Cold Spring, NY

Circa 1989, this question came up on an EPA National Priority Superfund Cleanup site, the former Marathon Battery site in Cold Spring, NY named by George Washington, across the Hudson River from West Point Military Academy and across Foundry Cove from Constitution Island, on which fortifications were designed by a Dutch cartographer to the American revolutionaries, Bernard Romans. What at first appeared to be the procedure was that any artifacts found after recording were to be placed in a bunker onsite for storage forever. The focus of a second cleanup, as it was, of cadmium and nickel (and other) it was negotiated to at first to be processed on site by only HazMat trained personnel in trailers on the site, and then by lab personnel without the training as long as that section of the site not associated with the direct contamination was involved, i.e., the mitigation of the designed "haul road" to create the earthen dam in the cove that would be pumped out and the sediments therein combined with concrete and hauled out on rail, utilizing the former rail bed that once was used by the historic West Point Foundry to its large two railroad line dock out into the Hudson River and later. "In 1896/97 J. B. & J. M. Cornell took over the iron foundry at Cold Spring, N. Y. on the Hudson River. The foundry was known as the West Point Foundry Works. These facilities are discussed in the magazine, The Successful American, Vol. III, No. 4, April 1901, p. 202, which also illustrates the extensive works at this location." Constructions of large bridge sections and skyscraper "parts" painted apparently also in Foundry Cove. It was also perhaps where the first "iron clad" ship was created in the US. As the tests in the cove were monitored for hydrocarbons and wipe tests done on some of the artifacts it was determined that there wasn't any threats of contamination and the "bunker" idea was abandoned.

MI6 "Casino Royale" site

Once upon a time I was going to get on the "Casino Royale" a new wooden "purse seiner" in Seal Cove on Grand Manan Island, where we had an old home for awhile, next to the schoolhouse. It had some new GM engine problems (assembly line failed to clean out metal turnings) and didn't. They had built the boat around the engine and had to cut the deck open to remove it and replace it. The aluminum boat was really fast, the one that pulls the net out in a large circle around the school of herring that the "mother ship" then draws the bottom of the net closed and then hydraulically closes the top of the net, lifting the catch onto the deck into the hold I think. It went for 17 years I heard until it broke up on some rocks, the archipelago is full of submerged hazards, e.g., rock ledges, tricky passages in some of the highest tides in the world (28 feet?). To help save the herring industry in the Northeast Atlantic see: Protect Atlantic Herring: Building Block of Our Ocean Ecosystem and take action at the National Environmental Trust.

Iran-Iraq

We should recall that the Israel flew over other nations in close-formation to be disguised as a wayward jetliner on radar to bomb the then French built nuclear power plant in Iraq. One of the four pilots perished in the disintegration of NASA orbiter Columbia, and ironically his notebook is being preserved, it fluttered to earth. This act directly or indirectly led to belligerency in "southwest Asia". I don't think it should be repeated. US Marines, just recently broke the international seals on the "yellow cake uranium" stored at that site which had been under international control, now mostly missing. Why? US mismanagement. A number of years ago, we built, delivered, and trained from a US compound in Iran of 4000 Grumman employees, pilots for 80 F-14 Tomcats (of 100) in service to the Shah of Iran, before the Iranian student begun "hostage crisis" (over Savak secret police spying on their students here in the US they've said). I was sitting with an F-14 test pilot on his birthday at his home when the US announced on national television it would destroy all the F-14's if the USSR made a move toward Iran's border, over the "air-to-air" technology the F-14 possessed which acquires up to 6 multiple targets at long range and rumored to have electronic counter-measure. I thought to speak here as the aircraft carrier Eisenhower steams toward Iran, where the US Navy Aegis system once destroyed a peaceful Iranian jetliner full of Islamic pilgrims. Ike warned us of the military-industrial complex, didn't he? There's an atomic cannon pointed at Dwight D. Eisenhower's hometown in Abilene, Kansas in Junction City, Kansas you can see at roadside america. My high school Western Civ. teacher was an Army Reserve atomic cannonman.

