I’ve always wanted to enroll in gladiator school. I once took a course in fencing, but it seemed far too precise and finicky and I hated the drills. I’d prefer to bash it out like Russell Crowe does.
The next best thing to attending gladiator school is watching Terry Jones, one of the guys from Monty Python, take a go at it. Jones milks it for laughs, but there’s also some artful battling from several skilled young men.
Like millions of other readers I’ve turned into a couch potato this summer, curled up with Stieg Larsson’s addictive page-turners. I could be out accompanying my dog Max as he tears through his favorite park hunting for forgotten sandwiches on summer evenings. Or dallying on the beach with g&t in hand. But no. I’m at home, mastering the intricacies of Swedish geography, intelligence agencies, and libel law. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has shanghaied my summer.
I’ve now finished the third and final book in Larsson’s trilogy, a strapping doorstopper at 563 pages in hardback. The series was a great read, and almost worth all those forsaken summer pleasures. But on one point, I am miffed. Larsson never tells us why his hacker heroine, Lisbeth Salander, has that famous dragon tattoo breathing fire across her back.
Sure, she’s about as volatile a character as I can recall in fiction, a kind of dragon lady in Goth. And it may be that Larsson simply intended to remind us of the extreme consequences that awaited anyone who messed with Salander. But since the Swedish author died soon after submitting all three novels to his publisher, we will never know. And that leaves a huge, open field for speculation.
So I began thinking about this famous tattoo, and then tattoos in general. And since I’m an archaeology writer, I began thinking about body markings in an archaeological way. Who, I wondered, were the first people to sport images on their bodies and why? And what did the ur-tattoos look like? Some of the answers surprised me. Continue reading
I confess: my secret vice is reading celebrity wedding news. So naturally I read voraciously all the news reports on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding last weekend to Marc Mezvinsky, spending several precious moments examining the ruffles on her gorgeous Vera Wang wedding gown. But I’m also a keen environmentalist, so I was eager to read of any green innovations that the happy couple may have incorporated into their celebration. All I learned was that the bride is a vegan and that the wedding cake was gluten free. Still, in the spirit of nuptial bliss and love for planet Earth, here are some of my favorite recent green wedding stories:
Grow Your Own Wedding: Julia Davis and her fiance, Andy McLeod, are growing virtually all of the food that will be served at their September 25 wedding. Continue reading
On July 28, 2010, nearly 900,000 galaxies were put into a public database, and this is Galaxy #1, or SDSS J000000.41-102225.6, and don’t tell me astronomers don’t know how to name things. Galaxy #1 is probably an elliptical; the rest of the 900,000 are either ellipticals or spirals or something else, and were identified as such by a few astronomers from notable universities, plus 100,000 housewives, high school students, helicopter pilots, physicians, school teachers, truck drivers, secretaries, and a mobile home park manager. Continue reading
Probably not God’s fault, but very few people understand that business of hidden dimensions in string theory.
http://abstrusegoose.com/235
When Henry VIII wasn’t off wooing new wives and attending to the pressing affairs of state, he was well…eating. Check this out: it’s a look behind the scenes at Hampton Court’s massive, factorylike kitchen. Now here’s a monarch who would have absolutely loved Julia Child.
Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February? And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger? And then everybody forgot about it? This is such a delight: last week, late July, not February, one of the Kepler astronomers publicly announced the discovery of around 140 earth-like planets, a whole galaxy of earth-like planets. I can’t decide whether it’s an example of scientists incapable of following corporate rules, or scientists congenitally unable to keep quiet, or scientists just behaving like the rest of us.
Patricia Sutherland is a very stubborn woman, the kind of damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead brand of stubbornness that the Scots and their descendants long ago perfected. Sutherland is an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and one of the world’s leading experts on the prehistory of the Arctic. Silver-haired, bespectacled, and notably fond of pantsuits, she doesn’t look much like a maverick. But since the late 1990s, Sutherland has been turning Arctic archaeology upside down.
Sutherland proposes that 1000 years or so ago, Norse seafarers–better known in pop culture as the Vikings–took part in a kind of medieval get-rich quick scheme in the Canadian Arctic. According to Sutherland,the Norse traded small bits of wood to Arctic dwellers known as the Dorset for luxurious furs and shimmering walrus ivory that could be sold for a king’s ransom in Europe. And Sutherland is not whistling Dixie. She has assembled an impressive mountain of evidence–from Norse yarn, Norse whetstones and other Norse artifacts found at four sites on Baffin Island and northern Labrador.
You might wonder why you haven’t heard about ancient Norse merchants in the Canadian Arctic. The answer is complex but it largely comes down to this. The search for Norse voyagers in North America is primarily the purview of amateurs and kooks who claim to have turned up Viking runes and ruins all along the Eastern Seaboard. None of these sites, however, with the sole exception of the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, has been accepted by the archaeological community. Continue reading