Archive for the 'History' Category
Celebration?
The T-Ford, the first mass-produced car, has been on the road for 100 years. This important date in transport engineering is being celebrated right now.
http://www.ford.com/about-ford/heritage/vehicles/100-years-ford-model-t-innovation/100-years-ford-model-t-innovation-688.
Or is it? Just 100 years!? It is totally incredible how the car has managed to completely ruin our world in so short a time.
Filed under: General, History, Obituaries, Things of beauty | Leave a Comment
Homer and astronomy
Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco have argued that the individual who described the killing of the suitors in the Odyssey (whom we know as Homer) has situated his story at a particular date, or rather at a specific moment in time, viz. a particular solar eclipse. I give you the authors’ abstract: ”Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in [...]
Filed under: Archaeology, General, Greece, History, Religion | Leave a Comment
O tempora, o mores
I quote from a BBC News item (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7473303.stm): ‘Jack Straw has said laws in England and Wales to let witnesses give evidence anonymously will be rushed through Parliament as this was “an emergency”. The law lords’ ruling last week that defendants needed to know who was testifying against them has already led to one £6m [...]
Filed under: History, Politics, Rome | Leave a Comment
Rome’s poor
Not every poor inhabitant in Rome spent his time at the games munching his free sandwich. The burial site of Ponte Galeria, excavated during the past year, has provided paleopathologists with a lot of evidence showing the back-breaking toil of those buried there, probably working in Ostia’s harbour. The Associated Press news item: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hKvgUclxefB2iLkkRP6K-nzmlSKQD916P4HG0.
Filed under: Archaeology, History, Rome | Leave a Comment
War profiteering
(Almost) everybody will be aware of the war profiteering that has been going on in Iraq, the beneficiaries being American firms, large and small, some of them, like Halliburton’s, intimately linked with the White House. But it is always a bit worse than you expected: in a BBC programme (below) we get the figures — but also [...]
Filed under: History, Politics | Leave a Comment
Extinct is forever part 2
There was a lot of attention in the media for the past few days being paid to the existence in the furthest reaches of the Amazon forest, on the border of Brasil and Peru, of Indian tribes which have lived there ‘isolated’ for many centuries at least. This is not true of course: they were [...]
Filed under: General, History, Politics | Leave a Comment
Blasko Gabric for president
In a BBC special report titled “What happened to Yugoslavia?” there is a short interview with Blasko Gabric, the man who runs the theme park (well, a very large word for a couple of billboards in a meadow) Yugoland. Hear and see the man at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7416069.stm. Being asked what he liked about the old Yugoslavia, Blasko [...]
Filed under: History, Politics | Leave a Comment
To build a fire
In a pre-press release, The Journal of Human Evolution has made available online an article by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and Richard Wrangham, titled “Great apes prefer cooked food”.
Below I quote the abstract that can be found at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484 (go to: articles in the press). You can buy the whole article for PDF-download, if your [...]
Filed under: Archaeology, History | Leave a Comment
Eleven elderly women were burned alive in Kenya because they were suspected of being witches. See the BBC news report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7413268.stm. Typical for Africa, you say? Where believe in magic lingers on? Certainly many of the news reports on this sad occurrence carried overtones of “Darkest Africa”.
In France some 15 graves are desecrated every day (!) by [...]
Filed under: General, History, Religion | 1 Comment
PVV shows racist face
The Dutch right-wing party PVV, whose leader Wilders drew international attention with his anti-Koran movie Fitna (the stupidity of which was so glaring that even a majority of Muslims did not waste their anger on that, in spite of the insults), now shows its true face: they protested against the commemoration of North-African soldiers who [...]
Filed under: General, History, Politics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
