Zen and the Art of Japanese Militarism

This will probably come as news to many New Agers:

To many Americans, Zen Buddhists primarily devote themselves to discovering inner serenity and social peace. But Zen has had strong ties to militarism — indeed so strong, that the leaders of one of the largest denominations in Japan have remorsefully compared their former religious fanaticism during Japan's brutal expansionism in the 1930's and 40's to today's murderously militant Islamists.

The unexpected apology for wartime complicity by the leaders of Myoshin-ji, the headquarters temple of one of Japan's main Zen sects, was issued 16 days after 9/11, which gave it a particular resonance. But the leaders of Myoshin-ji — as well as other Zen Buddhist leaders who have also delivered apologies over the past two years — mainly credit a disillusioned Westerner for their public regrets: Brian Victoria, a former Methodist missionary, who is a Zen priest and historian.

Buddhist leaders in Japan and the United States said in recent interviews that Mr. Victoria had exerted a profound influence, especially in the West, by revealing in his 1997 book, Zen at War, a shockingly dark and unfamiliar picture of Zen during World War II to followers who had no idea about its history. . .

Now, in a new sequel called Zen War Stories, Mr. Victoria has dug more specifically into relationships between Zen leaders and the military during World War II.

Though I was familiar with the martial activities of Zen monks in times long past, the book's findings were a revelation. Zen leaders wholeheartedly threw themselves into Imperial Japan's campaign of conquest, some also embracing the vicious anti-Semitism of their Axis allies.

Traditionally, Zen stresses an inward search for understanding and mental discipline. But Mr. Victoria said that imperial military trainers developed the self-denying egolessness Zen prizes into "a form of fascist mind-control." He said Suzuki and others helped by "romanticizing" the tie between Zen and the warrior ethos of the samurai. Worse, he charges, they stressed a connection between Buddhist compassion and the acceptance of death in a way that justified collective martyrdom and killing one's enemies.

"In Islam, as in the holy wars of Christianity, there is a promise of eternal life," Mr. Victoria said in an interview. "In Zen, there was the promise that there was no difference between life and death, so you really haven't lost anything."

Royal Oak's admiral's launch

A relic from one of the darkest moments in Scotland’s maritime history has been found after 60 years, serving as a London houseboat.

The admiral’s launch from the HMS Royal Oak - which was sunk off Scapa Flow in 1939 with the loss of over 830 lives - only survived because it had been sent for refurbishment. . .

The launch is all that remains of the 29,000 ton warship, which was torpedoed by a German U-boat in October 1939, in a daring raid on the British naval base in Orkney’s Scapa Flow.

From The Scotsman.

Old Masters sales preview

Highlight of this month's New York Old Master sales will be Andrea Mantegna's Descent into Limbo, but many other noteworthy items are also coming up, as the Art Newspaper reports.

Sotheby's offerings are listed here; Christie's, here.

BONUS: The Mantegna is listed here, but as of this moment, the page is rather a mess: where the painting's description should appear is the description of a lot of manuscript leaves for George Washington's first Inaugural Address. And rather amusingly, the Mantegna is captioned "Decent into Limbo" -- perhaps to indicate that Christ is properly clothed, unlike the rather scantily-draped inhabitants of Limbo.

Romans make children puke

Sounds as if this is taking historic re-enactment a bit far:

Four pupils were overcome by the smell - called 'Flatulence' - when they visited the museum in Chester.

The smell was coming from an AD 90 Roman 'latrine' feature at the Dewa Roman Experience.

But even after the man-made aroma was toned down by its manufacturers, a further two pupils threw up after smelling it [I think "synthetic" might have been a better choice of words; what was being mimicked, after all, is also "man-made", though admittedly the process of production isn't usually called "manufacture" -- D].

Museum staff insist the smell's strength is now healthy, if not pleasant.

Christine Turner, from the museum, said: "The company that makes our smells for us told us that they had a new smell come in, called 'Flatulence'.

