Chris Boese's Weblog

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking!

And look! The whole Errol Morris film on A Brief History of Time is up on Google Video! (I loved that movie...  just hearing the opening bars of the incredible Philip Glass score sets me off).

You know, this is probably awful, but you know what I miss? The newer computer voices have more inflection than that early computer voice that I just always associated with Stephen Hawking.

Even with other voices to choose from, I always picked the one that sounded like Stephen Hawking, just so I could pretend that I had the famous physicist talking to me inside my computer. I just like having him around!

I used to listen to the NOAA weather repeaters on my scanner as I drove around the country too (until they changed the voice), because I wanted Stephen Hawking giving me the weather report. I could just pretend he'd tell me about the tornado watch, and then after, give a short discourse on entropy or black holes in the hearts of tornadoes. Or maybe past tornadoes that existed at that particular point in the space-time continuum.

Mike Gauldin, 1954-2010. R.I.P.

A great man passed away last Thursday, taken too young by brain cancer, and I am just so sad. So when you're sad, best watch a funny video of the same talented fellow, doing his most hilarious and locally-famous bits for the Northwest Arkansas Gridion Show, as Brother Billy Bob.

Seldom has a parody been as rich. Keep in mind, this was taped probably in the late 80s, contemporary with scandals with Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker.

Sort of overshadows the fact that he also went to Washington, D.C. with that other guy from Arkansas, Governor Bill Clinton, doesn't it? But if you want to know about his distinguished career with that stuff, here's an early obituary.

YouTube - BroBillyBob.

Dan Gillmor proposes some "New Rules of News." I pick my favorites.

Link: The new rules of news | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Constantly risking absurdity and death... er, no. That's Ferlinghetti.

Um, clearly risking IRONY without death, Dan has waded into trying to define what journalism is yet again! Thanks Dan! Don't know what I'd do without you, and I mean that seriously (having taught from and even blurbed, I think, your terrific book We the Media).

But for the irony! It's so postmodern!

From this insightful list of 22 New Rules for News, we first must talk about Rule Number 11...

11. We would never publish lists of ten. They're a prop for lazy and unimaginative people.

I guess lists of 22 are OK then? Numerologists would tell you 11 and 22 are Master Numbers that can't be reduced, linked to both channeling IDEALISM into the planet from a higher plane (one more than 10 items) and working as a MASTER BUILDER, some kind of journalistic Freemason, I guess.

There you go, Dan. Always trying to moving things to a higher level! Lists of more than 10 items are OK. Whew! [grin]

I jokes. But some good stuff to chew on in this list of 22 items. Because Dan doesn't wade into the polemic that surrounds so much of the debate about the future of journalism (but instead has characteristically put his money where his mouth is, to work as a practical master builder of sorts for the highest kind of idealism the religion of journalism can sustain) I find it interesting picking his brain on this stuff.

Some things I agree with. Some I don't. Some are more important. Some less. Which inspired me to add my (for what it's worth) two cents.

How about a list of my 10 favorites?

First, the set-up (so it makes sense):

Dan sez:

You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the blizzard of anniversary stories last month about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last year's financial meltdown. The coverage reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year's crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.

It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here's a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I'd insist upon if I ran a news organization.

He's got me at Number 1, which just happened to be one of my pet peeves too, especially when I worked in TV-Land.

1. We would not run anniversary stories and commentary, except in the rarest of circumstances. They are a refuge for lazy and unimaginative journalists.

Dan tells my friend Grayson Daughters that the "lazy and unimaginative journalists" line was added by the editorial process at the Guardian, and that he wouldn't have used that term himself. I would have! If I'd have stayed in newspapers instead of morphing into cable news, it probably wouldn't bug me so much. But if I have to see ANOTHER Coney Island hot-dog eating story, I'll barf up all the hot dogs those guys are eating.

