MaxRedline

South Of The Border

Down Mexico way...

MEXICO CITY is sinking at an alarming rate, according to new data.

Scientists think the problem is largely unstoppable because some parts of the city are now too low to save.

They probably shouldn't have built in on a lake, but that's where the Spanish chose to start their ball rolling. Mexicans just kept adding onto their problem.

Mexico City is the densely populated capital of Mexico.

It's built on a lake bed which has been growing increasingly dry due to centuries of water drainage.

Cracks are now forming in the cities foundations, putting infrastructure at risk of collapse.

 

Coming Back To Oregon

The initiative's aim, which could begin as early as this upcoming fall, is to create a "nonessential experimental population" in the Pacific Northwest — where the birds haven't lived in the wild for a century.

Up here, they mostly died from lead poisoning, although now laws have been changed to reduce the incidents. So it's "welcome back, buzzards!"

 

The Roman Way

That servant seems to have been spared, but many others had their "bowels torn asunder" by the eels. And that's just one of the many horrific ways the ancient Romans devised to kill those who displeased or offended them, from crucifixions and feeding people to wild beasts, to setting slaves on fire, and assassinating Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. Historian Emma Southon covers them all in her wittily irreverent new book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, showing us how the people of ancient Rome viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.

I guess they were fun-loving folks, in their own way.

But then, death-spectacles were sort of a way of life, in those days.

 

It Still Seems Rather Odd

It's been a number of years, but it still seems curious. I don't follow football at all, but it does seem odd that a team from the Midwest plays for a team on the Pacific Northwest.

 

Second-Hand Stonehenge

Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at University College London, told the Guardian: “I’ve been researching Stonehenge for 20 years now and this really is the most exciting thing we’ve ever found.”

The evidence backs a century-old theory that the nation’s greatest prehistoric monument was built in Wales and venerated for hundreds of years before being dismantled and dragged to Wiltshire, where it was resurrected as a second-hand monument.

It seems like rather a lot of effort, but the evidence appears incontrovertible: the edifice was first constructed in Wales and stood there for centuries - until the Brits decided to take it.

An ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded 900 years ago, tells of the wizard Merlin leading men to Ireland to capture a magical stone circle called the Giants’ Dance and rebuilding it in England as a memorial to the dead.

As it happens, that part of Wales was, at the time, Irish territory. Odd times....

 

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.