The Nebra Sky Disk

In 2001, this mysterious artifact showed up on the international antiquities market, and the man attempting to auction it off foolishly and naively made it no secret that it had been dug up from a Saxony-Anhalt gravesite in Nebra by amateur treasure hunters in 1999.

What the man apparently didn't realize was that what he did was illegal. But even if he had obtained the disk by legal means, all archaeological artifacts are the property of the state in Saxony-Anhalt. The disk was seized by police and placed in the hands of the state archaeologist, Dr Harald Meller.

Wikipedia:

As part of a plea bargain, the illicit owners led police and archaeologists to the site where they had found it together with other remains (two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel and fragments of spiral bracelets). Though no witnesses were present at the first discovery, archaeologists have opened a dig at the site and have uncovered evidence that support the looters' claim (in the form of traces of bronze artifacts in the ground, as well as matching earth samples found sticking to the artifacts)...

The discovery site identified by the arrested metal detectorists is a prehistoric enclosure encircling the top of a 252 m elevation in the Ziegelroda Forest, known as Mittelberg ("central hill"), some 60 km west of Leipzig. The surrounding area is known to have been settled since the Neolithic, and Ziegelroda Forest is said to contain around 1,000 barrows.

The enclosure is oriented in such a way that the sun seems to set every solstice behind the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountains, some 80 km to the northwest. It was claimed by the treasure-hunters that the artifacts were discovered within a pit inside the bank-and-ditch enclosure. The signifiance of the site to prehistoric dwellers is underlined by the proximity to the much older Goseck circle.

Like Stonehenge and the Antikythera Mechanism, the Nebra Sky Disk appears to be an astronomical instrument that demonstrates greater knowledge of the solar calendar and stellar movements on the part of its creators than previously supposed.

A documentary about the artifact, Secrets of the Star Disc, airs Monday, March 1, 1pm on the National Geographic Channel.

Darcy James Argue

Great article on Darcy James Argue in the Boston Herald, all about his DIY jazz orchestra that plays a conglomerated metachronistic music he labels as Steampunk:

“My approach has been to take this very old-school instrumentation and hack it to try to force it to play music it wasn’t really designed to do, and use it to re-create electronic music effects acoustically,” said Argue, who studied with NEC orchestra guru Bob Brookmeyer and earned a master’s degree in 2002. “I am definitely inspired by steampunk ideas about our relationship to technology (and) the whole do-it-yourself aesthetic.”

See video clips of the Darcy James Argue Secret Society here.

Mardi Gras 1941

Spotted this on Dieselpunks tonight: great color footage of the 1941 Mardi Gras. 1941 was the first year a female krewe paraded (Krewe of Venus), although Les Mysterieuses, Carnival's first female organization, staged its premiere ball in 1896.


Click here to view it!

Post-Avatar Depression

Yeah, I saw this one coming from a long way off.

First this story started taking shape on the woo-woo circuit, and now it's hit the big time: the phenonemon of Post-Avatar Depression is real enough that even CNN is taking it seriously.

Thousands of people are experiencing severe depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the controversial James Cameron blockbuster film. Some have become so immersed in the film's reality that they find themselves obsessing over it. CNN quotes one unfortunate soul as saying:

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it..."

Other moviegoers, according to CNN, have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race because of the film's effect on them. Others report a disengagement with reality. Still another said:

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

What these people are reporting are exactly what many others have reported after undergoing various epiphanies and satoris, hyper-lucid dreaming, induced eidetic imagery, remote viewing, scrying, astral projection, past-life regression, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other practices best not spoken of here.

It's also akin to something I've always called "The Narnia Effect". When I read The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe as a child, even then I thought how unrealistic that the children would enter the magical land of Narnia and stay there for years, then return through the portal in time for supper at home, where only hours had elapsed. It was immediately evident to me that the children would have become so matured, so changed by those years of experience in faraway magical lands, that their parents and peers would have immediately noticed the drastic personality change. More to the point, the children would most likely be unable to function in their humdrum old normal schoolkid lives. Not after having the adventures they did. Not after growing up for years in a time-compressed track of an alternate reality.

