Will I Have to Eat My Black Beret?

Hola darlings! Whew, what a day. Weather was great - moderate temps and not the monsoon winds that sapped my energy yesterday while I was out raking. I filled a large trash container with fallen twigs and branches and you wouldn't think I'd raked at all when I looked out there this morning. Sigh. But - every hopeful, I got out in the backyard this afternoon since the Packers weren't on (they play on Monday Night Football tomorror in Denver) and raked up a storm, finished cleaning the patio furniture and putting it away for the season and cut the grass. We had an investment club meeting this morning. We settled on three new buys for the club, to be executed in stages starting tomorrow. We're doing quite well. I don't want to brag - well, actually I do want to brag - a lot - about our performance. Of course, we've only been officially investing for 2 years as a club, and as our portfolio of companies grows, it will become harder to make stellar returns, because the odds increase that we will buy a stinker, despite our most careful research to try and prevent that from happening. Still, I'm not sneezing at an 87.4% return since July, 2005. Okay, end of bragging. Now, to an extremely serious matter - about possibly having to eat my favorite black wool beret. I discovered this morning when doing a review of the weekly news gathered by Explorator that the little bird goddess I'd written about here is NOT what it was represented to be! It turns out that the little bird goddess isn’t from that excavation at all! Therefore, she’s not 11,000 years old. According to this article published by cyberpresse.ca on October 23, 2007, she was uncovered recently at Mari during ongoing excavations there, and was recovered with two (or possibly three) other figurines or parts of figurines. She is possibly dated to 2500 BCE, and is ancient certainly, but she is not, alas, neolithic. Hmmmm, I wonder if the newspaper made an honest mistake or engaged in some archeological dishonesty in putting together its article. It would be too much to believe that the Mari figurine is identical to either of the statuettes mentioned in the Mideast Online October 23, 2007 article, although the identical photograph was used in both stories, complete with the red and white marked measuring stick on the right side of the photograph! So, I'm thinking I'm not going to eat my black beret, since it was not I who made the mistake, but Mideast Online. But I'm shopping for a new hat, just in case.