Newsvine - Hundreds march for gay marriage in central Calif.

I am a New Yorker and I found the past California ballot to be confusing after-the-fact as there were a number of propositions, not just "8", to be voted on. Here in New York we only had one, as to whether military veterans should be given advantages when evaluated as employees to be hired by the State of New York, which passed. It was never discussed, nor was any information mailed, as had other information in other elections on other matters, nor did it appear in the major newspapers of New York City. It was also confusing to read in the lower right corner of the 1960s voting machine which no longer worked as it once did, the handle you move used to open and close the curtain, ensuring your privacy in the voting and a reassuring opening of the curtain meant "symbolically" that your vote had been cast and counted. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case on these machines that probably recorded the vote that elected President JFK. I like to think "9/11" a NYC "primary day" where all parties get voted on, might have kept a few people perhaps late to work in the World Trade Center. "9/11" also unfortunately removed some ballot issues leaving the mailed "Voting Guide" without connection to ballots later presented as I recall in the aftermath. I think the California vote should have not been grouped as the issues were "collectivized" in the voter's mind not allowing a clear choice for one or the other and muddled the choice.

io9 - The Mysterious Ice Circles of Siberia - Ice circles - shimmer

Differential geological thermal heating of a long ago buried impact crater? Reason I thought was Panther Mountain in the New York Catskills was recently discovered to have been one. (Wikipedia) Perhaps the two of them are like "Panther Mountain - Meteor Impact Crater" as seen in profile here [tinyurl.com]

Ground Zero, Harlem and Polo on Prince’s Itinerary - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

Hanover Square, where the statue of King George was torn down carted away to Connecticut to be melted into musket balls and nearby the statue of the American sympathizer in Parliament, William Pitt, was beheaded by the British Army. I see we’ve barely forgotten that!

Newsvine - Morley Safer suspicious of blogosphere

Congratulations! Silly, he's probably not going to read this, but then again reporters say the darnedest things sometimes. I had a cousin, an Army Captain in the Korean War, where there is still no treaty, who after went to work in the Signal Corps in NYC making training films. Then took a job in the film editing department of NBC news, when literally, "Film at 11!" was the story after processing and cutting, splicing, etc. One day the director of "Huntley and Brinkley" was out sick and he filled in. They liked him! He became a director and later a producer at NBC News as TV news programs went from 15 minutes to somewhat longer presentations, with commercials, until today we have whole networks for news. His contract at some point was not renewed, and last heard produced the 1976 Bicentennial coverages of both parties' conventions, i.e., the Democrats and the Republicans, for CBS, covering the "duopoly" as Ralph Nader called it.

At his eulogy in the UN Chapel, I'm told, Edwin Newman, an outstanding television journalist and author (of "Strictly Speaking" how the English language might be "devolving" and host of SNL) wrote me once that he was a good friend of the award winning television producer, after I mentioned George Murray on the Internet. He read a letter George Murray had to send to his crew inside Vietnam, they at great risk, were gathering the "common" soldiers point of view of the "conflict" then more an undeclared full-out war. In it, I'm told, he apologizes to canceling the months long investigative efforts, canceled by "higher-ups". Mr. Murray had a seizure and died while in Mexico City, where his wife, an Avon cosmetics executive, was organizing that product introduction into that market.

What I'm trying to say, well is, congratulations Mr. Safer, you've always brought integrity and interest to whatever news you've covered and kept the idea of investigative journalism alive, in my opinion.

Victoria Day

Happy Victoria Day Canada! Funny comic about Canadian folk-singer Stan Rogers (from Nova Scotia I think.) Only one "royal" governor survived after the American Revolution, John Wentworth, after his "nepotism" battle in London with "Americus" in the press and Peter Livius with the "court" both of New Hampshire. Wentworth became Governor of Nova Scotia and Livius one of Canada's Chief Justice's from where I'm heading this weekend, Wolfeboro/Tuftonboro, New Hampshire, on part of Livius' former property, Tuftonboro Neck. MySpace Stan Rogers http://tinyurl.com/pypljt

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Yuri Kondratyuk's Spacecraft

When Neil Armstrong visited the Soviet Union after his historic flight, he collected a handful of soil from outside Kondratyuk's house in Novosibirsk to acknowledge his contribution to spaceflight.

Yuri Kondratyuk Army Novosibirsk Back Kondratyuk's Spacecraft

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New seal on the wall…

Years ago I met Leon Shenandoah who was the "ta-dah-deh-ho" "chief of chiefs" of the Iroquois and had a cup of sassafras tea at archaeologist Joel Grossman's loft in Manhattan, his grand-daughter the now famous Native singer. Maybe he was. She said his name also meant "head full of snakes" which maybe how the term "Iroquois" got started...derogatory French...the Algonquins once called them "real adders". I think that wasn't the Shinnecock also Algonquian, whose seal they put up with the seals of the seven incorporated villages on the Southampton Town wall the other day.