Clinton says she's thought of '08 run

Imagine if she hadn't said she had. Duh! I was in the White House in my unpaid job as First Lady in charge of many events and affairs and you know, it just never crossed my mind! Imagine that! And you know traditionally regarded in charge of "purse strings" imagine my surprise when the Congress votes a double pay raise for the incoming replacement President whose father occupied the White House prior to President Clinton's two terms. Gee I'd sound kind of vapid wouldn't I? But seriously, I did enjoy her speech at Princeton University I caught on TV. I spent a lot of time in the tree nursery there digging test holes for archaeology in the fall and winter for the interchange on Route 1 there a new hi-tech corridor that's been ongoing. I went to a conference when PC's came out and were installed at Forbes College there and met Anna Roosevelt, the former President Theodore Roosevelt's granddaughter who works on Marajo island in Brazil, the size of Indiana, and with these new tools we have new ways of understanding the past peacefully it's hoped.

Just between me, you and the bushes...

Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Republican. Well, the Republicans did have a voter drive in the great state of Mississippi (and they got that barge canal over the "energy island" for NYC Congress once chose). They got hold of voters rolls or something and cross compared them with phone books I read. They then cold-called people to get them to register to vote. Bravo! However they were also reminding (or harassing) that a Republican called to get out the vote. Anyone have a recording of their "pep" speech? On a less happy note I read in the New Hampshire "Granite State News" a number of years ago that MLKjr had friends in Wolfeboro, NH and where it was reported Coretta Scott King, his wife, was hidden after the assassination. Wolfeboro is also where recently there is the small Wright Museum of WWII (former Wolfeboro Falls lumber yard) partly designed by the D.C. "Holocaust Museum" designer I was told. Former Vice President Dan Quayle was seen at the local lunch counter one election year and its said Bob and Libby Dole bought a judge's place out near the now to be decommissioned grass airfield on Wolfeboro Neck. Another rumor I heard in an antique barn was that Tom Selleck, a friend of the Doles', bought a place across the former seaplane strip over on Tuftonboro Neck. Wolfeboro, New Hampshire: Vice President George W. Bush stopped on the upper deck of the Motor Ship Mount Washington to ask the small crowd gathered at dockside to join him in a moment of silence. President Ronald Reagan was to go under general anesthesia for a colon probe and operation to correct a diagnosed medical condition. Vice President Bush would be Acting President during the procedure. He appeared to be wearing garters on his sleeves, perhaps. Vice President George W. Bush left the ship's deck and came ashore, and was surrounded by the Secret Service and whisked into a waiting limo.

I was getting an ice cream cone at "Dockside".

oops... Vice President H. W. Bush. Please believe me that really happened. I once was on the side of the road at MacArthur Airport on Long Island, NY when Hubert Humphrey went by who I still recall said "Thank you, boys" which we were. Later President Nixon stopped there at night in the old Air Force One and they moved the placard holding demonstrators to behind the bleachers. When President George W. Bush visited St Patrick's Cathedral, there were two sections one up the street away from the church for the myriad placard holding peaceful demonstrators and another cheering section out in front of the cathedral. I was there on a bus I had been called in in the middle of the day to go pick up maps to get the archaeological surveys of the Upper Hudson River for the GE PCB cleanup designed by T.A.M.S. which was then bought by TYCO, embroiled in fiscal scandal thereafter. Coincidently, under the alter in St. Patrick's, before Cardinal O'Connor "joined him" is Pierre Toussaint, a famous African-American Catholic helper of the poor in NYC whose burial was excavated apparently by an archaeologist for the church.

