi, please, there isn't anything we can do! We can't very well play the games for Vlady, after all, at least - not without cheating. And I would never ever do that in a millions years. And neither would you.
Candi: Well, all right, if you say so. But honestly - I told you yesterday - there's something really spooky going on here, and this proves it! Who could possibly have imagined Vishy playing (1) d4 yet again today in Game 6! Unbelievable! I've got chills running up and down my spine just thinking about it. Vlady is doomed, I tell you, doomed! He's hexed - it's come back to haunt him hasn't it - that hex he put on Kaspy back in London. Ohmygoddess! What are we going to do?
Bambi: Candi, read my lips - there-is-nothing-we-can-do.
Candi: I refuse to believe that. We always come up with a plan, don't we? Remember that time we were cornered in the Casbah in Algiers? And remember that time the pilot had a heart attack on our Cesna and yet we managed to land the plane without a scratch? And remember that time you painted the Black Putin's black labrador white and we had to improvise our escape at the last second because you'd gained so much weight you couldn't get your leg over the wall of the dacha?
Bambi: Candi! Don't tell our readers I was too heavy to climb over a brick wall! What will they think? Anyway, I've lost all of that weight and more. Imagine, Jan has started a weight loss plan too, without any prompting from us, and I never thought she'd do that! I think she's planning something spectacular for 2009 and will unveil her new svelt and sexy self in Las Vegas!
Candi: Hmmmm, maybe we can find a spot for her in the show -- oh, there you go, dissecting me again. I'm on to your tricks, though, Bambi. You can't fool me again! I am intending.
Bambi: Distracting, Bambi, not dissecting, and it's attending, not intending. Yes, you are too sharp for me.
Candi: My studying a ten-new-words list every day has vastly improved my vocalibation. Occasionally wearing my glasses helps, too. So - no more dissections! I think we can come up with A Plan.
Bambi: Hmmmm, Candi - take a look at this blog entry at Mig's:
Bartleby October 21, 2008 12:55 PM Reply
That's not him.Instead of playing the slow, quiet position slowly and patiently, he went for dubious activity.Does anyone know if he has fallen in love or something?
Candi: Bambi! Do you think it's true - Vlady is in Love!?
Bambi: Candi! Control yourself! He is a married man!
Candi: WHAT? Oh no he isn't. I KNOW he isn't!
Bambi: What are you talking about? For goddess sake, he's been married since December 31, 2006. Chessbase did a big spread on the wedding, photographs and everything. They even got a piece of the wedding cake. Here - look, I've got the website on the laptop -
Candi: Oh, I feel faint, I'm sinking, sinking into the dark swirling mist of unconsciousness, sinking into the abyss of despair - death cannot be far behind -
-- whereupon Candi gracefully sinks to the bear skin rug in front of the fireplace in the library where the Girls were sitting in their rented villa on the Rhine River, her eyelids fluttering and then going still.
-- whereupon Candi gracefully sinks to the bear skin rug in front of the fireplace in the library where the Girls were sitting in their rented villa on the Rhine River, her eyelids fluttering and then going still.
************************************
And at long last, the real truth about the Bambi/Candi/Kaspy/Vlady quadrangle will be revealed! As well as lots of other interesting stuff but all subsidiary to Sex! Shopping! Sex! Scandal! Sex! Sleeping! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Monday, October 20, 2008
Quick (Cheaters') Chicken Noodle Soup
I love chicken noodle soup, I just don't like the time it takes to cook up a real batch from scratch. So, here's my recipe for cheater's CN soup:
1 Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup "nugget"
1 Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup packet of flavorings
Feed Mrs. Grass' thin and skimpy "noodles" to the birds
Follow Mrs. Grass' package recipe for making soup but dump everything in before bringing to a boil: 4 cups water, "nugget" (shaped like an egg) and packet of flavorings
Add one cup frozen peas
Meanwhile: if you like carrots, cut up half a pound in coin size, par-boil, then add to "soup" mix
Keep fire low. When simmer level is reached, add four large hands-full of large-size egg noodles
Add one chicken flavor boullion cube and cover pot
Simmer for 20 minutes or so, until noodles are tender. Taste broth and add salt and pepper as needed.
This recipe does not include chicken. If you want a deluxe version, add some shredded chicken from a left-over broast picked up at the supermarket.
Delish!
1 Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup "nugget"
1 Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup packet of flavorings
Feed Mrs. Grass' thin and skimpy "noodles" to the birds
Follow Mrs. Grass' package recipe for making soup but dump everything in before bringing to a boil: 4 cups water, "nugget" (shaped like an egg) and packet of flavorings
Add one cup frozen peas
Meanwhile: if you like carrots, cut up half a pound in coin size, par-boil, then add to "soup" mix
Keep fire low. When simmer level is reached, add four large hands-full of large-size egg noodles
Add one chicken flavor boullion cube and cover pot
Simmer for 20 minutes or so, until noodles are tender. Taste broth and add salt and pepper as needed.
This recipe does not include chicken. If you want a deluxe version, add some shredded chicken from a left-over broast picked up at the supermarket.
Delish!
Live - From Bonn - It's Bambi and Candi!
Oh, those fabulous Las Vegas Showgirls, Candi Kane and Bambi Darlin! They put their own particular spin on covering big chess events. Even now they're enroute from shopping in Paris (playing hooky, tsk tsk) back to Bonn to continue their two-of-a-kind coverage of the World Chess Championship Match. Read their report on the first four games!
THE CURSE OF (1) d4 FOR KRAMNIK????
Stay tuned for their further unique take on events and more scandalous revelations!!! Oy! If the Showgirls are there, can scandal be far behind?
THE CURSE OF (1) d4 FOR KRAMNIK????
Stay tuned for their further unique take on events and more scandalous revelations!!! Oy! If the Showgirls are there, can scandal be far behind?
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Chess News
Darlings! Please keep your eye on Goddesschess tonight; even as I type this, delion is busy working on the weekly update to Random Round-up and, in addition, those fabulous Las Vegas Showgirls, Candi Kane and Bambi Darlin, have emailed Goddesschess an exclusive review of the first four games of the World Chess Championship Match between Anand and Kramnik! Their hot off the press review will also be up and running sometime tonight!
China Trying to Calm the Restive Provinces
In addition to clamping down - hard - on the Muslims within the "autonomous regions", China has enacted "land reform." Yeah - right. Let's see how far this reform is implemented in the face of totally corrupt local bureaucracies that the central government continues to do absolutely nothing about:
China Enacts Major Land-Use Reform
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 19, 2008
BEIJING — After days of uncertainty, the governing Communist Party on Sunday announced a rural reform policy that for the first time would allow farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that advocates say would raise lagging incomes in the Chinese countryside.
The new policy, announced by Chinese state media, is a major economic reform and is also rich in historical resonance, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the land reforms enacted by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, which were considered the first critical steps in the policies that have fueled China’s rapid economic growth.
For President Hu Jintao, whose tenure has disappointed some reformers, the new policy seems intended to position him as a worthy heir to Deng.
“The new measures adopted are seen by economists as a major breakthrough in land reforms initiated by late leader Deng Xiaoping 30 years ago,” reported Xinhua, the country’s official news agency.
Under the current system, farmers are assigned small plots of land. Under the new policy, the government will establish markets where farmers can “subcontract, lease, exchange or swap” land-use rights or join cooperatives. Reform advocates say allowing leasing or transfer would enable the creation of larger, more efficient farms that could increase output.
The fate of the reform program has been uncertain for the past week. Analysts had expected an announcement last Sunday after the conclusion of an important annual Communist Party planning session. But the communiqué released after the meeting made no mention of land reform, fueling speculation that opponents may have derailed the plan.
Critics had warned that weakening the existing system of collective village ownership could deprive peasants of the security of having a piece of land and possibly lead to millions of landless farmers. [Well, duh! Of course it will, darlings!] But the existing system has become rife with corruption, as local officials and developers have illegally seized farmland for urban expansion while paying minimal compensation to farmers.
Signs that the reforms had been approved began to appear during the week. In Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern Sichuan Province, a government land market opened last Monday. On Thursday, a leading Communist Party magazine published an article by one of the country’s most senior officials on rural issues in which he said that the party would create a market for transferring land-use rights in the countryside.
Deng’s reforms broke up the collective use, if not ownership, of land and created a household registration system that assigned land to individual families to use as they saw fit. Those reforms enabled farm incomes to rise sharply during the early 1980s, even as city dwellers suffered.
But the later creation of an urban real estate market saw an explosion of wealth in the cities that contributed to a sharp income divide between increasingly affluent city dwellers and impoverished peasants. In recent years, rural protests have become increasingly common as disgruntled farmers have demonstrated against illegal land grabs or corrupt local officials. At the same time, tens of millions of farmers have flocked to cities in search of work, leaving plots of land to be tended by their elderly parents.
Reducing the rural-urban income gap has been a major priority for Mr. Hu, but the gap has continued to widen in recent years, as China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world. On Sunday, Xinhua also announced the party’s intention to establish a modern rural financial system to extend more credit and investment into the countryside. Chinese banking regulators have been ordered to establish 40 more rural banking institutions by year’s end.
Increasing incomes in the countryside is a major part of the government’s effort to raise China’s domestic consumption at a time when the overall economy is slowing. More than 700 million people are still designated as rural inhabitants, yet their spending is minimal. [Well, duh again! That's because they don't have the money to spend, nim-nuts!] Economists say that jump-starting the rural economy is one way to offset the possibility of a recession, as exports are expected to slow because of the global financial crisis. [Yeah, right. Good luck with that.]
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
China Enacts Major Land-Use Reform
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 19, 2008
BEIJING — After days of uncertainty, the governing Communist Party on Sunday announced a rural reform policy that for the first time would allow farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that advocates say would raise lagging incomes in the Chinese countryside.
The new policy, announced by Chinese state media, is a major economic reform and is also rich in historical resonance, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the land reforms enacted by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, which were considered the first critical steps in the policies that have fueled China’s rapid economic growth.
For President Hu Jintao, whose tenure has disappointed some reformers, the new policy seems intended to position him as a worthy heir to Deng.
“The new measures adopted are seen by economists as a major breakthrough in land reforms initiated by late leader Deng Xiaoping 30 years ago,” reported Xinhua, the country’s official news agency.
Under the current system, farmers are assigned small plots of land. Under the new policy, the government will establish markets where farmers can “subcontract, lease, exchange or swap” land-use rights or join cooperatives. Reform advocates say allowing leasing or transfer would enable the creation of larger, more efficient farms that could increase output.
The fate of the reform program has been uncertain for the past week. Analysts had expected an announcement last Sunday after the conclusion of an important annual Communist Party planning session. But the communiqué released after the meeting made no mention of land reform, fueling speculation that opponents may have derailed the plan.
Critics had warned that weakening the existing system of collective village ownership could deprive peasants of the security of having a piece of land and possibly lead to millions of landless farmers. [Well, duh! Of course it will, darlings!] But the existing system has become rife with corruption, as local officials and developers have illegally seized farmland for urban expansion while paying minimal compensation to farmers.
Signs that the reforms had been approved began to appear during the week. In Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern Sichuan Province, a government land market opened last Monday. On Thursday, a leading Communist Party magazine published an article by one of the country’s most senior officials on rural issues in which he said that the party would create a market for transferring land-use rights in the countryside.
Deng’s reforms broke up the collective use, if not ownership, of land and created a household registration system that assigned land to individual families to use as they saw fit. Those reforms enabled farm incomes to rise sharply during the early 1980s, even as city dwellers suffered.
But the later creation of an urban real estate market saw an explosion of wealth in the cities that contributed to a sharp income divide between increasingly affluent city dwellers and impoverished peasants. In recent years, rural protests have become increasingly common as disgruntled farmers have demonstrated against illegal land grabs or corrupt local officials. At the same time, tens of millions of farmers have flocked to cities in search of work, leaving plots of land to be tended by their elderly parents.
Reducing the rural-urban income gap has been a major priority for Mr. Hu, but the gap has continued to widen in recent years, as China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world. On Sunday, Xinhua also announced the party’s intention to establish a modern rural financial system to extend more credit and investment into the countryside. Chinese banking regulators have been ordered to establish 40 more rural banking institutions by year’s end.
Increasing incomes in the countryside is a major part of the government’s effort to raise China’s domestic consumption at a time when the overall economy is slowing. More than 700 million people are still designated as rural inhabitants, yet their spending is minimal. [Well, duh again! That's because they don't have the money to spend, nim-nuts!] Economists say that jump-starting the rural economy is one way to offset the possibility of a recession, as exports are expected to slow because of the global financial crisis. [Yeah, right. Good luck with that.]
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
Chess Princess: Margaret Hua
Ten-year-old set to compete in world chess tournament
Rachel Lippmann, KWMU
ST. LOUIS, MO (2008-10-15)
On a rainy Tuesday night in the Central West End in the thick of an election season, TV's in 600,000 homes across the St. Louis area are tuned into the second presidential debate.
The debate is on downstairs at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis. But upstairs, the hands of eight players fly between the pieces on the vinyl chess boards in front of them and the switches of their game clocks. It's the Chess Club's weekly blitz tournament, where players play five, five-minute games of chess.
Ten-year-old Margaret Hua sits with her feet tucked under her, paying close attention to her unfolding game. She is the only girl, and one of the youngest players here.
The fifth-grader at Parkway's Pierremont Elementary School started playing chess with her family three years ago. "Me and my family would just play chess for fun, and then during summer, summer school they found a chess class, and then they put me in it, and I won the teacher, and then the, my parents thought I was pretty good, so I started to play chess tournaments," Margaret said.
Those tournaments, and some lessons, have helped Margaret achieve a 1603 ranking from the United States Chess Federation. That makes her the 36th best 10-year-old in the nation, and the 86th best player in Missouri - of all ages.
That ranking also earned her a spot on the 30-person team that will represent the United States at this year's World Youth Chess Championship in Vietnam. "What do you think is going to be the best thing about it?" I asked.
"That I'll be able to visit the beach, and I'll be able to have a good experience playing with other strong players," Margaret replied.
The tournament gives her a chance to compete against the top 10-year-old girls from 70 different countries.
The Chess Club is paying Margaret's way to the tournament. Executive director Tony Rich calls Margaret's invitation to the tournament an honor. And he says it shows just how focused she is on the game.
"Girls under 10, typically they have lower ratings than the average chess population, so the fact that Margaret has a very respectable chess rating indicates just how committed she is to the game and how focused she really is," Rich said.
In her third game at the Tuesday night blitz tournament, Margaret faced off against Joseph Garnier, ranked 38th in the state and the 2005 Missouri Scholastic champion. Garnier gave Margaret chess lessons for about a year. "I would put her in the top three most talented children I've worked with. Now she's so good that I can't even teach her anymore. She might beat me, y'know," he said laughing. "So I have to be humble and admit it, but she's very talented. I know eventually she's going to be beating all of us. It's inevitable."
More than an hour after the blitz tournament was over, Margaret, Joseph, and three other players were still gathered around the chess boards, playing a variety of different games and learning some moves that might come in handy in their next tournaments. "I've got one more for Margaret and then you've got to go home," Joseph told her.
Margaret's parents, Jun and Diane Hua, looked like they'd been read to go home for a while, since it's a 40-minute drive back to Ballwin, where the family lives.
"She's never tired while playing chess," Jun remarked. He hopes his daughter's success at the game gets more girls playing chess in the United States.
"Do you think that with you going in and playing so much chess that maybe more girls will start playing?" I asked. "Umm, maybe because I inspire them, I guess?" Margaret replied tentatively.
She knows for certain though, that she'd like to be a Grand Master - the highest rating [title] possible for a chess player.
© Copyright 2008, KWMU
Rachel Lippmann, KWMU
ST. LOUIS, MO (2008-10-15)
On a rainy Tuesday night in the Central West End in the thick of an election season, TV's in 600,000 homes across the St. Louis area are tuned into the second presidential debate.
The debate is on downstairs at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis. But upstairs, the hands of eight players fly between the pieces on the vinyl chess boards in front of them and the switches of their game clocks. It's the Chess Club's weekly blitz tournament, where players play five, five-minute games of chess.
Ten-year-old Margaret Hua sits with her feet tucked under her, paying close attention to her unfolding game. She is the only girl, and one of the youngest players here.
The fifth-grader at Parkway's Pierremont Elementary School started playing chess with her family three years ago. "Me and my family would just play chess for fun, and then during summer, summer school they found a chess class, and then they put me in it, and I won the teacher, and then the, my parents thought I was pretty good, so I started to play chess tournaments," Margaret said.
Those tournaments, and some lessons, have helped Margaret achieve a 1603 ranking from the United States Chess Federation. That makes her the 36th best 10-year-old in the nation, and the 86th best player in Missouri - of all ages.
That ranking also earned her a spot on the 30-person team that will represent the United States at this year's World Youth Chess Championship in Vietnam. "What do you think is going to be the best thing about it?" I asked.
"That I'll be able to visit the beach, and I'll be able to have a good experience playing with other strong players," Margaret replied.
The tournament gives her a chance to compete against the top 10-year-old girls from 70 different countries.
The Chess Club is paying Margaret's way to the tournament. Executive director Tony Rich calls Margaret's invitation to the tournament an honor. And he says it shows just how focused she is on the game.
"Girls under 10, typically they have lower ratings than the average chess population, so the fact that Margaret has a very respectable chess rating indicates just how committed she is to the game and how focused she really is," Rich said.
In her third game at the Tuesday night blitz tournament, Margaret faced off against Joseph Garnier, ranked 38th in the state and the 2005 Missouri Scholastic champion. Garnier gave Margaret chess lessons for about a year. "I would put her in the top three most talented children I've worked with. Now she's so good that I can't even teach her anymore. She might beat me, y'know," he said laughing. "So I have to be humble and admit it, but she's very talented. I know eventually she's going to be beating all of us. It's inevitable."
More than an hour after the blitz tournament was over, Margaret, Joseph, and three other players were still gathered around the chess boards, playing a variety of different games and learning some moves that might come in handy in their next tournaments. "I've got one more for Margaret and then you've got to go home," Joseph told her.
Margaret's parents, Jun and Diane Hua, looked like they'd been read to go home for a while, since it's a 40-minute drive back to Ballwin, where the family lives.
"She's never tired while playing chess," Jun remarked. He hopes his daughter's success at the game gets more girls playing chess in the United States.
"Do you think that with you going in and playing so much chess that maybe more girls will start playing?" I asked. "Umm, maybe because I inspire them, I guess?" Margaret replied tentatively.
She knows for certain though, that she'd like to be a Grand Master - the highest rating [title] possible for a chess player.
© Copyright 2008, KWMU
Another Murder Over a Chess Game
History keeps on repeating itself. The oldest story about a murder over a chess game I've been able to find is the King Canute story that dates to the late 10th or early 11th century CE.
Story from The Chicago Tribune:
Man dies after chess match leads to fight
Associated Press
1:44 PM CDT, October 19, 2008
IOWA CITY, Iowa - A late-night game of chess between neighbors went from a shouting match to a fight that left one man dead early Sunday morning.
Michael A. Steward died of his injuries at a local hospital. Police charged his neighbor David Christian with second-degree homicide and public intoxication.
Emergency responders found Steward unresponsive at about 3 a.m. on Sunday.
Iowa City police Sgt. Denise Brotherton says preliminary results from an autopsy are expected back this week. Brotherton says its unknown what injuries Steward suffered in the fight or what caused his death.
Brotherton says she doesn't know whether weapons were involved.
Story from The Chicago Tribune:
Man dies after chess match leads to fight
Associated Press
1:44 PM CDT, October 19, 2008
IOWA CITY, Iowa - A late-night game of chess between neighbors went from a shouting match to a fight that left one man dead early Sunday morning.
Michael A. Steward died of his injuries at a local hospital. Police charged his neighbor David Christian with second-degree homicide and public intoxication.
Emergency responders found Steward unresponsive at about 3 a.m. on Sunday.
Iowa City police Sgt. Denise Brotherton says preliminary results from an autopsy are expected back this week. Brotherton says its unknown what injuries Steward suffered in the fight or what caused his death.
Brotherton says she doesn't know whether weapons were involved.
Roman Elvis?
Back in the old days of the internet, when the wildly popular The International Chessoid used to ply its trade on the ether with news about chess and chessplayers that was not published anywhere else (mostly because it was all made up), the Chessoid featured "The Dead Ringers of Chess." The creative but admittedly warped minds behind the Chessoid would cull through online archives from history and art galleries for images resembling well-known (and not so well-known) chess players and feature them side-by-side in the Chessoid.
Imagine my delight when I saw this article crop up. It really is an uncanny resemblance:
£24,000 FOR 'ELVIS'
Thursday October 16,2008
By Paul Jeeves
A ROMAN marble head that looks like Elvis – right down to the quiff – was sold for £24,000 at auction yesterday.
The 13-inch carving, which came from a 2nd century AD sarcophagus, was bought by an unnamed collector at a Bonhams sale in London.
Antiquities specialist Georgiana Aitken said: “It bears an uncanny likeness to Elvis. It’s the quiff that does it. It wasn’t a hairstyle of the day as far as I know.”
Imagine my delight when I saw this article crop up. It really is an uncanny resemblance:
£24,000 FOR 'ELVIS' Thursday October 16,2008
By Paul Jeeves
A ROMAN marble head that looks like Elvis – right down to the quiff – was sold for £24,000 at auction yesterday.
The 13-inch carving, which came from a 2nd century AD sarcophagus, was bought by an unnamed collector at a Bonhams sale in London.
Antiquities specialist Georgiana Aitken said: “It bears an uncanny likeness to Elvis. It’s the quiff that does it. It wasn’t a hairstyle of the day as far as I know.”
Oval Objects of Desire
Lovely new book about the Faberge eggs. I have a modest collection of eggs; my most expensive was a "splurge" purchase made in Las Vegas in 1999 (while I was there for the FIDE World Chess Championship) of a Waterford crystal egg from a display I passed in the connecting hallway between Harrah's and the hotel/casino complext next store. It cost $100. The rest of my eggs have ranged in prize from a few dollars to about $20. I also collect pink elephants - but that's another story.
OCTOBER 6, 2008
Bookshelf
Oval Objects of Desire
By JOSEPH TARTAKOVSKY
In 1885, Czar Alexander III gave the czarina an Easter present that astonished her. When your wife lives in a palace with 900 rooms, delighting her with a gift is no easy task. And at first, Czarina Marie Fedorovna could have been excused for being underwhelmed by Alexander's offering: It was a plain enameled egg -- the traditional Russian Easter gift -- 2½ inches high. Inside the egg, though, she found a yolk made of gold; inside that, an exquisite golden hen on a bed of golden straw; inside that, a miniature diamond crown; and inside that, a tiny ruby pendant. She'd never seen anything like it. No one had. It so captivated the family that its maker, Carl Gustavovich Fabergé, earned the right to display the royal seal.
Nearly every Easter thereafter, Alexander III gave a new Fabergé creation to Marie; when he died, his son Czar Nicholas II continued each spring to present an egg, one to his wife, Alexandra, and one to his mother. Between 1885 and 1916, 50 "imperial eggs" were made for the czars. Then the tradition ended: In 1917, eggs were the last thing on the mind of a czar worried about his very survival.
Over the years the Fabergé eggs had grown more elaborate, each with a theme calculated to charm its recipient. When Marie's sons went to sea in 1890 on a Russian cruiser, the egg the following spring contained a gold and platinum replica of the ship floating on aquamarine, with diamonds for portholes. The Danish Palaces Egg from that period was so complex -- featuring watercolor miniatures of palaces from the czarina's youth in Denmark -- that it took a year to make. The 1913 Winter Egg, made of rock crystal and designed to imitate ice, was so perfectly etched and polished that it seemed freezing to the touch. Marie called Fabergé the "greatest genius of our time." (What did Tolstoy ever do for her?)
Luscious though Fabergé eggs might be, Toby Faber has not written a book just about glittering baubles. The former managing director of the British publishing house Faber & Faber and the author of "Stradivari's Genius" (2005) argues that these objects have something to teach us about history. Noting, for instance, that Carl Fabergé borrowed designs from the court jewelers of Louis XV and XVI, Mr. Faber observes that the French and Russian dynasties, both coming to gory ends, had both also debauched themselves in riches. While the Romanovs were ogling the latest gem-encrusted Fabergé fantasy, their subjects were farming with medieval tools.
But Mr. Faber wisely doesn't turn his story into a grim portrait of unfeeling excess. Instead, he tells a vivid, engrossing tale, describing, for instance, the rise and fall of Rasputin, the czarina's confidant, and giving a harrowing account of the final miserable months of Nicholas II and his family. We see them, prisoners in Siberia, hand-decorating Easter eggs that had been donated by sympathetic villagers, before being shot.
The leading character of Mr. Faber's book is, of course, Carl Fabergé. How did he become the world's most famous jeweler, purveyor to half of Europe's nobility? He hailed from a French Huguenot family, Mr. Faber informs us, that had arrived in the Russian Empire by 1800; the surname was probably modified by an ancestor to emphasize Gallic roots at a time when Russian aristocrats spoke French. A brilliant designer and craftsman, Fabergé trained in St. Petersburg, Dresden and Frankfurt before taking over his father's St. Petersburg jewelry store in 1872.
