On a crashing airplane
all the drinks are free
there’s time enough to drink them
that’s time enough for me

Hmmm… I was going to post some now, but the strongest storm I’ve seen here has just hit. I’ll post later…

Despite the objectives of people worried it would bring about the end of the universe, the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s new particle accelerator has been running since earlier this month. Just as predicted, the universe hasn’t ended. Or has it? There’s a bunch of writing and pictures on this page, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Maybe I’m just too educated.

A few miles west of the small town of Los Lunas, New Mexico (south of Albuquerque, north of Socorro), there is a boulder on a mountainside that may be carved with the world’s oldest surviving inscription of the Ten Commandments. Known as the Los Lunas Decalogue, it’s been dated using various methods to 600 B.C.E. I haven’t found any sites giving a skeptical view, and the evidience itself is fairly convincing. Given the technology of late Phonecian-era ships and the weather/geology of the time, it’s not out of the question for a single ship to find its way to central New Mexico. Of course the rock doesn’t show that there was a mass movement of people or regular back & forth travel. When I lived in the area, there was a “wacko” newpaper out of Hatch (the chile capital of the world) titled The Courier that documented ancient Ogam writing all around the Rio Grande valley and beyond. When I went looking for on-line issues the other day, I discovered that The Courier has folded. That’s too bad, because despite its wackiness, it was a good paper.

Life was hard before electricity. The BBC/PBS show 1900 House seems to be showing that fairly well. The Michael Lesy book Wisconsin Death Trip, published in 1973, shows us the same thing in a novel way. His book documents life in a small Wisconsin town from 1885 to 1899 using photographs from the state historical society paired with unrelated news stories culled from the pages of the local newspaper. The photos are eerie, but the stories are eerier still. You can find excerpts from the book at this Geocities site. BBC/Cinemax are presenting a movie version narrated by Ian Holmes. It’s currently mking the film festival circuit and will premier on Cinemax on July 4th. If you can believe the promotional materials, this will be a must-see movie.

“Lower ye the landing gear!” “The landing gear be lowered.” In The Ancient of Days: Deity or Manna Machine?, George Sassoon postulizes that the Israelite’s Exodus manna from heaven really came from a machine powered by a small thermonuclear device. He uses biblical passages and an ancient Aramaic Jewish text (the Kabbalah) to reach his conclusion. Suprisingly, this is an interesting and entertaining read.

If you’re into this sort of thing, you can read the wedding ceremony I wrote for my sister. It’s a bit longer than the last one, much more eclectic. My sister Lauryl is remarkably similar to me, and that comes across in the text, I think. After the wedding, my Grandmother asked how I, a never-married single man, came to know so much about marriage. The answer’s simple: the internet. The internet can make you sound like an expert on almost anything.

Last August, the Dallas Observer wrote a nice even-handed story on Romeo Hristov, the Bulgarian archaeology who made waves by publishing an article about a possible terra cotta Roman head found buried in a pre-Columbian tomb in Mexico. Many art historians feel the head is genuine; many archaeologists are rather skeptical. Hristov had a devil of a time even getting to see the head, which was discovered by one of the fathers of modern Mexican archaeology, Jose García Payón, in 1933, and locked away in a museum. “I was looking for the piece two and a half years. It’s not easy to convince to check. But if you persist, bring beer, tell dirty jokes, eventually they start to like you. " Not everyone does, though. One archaeology professor said “I’m actually teaching a course this spring, based on my encounters with Mr. Hristov and others. The title is Fantastic Archaeology. "

As the Shuttlecocks move from one place to another, they are giving us repeats. Today’s is the classic So Speaks Randon: And your foot massagers! By Grignr, what sort of softling invalids are the people of your world that they need foot massage mats with eleven intensity settings? Even the most gout-ridden, feeble merchant of my world would ask for no more than eight intensity settings, and the strong warriors of my tribe require only five!

It’s fairly common knowledge that a small Christian church in Ethiopia claims to house the Ark of the Covenant, thanks to Graham Hancock and his book The Sign and the Seal. Portions of the book are on-line and illustrated as part of OneWorld Magazine. The rest of the magazine looks pretty nice, too. For example: a story on the New Mexico pueblo revolt of 1680 and some of the more recent pueblo struggles. This pueblo revolt was the only successful revolt against the Spanish in the Americas, though it was short-lived. The town of Socorro, where I spent my college years, once had a pueblo tribe living there. The town got its name (Socorro means “help” in Spanish) from the life-saving aid that the natives gave the Spanish colonizer of New Mexico, Onate. In the revolt, the Socorro pueblo was one of the few that sided with the Spaniards and they fled with the surviving Spaniards south. The remnants of the tribe can be found in a tiny town outside El Paso named Socorro del Sur – Socorro of the South. Socorro (of the North) still has the original church sitting on the plaza, and it claims to be the oldest church in North America still used for regular services. The school that I taught at was a (very small) Catholic school sitting adjacent to the church. A local legend holds that the Socorro pueblo residents warned the priests of the upcoming revolt in time for the church’s sacred objects (the gold chalices, the sacristy, and other priceless objects) to be hidden in a cave on the mountain behind town. Today that mountain is part of the New Mexico Tech campus, but is used by the military for rather extensive explosives testing.

Wayne Newton’s Vicious Dogs Kill Elderly Census Worker! (You know, I bet I could write headlines for a living.) It’s a terrible story, really. It reminds me of several houses I had to visit as an engineer for the electric cooperative in Socorro. There’s a lot of crazy people living in the mountains that don’t care much for other people. I only had a few guns pulled on me, a few dogs sicced on me (thank you, pepper spray!), and one cannon fired at me. That last one was pretty freaky. I hit a tripwire that was put across the driveway, at ankle height. When I pulled it, a trapdoor in the ground a few feet away flipped open, a small cannon (inch and a half barrel, roughly) popped up and fired. It only had powder in it, I think. A message to leave and soon. I was mighty glad that the howizer dug into the side of a hill beside the home didn’t go off. I guess the tripwire controlling it was closer to the door. A hand-painted plywood sign did warn me that a Vietnam vet with special training in deadly traps lived there, and he’d use deadly force against all intruders. But who pays attention to signs anymore?