"Obviously we were tempted to use this smell for our latrine.

"We used it on the Friday, it was incredibly powerful, but we assumed that over the weekend it would get more diluted with the air coming into the centre.

"However on the Monday when we had a couple of classes of schoolchildren visit the centre the smell was still so overpowering that unfortunately four children vomited."

The smells are used to make the museum more realistic and bring Roman Britain back to life.

They are made by mixing a cocktail of harmless chemicals.

And no, we aren't going to tell you where you can get 'Flatulence'.

Learning languages early

A German-Italian study of bilingual children supports the notion that innate language acquisition ability is peculiar to early childhood:

"The younger, the better. In our investigation, functional magnetic resonance imaging has shown that our brain seems to have the need for additional resources when a language is learned late. This doesn't happen when a language is acquired since birth or at a very early stage," co-author Stefano Cappa, head of the psychology faculty at the San Raffaele Vita-Salute University in Milan, told Discovery News.

I'm not sure how decisive the results are in any practical sense, however. While the later learners did use more of their brains to work in their second language, their actual abilities in that language varied considerably. Does it really matter if you're using more (or different parts) of your brain, as long as you are thinking and speaking fluently?
Of course, you don't know until it's too late if you happen to be able to pick up languages later in life, so the advice to teach languages early still holds -- just don't give up on new languages just because you think you are too old.

Bolognese illuminated manuscripts show

A fine selection of Bolognese illuminated manuscripts from the second half of the 14th century will be on display at the Museo civico medioevale in Bologna until the end of March. The exhibition is entitled “I corali di San Giacomo Maggiore. Miniatori e committenti a Bologna nel Trecento”.
For pictures and a review, see La Repubblica (in Italian).

Venice vs Napoleon

When you live amidst history, you are less likely to dismiss it lightly (via Reuters):

Some 200 years after conquering Venice, Napoleon Bonaparte will face trial in the lagoon city accused of stealing some of its artistic treasures and worse.

A group of Venetians is mounting a mock trial as part of a campaign to stop a statue of the French emperor going on display in a museum on St Mark's Square, the heart of Venice. . .

Commissioned by Venetian merchants to thank Napoleon for making the city a tax-free port, it stood on St Mark's Square from 1811 to 1814, when Venice fell to the Austrians and it was removed to the nearby island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Historians then lost track of the statue until it resurfaced at Sotheby's auction house in New York last year, where it was jointly bought by a French association that raises funds for Venice and by the cultural foundation of a Venetian bank.

Their intention, approved by Venice's municipality, was to display the work at the Correr Museum, which is dedicated to the city's history and housed in the "Napoleonic Wing", a structure built on St Mark's Square on Napoleon's orders.

Some Venetians see Napoleon as a tyrant who robbed the city of its independence before looting it and destroying some of its architectural gems.

Fair enough; that he was, and that he did. On the other hand, the Venetians hardly have clean hands: San Marco is adorned inside and out with loot from the sack of Constantinople in 1204, including the famed bronze horses (which Napoleon took to Paris) and the so-called Pilastri Acritani.

Nonetheless, these statements by one of the Napoleon defenders go a bit far:

"Yes, his troops looted artworks. But many went to museums, not private collections, in line with the ideas of the French Revolution, and most were returned later anyway". . .

"Yes, Napoleon had churches and other historic buildings destroyed. But in their place he built other structures that at the time were seen as improvements."

Seen as improvements by whom? The French overlords? Not by the churches' parishioners or by the inhabitants of the suppressed monasteries and convents, to be sure.
As for Napoleon's looting of artworks, it was truly unprecedented: in its scope, organization, and ideological impetus, it finds its only real parallel in the kleptomania of the Nazis. And though some of the loot was returned (much of the plunder remains in France to this day) it was only thanks to Wellington. What was returned post-Waterloo sometimes took decades to be repatriated, and in many cases suffered grievous harm. Frescoes and panel paintings were transferred to canvas; fragile objects were hauled over the Alps in wagons. The art looted from all over Europe was then paraded around Paris in a grand triumphal procession. That must have been a sight to see -- but hardly good conservation practice.