Fabergé was a brilliant businessman as well. His company eventually made necklaces, rings, clocks, fans, plates and hundreds of other items; by 1910, it employed more than 1,500 people and turned (in today's dollars) annual profits of $175 million. His detailed system of accounting ensured that he kept his labor costs just low enough so that they never threatened his profit margins. Not that he was a skinflint: Every morning at 10, Fabergé toured his workshop, occasionally taking up a nearly finished object, examining it coolly and then smashing it to pieces. "You can do better," he would tell a gaping craftsman. "Start again and do it right."
In 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, Lenin's commissars seized Fabergé's company and looted dozens of imperial eggs from the deposed czar's possessions. The communists sold the eggs abroad during the 1920s to raise desperately needed hard currency. Other eggs had been smuggled out of the country long before. Mr. Faber tracks these masterpieces as they turn up around the world, from Shanghai flea markets to the private collections of heiresses.
It was investor-aficionado Malcolm Forbes who, in modern times, "almost single-handedly" made the eggs into some of the world's most precious objects, Mr. Faber says. Between 1965 and 1985, bidding at auctions and striking private deals, Forbes purchased nine imperial eggs for ever-increasing sums. Mr. Faber wonders whether Fabergé's prestige today is in part the effect, not the cause, of the price that Mr. Forbes was willing to pay.
Many people predicted that after Malcolm Forbes's death (in 1990) prices would collapse. They didn't. In 1994 the Winter Egg sold for $5.6 million; eight years later the emir of Qatar bought it for $9.6 million. Then, in 2004, the Forbes family engaged Sotheby's to put its Fabergé hoard -- all nine eggs -- up for sale. A Russian oil magnate named Viktor Vekselberg swooped in before the auction could even take place and bought the lot for $90 million.
"There's a satisfying symmetry," Mr. Faber writes, "inherent in the idea of eggs that were once ordered by the czar, the individual at the apex of an aristocratic society, being brought back to Russia by his modern-day successors, the oligarchs who now bestride the Russian economy." Maybe Mr. Vekselberg will someday give his collection to a Russian museum -- say, the famous one in St. Petersburg that was once an imperial palace -- and the circle will be complete.
Mr. Tartakovsky is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
Fabergé's Eggs By Toby Faber (Random House, 302 pages, $30)
OCTOBER 6, 2008
Bookshelf
Oval Objects of Desire
By JOSEPH TARTAKOVSKY
In 1885, Czar Alexander III gave the czarina an Easter present that astonished her. When your wife lives in a palace with 900 rooms, delighting her with a gift is no easy task. And at first, Czarina Marie Fedorovna could have been excused for being underwhelmed by Alexander's offering: It was a plain enameled egg -- the traditional Russian Easter gift -- 2½ inches high. Inside the egg, though, she found a yolk made of gold; inside that, an exquisite golden hen on a bed of golden straw; inside that, a miniature diamond crown; and inside that, a tiny ruby pendant. She'd never seen anything like it. No one had. It so captivated the family that its maker, Carl Gustavovich Fabergé, earned the right to display the royal seal.
Nearly every Easter thereafter, Alexander III gave a new Fabergé creation to Marie; when he died, his son Czar Nicholas II continued each spring to present an egg, one to his wife, Alexandra, and one to his mother. Between 1885 and 1916, 50 "imperial eggs" were made for the czars. Then the tradition ended: In 1917, eggs were the last thing on the mind of a czar worried about his very survival.
Over the years the Fabergé eggs had grown more elaborate, each with a theme calculated to charm its recipient. When Marie's sons went to sea in 1890 on a Russian cruiser, the egg the following spring contained a gold and platinum replica of the ship floating on aquamarine, with diamonds for portholes. The Danish Palaces Egg from that period was so complex -- featuring watercolor miniatures of palaces from the czarina's youth in Denmark -- that it took a year to make. The 1913 Winter Egg, made of rock crystal and designed to imitate ice, was so perfectly etched and polished that it seemed freezing to the touch. Marie called Fabergé the "greatest genius of our time." (What did Tolstoy ever do for her?)
Luscious though Fabergé eggs might be, Toby Faber has not written a book just about glittering baubles. The former managing director of the British publishing house Faber & Faber and the author of "Stradivari's Genius" (2005) argues that these objects have something to teach us about history. Noting, for instance, that Carl Fabergé borrowed designs from the court jewelers of Louis XV and XVI, Mr. Faber observes that the French and Russian dynasties, both coming to gory ends, had both also debauched themselves in riches. While the Romanovs were ogling the latest gem-encrusted Fabergé fantasy, their subjects were farming with medieval tools.
But Mr. Faber wisely doesn't turn his story into a grim portrait of unfeeling excess. Instead, he tells a vivid, engrossing tale, describing, for instance, the rise and fall of Rasputin, the czarina's confidant, and giving a harrowing account of the final miserable months of Nicholas II and his family. We see them, prisoners in Siberia, hand-decorating Easter eggs that had been donated by sympathetic villagers, before being shot.
The leading character of Mr. Faber's book is, of course, Carl Fabergé. How did he become the world's most famous jeweler, purveyor to half of Europe's nobility? He hailed from a French Huguenot family, Mr. Faber informs us, that had arrived in the Russian Empire by 1800; the surname was probably modified by an ancestor to emphasize Gallic roots at a time when Russian aristocrats spoke French. A brilliant designer and craftsman, Fabergé trained in St. Petersburg, Dresden and Frankfurt before taking over his father's St. Petersburg jewelry store in 1872.
Fabergé was a brilliant businessman as well. His company eventually made necklaces, rings, clocks, fans, plates and hundreds of other items; by 1910, it employed more than 1,500 people and turned (in today's dollars) annual profits of $175 million. His detailed system of accounting ensured that he kept his labor costs just low enough so that they never threatened his profit margins. Not that he was a skinflint: Every morning at 10, Fabergé toured his workshop, occasionally taking up a nearly finished object, examining it coolly and then smashing it to pieces. "You can do better," he would tell a gaping craftsman. "Start again and do it right."
In 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, Lenin's commissars seized Fabergé's company and looted dozens of imperial eggs from the deposed czar's possessions. The communists sold the eggs abroad during the 1920s to raise desperately needed hard currency. Other eggs had been smuggled out of the country long before. Mr. Faber tracks these masterpieces as they turn up around the world, from Shanghai flea markets to the private collections of heiresses.
It was investor-aficionado Malcolm Forbes who, in modern times, "almost single-handedly" made the eggs into some of the world's most precious objects, Mr. Faber says. Between 1965 and 1985, bidding at auctions and striking private deals, Forbes purchased nine imperial eggs for ever-increasing sums. Mr. Faber wonders whether Fabergé's prestige today is in part the effect, not the cause, of the price that Mr. Forbes was willing to pay.
Many people predicted that after Malcolm Forbes's death (in 1990) prices would collapse. They didn't. In 1994 the Winter Egg sold for $5.6 million; eight years later the emir of Qatar bought it for $9.6 million. Then, in 2004, the Forbes family engaged Sotheby's to put its Fabergé hoard -- all nine eggs -- up for sale. A Russian oil magnate named Viktor Vekselberg swooped in before the auction could even take place and bought the lot for $90 million.
"There's a satisfying symmetry," Mr. Faber writes, "inherent in the idea of eggs that were once ordered by the czar, the individual at the apex of an aristocratic society, being brought back to Russia by his modern-day successors, the oligarchs who now bestride the Russian economy." Maybe Mr. Vekselberg will someday give his collection to a Russian museum -- say, the famous one in St. Petersburg that was once an imperial palace -- and the circle will be complete.
Mr. Tartakovsky is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
Fabergé's Eggs By Toby Faber (Random House, 302 pages, $30)
Museum Display: "Climate Apocalypse"
Apocalypse Now, via Diorama
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: October 16, 2008
Water, 16 feet of it, smothers the southern tip of Manhattan, covering the landfill of Battery Park City. Tropic coral reefs are stripped of life, their rocks pocked with contusions. Polar bears rummage in junk heaps seeking food amid construction debris. Glaciers split into ice chips, floods ravage coastlines, droughts parch the Earth and forest fires rage untamable.
If the End of Days were going to be portrayed in a museum exhibition, it might look like the array of natural disasters, both real and imagined, that can be found at “Climate Change,” which opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.
There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: “The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.” And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife.
All this is because of something that can’t be seen or smelled or touched, a gas plentifully found in the natural world: carbon dioxide. Produced in abundance by an industrial urban world that depends on the burning of coal and oil, this gas has so increased its atmospheric presence and has so clear a “greenhouse effect” — preventing heat from escaping the Earth — that, the show argues, the sun’s energy is already raising the planet’s temperature (about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last century), with doleful consequences to follow.
This exhibition, organized by Edmond A. Mathez, curator in the earth and planetary sciences department at the museum, together with Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton University who has been active in international efforts to control global warming, is grim and unrelenting, but not without hope. Its final gallery is full of alternative energy and conservation proposals, and younger visitors will find some amusement as they try to cut down their carbon footprints with interactive displays.
The show’s focus, however, is on how dire a state of crisis we are in. Emerging from this ambitious and, at times, overwrought show, you almost expect to see a new set of dioramas and fossilized skeletons showing how Homo sapiens once dwelt on this planet in arrogant mastery before the species burned its way to oblivion. This vision of global warming — already globally familiar — will also globe-trot to St. Louis, Cleveland and Chicago, as well as Denmark, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, South Korea and Mexico.
There are real issues to be considered here — questions about probabilities, alternative technologies, industrial evolution, relationships between developed and undeveloped nations — but they are never really explored. The main impression, instead, is of an almost religious urgency. “Repent!” these displays seem to call out, “Repent! Before it’s too late!” And perhaps the religious overtones are no accident. Recently the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become a “worldwide secular religion” in which the “path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.”
Only here the urgency is not otherworldly. The glimpses of what could happen or what might happen or what “many experts” or “most experts” think will happen — as the exhibition puts it again and again — are meant to be spurs to immediate action. “Climate has changed throughout Earth’s long history,” but this time is different, the exhibition says, because “for the first time, humans are causing it.” A worldwide effort is required, “and it needs to start now.”
So running through the show is a thread mixing urgency and blame. That same combination is what gives the issue of global warming so political an edge right now: the urgency is directed toward particular policies and the blame toward particular parties. The politicization makes it all the more difficult to talk about global warming; a lot of money — perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars across the globe — is also at stake in the changes being sought. And while there is a scientific consensus about global warming, there is also a significant minority of skeptics about one portion or another of the theory, and the issues are notoriously complex. Mr. Dyson said the minority of scientific skeptics and the majority of scientific believers now engage in a passionate “dialogue of the deaf,” in which very little debate or convincing goes on.
It would have been helpful had the exhibition taken such disagreements and passions into account and made its case less sensationally. Though its sweep is an order of magnitude more sober than Al Gore was in the film “An Inconvenient Truth,” the exhibition’s insistence inspires wariness. That begins even in the opening gallery where a red neon line stretches across two walls showing the increase of the “heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere over the last 400 years. The graph provides a powerful image of a rising line overlaying images of technological change and heading steeply upward after 1950.
But the graph is set up so the line begins at a level below a child’s knees and ends when it is far over an adult’s head. The numbers tell us that the increase over 400 years was about 40 percent; the image makes it seem as if the increase was perhaps 600 percent. One gets a similar sensation from a table showing month-by-month warming in recent years, when compared to average monthly temperatures between 1951 and 1980. That interval seems arbitrary and includes periods of falling temperatures (which help make the contrast greater). Yet when illustrating that “temperature and CO2 march in lockstep,” the show chooses intervals of centuries instead. Why not make the case with more consistency instead of seeking greatest effect? That would also require some explanation of seeming anomalies, for example, the way the monthly table shows increases in temperatures between 1900 and 1940, followed by decreases until the late 1970s — facts that don’t seem in lockstep with the graph of carbon dioxide concentrations.
And why show a model of Lower Manhattan with the stark consequences of a five-meter rise in ocean level? That would happen, we are told, if there were a complete “polar ice-sheet meltdown,” something that “experts consider unlikely to happen anytime soon.” The model “doesn’t predict the future,” the text acknowledges, but “it does illustrate one possible outcome,” though perhaps “thousands of years in the future.” In other words this is something so unlikely that it is unconnected to either immediate threat or practical concern. The image is used to stir advocacy.
Such tendencies are troubling. One of the controversies about global warming, after all, recently raised by Bjorn Lomborg in his “Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” called “Cool It,” is that policies adopted to deal with climate change must be weighed according to their costs. Some measures may be extremely expensive yet almost inconsequential. But how can a policy be assessed if its alternative is presented as apocalypse?
Apocalypse is too easy a prediction when there is so much still uncertain; no one has succeeded in completely modeling climate’s past, let alone its future. “Many experts think,” we are told, that warmer ocean waters will make hurricanes more powerful. But “it is difficult to predict how much more intense hurricanes could become.” That makes it seem as if this is some rough guess, when the claims being made for climate change are in the precision of the observations and conclusions. And are the “many experts” even correct about hurricanes? The scientist (and global-warming skeptic) Roy W. Spencer has pointed out that experts at the National Hurricane Center have been warning for decades that there had been a lull in hurricane activity and that a natural 30-to-40-year cycle would bring on a resurgence, something having no connection at all to global warming.
Some dangers and data are beyond question, but some seem not to be, given the hedging and uses of “likely” often invoked here. Yes, there is reason for concern and conservation. But what we need from a museum is not proselytizing but a more reflective analysis. An interactive display shows how carbon dioxide emissions can be decreased by altering habits, for example, but what impact will that actually have on changes in global temperature? And if there are counterarguments to be made about aspects of global warming, why can’t they be addressed here? Take a look at the two sides of the Web site climatedebatedaily.com to see how much disagreement there can be.
This exhibition, in other words, made me feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation. It may all be true — some of it assuredly is — but from a museum, particularly one devoted to natural science, it is reasonable to seek more revelation.
“Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future,” opens Saturday and continues through Aug. 16 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.
More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on October 17, 2008, on page C27 of the New York edition.
Bangladesh is the most densely populated country on earth. If people are flooded out and can no longer make a living on the now saline waters invading their sea level country, they're not just going to sit there and die! So, where do they go? Into India - hmmmm. Well, you can just imagine what may happen as millions of Bangladeshi Muslims seek to migrate into Hindu India.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: October 16, 2008
Water, 16 feet of it, smothers the southern tip of Manhattan, covering the landfill of Battery Park City. Tropic coral reefs are stripped of life, their rocks pocked with contusions. Polar bears rummage in junk heaps seeking food amid construction debris. Glaciers split into ice chips, floods ravage coastlines, droughts parch the Earth and forest fires rage untamable.
If the End of Days were going to be portrayed in a museum exhibition, it might look like the array of natural disasters, both real and imagined, that can be found at “Climate Change,” which opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.
There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: “The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.” And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife.
All this is because of something that can’t be seen or smelled or touched, a gas plentifully found in the natural world: carbon dioxide. Produced in abundance by an industrial urban world that depends on the burning of coal and oil, this gas has so increased its atmospheric presence and has so clear a “greenhouse effect” — preventing heat from escaping the Earth — that, the show argues, the sun’s energy is already raising the planet’s temperature (about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last century), with doleful consequences to follow.
This exhibition, organized by Edmond A. Mathez, curator in the earth and planetary sciences department at the museum, together with Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton University who has been active in international efforts to control global warming, is grim and unrelenting, but not without hope. Its final gallery is full of alternative energy and conservation proposals, and younger visitors will find some amusement as they try to cut down their carbon footprints with interactive displays.
The show’s focus, however, is on how dire a state of crisis we are in. Emerging from this ambitious and, at times, overwrought show, you almost expect to see a new set of dioramas and fossilized skeletons showing how Homo sapiens once dwelt on this planet in arrogant mastery before the species burned its way to oblivion. This vision of global warming — already globally familiar — will also globe-trot to St. Louis, Cleveland and Chicago, as well as Denmark, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, South Korea and Mexico.
There are real issues to be considered here — questions about probabilities, alternative technologies, industrial evolution, relationships between developed and undeveloped nations — but they are never really explored. The main impression, instead, is of an almost religious urgency. “Repent!” these displays seem to call out, “Repent! Before it’s too late!” And perhaps the religious overtones are no accident. Recently the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become a “worldwide secular religion” in which the “path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.”
Only here the urgency is not otherworldly. The glimpses of what could happen or what might happen or what “many experts” or “most experts” think will happen — as the exhibition puts it again and again — are meant to be spurs to immediate action. “Climate has changed throughout Earth’s long history,” but this time is different, the exhibition says, because “for the first time, humans are causing it.” A worldwide effort is required, “and it needs to start now.”
So running through the show is a thread mixing urgency and blame. That same combination is what gives the issue of global warming so political an edge right now: the urgency is directed toward particular policies and the blame toward particular parties. The politicization makes it all the more difficult to talk about global warming; a lot of money — perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars across the globe — is also at stake in the changes being sought. And while there is a scientific consensus about global warming, there is also a significant minority of skeptics about one portion or another of the theory, and the issues are notoriously complex. Mr. Dyson said the minority of scientific skeptics and the majority of scientific believers now engage in a passionate “dialogue of the deaf,” in which very little debate or convincing goes on.
It would have been helpful had the exhibition taken such disagreements and passions into account and made its case less sensationally. Though its sweep is an order of magnitude more sober than Al Gore was in the film “An Inconvenient Truth,” the exhibition’s insistence inspires wariness. That begins even in the opening gallery where a red neon line stretches across two walls showing the increase of the “heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere over the last 400 years. The graph provides a powerful image of a rising line overlaying images of technological change and heading steeply upward after 1950.
But the graph is set up so the line begins at a level below a child’s knees and ends when it is far over an adult’s head. The numbers tell us that the increase over 400 years was about 40 percent; the image makes it seem as if the increase was perhaps 600 percent. One gets a similar sensation from a table showing month-by-month warming in recent years, when compared to average monthly temperatures between 1951 and 1980. That interval seems arbitrary and includes periods of falling temperatures (which help make the contrast greater). Yet when illustrating that “temperature and CO2 march in lockstep,” the show chooses intervals of centuries instead. Why not make the case with more consistency instead of seeking greatest effect? That would also require some explanation of seeming anomalies, for example, the way the monthly table shows increases in temperatures between 1900 and 1940, followed by decreases until the late 1970s — facts that don’t seem in lockstep with the graph of carbon dioxide concentrations.
And why show a model of Lower Manhattan with the stark consequences of a five-meter rise in ocean level? That would happen, we are told, if there were a complete “polar ice-sheet meltdown,” something that “experts consider unlikely to happen anytime soon.” The model “doesn’t predict the future,” the text acknowledges, but “it does illustrate one possible outcome,” though perhaps “thousands of years in the future.” In other words this is something so unlikely that it is unconnected to either immediate threat or practical concern. The image is used to stir advocacy.
Such tendencies are troubling. One of the controversies about global warming, after all, recently raised by Bjorn Lomborg in his “Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” called “Cool It,” is that policies adopted to deal with climate change must be weighed according to their costs. Some measures may be extremely expensive yet almost inconsequential. But how can a policy be assessed if its alternative is presented as apocalypse?
Apocalypse is too easy a prediction when there is so much still uncertain; no one has succeeded in completely modeling climate’s past, let alone its future. “Many experts think,” we are told, that warmer ocean waters will make hurricanes more powerful. But “it is difficult to predict how much more intense hurricanes could become.” That makes it seem as if this is some rough guess, when the claims being made for climate change are in the precision of the observations and conclusions. And are the “many experts” even correct about hurricanes? The scientist (and global-warming skeptic) Roy W. Spencer has pointed out that experts at the National Hurricane Center have been warning for decades that there had been a lull in hurricane activity and that a natural 30-to-40-year cycle would bring on a resurgence, something having no connection at all to global warming.
Some dangers and data are beyond question, but some seem not to be, given the hedging and uses of “likely” often invoked here. Yes, there is reason for concern and conservation. But what we need from a museum is not proselytizing but a more reflective analysis. An interactive display shows how carbon dioxide emissions can be decreased by altering habits, for example, but what impact will that actually have on changes in global temperature? And if there are counterarguments to be made about aspects of global warming, why can’t they be addressed here? Take a look at the two sides of the Web site climatedebatedaily.com to see how much disagreement there can be.
This exhibition, in other words, made me feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation. It may all be true — some of it assuredly is — but from a museum, particularly one devoted to natural science, it is reasonable to seek more revelation.
“Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future,” opens Saturday and continues through Aug. 16 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.
More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on October 17, 2008, on page C27 of the New York edition.
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While I was posting this I was also watching a PBS program called "Foreign Exchange" which today featured a film by a Bangladeshi producer called something like "Will Anyone Care if Bangladesh Drowns?" The film shows dramatic current evidence of the rising sea levels invading formerly fresh water coast lands and the devastation that has been wrought in just a few years' time. Bangladesh is the most densely populated country on earth. If people are flooded out and can no longer make a living on the now saline waters invading their sea level country, they're not just going to sit there and die! So, where do they go? Into India - hmmmm. Well, you can just imagine what may happen as millions of Bangladeshi Muslims seek to migrate into Hindu India.
World's First Dog Excavated
To me, this is a "wow" story, not only because I am a dog lover (like some people are cat lovers), but because of the dog's close symbolic connections with ancient board games. Pushing back the date of domestication of canines to beyond 14,000 - 12,000 BCE is not amazing to me, because if I've learned anything studying archaeology and history all these years, it's that there are incredibly large gaps in our knowledge and just because we don't have "bones" evidencing that something did happen, doens't mean it did not happen. This discovery will have implications for views on the domestication of other animals, also impacting views on just how "civilized" ancient man was. Good Goddess, even so-called "Neanderthal" man may have had domesticated canines if the dating of this new discovery holds up; therefore, I expect it may be fully attacked before long as "totally inaccurate":)
World's first dog lived 31,700 years ago, ate big
Discovery could push back the date for the earliest dog by 17,700 years
By Jennifer Viegas
updated 1:17 p.m. CT, Fri., Oct. 17, 2008
An international team of scientists has just identified what they believe is the world's first known dog, which was a large and toothy canine that lived 31,700 years ago and subsisted on a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer, according to a new study.
The discovery could push back the date for the earliest dog by 17,700 years, since the second oldest known dog, found in Russia, dates to 14,000 years ago.
Remains for the older prehistoric dog, which were excavated at Goyet Cave in Belgium, suggest to the researchers that the Aurignacian people of Europe from the Upper Paleolithic period first domesticated dogs. Fine jewelry and tools, often decorated with depictions of big game animals, characterize this culture.
If Paleolithic dogs still existed as a breed today, they would surely win best in show for strength and biting ability.
"In shape, the Paleolithic dogs most resemble the Siberian husky, but in size, however, they were somewhat larger, probably comparable to large shepherd dogs," added Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
For the study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the scientists analyzed 117 skulls of recent and fossil large members of the Canidae family, which includes dogs, wolves and foxes.
Skeletal analysis revealed, "the Paleolithic dogs had wider and shorter snouts and relatively wider brain cases than fossil and recent wolves," said Germonpré, who added that their skulls were also somewhat smaller than those of wolves.
DNA studies determined all of the canids carried "a substantial amount of genetic diversity," suggesting that past wolf populations were much larger than they are today.
Isotopic analysis of the animals' bones found that the earliest dogs consumed horse, musk ox and reindeer, but not fish or seafood. Since the Aurignacians are believed to have hunted big game and fished at different times of the year, the researchers think the dogs might have enjoyed meaty handouts during certain seasons.
Germonpré believes dog domestication might have begun when the prehistoric hunters killed a female wolf and then brought home her pups. Recent studies on silver foxes suggest that when the most docile pups are kept and cared for, it takes just 10 generations of breeding for morphological changes to take effect.
The earliest dogs likely earned their meals too.
"I think it is possible that the dogs were used for tracking, hunting, and transport of game," she said. "Transport could have been organized using the dogs as pack animals. Furthermore, the dogs could have been kept for their fur or meat, as pets, or as an animal with ritual connotation."
Ancient, 26,000-year-old footprints made by a child and a dog at Chauvet Cave, France, support the pet notion. Torch wipes accompanying the prints indicate the child held a torch while navigating the dark corridors accompanied by a dog.
Susan Crockford, a University of Victoria anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist at Pacific Identifications, Inc. in Canada, told Discovery News that "this is an important paper."
Crockford, however, is not convinced the Aurignacians domesticated dogs. She instead suspects dogs may have undergone "self-domestication" from wolves more than once over history, which could explain why the animals appear and then seemingly disappear from the archaeological record.
Crockford details the possible process in her book, Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone and the Origin of Species. She theorizes that the genes that control thyroid rhythms, allowing individuals to adapt to changing environmental conditions, can, over time, lead to the evolution of new species.
World's first dog lived 31,700 years ago, ate big
Discovery could push back the date for the earliest dog by 17,700 years
By Jennifer Viegas
updated 1:17 p.m. CT, Fri., Oct. 17, 2008
An international team of scientists has just identified what they believe is the world's first known dog, which was a large and toothy canine that lived 31,700 years ago and subsisted on a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer, according to a new study.
The discovery could push back the date for the earliest dog by 17,700 years, since the second oldest known dog, found in Russia, dates to 14,000 years ago.
Remains for the older prehistoric dog, which were excavated at Goyet Cave in Belgium, suggest to the researchers that the Aurignacian people of Europe from the Upper Paleolithic period first domesticated dogs. Fine jewelry and tools, often decorated with depictions of big game animals, characterize this culture.
If Paleolithic dogs still existed as a breed today, they would surely win best in show for strength and biting ability.
