Worshipping Prince Philip

Britain's Duke of Edinburgh may be planning a quiet birthday celebration at home this weekend, but there will be feasting and flag-waving in an isolated jungle village in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where he is worshipped as a god.

Full story at the BBC.

Reprieve for the bows

A welcome bit of sanity:

Top-flight violinists will be able to travel unhindered by endangered species restrictions after a compromise was reached on the wood in their bows.

Professionals frequently use bows made from the pau brasil tree.

The CITES meeting approved Brazil's proposal to put trade restrictions on the wood after a deal was made to exclude finished products. . .

As it stood, that proposal would have obliged violinists to carry permits validating their right to take their pau brasil bows through border controls.

From the BBC. Too often well-meaning legislators have passed laws banning one material or another without any provision for special cases -- most notably, antiques.

From "Medic!" to "Teddy!"

The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers away from the battlefield.

The Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR) can scoop up even the heaviest of casualties and transport them over long distances over rough terrain.

New Scientist magazine reports that the "friendly appearance" of the robot is designed to put the wounded at ease.

It is expected to be ready for testing within five years.

From the BBC.

Former museum director pleads guilty

The former director of the Independence Seaport Museum pleaded guilty yesterday to charges that he defrauded the institution out of $1.5 million and used the money to fund a lavish lifestyle.

John S. Carter, 57, of Osterville submitted false invoices to get the maritime museum to pay for home improvements, artwork, jewelry, electronics and even a root canal, among other personal expenditures, federal authorities said. . .

Carter served as museum president for 17 years before being fired last year. The museum, located along the Delaware River waterfront, owns the Spanish-American War cruiser USS Olympia and the World War II-era submarine USS Becuna.

In a lawsuit filed against Carter in Massachusetts in January, museum officials accused him of defrauding the institution of $2.4 million.

Museum officials say the misuse of funds dated back to 1997.

Full story here.

Collecting art and antiques, nice and hot

Most cases in which it is claimed artworks are being stolen on commission for crooked collectors turn out to be anything but. The number of cases where a wealthy sociopath is caught furnishing with hot goods are vanishingly few. But never say never:

A wealth of stolen art and antiques found at crime boss Terry Adams' north London home was revealed today.

The haul was uncovered in a raid on Adams' Mill Hill home in 2003.

Police now say they have traced the owners of £274,000 worth of the items, stolen over a 15-year period.

Victims of Adams' crimes included the Library Museum of the Freemasons, which lost five pieces of Meissen porcelain worth £120,000 in two thefts in 1991 and 1996; an 85-year-old woman from Dorset, whose £2,000 Chinese lacquered Davenport writing bureau was stolen in 1992 and a the Marlborough gallery, which had three Henry Moore prints and three Picasso etchings worth £35,000 stolen in 1997.

From the Daily Mail (with pictures). The ormolu I can understand -- old bling and all that -- but Meissen figurines? Not what you'd expect from a gangster whose "family has been linked to 25 murders since the early Eighties".

Banning barometers

The EU has come in for mockery in the past for rules threatening such traditional manufactures as organ pipes (because of their lead content). Now it is mercury barometers facing a blanket ban, but it is still unclear if there will be an exemption for antiques.

Quite a few American states have passed quite stringent laws regarding mercury-bearing instruments, many of which do not exempt antiques. The Maine Antique Digest has been on the story for some time:

A nightmare scenario has developed for sellers of antique barometers. An event has crept up on them silently and suddenly, with little publicity and no warning. The sale of mercury barometers, new or antique, has been outlawed in most of the New England states . . .

Legislation is pending in several state legislatures, and mercury regulations in others are murky at best and totally confusing at worst. . .

In addition to state laws, some cities and counties have their own regulations.

Note that this also potential affects the sale or ownership of thermometers and clocks with mercury-filled pendulums. Further updates here and here, including the news that Maine has now passed a new law explicitly permitting the sale of antique barometers in the state. At this point, however, cleanup costs in case of a mercury spill can run so high that the potential liability for those selling mercury-containing instruments may prove a powerful deterrent. Many people scoff at the elaborate measures taken nowadays in case of spills (one of the RISD buildings was completely closed for an extended period at the end of last academic year after a small amount of mercury was found on a staircase), but the law is the law -- we're not going back to the days where kids were given mercury from broken thermometers to play with.

Stolen Stradivarius recovered

Austrian police discovered the valuable instrument in a raid on a flat in the capital, arresting six asylum seekers from Georgia as suspects. . .

Musician Christian Altenburger said he was "overjoyed" at the return of the violin, which was found unscathed . . . "I never dared to hope that my instrument would be found so quickly," Mr Altenburger said.

