So that Israeli attack on Syria was on a missle site being fitted with chemical weapons, not nuclear?
Eh... color me skeptical. All of the original "no comment" pieces doesn't have me thinking it was chemical, or Bush would be pointing at Iraq and Saddam's fictional WMDs immediately.
Fiction by Roberto Bolano in the New Yorker. Nope, not had a chance to read it yet.
In Austin, i finally picked up my copy of The Savage Detectives. (It's one of those books that i've been holding out for a first edition.) About halfway through.
One of these videos i've seen before. Although the effort is appreciated, the motion and sound do very little for me. The stillness of the frames of the Frank comics that is unnerving all by itself, making them seem even more like dream fragments.
This can't be good. What the fuck is going on in Syria?
Admittedly, i'm out of the loop. Between the vacation in austin and the work i've had to make up, as well as these recurring headaches, i'm not so up on the news.
My speculation is that this proves once again, Syria did not have WMDs smuggled in from Iraq, or at least any nuclear ones. Why on earth would they import them from North Korea? The reason why the Bush administration is not crowing about the Israeli strike is because they don't know how to spin this. Syria had to import nuclear weapons and North Korea was not contained. Sure, Syria has possibly suffered a setback to what might be a nuclear program, but how is that an argument bolstering U.S. foreign policy?
Bush can cry all he wants about how he warned us that North Korea would be engaging in nuclear proliferation, but where is the United States? Bogged down in Iraq. Idiot.
ACL was fun, but a little of a bust for us.
We attended Friday, seeing Blonde Redhead, LCD Soundsystem, part of Spoon (who turned out not to be very compelling live,) part of Queens of the Stone Age (who were quite good live,) the Kaiser Chiefs, and the Killers. Actually i saw a bit more than that, but thopse are the ones i caught enough to identify songs. I only regret not seeing more of Del McCoury, and choosing Spoon over QotSA initially.
Saturday, we skipped altogether. The White Stripes cancellation played a factor in that decision, but we were having too much fun sightseeing.
Sunday, we showed up for Bloc Party, only to be defeated by heat and overcrowded. Kat & i were fed up with tripping over the abandoned chairs set up for camps at the AT&T tent. There were plenty of shows that i wanted to see, but it simply wasn't worth the claustrophobia. My brother Travis was able to make it into the tent where Preservation Hall Jazz Band was playing, and said it's the best thing he saw at the whole festival. He stuck around to catch part of Wilco, who bored him, and My Morning Jacket, who he said was excellent. He tried unsuccessfully to get us to come back to see Bob Dylan, but we already got our money's worth, as i had lucked out on the $50 for 3 day pass deal.
LCD Soundsystem was my favorite performance. I was a little worried about dragging Kat & Travis to see them despite LCD's great reputation as a live band. (Also, at the time, i was not aware of Travis' near obsession with Daft Punk. I feared that he might be bored with dance music.) Although it wasn't necessary for my entertainment, i was amazed that nearly every sound on the songs was replicated live, no tapes, very little sampling, which was a huge contract to the Blonde Redhead show that we saw earlier on the same stage. Murphy was also one of the most engaging presences i saw onstage at ACL, chatting up the audience, making funny quips, and making a spectacle of himself. For allegedly being a go-to hipster band to namedrop, they seemed like one the most grounded bands that i've seemed in awhile, with a real desire to entertain, not so much striving to impress with credentials.
A trip to ACL next year seems like a longshot. The outdoor festival thing in 90 degree weather surrounded by tens of thousands of people just doesn't seem to be my thing anymore. SxSW maybe?
A couple of months ago, i bought a kit from the Genographic Project. The postal service lost it the first time... some sort of weird, byzantine shit about strictly and perversely interpreted subcontracts that made my little corner a world a black hole for the postal service. Then Stephen Colbert did his show on it, and i gnashed my teeth.
The replacement that National Geographic provided finally arrived yesterday.
I've done one swab already. The mtDNA test seems to be the way to go for my amusement, as most likely with the Y chromosome test, as i'll probably just wind up with R1b, and probably R1b1c at that.
My DNA is pretty whitebread on my father's side, solidly Western European. The probability of getting R1b just doesn't make it worth it to find if there is something unexpected in there.
I'm going to lay some odds in the coming days on the results, just to amuse myself.
I neglected to mention that Bill and i picked up some books at Cottonwood Books in Baton Rouge last Saturday. I bought Richard Powers' Gold Bug Variations and Peter Ackroyd's First Light.