That's precisely what these people are apparently feeling, so dazzled and bowled over are they by the fascinating and beautiful 3-D world of "Pandora" that Cameron has crafted. Another quote from a sufferer:

"One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality."

If there is a solution, it's to try to learn to spiritually multitask - to hold these different realms in your head at the same time, keeping your feet in multiple worlds 24-7. Sure, it'll make you seem erratic, cloudy, foggy, bipolar, inconsistent, self-contradictory, confused, vague, disassociated and absent-minded - just like your humble chronicler - but hey, it's better than having your body sit here in a near-coma of mopey unfunctionality while you're traveling in that land which lies an inch behind your forehead.

The Sound of Space

"In Space, no one can hear you scream."

That was the tag line for Ridley Scott's film Alien, and it's generally assumed to be an absolute truth, since we've all been taught that space is a vacuum in which sound does not travel.

However, the actual truth is more interesting. While it may well be that humans cannot hear another human screaming in space (assuming they didn't die instantly from exposure to space anyway), sound waves do travel through space. Space is actually not the total vacuum it's made out to be, and atoms of gas that pervade the entire universe give it what might be defined as an atmosphere of sorts - albeit a very, very thin one.

Even if a human could live unprotected in space long enough to listen for that scream, they still wouldn't hear it, though. Not enough atoms would strike that person's eardrums to perceive the sound. But that doesn't mean the sound waves aren't there.

In 2003, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced their discovery that the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million light-years away, was emitting a constant B-flat tone. That note has been sounding, the researchers said, for about 2.5 billion years. It's extremely low and bassy - 57 octaves below below a piano's middle C, to be precise.

The Radioplane

One of the first major unmanned drone planes was the Radioplane, invented by Hollywood actor and remote-control toy plane hobbyist Reginald Denny.

Denny was well known for screen appearances in the 1922 production of Sherlock Holmes, George Cukor's Romeo and Juliet, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, and the Cecil B. DeMille musical Madam Satan (a film noted for, among other things, an amazing zeppelin sequence, as seen below). But he soon found himself wearing the hat of a major military contractor when the idea of his Radioplane took off - literally - during World War II.


15,000 Radioplane drones were manufactured by Denny's company for the Allied Forces during World War II, and there was an young woman working at the Van Nuys Radioplane factory named Norma Jeane Mortenson (pictured above). In 1944, Army photographer David Conover took her picture in the assembly plant for Yank magazine, and told her she had star potential as a model.

He was right. After a bleach job, a makeover and a name change, Mortenson went on to worldwide fame as Marilyn Monroe.

Spiderweb Pocket Watch

I want this!

"Straight out of Wild Wild West! A silver-plated alloy mechanical (wind-up) pocket watch with a fabulous spiderweb filigree front cover, elaborate scroll relief design on the back, and clear glass windows on the inside face and back which reveal the moving brass gears inside. Gold-tone Arabic numerals and elegant black hands. Press top button to open, pull up grooved ring to set time. To wind, roll grooved ring back and forth between your fingers until resistance begins to change (1-3 times daily). No batteries required."

Now that's a watch!

Only $33.99 from Art of Adornment.

Last "Lost", At Last

Mark your calendars and set your TiVos: on February 2nd, the final season begins of Lost, a TV program that we look upon, in all seriousness, as a non-fiction documentary and a training film, not fiction.

Despite assurances from J.J. Abrams years ago that the show would not, in the end, leave dangling plotpoints and unanswered questions, it seems to me that such will be the case. There's just too much going on, on multiple layers, dimensions, and time tracks, to ever tie up all the loose ends. And that's OK. In reality, loose ends are never truly tied up, no matter how much they may appear to be.

Lonely Tylenol

At this writing, the beleaguered pain reliever Tylenol is the subject of yet another product recall, which makes me think this pill definitely has a black cloud over its head, a literal curse or a hex, and that maybe it's time they just packed it in and gave up and shut down altogether.