Later, I think a new "chief of chiefs" was Oren Lyons who spoke at a Syracuse U. commencement. I met him too once outside Grossman's office on 16th St. and Third Ave., he was on his way to testify at the United Nation's commission on the rights of indigenous peoples.

"Fat Tuesdays" across the street is where Les Paul used to play and they had this moving hologram of Dizzy Gillespie, as you walked by he would lower his trademark horn and smile as you looked back. Never seen a hologram again quite like it. Scheffel Hall it was once called and the author O. Henry (from the demolished Ohio Penitentiary...they think in Austin, Texas) William Sydney Porter used to frequent and write.

The Secret in the Cellar, is a Webcomic based on an authentic forensic case of a recently discovered 17th Century body. Using graphics, photos, and online activities, the Webcomic unravels a mystery of historical, and scientific importance. - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Interesting, early Italians in New Netherlands

www.fonda.org

Further: Isaac Allerton, Puritan in New Amsterdam

I was researching his warehouse in New Amsterdam just outside the famous Wall for the English doing business there as part of an archaeological assessment of the parking lot in the South Street Seaport Historic District adjacent to the National Register Building at 251 Water Street. A large block covering building was proposed to be named "250 Water St."

I read records of a current historian on the Yale University which acquired the cemetery in it's "front yard" I think and learned that the first cemetery of its kind to have "family plots" was where he had been, modeled after the French "Pere Lachaise" where before it was wherever the clergy placed the remains. However, that cemetery was impacted and the bones of Isaac Allerton were moved to the Yale University now controlled one. I seem to recall however the headstone was incorporated into a wall and was barely legible. So any other info to the final resting place I do not know. He's sometimes called the last "Pilgrim" to pass-on in Connecticut a claim perhaps that had been falsely attributed to one of its early governors.

His ship the "Hope" was what he traveled in between NYC and New Haven according to some of the history also used in his business of trade to Maine and back, perhaps at Pemaquid (near Bristol, Maine) once part of the later Duke of York holdings and the colony of New York.

In 1903 the Mayflower Society put up a monument to Isaac Allerton, Puritan, whose warehouse was in the parking lot in NYC. There are some interesting stories about the warehouse run by former indentured servant of George Holmes, Thomas Hall, that are important to the early history of the city and rise of merchants in New Amsterdam then New York.

You might be interested:

From Archaeoseek:

Very early in New Amsterdam there's also cited an "old shipwreck" nearby Philippe du Trieux whose property became the Isaac Allerton Warehouse, outside the Wall for the English doing business there. Isaac Allerton is reburied in New Haven in the cemetery Yale University maintains. He's also named in Allerton Ave. in the Bronx a large street, the exit between the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens on the oldest motor parkway in the US the Bronx River Parkway. He kept a home in New Haven had business in Maine and "abandoned" the Pilgrims, he a Puritan, apparently a partial construction's archaeology discovered discussed "In Small Things Forgotten" by J. Deetz. Once upon a time a monument erected by the Mayflower Society was up in the Seaport, across the street from where Alfred E. Smith grew up, first Catholic to run for President, I reported.

You must know however the context of my blog entry? The Yale University "Skull and Bones" club of which many prominent Yale grads were a part of, later in important governmental positions, take some oath over bones that some claim were dug up from Geronimo's grave and "treated"?

When presented with lawyers they showed something that those who knew of the "secret ceremony" (former President George W. Bush is thought to have a small brand on his buttocks) were the wrong ones so something exists in reality. There is also a petition signed by thousands to have them produced, including Geronimo's grandson on behalf of the Apache?

Further: New Haven Green: "The Green was used as the main burial grounds for the residents of New Haven during its first 150 years, but by 1821 the practice was abolished and many of the headstones were moved to the Grove Street Cemetery. However, the remains of the dead were not moved, and thus still remain below the soil of the Green." - Wikipedia "New Haven Green"

Kansas City - Plog - Reporter's Notebook: Skillicorn and the Mexico murder

George Myers says: I grew up with kids, their Dad a plumber, from Missouri on Long Island, NY. Sadly, he and later his youngest perished on the road nearby. I think this is a case of mistaken justice if allowed on May 20. The case made, outright acts of murder, as I read it, are "not proven" for him, and clearly can be attributed to the other by his own admission.