Sad shift work, really, was what it was, for 24-hour news staffers who couldn't get those days off. I didn't mind the national election rituals. But certain non-holidays that lead to a pre-set mandatory programming mantra of cliche's could just make me run around the room screaming. Like the hurricane preparation story, as the hurricane is of course "bearing down," right before it starts to "wreak havock."

How about the Super Bowl Sunday bizarro land programming as a national holiday?

OK, maybe it isn't a refuge of "lazy and unimaginative journalists" at all. Nope, I'm sure it isn't. They dread those godawful assignments. The mandate for such "coverage" comes from on high, editorial/management, that you MUST stack a show a certain way on those cliche' days. Mother's Day. All the stories about these days have to have several invocations of "We" in them, and the on-air staff have to chuckle or sigh sadly along with the same remarks from the year before.

I have to stop. I'm giving myself nightmares.

Rules 2-3 are from the glory days when citizen journalism was a bright and shiny new thing. It still has great promise, and I'll invest as much energy in it as ever, but oh boy, the rumbles I hear from the trenches. There's a lot of blogger payola not disclosed on the ground in some state and local political wars!

I feel like it's the 80s all over again

It's not a good thing, but not wholly a bad thing either. The terrible tragedy of the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas is bringing a lot of old relics out of the attic, and as the far right wingnuts brush the cobwebs off their terrorist tactics, something else is happening.

Some of the old style 70s feminists and other pro-choice activists who have been largely silent and inactive for the past 30 years are coming out of the woodwork too, speaking up and speaking out against what, if done by a Muslim in the United States, would have inspired a change in the National Terror Alert Level and anti-terrorist scare tactics of "Katie bar the door."

 I need to strongly qualify that last paragraph. There were some feminists and pro-choice activists, compassionate doctors, nurses, rape crisis advocates, suspected child abuse and neglect social workers, and many others WHO DID NOT go silently into that good night of feminist movement forgetfulness of the past 30 years. They have stayed on the job, day in and day out, and, as we see in the article below, risking their lives more fully every day, especially when there is a Democrat or pro-choice president in the White House.

 The medical professionals and social workers, the ones that kept working, like Dr. Tiller, the ones who are now speaking out nightly on MSNBC, these are people who didn't go away or shut down just because the movement politics had waned. They are true heroes.

For the rest of us, maybe we will remember our old activist selves. Maybe we'll remember what it was like to regularly staff the counter-protests at the clinics on Friday afternoons.

Maybe we'll remember what it was like to organize and stand up for what we believe in, as if it were the norm, and not something forgotten, in an old scrapbook.

Watch Rachel Maddow on MSNB in the evenings, and it makes you, makes me, remember the old days, of staffing the pro-choice tables in the student union on campus, bringing the speakers in, of marching and raising hell and pestering those folks with the oddly arched eyebrows and permanently angry faces protesting outside of clinics on Friday afternoons.

Maybe we forgot to be those people because the clinics disappeared, so we didn't see the protesters, forgot we still needed to fight back. I don't know why. I didn't stop being that feminist. But we sure did stop getting riled up over travesties that should have kept us riled up.

Some paragraphs in the article below just blew me away, so much so I have to bold them, call them out. Read them once. Then read them again.

Link: Cristina Page: The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing.

Cristina Page

Author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America

Posted: May 31, 2009 09:36 PM

The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing

For those who would like to think today's murder in church of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, is an isolated incident, here's the horrifying news: You are wrong. The pattern is clear and frightening.

In March 1993, three months into the administration of our first pro-choice president, Bill Clinton, abortion provider Dr. David Gunn was murdered in Pensacola, Florida. That was the beginning of what would become a five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers throughout the Clinton years.

Today's assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes 5 months into the term of our second pro-choice president. For anyone who would like to believe that this is a statistical anomaly, a coincidence that doesn't portend anything, again, you are wrong.

During the entire Bush administration, from 2000-2008 there were no murders.

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.

One can only conclude that like terrorist sleeper cells, these extremists have now been set in motion. Indeed the evidence is already there. The chatter, the threats, the hate-filled rhetoric are abundant.