"In shape, the Paleolithic dogs most resemble the Siberian husky, but in size, however, they were somewhat larger, probably comparable to large shepherd dogs," added Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
For the study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the scientists analyzed 117 skulls of recent and fossil large members of the Canidae family, which includes dogs, wolves and foxes.
Skeletal analysis revealed, "the Paleolithic dogs had wider and shorter snouts and relatively wider brain cases than fossil and recent wolves," said Germonpré, who added that their skulls were also somewhat smaller than those of wolves.
DNA studies determined all of the canids carried "a substantial amount of genetic diversity," suggesting that past wolf populations were much larger than they are today.
Isotopic analysis of the animals' bones found that the earliest dogs consumed horse, musk ox and reindeer, but not fish or seafood. Since the Aurignacians are believed to have hunted big game and fished at different times of the year, the researchers think the dogs might have enjoyed meaty handouts during certain seasons.
Germonpré believes dog domestication might have begun when the prehistoric hunters killed a female wolf and then brought home her pups. Recent studies on silver foxes suggest that when the most docile pups are kept and cared for, it takes just 10 generations of breeding for morphological changes to take effect.
The earliest dogs likely earned their meals too.
"I think it is possible that the dogs were used for tracking, hunting, and transport of game," she said. "Transport could have been organized using the dogs as pack animals. Furthermore, the dogs could have been kept for their fur or meat, as pets, or as an animal with ritual connotation."
Ancient, 26,000-year-old footprints made by a child and a dog at Chauvet Cave, France, support the pet notion. Torch wipes accompanying the prints indicate the child held a torch while navigating the dark corridors accompanied by a dog.
Susan Crockford, a University of Victoria anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist at Pacific Identifications, Inc. in Canada, told Discovery News that "this is an important paper."
Crockford, however, is not convinced the Aurignacians domesticated dogs. She instead suspects dogs may have undergone "self-domestication" from wolves more than once over history, which could explain why the animals appear and then seemingly disappear from the archaeological record.
Crockford details the possible process in her book, Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone and the Origin of Species. She theorizes that the genes that control thyroid rhythms, allowing individuals to adapt to changing environmental conditions, can, over time, lead to the evolution of new species.
Ancient Trade: The Belitung Wreck
Page last updated at 11:52 GMT, Saturday, 18 October 2008 12:52 UKThe treasure trove making waves
Simon Worrall explains why a recent discovery on the seabed of the Indian Ocean will revolutionise our understanding of two ancient civilisations.
"The local fishermen believe that there are underwater spirits guarding the wrecks," says Tilman Walterfang, as our boatman picks his way through a maze of coral reefs and submerged rocks.
"Sometimes, they perform prayers on the boats, sacrificing a goat, spreading the blood everywhere, to keep the vessel safe."
I am on a fishing boat in the Gaspar Strait, near Belitung Island, off the south-east coast of Sumatra.
Since time immemorial, this funnel-shaped passage linking the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean has been one of the two main shipping routes. The Malacca Straits is the other, from China to the West.
A British sea captain, shipwrecked here in 1817, called it "the most dangerous area between China and London".
Discovery
Ten years ago, at a spot known locally as "Black Rock", two men diving for sea cucumbers came across a large pile of sand and coral.
Digging a hole, they reached in and pulled out a barnacle-encrusted bowl. Then another. And another.
They had stumbled on the oldest, most important, marine archaeological discovery ever made in South East Asia, an Arab dhow - or ship - built of teak, coconut wood and hibiscus fibre, packed with a treasure that Indiana Jones could only dream of.
There were 63,000 pieces of gold, silver and ceramics from the fabled Tang dynasty, which flourished between the seventh and 10th centuries.
Among the artefacts was the largest Tang gold cup ever discovered and some of the finest Yue ware - a porcelain that the ancient Chinese likened to snow because of its delicacy.
The exceptional quality of the goods has led some scholars to suggest that these were gifts from the Tang Emperor himself.
The bulk of the cargo was more homely, including 40,000 Changsha bowls, named after the Changsha kilns in Hunan Province, where they were produced.
Found packed inside tall, earthenware jars, some experts believe bean sprouts were placed between the bowls as a sort of organic bubble-wrap. These brightly painted tea bowls were the Tang equivalent of plastic food containers.
"It looks like they were approaching Tanjung Pandang, the main town on Belitung Island, when they hit the reef," explains Walterfang, the stocky German treasure hunter who salvaged the wreck.
"They may have come here for water or other supplies. Perhaps there was an emergency. Or even an attack by pirates.
"But we cannot know. It was nearly 1,200 years ago."
Magically, everything was perfectly preserved by a layer of silt. Raised from the seabed more than a millennium later, the gold cups and bronze mirrors, silver boxes and ewers look as fresh as the day they were created.
In 2005, the Singapore government paid more than £20m to acquire the treasure as the centrepiece for a new maritime museum.
But it is not just about bling. The Belitung wreck is a time capsule that has revolutionised our understanding of two ancient civilisations that fill the airwaves today - China and the Middle East.
The serial nature of the cargo - 1,000 miniature funeral urns and 800 identical inkpots - shows that China was mass-producing goods for export several centuries earlier than previously thought.
The Arab dhow, the first of its kind ever found, proves something equally startling - that mariners from the Persian Gulf were trading on a scale, and over distances, unmatched by human beings until Vasco da Gama set sail for India at the end of the 15th Century. Sinbad the Sailor was for real.
Prosperous Basra
One of the Changsha bowls bore a date stamp, "the 16th Day of the seventh Month of the second Year of the Baoli reign", or AD 826. Carbon-14 analysis of some star anise found in the wreck confirmed this as the probable date of the dhow's departure from China.
Most scholars believe it set sail from Canton, or Guangzhou, as it is today, the largest of the five ports servicing the Maritime Silk Route.
No-one knows exactly where the dhow was heading when it struck the coral reef.
Its most likely destination was a place familiar to us for other reasons, the Iraqi port of Samara, or Basra as it is called today.
In the 9th Century, Basra was one of the wealthiest cities in the world, with a prosperous merchant class hungry for Chinese luxury goods.
Among the most sensational artefacts found in the wreck are three dishes decorated with cobalt from Iran which represent the oldest blue and white ware ever found, setting back by several hundred years the invention of what would become known all over the world simply as "china."
More Treasure Trove - From Hook
Coroner declares brooch is a medieval treasure8:40am Tuesday 14th October 2008
By Chris Gregory »
A MEDIEVAL silver gilt brooch found in a north Hampshire field has been declared treasure by a coroner.
The jewellery, which could be from the 13th century, was found in a field near Hook. It has a circular frame with four bosses and one lozenge, and is thought to be worth hundreds of pounds.
North East Hampshire coroner Andrew Bradley ruled, at an inquest held at Basingstoke and Deane’s Civic Offices, that the brooch was treasure.
The find has now been handed over to the British Museum for valuation, under the Treasure Act of 1996.
It will be offered, for a price, to the Hampshire Museums Service to go on display in the county.
Kay Ainsworth, keeper of archaeology at the trust, said: “We have a number of medieval brooches and nearly all of them are individual. Most are worth a couple of hundred pounds.
“It’s of a particular style that you get in that period. It’s a delightful little brooch and certainly we would like to buy it if we can afford it.”
At the inquest, Mr Bradley said a man with a metal detector found the piece in February 2008.
Thinking it was valuable, he handed it over to the British Museum, where James Robinson, curator of medieval collections, appraised it.
In a report, he stated the brooch dates from the late 13th or early 14th century. He said the decorative bosses have lost their detail over time, and that a second lozenge on the brooch has been lost.
Neither the finder of the brooch, nor the owner of the land where the brooch was found, attended the treasure trove inquest.
Mr Bradley said: “I will find in the absence of representation to the contrary that it is treasure because it complies with all the requirements.
“It’s now forfeited to the Crown. The finder and/or landowner will be compensated to the value of it.”
Treasure Trove in Teeside!
This may be a recap of some earlier posts here:
Rare finds unearth Teesside link with royalty
Oct 14 2008 by Karen Faughey, Evening Gazette
RARE Anglo Saxon jewellery worth an estimated £250,000 has revealed a fascinating link between East Cleveland and the royal family of 1,400 years ago.
Exciting archeological finds dating back to the seventh century have been ruled to be treasure during five separate inquests at Teesside Coroners’ Court.
Experts have described the finds as ‘unparallel in the North East’ after historians discovered 109 graves near Loftus from around 650AD - one of which is thought to have contained the body of a princess.
Though the acidity in the soil means the remains no longer exist, dozens of high status items have stood the test of time including brooches, pendants, glass beads, pottery, and coins dating as far back as 43AD.
Archaeologist Stephen Sherlock said: "This is a site of national significance. Regionally it is the most significant assemblage of material relating to the Northumbrian royal family.
"Any one of these pieces would be the best in the North East, and it was completely unexpected to find something like this in Loftus when Bede says the royal family was in Northumbria."
Excavations began secretly in 2005 on farmland at Street House Farm, south-east of Loftus, after aerial photographs from the previous year revealed evidence of Iron Age houses.
But as 30 volunteers began the painstaking procedure of unearthing the 1,200sqm site, no-one could have predicted that what lay beneath was an undisturbed Anglo Saxon burial ground.
Mr Sherlock, 54, who grew up in Redcar, but now lives in York, described the initial moment of discovery as one of ‘disbelief".
"I’ve dug an Anglo Saxon cemetery before (at Norton) and I thought that was a once in a lifetime scoop," he said. "I never expected to find anything like this."
The dig then re-commenced in 2006 and 2007 during the months of August and September in between the farmer harvesting and re-seeding his crops.
Fragments of iron found in one of the graves revealed that one of the deceased had been buried on a bed - a ritual then only reserved for people of very high status.
The fact that this person had been wearing some of the dig’s most ‘exceptional’ pieces of jewellery has led experts to the conclusion that she may have in fact been an Anglo Saxon princess.
Mr Sherlock, a self employed archaeologist who spends most of the year out on development jobs, highlighted an impressive shield-shaped brooch found in this grave as his personal favourite.
"It’s not because it’s pretty," he said. "It’s because it’s unique. It symbolises somebody who had the clout to commission it and get it made.
"Whoever made that was the best craftsman of their time. It would be like going to the queen’s jeweler today."
During the inquest, he explained how such an item would not have been available commercially, and instead would have to have been commissioned.
It is thought that the other people buried in the graveyard may have been lesser members of the same royal family.
The finds will now be taken before an independent panel of experts made up of academics, dealers and curators who will value the pieces based on market value, collectibility and previous sales.
Kirkleatham Museum in Redcar, which wishes to buy the pieces, will then have three months to come up with the money - 50% of which will go to the landowner Alan Bothroyd, of nearby Upton Cottages.
Items are only referred to as treasure when the owner of an archaeological find cannot be traced. The items must be at least 300-years-old and have a metallic content of more than 10% precious metal.
Some of the lesser important items found at Street House Farm, such as a piece of a Jet hairslide and pottery, were yesterday ruled as treasure by association.
Finds liaison officer at the department of Antiquities in Newcastle Doctor Rob Collins said: "This is highly significant for the region. Although we known the names of many kings, queens, princes and princesses, we don’t really have any burial sites.
"And what we are seeing here is most likely a member of the royal family - if not a king or queen then someone who is very close to them."
Despite being able to date the items found, it is not known where any of the jewellery or beads would have come from.
Dr Collins said: "The style of some of the jewellery suggests if not a southern origin, then a southern influence.
"It could have been made by a southern craftsman from Kent who was working in the north. It could be that the woman in the bed burial had brought the jewellery north. It could also be that they were wedding gifts.
"In that period there was a lot of excessive trade all around the North Sea."
According to experts, Anglo Saxon burials are rare in England, but the majority that have been found are in Suffolk, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Wiltshire.
Teesside coroner Michael Sheffield said: "These finds are unusual and rare because there are so many items involved and they reflect the status of the people in the graves where they were found."
Rare finds unearth Teesside link with royalty
Oct 14 2008 by Karen Faughey, Evening Gazette
RARE Anglo Saxon jewellery worth an estimated £250,000 has revealed a fascinating link between East Cleveland and the royal family of 1,400 years ago.
Exciting archeological finds dating back to the seventh century have been ruled to be treasure during five separate inquests at Teesside Coroners’ Court.
Experts have described the finds as ‘unparallel in the North East’ after historians discovered 109 graves near Loftus from around 650AD - one of which is thought to have contained the body of a princess.
Though the acidity in the soil means the remains no longer exist, dozens of high status items have stood the test of time including brooches, pendants, glass beads, pottery, and coins dating as far back as 43AD.
Archaeologist Stephen Sherlock said: "This is a site of national significance. Regionally it is the most significant assemblage of material relating to the Northumbrian royal family.
"Any one of these pieces would be the best in the North East, and it was completely unexpected to find something like this in Loftus when Bede says the royal family was in Northumbria."
Excavations began secretly in 2005 on farmland at Street House Farm, south-east of Loftus, after aerial photographs from the previous year revealed evidence of Iron Age houses.
But as 30 volunteers began the painstaking procedure of unearthing the 1,200sqm site, no-one could have predicted that what lay beneath was an undisturbed Anglo Saxon burial ground.
Mr Sherlock, 54, who grew up in Redcar, but now lives in York, described the initial moment of discovery as one of ‘disbelief".
"I’ve dug an Anglo Saxon cemetery before (at Norton) and I thought that was a once in a lifetime scoop," he said. "I never expected to find anything like this."
The dig then re-commenced in 2006 and 2007 during the months of August and September in between the farmer harvesting and re-seeding his crops.
Fragments of iron found in one of the graves revealed that one of the deceased had been buried on a bed - a ritual then only reserved for people of very high status.
The fact that this person had been wearing some of the dig’s most ‘exceptional’ pieces of jewellery has led experts to the conclusion that she may have in fact been an Anglo Saxon princess.
Mr Sherlock, a self employed archaeologist who spends most of the year out on development jobs, highlighted an impressive shield-shaped brooch found in this grave as his personal favourite.
"It’s not because it’s pretty," he said. "It’s because it’s unique. It symbolises somebody who had the clout to commission it and get it made.
"Whoever made that was the best craftsman of their time. It would be like going to the queen’s jeweler today."
During the inquest, he explained how such an item would not have been available commercially, and instead would have to have been commissioned.
It is thought that the other people buried in the graveyard may have been lesser members of the same royal family.
The finds will now be taken before an independent panel of experts made up of academics, dealers and curators who will value the pieces based on market value, collectibility and previous sales.
Kirkleatham Museum in Redcar, which wishes to buy the pieces, will then have three months to come up with the money - 50% of which will go to the landowner Alan Bothroyd, of nearby Upton Cottages.
Items are only referred to as treasure when the owner of an archaeological find cannot be traced. The items must be at least 300-years-old and have a metallic content of more than 10% precious metal.
Some of the lesser important items found at Street House Farm, such as a piece of a Jet hairslide and pottery, were yesterday ruled as treasure by association.
Finds liaison officer at the department of Antiquities in Newcastle Doctor Rob Collins said: "This is highly significant for the region. Although we known the names of many kings, queens, princes and princesses, we don’t really have any burial sites.
"And what we are seeing here is most likely a member of the royal family - if not a king or queen then someone who is very close to them."
Despite being able to date the items found, it is not known where any of the jewellery or beads would have come from.
Dr Collins said: "The style of some of the jewellery suggests if not a southern origin, then a southern influence.
"It could have been made by a southern craftsman from Kent who was working in the north. It could be that the woman in the bed burial had brought the jewellery north. It could also be that they were wedding gifts.
"In that period there was a lot of excessive trade all around the North Sea."
According to experts, Anglo Saxon burials are rare in England, but the majority that have been found are in Suffolk, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Wiltshire.
Teesside coroner Michael Sheffield said: "These finds are unusual and rare because there are so many items involved and they reflect the status of the people in the graves where they were found."
James Ossuary Back in the News
Time Magazine online (now owned by CNN) has a feature on the James Ossuary. For the record, I'm not convinced the Ossuary (or the other relics referred to in the article) is a fraud, but I'm not convinced it is genuine, either.
Exposing the 'Jesus' Brother' Fraud
By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008
For as long as man has worshipped a god, there have been forgers, crafty hucksters who seize on a believer's desire to possess material proof of the divine. In Jerusalem, it is a bountiful trade. The old adage is that if all the splinters of the True Cross were gathered from across Christendom, it would yield a wooden crucifix the size of a Manhattan skyscraper. Even back in the Middle Ages, pilgrims visiting Jerusalem told of hawkers who sold counterfeit bones and relics of saints.
But indisputable historical evidence that Jesus Christ, or any of the other Biblical prophets, truly existed is something that eludes religious scholars. There was therefore much excitement in 2001 when a reclusive Tel Aviv collector, Oded Golan, announced that a stone reliquary had come into his possession inscribed with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." The discovery of the ossuary was hailed in some quarters as a spectacular archaeological find — solidly circumstantial proof, at last, of Christ's existence. For it would have held the remains of the Apostle James, who was killed in A.D. 62 and is described in the Bible as Jesus' brother.
When the James ossuary toured Canada in October 2002, it attracted thousands of the curious and faithful. Some visitors kneeled in quiet prayer. But back in Israel, police detectives, along with a growing posse of biblical scholars, were growing skeptical of the ossuary's authenticity. After a two-year investigation, police in December 2004 charged the antiquities collector and four others of forgery, alleging that the James ossuary was a clever fake and that Golan had masterminded an international ring of thieves that over the past 20 years had duped major museums and collectors out of millions. Put on trial, Golan denied the charges, and some experts and the pious rallied to his side. Nevertheless, one of the detectives insisted, "Oded Golan played with our beliefs, the beliefs of Jews and Christians. That is why it's the fraud of the century."
The extraordinary story of how Israeli detectives built a case against Golan and his alleged cohorts is the subject of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh, a former TIME staffer who now writes for People. In fast, noir-ish prose — imagine Sam Spade in the Holy Land — Burleigh tracks her story through the twilight world of Arab grave robbers and smugglers to the glimmering salon of a billionaire collector in Mayfair whose mission, writes Burleigh, is "proving the Bible true." Past accounts of the James ossuary are fiercely partisan, written by debunkers or true believers. But Burleigh keeps her balance, and her humor, as she sifts — far more diligently than many archaeologists — through the evidence. She also has unprecedented access to all the major players in the James ossuary debate: dogged police detectives, sharp-witted antiquarians, Bible-besotted collectors and suspected forgers of near genius.
Like any other Holy Land story, it's a potent mix of religion and politics. As Burleigh writes, "Where historians seek clues to the puzzle of the ancient worlds, evangelical Christians seek proof of the literal interpretation of the Bible and nationalist Israelis want evidence of ancient Jewish inhabitation."
The James ossuary provided all of that, and more. At first detectives from the Israel Antiquities Authority suspected that the ossuary was authentic but had been stolen from a site by Arab grave diggers and sold to Golan. Israeli sleuths say they discovered that the limestone casket was indeed authentic, and dated back to the correct period of A.D. 60. But the key inscription, linking the object to Jesus Christ, was a clever fake. An analysis of the patina also revealed the presence of Tel Aviv tap water. In his defense, Golan claims it was because his mother occasionally scrubbed the ossuary with soap and water, not realizing its historical value.
Believers and scientists alike were shocked by the accusations that not only was the James ossuary a fake but so were two other rare objects of biblical significance: an inscribed pomegranate and the gold-flecked Jehoash tablet, which both supposedly came from Solomon's Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century B.C. Those two relics are linked to Golan's workshop, say police. As Burleigh describes it, the debate over the authenticity of these sacred items pitted scientists against believers. She writes, "The faithful — those who believe in a higher, supernatural power that leaves a material record of itself for man to literally hold and behold — must also confront and grapple with the painful presence of doubt."
Meanwhile, Golan's trial, with its parade of more than 75 scientists and biblical scholars, is likely to drag on for another year. But Golan maintained in an interview with TIME that he is innocent of all charges and that since the trial began experts have come forth to prove that both the inscriptions on the James ossuary and the Jehoash tablet are genuine. Even after the judge finally decides whether Golan was an innocent collector or a master forger, it's likely that the debate between skeptics and believers over the James ossuary — and its supposed proof of Christ's historical existence — will rage on long afterward.
Exposing the 'Jesus' Brother' Fraud
By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008
For as long as man has worshipped a god, there have been forgers, crafty hucksters who seize on a believer's desire to possess material proof of the divine. In Jerusalem, it is a bountiful trade. The old adage is that if all the splinters of the True Cross were gathered from across Christendom, it would yield a wooden crucifix the size of a Manhattan skyscraper. Even back in the Middle Ages, pilgrims visiting Jerusalem told of hawkers who sold counterfeit bones and relics of saints.
But indisputable historical evidence that Jesus Christ, or any of the other Biblical prophets, truly existed is something that eludes religious scholars. There was therefore much excitement in 2001 when a reclusive Tel Aviv collector, Oded Golan, announced that a stone reliquary had come into his possession inscribed with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." The discovery of the ossuary was hailed in some quarters as a spectacular archaeological find — solidly circumstantial proof, at last, of Christ's existence. For it would have held the remains of the Apostle James, who was killed in A.D. 62 and is described in the Bible as Jesus' brother.
When the James ossuary toured Canada in October 2002, it attracted thousands of the curious and faithful. Some visitors kneeled in quiet prayer. But back in Israel, police detectives, along with a growing posse of biblical scholars, were growing skeptical of the ossuary's authenticity. After a two-year investigation, police in December 2004 charged the antiquities collector and four others of forgery, alleging that the James ossuary was a clever fake and that Golan had masterminded an international ring of thieves that over the past 20 years had duped major museums and collectors out of millions. Put on trial, Golan denied the charges, and some experts and the pious rallied to his side. Nevertheless, one of the detectives insisted, "Oded Golan played with our beliefs, the beliefs of Jews and Christians. That is why it's the fraud of the century."
The extraordinary story of how Israeli detectives built a case against Golan and his alleged cohorts is the subject of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh, a former TIME staffer who now writes for People. In fast, noir-ish prose — imagine Sam Spade in the Holy Land — Burleigh tracks her story through the twilight world of Arab grave robbers and smugglers to the glimmering salon of a billionaire collector in Mayfair whose mission, writes Burleigh, is "proving the Bible true." Past accounts of the James ossuary are fiercely partisan, written by debunkers or true believers. But Burleigh keeps her balance, and her humor, as she sifts — far more diligently than many archaeologists — through the evidence. She also has unprecedented access to all the major players in the James ossuary debate: dogged police detectives, sharp-witted antiquarians, Bible-besotted collectors and suspected forgers of near genius.
Like any other Holy Land story, it's a potent mix of religion and politics. As Burleigh writes, "Where historians seek clues to the puzzle of the ancient worlds, evangelical Christians seek proof of the literal interpretation of the Bible and nationalist Israelis want evidence of ancient Jewish inhabitation."
The James ossuary provided all of that, and more. At first detectives from the Israel Antiquities Authority suspected that the ossuary was authentic but had been stolen from a site by Arab grave diggers and sold to Golan. Israeli sleuths say they discovered that the limestone casket was indeed authentic, and dated back to the correct period of A.D. 60. But the key inscription, linking the object to Jesus Christ, was a clever fake. An analysis of the patina also revealed the presence of Tel Aviv tap water. In his defense, Golan claims it was because his mother occasionally scrubbed the ossuary with soap and water, not realizing its historical value.
Believers and scientists alike were shocked by the accusations that not only was the James ossuary a fake but so were two other rare objects of biblical significance: an inscribed pomegranate and the gold-flecked Jehoash tablet, which both supposedly came from Solomon's Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century B.C. Those two relics are linked to Golan's workshop, say police. As Burleigh describes it, the debate over the authenticity of these sacred items pitted scientists against believers. She writes, "The faithful — those who believe in a higher, supernatural power that leaves a material record of itself for man to literally hold and behold — must also confront and grapple with the painful presence of doubt."
Meanwhile, Golan's trial, with its parade of more than 75 scientists and biblical scholars, is likely to drag on for another year. But Golan maintained in an interview with TIME that he is innocent of all charges and that since the trial began experts have come forth to prove that both the inscriptions on the James ossuary and the Jehoash tablet are genuine. Even after the judge finally decides whether Golan was an innocent collector or a master forger, it's likely that the debate between skeptics and believers over the James ossuary — and its supposed proof of Christ's historical existence — will rage on long afterward.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Friday Night Miscellany
A shortened version. "The Fire" is singing it's siren song from downstairs, before the fireplace, as is a new jug of wine...
I've now lost over 8 pounds on my "new and improved regimen" began nearly five weeks ago - coinciding with the start of "The Biggest Loser" on TV. LOL! The goal was to lose 10 pounds in 5 weeks. My five weeks expires officially on Monday October 20, but with 2 pounds to go I don't think I'll make it, although I may make it to 9 pounds lost.
I will be starting a second cycle on October 20 with a goal of losing another 10 pounds. We'll see how close I come. As the weather gets colder it gets harder to get motivated to get out and walk my butt off (literally).
For the Friday Night Miscellany:
JOE THE PLUMBER
I have to say that I was shocked - really! - when it was reported the day after the last debate between Obama and McCain that "Joe the Plumber" was a liar and a tax cheat. Now you know, darlings, it's probably splitting hairs that he isn't a "licensed" plumber in a state that doesn't require it, although certain municipalities within his home state do require licensing. Joe happens to work in a city where a license to be a plumber is required, therefore he is working as a plumber illegal. Just what part of illegal do the Republican hordes now idolizing Joe as a symbol of the suffering middle class abused by a liberal media not understand?