Rival Blasts Clinton on White House Hope

Newsvine: One of Yonkers (mayors), not too long ago, when they were in Federal court over minority and low-income housing provisos, committed suicide. Yonkers is New York State's fourth largest city according to Encarta. One proposal I worked on the archaeology of, was to take property from St. Josephs Catholic Seminary, on the former strategic Valentine tavern site from which General Washington's spies could see British ships on the Long Island Sound and in the Hudson River. I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. There's a "pieta" replica in it and other interesting sculpture. This is an interesting "attack" which if you take the citizen test is sort of meaningless. In the one of twenty multiple choice questions in their review book one is asked who elects the President? If you answer the people and not the Electoral College you will be marked wrong. The Electoral College should be reformed, imho, as it was part of the Constitution before an amendment was passed requiring that the President and the Vice-President be from the same party, not as the framers wrote it.

Shoot without shooting

"It's been quoted so many times since it was first uttered during FDR's first inaugural address in March 1933, it's become almost too familiar -- we hear it without really hearing it." - Arianna Huffington I referred to this, Monday, October 09, 2006, and have been thinking about it, the Sing Sing exhibit in New York Urban Cultural Park in Ossining, NY, standing in Watertown, NY airport with one of the editors of "Archaeology" Angela Schuster, as a big 747 Aer Lingus jet landed out of the blue, and the NY Dept. of Correctional Services buses pulled up to it I thought for the new prison at Cape Vincent, NY (where some of the Bonapartes were seen and perhaps lived) with apparently no crash equipment and one small hangar her husband had flown their recently restored plane to, through the last night's storm, while we were watching "Young Guns" at the mall. We were at Sacketts Harbor tracking down human remains in the area where condos were planned in this Lake Ontario-side touted retirement community, where its said over 45,000 may have been encamped in the War of 1812. We were testing near a small fort that was manned by the veterans of the American Revolution, and at one point called the County Coroner to verify the bones we had found were historic, in the parade field where a young lieutenant, Ulysses S. Grant had served, fresh out of West Point Academy in the Madison Barracks, a future captain on Governors Island, a General in the Civil War, a President of the United States and who is interred in Grant's Tomb with his wife on Manhattan Island in NYC. (Add: "Both Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia Dent Grant are still in New York's General Grant National Memorial, commonly known as Grant's Tomb." bluffr.com) In the intro film clip of "To Kill a Mockingbird" from the book by Nelle Harper Lee, the narrator, remarks that in 1932, "Macon County had been recently told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself." It then has the dialogue begin with Atticus and the boy, a guest at their table. Atticus explains his father told him he could shoot all the bluejays he wanted but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

triptych

I often look at this site because of the hidden messages in the mouse "balloons".

Some 1999 research

Thanks for the info, my info is dated for New York State and the comparison I was alluding to, by Ezra Zubrow, I remember was a statistical comparison of east-west differences in archaeological survey. One was the surface walk over, in the east 3 or 4 would walk down the furrows of a field, "out west" 3 would walk and one would zig-zag behind the 3. Other info was analyzed, i.e. average size of the survey, costs per acre etc., sort of "raw" analyses. That certainly sounds great for analysis! I have that feeling too sometimes that the research hasn't been completed, before the work. The research and other factors get very complicated in urban settings, especially back around the time those German tourists died in the Concorde crash in France on their way over here to be tourists in America. I could research the torn down empty lots but not some of the buildings now since torn down next to one another that perhaps were the "Steuben House" (for returning Civil War veterans and prior the National Guard called out to defend Washington, D.C.) and "Germania Hall" where a now National Register house owner from Troy, NY, Kate Mullaney, sitting next to Susan B. Anthony, was the first woman elected to a union. She had organized the white collar workers who washed and ironed the newly invented detachable men's collar. It's listed simply in a new history of gotham as a "bowling alley". Complicating the situation was that later "Steuben House" was known as the notorious "McGurk's Suicide Bar" where some women in the oldest profession had poisoned themselves, and in it were artists and noted feminist Kate Millet, an Oxford grad feminist and the people there trying to save some of the old buildings in the Bowery, once NYC's theater district before it moved up to Broadway, leaving the Yiddish Theater which was sort of destroyed in subway expansion, though by then pretty run down on NYC's Houston St. ("Howston" we still say after the Scottish merchant). The older records, like phonebooks are listed by name one year another listed by address, making it hard to compare the lot "chain of title" owners with the residents. But with IT there's more and more info, like indexed photos of every building at one time in NYC, and other info that's a little easier to get to than I imagine my grandfather a real estate reporter working in the "Hall of Records" during the Great Depression. His son, with polio in a wheelchair, died in an elevator accident there just before my father was to ship out in WWII to Italy. They've fairly recently fixed up the elevators there under the federal disabilities act to be more handicapped accessible.