Knife wound fatal 21 years later

A strange story from New York City:

In 1981, Charles Boccaleri was stabbed in the West Village. More than 20 years later and only 10 blocks away, he died as a result of his wounds. . .

The fact that such an old wound could eventually lead to the victim's death is unusual, according to a former chief medical examiner for New York City, Dr. Michael Baden. While he was not involved in this case, he said that to get one "delayed homicide" out of 1,000 killings would be a lot.

In this case, Ellen S. Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner's office, said Mr. Boccaleri died from bleeding inside his intestines that resulted from the wound.

Dr. Baden explained that after a stabbing, scar tissue could build and the intestines could wrap themselves around the tissue, constricting the flow of arterial blood. He said the delay in classifying the case a homicide was likely the result of ruling out the other possible causes for the bleeding.

While this is an extreme example, it's not just a stabbing that can lead to such adhesions; to a lesser degree, they are an inevitable consequence of abdominal surgery as well. Not something most nonmedical folk are properly aware of. . . .

Important 17th-century cannon find

Archaeologists. . . have found a 17th-century iron cannon, thought to be the only one of its kind still in existence.

It was recovered from the wreck of the Swan, a small Cromwellian warship lost off Mull while attacking the royalist stronghold of Duart Castle in 1653.

Dr [Colin] Martin [of the University of St Andrews] said the cannon had the initials of John Browne, King Charles I's royal gunfounder, on it.

"In the 1620s Browne developed a completely revolutionary new type of gun - one which was much lighter for the weight of shot it fired, allowing more to be carried on the king's ships," said Dr Martin.

"These stronger and lighter new guns were called 'drakes', and the secret of their success was a tapered end to their bores, where the pressure of the gunpowder explosion was greatest."

St Andrews University said conservationists hope to find out soon whether the cannon is indeed a drake. Work is expected to reveal that it is probably the only iron example of this type of gun known to have survived into modern times.

From Ananova.

Thracian burial mound excavated

News from Bulgaria; the English may be imperfect, but the find is excellent:

A funeral of a high-ranking Thracian aristocrat, devotee of the Orpheus cult, was discovered by Bulgarian archaeologists during excavations in what they call "Thracia's sacred valley." The rich Thracian was buried in a mound near the largest yet found Thracian temple in the vicinity of the village of Starosel, 100 miles east of Bulgaria's capital Sofia. In the 5th century BC, the body of the dead aristocrat was dismembered in three pieces and buried at the foot of an apparently sacred rock. At one side of it, the ancient have built a chamber with two-level roof to resemble a sanctuary. The belongings of the chieftain were arranged in that chamber. There is a full set of arms and armour including gold-washed ruff and helmet, spears, sword, shield and arrows. Except the armour, the archeologists found silver and bronze vessels and a lot of pottery. The find that stirred the most excitement among them was a silver double-blade axe called by Thracians "labris." In Thracian civilization, it symbolized royal power. There was also a gold seal-ring engraved with an image of a horseman spearing a boar.

DNA testing for truffles

French scientists have identified the genetic code of the truffle, enabling anti-fraud investigators to distinguish between true examples of the prized fungus and an inferior Chinese variety flooding the market.

The breakthrough is a major advance in the campaign to protect Tuber Melanosporum - the classic black Perigord truffle beloved of gourmets round the world - from its physically almost indistinguishable rival Tuber Indicum, which has been imported to France from China in growing quantities since 1994. . .

"This year Chinese truffles are being imported for around 20 euro a kilo, while Perigord truffles are selling at markets in the south for 300 euro a kilo," said Michel Courvoisier, director of the French Federation of Truffle-Growers (FFT).

Mafia hitman's alibi

A mafia hitman has told Italy's Crown Court he couldn't have committed a double murder because he was killing two other men at the time.