With more than just a "reasonable doubt" in retrospect, as we often see in television legal dramas, we see a prosecution that though well thought out, left some facts in that should have been checked further outside, that is so-called "facts" from outside the country that should have been left out, i.e., the imaginary murder in Mexico, which probably "prejudiced" the prosecution's case and casts doubt on the probative value of the confessions, and casts doubt on other testimony, if used in judgment. And perhaps should have been stricken from the record.

Posted On: Thursday, May. 14 2009 @ 12:15PM

Kansas City - Plog - Reporter's Notebook: Skillicorn and the Mexico murder

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Newsvine - Afghanistan: Casualties of War, is it worth it?

Afghanistan reminds me of what one person can do to the world, unfortunately. A few now decades ago, one Treasury "minister" ran off with what would be a small sum, however large for Afghans, $80 million it was reported, throwing the country into the chaos of accusations and repercussion that the then USSR thought, without any other proposed international interdiction, to control enough on its border to perhaps stop what might become "break away republics" in the region.

As a grad student in Anthropology some of the more excellent social anthropology/ethnography studies had been done there by the British, i.e., the Swat Pathans, and had been involved in that area militarily and historically as part of former "colonial" efforts, also producing literature. However, given the opportunity, US intelligence and arms dealers saw an opportunity to create a insurgency there against the USSR helping to provide high tech weapons, and help create for the USSR a "Vietnam debacle".

The other day I watched a German television documentary of a devout Muslim truck-trailer driver deliver his cargo from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The Taliban had declared war on Germany, as part of NATO, the narrator stated, which developed out of the hostilities with the Americans.

I wish at the time an international effort, perhaps as a economic package from various nations had been able to stabilize what had started as the grandest of larceny -- the theft of a country's treasury.

#3 - Thu May 14, 2009 8:56 AM EDT

Newsvine - Afghanistan: Casualties of War, is it worth it?

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New weapon turns fire ants into headless zombies

Back in the 1930s a test was done on Noman's Island off Massachusetts, introducing a tiny parasitic wasp to control ticks. It was reported to have reduced the tick population by 50% which can carry five different kinds of disease. Maybe the tick's natural predators were once more numerous in the Northeast US extinguished by pesticide or other factors, i.e., wide-scale forest clearing, etc.

#2 - Wed May 13, 2009 10:50 AM EDT Newsvine

RE: MSNBC Report: One-fourth of overseas votes uncounted

I recall the previous election counts for President from troops overseas to be for the Democrat candidate and there was some questions about how they were not "secret ballots" either, someone was counting them before they came to the US for some reason, perhaps just this one, where did they go George?

Perhaps in some Electoral College elections they may have made a difference, especially where i.e., Maine, no longer give all to one party or the other, apportioned as shown in the number of ballots for each candidate as fairly as possible. An example might be the constant blaming of Ralph Nader for "losing" the election for the Democrat candidate Al Gore, who however could not "win" his own state of Tennessee, as the rules for that state allow all Electoral College votes to go to the party with majority of the popular vote there, if even by the narrowest of margins, third party challenges left out.

Mr. Nader, the oldest candidate to run for President of the US was left off the 1960s voting machines in my polling place in the Bronx, NY where before he had been on it.

#11 - Wed May 13, 2009 10:28 AM EDT

Newsvine: Report: One-fourth of overseas votes uncounted

io9 - Tesla's Mystery Tower On The Brink Of Being Demolished - Nikola Tesla (cont'd)

Karl Ferdinand Braun: "During the development of radio, he also worked on wireless telegraphy. Around 1898, he invented a crystal diode rectifier or Cat's whisker diode. Guglielmo Marconi used Braun's patents (among others). Braun's British patent on tuning was used by Marconi in many of his tuning patents. Marconi would later admit to Braun himself that he had "borrowed" portions of Braun's work. In 1909 Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Marconi for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy." -Wikipedia

Marconi was also nearby on Long Island: "Guglielmo Marconi had a radio station built to communicate with inbound and outbound ships on Fire Island Ave in Babylon. There is a picture of the radio shack in Babylon Historical Museum, Montauk Hwy, Babylon. The original site is marked with a plaque at Fire Island Ave and Virginia Avenue in the town of Babylon." Marconiville  [First Guided Missile 1917-1918]

io9 - Tesla's Mystery Tower On The Brink Of Being Demolished - Nikola Tesla

Seriously, What Are the Odds? - Dick Cavett Blog - NYTimes.com

An East End synchronicity story came from now deceased Robert David Lion Gardiner of Gardiners Island. During the American Civil War, former President John Tyler was in charge of Richmond, Virginia, under siege by the Union. His young wife Julia Gardiner whom he met when the NYC “Hogg and Delamater” cast “Peacemaker” cannon exploded, on the S.S. Princeton, on the Potomac River below Mount Vernon, killing her father US Senator Gardiner and others. The former First Lady had a dream of Tyler’s death on their plantation in Tidewater Virginia. She got on horseback and rode all night to see if he was alright. She met him and he died that day on the steps of the hotel where he was in charge of that city. The siege hostilities ceased long enough for the grieving former First Lady and her entourage to pass through the Union lines as she traveled back to NYC, where later she was involved in a well-publicized precedent setting “changed will” case involving expensive Manhattan real estate.