Angelina Jolie "blackfaced" as Mariane Pearl

Black-face began in the Bowery I read, where the theater district once was, beginning quite large in the 1820s. A little later the first successful American opera "A Sawmill River or a Yankee Trick" was said to have been done in "black face". It was written by the "Pied Piper of Catherine Slip" Micah Hawkins, a relation of American genre painter, William Sydney Mount, famous for some of the first portrayals of African-Americans in the arts (see Frankenstein's excellent book). Unfortunately he died of a fever when he was only 44, playing his piano under the counter for his customers in the store. For "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" now in paperback by Bernard-Henri Levy, Melville House books in its website "Moby Lives".

Black-Crowned Night Heron

Spartina Salt Marshes - which I've spent some time around. I think I saw some in the Stony Brook pond where Adam Smith's Mill once was, in the pond for the Stony Brook Grist Mill. Strange to see them standing together, about the same size in different "suits".

Seacoast Notes, NH, very interesting newsletter...

Abramoff Probe Touches Primedia's Channel One, MPA

• Primedia describes Channel One as “the largest source of news and information for young people reaching more than 7 million teens in middle schools and high schools across the country, nearly 30 percent of teenagers in the U.S.”
• Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates repeatedly sought payment from the Magazine Publishers of America and Primedia's Channel One as they orchestrated lobbying campaigns in Washington, according to a Senate report.

Media Week October 16, 2006

New Music Hall of Fame on Long Island

Notes of praise for LI musicians at Hall induction Patchogue gala kicks off inductions of Joan Jett, KISS member, Billy Joel and others into hall of fame for artists with local ties. Newsday

21st Century Neanderthal Man

The Smithsonian magazine has an article (October, 2006) on the efforts and plans to decode the Neanderthal genome and discover differences, similarities and the events we may have shared with the extinct species. From it, may come clues to disease and cures for ailments we don't share with other animals. Again, however, this is a Eurocentric view of Neanderthals and leaves out the "Shanidar Cave" burials excavated in Iraq by Ralph Solecki, Ph.D., who used to teach at Columbia University in New York City. I once worked in his small lab on a historical archaeology, for Joan Geismar, Ph.D., on a site we worked from under a "coopers" dam (barrel makers that became water powered furniture makers then still repairing furniture at the "Coopers Dam" historic site. I had a friend's rocking chair's wicker seat replaced there) and last I heard he had moved to Texas. He also discovered many of the early sites on Long Island, discovering and working in local archaeology with friends growing up there. I thought I heard Carlyle Shreeve Smith (1915-1993) who was a good friend of Thor Heyerdahl (1914-1992) who gave a talk and slide show about Thor Heyerdahl at a Suffolk County Archaeology Association annual meeting at the "Sunwood" estate, in Old Field, NY.

Just the Artifacts, Ma'am

Cover Story Oct. 13, 2006

"The Palisades Museum of Prehistory houses 5,000-year-old stone tools, pottery sherds, and arrowheads, as well as evidence of how the first Washingtonians relaxed after hunting and gathering: Jacuzzi." Washington CityPaper

A Soldier's Tale

Lynndie England finally gives an interview. Interesting story. I grew up behind the lawyers "England & England" in Centereach, across from its first schoolhouse (became "Schmidt's Deli," run by a nice old German couple with Dobermans) next to the post office and stores ("Groben's" candy store, the building has burned down since) and behind the other lawyer in the other house Ronald Sickman. The machine shop next to "Centereach Auto Parts" has become a little "Orange County Chopper" like shop where once a piece of the LEMs (Lunar Excursion Modules) was made I was told wandering there one day. Enough about me. Give this woman parole so she can take care of her child and return to being a productive member of society. We need more whistleblowers like her, not fewer. (in "marie claire")

Northwestern U., "News at Seven"

Beyond Broadcast This is a really interesting site too, with great research projects in modern information processing.

