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Italy Plans To Renovate The Country's Oldest Entertainment Venue

As Jonathan Hilburg reports for the Architect’s Newspaper, Italian authorities say the restored version of the floor will feature replicas of trapdoors, lifts and other mechanical elements used in Roman times.

The original floor was planks covered in sand, and the Romans used the venue for four centuries. The staging was at once ingenious and grisly. A lot of blood was involved.

Beneath the floor was a complex network of tunnels from which gladiators and wild animals emerged to fight to the death before thousands of spectators. The tunnels are still there.

Anniversary Of Discovery

On November 18, 1978, Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones leads hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who perished were children.

The price of insanity can be harsh. And often is.

 

Ah, Memories

FLORENCE, Ore. - Fifty years ago Monday, a whale washed up on Heceta Beach.

Three days later on November 12, 1970, that dead whale exploded into history with what has been described as the first-ever viral news story.

"It had to be said the Oregon State Highway Department not only had a whale of a problem on its hands," Paul Linnman reported for KATU a half century ago. "It had a stinking whale of a problem". "So dynamite it was, some 20 cases or a half ton of it," he said. "The hope was that the long-dead pacific gray whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast."

It didn't quite work as planned; blubber flew everywhere, flattening one person's new car and covering bystanders a quarter of a mile away in what can only be described as a layer of stinking goo.

The plan was to obliterate the whale into tiny pieces that seagulls would eat.

But as Linnman and former KATU Photojournalist Doug Brazil found out, the pieces were not exactly bite-sized.

The two had to run to escape the flying blubber.

"It came down as this oil rain on your jacket," Brazil said in 2010. "It was horrible and the smell - it was just sickening."

"If I think about it, I can still smell that smell," said Linnman.

The smell was only part of it.

Ah, I remember it well. It's something that stays with you. Hard to believe it was 50 years ago....

 

 

 

Anthropodermic Books

Yes...books bound in human skin.

In January of 1869, Dr. John Stockton Hough stooped over an autopsy table to examine the emaciated corpse of Mary Lynch.

When Dr. Hough opened Lynch's chest cavity to inspect her tuberculosis-wracked lungs, he noticed an unusual cyst in her pectorals. Under a microscope, his vision swam as countless tiny worms wriggled around. Lynch was the first known case of trichinosis in Philadelphia.

However, Dr. Hough is not most famous for this discovery but, rather, for what he did immediately afterward: He cut a slice of Lynch's skin from her thighs and preserved it in a chamber pot. Decades later, Dr. Hough used this preserved human skin to bind three of his most prized books, all of which dealt with women's health.

Everybody's got to have a hobby....

 

Yet Another Reason To Avoid Google Whenever Possible

Rather than create entirely on its own all the parts of the mobile operating system that has now come to be known as Android, Google elected to use more than 11,000 lines of coding from Oracle’s Java to make it run.

They didn't bother with stuff like licensing; they just lifted it. In executing this theft, they willfully violated a number of laws - not the least among which was federal copyright law, which covers computer code in addition to most other works.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Google v. Oracle on Oct. 7. The case involves several legal issues, all of which boil down to one principal question: Did Google cheat and steal its way to the top? 

While a decision on the case isn’t expected for a few months, the justices’ pointed questioning at the Big Tech giant points to the answer being a clear and resounding yes.

Personally, I don't use Google; I use DuckDuckGo for searches. Google tracks everything you do on the internet, DDG doesn't. While I don't do anything nefarious, I prefer privacy to snoops, so DDG is my default engine. I also use a virtual private network that tells anyone snooping that I'm in Seattle.

It's been ten years of legal wrangling between Google 's parent company and Sun Microsystems (which did the original Java coding before disbanding and turning the code over to Oracle), but it seems that the ducks have finally come home to roost at SCOTUS. It couldn't happen to a more deserving company.

 

A Steal Of A Deal

Architect Nick Drummond bought this place in upstate New York with an eye toward restoring the house, which he was told had been built by a former German baron, who in the 1920s began bootlegging illegal booze. Although the baron part of the story is unclear to this day,at least part of the tale seems to have been true: during the course of the project, multiple false walls were discovered, which seemed odd. Upon further investigation, it was found that the foundation, walls, and floors in the cellar were lined with intact cases of 1920s whiskey - worth thousands of dollars today.