In the last year of the Bush administration there were 396 harassing calls to abortion clinics. In just the first four months of the Obama administration that number has jumped to 1401.

[...]

Battered women are at greatest danger of being killed by their abusers when they are most strong -- that is, when they muster the courage to leave. The same phenomenon may be true in the abusive political abortion debate. The pro-choice movement, specifically our abortion providers, are in the greatest danger of violence when we take power. When the anti-abortion movement loses power, their most extreme elements appear to move to the fore and take control. The murder of Dr. Tiller suggests that violence against abortion providers may be far more linked to the power, or lack thereof, anti-abortion groups have politically than to laws designed to increase penalties against such acts.

History has another disturbing lesson for us. The escalation of anti-abortion rhetoric plays a direct role in instigating violence. When anti-abortion groups ratchet up the rhetoric, they know exactly what they're doing and the results it will have.

[...]

Eleanor Bader, co-author of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism, in an article in March for RHRealityCheck.org about clinics bracing for an uptick in violence after the election of Obama wrote, "immediately after Obama's election, Douglas Johnson, Legislative Director of the National Right to Life Committee, called him a "hardcore pro-abortion president." The American Life League dubbed him "one of the most radical pro-abortion politicians ever," and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life warned that Obama will "force Americans to pay for the killing of innocents." Americans United for Life, the Family Research Council and Operation Save America quickly joined the chorus."

[...]

Many in the pro-choice movement believed that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law, passed in 1994 in response to Gunn's murder, was responsible for reigning in violence against abortion providers. Clearly that is not the case. Based on statistics on violence against abortion providers compiled by the National Abortion Federation, even after the passage of FACE in 1994, there was still considerable violence and threats against clinic personnel, including six murders. As appears clear, the pro-choice movement has looked through rose-colored glasses, assuming or hoping that legalities can restrain terrorists.

In fact, it didn't abate after FACE, as we've seen. It was not until a comforting anti-abortion president did they calm down and stop the murder, bombing and harassment spree.

As a result of Bush's policies, recent reportings from clinics suggest that we may be seeing a surge in abortions. That has failed to inspire introspection from anti-abortion groups. That Clinton presided over the most dramatic decline in abortion rates in the recorded history of our country left them unmoved. That Obama has assigned his senior-most staff to the task of finding ways to reduce the need for abortion has not protected clinics nor providers nor Obama. Holder and his Justice Department should take note of the chatter and move aggressively against this form of domestic terrorism. The hate-filled rhetoric against Obama from the anti-abortion movement is at unprecedented levels, even for this reflexively inflammatory group. They refer to him as the "Most Pro-Abortion President Ever" ignoring the fact that he is the first to extend an olive branch in hopes that together we can make abortion more rare.

[...]

Told you they'd be playing Heart, Barracuda!

RNC rolls with the 80s tonight! LOL. Wonder if Sarah had input into the music? The string of songs playing as the balloons fell sounded like the soundtrack we played on high school basketball bus trips!

More disturbing, I think, is that McCain did something with that speech that I can't quite put my finger on, until I get the transcript, but I know one thing: he was not talking to the Republican base, and said plenty of things that should either make that base nervous, or angry.

One thing for certain, he took shots at standard operating procedure politics of KARL ROVE et. al., of DeLay, of K Street, of Abramoff. He sounded more like the man who is married to the bio that played in the film about his wife, who by most rights, should be a Democrat, but that she is extremely rich, and married to John McCain. Cindy McCain was definitely intriguing, but I didn't understand how she wasn't allowed to be interesting ALONE, but always had to link her back to her Daddy, like a woman can't be that interesting by herself, without invoking Daddy.

But McCain, who were you talking to tonight? Not the Dems, but who was your audience? And was it lip service? Will Rove and the puppetmasters still call the real policy shots behind the scenes? Are the power-brokers still in power, and using you as a front man?

That's the doubt that should keep Dems fighting for Obama, because while McCain is certainly interesting, we have NO CLEAR TRUST that the evil fascist authoritarian police-staters have been exorcised from the deep bowels of Washington, where they have taken root.