Republicans are Whistling Past the Foley Graveyard

Where's Newt Gingrich's Republican lexicon? Did he lose his book of "new" words to toss at the non-Republicans? "Foley arts" is also the guys who put the sound effects that make the film arts "rock" and "roll" with footsteps, broken glass, etc., named after the guy who did it best I guess. Also watching my father in the hospital I learned another name for a catheter is a "foley" at least that's how it sounds. "Foolee" would be the guy who ran into the Scottish "bobby" at the world economic conference in Scotland on his bicycle and put the officer out of service for, what, 14 weeks?

October 11, 2006 at 04:02pm 

Any relation to?

"The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange." (Washington Post)

September 17, 2006

Operation Orpheus

In the "Subterranean Britannica" is this article about "Operation Orpheus" and the United States' simultaneous, "Operation Cowboy" in a Louisiana salt mine in 1960. The idea was that if you dug a big enough hole underground, an explosion would be "decoupled" vs. "coupled" and would register very little on seismographs which measure tremors as small as 1/50 the width of a virus it states. The Latter Decoupling Theory was proven using the "Excelsior Tunnel" in Cornwall, on the peninsula in the southwest of Great Britain that projects out into the Atlantic Ocean and the Greenside Mine near the Cumbrian Mountains also. Early 3-D drawings of, for example the output of a power station in an x,y,z graph (circa 1976?) involved the "decoupling" of one's eyes, combining two images which created a perception of dimensionality in the mind and a black "thread" would result suspended in the visual cortex.

FDR and Fearlessness: How the Personal Became the Political

Huffington Post: My aunt's husband, Mr. Donovan, was a law clerk in FDR's office in NYC, part of family history when your father was the youngest of eleven. I was sitting in Cold Spring, NY where the EPA was going to clean-up the Marathon Battery heavy metal site, made the batteries for NIKE missiles, next to the historic West Point Foundry, across the Hudson River from the military academy and heard an interesting story on the radio. They had found, with great difficulty, a bit of "archeology" a bit of detective work, the recording of the lone dissenting voice against declaring war in the Congress, by a woman. She thought we might be too "gut" felt convinced of what had happened, perhaps another side of the "fear itself" equation FDR has been attributed to, perhaps out of its context. Abe Lincoln once remarked upon meeting the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" "...here's the little lady that started the war."

Should presidents be allowed to serve more than 2 terms?

