So New York City suffered a terrible, shocking attack one September day. The evil empire had fallen and Americans had thought they'd entered a new era, but then swarthy foreigners attacked their way of life in an attempt to advance their own violent agenda by killing as many people as possible. It was the worst terrorist attack the US had ever seen.

I'm speaking, of course, of the terrible events of 9/16 -- 1920, that is. Come have a read of the latest Passing Strangeness, if you're so inclined.

Tutankhamen was notable because his tomb wasn't looted. People visit all kinds of indignities on the dead when there's money to be made. In the particular case of Egyptian dead, though, tomb robbery was not their biggest worry. In the Middle Ages and down into the 20th century people found uses for the mummies themselves, and literal shiploads of them were sent to Europe.

The Egyptians were recyclers themselves when it came to mummies, though, which has also led to an important discovery about ancient Italy.

So with all that, please enjoy the latest Passing Strangeness: Liber Linteus, or 101 Uses for an Egyptian Mummy(*)

(*) I almost called it 101 Uses for a Dead Egyptian -- if you were alive in the early 1980s, you get this -- but I guessed that might be misconstrued.

The first photos of the Earth taken from space, by a captured V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground

East and west, how did they meet? The late middle ages saw a few Europeans head west into China -- most famously Marco Polo, but there were others. Today's Passing Strangeness is about what is, so far as anyone knows, the one and only journey in the opposite direction,

There was a paint called Mommia or Mummy Brown used up 'til the end of the19th century or so(1). The name wasn't a flight of fancy -- it was actually made from Egyptian mummies. So I was just flipping through Rudyard Kipling's autobiography(2) and there's an aside about his uncle, the painter Edward Burne-Jones. When Kipling was a child, Burne-Jones came downstairs one day, tubes of paint in hand, aghast to have discovered that there were actual corpses in the pigment. So everyone trooped outside to bury them in the yard.

I've seen this story someplace else before, but that it was Kipling (and Burne-Jones) is new to me.

(1)You can still get it in art stores, but it's artificial these days.
(2)Hooray, Google Books!

It's a fan-made trailer for a non-existent Green Lantern movie:



If this were an actual movie it would strike me as a little second-rate (Nathan Filion being incapable of raising the bar entirely by himself). But it's an interesting exercise to see from which movies the fan lifted scenes, and pretty remarkable for being a product of repurposing.

I'm thinking of buying a GPS unit, a kind of technology I know little about (I mean, I understand the technology, but I know nothing about the manufacturers). My purposes is two-fold:

1) I want it to tell me my latitude and longitude when I stand next to something.
2) I want it to do so as cheaply as possible.

It would also be very nice if I could carry it in my hand easily, or at least put it in my pocket.

I don't need to plan trips. I don't need driving or hiking directions. I don't need maps. I do not need it to tell me out loud that I should bear left at the next Tim Horton's.

With that in mind, does anyone have suggestions for make and models to look at?

Just as the flu scare was at its media height about ten days ago I came across a mention of another influenza epidemic that really should have taken the place of the 1918 Pandemic in all those TV news stories. OK, maybe not entirely, but I think it's a much closer match for what we were facing just before the dance back from the apparently inevitable brink up until about a week ago -- barring one important detail.

And when it turned out that the root of the story was just a few blocks away from where I once worked (though offset by 130 years in the time axis), I knew I had to write about The Great Epizootic.

I don't think it's strange for the usual reasons -- "he" is widely discussed in creationist circles because he's close to that old favourite, the Calaveras Skull. I think it's interesting because it was taken seriously back in the early days of paleontology when we had only the murkiest ideas of human evolution. Even today it's taken as a mere accident, while to me there's pretty good circumstantial evidence of a hoax.

Working backwards from there, it's interesting to discuss how the artifacts and fossils in question got into such an impossible spot-- and particularly to be careful about begging the question in the first place. So today's Passing Strangeness is The Auriferous Gravel Man of Tuolumne County.