More hidden compartments are being discovered throughout the "Bootlegger Bungalow", as he calls it, containing more bottles of whiskey.

I imagine that all that whiskey kept the winter chill at bay.

 

"While repairing trim as part of a larger renovation, we discovered multiple false walls and secret compartment under the floor in our mudroom. The foundation walls and floors in the mudroom are lined with intact cases of 1920s whiskey."

Read More: Upstate NY Man Uncovers Treasure Worth Thousands in Walls of Home | https://lite987.com/upstate-ny-man-discovers-treasure-worth-thousands-in-walls-of-home/?&utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

"While repairing trim as part of a larger renovation, we discovered multiple false walls and secret compartment under the floor in our mudroom. The foundation walls and floors in the mudroom are lined with intact cases of 1920s whiskey."

Read More: Upstate NY Man Uncovers Treasure Worth Thousands in Walls of Home | https://lite987.com/upstate-ny-man-discovers-treasure-worth-thousands-in-walls-of-home/?&utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

"While repairing trim as part of a larger renovation, we discovered multiple false walls and secret compartment under the floor in our mudroom. The foundation walls and floors in the mudroom are lined with intact cases of 1920s whiskey."

Read More: Upstate NY Man Uncovers Treasure Worth Thousands in Walls of Home | https://lite987.com/upstate-ny-man-discovers-treasure-worth-thousands-in-walls-of-home/?&utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

When Nick Drummond bought a home in upstate New York to restore, he knew the walls would have some secrets - he didn't realize those secrets would end up being worth thousands of dollars.

Read More: Upstate NY Man Uncovers Treasure Worth Thousands in Walls of Home | https://lite987.com/upstate-ny-man-discovers-treasure-worth-thousands-in-walls-of-home/?&utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

When Nick Drummond bought a home in upstate New York to restore, he knew the walls would have some secrets - he didn't realize those secrets would end up being worth thousands of dollars.

Read More: Upstate NY Man Uncovers Treasure Worth Thousands in Walls of Home | https://lite987.com/upstate-ny-man-discovers-treasure-worth-thousands-in-walls-of-home/?&utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

More Katy

The Katy publicity stunt drew a huge crowd of observers in the gay 90s, but it wasn't exactly well thought-out:

At least two people died, and many more were injured by the flying debris and scalding water that erupted from the boilers.

Nonetheless, it was considered a great success, as running two trains into one another was - for those a sufficient distance away - quite a spectacular event.

Entertainment was hard to come by in Texas at the time.

 

History Unmystified

She caught the Katy
And left me a mule to ride
She caught the Katy
And left me a mule to ride
Now my baby caught the Katy
Left me a mule to ride
The train pulled out
I swung on behind
Crazy 'bout her
That hard headed woman of mine

I'd never quite understood that song, until I ran across this:

Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company—more commonly known as the Katy.

I'd no idea that it was a real thing, much less the nickname of a railroad route.

 

Political Points By Any Means Necessary

Last week Joe Biden was confronted by an Air Force veteran who had lost friends in the Iraq War, which Biden voted for as a senator. “We are wondering why we should vote for someone who voted for … and enabled a war that killed thousands of our brothers and sisters?” the veteran said, intimating that close friends of his were casualties. Biden’s response, as Howard Portnoy noted, was to claim his own son was one of those casualties. If anything that should have amplified the veteran’s point, but the former vice president changed the subject, accusing the veteran of attacking his son. “I’m not going after your son,” the man said in his own defense, to which Biden responded, wagging a finger, “You better not!”

What made the exchange even uglier was that it was based on a bald-faced lie. Biden’s son Beau was indeed activated to deploy to Iraq in 2008. But he returned alive and well a year later, having pushed paper as a major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. His untimely death from cancer came six years after his return to the States.

Something tells me that Slow Joe isn't going to come off well in the debates, unless they allow Teleprompters there.

 

Grim Anniversary

New York news at the time.

Remember.