And it's probably splitting hairs that Joe didn't know enough about accounting practices in running a business to realize that he, personally, would have to NET $250,000 income from his business a year to experience a tax increase under Obama's proposed tax plan. This has nothing to do with net taxable business income. I'm ignoring that Joe doesn't have the funds to buy a shoe-shine business, let alone a plumbing business that would NET him wages of $250,000 a year!
It is not splitting hairs that Joe lied about being a member of the local plumbers union on his personal web space. Tsk, tsk. It is also not splitting hairs that Joe is delinquent on personal property taxes. Yeah, it can happen to anybody I suppose, but if you put yourself out there in a confrontational mode with a candidate for President of the United States, and Joe readily admits that is what he did, trying to get a "gotcha moment", then you'd best be prepared for media scrutiny.
And this is a fella now being held up by John McCain and Sarah Palin as an "average" American being made a political scapegoat by the evil Democrats. If Joe the Plumber is an average American, Goddess Help Us!
WHAT IS MIDDLE CLASS
Since when is making $250,000 a year "middle class?" I don't have the exact figure but I know the current mean wages in the US is about $45,000 a year! That's GROSS wages, folks, not what you're left with after state and federal taxes, Medicare and Social Security deductions. And - get this - people earning $45,000 a year actually pay a higher percentage overall of their total income in such taxes and deductions than someone earning $250,000 a year, because Social Security taxes stop at $110,000. Earn more than $110,000 a year in wages and you don't pay a DIME extra in Social Security taxes. So please, John McCain, don't tell me that a "family" - in Federal speak that means a husband and wife - earning $250,000 a year GROSS are "middle class." The middle is $45,000.
345,000 YEAR OLD HUMAN FOOTPRINTS
I find it fascinating that on the one hand, homo heidelbergensis is called "human" in this article, and on the other hand, Neanderthal man, whom you probably wouldn't notice cleaned up and in a suit, is NOT considered human. Scientists speaketh with forked tongues.
LET'S TALK CRAP
No - not about Wall Street or the Bush Administration. A book about how we "do our business", how we clean up (or not) after we "do our business," and why it's a matter of life and death. From Salon (site pass - click on Enter Salon in upper right to enter to story if the link doesn't work).
WITCHCRAFT, OH, IT'S WITCHCRAFT...
Really! Some evidence of practice at recently as the 1950's has cropped up in the yard of an old homestead in England. Eek!
WATER WITCHING A/K/A DOWSING
They don't know how it works, they just know it does more often than not...
I've now lost over 8 pounds on my "new and improved regimen" began nearly five weeks ago - coinciding with the start of "The Biggest Loser" on TV. LOL! The goal was to lose 10 pounds in 5 weeks. My five weeks expires officially on Monday October 20, but with 2 pounds to go I don't think I'll make it, although I may make it to 9 pounds lost.
I will be starting a second cycle on October 20 with a goal of losing another 10 pounds. We'll see how close I come. As the weather gets colder it gets harder to get motivated to get out and walk my butt off (literally).
For the Friday Night Miscellany:
JOE THE PLUMBER
I have to say that I was shocked - really! - when it was reported the day after the last debate between Obama and McCain that "Joe the Plumber" was a liar and a tax cheat. Now you know, darlings, it's probably splitting hairs that he isn't a "licensed" plumber in a state that doesn't require it, although certain municipalities within his home state do require licensing. Joe happens to work in a city where a license to be a plumber is required, therefore he is working as a plumber illegal. Just what part of illegal do the Republican hordes now idolizing Joe as a symbol of the suffering middle class abused by a liberal media not understand?
And it's probably splitting hairs that Joe didn't know enough about accounting practices in running a business to realize that he, personally, would have to NET $250,000 income from his business a year to experience a tax increase under Obama's proposed tax plan. This has nothing to do with net taxable business income. I'm ignoring that Joe doesn't have the funds to buy a shoe-shine business, let alone a plumbing business that would NET him wages of $250,000 a year!
It is not splitting hairs that Joe lied about being a member of the local plumbers union on his personal web space. Tsk, tsk. It is also not splitting hairs that Joe is delinquent on personal property taxes. Yeah, it can happen to anybody I suppose, but if you put yourself out there in a confrontational mode with a candidate for President of the United States, and Joe readily admits that is what he did, trying to get a "gotcha moment", then you'd best be prepared for media scrutiny.
And this is a fella now being held up by John McCain and Sarah Palin as an "average" American being made a political scapegoat by the evil Democrats. If Joe the Plumber is an average American, Goddess Help Us!
WHAT IS MIDDLE CLASS
Since when is making $250,000 a year "middle class?" I don't have the exact figure but I know the current mean wages in the US is about $45,000 a year! That's GROSS wages, folks, not what you're left with after state and federal taxes, Medicare and Social Security deductions. And - get this - people earning $45,000 a year actually pay a higher percentage overall of their total income in such taxes and deductions than someone earning $250,000 a year, because Social Security taxes stop at $110,000. Earn more than $110,000 a year in wages and you don't pay a DIME extra in Social Security taxes. So please, John McCain, don't tell me that a "family" - in Federal speak that means a husband and wife - earning $250,000 a year GROSS are "middle class." The middle is $45,000.
345,000 YEAR OLD HUMAN FOOTPRINTS
I find it fascinating that on the one hand, homo heidelbergensis is called "human" in this article, and on the other hand, Neanderthal man, whom you probably wouldn't notice cleaned up and in a suit, is NOT considered human. Scientists speaketh with forked tongues.
LET'S TALK CRAP
No - not about Wall Street or the Bush Administration. A book about how we "do our business", how we clean up (or not) after we "do our business," and why it's a matter of life and death. From Salon (site pass - click on Enter Salon in upper right to enter to story if the link doesn't work).
WITCHCRAFT, OH, IT'S WITCHCRAFT...
Really! Some evidence of practice at recently as the 1950's has cropped up in the yard of an old homestead in England. Eek!
WATER WITCHING A/K/A DOWSING
They don't know how it works, they just know it does more often than not...
Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt?
I have previously read that there was some very early evidence of human sacrifice in ancient Egypt, but it was something that the Egyptians evidently decided against quite early on in their dynastic development, turning instead to the original and clever invention of "substitutes" by way of ushabti dolls, carved and molded miniatures and artful tomb paintings. Therefore, I'm taking this report at National Geographic with a grain of salt. Egypt has undergone extensive excavations, some more "expert" than others, for more than 200 years (I'm starting from 1799). If human sacrifice was prevalent for a couple hundred years or more, wouldn't there be a lot more evidence???
Abydos - Life and Death at the Dawn of Egyptian Civilization
By John Galvin
Photographs by Kenneth Garrett (Photo Gallery from the dig of Aha's Tomb)
New evidence shows that human sacrifice helped populate the royal city of the dead.
King Aha, "The Fighter," was not killed while unifying the Nile's two warring kingdoms, nor while building the capital of Memphis. No, one legend has it that the first ruler of a united Egypt was killed in a hunting accident after a reign of 62 years, unceremoniously trampled to death by a rampaging hippopotamus. News of his demise brought a separate, special terror to his staff. For many, the honor of serving the king in life would lead to the more dubious distinction of serving the king in death.
On the day of Aha's burial a solemn procession made its way through the sacred precincts of Abydos, royal necropolis of Egypt's first kings. Led by priests in flowing white gowns, the funeral retinue included the royal family, vizier, treasurer, administrators, trade and tax officers, and Aha's successor, Djer. Just beyond the town's gates the procession stopped at a monumental structure with imposing brick walls surrounding an open plaza. Inside the walls the priests waded through a cloud of incense to a small chapel, where they performed cryptic rites to seal Aha's immortality. Outside, situated around the enclosure's walls, were six open graves. In a final act of devotion, or coercion, six people were poisoned and buried along with wine and food to take into the afterlife. One was a child of just four or five, perhaps the king's beloved son or daughter, who was expensively furnished with ivory bracelets and tiny lapis beads.
The procession then walked westward into the setting sun, crossing sand dunes and moving up a dry riverbed to a remote cemetery at the base of a high desert plateau. Here Aha's three-chambered tomb was stockpiled with provisions for a lavish life in eternity. There were large cuts of ox meat, freshly killed waterbirds, loaves of bread, cheese, dried figs, jars of beer, and dozens of wine vessels, each bearing Aha's official seal. Beside his tomb more than 30 graves were laid out in three neat rows. As the ceremony climaxed, several lions were slain and placed in a separate burial pit. As Aha's body was lowered into a brick-lined burial chamber, a select group of loyal courtiers and servants also took poison and joined their king in the next world.
Is this how a pharaoh's funeral in 2900 b.c. actually unfolded? It's a plausible scenario, experts say. Archaeologists have been sifting through the dry sands of Abydos for more than a century. Now they have found compelling evidence that ancient Egyptians indeed engaged in human sacrifice, shedding new—and not always welcome—light on one of the ancient world's great civilizations.
"Yellah! Yellah! Yellah!" barks Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian crew boss, spurring his workers to move it, move it, move it. "You are big fat water buffalo! You are dung!" The mostly teenage boys hauling buckets of sand giggle nervously but pick up the pace while keeping an eye on their still ranting foreman. "You chatter worse than a bunch of women!" Standing tall in a loose, flowing galabia and white head wrap, Ibrahim looks somehow wizardly, maybe capable of vaporizing slackers with a cast from the long, intimidating stick-wand he keeps clutched behind his back. Ibrahim's 125-person crew is working with a team of archaeologists to uncover part of the immense royal burial center at Abydos, located 260 miles (420 kilometers) up the Nile from Cairo. As a line of workers use hoe-like tureyas to scrape away the sand, the so-named bucket boys haul away clanking pails of dirt and pour it like water into the laps of sifters. Excavators are on the ground with trowels in hand, surveyors are plotting the coordinates of artifacts, a photographer is documenting each new find, and illustrators are pencil-drawing an ancient coffin and an infant skeleton.
Kneeling on one knee in the center of this swarm is Matthew Adams, associate director of a multiyear project sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Yale University, and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Adams is brushing sand away to reveal a smooth, ancient mud floor. "If this is from the time of Aha," he says in a raspy voice dried out from months in the desert, "then it's the oldest funerary enclosure ever found in Egypt. We're talking about the beginning of Egyptian history. Not one trowel has been laid here before now."
Abydos is the source of many of Egypt's most ancient artifacts. In 1988 Günter Dreyer, a German archaeologist, unearthed small bone and ivory tags intricately inscribed with one of the world's earliest forms of writing—crude hieroglyphs developed at about the same time as Mesopotamian cuneiform. In 1991 Adams's mentor and the project's director, David O'Connor, uncovered an eerie fleet of wooden boats buried in enormous brick-lined graves.
Now O'Connor and Adams are digging down into the beginning of Egypt's 1st dynasty, a pivotal period when kings laid down the roots of religion, government, and architecture that would last for the next 3,000 years. Unlike the colossal pyramids of later pharaohs, the more modest burial complexes of the Abydos kings consisted of two separate structures—a tomb and a ceremonial enclosure. The large, walled enclosures where mortuary rituals were performed were situated on the edge of town, while the underground tombs were located more than a mile away on the threshold of the desolate Western Desert, a place known to ancient Egyptians as the land of the dead.
All of the 1st-dynasty tombs and most of the enclosures excavated so far are accompanied by subsidiary graves—hundreds in some cases—containing the remains of elite officials and courtiers. Egyptologists have long speculated that these graves might hold victims of sacrifice but also acknowledged that they could simply be graves reserved for the king's staff, ready to use as each person died naturally. [Emphasis added].
The question of whether ancient Egyptians practiced human sacrifice has intrigued archaeologists since the late 1800s. Frenchman Émile Amélineau and his English rival Sir Flinders Petrie excavated all the 1st-dynasty desert tombs by 1902. Each had been heavily looted in antiquity, and no royal remains were found except a single bejeweled arm. Still, there was much yet to discover. In Aha's tomb were the remains of dozens of wine vessels, tools, some jewelry, and signs of food. Beside the tomb Petrie discovered 35 subsidiary graves, which he called the Great Cemetery of the Domestics. While he didn't dwell on it in his published papers, he hinted at human sacrifice. Later, in the 1980s, German archaeologists uncovered the remains of at least seven young lions.
The only funerary enclosure standing during Petrie's time was the massive 4,600-year-old Shunet el-Zebib, built by the 2nd-dynasty king Khasekhemwy. The towering shuneh (storehouse), with its three-story walls enclosing nearly two acres of space, still dominates the landscape. Two of Petrie's associates discovered another 2nd-dynasty enclosure, built by King Peribsen, and Petrie returned in the 1920s and found hundreds of subsidiary graves. The graves surrounded three 1st-dynasty enclosures, but curi-ously, Petrie located only one of them. These discoveries led archaeologists to speculate that they had found only half the puzzle of Abydos, and that for each tomb they had uncovered out in the desert, there should be a corresponding enclosure still hidden on the city's edge.
In 1967 David O'Connor came to Abydos to search for, among other things, the funerary enclosures that had eluded Petrie. Almost 20 years later, while digging in the shadow of the shuneh, he made a totally unexpected discovery.
"I opened an excavation pit, and poking into one corner of it was this intrusion," O'Connor recalls. "I knew it was something from the earliest dynasty, I just didn't know what." To O'Connor's amazement, the "intrusion" turned out to be one of 14 ancient boats, each buried in its own brick-lined tomb adjacent to the enclosure of a still unknown king. The boats, which measured up to 75 feet (23 meters) long, were expertly crafted and had been fully functional when buried. They proved to be the world's oldest surviving boats built of planks (as opposed to those made of reeds or hollowed-out logs).
"The boats are like the servants who were buried at Abydos," says O'Connor. "The king intended to use t hem in the afterlife in the same manner that he used them before his death." In life the boats enabled the king to travel rapidly up and down the Nile in a powerful display of wealth and military might. As the Egyptian kings also expected to be kings in the afterlife, the boats would be useful tools.
News of the boats'discovery rippled through the Egyptology world and also energized O'Connor's hunt for the lost enclosures of the first kings. To help focus the search, O'Connor and Adams sought out Tomasz Herbich, a Polish archaeologist who specializes in finding buried ruins with a device called a fluxgate gradiometer, a type of magnetometer. It measures slight variations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by certain types of iron oxides beneath the surface. "These oxides are present in Nile mud," explains Herbich. "And what's the main material used by ancient Egyptian builders? Sun-dried bricks made of Nile mud!"
For nearly a week in 2001 Herbich's assistant walked more than ten miles (16 kilometers) a day over a numbing grid, taking over 80,000 measurements. The survey turned up several small funerary chapels but no enclosures. Then, during Herbich's last hour in the field, his magnetic divining rod finally found royal mud. He downloaded the data onto his laptop, and as the digital map came into focus, he called out, "We have an enclosure!"
Adams and a small crew went to work uncovering part of the enclosure, but the field season was ending, and they had to rebury it and return home. In 2002 O'Connor again asked Adams to go to Abydos, this time to undertake a massive excavation of the new discovery.
After a month of tediously peeling back layers of sand, Adams uncovered jars and wine stoppers bearing Aha's name, confirming that his lost funerary enclosure was at last found.
Once the crew reached the enclosure's floor, they discovered six surrounding graves. Three contained the bodies of adult women, one held the remains of a man, and one held a young child with 25 ivory bracelets embellished with tiny lapis beads. The sixth grave remains unexcavated. In each case the archaeological evidence pointed to a sacrificial death.
"The graves were dug and lined with bricks, then roofed with wood and capped with mud-brick masonry," says Adams. "Above that masonry cap, a plaster floor extends out from the enclosure and covers all the graves." The floor extension is seamless-an important clue, for it would have been impossible to entomb people under the floor except all at the same time.
It's unlikely that 41 people-the six at Aha's enclosure plus 35 at his tomb-would have died of natural causes at the same time. Another possibility is that they died randomly over time and were then stockpiled and reburied en masse. But for O'Connor and Adams, the evidence strongly suggests they were sacrificed.
How were they killed? Petrie believed that he saw signs of post-burial movement in the tomb graves, suggesting that people were alive or semiconscious when buried. Brenda Baker, a physical anthropologist from Arizona State University, examined all the skeletons from Aha's enclosure and found no signs of trauma. "The method of their demise is still a mystery," says Adams. "My guess is that they were drugged."
Or strangled, suggests Nancy Lovell, a physical anthropologist at the University of Alberta. Lovell studied skulls from Aha's tomb and found telltale stains inside the victims' teeth. "When someone is strangled," she explains, "increased blood pressure can cause blood cells inside the teeth to rupture and stain the dentin, the part of the tooth just under the enamel."
It now seems clear that human sacrifice was practiced in early Egypt-as was true in other parts of the ancient world. Sir Leonard Woolley's excavation during the 1920s and '30s at Ur in modern-day Iraq revealed hundreds of sacrificial graves dating back to 2500 b.c. and related to the burial of Mesopotamian kings and queens. Evidence for sacrifice has also been seen in Nubian, Mesoamerican, and several other ancient cultures.
In Egypt enthusiasm for the grim practice seems to have waned quickly. Aha's subsidiary graves are the earliest to be found, and his successor, Djer, embraced the practice with fervor-more than 300 graves flank his tomb, and another 269 surround his mortuary enclosure. But Qaa, the last ruler of the 1st dynasty, had fewer than 30 sacrificial graves beside his tomb, although his enclosure remains lost. And by the 2nd dynasty the practice simply stopped.
O'Connor thinks it ended because the royal staff rebelled. "People tend to say that the Egyptians were becoming more civilized and that's why it stopped, but I think that reflects our own prejudices. These graves included relatively high-ranking people, and the reason it stopped might be more political than ethical." Perhaps it was an honor to serve the king in the afterlife, but it was an honor that could wait.
By the 3rd dynasty Egypt's pharaohs began building their tombs more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) downstream at Saqqara. There, a new tradition arose: The separate tomb and enclosure were combined into a single complex that included a colossal pyramid tomb bounded by the walls of a ceremonial enclosure. The royal necropolis at Abydos lay abandoned for the next 700 years.
Then during the Middle Kingdom the cult of Osiris became a major force in Egyptian religion. Legend held that Osiris, lord of the afterlife, was also Egypt's first king, and so pharaohs dispatched priests to Abydos on a kind of archaeological expedition to locate Osiris's tomb. They excavated several of the 1st-dynasty tombs and ultimately decided that Djer's belonged to Osiris. In so doing they turned Abydos into the mecca of ancient Egypt. Over the next 2,000 years several pharaohs, including Senusret III and Ramses II, built great monuments and temples at Abydos to honor Osiris. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, farmers and pharaohs alike, made the pilgrimage to take part in an annual celebration of Osiris's resurrection. The festival culminated in an elaborate parade that wound from the town past a series of small chapels built to honor the god-king, then up a dry riverbed to the ancient desert cemetery.
Arriving at Osiris's tomb, the pilgrims had no inkling that hundreds of their ancestors-royal staff members sacrificed more than a thousand years earlier-lay buried beneath their feet. Seeking Osiris's blessing for their own passage to the afterlife, the worshippers brought millions of small clay offering pots filled with fruit and smoldering incense. You can still see the potsherds today, piled high like so many hopes that in the wake of death comes eternal life.
Abydos - Life and Death at the Dawn of Egyptian Civilization
By John Galvin
Photographs by Kenneth Garrett (Photo Gallery from the dig of Aha's Tomb)
New evidence shows that human sacrifice helped populate the royal city of the dead.
King Aha, "The Fighter," was not killed while unifying the Nile's two warring kingdoms, nor while building the capital of Memphis. No, one legend has it that the first ruler of a united Egypt was killed in a hunting accident after a reign of 62 years, unceremoniously trampled to death by a rampaging hippopotamus. News of his demise brought a separate, special terror to his staff. For many, the honor of serving the king in life would lead to the more dubious distinction of serving the king in death.
On the day of Aha's burial a solemn procession made its way through the sacred precincts of Abydos, royal necropolis of Egypt's first kings. Led by priests in flowing white gowns, the funeral retinue included the royal family, vizier, treasurer, administrators, trade and tax officers, and Aha's successor, Djer. Just beyond the town's gates the procession stopped at a monumental structure with imposing brick walls surrounding an open plaza. Inside the walls the priests waded through a cloud of incense to a small chapel, where they performed cryptic rites to seal Aha's immortality. Outside, situated around the enclosure's walls, were six open graves. In a final act of devotion, or coercion, six people were poisoned and buried along with wine and food to take into the afterlife. One was a child of just four or five, perhaps the king's beloved son or daughter, who was expensively furnished with ivory bracelets and tiny lapis beads.
The procession then walked westward into the setting sun, crossing sand dunes and moving up a dry riverbed to a remote cemetery at the base of a high desert plateau. Here Aha's three-chambered tomb was stockpiled with provisions for a lavish life in eternity. There were large cuts of ox meat, freshly killed waterbirds, loaves of bread, cheese, dried figs, jars of beer, and dozens of wine vessels, each bearing Aha's official seal. Beside his tomb more than 30 graves were laid out in three neat rows. As the ceremony climaxed, several lions were slain and placed in a separate burial pit. As Aha's body was lowered into a brick-lined burial chamber, a select group of loyal courtiers and servants also took poison and joined their king in the next world.
Is this how a pharaoh's funeral in 2900 b.c. actually unfolded? It's a plausible scenario, experts say. Archaeologists have been sifting through the dry sands of Abydos for more than a century. Now they have found compelling evidence that ancient Egyptians indeed engaged in human sacrifice, shedding new—and not always welcome—light on one of the ancient world's great civilizations.
"Yellah! Yellah! Yellah!" barks Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian crew boss, spurring his workers to move it, move it, move it. "You are big fat water buffalo! You are dung!" The mostly teenage boys hauling buckets of sand giggle nervously but pick up the pace while keeping an eye on their still ranting foreman. "You chatter worse than a bunch of women!" Standing tall in a loose, flowing galabia and white head wrap, Ibrahim looks somehow wizardly, maybe capable of vaporizing slackers with a cast from the long, intimidating stick-wand he keeps clutched behind his back. Ibrahim's 125-person crew is working with a team of archaeologists to uncover part of the immense royal burial center at Abydos, located 260 miles (420 kilometers) up the Nile from Cairo. As a line of workers use hoe-like tureyas to scrape away the sand, the so-named bucket boys haul away clanking pails of dirt and pour it like water into the laps of sifters. Excavators are on the ground with trowels in hand, surveyors are plotting the coordinates of artifacts, a photographer is documenting each new find, and illustrators are pencil-drawing an ancient coffin and an infant skeleton.
Kneeling on one knee in the center of this swarm is Matthew Adams, associate director of a multiyear project sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Yale University, and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Adams is brushing sand away to reveal a smooth, ancient mud floor. "If this is from the time of Aha," he says in a raspy voice dried out from months in the desert, "then it's the oldest funerary enclosure ever found in Egypt. We're talking about the beginning of Egyptian history. Not one trowel has been laid here before now."
Abydos is the source of many of Egypt's most ancient artifacts. In 1988 Günter Dreyer, a German archaeologist, unearthed small bone and ivory tags intricately inscribed with one of the world's earliest forms of writing—crude hieroglyphs developed at about the same time as Mesopotamian cuneiform. In 1991 Adams's mentor and the project's director, David O'Connor, uncovered an eerie fleet of wooden boats buried in enormous brick-lined graves.
Now O'Connor and Adams are digging down into the beginning of Egypt's 1st dynasty, a pivotal period when kings laid down the roots of religion, government, and architecture that would last for the next 3,000 years. Unlike the colossal pyramids of later pharaohs, the more modest burial complexes of the Abydos kings consisted of two separate structures—a tomb and a ceremonial enclosure. The large, walled enclosures where mortuary rituals were performed were situated on the edge of town, while the underground tombs were located more than a mile away on the threshold of the desolate Western Desert, a place known to ancient Egyptians as the land of the dead.
All of the 1st-dynasty tombs and most of the enclosures excavated so far are accompanied by subsidiary graves—hundreds in some cases—containing the remains of elite officials and courtiers. Egyptologists have long speculated that these graves might hold victims of sacrifice but also acknowledged that they could simply be graves reserved for the king's staff, ready to use as each person died naturally. [Emphasis added].
The question of whether ancient Egyptians practiced human sacrifice has intrigued archaeologists since the late 1800s. Frenchman Émile Amélineau and his English rival Sir Flinders Petrie excavated all the 1st-dynasty desert tombs by 1902. Each had been heavily looted in antiquity, and no royal remains were found except a single bejeweled arm. Still, there was much yet to discover. In Aha's tomb were the remains of dozens of wine vessels, tools, some jewelry, and signs of food. Beside the tomb Petrie discovered 35 subsidiary graves, which he called the Great Cemetery of the Domestics. While he didn't dwell on it in his published papers, he hinted at human sacrifice. Later, in the 1980s, German archaeologists uncovered the remains of at least seven young lions.
The only funerary enclosure standing during Petrie's time was the massive 4,600-year-old Shunet el-Zebib, built by the 2nd-dynasty king Khasekhemwy. The towering shuneh (storehouse), with its three-story walls enclosing nearly two acres of space, still dominates the landscape. Two of Petrie's associates discovered another 2nd-dynasty enclosure, built by King Peribsen, and Petrie returned in the 1920s and found hundreds of subsidiary graves. The graves surrounded three 1st-dynasty enclosures, but curi-ously, Petrie located only one of them. These discoveries led archaeologists to speculate that they had found only half the puzzle of Abydos, and that for each tomb they had uncovered out in the desert, there should be a corresponding enclosure still hidden on the city's edge.