Seriously, What Are the Odds? - Dick Cavett Blog - NYTimes.com

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io9 - Tesla's Mystery Tower On The Brink Of Being Demolished - Nikola Tesla

For many years I recall it was "Peerless Photos" why it became contaminated. Nearby they built the "safest nuclear power plant in the world" at Shoreham, NY though a number of events conspired to stop that, i.e., the California built backup generator's crankshaft cracked on a test run, Westinghouse renegotiated the price of ore per ton, through the proverbial roof, and other costs. I was associated with the Suffolk County Archaeology Association, one person said they just bulldozed the nuke site without a proper archaeology survey, picking up pieces afterward. One of the members was asked about the Tesla tunnels, her husband had perished in a lab accident at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory, then run by DOE the Dept of Energy, now by a consortium led by nearby Stony Brook University. She said they were brick lined but not large enough for a person to get through and had had cables in them or proposed. I at the time had no idea what was there, still in the NIKE missile mentality of nearby Rocky Point, and rumored WWII sub-hunter shore sites, so you often stayed off those topics. It seems a shame that the science museum proposed for one of our world's famous scientist would not get built. He also had a lab in NYC down off Houston street. Some of his ideas are actively pursued and shown on YouTube for example and were very ingenious, i.e, water viscosity turbine, demonstrated out of cdroms, using a low flow of water, produce very high r.p.m. Stanford White lived not too far away in the Nissequogue, Head-of-the-Harbor, Smithtown, NY area (as did one author of the Japanese and Philippine constitutions at the end of WWII) and designed many structures, including the West Wing of the White House with McKim, Mead and White to the local "shingle style" church in Stony Brook, NY. Their farm/estate had a well-seen landmark, a very tall windmill with large vanes, that could be seen from many places along the Long Island Sound, perhaps the tallest in the world at the time, 125' ? It pumped water up to a reservoir near the "squash courts" and was also "shingle-style" with stanchions cast in Baltimore, MD. It burned down in the early 1960s made mostly of wood, as diagrammed in "Scientific American". Guy I worked for replaced the many small joined window panes in the sculpture studio with a patio door in the roof, got too hot in there sometimes, simply open up 1/2 of it.

io9 - Tesla's Mystery Tower On The Brink Of Being Demolished - Nikola Tesla

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Rare Woody Guthrie bootleg album surfaces

Like a bird on a wire...

Many of the old folk and blues music recordings in the archives were done on the wire recorder by Alan Lomax. This is so good to hear. I had a friend who years ago, a woman folksinger, I think told me Mrs. Guthrie had heard the shots from her small apartment in the Dakota that killed John Lennon. I still remember her playing on the Hudson River sailing sloop Clearwater full of pumpkins down at the Seaport. I once sailed on the Clearwater out of Port Jefferson for a sunset cruise on Long Island Sound. We had a concert in Riverhead one summer after selling "Public Citizen" mag subscriptions for NYPIRG in St. James on "water issues" and Pete Seegar and another musician gave us a treat of a concert in the old Riverhead Theater, Gee whiz I hope somebody recorded it! I found my life revolving around the archaeology of the Hudson River after that. I haven't been to the "Tear in the Clouds" though.

#1 - Wed May 6, 2009 9:40 PM EDT

Update: In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

In "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home" Shirley MacLaine is Jenny Ericson a 'Strife Magazine' reporter. That was in 1965 in the imaginary Middle East kingdom of Fawzia. Notre Dame sued in New York over the use of its name. However, I've seen pictures of a woman copilot in jetliners I think from the new Saudi flight school, and perhaps there is really no reason for what might been seen as affectation and even more reason to be Katie Couric, well-known television journalist.