Salvatore Torre, 33, is already serving a life sentence for murder.

"I am not the murderer, not just because I would have admitted it anyway, but because that day I was killing someone else," he told the court.

From Ananova.

Chinese waterway structure is 700-year old lock

Chinese experts have confirmed that an ancient water project discovered in Shanghai in May 2001 is a lock built more than 700 years ago.

Experts consider the seven-meter high lock the most precious water works find in China, and is even larger than one found in Beijing in 1993, which was recorded as one of the top ten archaeological finds of that year.

The lock is located on a silted tributary on the old course of the Wusong River, a major shipping route in ancient China now known as the Suzhou River, stretching from the prosperous lower reaches of the Yangtze River to the East China Sea.

Constructed in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), the lock was one of many used at that time to prevent silt and sand carried back by reverse tidal flows from choking the waterway, according to Chen Xiejun, curator of the Shanghai Museum.

Meanwhile, more finds from the Qin tombs:

Chinese archaeologists recently unearthed 27 pieces of rare cultural relics at the tombs of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor who unified China in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.).

Excavated from a pit of the Qin tombs in Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, the cultural relics included 10 bronze swans, 16 bronze cranes and a crane standing on a bronze platform, said Duan Qingbo, head of the excavation team.

In addition to the waterfowl, the archaeologists also found 15 terracotta warriors with different poses at a passage leading to the pit.

Earlier, 13 bronze water birds had been unearthed from the pit, he added.

Pirate shipwreck gold goes on display

One of the largest ever hoards of gold and jewellery discovered on a shipwreck off the Devon coast is to go on display at the British Museum.

It is thought the ship was sunk off Salcombe during the 17th century after being attacked by pirates hunting white slaves. . .

It is believed the vessel was used by pirates who raided the coastline for white slaves to sell in North Africa. . .

Archaeologists are puzzled by the mixture of European items and gold coins from Morocco and how a vessel containing one of the largest ever seabed finds came to be in waters off Salcombe.

The gold goes on display next week and divers will continue their hunt for further relics later in the year.

From the BBC, which will also be broadcasting a documentary on the wreck this Friday.

Vatican City: crime capital of Europe?

From the BBC:

The world's smallest country - the Vatican - has one of the highest crime rates in the world, a report said.

The report, for the year 2002, was presented to the pontifical court by the state's Chief Prosecutor, Nicola Picardi.

Mr Picardi said that criminal offences per capita were more than 20 times higher than in neighbouring Italy.

St Peter's Basilica and the Vatican museums provide a kind of earthly paradise for pickpockets, the report said.

Other crimes included embezzlement, fraud and insulting the police and civil servants.

Yes, saying rude things to policemen and bureaucrats can get you in serious trouble in Italy (and the Vatican). The overall stats are a little skewed, given that the population of the Vatican is only 500 or so. Still, watch your pockets when you are walking around St. Peter's.

Important finds in Ireland

From the BBC:

Hunting tools believed to be 9,000 years old have been uncovered during a road development in County Antrim. . .

The finds are the most significant discovery in the province since a 4,000-year-old grave was discovered during an excavation in the ruins of Newtownstewart Castle in County Tyrone in 1999. . .

A special team of experts has been appointed by the Roads Service to carry out a full examination of the site where a 3.5-kilometre-long dual carriageway is being built to ease chronic traffic congestion.

More than 8,000 pieces of flint, including small microlith blades and bigger tools used for hunting and fishing, have been discovered.

The finds range from Mesolithic (7,000-3,500 BC) and Neolithic (4,000-2,500 BC) to the Bronze Age (2,500-1,200 BC) and right up to some tools from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Urban renewal, historic preservation, and the Brighton pier

Today's NY Times has an article on the Brighton pier collapse (which we reported back on Dec 30).