Bill bought what was labeled as a first edition Borges, Brodie's Report, but definitely was not.
the purchases were of no real consequence, although i'm pleasantly surprised by that Ackroyd. Really, i just wanted an excuse to slap an embedded Google Map into a post.
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I ought to confess that i'm very sympathetic to the idea that Homo erectus had villages. Laugh at me. I promise not to cry. It's just that the jump from tool-using nomadic apes to agrarian villages seems like a big one. What Bednarik proposes does not seem that outrageous.
via Remote Central.
Update: This has been nagging me for the past day. Please let me clarify that "villages" should be just that... "villages" in quotes. I doubt whether they were villages as we understand the word now. It's just that a relentlessly nomadic model for the entire species doesn't sit well.
I lost my password for Library Thing months ago. Recently i went insane on Facebook trying to put together my library on some app they stuck on there, before it began to bore me to tears with how damned slow it was to load. Now there is a My Libary feature on Google Book Search.
That edition of The Master & Margarita that i just mentioned? It ain't on there. I checked the ISBN. It's a relatively common book. Their database cannot be terribly vast yet, can it?
So much for wasting a few hours trying to save some work for the government clerks assigned to track my every movement.
When they do get this together though, it looks like it might be fairly useful, in that some of my searches on certain books will go far more smoothly.
Damn it to hell... i finally read The Master & Margarita earlier this year. Although it had been recommended to me dozens of times, it was usually recommended by kids who played Vampire: The Masquerade who fancied themselves as libertine iconoclasts. They also had good things to say about Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible and wore pewter pentacles around their necks. I cannot count how many cats that i've met named Behemoth. There was no fucking way that I was going to read Bulgakov.
Another debate has erupted over which is the superior translation of the book, and this time, i actually give damn. Unfortunately, the translation that i've read is the Burgin & O'Connor translation, which suited me just fine as i now love the book, but i ain't got a horse in this race.
Despite the number of books that i read that are in translation, the only non-epic poem ones that i recall intentionally reading in different translations are Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights oddly. And the Bible. Ach.
via 3%.
This makes as much sense as anything else the Christian fundamentalists spout about why New Orleans and coastal Mississippi were hit by Katrina. I've heard perhaps hundreds of times now that New Orleans was struck because of the Decadence Festival.
Their god's hatred for shellfish is just as explicit as homosexuality.
Oh yeah, but locusts are kosher.
via The Other 95%.
Interesting. This story about the genetics of the domestic pig fleshes out some theories about human migration into Europe. There was a previous story that stated that all European pigs descended from the native European boar, and it was an independent domestication, but that turns out not to be the case.
It's not just remarkable that human DNA (from saliva) was found in masticated yucca leaves that ranged in age from 800 to 2,400 years old, it's that the information could be used to track human migration patterns. They've also found DNA on "aprons" or menstrual pads, and plan to check sandals, textiles, and cane cigarettes. Scientists hope to answer the question of whether agriculture was indigenously invented in the Southwest United States or imported from migrations from Mexico.
This makes me very happy. I become quite annoyed with the games that are played with human remains, as i'm more interested in history than respecting burial ceremonies. Yes, this probably makes me an asshole to many people. I do respect cultural traditions, but being satisfied with ignorance is a vast disservice to everyone. jj
I don't mean to be a complete bastard, but this story about a myseterious tablet of cuneiform is mighty fishy. An incredibly well-preserved tablet of cuneiform surfaces in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This is the story one of the people came up with to explain its presence:
Riiiiggghhht... I'm sorry, but i doubt this. Just looking at the condition of the tablet in that photos, i'd wager that it is a piece looted from National Museum of Iraq.According to Buie, Eddie has had the tablet for at least a couple of years. “He had it long before his wife died. I think it came out of Pennsylvania,” he said.
As the story goes, a girl brought the tablet along when she visited Eddie’s wife. Somehow, Eddie’s wife wound up with it.
Buie said he doesn’t know much else about the artifact’s recent history.
Last night, i finally went back to trying to get the old blog back online. The size of the backup database is enormous though, causing the upload to timeout each time. In trying to pare down the size of the file, i've found that the spam problem was even worse than i thought, in that even when i flagged messages as spam, the database still saved them. In my naivety, i thought that they were deleted.
Now i'm just deleting line after line manual, scared of losing some very good comments from real people, and ignorant of a good text editor that would preserve the formatting and mass delete the stuff flagged as spam.
