I listen to WFUV radio, the Fordham University, the Jesuit university public station in the Bronx, NY, "listener supported" where it's "Robert Plant Day". He lost a son who today may have been 40 to some form of cancer I think. I graduated from Stony Brook University with a Welsh native of Penalt on the Wye River valley between Wales and England where Robert Plant lived in the early 1970s. We lived "together" working in Mississippi. I wonder sometimes if he ever met Mary FitzHerbert of Hillside Farm, Birches Road, though she married an Iberia airline pilot living in Uruguay, and worked on some of the initial archaeology of a huge hydroelectric power dam built by Citibank between Uruguay and Brazil. She has a couple of sons. Later an American Fulbright scholar worked on the site and the Museum of Man from Paris, France. There's been some interesting very old archaeology sites found there more recently, the sort not expected based on many of the models for settlement in North and South America. I used to work for Joel Grossman, PhD, who used to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica's yearbook on the archaeology developments in the Western Hemisphere, certainly becoming a more difficult task as more discoveries and excavations are made, and heretofore unknown sites discovered.
Fordham University has conducted historical archaeology excavations in the middle of the campus on Rose Hill, on the remains of the earlier 19th century founders facilities. Professor Gilbert, there, an archaeologist, has a collection of bricks from all over the lower Hudson River, the vanishing labor of yesterdays that has become more mechanical and automated that before employed a fairly large number of people, at for example Verplanck, NY on the Hudson River, where many also fed on the "local" fish. The river is a tidal estuary all the way to Albany, NY an "arm of the Atlantic". While working at the Waverly Plantation Ferry Access on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Barge Canal impacts, I unearthed a brick embossed "Brooklyn" which I later read the site report from the former brick kilns and site in nearby Brooklyn, Alabama which had been excavated by archaeologists and researched by historians. Many of the bricks in the early plantation days (and in Uruguay by the way, not just a plantation thing) were/are made by building a big cube of air-dried bricks, with a central place for a fire which is kept going until all the bricks are hardened, the ones on the outside sometimes glazing I was told. The Brooklyn, Alabama brick yard was more formal, with brick kilns the bricks were fired in after formed in the probably wooden hand-moulds.
On an EPA Super fund site evaluated, researched on the Raritan River near Fords, New Jersey, we found that there had been an extensive and elaborate system of rails to and out of clay mines to obtain brick clay. The large excavations had been filled over the years as urban development evolved along the riverside and the extensive network of transportation routes and other, likely chemical, industries developed. At the time Joel Grossman was in the USSR, part of a professional exchange, during which had a short lived coup which we thought he might not return from occurred, that he recounted being escorted out of the hostilities as the "old guard" removed Mikhail Gorbachev from office for a short time until President Yeltsin hammered their White House and the coup failed, or so it's seemed and the new Russian republic was born. I entered the map overlays I worked on in a Corel competition using their software (with AutoCad) to try to refine the history of the mines there, though all the layers are combined, sort of counter-intuitive, found on Corel 5 CD, otherwise printed separately on overlays.
I was at the opening of the New York State Law School at Buffalo University in Amherst, NY back in 1974, and was an anthropology student there, some go into law and they have one of the better collection of native American papers and research important as the local peoples are still represented there and some like Chief Red Jacket important leaders. The American Indian Movement (AIM) just turned 40 years old the other day, and some of the people of the "Five Nations" live or have relations with those across the border in Canada in it's largest single populous settlement of "Six Nations" (the Huron?). One of the victims of a mysterious shooting at Wounded Knee was a Canadian native woman shot dead thought over the paranoia of "inside informants" for the US government. Her remains were somewhat recently returned there.
Anyway...as Ellen Degeneres might say...I was reading Lawrence Solum's Law Blog and saw this interesting reference to the people over at Fordham University Law:
Denno on Lethal Injection
Deborah W. Denno (Fordham University School) has posted The Lethal Injection Debate: Law and Science (Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. 35, No. 701, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
On April 16, 2008, for the first time in decades, the United States Supreme Court reviewed evidence concerning whether a state's method of execution violated the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. In Baze v. Rees, a 7-2 plurality ruling, the Court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky's method of executing inmates by lethal injection, determining that Kentucky's administration of a three-drug combination used by most death penalty states did not pose a "substantial" or "objectively intolerable" risk of "serious harm" to inmates. While the road leading to Baze is well traveled with lethal injection litigation, post-Baze, there appear to be many more litigation miles still to go. There is no better background for attempting to assess the future direction of Baze than the Fordham Urban Law Journal's symposium issue, The Lethal Injection Debate: Law and Science. This forum, the first of its kind on this topic, reflects the latest balanced perspective on the legal, medical, and ethical concerns over lethal injection from some of the country's leading experts. Likewise, this Introduction discusses the ways the symposium's ten articles provide the proper insight and context for determining how the Baze Court's Eighth Amendment standards will apply in practice.
From Lawrence Solum's "Legal Theory Blog" (check out his excellent photo album...a wonderful voyage to various interesting places on the planet)