Apparently there are those who feel the landmark pier should not be reconstructed; the president-elect of the Royal Institute of British Architects expressed his doubts thus:

"One needs to look at the right balance. When you come to virtually rebuild something, it is not the same as it was; it becomes a pastiche. The West Pier had already gotten past the point of no return, and now that it has collapsed, it is certainly past it. . . Piers were built for promenading, and we don't promenade in bustles and toppers anymore. The piers that are left have become very tacky experiences, so we should be thinking what we want piers for."

While the hesitance to rebuild is understandable, it should be recalled that a similar reluctance to put money into neighborhoods deemed hopelessly depressed and permanently unfashionable propelled the wholesale destruction of 1950s and '60s "urban renewal".
In hindsight, the planners of the era were tragically shortsighted. It may be equally shortsighted to write off the seaside resorts of England, depressed as they may be.

Tyrannosaurus revisited

Our 4-year-old has recently taken an interest in dinosaurs, which has prompted a bit of catching-up on the part of her parents (whose dino-knowledge has become rather dated).
This article from New Scientist may be helpful for others in the same boat (and don't miss the links to the left).

Last Canadian WW1 fighter pilot dies

From the AP:

Henry Botterell, the last of Canada's World War I fighter pilots, has died. He was 106. . .

He was one of the estimated 15 remaining Canadian veterans of World War I, and the Department of Veteran Affairs considered him the last fighter pilot from the 1914-1918 conflict.

Only fifteen Canadian WW1 veterans left!

UPDATE: This article states that Botterell may indeed have been the last surviving pilot of any nation to have seen action in the Great War.

Battle royal over sunken treasure

From the BBC:

An international row is brewing between the Spanish Government and an American sea salvage company over what could be the most valuable shipwreck ever.

The salvage firm Sub Sea Research believes it has found what remains of the 64-cannon French ship, Notre Dame de Deliverance, which sank in a fierce storm 60 kilometres (40 miles) off Florida's Key West in 1755.

The merchant vessel was chartered by Spain to carry treasures extracted from mines in Mexico, Peru and Colombia.

Its cargo of gold bullion, gems, coins and silver is worth an estimated $3bn. . .

The Sub Sea Research has produced an incomplete inventory of what was believed to be on board of the Notre Dame de Deliverance when it left the Cuban port of Havana.

The cargo included:
- 437 kilogram of gold bullion in 17 chests,
- more than 15,000 gold coins
- 153 golden snuff boxes
- six chests of gems
- more than 1,000,000 silver pieces
- 14 kg of sliver ore
- six pairs of diamond earrings
- a diamond ring

"It was one of the richest ships ever lost," one of the owners of the company, Greg Brooks, told the Miami Daily Business Review.

The Deliverance's glimmering cargo is approximately 10 times larger than that found in 2000 on the galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, from which about $400m in treasure was retrieved.

Drunkenness all in your head

From the BBC:

A person's memory is impaired if they believe they are drinking alcohol even when it is really water, a study has found.

Researchers at Victoria University in New Zealand tricked 148 students into believing they were drinking vodka to study the so-called placebo effect.

The undergraduates were given drinks in a room set up like a pub with bartenders, vodka bottles and glasses.

Half were told they were drinking vodka and half tonic water. In reality, they were all given plain water with limes.

Afterwards, the students were shown slides of a crime and were asked to assess a story spiked with misleading information.

The researchers found those who thought they were drinking vodka had poorer memory powers than those who knew they were sober. They were also more suggestible and less reliable as eye witnesses.

I wonder if it works the other way around?

This story also reminded me of a party during my college days. My friend John and I mixed our drinks, finishing off the contents of a vodka bottle. We then thoughtfully refilled the bottle from a drinking fountain before putting it back on the drinks table. Soon enough some underclassman comes along and mixes himself a stiff one. After tasting it he makes a face; then he pours in a little more "vodka", tastes it again, smiles happily, and wanders off.

Illegal Easter Island artifacts for sale in Miami?