This is not a "return" to democracy idea. In other parliamentary democracies a "vote of confidence" can be called and the current leader ousted. Our system requires "high crimes and misdemeanors" for the basis of impeachment, used very rarely, and perhaps inappropriately as Kenneth Starr has stated, an investigator of the Clinton White House while they were in office in Arkansas. A bunch of freaking religious fanatics from the "Father, the Son and the holy jihad" should not change Mohammad's once emulated career in diplomacy (once involved in the kingdoms of Spain which sponsored Christopher Columbus' voyages, which we celebrate today in the US. The "Christian" idea that year, 1492, was to outlaw Jews, not the Alhambra's in Andalusia) as countries try to recover from tsunami, famine, and climate change. It is not a good time to repeal the 22nd Amendment because "the sky is falling" according to the baseball team buying wannabe Texan who lives on a former German's turkey farm he bought from "betting" on baseball. - I was making the comparison, that we investigated the Clinton White House for Arkansas but not the Bush White House for Texas. There's reason to believe that the sale of the baseball team to him (and not to CBS, Inc., CEO's brother) and the shenanigans around the State funded stadium I heard to think that the profit Mr. G W. Bush made while Governor benefited him to the detriment of others. The $ he made I heard went to purchase the former turkey farm in Crawford, Texas which he now lives on more than perhaps any other President, outside the Beltway. Incidentally singer and entertainer Joe Cocker has a ranch in Crawford, Colorado and actually raises cows on it. One large giant Texas ranch owner in the "Texas Peerage" if you will is named "Bush" but is not a relation to our hound-doggie President. Oct. 10 - If there are no term limits Vice Presidents are also included? The original Constitution had the President and Vice President elected separately, and could and did come from two separate parties. This was found to be problematical, almost an unimaginable situation today. The immigration and naturalization citizenship test asks, (1 of 20) who elects the President? If you multiple choice answer the people and not the Electoral College, you will be marked wrong. I think, in my opinion, perhaps a good place for debate, is that the Electoral College was put in place because the P and VP could come from separate parties, and perhaps when the amendment was passed making them a "duo" from one party, the Electoral College process was overlooked, perhaps, for reform. "American Prison Camps Are on the Way" Someone in the legal profession could go check the "American Anthropological Association" tribute to Morris Opler, PhD. He wrote I think 4 briefs, three of which were presented to the US Supreme Court for the rights of internment US Japanese American citizens (who have been recompensed in some way, however South American citizens of 17 countries taken out of their respective domiciles and interned in the US, I heard mostly in Texas, never have been). I was surprised, I had been in anthropology classes taught by his brother Marvin K. Opler, PhD and in "Culture, Personality, and Deviant Behavior" at New York State's Buffalo University, NY. Morris Opler's original thesis was on the Apache at the University of Chicago.

archaeology and heritage

My old "A Dictionary of Archaeology" c) 1970 edited by Dr. Warwick Bray, a Lecturer then in American Archaeology at London University and David Trump then Staff Tutor in Archaeology at the Cambridge University Board of Extra-mural Studies, (with drawings by Judith Newcomer which became "The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology" published in 1972. By the way there is/was a public "Penguin" statue in Baltimore's "Inner Harbor" from the book publishers) states: industry An ASSEMBLAGE of artifacts including the same types so consistently as to suggest that it is the product of a single society. If more than one class of objects (eg flint tools or bronze weapons) is found, we can talk of a CULTURE." (p. 114 between Indus and ingot) In Irving Rouse's "Introduction to prehistory: A systematic approach" which I once studied, (also author of "The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus" Yale University Press and other Caribbean archaeology) he used a similar typology to describe archaeology. Unfortunately I see "American Heritage" dismissed when used about archaeology, for example the marker of the "Last Village of the Wesqueqeck" in Westchester County, their subsequent history, which historians attribute to a lured into massacre in New Jersey and the perhaps first "reservation" drawn up in treaty by the Dutch and English on the Nissequogue River for the survivors in Suffolk County, Long Island, NY, left out of a report on the "prehistory" of a report I worked on, with 12 radiocarbon dates, though their descendants may still survive. A similar "hypothesis" might involve the wintering of the Russian Fleet in the ports of San Francisco and New York City during the American Civil War and a possible contribution to our industrial heritage from it in exchange in the West Point Foundry, Cold Spring, NY I once heard posited, the foundry proper currently the subject of industrial archaeology for a number of years by Michigan Technological University. The smuggled industrial "workers" from Great Britain also involved in the historic Foundry might be considered part of British "industrial heritage". So it seems, there is some questions of industrial archaeology that show that "industrial heritage" as the concepts that travel with language and "culture" are transferred, perhaps "unbeknown" to an archaeologist despite the known occurrence of "simultaneous invention". George Myers (not necessarily the opinion of anyone connected with the archaeology and heritage cited)

F-14 Simulators Debut in Pensacola, Fla.