In 1967 David O'Connor came to Abydos to search for, among other things, the funerary enclosures that had eluded Petrie. Almost 20 years later, while digging in the shadow of the shuneh, he made a totally unexpected discovery.
"I opened an excavation pit, and poking into one corner of it was this intrusion," O'Connor recalls. "I knew it was something from the earliest dynasty, I just didn't know what." To O'Connor's amazement, the "intrusion" turned out to be one of 14 ancient boats, each buried in its own brick-lined tomb adjacent to the enclosure of a still unknown king. The boats, which measured up to 75 feet (23 meters) long, were expertly crafted and had been fully functional when buried. They proved to be the world's oldest surviving boats built of planks (as opposed to those made of reeds or hollowed-out logs).
"The boats are like the servants who were buried at Abydos," says O'Connor. "The king intended to use t hem in the afterlife in the same manner that he used them before his death." In life the boats enabled the king to travel rapidly up and down the Nile in a powerful display of wealth and military might. As the Egyptian kings also expected to be kings in the afterlife, the boats would be useful tools.
News of the boats'discovery rippled through the Egyptology world and also energized O'Connor's hunt for the lost enclosures of the first kings. To help focus the search, O'Connor and Adams sought out Tomasz Herbich, a Polish archaeologist who specializes in finding buried ruins with a device called a fluxgate gradiometer, a type of magnetometer. It measures slight variations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by certain types of iron oxides beneath the surface. "These oxides are present in Nile mud," explains Herbich. "And what's the main material used by ancient Egyptian builders? Sun-dried bricks made of Nile mud!"
For nearly a week in 2001 Herbich's assistant walked more than ten miles (16 kilometers) a day over a numbing grid, taking over 80,000 measurements. The survey turned up several small funerary chapels but no enclosures. Then, during Herbich's last hour in the field, his magnetic divining rod finally found royal mud. He downloaded the data onto his laptop, and as the digital map came into focus, he called out, "We have an enclosure!"
Adams and a small crew went to work uncovering part of the enclosure, but the field season was ending, and they had to rebury it and return home. In 2002 O'Connor again asked Adams to go to Abydos, this time to undertake a massive excavation of the new discovery.
After a month of tediously peeling back layers of sand, Adams uncovered jars and wine stoppers bearing Aha's name, confirming that his lost funerary enclosure was at last found.
Once the crew reached the enclosure's floor, they discovered six surrounding graves. Three contained the bodies of adult women, one held the remains of a man, and one held a young child with 25 ivory bracelets embellished with tiny lapis beads. The sixth grave remains unexcavated. In each case the archaeological evidence pointed to a sacrificial death.
"The graves were dug and lined with bricks, then roofed with wood and capped with mud-brick masonry," says Adams. "Above that masonry cap, a plaster floor extends out from the enclosure and covers all the graves." The floor extension is seamless-an important clue, for it would have been impossible to entomb people under the floor except all at the same time.
It's unlikely that 41 people-the six at Aha's enclosure plus 35 at his tomb-would have died of natural causes at the same time. Another possibility is that they died randomly over time and were then stockpiled and reburied en masse. But for O'Connor and Adams, the evidence strongly suggests they were sacrificed.
How were they killed? Petrie believed that he saw signs of post-burial movement in the tomb graves, suggesting that people were alive or semiconscious when buried. Brenda Baker, a physical anthropologist from Arizona State University, examined all the skeletons from Aha's enclosure and found no signs of trauma. "The method of their demise is still a mystery," says Adams. "My guess is that they were drugged."
Or strangled, suggests Nancy Lovell, a physical anthropologist at the University of Alberta. Lovell studied skulls from Aha's tomb and found telltale stains inside the victims' teeth. "When someone is strangled," she explains, "increased blood pressure can cause blood cells inside the teeth to rupture and stain the dentin, the part of the tooth just under the enamel."
It now seems clear that human sacrifice was practiced in early Egypt-as was true in other parts of the ancient world. Sir Leonard Woolley's excavation during the 1920s and '30s at Ur in modern-day Iraq revealed hundreds of sacrificial graves dating back to 2500 b.c. and related to the burial of Mesopotamian kings and queens. Evidence for sacrifice has also been seen in Nubian, Mesoamerican, and several other ancient cultures.
In Egypt enthusiasm for the grim practice seems to have waned quickly. Aha's subsidiary graves are the earliest to be found, and his successor, Djer, embraced the practice with fervor-more than 300 graves flank his tomb, and another 269 surround his mortuary enclosure. But Qaa, the last ruler of the 1st dynasty, had fewer than 30 sacrificial graves beside his tomb, although his enclosure remains lost. And by the 2nd dynasty the practice simply stopped.
O'Connor thinks it ended because the royal staff rebelled. "People tend to say that the Egyptians were becoming more civilized and that's why it stopped, but I think that reflects our own prejudices. These graves included relatively high-ranking people, and the reason it stopped might be more political than ethical." Perhaps it was an honor to serve the king in the afterlife, but it was an honor that could wait.
By the 3rd dynasty Egypt's pharaohs began building their tombs more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) downstream at Saqqara. There, a new tradition arose: The separate tomb and enclosure were combined into a single complex that included a colossal pyramid tomb bounded by the walls of a ceremonial enclosure. The royal necropolis at Abydos lay abandoned for the next 700 years.
Then during the Middle Kingdom the cult of Osiris became a major force in Egyptian religion. Legend held that Osiris, lord of the afterlife, was also Egypt's first king, and so pharaohs dispatched priests to Abydos on a kind of archaeological expedition to locate Osiris's tomb. They excavated several of the 1st-dynasty tombs and ultimately decided that Djer's belonged to Osiris. In so doing they turned Abydos into the mecca of ancient Egypt. Over the next 2,000 years several pharaohs, including Senusret III and Ramses II, built great monuments and temples at Abydos to honor Osiris. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, farmers and pharaohs alike, made the pilgrimage to take part in an annual celebration of Osiris's resurrection. The festival culminated in an elaborate parade that wound from the town past a series of small chapels built to honor the god-king, then up a dry riverbed to the ancient desert cemetery.
Arriving at Osiris's tomb, the pilgrims had no inkling that hundreds of their ancestors-royal staff members sacrificed more than a thousand years earlier-lay buried beneath their feet. Seeking Osiris's blessing for their own passage to the afterlife, the worshippers brought millions of small clay offering pots filled with fruit and smoldering incense. You can still see the potsherds today, piled high like so many hopes that in the wake of death comes eternal life.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
2008 World Youth Chess Championships
From the Southlake Times Star:
Eubanks student makes second trip to world chess championship
By Christina Rowland/ Staff Writer
(Created: Thursday, October 16, 2008 1:02 PM CDT)
Sarah Chiang has come a long way since she took up chess four years ago. The 11-year-old leaves Friday morning for Vietnam and her second appearance at the World chess Championships.
Sarah was originally taught the game by her father and shortly after joined a Southlake city-wide chess club to perfect her skills.
When asked about how she felt about her upcoming matches she said, “It’s going to be hard, I think it is hard because you can’t really master a game of chess all the way through because there is always something new.”
To get ready for the upcoming tournament, Sarah studies her openings.According to Christine Chiang, Sarah’s mom, the game of chess is broken up into three parts openings, middle games, and end games. “(In openings) all the pieces are still on the board, so you plan the best place to put your pieces,” Christine said.
Sarah has also been practicing tactics, which includes tricks and traps. Her mom said she practices 50 to 100 of these a day.
Sarah also works with a chess coach. “He usually teaches us middle game strategy and what you think and the ideas behind it,” Sarah said.
Sarah leaves Friday for Vietnam and the tournament runs from Oct.17 through Nov.1 with only one day of rest. When she gets there, her typical schedule will be to wake up, eat breakfast, spend a half-hour working with her coach, play a match, go over match with her coach, eat dinner and go to bed.
The matches start at 3 p.m. everyday and can last hours. Christine explained that each player gets 90 minutes to play, but after each move they make, they hit the clock on their side and it adds 30 seconds back to the clock. “Sometimes in a game you get stuck and use up a lot of time,” Sarah said.
A player wins a chess game if they checkmate the other player, if one player runs out of time, or if there is a draw, which means that there are no pieces on the board to make a move with. “Chess is a battle of ideas across the board,” Sarah said. “Every single game is different and there are always new challenges to meet and it’s always interesting.”
There are 11 rounds in the tournament and each player acquires points in the rounds.. A win earns one point, a draw earns half a point, and a loss gets zero points.
There are 68 girls in Sarah’s category representing 39 different countries. Sarah represents the U.S. Team under 12. Last year, she placed second in the world and earned the title Woman Candidate Master. She had eight and a half points.“(This year) I just hope I don’t do bad. It would be wonderful if I got first but I don’t know,” Sarah said.
Sarah will be joined in Vietnam by her little brother, Jonathan, who also plays on the U.S. Chess team under 8 division.
Eubanks student makes second trip to world chess championship
By Christina Rowland/ Staff Writer
(Created: Thursday, October 16, 2008 1:02 PM CDT)
Sarah Chiang has come a long way since she took up chess four years ago. The 11-year-old leaves Friday morning for Vietnam and her second appearance at the World chess Championships.
Sarah was originally taught the game by her father and shortly after joined a Southlake city-wide chess club to perfect her skills.
When asked about how she felt about her upcoming matches she said, “It’s going to be hard, I think it is hard because you can’t really master a game of chess all the way through because there is always something new.”
To get ready for the upcoming tournament, Sarah studies her openings.According to Christine Chiang, Sarah’s mom, the game of chess is broken up into three parts openings, middle games, and end games. “(In openings) all the pieces are still on the board, so you plan the best place to put your pieces,” Christine said.
Sarah has also been practicing tactics, which includes tricks and traps. Her mom said she practices 50 to 100 of these a day.
Sarah also works with a chess coach. “He usually teaches us middle game strategy and what you think and the ideas behind it,” Sarah said.
Sarah leaves Friday for Vietnam and the tournament runs from Oct.17 through Nov.1 with only one day of rest. When she gets there, her typical schedule will be to wake up, eat breakfast, spend a half-hour working with her coach, play a match, go over match with her coach, eat dinner and go to bed.
The matches start at 3 p.m. everyday and can last hours. Christine explained that each player gets 90 minutes to play, but after each move they make, they hit the clock on their side and it adds 30 seconds back to the clock. “Sometimes in a game you get stuck and use up a lot of time,” Sarah said.
A player wins a chess game if they checkmate the other player, if one player runs out of time, or if there is a draw, which means that there are no pieces on the board to make a move with. “Chess is a battle of ideas across the board,” Sarah said. “Every single game is different and there are always new challenges to meet and it’s always interesting.”
There are 11 rounds in the tournament and each player acquires points in the rounds.. A win earns one point, a draw earns half a point, and a loss gets zero points.
There are 68 girls in Sarah’s category representing 39 different countries. Sarah represents the U.S. Team under 12. Last year, she placed second in the world and earned the title Woman Candidate Master. She had eight and a half points.“(This year) I just hope I don’t do bad. It would be wonderful if I got first but I don’t know,” Sarah said.
Sarah will be joined in Vietnam by her little brother, Jonathan, who also plays on the U.S. Chess team under 8 division.
Katherine Neville "The Fire"
I started reading "The Fire" on the bus ride to the office this morning. Read some more on the ride home tonight. Wow! Unbelievably, I guess I won't be giving too much away to say it starts out with a bang.
So, for the next few days as I snatch time to read, I won't be here much!
So, for the next few days as I snatch time to read, I won't be here much!
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
When Did People Arrive in the Americas?
From The Archaeology Channel:
ICE AGE DISCOVERIES: NEW EVIDENCE
Location: Virginia Length: 30 min. (Windows Media Player 56k 300k 700k) (Real Player 56k 300k 700k)
Click on your speed to play
Recent excavations at a number of sites, including Cactus Hill located along the Nottoway River in southwest Virginia, have provided new evidence and raised new questions about when people ventured into the Americas. For many years, archaeologists thought that people arrived approximately 11,500 years ago. However, stone artifacts, charcoal, and soil, plant and animal remains suggest human habitation at Cactus Hill at least 18,000 years ago, when much of the continent was under ice.
ICE AGE DISCOVERIES: NEW EVIDENCE
Location: Virginia Length: 30 min. (Windows Media Player 56k 300k 700k) (Real Player 56k 300k 700k)
Click on your speed to play
Recent excavations at a number of sites, including Cactus Hill located along the Nottoway River in southwest Virginia, have provided new evidence and raised new questions about when people ventured into the Americas. For many years, archaeologists thought that people arrived approximately 11,500 years ago. However, stone artifacts, charcoal, and soil, plant and animal remains suggest human habitation at Cactus Hill at least 18,000 years ago, when much of the continent was under ice.
Supporting Local Chess: The Southwest Chess Club, Hales Corners, WI
I have news! The results of the judging for the "best games" prizes funded by Goddesschess at the Hales Corners Challenge VIII on October 4, 2008 are in:
Best Game by a Female Player--$25: won by Joanna Huang for her victory over Al Buschmann; and Best Game by a Male Player--$25: won by Andrew Grochowski for his victory over Bill Olk. The prize games can be replayed here.
Here is the entire announcement from my adopted Club's website:
Our club sponsors two weekend tournaments each year (October & April). The Hales Corners Challenge VIII was held on Saturday, October 4, 2008 at the Wyndham Milwaukee Airport Hotel. In addition to the usual prizes, Goddess Chess sponsored additional prizes: Top Finishing Female Player--$50: won by Nicole Niemi; Best Game by a Female Player--$25: won by Joanna Huang for her victory over Al Buschmann; and Best Game by a Male Player--$25: won by Andrew Grochowski for his victory over Bill Olk. The prize games can be replayed here.
Stay tuned for details on our next Hales Corners Challenge series tournament, scheduled for April 25, 2009 (probably at the Wyndham Milwaukee Airport Hotel).
It was a lot of fun for Goddesschess to sponsor prizes for local events in Milwaukee and Montreal this year. We're already looking forward to 2009.
Best Game by a Female Player--$25: won by Joanna Huang for her victory over Al Buschmann; and Best Game by a Male Player--$25: won by Andrew Grochowski for his victory over Bill Olk. The prize games can be replayed here.
Here is the entire announcement from my adopted Club's website:
Our club sponsors two weekend tournaments each year (October & April). The Hales Corners Challenge VIII was held on Saturday, October 4, 2008 at the Wyndham Milwaukee Airport Hotel. In addition to the usual prizes, Goddess Chess sponsored additional prizes: Top Finishing Female Player--$50: won by Nicole Niemi; Best Game by a Female Player--$25: won by Joanna Huang for her victory over Al Buschmann; and Best Game by a Male Player--$25: won by Andrew Grochowski for his victory over Bill Olk. The prize games can be replayed here.
Stay tuned for details on our next Hales Corners Challenge series tournament, scheduled for April 25, 2009 (probably at the Wyndham Milwaukee Airport Hotel).
***************************************************
Thanks to the folks who volunteered to go over the games after the tournament finished to select the games for the "best games" prizes. It was a lot of fun for Goddesschess to sponsor prizes for local events in Milwaukee and Montreal this year. We're already looking forward to 2009.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Byzantine Mosaics of the Amazon Queens
From Today's Zaman:Amazonian queen excavations reveal ancient palace in Şanlıurfa
Excavation work in southeastern Şanlıurfa province has led to the discovery of a Roman palace (A.D. fifth to sixth century) and floor mosaics.
The Anatolia news agency reported on Sunday that the Haleplibahçe district, one of the oldest historical residential areas of the city, constitutes an important part of the ancient city of Edessa, famous for its wall pictures depicting the Amazonian queens Hippolyte, Antiope, Melanippe and Penthesileia hunting in the forest. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism began the excavation work two years ago after these wall pictures were found.
Archeologists have analyzed the mosaic of goddess Kticic, the founder and guardian goddess, found during the course of this year's excavations, which lasted for four months. She stands in the foreground, holding the scales of justice in her hand. The background includes a black man and a zebra. The archeologists explained that the figure of the black man and the zebra in mosaics are characteristic of Palestine and that this was the first time they had been encountered in Turkey. The work also partly revealed a mosaic that depicts a scene in which Chiron, the trainer of Achilles -- the famous Greek mythological warrior -- is learning how to fight. Excavation work in the region still continues and, following its completion, the area will be turned into an archeology park.
Mehmet Önal, one of the archeologists working on the Haleplibahçe excavations, said the mosaics they found were very similar to those found in Antakya and Byzantine mosaics in İstanbul. Önal noted that they have revealed western, northern and eastern walls of the ancient building this year, adding that there were also fountains and shallow pools around the walls of the palace. Önal stated that the palace had a 34-meter-long baronial hall with a floor covered with mosaics, adding that the palace was similar to villas that were found in the ancient city of Zeugma in Gaziantep province. However, none of the villas in Zeugma had a hall of this size. "The tesserae used for the mosaics of this palace are very small, which shows that the workmanship of the mosaics was very good. This shows that the palace belonged to an important administrator of the Eastern Roman Empire," Önal said, adding: "There is an unbelievable color harmony in the mosaics with their rich anatomical figures. No other mosaic has ever had the influential image of the horse that Amazonian Penthesilea rides."
14 October 2008, Tues
Tuesday
TODAY'S ZAMAN WITH WIRES İSTANBUL
Kumar Purnima and Puja to Laxmi
Two celebrations running concurrently in parts of India:
Hemant Kumar Rout I ENS
First Published : 14 Oct 2008 11:05:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 14 Oct 2008 01:24:34 PM IST
BALASORE: After bidding adieu to Goddess Durga, girls of the coastal district of Balasore are all set to celebrate Kumar Purnima, on Tuesday. It is a festival of unmarried girls.
This autumn festival is celebrated on a full-moon day in the month of Aswina and is one of the most popular festivals of Orissa.
Kumar or Kartikeya, the son of Lord Shiva was born on this day. During the festival, instead of any God, the girls worship the Sun and the Moon. “We have been celebrating this festival for years. As this is the only festival for teenage girls, we eagerly wait to celebrate it. It spreads the message of togetherness,” said Sumitra Mohanty, a college girl.
Puja to Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth, also starts from the day of Kumar Purnima and continues for a week.
Beautiful images of Goddess Laxmi are prepared in clay and worshiped in brightly decorated puja pandals. Besides the ‘sarbajanin’ pujas, some people also offer puja to the Goddess after installing idols in their houses.
“Many people worship the Goddess in their homes and keep themselves awake by playing pasa (chess), and other indoor games. Significantly, it suggests that those who wish to acquire wealth should always be vigilant at night. It is for this reason that the owl, the carrier of Goddess Laxmi, sleeps in the day and comes out only at night,” said Gananatha Padhi, a priest.
Hemant Kumar Rout I ENS
First Published : 14 Oct 2008 11:05:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 14 Oct 2008 01:24:34 PM IST
BALASORE: After bidding adieu to Goddess Durga, girls of the coastal district of Balasore are all set to celebrate Kumar Purnima, on Tuesday. It is a festival of unmarried girls.
This autumn festival is celebrated on a full-moon day in the month of Aswina and is one of the most popular festivals of Orissa.
Kumar or Kartikeya, the son of Lord Shiva was born on this day. During the festival, instead of any God, the girls worship the Sun and the Moon. “We have been celebrating this festival for years. As this is the only festival for teenage girls, we eagerly wait to celebrate it. It spreads the message of togetherness,” said Sumitra Mohanty, a college girl.
Puja to Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth, also starts from the day of Kumar Purnima and continues for a week.
Beautiful images of Goddess Laxmi are prepared in clay and worshiped in brightly decorated puja pandals. Besides the ‘sarbajanin’ pujas, some people also offer puja to the Goddess after installing idols in their houses.
“Many people worship the Goddess in their homes and keep themselves awake by playing pasa (chess), and other indoor games. Significantly, it suggests that those who wish to acquire wealth should always be vigilant at night. It is for this reason that the owl, the carrier of Goddess Laxmi, sleeps in the day and comes out only at night,” said Gananatha Padhi, a priest.
Politkovskaya family lawyer ill, possibly poisoned
From the website for The Committee to Protect Journalists:
FRANCE/RUSSIA: Politkovskaya family lawyer ill, possibly poisoned
New York, October 14, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about the welfare of Russian lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, who represents the family of slain Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Moskalenko was the target of an apparent poisoning in Strasbourg, France, days before she was due to appear in a Moscow court for pretrial proceedings for three suspects charged in Politkovskaya’s October 2006 slaying, news reports said.
“We are shocked by this apparent attempt to intimidate Karinna Moskalenko,” CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. “We wish Moskalenko and her family a speedy recovery, and we call on French and Russian authorities to investigate the matter thoroughly.”
Moskalenko was sickened by a mercury-like substance she found beneath the rugs of her car on Sunday morning, according to Sergei Sokolov, Novaya Gazeta’s deputy editor-in-chief. French police opened a criminal investigation but have not commented publicly, Agence France-Presse reported. Investigators were working to identify the substance, which the Moskalenkos found because the car’s rugs were not fitting properly, according to Russian press reports.
Moskalenko had felt weak for several days, suffering nausea, coughing, swelling, and headaches, according to Russian press reports. The lawyer, who lives part-time in Strasbourg with her husband and three children because of her frequent appearances before the European Court of Human Rights, told the independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy, that her children suffered similar symptoms.
Sokolov, who is in contact with the lawyer, said Moskalenko and her family were examined by doctors in Strasbourg today and were told they would recover. Doctors did not publicly disclose a diagnosis, but the lawyer said she believed the illnesses were tied to the substance, news reports said.
Sokolov said lingering illness would preclude Moskalenko from traveling to Moscow for Wednesday’s scheduled opening of the Politkovskaya murder proceedings. A preliminary hearing in the case against Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police officer with the Moscow Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, and brothers Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov is due to start on Wednesday in Moscow District Military Court, Sokolov said. He said Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya, and defense lawyer Anna Stavitskaya are expected to seek a postponement because of the Strasbourg incident.
The preliminary hearing is significant. Sokolov told CPJ that the hearing would determine whether the case would be heard by a jury or a judge; if the defendants would be held in custody during the proceedings; and whether the trial would be open to the public. Novaya Gazeta and CPJ have called for the proceedings to be open.
Sokolov told CPJ that the motive for the apparent poisoning is unclear. Moskalenko has been involved in a number of sensitive cases. Her clients include Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned former chief executive of oil conglomerate Yukos; Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion turned opposition leader, dissident Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was slained in London in 2006; and the relatives of slain journalist Dmitry Kholodov, who was murdered in October 1994.
Moskalenko and her team of lawyers at the Moscow-based International Protection Center have won 27 cases before the European Court of Human Rights and have more than a 100 cases pending, according to the Russian independent news Web site Gazeta. She has represented families of torture victims in Chechnya, as well as relatives of victims of the 2002 Nord-Ost theater hostage crisis in Moscow and the 2004 school hostage crisis in Beslan, according to Russian press reports.
© 2008 Committee to Protect Journalists. http://www.cpj.org E-mail: info@cpj.org
FRANCE/RUSSIA: Politkovskaya family lawyer ill, possibly poisoned
New York, October 14, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about the welfare of Russian lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, who represents the family of slain Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Moskalenko was the target of an apparent poisoning in Strasbourg, France, days before she was due to appear in a Moscow court for pretrial proceedings for three suspects charged in Politkovskaya’s October 2006 slaying, news reports said.
“We are shocked by this apparent attempt to intimidate Karinna Moskalenko,” CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. “We wish Moskalenko and her family a speedy recovery, and we call on French and Russian authorities to investigate the matter thoroughly.”
Moskalenko was sickened by a mercury-like substance she found beneath the rugs of her car on Sunday morning, according to Sergei Sokolov, Novaya Gazeta’s deputy editor-in-chief. French police opened a criminal investigation but have not commented publicly, Agence France-Presse reported. Investigators were working to identify the substance, which the Moskalenkos found because the car’s rugs were not fitting properly, according to Russian press reports.
Moskalenko had felt weak for several days, suffering nausea, coughing, swelling, and headaches, according to Russian press reports. The lawyer, who lives part-time in Strasbourg with her husband and three children because of her frequent appearances before the European Court of Human Rights, told the independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy, that her children suffered similar symptoms.
Sokolov, who is in contact with the lawyer, said Moskalenko and her family were examined by doctors in Strasbourg today and were told they would recover. Doctors did not publicly disclose a diagnosis, but the lawyer said she believed the illnesses were tied to the substance, news reports said.
Sokolov said lingering illness would preclude Moskalenko from traveling to Moscow for Wednesday’s scheduled opening of the Politkovskaya murder proceedings. A preliminary hearing in the case against Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police officer with the Moscow Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, and brothers Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov is due to start on Wednesday in Moscow District Military Court, Sokolov said. He said Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya, and defense lawyer Anna Stavitskaya are expected to seek a postponement because of the Strasbourg incident.
The preliminary hearing is significant. Sokolov told CPJ that the hearing would determine whether the case would be heard by a jury or a judge; if the defendants would be held in custody during the proceedings; and whether the trial would be open to the public. Novaya Gazeta and CPJ have called for the proceedings to be open.