I wouldn't miss them a bit if they did - even without the perennial concerns of product tampering and company malfeasance, Tylenol is a very dangerous substance. Acetaminophen causes three times as many cases of liver failure as all other drugs combined, and is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States, accounting for an astonishing 39% of cases. Acetaminophen overdose is responsible for more emergency room visits than any other medicine on the market, over-the-counter or otherwise. Why is this junk still legal?

The evidence is clear: product recall or not, the stuff is evil and you ought not be taking it. Tylenol is also extremely toxic to pets - dogs can suffer liver damage from it, and even a tiny amount is enough to kill a cat.

Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) was discovered in 1877 by Harmon Northrop Morse, and was considered as a useful drug but ultimately rejected because it was believed to cause methemoglobinemia as a side effect. Many years later in 1948, studies by Dr. Julius Axelrod (pictured below) and others indicated that the previous data was faulty, and Paracetamol began being sold as an analgesic in the early 1950s as Tylenol and Panadol.


Tylenol was, and is, manufactured and marketed by McNeil Laboratories, which got its humble start as a drugstore/soda fountain in 1879. McNeil was later acquired by Johnson & Johnson.

Concerns about paracetamol's safety delayed its widespread acceptance until the 1970s. But in 1982, a product tampering scare killed seven people when cyanide was added to Tylenol pills by an unknown hand. A man named James W. Lewis has been a recurring suspect, but there's been insufficient evidence as yet to prosecute.

The Match King

Consider the case of Ivar Kreuger, born 1880, died 1932. He was a Swedish entrepreneur who, by the end of his career, controlled two thirds of the world's match production, thus earning him the sobriquet "Match King". His financial empire, described by some as a Ponzi scheme, collapsed during the Great Depression, just as he was trying to further his reach by dominating the European timber industry and form a cellulose cartel.

According to Wikipedia:

He had a large private library in both his apartments in Stockholm and New York and quite a large art collection. The paintings were sold at different auctions that were held in September 1932, as all of Kreuger's private assets were incorporated into the bankruptcy. The collection in Stockholm comprised 88 original paintings, among them 19 by Anders Zorn and a great number by old masters from the Netherlands. The New York collection comprised original paintings by Rembrandt and Anthony van Dyck.

Kreuger became the major shareholder when the Swedish film company AB Svensk Filmindustri (SF) was founded in 1919 and because of that, sometimes met celebrities from the film industry. In June 1924, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were invited by SF to Stockholm and were guided around the Stockholm archipelago in Kreuger's motor yacht Loris. A 5 minute film sequence of this occasion is stored in SF's film archive. Pickford, Fairbanks, Kreuger, Charles Magnusson (the manager for SF), Greta Garbo and various SF employees appear in the film.

Faced with ruin after the Depression, he committed suicide by shooting himself in March 1932. Or so some say.

In 1966 This brother Torsten published Sanningen om Ivar Kreuger (published in America as Ivar Kreuger: The Truth at Last in 1965) claiming that Ivar Kreuger had been murdered. In subsequent years, more and more researchers have supported Torsten findings.

Ayn Rand wrote a play inspired by Kreuger's life and death, entitled Night of January 16th, which was a surprise hit on Broadway in 1935.

Lucky 7 Lampwerks

Saw a feature on Toronto's Lucky 7 Lampwerks recently on The Steampunk Home. Love the elegant primitivism of his home decor, utilizing Edison bulbs and various reclaimed bric-a-brac.

Vernian Process

There's a great interview on Dieselpunks with Josh Pfeiffer of the Steamwave band Vernian Process, who openly share all their music for free - check it out. Right now I have their new early-mixes advance download (get yours here!) of their latest album Behold the Machine, and I can't stop listening to it.

"The Curse of Whitechapel", interwoven with brilliant samples of Ian Holm dialogue from From Hell is #1 on my Zune hit parade right now.