From the BBC this morning:

The Chilean Government has launched an investigation after it discovered that a Miami art gallery is selling a collection of Easter Island artefacts which it claims are up to 1,000 years old.

Easter Island is world famous for its giant stone statues that are considered archaeological treasures.

The Chilean authorities were shocked when they found that two statue heads, both standing more than one metre high, were on sale in a Miami art gallery.

The Chilean Committee of National Monuments said they had not given permission for the pieces - which are on display with 12 other artefacts - to leave the country, much less be sold.

A government archaeologist told the BBC that the artefacts had either left the country illegally or were fakes.

UPDATE: This article reports the suspicion that the sculptures are newly carved from genuine Easter Island stone.

Saint Walburga dunned in Germany

Germany's TV licence fee agency has apologised after demanding payment from an eighth-century saint.

Officials sent letters to Frau Walburga St. asking for a monthly licence payment of 16.50 euros.

Father Karl Terhorst initially ignored the letters when they arrived at his Roman Catholic church in Ramsdorf.

But when one letter threatened legal action and a fine he wrote back explaining St Walburga was born in 710 in England and was an abbess and missionary who was made a saint in 880.

From Ananova.

NOTE: For those unfamiliar with the concept (including James Taranto, it seems), a number of countries require TV owners to pay regular license fees to help pay for public broadcasting. In the UK, they even have vans equipped with TV-detection gear that cruise neighborhoods looking for unlicensed sets.

Mildenhall Treasure: how many pieces missing?

So far this story has not been widely reported:

Experts have revealed a second piece of the world-famous Mildenhall Treasure could be missing – just days after discovering one part was already unaccounted for.

The new revelation has come from the British Museum, which houses the impressive 34-piece collection of Roman silver, found in a field in West Row, Suffolk, in 1943.

Specialists at the museum have been studying an old photograph of the treasure and are now concerned that a second mystery piece disappeared before the find was ever made public and has never been seen since.

The 1,500-year-old silver was found by ploughman Gordon Butcher in January 1943. He told his boss Sydney Ford, an agricultural engineer who collected antiquities, and they took it back to Ford's workshop.

The photograph is of Sydney Ford's son Jack, taken in Sydney's house in the 1940s with the treasure visible on display on a sideboard in the background.

Experts have now started examining the picture more closely as it seems there is an object, which could be a million pound piece of Roman silver, on show which is not part of the British Museum's collection and is not the missing goblet described by 94-year-old Jack Thompson – who recently broke his 60-year silence in the EADT (East Anglian Daily Times).

Lawsuit over "Anglo-Saxon" cross

A too-familiar story nowadays: a seller consigns something for sale at auction; someone else buys it, turns around, and sells it for a big markup, and then the original owner sues the auctioneer.
Here's a recent variation, with some twists, from England:

Mel Glazer, who put up what some experts continue to argue is a rare Anglo Saxon cross shaft for auction at Norfolk auction house T.W. Gaze and Son, saw the hammer fall at £7500. Antiquities dealer Rupert Wace, the successful bidder, sold the piece at the Grosvenor House Fair in June last year for almost £300,000.

Mr Wace, among other experts, is confident that the cross shaft is a genuine Anglo Saxon piece dating from the 8th/9th century – a view that, importantly, is still shared by his American buyer – and has guaranteed the sale. But his view contradicts the verdict of the Government-appointed Export Review Committee, who advise Ministers on whether works of art should be allowed out of the country.

The committee were advised by Professor Rosemary Cramp, editor of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, and an independent assessor whose identity has been kept secret by the committee but who is understood to be a British Museum curator.

Despite experts disagreeing over the age of the cross shaft, Mr Glazer is pressing ahead with his claim for compensation from the auctioneers through his lawyers.

It seems unlikely that the lawsuit will succeed; unlike in the USA, however, it will be the losing party that will be saddled with the legal bills.

UPDATE: Here's a bit more on the cross (but not on the lawsuit) from the Art Newspaper.