Sokolov told CPJ that the motive for the apparent poisoning is unclear. Moskalenko has been involved in a number of sensitive cases. Her clients include Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned former chief executive of oil conglomerate Yukos; Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion turned opposition leader, dissident Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was slained in London in 2006; and the relatives of slain journalist Dmitry Kholodov, who was murdered in October 1994.
Moskalenko and her team of lawyers at the Moscow-based International Protection Center have won 27 cases before the European Court of Human Rights and have more than a 100 cases pending, according to the Russian independent news Web site Gazeta. She has represented families of torture victims in Chechnya, as well as relatives of victims of the 2002 Nord-Ost theater hostage crisis in Moscow and the 2004 school hostage crisis in Beslan, according to Russian press reports.
© 2008 Committee to Protect Journalists. http://www.cpj.org E-mail: info@cpj.org
Katherine Neville "The Fire"
Whoa! My copy of Neville's long-awaited seqel to "The Eight" is on its way from Borders online, yippee! Saw this - an excerpt from USA Today!!!
Excerpt from 'The Fire'
9/4/2008 11:33 AM
By Katherine Neville
EXCERPT...
THE BLACK LAND
Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne eorl, ponne his ellen deah.
(Unless he is already doomed, fortune is apt to favor the man who keeps his nerve.)
–Beowulf
Mesa Verde, Colorado Spring 2003
BEFORE I'D EVEN REACHED THE HOUSE, I KNEW SOMETHING was wrong. Very wrong. Even though on the surface, it all seemed picture-perfect.
The steep, sweeping curve of drive was blanketed deep in snow and lined with stately rows of towering Colorado blue spruce. Their snow-covered branches sparkled like rose quartz in the early morning light. Atop the hill, where the driveway flattened and spread out for parking, I pulled up my rented Land Rover in front of the lodge.
A lazy curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the moss rock chimney that formed the center of the building. The rich scent of pine smoke pervaded the air, which meant that–although I might not be warmly welcomed after all this time–at least I was expected.
To confirm this, I saw that my mother's truck and jeep were both sitting side-by-side in the former horse stable at the edge of the parking area. I did find it odd, though, that the drive had not yet been plowed and there were no tracks. If I were expected, wouldn't someone have cleared a path?
Now that I was here at last, in the only place I'd ever called home, you would think I could finally relax. But I couldn't shake the sense that something was wrong.
Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon–patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge–with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
Each female descendant had lived here at one time or another, including my mother and me.. .. So what was wrong with me? Why couldn't I ever come here without this sense of impending doom? I knew why, of course. And so did my mother. It was the thing we never spoke about. That's why–when I had finally left home for good–my mother understood. She'd never insisted, like other mothers, that I come back for familial visits.
That is, not until today.
But then, my presence today hadn't exactly been by invitation–it was more of a summons, a cryptic message that Mother had left on my home phone back in Washington D.C., when she knew very well I'd be off at work.
She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party.
And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.
You see, my mother didn't have birthdays. She'd never had birthdays.
I don't mean she was concerned about her youth or appearance or wished to lie about her age–in fact, she looked more youthful each year.
But the strange truth was, she didn't want anyone outside of our family even to know when her birthday was.
This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncracies–like the fact that she'd been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years, ever since. .. the thing we never spoke about–all went far to explain why there were those who may have perceived my mother, Catherine Velis, as a pretty eccentric duck.
The other part of my current problem was that I hadn't been able to contact my mother for an explanation of her sudden revelation. She'd answered neither her phone nor the messages I'd left for her, here at the lodge. The alternate number she'd given me was clearly not right–it was missing some final digits.
With my first true inkling that something was really wrong, I'd taken a few days off work, bought a ticket, caught the last flight into Cortez, Colorado, in a blizzard, and rented the last four-wheel-drive vehicle in the airport lot.
Now I left the engine running as I sat here for a moment, letting my eyes graze over the breathtaking panoramic view. I hadn't been home in more than four years. And each time I saw it afresh, it smacked the wind out of me.
I got out of the Rover in knee-deep snow and let the engine run.
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus–which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.
Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook'o'osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah–"Home of the Diné," as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states–Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona–come together at right angles to form a cross.
Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of this land.
For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow important. I knew that was why she had left a message strange enough to bring me to this spot.
And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she'd insisted I come here today. For today–April fourth–actually was my mother, Cat Velis's, birthday.
I YANKED MY KEYS FROM THE IGNITION, GRABBED MY hastily packed duffle bag from the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-yearold front doors. These huge doors–two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut from ancient trees–were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face. And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.
Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were pretty realistic–with glass eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear's paw, her jaw dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to alert those within.
I did both and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response. Someone must have been inside–the chimney was active. And I knew from practice that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.
My situation suddenly dawned on me: Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn't have a key.
My alternative–wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window–seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn't get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks–even deer tracks–anywhere near the house.
So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cellphone out of my pocket and dialed Mother's number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank: "I can be reached at. .. " and she rattled off the same number she'd left on my D.C. phone–still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?
And then I remembered the game.
My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author Ladislaus Nim. He'd been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn't seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house.
Telephones, no–but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He'd written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn't real–it must be some kind of encrypted message.
That was his delight.
It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn't even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn't invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.
More unlikely still, was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn't talked to my uncle in years, not since. .. the thing we never spoke about.
Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.
I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she'd gone.
I called her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she'd left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first. "I can be reached at 615-263-94.. ." my mother's recorded voice said.
My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad. I'd been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava's puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.
It took about ten minutes to figure it out–much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with:
61-52-63-94
If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with two-digit square numbers, starting with the square of four. That is, the products of four, five, six, and seven when multiplied by themselves:
16-25-36-49
The next number in the sequence–and the missing number–was eight. So the missing last two digits of the series were the square of eight–that is, 64. In the real puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46–but that wasn't it.
I knew–and so did my mother–that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a chess board, with eight squares on each side.
In a nutshell: the thing we never talked about.
My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess–even to permit it into her house. Since my father's death (the other thing which we never talked about), I was forbidden ever to play the game–the only thing I'd ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.
My mother was opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I'd never been able to follow her logic–if indeed, it was logic–to my mother's mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.
But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.
I TIMED IT: IT TOOK ME TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES AND– since I'd left the engine running–a gallon of hog-guzzling gas, until I figured out how to get inside.
By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lock box. The keys to the cars were kept there.
Would I be justified in saying "Duh"?
I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn–and voil?!–a few tumblers dropped, the door to the lock box opened, and the door key appeared on a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted into the eagle's left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.
I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted morning light.
Within the dim interior of the mud room–an entry not much bigger than a confessional that kept the cold winds out–I kicked off my dripping boots and pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin apr?s-ski booties that always sat there atop our frozen-food locker. When I'd hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in the central hearth.
The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the moss stone chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on, but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.
The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.
Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.
I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: There was not one print to be seen, anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.
But how had she done it?
It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.
A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop mother's British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.
"Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this god forsaken spot?" came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew only too well. "And for that matter, where on earth are you? We've been driving around this wilderness for what seems like days!" There was a pause, when she seemed to be speaking to someone else.
"Aunt Lily?" I said.
For it was surely she–my aunt, Lily Rad–my first chess mentor, and still one of the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she'd been my mother's best friend, though they hadn't touched base in years. But what was she doing calling here now? And driving around–what on earth did that mean?
"Alexandra?" said Lily, confused. "I thought I was phoning your mother. What are you doing there? I thought you and she weren't. .. on the best of terms."
"We've reconciled," I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again. "But mother doesn't seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?"
"She's not there?! You can't be serious," Lily said, fuming. "I've come all the way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party– God knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone's guess! The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I'm in Purgatory–and I'm fully able to accept that judgment. We haven't seen anything resembling civilization for hours."
"You're here? In Purgatory?" I said. "That's a ski area; it's less than an hour from here." But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? "When did mother invite you?"
"It wasn't so much an invitation as an edict," Lily admitted. "She left the news on my cellphone, with no means to reply." There was a pause, then Lily added, "I adore your mother–you know that, Alexandra. But I could never accept–"
"Neither could I," I agreed. "Let's drop it. So how did you know how to find her?"
"I didn't! Good God, I still don't! My car's by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from Hell; there's no edible food; my driver refuses to budge without being given a pint of vodka; my dog has disappeared into some. .. dune of snow, chasing some local rodent. .. and–I might add–I have had more trouble locating your mother by phone, this past week, than the Mossad had in tracking down Doctor Mengele in South America!"
She was hyperventillating. I considered it was time to intervene.
"It's okay, Aunt Lily," I told her. "We'll get you here. As for food, you know I can whip something up. There's always plenty of tinned food here and vodka for your driver–we can put him up, too, if you like. I'm too far away; it would take me too long to reach you. But if you'll give me your satellite coordinates, I've a friend quite near there who can escort you here to the lodge."
"Whomever he may be, bless him," said my aunt Lily, not a person normally given to gratitude.
"It's a she," I said. "And her name is Key. She'll be there in half an hour." I took down Lily's cellphone number and left a message at the airstrip to arrange for Key to pick her up. Key had been my best friend since childhood, but she'd be more than surprised to learn that I'd turned up here with no warning after all this time.
As I hung up the phone, I saw something across the room that I hadn't noticed before. The top of Mother's parlor grand piano–which was always raised, in case she got the urge to play–had been lowered flat. Atop was a piece of paper with a round, dark weight set upon it. I went over to look, and I felt the blood flooding into my brain.
The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metal key ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billiard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she'd worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.
The note, in large print, read:
–Washington
–Luxury Car
–Virgin Isles
–Elvis Lives
–As Above So Below
The Elvis part was simple: My mother's last name– Velis–was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.
Washington was, of course, "DC"; Luxury Car was "LX"; Virgin Isles was "VI." Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:
D = 500
C = 100
L = 50
X = 10
V = 5
I = 1
Tally them up, and it's 666–the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.
I wasn't worried about that Beast–we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother. Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top–another standard bunkum, "Behind the eight ball"–what on earth did that mean?
And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, "As Above, So Below"?
Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.
There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother's house as long as she lived.
A chess set.
Not just a chess set–but a chess set with a game set up, a game that was partially in play. There were pieces that had been removed from the field of play and set out upon the keyboard strings at either side–black or white.
The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table–good heavens, Mother, really!–and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.
It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.
I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I'd sacrificed–what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything except the game before me–the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.
But as I reconstructed the moves, dawn arose through the high glass windows–just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind, these past ten years?
For I knew this game quite well.
It was the game that had killed my father.
THE FIRE
ISBN: 978-0-345-50067-0
On Sale: October 14, 2008
$26.00
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Excerpt from 'The Fire'
9/4/2008 11:33 AM
By Katherine Neville
EXCERPT...
THE BLACK LAND
Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne eorl, ponne his ellen deah.
(Unless he is already doomed, fortune is apt to favor the man who keeps his nerve.)
–Beowulf
Mesa Verde, Colorado Spring 2003
BEFORE I'D EVEN REACHED THE HOUSE, I KNEW SOMETHING was wrong. Very wrong. Even though on the surface, it all seemed picture-perfect.
The steep, sweeping curve of drive was blanketed deep in snow and lined with stately rows of towering Colorado blue spruce. Their snow-covered branches sparkled like rose quartz in the early morning light. Atop the hill, where the driveway flattened and spread out for parking, I pulled up my rented Land Rover in front of the lodge.
A lazy curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the moss rock chimney that formed the center of the building. The rich scent of pine smoke pervaded the air, which meant that–although I might not be warmly welcomed after all this time–at least I was expected.
To confirm this, I saw that my mother's truck and jeep were both sitting side-by-side in the former horse stable at the edge of the parking area. I did find it odd, though, that the drive had not yet been plowed and there were no tracks. If I were expected, wouldn't someone have cleared a path?
Now that I was here at last, in the only place I'd ever called home, you would think I could finally relax. But I couldn't shake the sense that something was wrong.
Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon–patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge–with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
Each female descendant had lived here at one time or another, including my mother and me.. .. So what was wrong with me? Why couldn't I ever come here without this sense of impending doom? I knew why, of course. And so did my mother. It was the thing we never spoke about. That's why–when I had finally left home for good–my mother understood. She'd never insisted, like other mothers, that I come back for familial visits.
That is, not until today.
But then, my presence today hadn't exactly been by invitation–it was more of a summons, a cryptic message that Mother had left on my home phone back in Washington D.C., when she knew very well I'd be off at work.
She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party.
And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.
You see, my mother didn't have birthdays. She'd never had birthdays.
I don't mean she was concerned about her youth or appearance or wished to lie about her age–in fact, she looked more youthful each year.
But the strange truth was, she didn't want anyone outside of our family even to know when her birthday was.
This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncracies–like the fact that she'd been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years, ever since. .. the thing we never spoke about–all went far to explain why there were those who may have perceived my mother, Catherine Velis, as a pretty eccentric duck.
The other part of my current problem was that I hadn't been able to contact my mother for an explanation of her sudden revelation. She'd answered neither her phone nor the messages I'd left for her, here at the lodge. The alternate number she'd given me was clearly not right–it was missing some final digits.
With my first true inkling that something was really wrong, I'd taken a few days off work, bought a ticket, caught the last flight into Cortez, Colorado, in a blizzard, and rented the last four-wheel-drive vehicle in the airport lot.
Now I left the engine running as I sat here for a moment, letting my eyes graze over the breathtaking panoramic view. I hadn't been home in more than four years. And each time I saw it afresh, it smacked the wind out of me.
I got out of the Rover in knee-deep snow and let the engine run.
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus–which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.
Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook'o'osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah–"Home of the Diné," as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states–Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona–come together at right angles to form a cross.
Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of this land.
For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow important. I knew that was why she had left a message strange enough to bring me to this spot.
And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she'd insisted I come here today. For today–April fourth–actually was my mother, Cat Velis's, birthday.
I YANKED MY KEYS FROM THE IGNITION, GRABBED MY hastily packed duffle bag from the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-yearold front doors. These huge doors–two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut from ancient trees–were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face. And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.
Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were pretty realistic–with glass eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear's paw, her jaw dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to alert those within.
I did both and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response. Someone must have been inside–the chimney was active. And I knew from practice that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.
My situation suddenly dawned on me: Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn't have a key.
My alternative–wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window–seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn't get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks–even deer tracks–anywhere near the house.
So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cellphone out of my pocket and dialed Mother's number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank: "I can be reached at. .. " and she rattled off the same number she'd left on my D.C. phone–still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?
And then I remembered the game.
My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author Ladislaus Nim. He'd been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn't seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house.
Telephones, no–but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He'd written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn't real–it must be some kind of encrypted message.
That was his delight.
It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn't even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn't invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.
More unlikely still, was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn't talked to my uncle in years, not since. .. the thing we never spoke about.
Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.
I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she'd gone.
I called her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she'd left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first. "I can be reached at 615-263-94.. ." my mother's recorded voice said.
My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad. I'd been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava's puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.
It took about ten minutes to figure it out–much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with:
61-52-63-94
If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with two-digit square numbers, starting with the square of four. That is, the products of four, five, six, and seven when multiplied by themselves:
16-25-36-49
The next number in the sequence–and the missing number–was eight. So the missing last two digits of the series were the square of eight–that is, 64. In the real puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46–but that wasn't it.
I knew–and so did my mother–that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a chess board, with eight squares on each side.
In a nutshell: the thing we never talked about.
My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess–even to permit it into her house. Since my father's death (the other thing which we never talked about), I was forbidden ever to play the game–the only thing I'd ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.
My mother was opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I'd never been able to follow her logic–if indeed, it was logic–to my mother's mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.
But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.
I TIMED IT: IT TOOK ME TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES AND– since I'd left the engine running–a gallon of hog-guzzling gas, until I figured out how to get inside.
By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lock box. The keys to the cars were kept there.
Would I be justified in saying "Duh"?
I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn–and voil?!–a few tumblers dropped, the door to the lock box opened, and the door key appeared on a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted into the eagle's left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.
I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted morning light.
Within the dim interior of the mud room–an entry not much bigger than a confessional that kept the cold winds out–I kicked off my dripping boots and pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin apr?s-ski booties that always sat there atop our frozen-food locker. When I'd hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in the central hearth.
The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the moss stone chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on, but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.
The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.
Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.
I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: There was not one print to be seen, anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.
But how had she done it?
It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.
A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop mother's British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.
"Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this god forsaken spot?" came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew only too well. "And for that matter, where on earth are you? We've been driving around this wilderness for what seems like days!" There was a pause, when she seemed to be speaking to someone else.
"Aunt Lily?" I said.
For it was surely she–my aunt, Lily Rad–my first chess mentor, and still one of the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she'd been my mother's best friend, though they hadn't touched base in years. But what was she doing calling here now? And driving around–what on earth did that mean?
"Alexandra?" said Lily, confused. "I thought I was phoning your mother. What are you doing there? I thought you and she weren't. .. on the best of terms."
"We've reconciled," I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again. "But mother doesn't seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?"
"She's not there?! You can't be serious," Lily said, fuming. "I've come all the way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party– God knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone's guess! The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I'm in Purgatory–and I'm fully able to accept that judgment. We haven't seen anything resembling civilization for hours."
"You're here? In Purgatory?" I said. "That's a ski area; it's less than an hour from here." But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? "When did mother invite you?"
"It wasn't so much an invitation as an edict," Lily admitted. "She left the news on my cellphone, with no means to reply." There was a pause, then Lily added, "I adore your mother–you know that, Alexandra. But I could never accept–"
"Neither could I," I agreed. "Let's drop it. So how did you know how to find her?"
"I didn't! Good God, I still don't! My car's by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from Hell; there's no edible food; my driver refuses to budge without being given a pint of vodka; my dog has disappeared into some. .. dune of snow, chasing some local rodent. .. and–I might add–I have had more trouble locating your mother by phone, this past week, than the Mossad had in tracking down Doctor Mengele in South America!"
She was hyperventillating. I considered it was time to intervene.
"It's okay, Aunt Lily," I told her. "We'll get you here. As for food, you know I can whip something up. There's always plenty of tinned food here and vodka for your driver–we can put him up, too, if you like. I'm too far away; it would take me too long to reach you. But if you'll give me your satellite coordinates, I've a friend quite near there who can escort you here to the lodge."
"Whomever he may be, bless him," said my aunt Lily, not a person normally given to gratitude.
"It's a she," I said. "And her name is Key. She'll be there in half an hour." I took down Lily's cellphone number and left a message at the airstrip to arrange for Key to pick her up. Key had been my best friend since childhood, but she'd be more than surprised to learn that I'd turned up here with no warning after all this time.
As I hung up the phone, I saw something across the room that I hadn't noticed before. The top of Mother's parlor grand piano–which was always raised, in case she got the urge to play–had been lowered flat. Atop was a piece of paper with a round, dark weight set upon it. I went over to look, and I felt the blood flooding into my brain.
The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metal key ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billiard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she'd worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.
The note, in large print, read:
–Washington
–Luxury Car
–Virgin Isles
–Elvis Lives
–As Above So Below
The Elvis part was simple: My mother's last name– Velis–was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.
Washington was, of course, "DC"; Luxury Car was "LX"; Virgin Isles was "VI." Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:
D = 500
C = 100
L = 50
X = 10
V = 5
I = 1
Tally them up, and it's 666–the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.
I wasn't worried about that Beast–we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother. Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top–another standard bunkum, "Behind the eight ball"–what on earth did that mean?
And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, "As Above, So Below"?
Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.
There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother's house as long as she lived.
A chess set.
Not just a chess set–but a chess set with a game set up, a game that was partially in play. There were pieces that had been removed from the field of play and set out upon the keyboard strings at either side–black or white.
The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table–good heavens, Mother, really!–and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.
It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.
I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I'd sacrificed–what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything except the game before me–the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.
But as I reconstructed the moves, dawn arose through the high glass windows–just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind, these past ten years?
For I knew this game quite well.
It was the game that had killed my father.
THE FIRE
ISBN: 978-0-345-50067-0
On Sale: October 14, 2008
$26.00
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Young Philippines Players Headed to World Youth Chess Championships
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
4 Pangasinense chess players to compete in Vietnam
LINGAYEN -- Four Pangasinense young chess protégés will be flying to Vietnam to compete in the upcoming World Youth Chess Championships on October 19-31 in Vungtau, Vietnam. The chess players are Haridas Pascua of Mangatarem (15 years old), Prince Mark Aquino of San Nicolas (13 years old), Cherry Ann Mejia of San Jacinto (13 years old), and Samantha Glo Revita of Rosales (eight years old).
Pascua and Revita had played in several international competitions and brought home several medals. Mejia said it will be her second competition abroad. Aquino has also experienced playing in other countries.
Last Monday, Sangguniang Kabataan Provincial Federation president Kazel Celeste wished Mejia and the other players good luck during their visit to the provincial Capitol. Celeste also commended the parents of the four chess players for supporting their children especially when they compete abroad.
One of the parents said it is really hard work and patience for them as they shoulder all of the expenses of their children.
The National Chess Federation extends no financial assistance to the players. (LCMY/Sunnex)
4 Pangasinense chess players to compete in Vietnam
LINGAYEN -- Four Pangasinense young chess protégés will be flying to Vietnam to compete in the upcoming World Youth Chess Championships on October 19-31 in Vungtau, Vietnam. The chess players are Haridas Pascua of Mangatarem (15 years old), Prince Mark Aquino of San Nicolas (13 years old), Cherry Ann Mejia of San Jacinto (13 years old), and Samantha Glo Revita of Rosales (eight years old).
Pascua and Revita had played in several international competitions and brought home several medals. Mejia said it will be her second competition abroad. Aquino has also experienced playing in other countries.
Last Monday, Sangguniang Kabataan Provincial Federation president Kazel Celeste wished Mejia and the other players good luck during their visit to the provincial Capitol. Celeste also commended the parents of the four chess players for supporting their children especially when they compete abroad.
One of the parents said it is really hard work and patience for them as they shoulder all of the expenses of their children.
The National Chess Federation extends no financial assistance to the players. (LCMY/Sunnex)
Alisha Chawla: Chess Princess
Fremont girl is a chess star at age 7Posted by tomlangland on Tuesday, October 14 @ 10:58:59 CDT
Photo: From Susan Polgar Girls Blog
Alisha Chawla isn't much for dolls, but she loves the children's book, "A Little Princess," and adores the queen.
How fitting for Fremont's 7-year-old little princess of chess, the highest-rated female player for her age in Northern California, who is rapidly becoming one of the best in the country.
Alisha is adorable. She's sweet and petite. Like most 7-year-olds, she's precocious at times and shy at others. For her first newspaper interview, she pretty much stuck to one-word answers and required frequent eye-glance reassurance from her mother.
But on a chess board, particularly wielding her favorite piece — the queen — Little Miss Chawla quickly transforms into a tiger. She moves the pieces authoritatively and thumps them hard onto the board wherever she places them. It's intimidating, even for an adult sports columnist who challenged her to a game.
"I like to win," Alisha said with an innocent but confident smile.
A large shelf in her room proves that she's already won a lot. It's loaded with trophies, and she quickly removed her piano recital and softball trophies to display just the ones she's accumulated playing chess — 22 by her count. It looked like more.
One of the largest trophies in Alisha's growing collection came less than two weeks ago, when she tied for first in her age group at the Las Vegas International Chess Festival, winning four of five games. Her achievement landed her a spot in the prestigious Susan Polgar National Invitational For Girls at Texas Tech in July, an event that will bring together the country's top young female players.
Alisha's biggest honor, however, was the invitation she recently received to participate in the World Youth Chess Championships in Vung Tau, Vietnam, Oct. 19 to 31. It's an unprecedented development for the renowned Weibel Elementary School chess program, which attracts more than 200 K-6 students every year to learn and play the most cerebral of strategy games.
"We've had some fine, highly ranked players who placed high at the state and national levels in the past," said Dr. Alan Kirshner, an Ohlone College history/political science professor who has run the Weibel program since 1988. "But this is the first time we've ever had any of our players invited to a world championship — male or female — so it's very, very exciting for us."
The Bay Area boasts some of the best preteen chess talent in the world. In March, 9-year-old Nicholas Nip of San Francisco became the youngest master in history by reaching a 2200 rating, an accomplishment that the late Bobby Fischer did not achieve until he was 13. In the East Bay, 7-year-old Tanuj Vasudeva of Newark tied for first in the Lerner National Elementary Championships in May, an event in which Chawla finished 57th but was the second-highest female finisher.
The United States Chess Federation lists Vasudeva as the fifth-ranked 7-and-under player in the country with a rating of 1545. Another Weibel 7-year-old, Kevin Moy, is ranked 42nd nationally (1020 rating), and Chawla is 77th and rated at 924. Ratings go up or down with wins and losses against other rated competition in tournaments, and Alisha has nearly doubled her rating in the past year.
"I'm no match for her now," said Alisha's mother, Sunanda Chawla, who taught her daughter to play when she was 3. Neither is her older brother, Ashwin, whom she followed into the Weibel program. Her father, Sanjeev, a telecommunications software executive, has to study constantly to keep up and win an occasional game.
While there are better players her age nationally, Alisha's distinction in chess is her gender. Young male chess players outnumber females by nearly 10 to 1, and the disparity grows as the competition gets tougher. Only in the past two decades have top women started to gain notice, largely because of the Hungarian-born Polgar sisters, Susan and Judit. Susan, the world women's chess champ from 1995 to 1999, is one of the game's leading promoters and authors. Judit is the highest-rated woman in history (eighth) and the only woman among the top 100 chess players in the world.