Yes, so this game is addictive

(WARNING: contains large amounts of unrelated techno)

MARX, Karl (1818-1893) & ENGELS, Friedrich (1820-1895). Manifest der kommunistischen Partei. Veröffentlicht im Februar 1848. Londres: imprimé par la "Bildungs=Gesellschaft für Arbeiter" de J.E. Burghard, 1848.

Price Realized, Price includes buyer's premium €97,000

...draw a picture. There's a weird incident in the history of Western relations with Japan that spawned the phrase "Yellow Peril" and then was forgotten. Altogether we have war, peace, Kaiser Wilhelm as his usual meddling self, The Madness of Czar Nicholas II, a hack propaganda artist, not one but two diplomats who married grand-nieces of Napoleon, and the Archangel Michael.

The latest Passing Strangeness is "The Yellow Peril".

The Sun doesn't just affect us with light and gravity. Charged particles stream out from it and are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, giving us the auroras among other things.

Sometimes the Sun throws a fit and our planet gets really pounded if it happens to be the way of the fountain of protons and electrons streaming away from the solar corona. The biggest storm in history is likely not known as, until the human race understood electromagnetism, there was no way to tell something unusual was happening. By odd coincidence, though, the biggest storm we know about happened to coincide with the very cutting edge of Victorian science, just a few years before James Clerk Maxwell definitively cracked the problem of light and magnetism--and established himself as the smartest man in the gap between Newton and Einstein.

The technological wonder of the age turned out to be literally sympathetic, too, and by pure luck an old-fashioned visual astronomer happened to be looking at the right place at the right time. This Wednesday's Passing Strangeness is The Carrington Flare.

...but does anyone have access to this JSTOR article?

http://www.jstor.org/pss/108745?cookieSet=1

I'm looking to crosscheck some facts for Wednesday's blog post.

...but you have seen the Mount Redoubt mushroom cloud, right?

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~ajdurant/publications/MountRedoubtEruption.jpg

I don't know what it is about nature's and history's mashups that interest me so, but I'm fascinated when one well-known thing impinges on the territory of another. A-Bombs and Volcanoes? Wooo!

Today's Passing Strangeness is a story from the very earliest days of US history, which is to say "People from England north of the Rio Grande" -- there's some discussion of that too, because that's a mess. But the main point is the long-forgotten Popham Colony, which only started yielding physical evidence about fifteen years ago. Before that all we had was documentation, and for a long time that was believed by many to be a legend. It wasn't, it was real, and this is it's story.

Does any reader have an opinion on Stephen Hunt that they'd like to share? I like the general concept of pseudo-Victorian fantasy (viz. His Dark Materials) so Hunt's stuff looks promising, but on the other hand I found the country names "Jackals" and "Quatérshift" pretty terrible--bad names are actively painful for me to read, I find.

So I'm a bit up in the air about them and would welcome some opinions on him.

Writing Sword Worlds got me interested in the comprehensive defeat and its effect on national psychologies since nationalism and "total war" developed. Germany after WWI, Japan after WWII, the South after the American Civil War, those are the big three. People get so invested in winning that they act in fascinating ways when they lose.

So if I've visited the connection between the US and Brazil before with Fordlândia, now I'm doing it again with Americana. After the Civil War ended, a lot of people couldn't reconcile themselves to being in the Union again (a lot less than might have been expected, but still a lot). Many of them left for Brazil in an organized colonization attempt supported by the Brazilian government, The mid-week Passing Strangeness is After the Confederate States.

"Steam Engine Time" is when the world is simply ready for a technology to come into existence; multiple inventors assemble the requisite pieces independently of one another in a short period of time. Sometimes the clock strikes even before the "steam engine" is possible, though, and the odd results of trying to force a route down a dead end (*) cross-fertilize the final result.

This brings us to today's Passing Strangeness, The Sound Mirrors of Denge.

(*) Once the metaphors are thoroughly mixed, place in a pre-heated oven and bake for 45 minutes.

http://www.baconsaltblog.com/2009/03/our-newest-product.html

(Actually, I'm not: "Aren't you 24 hours early?")