Handbags designed to look like they contain weapons

If this isn't the stupidest idea ever. . .

Xmas tree prank

A pretty amusing practical joke:

A Norwegian man eturned home after a Christmas holiday abroad to find 150 Christmas trees surrounding his house.

Dag Lotveit says he had to fight his way through the trees, which were wired together, to get back into the house.

The trees had been put there by his three older brothers as a surprise to mark his 40th birthday. . .

"This is what it is like to be the youngest of four brothers," he told local newspaper Budstikka.

Ho, ho, ho.

Prehistoric elephant graveyard

My grandmother would take me to the La Brea Tar Pits when I was a little boy; I didn't end up as a paleontologist, but I still look out for articles like this:

A Pompeii for elephants, an Italian site packed with the remains of Middle Pleistocene stuck-in-the-mud pachyderms, has just opened to the public after a 17-year excavation.

Situated 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) northeast of Rome, La Polledrara di Cecanibbio is a sort of a fossilized prehistoric zoo. The bones — more than 10,000 of them — emerged from the hardened earth of a 900-square-meter area (ca. 9,700 square feet) belonging to an ancient riverbed. . .

Researchers studying and restoring the faunal remains have already identified 1,500 elephant bones. They belong to the extinct species Elephas antiquus, the ancestor of the modern elephant. . .

The prehistoric zoo includes fossilized bones of ancient deer, horses, rhinoceros, oxen, rodents, birds, small reptiles and fish.

Archaeologists also unearthed about 500 tools that pre-humans made from pebbles and fragments of long elephant bones. . .

The abundance and unique preservation of large mammal fossils make this the second-best collection of elephant bones in the world, after the Hot Springs Mammoth Site in South Dakota.

Museum of Capitalism

Today's New York Times has an article on an institution that was new to me: the Museum of American Financial History, in downtown Manhattan. Currently on exhibit is a collection of stock certificates; the one from Enron shown in the article really belongs in James Lileks' Bureau of Corporate Allegory. Should we chip in and get him one?

3D scanning of terror target monuments

According to this article in the New York Daily News, the US government has quietly begun to make detailed 3D laser-scanned surveys of major monuments whose iconic status might make them targets of terrorist attack.

Monuments mentioned include the Capitol, the Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore, though the list is undoubtedly considerably longer.

Scots' top 10 treasures

Responding to the list recently compiled at the British Museum, two BBC TV archeologists have come up with their own list of Scotland's ten most important archeological discoveries of all time.

The top spot went to the Smerrick axes, a Neolithic hoard found by drain diggers in 1881.

Other leading contenders were the oldest bow ever found in Britain, a Viking boat discovered in an Orkney sand dune, a carved stone Roman lioness which emerged from the muddy banks of a river after 1,700 years, an Iron Age wind instrument cast into a bog and a hoard of silver Roman coins.

See the whole list here.

Slavery museum for Mobile

Just in from Mobile, Alabama:

Owners of a major collection of items from the age of slavery to the civil rights era have chosen Mobile for a future museum to house the 15,000 artifacts.

Jim and Mary Anne Petty of Gulfport, Miss., said they chose Mobile as the site for a future museum to house their collection to keep it in the South.

The Pettys said they will form a nonprofit organization, with a board of directors, to raise funds for the planned Middle Passage Museum. Middle Passage refers to the often brutal journey African slaves endured from their homeland to the Americas. Prior to the Civil War, a slave auction operated in Mobile.