It's too early to know the full level of Alisha's potential. Her skills must be developed and refined. She has to increase her game study and also maintain her verve for playing. But she showed rare talent and the instincts of a fearless competitor in kindergarten.
"She doesn't like losing," said Ted Castro of Newark, chess tutor to 10 East Bay youngsters ranked in the top 100 nationally, including Chawla and Vasudeva. "She's very, very competitive and very feisty, too. She's very good at opening and she has excelled at tactics, but endgame is an area where she definitely needs to get better. She's a work in progress, but she has many, many years to improve."
She definitely has the heart of a champion. Chawla and Vasudeva "fought it out" for the state kindergarten championship last year, but Vasudeva won — no disgrace considering he had beaten Weibel's top sixth-graders. Kirshner and Castro said she did not take it well.
"She was so upset by losing, she would not accept the second-place trophy," said Kirshner. "You can see a determination in this young lady that's just unreal."
After losing three consecutive times to Vasudeva in competition, she finally beat him in a regional tournament last year.
"She didn't care how she did the rest of the tournament," said Castro, who tutors Alisha four hours a week. "She was jumping around and yelling, 'I beat Tanuj, I finally beat Tanuj.' "
Earlier this week, five other young Weibel players gathered in the Chawla's garage for a "simul" against Alisha. She played the five kids and one columnist on six boards at once. She went 3-3, beating 8-year-old Sangetha Bharath, 7-year-old Desiree Ho (state K-1 girls champ) and 7-year-old Luke Bugbee. She lost to Moy, in the top 50 nationally; 9-year-old Nick Bugbee and the 50-something columnist named Carl ... barely.
She had the columnist in trouble but missed a key move late that would have sealed her win. Ah, that endgame. Then again, it was Alisha's first real simul, and she doesn't often play adults other than her parents. She offered her tiny hand when the game ended, congratulated me and then ran away to play, later returning to pronounce me a good player. In truth, I was probably lucky.
I asked Alisha for some sage 7-year-old chess advice, which she graciously provided.
"Castle as early as you can, knights before bishops and hold back the queen," she said.
Add this one: If you're playing Alisha Chawla, ignore the puppy-dog eyes and the little princess look. She'll have you in checkmate before you can say, "Aw, how cute."
Source: http://www.contracostatimes.com/sports/ci_9630401?source=rss%C2%A0
Monday, October 13, 2008
On Auction: Game Counters Owned by Frank Marshall
From Sotheby's, on auction October 18, 2008:Sale: N08478 Location: New York
Auction Dates: Session 1: Fri, 17 Oct 08 10:00 AM
LOT 106 A SET OF THIRTY SILVER AND ENAMEL AND IVORY GAMING COUNTERS, PROBABLY AUSTRIAN, LATE 19TH CENTURY
5,000—7,000 USD
MEASUREMENTS
diameter 1 3/8 in. (3.6cm)
DESCRIPTION
the ivory discs applied with crowned cartouches enameled in translucent green or red with pellets, stars or crescents on ermine backgrounds, each with blue enamel ribbon suspending a crescent, fitted case
CATALOGUE NOTE
Stated to have been given as a chess prize to Frank Marshall, American chess champion.
A Pledge to the Goddess to Stop Female Foeticide
From IndiaExpress.com:
Ambaji pilgrims pledge before goddess to fight female foeticide
Amrita Didyala
Posted: Oct 13, 2008 at 0313 hrs IST
Ahmedabad, October 12
A total of five lakh ‘Sankalp Patras’ signed to save the girl child and curb sex discrimination
Pilgrims at the famous Ambaji temple in Banaskantha district found a new way to check the dwindling female sex ratio in the state - ‘Sankalp Patras’. The Ambaji Temple Committee members made the devotees sign the ‘Sankalp Patras’ to curb sex discrimination and female foeticide, along with a pledge to save the girl child. A total of five lakh ‘Sankalp Patras’ were signed.
R.J Patel, District Collector of Banaskantha and Chairman of the Ambaji Temple Committee, said: “Out of the 25 lakh pilgrims who visited Ambaji Temple, a total of 5 lakh devotees signed the Sankalp Patras in a span of 5 days between September 11 and 15.”
He added: “While the idea has been implemented for the first time at any religious place, the chances of its success are quite high as people have willingly taken a pledge before the goddess and are most likely to abide by it. In fact, we did not have to make too many efforts to persuade the devotees. All we had to do was to put up notice boards along with the Sankalp Patras.”
The Ambaji Development Authority also plans to implement the same method to make devotees pledge for saving the girl child by making the Sanklap Patras available in the soon-to-be developed replicas of the 51 Shaktipeeths at the Gabbar mountain.
Patel said: “We have plans to extend the experiment to other religious destinations in the area as well. This is for the first time that such an experiment has been undertaken at a religious place in the state. However, with the active participation of future devotees, the awareness campaign is bound to be effective.”
Ambaji pilgrims pledge before goddess to fight female foeticide
Amrita Didyala
Posted: Oct 13, 2008 at 0313 hrs IST
Ahmedabad, October 12
A total of five lakh ‘Sankalp Patras’ signed to save the girl child and curb sex discrimination
Pilgrims at the famous Ambaji temple in Banaskantha district found a new way to check the dwindling female sex ratio in the state - ‘Sankalp Patras’. The Ambaji Temple Committee members made the devotees sign the ‘Sankalp Patras’ to curb sex discrimination and female foeticide, along with a pledge to save the girl child. A total of five lakh ‘Sankalp Patras’ were signed.
R.J Patel, District Collector of Banaskantha and Chairman of the Ambaji Temple Committee, said: “Out of the 25 lakh pilgrims who visited Ambaji Temple, a total of 5 lakh devotees signed the Sankalp Patras in a span of 5 days between September 11 and 15.”
He added: “While the idea has been implemented for the first time at any religious place, the chances of its success are quite high as people have willingly taken a pledge before the goddess and are most likely to abide by it. In fact, we did not have to make too many efforts to persuade the devotees. All we had to do was to put up notice boards along with the Sankalp Patras.”
The Ambaji Development Authority also plans to implement the same method to make devotees pledge for saving the girl child by making the Sanklap Patras available in the soon-to-be developed replicas of the 51 Shaktipeeths at the Gabbar mountain.
Patel said: “We have plans to extend the experiment to other religious destinations in the area as well. This is for the first time that such an experiment has been undertaken at a religious place in the state. However, with the active participation of future devotees, the awareness campaign is bound to be effective.”
It's That Time of Year Again: Durga Puja Returns
A look at the Goddess and her Festival in the United States, from the NorthIndyStar.com:
For weekend, school hosts Hindu goddess
By Chris Sikich
Posted: October 13, 2008
Northview Middle School took on a new look this weekend for a Bengali religious event called the Durga Puja.
Hundreds of people from Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana flocked to Indianapolis on Saturday and Sunday for the 24th annual Tri State Durga Puja and erected a shrine in the Far-Northside school's gym.
The holiday honors the goddess Durga. Hindus believe she comes to Earth once a year to destroy evil and bring happiness to families.
Bengal is a state in northeast India, and the Bengali people practice a form of Hinduism that celebrates Durga Puja as its major holiday.
Dipan Basu, 60, president of the Bengali Association of Indiana, compares Durga Puja to Christmas in its importance. The Indianapolis event drew 700 adults and 200 children.
A statue of the 10-armed goddess showed her riding a lion and defeating a blue demon. Statues of her four children flanked her.
The devotees left their everyday clothes behind and donned traditional colorful robes and shirts for the celebration. They took off their shoes, knelt and prayed, and placed offerings of fruit, flowers and sweets on the floor before the statues.
They also listened to and watched musical and dance performances in the school's auditorium and enjoyed traditional Indian food.
Basu, a Rolls-Royce Corp. engineer from Carmel, said the event also serves social and cultural purposes, giving participants who don't see one another often the chance to connect.
Rabindra Mukerjea, 63, West Lafayette, director of strategic planning and assessment at Purdue University, sang philosophical and religious songs Saturday night.
"This is a wonderful gathering of people, not only for religious traditions but also for fellowship," Mukerjea said.
Saturday's festivities lasted past midnight, but many people were back at the school in time for the closing religious ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday. In Bengal, the holiday lasts 10 days; families observe five of the days privately and five with the community. Here, the five public days of celebration are condensed into a weekend, said Sudip Das, 49, Carmel.
The Tri State Durga Puja comes to Indiana every four years after making a stop in Kentucky and two in Ohio.
Related Information:
Durga: The most powerful deity
The Bengali believe the goddess Durga visits Earth once a year to destroy all evil and bring happiness to families.
She's the most powerful god or goddess in Bengali tradition and is depicted with 10 arms.
During Durga Puja, the Bengali pray and offer the goddess and her four children gifts such as fruit, flowers and sweets. After she defeats evil, she leaves Earth and returns to her husband, the god Shiva.
Source: Dipan Basu, president, Bengali Association of Indiana
For weekend, school hosts Hindu goddess
By Chris Sikich
Posted: October 13, 2008
Northview Middle School took on a new look this weekend for a Bengali religious event called the Durga Puja.
Hundreds of people from Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana flocked to Indianapolis on Saturday and Sunday for the 24th annual Tri State Durga Puja and erected a shrine in the Far-Northside school's gym.
The holiday honors the goddess Durga. Hindus believe she comes to Earth once a year to destroy evil and bring happiness to families.
Bengal is a state in northeast India, and the Bengali people practice a form of Hinduism that celebrates Durga Puja as its major holiday.
Dipan Basu, 60, president of the Bengali Association of Indiana, compares Durga Puja to Christmas in its importance. The Indianapolis event drew 700 adults and 200 children.
A statue of the 10-armed goddess showed her riding a lion and defeating a blue demon. Statues of her four children flanked her.
The devotees left their everyday clothes behind and donned traditional colorful robes and shirts for the celebration. They took off their shoes, knelt and prayed, and placed offerings of fruit, flowers and sweets on the floor before the statues.
They also listened to and watched musical and dance performances in the school's auditorium and enjoyed traditional Indian food.
Basu, a Rolls-Royce Corp. engineer from Carmel, said the event also serves social and cultural purposes, giving participants who don't see one another often the chance to connect.
Rabindra Mukerjea, 63, West Lafayette, director of strategic planning and assessment at Purdue University, sang philosophical and religious songs Saturday night.
"This is a wonderful gathering of people, not only for religious traditions but also for fellowship," Mukerjea said.
Saturday's festivities lasted past midnight, but many people were back at the school in time for the closing religious ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday. In Bengal, the holiday lasts 10 days; families observe five of the days privately and five with the community. Here, the five public days of celebration are condensed into a weekend, said Sudip Das, 49, Carmel.
The Tri State Durga Puja comes to Indiana every four years after making a stop in Kentucky and two in Ohio.
Related Information:
Durga: The most powerful deity
The Bengali believe the goddess Durga visits Earth once a year to destroy all evil and bring happiness to families.
She's the most powerful god or goddess in Bengali tradition and is depicted with 10 arms.
During Durga Puja, the Bengali pray and offer the goddess and her four children gifts such as fruit, flowers and sweets. After she defeats evil, she leaves Earth and returns to her husband, the god Shiva.
Source: Dipan Basu, president, Bengali Association of Indiana
Göbekli Tepe - Oldest Constructed Place of Worship Yet Discovered
From Archaeology Magazine:The World's First Temple
Volume 61 Number 6, November/December 2008
by Sandra Scham
Turkey's 12,000-year-old stone circles were the spiritual center of a nomadic people [Image: carved pillar, two boars and what the article calles "ostrich-like" birds on the top]
At first glance, the fox on the surface of the limestone pillar appears to be a trick of the bright sunlight. But as I move closer to the large, T-shaped megalith, I find it is carved with an improbable menagerie. A bull and a crane join the fox in an animal parade etched across the surface of the pillar, one of dozens erected by early Neolithic people at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. The press here is fond of calling the site "the Turkish Stonehenge," but the comparison hardly does justice to this 25-acre arrangement of at least seven stone circles. The first structures at Göbekli Tepe were built as early as 10,000 B.C., predating their famous British counterpart by about 7,000 years.
The oldest man-made place of worship yet discovered, Göbekli Tepe is "one of the most important monuments in the world," says Hassan Karabulut, associate curator of the nearby Urfa Museum. He and archaeologist Zerrin Ekdogan of the Turkish Ministry of Culture guide me around the site. Their enthusiasm for the ancient temple is palpable.
By the time of my visit in late summer, the excavation team lead by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute has wrapped up work for the season. But there is still plenty to see, including three excavated circles now protected by a large metal shelter. The megaliths, which may have once supported roofs, are about nine feet tall.
Göbekli Tepe's circles range from 30 to 100 feet in diameter and are surrounded by rectangular stone walls about six feet high. Many of the pillars are carved with elaborate animal figure reliefs. In addition to bulls, foxes, and cranes, representations of lions, ducks, scorpions, ants, spiders, and snakes appear on the pillars. Freestanding sculptures depicting the animals have also been found within the circles. During the most recent excavation season, archaeologists uncovered a statue of a human and sculptures of a vulture's head and a boar.
As we walk around the recently excavated pillars, the site seems at once familiar and exotic. I have seen stone circles before, but none like these.
Excavations have revealed that Göbekli Tepe was constructed in two stages. The oldest structures belong to what archaeologists call the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, which ended around 9000 B.C. Strangely enough, the later remains, which date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, or about 8000 B.C., are less elaborate. The earliest levels contain most of the T-shaped pillars and animal sculptures.
Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt downplays extravagant spiritual interpretations of Göbekli Tepe, such as the idea, made popular in the press, that the site is the inspiration for the Biblical Garden of Eden. But he does agree that it was a sanctuary of profound significance in the Neolithic world. He sees it as a key site in understanding the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from tribal to regional religion.
Schmidt and his colleagues estimate that at least 500 people were required to hew the 10- to 50-ton stone pillars from local quarries, move them from as far as a quarter-mile away, and erect them. How did Stone Age people achieve the level of organization necessary to do this? Hauptmann speculates that an elite class of religious leaders supervised the work and later controlled the rituals that took place at the site. If so, this would be the oldest known evidence for a priestly caste--much earlier than when social distinctions became evident at other Near Eastern sites. [Typical assumption, that the ancient people used an organizational structure similar to our hierarchal way of thinking! Why not just admit the truth, WE DON'T KNOW, and leave it at that.]
Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture. Scholars thought that the earliest monumental architecture was possible only after agriculture provided Neolithic people with food surpluses, freeing them from a constant focus on day-to-day survival. A site of unbelievable artistry and intricate detail, Göbekli Tepe has turned this theory on its head. [Yes, and if we were wrong about that, what else are we wrong about?]
Schmidt believes the people who created these massive and enigmatic structures came from great distances. It seems certain that once pilgrims reached Göbekli Tepe, they made animal sacrifices. Schmidt and his team have found the bones of wild animals, including gazelles, red deer, boars, goats, sheep, and oxen, plus a dozen different bird species, such as vultures and ducks, scattered around the site. Most of these animals are depicted in the sculptures and reliefs at the site.
There is still much that we don't understand about religious practices at Göbekli Tepe, Schmidt cautions. But broadly speaking, the animal images "probably illustrate stories of hunter-gatherer religion and beliefs," he says, "though we don't know at the moment." The sculptors of Göbekli Tepe may have simply wanted to depict the animals they saw, or perhaps create symbolic representations of the animals to use in rituals to ensure hunting success.
Schmidt has another theory about how Göbekli Tepe became a sacred place. Though he has yet to find them, he believes that the first stone circles on the hill of the navel marked graves of important people. Hauptmann's team discovered graves at Nevali Cori, and Schmidt is reasonably confident that burials lie somewhere in the earliest layers of Göbekli Tepe. This leads him to suspect the pillars represent human beings and that the cult practices at this site may initially have focused on some sort of ancestor worship. The T-shaped pillars, he points out, look like human bodies with the upper part of the "T" resembling a head in profile. Once, Schmidt says, they stood on the hillside "like a meeting of stone beings."
Sandra Scham is ARCHAEOLOGY's Washington, D.C., correspondent and a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
© 2008 by the Archaeological Institute of Americawww.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html
Hou Wins First Gold Medal at Mind Sports Games
From People's Daily Online:
China's hopeful Hou reaps first chess gold at World Mind Games
09:27, October 13, 2008
China's ace chess player Hou Yifan claimed her first title at the World Mind Sports Games here on Sunday as the 14-year-old promising star paced the host's pairs toa convincing victory in the rapid finals. Hou, combined with her teammate Ni Hua, whitewashed their Vietnamese counterpart 4-0 in the two round finals, presenting China's chess team the second gold of the 15-day Games.
Though winning the gold, Hou said it was only her start. "It feels great to win my first gold medal. But there are still two team events in the following days. They are more important than the pairs competitions." said Hou, adding that the coach's timely directions helped her back to track.
"I wanted to say 'thank you' to my coach. He helped me a lot and made me feel less pressure today. I was in good form and played better than I did in the blitz round. I hoped to win more golds in the following days." said the winner.
China's leading pairs witnessed a slump in blitz chess on last Wednesday. They failed to advance to the finals after their upset defeat to Ecuador in the preliminaries. China's head coach Ye Jiangchuan said lacking experience was the reason to their failure. "Both of them played less blitz chess before and they were still not used to it. Take Hou for example, she lost both in the individual and pairs competitions though she played much better in the slow chess in other world tournaments. We will do more trainings on this event after the Games," said Ye.
Hou is the highest ranking player in China's women team. In last month's world championships, the wunderkind could have become the world's youngest chess queen by a finger's breadth. In the final, Hou lost to Russian pinup player Kosteniuk, who is ten-year-older than her Chinese opponent. However, China's coach still showed his confidence to the hopeful girl.
"She is a talented player with good potentials. In the preliminaries, she collected nine straight victories, which is not common in the world's top level competitions. Besides, her steady performance is the key to the pairs' victory today. I hope she can learn some lessons from the Games and do better in the oncoming tournaments." said Ye.
In the third-place playoff, Iran beat Indonesia to wrap up the bronze. The 1st World Mind Games have attracted more than 3,000 players from 143 countries and regions. Bridge, Chess, Go, Draughts and Xiangqi were on the program. Source: Xinhua
China's hopeful Hou reaps first chess gold at World Mind Games
09:27, October 13, 2008
China's ace chess player Hou Yifan claimed her first title at the World Mind Sports Games here on Sunday as the 14-year-old promising star paced the host's pairs toa convincing victory in the rapid finals. Hou, combined with her teammate Ni Hua, whitewashed their Vietnamese counterpart 4-0 in the two round finals, presenting China's chess team the second gold of the 15-day Games.
Though winning the gold, Hou said it was only her start. "It feels great to win my first gold medal. But there are still two team events in the following days. They are more important than the pairs competitions." said Hou, adding that the coach's timely directions helped her back to track.
"I wanted to say 'thank you' to my coach. He helped me a lot and made me feel less pressure today. I was in good form and played better than I did in the blitz round. I hoped to win more golds in the following days." said the winner.
China's leading pairs witnessed a slump in blitz chess on last Wednesday. They failed to advance to the finals after their upset defeat to Ecuador in the preliminaries. China's head coach Ye Jiangchuan said lacking experience was the reason to their failure. "Both of them played less blitz chess before and they were still not used to it. Take Hou for example, she lost both in the individual and pairs competitions though she played much better in the slow chess in other world tournaments. We will do more trainings on this event after the Games," said Ye.
Hou is the highest ranking player in China's women team. In last month's world championships, the wunderkind could have become the world's youngest chess queen by a finger's breadth. In the final, Hou lost to Russian pinup player Kosteniuk, who is ten-year-older than her Chinese opponent. However, China's coach still showed his confidence to the hopeful girl.
"She is a talented player with good potentials. In the preliminaries, she collected nine straight victories, which is not common in the world's top level competitions. Besides, her steady performance is the key to the pairs' victory today. I hope she can learn some lessons from the Games and do better in the oncoming tournaments." said Ye.
In the third-place playoff, Iran beat Indonesia to wrap up the bronze. The 1st World Mind Games have attracted more than 3,000 players from 143 countries and regions. Bridge, Chess, Go, Draughts and Xiangqi were on the program. Source: Xinhua
Phillipines Chess News
From the Sun Star:
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Lady chessers sow terror in 14U class
A PAIR of lady woodpushers threatens to spoil the party of the boys' pre dominated 14-under field in the well-attended 1st Ace Hardware Youth Challenge Open chess tournament in Cagayan de Oro at the Inilog Grill.
Alyssa Joshua Jamaca bestowed her Polgar-like aura in mesmerizing fashion to conquer Ven Christian Salcedo, as Carol Anne Chua protects her own winning streak by holding early pacesetter Kenneth Norman Honculada to a fighting draw. With this development, the two little señoritas are assured to dispute the top honors in this exciting event, which also stakes fabulous trophies, medals and knowledge book on top of the cash prizes.
While the top-board features an all-male clash between Honculada and Chezter Jayson Coquilla, fellow 4.5 pointers Chua and Jamaca were taking on Jan Eduard Amper and Annerose Manilhig, respectively, on the second and third boards in the penultimate sixth round.
"Now we witness a fighting chess unfolding in the kiddies rivalry that it's not a remote possibility to see a girl ending up in a big triumph," surmised tournament arbiter Lorenzo "Jun" Cuizon.
Half a point behind at 4 points each are Christian Mario Pabillore and Harold Taganas who were still locked in horns against Alexander Ray Sumania and Keenard Troy Ibaoc. In the junior division for 20 and below participants, chess buddies Alfredo Rapanot Jr., Lennon Hart Salgados and Charles Joseph Laya went on to share the lead after the third round.
"I wish them luck in the last two rounds," the 15-year-old Salgados said of Laya and Rapanot who were still battling in the pivotal fourth round. "I just keep on playing over the board matches so as to prepare myself for the grandfinals of the 2008 National Shell Youth Active tourney," said Cagayan de Oro's lone finalist to the national Shell junior championship.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Lady chessers sow terror in 14U class
A PAIR of lady woodpushers threatens to spoil the party of the boys' pre dominated 14-under field in the well-attended 1st Ace Hardware Youth Challenge Open chess tournament in Cagayan de Oro at the Inilog Grill.
Alyssa Joshua Jamaca bestowed her Polgar-like aura in mesmerizing fashion to conquer Ven Christian Salcedo, as Carol Anne Chua protects her own winning streak by holding early pacesetter Kenneth Norman Honculada to a fighting draw. With this development, the two little señoritas are assured to dispute the top honors in this exciting event, which also stakes fabulous trophies, medals and knowledge book on top of the cash prizes.
While the top-board features an all-male clash between Honculada and Chezter Jayson Coquilla, fellow 4.5 pointers Chua and Jamaca were taking on Jan Eduard Amper and Annerose Manilhig, respectively, on the second and third boards in the penultimate sixth round.
"Now we witness a fighting chess unfolding in the kiddies rivalry that it's not a remote possibility to see a girl ending up in a big triumph," surmised tournament arbiter Lorenzo "Jun" Cuizon.
Half a point behind at 4 points each are Christian Mario Pabillore and Harold Taganas who were still locked in horns against Alexander Ray Sumania and Keenard Troy Ibaoc. In the junior division for 20 and below participants, chess buddies Alfredo Rapanot Jr., Lennon Hart Salgados and Charles Joseph Laya went on to share the lead after the third round.
"I wish them luck in the last two rounds," the 15-year-old Salgados said of Laya and Rapanot who were still battling in the pivotal fourth round. "I just keep on playing over the board matches so as to prepare myself for the grandfinals of the 2008 National Shell Youth Active tourney," said Cagayan de Oro's lone finalist to the national Shell junior championship.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Sunday Miscellany!
Hola darlings!
I'm tapping away on the Toshiba laptop outdoors at the moment, with the Packers/Seahawks game on the radio in the background. It's a gorgeous day, one of summer's last gasps. Hot, humid, sunny, a fitful breeze. It's after 5 now and the squirrels are out in force, foraging for peanuts and other treats, and the sun is sinking in the southwest.
I should have cut the grass in the backyard today, but I didn't. It was too damn hot and humid! I think it reached 80 degrees, incongruous when looking at the trees colored and shedding their leaves, my hostas and grape-vine covered fence turning yellow. At the moment the Packers/Seahawks are tied 10-10, but the Seahawks have the ball at the moment...
Today was the ladies' investment club meeting. One of our members left at the end of June, but our newest member joined at about the same time, so we are still at five members. Despite - oh yippee! Packers just scored, and now lead 17/10 - Despite losing most of our gains accrued during the past three plus years in the past seven days' market crash, we have accumulated some cash and are buying great companies at Depression-era prices. It's just amazing to me that we have already purchased stock in two companies whose shares are selling for less than solid book value. People are so fricking stupid some times, selling their stocks at the worst possible moment! But hell, we're just a small group of middle-aged LIBERAL Democrats, what do we know from Wall Street, heh? We're all old enough to have lived through several recessions before, and it doesn't make any difference to us that this one is caused by a "liquidity" problem. Eventually it will be solved, one way or another, and things will either go on as before or we'll all be living in caves and it won't make any difference. Darlings, despite the Republicans' best efforts to force us back to the Stone Age in the USA, I do not believe we will be living in the Stone Age.
