MaxRedline

He Lived It Well And Fully

Meat Loaf Has Passed. Glad that we had him for as long as we did.

He was 74, which seems hard to believe.

Covid got him.

https://www.tmz.com/2022/01/21/meat-loaf-dead-dies-singer/

 

I'm Going To Tell Mummy!

The 200-year-old secrets of the child mummies of the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo in northern Sicily are to be revealed by a British-led team of scientists using X-ray technology. The Catacombs contain 1,284 mummified and skeletonised bodies, the largest collection of mummies in Europe. While many of the children contained there are now skeletal, others have been described as appearing as if they are sleeping.

The catacombs, once solely for the deceased friars of the Capuchin order, have become a popular, if macabre, tourist attraction, with every niche and crevice bearing bodies on open display. The preserved dead were often dressed in their finery and would be visited by their relatives.

Radiographic images – 14 per mummy, from head-to-toe – will be taken and examined by Dr Robert Loynes, a retired orthopaedic surgeon who has previously investigated ancient Egyptian mummies. Piombino-Mascali said it was vital that the work on the fragile corpses was “non invasive”.

45 were naturally mummified friars initially interred in a crypt in Palermo. Later bodies were treated prior to placement.

 

 

Happy 2022

Before the 1970s, countdowns were generally associated with bad things.

"In the 1950s, there were atomic bomb tests," McCrossen said. "And the countdown to the dropping of the bomb and then to its detonation was televised and people could hear it. And so this was a kind of apocalyptic countdown."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4QVXcPDgjI

The Countdown.

And the history underlying it.

 

Keep Tightening That Belt - Food Prices Jumping

The Wall Street Journal has seen the first pricing notification memo from Kraft-Heinz food group to the buying offices of major U.S. retailers.  Here’s how the WSJ presents it: “Kraft Heinz Co. told retailer customers that it would raise prices across many of its products including Jell-O pudding and Grey Poupon mustard, with some items going up as much as 20%, according to a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal.” 

This starts kicking in in about three days. And everything's going to go up; not just mustard and Cosby pudding.

Hope you got a 20% pay raise!

Haven't seen this since 1972.

 

 

 

A jaw-droppingly beautiful Christmas carol from ... The Monkees?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/a_jawdroppingly_beautiful_christmas_carol_from__the_monkees.html

Hope you're having a wonderful Christmas!

Peace.

 

Notes From The Past.

The elders of the Wahpeton Dakota Nation had long prophesized that the return of the plains bison to their ancestral lands would portend a welcome turn of events for Canada’s First Nation peoples. They may not have known, however, that it would take just eight months for this prediction to come true.

In December 2019, officials at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in the province of Saskatchewan reintroduced bison to the region more than a century after the animals were hunted to near extinction. The following August, the herd’s hooves uncovered four petroglyphs, or rock carvings, and an accompanying tool used to create the ancient artworks.

Archaeologist Ernie Walker and bison manager Craig Thoms made the find last summer while visiting the park. They were standing near a wallow, or a vegetation-free spot where the bison give themselves dust baths, when Walker noticed a grooved rock protruding from the ground. Assuming the cut was from tool damage, he brushed away the dirt, only to expose another groove and then another. “They were all parallel, all symmetrical,” he says. “It was at that point I realized this [was] actually what is known as a petroglyph. This was intentionally carved.”

The 550-pound boulder turned out to be a ribstone, so called because it’s engraved with motifs that represent bison’s ribs. Researchers found three more carvings over the ensuing weeks: a larger stone with a grid pattern, a small specimen with pits and grooves, and a 1,200-pound boulder covered in lines. Then, most surprisingly of all, the stone knife used to carve the petroglyphs resurfaced.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/bison-in-canada-discover-ancient-petroglyphs-fulfilling-an-indigenous-prophecy-180979119/?fbclid=IwAR0QYRxCapUFIGRo8BRc0U3ApQnqydlibA6IbRL_yuQXCZFlE0B1iSY52UE&

What I find amazing about petroglyphs is that not only did the natives make the tools to produce such engravings - but apparently had the free time to do so. Obviously, such endeavors were of great importance to them.

 

First Thanksgiving

Traditional Thanksgiving dinner includes turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes but the First Thanksgiving likely included wildfowl, corn, porridge and venison.

“Wildfowl was there. Corn, in grain form for bread or for porridge, was there. Venison was there,” says Kathleen Wall. “These are absolutes.”

Turkey was not the centerpiece of the meal, as it is today, explains Wall. Though it is possible the colonists and American Indians cooked wild turkey, she suspects that goose or duck was the wildfowl of choice. In her research, she has found that swan and passenger pigeons would have been available as well.

In any case, you'll find that passenger pigeons are unavailable for your menu.

 

 

Since Biden's Doing Nothing, Texas Governor Greg Abbott Is

They've built their own border wall.

1883 - Time Zones Established

At exactly noon on this day, American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. The bold move was emblematic of the power shared by the railroad companies.

Since human beings had first begun keeping track of time, they set their clocks to the local movement of the sun. Even as late as the 1880s, most towns in the U.S. had their own local time, generally based on “high noon,” or the time when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. As railroads began to shrink the travel time between cities from days or months to mere hours, however, these local times became a scheduling nightmare.

Rather than turning to the federal governments of the United States and Canada to create a North American system of time zones, the powerful railroad companies took it upon themselves to create a new time code system. The companies agreed to divide the continent into four time zones; the dividing lines adopted were very close to the ones we still use today.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/railroads-create-the-first-time-zones

i hadn't realized any of that; never actually had put much thought toward the time zones. Glad the government wasn't involved - who knows what we'd have ended up with!

 

 

 

40 Years

For almost 40 years Ken Smith has shunned conventional life and lived without electricity or running water in a hand-made log cabin on the banks of a remote loch in the Scottish Highlands.

"It's a nice life," says Ken. "Everybody wishes they could do it but nobody ever does."

Not everyone would agree that Ken's isolated, reclusive lifestyle of foraging and fishing as well as collecting firewood and washing his clothes in an old bath outdoors is the ideal. And even less so at the age of 74.

His log cabin is a two-hour walk from the nearest road on the edge of Rannoch Moor, by Loch Treig.

"It's known as the lonely loch," he says. "There's no road here but they used to live here before they built the dam."

Looking down on the loch from hillside, he says: "All their ruins are down there. The score now is one and that's me."

Ken, who is originally from Derbyshire, tells the programme how he began work at the age of 15, building fire stations.

But his life changed at the age of 26 when he was beaten up by a gang of thugs after a night out.

He suffered a brain haemorrhage and lost consciousness for 23 days.

"They said I would never recover. They said I would never speak again," he says.

"They said I would never walk again but I did.

"That's when I decided I would never live on anyone's terms but my own," he says.

Ken began to travel and became interested in the idea of the wilderness.

In the Yukon, the Canadian territory that borders Alaska, he wondered what would happen if he just walked off the highway and "went into nowhere".

So that's what he did, saying he finally walked about 22,000 miles before returning home.