Definitive Christopher Hitchens Rant on Falwell

I have very little stomach for Christopher Hitchens anymore. While I don't mind people who piss me off, Hitchens fell into a non-reality-based sleep (or bender) for a while there, and the iconoclastic gadfly seems to wallow more incredulously in wildly irrational rants.

That said, maybe he was more sober or lucid than normal in the bit below, or not, as the case may be. Either way, it's a great epitaph for someone (Jerry Falwell) most of us will only want to remember in terms of the kind of devils we'd like to avoid in the future.

And Hitchens does skewer media culpability in the Falwell narrative so very well...

Here are some of my favorite bits, I want to preserve for posterity, until the next time Hitchens takes leave of his senses and pisses me off (I don't care that he's a darling again now, with his book out).

Link: Jerry Falwell, faith-based fraud. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine.

fighting words: A wartime lexicon

Faith-Based Fraud

Jerry Falwell's foul rantings prove you can get away with anything if you have "Reverend" in front of your name.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 12:46 PM ET

 The Rev. Jerry Falwell

 The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled "credulous idiot." The first such category consists of those who expected Falwell (and themselves) to be bodily raptured out of the biosphere and assumed into the heavens, leaving pilotless planes and driverless trucks and taxis to crash with their innocent victims as collateral damage.

[...]

The second such category is of slightly more importance, because it consists of the editors, producers, publicists, and a host of other media riffraff who allowed Falwell to prove, almost every week, that there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word Reverend. Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin. "Why, Reverend, come right on the show!" What a fool Don Imus was. If he had paid the paltry few bucks to make himself a certified clergyman, he could be jeering and sneering to the present hour.

Falwell went much further than his mad 1999 assertion about the Jewish Antichrist. In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism on American civil society in September 2001, he used his regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were a divine punishment of the United States. Again, I ask you to imagine how such a person would be treated if he were not supposedly a man of faith.

[...]

Seeking to deflect the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice, Falwell adopted the cause of the most thuggish and demented Israeli settlers, proclaiming that their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was a holy matter and hoping that they might help to bring on Armageddon and the return of the Messiah. A detail in this ghastly narrative, as adepts of the "Left Behind" series will know, is that the return of the risen Christ will require the mass slaughter or mass conversion of all Jews. This consideration did not prevent Menachem Begin from awarding Falwell the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal in 1980 and has not inhibited other Israeli extremists from embracing him and his co-thinkers ever since. All bigots and frauds are brothers under the skin. Trying to interrupt the fiesta of piety on national television on the night of Falwell's death, I found myself waiting while Ralph Reed went all moist about the role of the departed in empowering "people of faith." Here was the hypocritical casino-based Christian who sought and received the kosher stamp from Jack Abramoff. Perfect.

Like many fanatical preachers, Falwell was especially disgusting in exuding an almost sexless personality while railing from dawn to dusk about the sex lives of others. His obsession with homosexuality was on a par with his lip-smacking evocations of hellfire.

[...]

The evil that he did will live after him. This is not just because of the wickedness that he actually preached, but because of the hole that he made in the "wall of separation" that ought to divide religion from politics. In his dingy racist past, Falwell attacked those churchmen who mixed the two worlds of faith and politics and called for civil rights. Then he realized that two could play at this game and learned to play it himself.

[...]

It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it's extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the "faith-based."

The "God of God-Games" Speaks

Link: The New Yorker: Fact: GAME MASTER.

Great couple of paragraphs in this new longer story in the New Yorker, about Will Wright, the ground-breaking creator of the immersion game Sims. I couldn't help myself. I had to pull out excerpts.

It's a typically long New Yorker piece, so go read the whole thing, some time when you're eating dinner by yourself. I love those good long reads.