So, here I sit, gingerly typing away on this yet unfamiliar keyboard as the squirrels cavort around - much to the ladies' delight earlier today a couple came up to the open patio screen door and peered in, seeming to intently listen as we discussed the current market conditions and our potential purchases!
So, here I sit, not writing about anything of substance, just knowing that despite the market's gyrations, the world, and life, go on, oblivious of Wall Street and all of our collective Angst. This too, shall pass. The leaves are turning, and are dropping from the trees; the sun is going down before 6:30 now, and now rising until after 7 a.m.; the squirrels have fat white bellies, well, at least the squirrels who hang around here have fat white bellies! Today is beautiful, and I'm enjoying it. I've got a hot pizza waiting in the oven, a full glass of wine, and the Packers are winning against that TRAITOR MIKE HOLMGREN. All is right with the world.
I'm tapping away on the Toshiba laptop outdoors at the moment, with the Packers/Seahawks game on the radio in the background. It's a gorgeous day, one of summer's last gasps. Hot, humid, sunny, a fitful breeze. It's after 5 now and the squirrels are out in force, foraging for peanuts and other treats, and the sun is sinking in the southwest.
I should have cut the grass in the backyard today, but I didn't. It was too damn hot and humid! I think it reached 80 degrees, incongruous when looking at the trees colored and shedding their leaves, my hostas and grape-vine covered fence turning yellow. At the moment the Packers/Seahawks are tied 10-10, but the Seahawks have the ball at the moment...
Today was the ladies' investment club meeting. One of our members left at the end of June, but our newest member joined at about the same time, so we are still at five members. Despite - oh yippee! Packers just scored, and now lead 17/10 - Despite losing most of our gains accrued during the past three plus years in the past seven days' market crash, we have accumulated some cash and are buying great companies at Depression-era prices. It's just amazing to me that we have already purchased stock in two companies whose shares are selling for less than solid book value. People are so fricking stupid some times, selling their stocks at the worst possible moment! But hell, we're just a small group of middle-aged LIBERAL Democrats, what do we know from Wall Street, heh? We're all old enough to have lived through several recessions before, and it doesn't make any difference to us that this one is caused by a "liquidity" problem. Eventually it will be solved, one way or another, and things will either go on as before or we'll all be living in caves and it won't make any difference. Darlings, despite the Republicans' best efforts to force us back to the Stone Age in the USA, I do not believe we will be living in the Stone Age.
So, here I sit, gingerly typing away on this yet unfamiliar keyboard as the squirrels cavort around - much to the ladies' delight earlier today a couple came up to the open patio screen door and peered in, seeming to intently listen as we discussed the current market conditions and our potential purchases!
So, here I sit, not writing about anything of substance, just knowing that despite the market's gyrations, the world, and life, go on, oblivious of Wall Street and all of our collective Angst. This too, shall pass. The leaves are turning, and are dropping from the trees; the sun is going down before 6:30 now, and now rising until after 7 a.m.; the squirrels have fat white bellies, well, at least the squirrels who hang around here have fat white bellies! Today is beautiful, and I'm enjoying it. I've got a hot pizza waiting in the oven, a full glass of wine, and the Packers are winning against that TRAITOR MIKE HOLMGREN. All is right with the world.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Palin Buzz
Commentary on Presidential Politics - read only if you have an exceptionally strong stomach, otherwise, I highly recommend you skip this post.
The McCain/Palin campaign, backed by whatever millions the Republican National Committee has left after the Mother of All Stock Market Crashes, has been in attack/lie/attack/MONDO lie mode ever since McCain lost the second debate to Obama on national television. I say that McCain lost not out of personal bias, but by the evidence presented by national polls taken about the debate performances of McCain and Obama.
Today the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign unleashed a new round of attack ads that feature the most blatant misrepresentations and outright lies - and absolute character assassination of an opponent, that I have ever seen. And believe me, darlings, I've seen plenty since my first "official" presidential election in 1972, not to mention the b.s. I had to dig my way through when I actively practiced law (including going up against a couple of New York lawyers, who were blasphemously against the Great Goddess called "snakes"!)
That's par for the course; normally I don't pay any attention to this type of bullshit politics in an election. But in the case of our presidential election now less than a month away, the issues at hand are too pressing, too important, and too overwhelming to deal with crap like the lies McCain is tossing up at the 11th hour in an attempt to sway the "undecided" voters out there. McCain and Palin are triggering my gag reflex big time.
I destest, hate and positively loathe the "new and improved" McCain ads plastered all over television in this "battleground" state of Wisconsin. These feelings are even more intensified against Senator McCain for abandoning his ethics in what will prove, I have no doubt, to be a totally futile attempt to win the White House. I used to think he was an honorable man, although misguided in his political leanings. But a good man, nonetheless. I no longer think so, and it makes me sad, and it makes me very very angry, too. How could he have sold himself out like this? A good man could not condone the lies and garbage being passed off as political commentary in the new Republican ads.
Earlier today I read an article at The New York Times - I don't remember what the article was, perhaps it was on the political blog; it was short, and there were a lot of comments. I usually don't read such commentary at all, but given the recent dramatic economic developments that have directly affected my pocketbook and my 401(k)s and my retirement nestegg, which has had five years of hard-earned gains wiped out in seven days, I've been reading more of this type of commentary. I used to think I could retire at my "full" Social Security retirement age of 67 years and 4 months. I no longer think so. Now I think I'll be working until I drop dead at the copy machine with some first year associate standing over me bitching that I'm not moving fast enough.
Today I happened upon a comment that linked the new aggressive and full of lies attack mode of the Republican campaign and the Republican National Committee to the soon to be released report on what the press is calling Palin's "Troopergate."
It seems the person who wrote that post was 100% on and showed a great deal of astuteness. I checked the news a bit ago and saw that the bipartisan committee of the Alaskan Legislature that was investigating Troopergate found improprieties in Palin's conduct. Tsk tsk. Fifi the Alaskan Attack Dog has been caught out. Is she going to take a rifle to the Alaskan Assembly and gut them out???
Legislative panel: Palin abused authority
2 hours, 16 minutes ago
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state's public safety commissioner.
The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn't the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.
The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.
Monegan says he was dismissed as retribution for resisting pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor's sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska lawmakers have emerged from a private session in Anchorage where they spent more than six hours discussing a politically charged ethics report into Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of her state public safety commissioner.
The legislative panel began its public session by discussing whether to release the report's findings. The investigation was examining whether Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, fired a state commissioner to settle a family dispute. The report was also expected to touch on whether Palin's husband meddled in state affairs and whether her administration inappropriately accessed employee medical records.
Critics claim Palin fired Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan after months of pressure on him to fire Mike Wooten, a state trooper involved in a nasty divorce and custody dispute with the governor's sister.
Lawmakers indicated they planned to release the report even though there was disagreement about its findings.
"I think there are some problems in this report," Republican state Sen. Gary Stevens. "I would encourage people to be very cautious, to look at this with a jaundiced eye."
*******************************************************************************
It's shame shame on the Alaskan Republicans for trying to hush this up at the 11th hour - once Palin was pinned as the VP candidate. They filed - and lost - a law suit in an attempt to block release of the investigation's results until AFTER the presidential election. I find it very strange, don't you, that the Republicans in the Alaskan State Legislature had no problems with investigating their very own Governor Palin BEFORE she hit the national spotlight. Their actions triggers that gag reflex again, doesn't it.
Pathetic. They can try - and will try - to put a different twist on the plain truth that Palin was trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper and she brought as much pressure on the man who could fire him as she could. But anyone who isn't already leaning in one direction or the other who can read will see the truth of the matter. Palin is guilty of malfeasance in office.
The McCain/Palin campaign, backed by whatever millions the Republican National Committee has left after the Mother of All Stock Market Crashes, has been in attack/lie/attack/MONDO lie mode ever since McCain lost the second debate to Obama on national television. I say that McCain lost not out of personal bias, but by the evidence presented by national polls taken about the debate performances of McCain and Obama.
Today the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign unleashed a new round of attack ads that feature the most blatant misrepresentations and outright lies - and absolute character assassination of an opponent, that I have ever seen. And believe me, darlings, I've seen plenty since my first "official" presidential election in 1972, not to mention the b.s. I had to dig my way through when I actively practiced law (including going up against a couple of New York lawyers, who were blasphemously against the Great Goddess called "snakes"!)
That's par for the course; normally I don't pay any attention to this type of bullshit politics in an election. But in the case of our presidential election now less than a month away, the issues at hand are too pressing, too important, and too overwhelming to deal with crap like the lies McCain is tossing up at the 11th hour in an attempt to sway the "undecided" voters out there. McCain and Palin are triggering my gag reflex big time.
I destest, hate and positively loathe the "new and improved" McCain ads plastered all over television in this "battleground" state of Wisconsin. These feelings are even more intensified against Senator McCain for abandoning his ethics in what will prove, I have no doubt, to be a totally futile attempt to win the White House. I used to think he was an honorable man, although misguided in his political leanings. But a good man, nonetheless. I no longer think so, and it makes me sad, and it makes me very very angry, too. How could he have sold himself out like this? A good man could not condone the lies and garbage being passed off as political commentary in the new Republican ads.
Earlier today I read an article at The New York Times - I don't remember what the article was, perhaps it was on the political blog; it was short, and there were a lot of comments. I usually don't read such commentary at all, but given the recent dramatic economic developments that have directly affected my pocketbook and my 401(k)s and my retirement nestegg, which has had five years of hard-earned gains wiped out in seven days, I've been reading more of this type of commentary. I used to think I could retire at my "full" Social Security retirement age of 67 years and 4 months. I no longer think so. Now I think I'll be working until I drop dead at the copy machine with some first year associate standing over me bitching that I'm not moving fast enough.
Today I happened upon a comment that linked the new aggressive and full of lies attack mode of the Republican campaign and the Republican National Committee to the soon to be released report on what the press is calling Palin's "Troopergate."
It seems the person who wrote that post was 100% on and showed a great deal of astuteness. I checked the news a bit ago and saw that the bipartisan committee of the Alaskan Legislature that was investigating Troopergate found improprieties in Palin's conduct. Tsk tsk. Fifi the Alaskan Attack Dog has been caught out. Is she going to take a rifle to the Alaskan Assembly and gut them out???
Legislative panel: Palin abused authority
2 hours, 16 minutes ago
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state's public safety commissioner.
The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn't the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.
The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.
Monegan says he was dismissed as retribution for resisting pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor's sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska lawmakers have emerged from a private session in Anchorage where they spent more than six hours discussing a politically charged ethics report into Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of her state public safety commissioner.
The legislative panel began its public session by discussing whether to release the report's findings. The investigation was examining whether Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, fired a state commissioner to settle a family dispute. The report was also expected to touch on whether Palin's husband meddled in state affairs and whether her administration inappropriately accessed employee medical records.
Critics claim Palin fired Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan after months of pressure on him to fire Mike Wooten, a state trooper involved in a nasty divorce and custody dispute with the governor's sister.
Lawmakers indicated they planned to release the report even though there was disagreement about its findings.
"I think there are some problems in this report," Republican state Sen. Gary Stevens. "I would encourage people to be very cautious, to look at this with a jaundiced eye."
*******************************************************************************
It's shame shame on the Alaskan Republicans for trying to hush this up at the 11th hour - once Palin was pinned as the VP candidate. They filed - and lost - a law suit in an attempt to block release of the investigation's results until AFTER the presidential election. I find it very strange, don't you, that the Republicans in the Alaskan State Legislature had no problems with investigating their very own Governor Palin BEFORE she hit the national spotlight. Their actions triggers that gag reflex again, doesn't it.
Pathetic. They can try - and will try - to put a different twist on the plain truth that Palin was trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper and she brought as much pressure on the man who could fire him as she could. But anyone who isn't already leaning in one direction or the other who can read will see the truth of the matter. Palin is guilty of malfeasance in office.
A Heart-Tugging Story from Stonehenge
From the Daily Mail (co.uk) online:
Prehistoric child is discovered buried with 'toy hedgehog' at Stonehenge
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 9:42 AM on 10th October 2008
This toy hedgehog, found in a child's grave at Stonehenge, is proof of what we have always known - children have always loved to play.
The chalk figurine was probably a favourite possession of the three year old, and placed next to the child when they died in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago.
Archaeologists who discovered the grave, where the child was laying on his or her side, believe the toy - perhaps placed there by a doting father - is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in British history.
The diggers were working to the west of Stonehenge in what is known as the Palisade Ditch when they made the remarkable discovery last month in the top of the pit in which the child was buried.
Archaeologist Dennis Price said: 'It is not difficult to envisage the raw emotion and harrowing grief that would have accompanied the death of this child.
'Amid the aura of gloom that surrounds Stonehenge, it comes as a beam of light to find a child's toy lovingly placed with the tiny corpse to keep him or her company through eternity.
'I'm not aware of hedgehogs having any significance in pagan tradition so the discovery must rank as yet another unique and baffling aspect of one of the most famous and instantly recognisable prehistoric monuments on Earth. To my mind, the hedgehog possesses a real charm and an innocent beauty. '
Dr. Joshua Pollard, of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, said: 'Representational art from this period is very rare and so far as I'm aware, if the identification is correct, it's the only known prehistoric depiction of a hedgehog from Britain.'
Fay Vass, of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, said: 'We are very excited to hear about this find. It shows humans have taken hedgehogs to their hearts for a very long time.
*************************************************************************
I confess I'm not exactly sure what a hedgehog looks like! At first I thought this resembled a "hippo" - but the ears aren't right for a hippo (they have little rounded upright ears) - this animal has floppy ears. Then I thought, perhaps it is a sow. Sows were a symbol of the Great Mother Goddess and the timing would be right (circa 1000 BCE) for worship of the Sow aspect of the Great Goddess in old England. Is it really a hedgehog - or is this a presumption imposed on a singular find? I don't know.
I'd be interested to know if they can tell the origin of the chalk from which this was carved. That might not mean, though, that the piece was carved where the chalk came from.
Prehistoric child is discovered buried with 'toy hedgehog' at Stonehenge
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 9:42 AM on 10th October 2008
This toy hedgehog, found in a child's grave at Stonehenge, is proof of what we have always known - children have always loved to play.
The chalk figurine was probably a favourite possession of the three year old, and placed next to the child when they died in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago.
Archaeologists who discovered the grave, where the child was laying on his or her side, believe the toy - perhaps placed there by a doting father - is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in British history.
The diggers were working to the west of Stonehenge in what is known as the Palisade Ditch when they made the remarkable discovery last month in the top of the pit in which the child was buried.
Archaeologist Dennis Price said: 'It is not difficult to envisage the raw emotion and harrowing grief that would have accompanied the death of this child.
'Amid the aura of gloom that surrounds Stonehenge, it comes as a beam of light to find a child's toy lovingly placed with the tiny corpse to keep him or her company through eternity.
'I'm not aware of hedgehogs having any significance in pagan tradition so the discovery must rank as yet another unique and baffling aspect of one of the most famous and instantly recognisable prehistoric monuments on Earth. To my mind, the hedgehog possesses a real charm and an innocent beauty. '
Dr. Joshua Pollard, of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, said: 'Representational art from this period is very rare and so far as I'm aware, if the identification is correct, it's the only known prehistoric depiction of a hedgehog from Britain.'
Fay Vass, of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, said: 'We are very excited to hear about this find. It shows humans have taken hedgehogs to their hearts for a very long time.
*************************************************************************
I confess I'm not exactly sure what a hedgehog looks like! At first I thought this resembled a "hippo" - but the ears aren't right for a hippo (they have little rounded upright ears) - this animal has floppy ears. Then I thought, perhaps it is a sow. Sows were a symbol of the Great Mother Goddess and the timing would be right (circa 1000 BCE) for worship of the Sow aspect of the Great Goddess in old England. Is it really a hedgehog - or is this a presumption imposed on a singular find? I don't know.
I'd be interested to know if they can tell the origin of the chalk from which this was carved. That might not mean, though, that the piece was carved where the chalk came from.
Learn and Play Chess in Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of my home state, and a beautiful town. It is situated amongst three lakes (Mendota, Monona and Wingra, the one nobody ever remembers the name!), with the State Capitol building situated on rising ground that can be viewed from just about all approaches into the city. It has breathtakingly beautiful views. Home to the largest University of Wisconsin campus and the nationally known Wisconsin Badgers Football Team (part of the original Big Ten), Madison is a cosmopolitan, liberal city and proud of it. From the Madison Eagle:
Chess sharpens minds Fridays at YMCA
Published: Friday, October 10, 2008 7:01 AM EDT
MADISON – For both aficionados and people who have always wanted to learn how to play, the Madison Area YMCA at 111 Kings Road hosts its own chess club at 7 p.m. each Friday.
The chess club is free and open to the public. Players from teens to seniors are invited to play chess with all age groups, learn from someone who knows the game well, stimulate their minds and develop strategic thinking.
For information, contact Barbara Carkhuff at (973) 822-9622, ext. 2307, or bcarkhuff@madisonymca.org.
Chess sharpens minds Fridays at YMCA
Published: Friday, October 10, 2008 7:01 AM EDT
MADISON – For both aficionados and people who have always wanted to learn how to play, the Madison Area YMCA at 111 Kings Road hosts its own chess club at 7 p.m. each Friday.
The chess club is free and open to the public. Players from teens to seniors are invited to play chess with all age groups, learn from someone who knows the game well, stimulate their minds and develop strategic thinking.
For information, contact Barbara Carkhuff at (973) 822-9622, ext. 2307, or bcarkhuff@madisonymca.org.
First World Mind Sports Games
Xiang qi - Chinese chess - variously translated as "elephant game," something akin to "ambassador game" and "star" or "celestial" game."
It has a lot of similarities to western chess, but has enough differences to require learning a whole different set of pattern-recognition and, of course, basic piece moves and rules. The pieces are different from western ches pieces, too. The modern game of xiang qi is played with flat pieces (like checkers) that have their symbols painted or printed on them. The xiang qi board is not checkered like a western chess board; the pieces are placed on the intersections of the squares and not within the squares, and there is a "river" that divides the xiang qi board in half - so a xiang qi board has 72 squares, but the number of playing pieces is 16 to each side because of their placement. Pieces are distingished entirely by color and by subtle variations in the names of the pieces.
I'm no expert, that's for sure! The extent of my knowledge is very limited, basically gleaned from a few articles read when I researched the meaning of the name of xiang qi in English ("qi" basically can mean "man" - as in a "playing piece" - but it can also, more intriguingly, refer to the "qi" that is, to put it into popular venacular, rather like "The Force," that invisible yet palpable "something" that forms the very essence of the universe, from "Star Wars."
Thre are several different siang qi events taking place side by side with western chess events. Here is news about one of the women's events. Unfortunately, the photograph of the chessboard and pieces in the article is a western chess set with a checkered board!
Lan Huong brings home xiangqi bronze
14:06' 10/10/2008 (GMT+7)
VietNamNet Bridge – Ngo Lan Huong yesterday secured a bronze medal in the women's individual xiangqi (Chinese chess) event at the first-ever World Mind Sports Games, held in Beijing, China.
Huong beat Tan Min Fang Fiona from Singapore in the last round to grab a spot in the top three. The 2007 Asian Indoor Games title-holder pocketed 10 points after seven matches, finishing behind China's Wang Linna and Zhao Guanfang.
In a near tie-break for gold, Wang and her compatriot Zhao both accumulated 13 points. Wang was finally awarded the medal because of better rival points, suggesting she encountered stronger opponents during the tournament.
"I am so excited with the results," said 28-year-old Wang. "After all, this is the World Mind Sports Games, and in some sense it is just like the Olympic Games for the mind. So being the champion means a lot to me."
Ranked as one of the best female xiangqi players in China, Wang earned six victories during, the competition. A native of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, Wang is a veteran in the sport, having started learning xiangqi at the age of eight. She bagged her first national title in 1997.
But facing Zhao was a close call, Wang said. "I did not play well in that match. I left too many chances for my opponent. I think Zhao was too nervous to beat me at that time, or I could not have earned one point from that match."
The champion said she hoped her gold medal will be a good start for Chinese female xiangqi players, adding: "Hopefully, my teammates will win another gold for China in the women's team event."
The competition was also a hard-won battle for silver medallist Zhao: "Foreign female xiangqi players have made great progress in recent years. Competitors from Viet Nam, the Netherlands and Britain have posed a huge challenge for us during the matches."
On the men's side, Vietnamese Nguyen Thanh Bao and Nguyen Hoang Lam are both in the top ten. The duo finished round five with six points. The competition for men has nine rounds and will conclude tomorrow.
In the chess event's mixed pair blitz, Ecuador secured gold after tense games against India.
In the play-off for third place the Ukraine proved too strong for Iran, winning 3-1 to take the bronze. Vietnamese duo Le Quang Liem and Hoang Thi Nhu Y did not play well, earning only 13 points after 11 rounds, which was not enough to qualify for the semi-final.
In the mixed pair rapid event which kicked off yesterday, Dao Thien Hai and Le Kieu Thien Kim of Viet Nam took two points from two first matches and were in the middle of the ranking table.
The first World Mind Sports Games attracted more than 3,000 players from 143 countries and regions. Masters compete for 35 medal sets divided into five events: bridge, chess, go, draughts and xiangqi.
(Source: VNS/XINHUA)
It has a lot of similarities to western chess, but has enough differences to require learning a whole different set of pattern-recognition and, of course, basic piece moves and rules. The pieces are different from western ches pieces, too. The modern game of xiang qi is played with flat pieces (like checkers) that have their symbols painted or printed on them. The xiang qi board is not checkered like a western chess board; the pieces are placed on the intersections of the squares and not within the squares, and there is a "river" that divides the xiang qi board in half - so a xiang qi board has 72 squares, but the number of playing pieces is 16 to each side because of their placement. Pieces are distingished entirely by color and by subtle variations in the names of the pieces.
I'm no expert, that's for sure! The extent of my knowledge is very limited, basically gleaned from a few articles read when I researched the meaning of the name of xiang qi in English ("qi" basically can mean "man" - as in a "playing piece" - but it can also, more intriguingly, refer to the "qi" that is, to put it into popular venacular, rather like "The Force," that invisible yet palpable "something" that forms the very essence of the universe, from "Star Wars."
Thre are several different siang qi events taking place side by side with western chess events. Here is news about one of the women's events. Unfortunately, the photograph of the chessboard and pieces in the article is a western chess set with a checkered board!
Lan Huong brings home xiangqi bronze
14:06' 10/10/2008 (GMT+7)
VietNamNet Bridge – Ngo Lan Huong yesterday secured a bronze medal in the women's individual xiangqi (Chinese chess) event at the first-ever World Mind Sports Games, held in Beijing, China.
Huong beat Tan Min Fang Fiona from Singapore in the last round to grab a spot in the top three. The 2007 Asian Indoor Games title-holder pocketed 10 points after seven matches, finishing behind China's Wang Linna and Zhao Guanfang.
In a near tie-break for gold, Wang and her compatriot Zhao both accumulated 13 points. Wang was finally awarded the medal because of better rival points, suggesting she encountered stronger opponents during the tournament.
"I am so excited with the results," said 28-year-old Wang. "After all, this is the World Mind Sports Games, and in some sense it is just like the Olympic Games for the mind. So being the champion means a lot to me."
Ranked as one of the best female xiangqi players in China, Wang earned six victories during, the competition. A native of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, Wang is a veteran in the sport, having started learning xiangqi at the age of eight. She bagged her first national title in 1997.
But facing Zhao was a close call, Wang said. "I did not play well in that match. I left too many chances for my opponent. I think Zhao was too nervous to beat me at that time, or I could not have earned one point from that match."
The champion said she hoped her gold medal will be a good start for Chinese female xiangqi players, adding: "Hopefully, my teammates will win another gold for China in the women's team event."
The competition was also a hard-won battle for silver medallist Zhao: "Foreign female xiangqi players have made great progress in recent years. Competitors from Viet Nam, the Netherlands and Britain have posed a huge challenge for us during the matches."
On the men's side, Vietnamese Nguyen Thanh Bao and Nguyen Hoang Lam are both in the top ten. The duo finished round five with six points. The competition for men has nine rounds and will conclude tomorrow.
In the chess event's mixed pair blitz, Ecuador secured gold after tense games against India.
In the play-off for third place the Ukraine proved too strong for Iran, winning 3-1 to take the bronze. Vietnamese duo Le Quang Liem and Hoang Thi Nhu Y did not play well, earning only 13 points after 11 rounds, which was not enough to qualify for the semi-final.
In the mixed pair rapid event which kicked off yesterday, Dao Thien Hai and Le Kieu Thien Kim of Viet Nam took two points from two first matches and were in the middle of the ranking table.
The first World Mind Sports Games attracted more than 3,000 players from 143 countries and regions. Masters compete for 35 medal sets divided into five events: bridge, chess, go, draughts and xiangqi.
(Source: VNS/XINHUA)
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Maoists Approve New Kumari
Nepalese girl begins life as 'living goddess'2 days ago
KATHMANDU (AFP) — The three-year-old daughter of a Nepalese watch repairer became a "living goddess" on Tuesday after being approved by the country's new atheist government.
Despite Nepal being a Maoist republic after the monarchy was unseated in May, the centuries-old tradition of worshipping a young virgin as the living embodiment of a powerful Hindu goddess has survived.
"Matina Shakya was chosen after consultation with Buddhist priests, community leaders and officials who will look after her," said Achyut Pokharel, a member of the government-run trust that maintains the tradition.
"She b