(F-14's I saw I think the last two to fly over Long Island)

I wonder what Iran is doing with theirs. I was in the F-14 test pilots house, Tom Gwynne, one of the directors of the "Cradle of Aviation Museum" on Long Island, NY back during the Iranian Hostage crisis, brought on as Kissinger would tell you by the reports of spying on Iranian students by the Shah's secret police, "Savak" while attending school here, when the TV announced that it would blow up all the F-14's on the ground if the USSR made any steps toward the Iran border during the crisis, back in 1980 or so in graduate school in Anthropology. His wife now has a PhD in it and we had been watching "Ishi: the last Californian Indian" or some baloney, Ishi was befriended by anthropologist A.L. Kroeber, (author Ursula K. Le Guin's father) who didn't know Ishi's brain had been separated from his body and more recently "repatriated" with his body. Too bad the Yale U. "Skull and Bones" won't do the same for Geronimo, it's alleged, which both John Kerry and the Presidents Bush belong to.

The Shah of Iran had ordered, I'd thought 100 F-14's, but only received 80 according to Mr. Gwynne, cited in "Newsday" a number of months ago, they were built mostly on Long Island, NY. I suppose they factored into former President Carter's strategy, the "air-to-air" missile systems, the reason we declared they would be obliterated before the technology fell into "enemy" hands. What a birthday for Mr. Gwynne!

Sat Oct 7, 2006 12:24 PM EDT

New York Post ridicules Olbermann for behaviour after anthrax scare

Another target "back then" was reported in the local press near Bridgewater, New Jersey, a place of a recent flood from Hurricane Floyd. A suspicious letter with powder arrived at a division of Johnson & Johnson that is involved in the production of wound dressings for like 80 years or so. The company I was working for was also archaeological testing at nearby Picatinney Arsenal, NJ and West Point Military Academy. We heard on the radio that the letter in Florida was supposed to be about J.Lo who grew up nearby here in Castle Hill section of the Bronx, NYC and had a "Seal of Solomon" or "Star of David" on it, though never recovered. Kathy Nguyen, a resident of the Bronx died in the attacks a Vietnamese-American immigrant also a nurse. We were inspected going in and out of the West Point Academy but not as I recall Picatinney Arsenal where we tested around a former rocket assembly plant on-top of a hill covered with a forest of lightning rods from about WWII. Recently "Conscientious Objectors" were given medals for their life-threatening participation in US anthrax exposure experiments according to the Washington Post's book about anthrax ca. 2003. #5 - Thu Oct 5, 2006 6:16 PM EDT At Picatinney Arsenal we were screened for identification however as was the case daily for the same company doing work at Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, NY an Enron hit for $10 million facility that is also a large induction center or was for the US Army. #6 - Thu Oct 5, 2006 6:20 PM EDT

Civil War Artist Finally Gets His Due

Just Around the Corner...

"'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate" Comment at Newsvine

I recently discovered, as I was involved a number of times in the issues of 17th century "Almshouse" human burials in New York City Hall Park, for different "public archaeology" companies, that the issue of torture was important to the early history of the republic. In 1904, the New York Times published an article stating that the British prison (next to the possible location of the almshouse cemetery) was run by a Major Cunningham and "blacker than any black hole of Calcutta" (another notorious "gaol") and it was where Ethan Allen, an American patriot of Vermont's "Green Mountain Boys" (with whom Captain Hulbert of Bridgehampton, NY served with, and a controversial flag of both, said considered to be the basis for the current US flag's layout) was tortured.

Another American patriot, Nathan Hale, who had "only one life to lose" was captured in Connecticut, brought to "Fort Golgotha" built in a hilltop cemetery from torn down Presbyterian churches in Huntington, NY (under command of Benjamin Thompson, later known as physicist "Count Rumford") and then to Manhattan where he was hung, his remains location unknown. It's possible he might have been tortured too. I once was part of a small team that recovered a large metal "Queens Rangers" pin perhaps worn at the neck on a choker, from there, part of a Saturday class for "gifted and talented" children.

A statue of him was recently moved to the front of City Hall in New York City, and the remains of the "almshouse cemetery" were found in the architectural and interpretation upgrades, some for protection, in 1999 by the former Giuliani administration. The remains were demarcated and left where possible after treatment for preservation. Some were two and three deep, atop one another, with mainly no material remains found, except perhaps a Jewish burial ornament of wood attached to one wrist.