Speaking of gods and god-games... right now I'm plowing through the wonderful Harper's "Soldiers of Christ," on the Colorado Springs megachurch and Pastor Ted Haggard's leadership of it (and his connection to the Bush administration). I'm feeling awfully pleased with myself that I'd read it when it first came out in May 2005. Gives the recent Ted Haggard stories much more context (you think it's because his last name is a slant rhyme with Jimmy Swaggart? Do you suppose Jimmy used to swagger? Is Ted feeling a bit haggard these days?)

If you've been living under a rock the last two days (or are reading this from deep in the archives):

Link: Just a massage, pastor says: Ted Haggard, who led a national evangelical group, says he also bought meth from the gay prostitute. - Los Angeles Times.

My favorite bits about game designer Will Wright in the article below are in bold.

Link: The New Yorker: Fact: GAME MASTER.

GAME MASTER

Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims. Can he do it again with Spore?

by JOHN SEABROOK

Issue of 2006-11-06
Posted 2006-10-30

[...]

Among the pioneers of the God game was Peter Molyneux, of Great Britain, who created Populous, in 1989. The game gives the player omniscient power over a variety of simulated societies. (You can help them or torture them as you wish, although your actions have consequences in the game.) Another important God-game designer, Sid Meier, has based his Civilization series, which began to appear in 1991, on historical processes, such as scientific discovery, war, and diplomacy. But the master of the genre—the god of God games—is Will Wright. Beginning in 1989, with SimCity, in which the object is to design and manage a modern city, and continuing with The Sims, in 2000, in which you care for a family in an ordinary suburban environment, Wright created situations that redefined the boundaries of what a game can be. “It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations,” he has said. “Why shouldn’t games be?” To game designers, Wright is the Zola of the form: the man who moved the subject matter of games away from myth, fantasy, and violence and toward ordinary social life.

For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves—that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls “possibility space.” “Will has a reality-distortion field around him,” his former business partner, Jeff Braun, told me. “He comes up with the craziest idea you’ve ever heard, and when he’s finished explaining it to you the world looks crazy—he’s the only sane person in it.”

[...]

Spore isn’t a multiplayer game, like the immensely popular World of Warcraft, which runs on “massively parallel” computers (a distributed system employing many networked machines); it’s what Wright jokingly calls a massively parallel single-player game. If you enable an Internet feature, Spore servers will “pollinate” your copy of the game with content created by other players. In order to create the best content for your style of play—“the right kind of ecosystem for your creature,” as Wright puts it—Spore builds a model of how you play the game, and searches for other players’ content that fits that model. If you create a hyper-aggressive Darwinian monster, for example, the game might download equally cutthroat opponents to test you. In other words, while you are playing the game, the game is playing you.

[...]

Wright had been working on a Power-Point presentation of a talk he had been asked to give about Spore. “It’s supposed to be about how I came up with the game, but what I really want to talk about is the history of astrobiology, so I’m doing both,” he said. He moved over to the two computers in his office and clicked through some images, while describing the basic structure of Spore. At first, I was baffled. Up to this point in his career, Wright has been including more and more social realism in his games. But Spore is a surprise—at a glance, it looks like a “cartoony bug game,” as one contributor to a gaming Web site put it. The buildings don’t have the crisp urban lines of SimCity; they look more like the architecture in Dr. Seuss books. Wright has also introduced weapons and conquest. The violence isn’t gratuitous—in some cases, you have to kill to survive—but it isn’t sugar-coated, either. Not only do you kill other creatures in Spore but you have to eat them.

[...]

Women banned from swimming at Somalia Beach

Once again, I've been transported back into Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale." I know repression around the world is too common to actually remark upon, except that I can't help the outrage, ever. And the feeling that when this kind of second-class status is institutionalized in one place it can more easily be institutionalized somewhere else.

And for those who have a bent toward this line of thinking, about how women should not be swimming among men on a beach, they get righteous reinforcement, which gives them greater force and backup for the next outrage and oppression they have in mind.

The very idea, that women should be banned from a beach. That their horizons cannot include the wider horizons of staring into the sea, the peace of being buoyed by it, the relaxation of a day in the sun and surf. How easy it is for those with power to decide that those without power should not be able to enjoy such things.