Huffington Post: Saudi Arabia 

-- My response to whether Katie Couric should wear a head covering and veil while reporting in Saudi Arabia on camera, May 5, 2009

John Williams, the famous film composer from Long Island, NY is being celebrated at a blog-a-thon on Edward Copeland on Film site. I think because of the lawsuit we can only imagine what the film is like from his brilliant and funny soundtrack, available on Amazon.  It is very funny, and I recall seeing the film in the theater when it came out and enjoyed it as I enjoy Shirley MacLaine’s acting in the film arts. The film credits cite “Johnny Williams” as the music composer and the tunes are hilarious. Couldn’t we see the film? On cable? Or somewhere?  Maybe the pro-Catholic US Supreme Court could take it up the First Amendment issue over “Notre Dame” again. At least that’s what I think.

Slate: Choose Your Own Supreme Court Justice Out of our Top 20, whom do you like best?

I think Hillary Clinton, as a Yale Law graduate, and the only one of the recent politicians who has not had a deserved honorary mention from that school, would be a good Supreme Court judge because of her years of experience in government, from the Watergate hearings (with Liz Holtzman the only other woman there, who perhaps should have been appointed to replace her NY Senator seat) later as Arkansas' and then our First Lady, then New York's Senator, former Presidential candidate and now Secretary of State, she has experience.

She might finally get those "Skull and Bones" guys, Senator John Kerry and the former President George W. Bush rumored to be members (same debating coach for crying out loud!) a reason to listen to the petition and deliver the human remains they have in their possession to be returned as per law the former President George H.W. Bush signed. Isaac Allerton's remains, a Puritan who came over on the "Mayflower" were moved to the cemetery Yale University maintains. Let them stand and deliver and prove the reported bones they have are not his!

Her experience would also bring a working knowledge to opinions and to the criterion for selection of those cases that need to be heard. Not a judge currently employed, and a great statesperson, there would be very limited questionable "litmus tests" for her in the candidates debate. I think after the revelation of reactionary policies of incarceration and denial of due process, where the founders thought our documents and laws to be emulated and even promulgated to the rest of the world as THE basis for humane and equitable law, her appointment might also help to heal national and world opinion.

George J. Myers, Jr.

BA Anthropology, Stony Brook University 

Newsvine - Iran: Outrage At Execution of Delara Darabi

I heard this the other day: "Then what is a miscarriage, manslaughter?"

Back before 1979, when students, outraged on being spied on in the US by Savak, with political repercussions to their families back home, took over the US Embassy, we had a US compound of over 3000 then Grumman employees teaching the Shah's air force how to fly and service our then naval fleet's mainstay, the F-14 "Tomcat" fighter-bomber of which they had taken delivery of 80. Seen in "Top Gun" the actress, who looked so much like one of the royals of the Netherlands, it caused their air force recruitments to shoot up, it seems a shame that we both still share the death penalty as thus applied, where the majority of international jurisprudence does not. 

Sat May 2, 2009 11:07 AM EDT Newsvine - Iran: Outrage At Execution of Delara Darabi

Swine Flu Found on Wall Street

I worked a number of years in archaeology around the Wall St. neighborhood and watched the ticker-tapes and various evolving computer equipment hit the curb. A number years ago I was sent a packet of information on a federal case that alleged that a number of brokers were selling blue-chip stock solely on a directive of whether the stock ended in an odd or even number in the fraction, to the tune of $3/4 billion losses and seeking damages of $1.5 billion from about 20 of the major brokerage houses on Wall St. "The fractional format is the type used traditionally in the stock market, and the decimal format is the type that the stock market has now adopted." (hashemian.com) That in retrospect, though significant, might have been a Trojan Horse? Perhaps the SEC was led to look in the wrong place and it should have had better information.

Not having the stock alleged "mis-traded" I wonder why I received the inquiry. We sometimes look for remains of old traders in the city, Augustine Heerman, the "Czech" from Maryland or Isaac Allerton, the "Puritan" from New Haven, CT both with warehouses in early Manhattan. I've not seen any evidence like these crooked deals, that would have astonished them, and might have placed their customers in the "First Almshouse" cemetery, today inside City Hall Park, next to the monuments to Horace Greeley and Joseph Pulitzer. Thanks to the free press.
About Swine Flu
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Architect of "Shelters for Roman Archaeological Site" (1986) Peter Zumthor Wins 2009 Pritzker Award.

Architect of the 1986 Shelters for Roman Archaeological Site (3 structures) architect Peter Zumthor won the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Award. In archaeology we have had pretty good success working under greenhouses for plants, one 25' we put wheels on to move. Assembled with a double layer some can be inflated and act as a barrier to the elements. I've seen on some archaeology sites custom structures and trusses of PVC for example with greenhouse plastic (UV blocking?) stretched over them. I had often worked in winter thereby and construction schedules, mostly unimpeded resulted. U-Haul used to rent toboggans. Safety First!