Literary hoaxes, fairy tales

Thanks to a feature in today's Sunday Times, I've just discovered a fine site devoted to fairy tales and folklore studies -- www.surlalunefairytales.com -- along with a literary hoax from the 1940s that oddly prefigures the recent exposure of pseudoscientific cant by postmodernists by Alan Sokal. Writing in a special Jacket issue devoted to hoaxes, David Lehman introduced the Ern Malley poems as follows:

The greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Once the poems were published, their authors went public. But things were only beginning to get interesting:

The wondrous twist in the Ern Malley story was the surprising, and actually quite heroic, intransigence of Max Harris and his cohorts, who maintained in the face of all ridicule their belief in Malley’s genius. ‘The myth is sometimes greater than its creator,’ said Harris. Sir Herbert Read, tireless in his advocacy of vanguard art, wired his support from England. It seemed to him that the hoaxers had been ‘hoisted on their own petard’. It was, Read reasoned, possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means — even if the motive of the writer was to perpetrate a travesty. In time others have come to share this view, and it is clear that the tide in Australia has turned in their favor. The editors of the new Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1992) elected to include all of Malley’s poems in their anthology.

And so Ern Malley lives on, even as his creators and their targets have fallen into obscurity.

VW Beetles face extermination

In the name of progress, Mexico City is trying to do away with its legions of Volkswagen Beetle taxis:

Their 45-horsepower engines have been part of the city's cacophonous symphony since the 1950's. Mexico is the only place where they still make the old Beetle, the most popular car in history, with over 22 million manufactured since the first one emerged from Hitler's Germany in 1936.

Now the city government wants them gone. It has branded the old Beetle taxis as a threat to public health, a blight on Mexico's City's air, a locus of crime and kidnapping. It has started a program to replace the cars with four-door sedans, offering taxi drivers hard-to-obtain bank loans for new Nissans, Ford Fiestas, Hyundais and Volkswagen Pointers.

By the end of the decade, if all goes according to plan, the taxi fleet will be Beetle-free. But things rarely go according to plan in Mexico City, where laws and regulations, like red lights, are often regarded as mere suggestions.

Vikings came in peace. Not.

From today's Sunday Times:

Revisionist accounts of history depict the Vikings as a peaceable people who came to Scotland to farm and trade with the local population. However, a new archeological find supports the traditional view that they were a bloodthirsty race who wreaked havoc, attacking defenceless villages, raping their women and plundering their possessions.

The Dark Age drawing, carved into slate with a metal stylus in the eighth century, was discovered on Inchmarnock, an unpopulated island off the west coast of Scotland. It is believed to be the first contemporary drawing of a Viking slave raid ever discovered.

The “hostage stone” shows a shackled man being led away by a wild-haired Viking warrior clad in chainmail. In the foreground is a longboat with a row of oars resting on the water. . .

Chris Lowe, director of Headland Archeology, which has been excavating Inchmarnock since 1999, said: “What we seem to have is a contemporary eyewitness account of a Viking slave-raiding party, presumably at Inchmarnock itself. We have found something very significant and unique. As far as I’m aware, this is the only graphical representation from the British Isles, or anywhere else, that depicts a slave-raiding party”. . .

The slate, roughly the size of an adult hand, was found in two pieces. The first, smaller section was discovered in 2001 and the second, larger piece last October. Only when they were matched did the significance of the find become apparent.

The stone is also significant in depicting what appears to be a reliquary being carried by the hostage. These were commonly used by monks to contain the remains of saints, but this is the only example of such an item being used in context.

The earliest seaborne Vikings — an old Norse word meaning “pirate” — sailed from Denmark, Sweden and Norway at the end of the 8th century. The raids plundered valuable goods for trade and the attacks on Christian monasteries in the British Isles gave Vikings a fearsome reputation.

Evidence uncovered by archeologists on the east coast of Scotland at Tarbat, for example, revealed a community of monks with sword wounds in their skulls alongside the charred traces of buildings.

Coastal parts of Scotland, the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland, together with the Isle of Man, were quickly overrun. The Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland were under Viking political control for centuries.

On mainland Scotland, Viking settlements were mainly in narrow coastal areas of the southwest, the west and the extreme north. The last Viking battle was in 1263 at Largs, when the Highland and Lowland clans joined forces to take back the Western Isles.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Inchmarnock Archaeological Research Project website, which also hosts pictures of the finds.