Link: My Way News - Somalia Bans Swimming for Women at Beach.

Somalia Bans Swimming for Women at Beach

Oct 20,  1:27 PM (ET)

Sheikh Farah Ali Hussein, chair of a northern Mogadishu Islamic court, said Friday that the ban applies only to the northern Mogadishu Leedo beach, where families usually go on weekends to play and relax.

"We stopped women from swimming because it is against the teaching of Islam for women to mingle with men, especially while they are swimming," Hussein said.

Since sweeping to power over much of southern Somalia in June, the Islamists have banned movie viewing, publicly lashed drug users and broke up a wedding celebration because a band was playing and women and men were socializing together. They also have introduced public executions.

Somali women usually swim fully clothed as swimsuits are generally frowned upon. Somali men, however, swim in trunks, at times bare-chested or wearing vests.

"They cannot prevent us from our right to swim in the sea. What is wrong with us enjoying ourselves like men? That is clear discrimination," Miriam Isse told The Associated Press as she watched others swimming in the Indian Ocean.

[...]

Was Crete Plato's Atlantis?

I'm not saying Plato's Atlantis was THE Atlantis, because other things point to a real Atlantis, a civilization or period that precedes our known historical memory, that was wiped out with apocalypic destruction. Plato is most certainly directionally-challenged if he had been talking about Crete, tho, because it ain't WEST of the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibralter).

The Minoans ARE in our historical memory, but their archetype fits the Atlantis archetype, and for Plato, that would work just as surely as the Greek Artemis moon goddess archetype resembles the Roman Diana, as well as moon goddesses in other cultures, like the Sumerian Nanna. The archetype is the pattern, and humanity and memory extend to flesh out and enact the archetype, just as surely as Noah's flood came from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Link: Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology: Olive branch clue to how Minoans were wiped out.

Olive branch clue to how Minoans were wiped out

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 28 April 2006    

A single olive branch may have solved one of ancient history's most enduring mysteries: when and why did the great Minoan civilisation of the Mediterranean come to a sudden end?

The branch was buried during a cataclysmic volcanic eruption on the Aegean island of Thera - now known as Santorini - and scientists believe they can date the precise moment of the tree's death.

Knowing when the Thera eruption happened is important because the explsion was so powerful that it almost certainly caused the collapse of the Minoan civilisation, centred on the island of Crete, 60 miles away. Vulcanologists believe the explosion generated violent tsunamis that destroyed Crete's ports, threw thousands of tons of ash and pumice into the atmosphere and created a "nuclear winter" that led to successive crop failures in the region.

Scientists have detected ash from the explosion as far away as Greenland, the Black Sea and Egypt. They have also discovered signs of frost damage caused by the volcano on preserved plant material excavated in Ireland and California.

Walter Friedrich, of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and his colleagues have analysed the olive branch's growth rings and combined the findings with radiocarbon dating to show the tree must have died between 1627BC and 1600BC.

[...]

The study, published in the journal Science, suggests Thera blew apart a century or so prior to the conventional date when the Minoan civilisation was thought to have gone into demise, based on evidence from archaeological objects. The scientists suggest it is highly unlikely the Minoans were able to survive the environmental impact of the eruption, which meant their civilisation ended 100 to 150 years earlier than thought. This would mean the Minoan civilisation was not contemporary with the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt - which began in the 16th century BC - as many archaeologists believed.

[...]

An old friend

By accident tonight I came across a book I'd gotten many years ago... in the late 1980s, I think. In flipping through favorite folded-over pages, I found a little meditation, not much to it, really. But in rereading it again after all this time, the simple four lines, the force of it just rolled over me like a steamroller. Wow.

I'd spent a good bit of time with these four lines back then, so part of the force is the power of what I was learning in meditation at that time. And still, the lines just have force. So thank you Thich Nhat Hanh, one more time.

Here it is:

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.

"Being Peace," Thich Nhat Hanh