The investigation led police to a Georgian gang wanted for 21 other burglaries, Major Manfred Briegl told a press conference.

"The fact that alcohol and clothes were also stolen from the flat led us to immediately rule out a contracted theft and reminded us of the operating methods of a Georgian gang," the leader of the search said.

From the BBC.

While I'm posting on Cremonese violins, I might as well add a link to this recent NY Times piece:

A violin, it turns out, needs to be played, just as a car needs to be driven and a human body shooed off the couch. In this city that produced the best violins ever made, that job belongs to Andrea Mosconi. He is 75, and for the past 30 years, six days a week, he has finger-fed 300-year-old violins, worth millions, a diet of Bach, Tchaikovsky and Bartok. . .

Mr. Mosconi — who was born in Cremona, began playing the violin at age 9, studied violin making and went on to teach and perform — starts his work at 8 a.m., an hour before the museum opens. He stores his tools in a tastefully concealed closet: two bows, resin, baby-soft cotton rags and jugs of distilled water for the humidifier that keeps the air at the perfect moisture to preserve the instruments.

Getting down to work, he unlocks the cases and carefully removes each instrument. He tunes them, then plays each for six or seven minutes. He starts with scales and arpeggios, then something more substantial, on a recent day one of Bach’s partitas for the violin. Nothing less would do.

Blinded by authority

I'm not big on making fun of people doing difficult and unpopular jobs.
I'm also decidedly lacking in sympathy for middle-aged adults who still have major issues with authority. Which is why I find Nora Ephron's recent essay mocking FBI terrorism investigations so unbearably misguided. Roger Simon puts it well:

Nora Ephron has written a snarky piece for the Huff Post, which purports to reveal the dishonest nature of FBI terror investigations like the latest one at JFK and, presumably, Fort Dix a few weeks back. A hundred and fifty or more commenters applaud her post like the congregation at a gospel meeting.

I found the whole thing depressing. Actually I could barely read it. Why - after Bali, Madrid, London, Amsterdam, New York (twice), Casablanca, Istanbul, on and on - is someone so intelligent as Nora writing this trendy tripe? What does she expect law enforcement to do? Not to investigate these things? Nora implies it's all entrapment... but is it? How does she know? Indeed, she doesn't and couldn't. She just assumes it to be so because it is a comfortable world view for her.

People like Nora in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were supporting such actions themselves, but soon grew weary. It put too much strain on their self-images, so it became easier to make snotty comments about the FBI, as if J. Edgar Hoover was still in charge and the Palmer Raids never ended - only he's dead and they have. Long ago. Times have changed. And how.

Those who think the police can do nothing right are but the mirror image of those who think the police can do no wrong.

Petroglyph vandalism

Not-good news from Utah:

Federal authorities are investigating the vandalism of a series of petroglyphs believed to be thousands of years old.

The rock panels were damaged last month by gunfire — as many as 35 shots destroyed the ancient art located southwest of Fillmore, the Bureau of Land Management reported. . .

The area is popular, BLM archaeologist Misti Haines said Friday. "These are things the Boy Scouts like to come out and visit. We have some very passionate volunteer groups, they come out to our area almost every year. They help us record these sites," she said.

Blackbeard ship update

Ten years and $2 million have yet to result in a "smoking blunderbuss" that proves a shipwreck off the coast of Beaufort belonged to the notorious pirate Blackbeard.

But researchers say they haven't found anything among the cannons, coins, anchors, and other artifacts to rule it out, either.

"Ten years of archaeological and historical research all say it's the Queen Anne's Revenge," said Lindley Butler of Wentworth, the historian on the shipwreck project. . .

But even if it turns out not to be the French slave ship many believe Blackbeard captured in 1717 and renamed Queen Anne's Revenge before it ran aground off Atlantic Beach a year later, the decade of research has been worth the effort, said Jerry Cashion, chairman of the N.C. Historical Commission.

"This is the most important maritime wreck in North Carolina regardless of what it is," Cashion said. "... It's a treasure trove."

From the Charlotte Observer.

Amphoras galore in Pola

Another 100 amphoras, dating from the 1st century BC, were found at an archaeological site today of a luxury Roman patrician villa and the first city spa, situated in the centre of Pula, in Kandlerova Street, head of the excavational works, archaeologist Alka Starac.

The archaeological site is at a housing-business object and an underground garage construction site, which will be built by Zagreb-based PZ ulaganja company in the centre of Pula.

A total of 2,040 amphoras have now been found at the site, according to this report.

Bones in the lake

A drought that has bared parts of the bed of Florida's largest lake has exposed human bone fragments, pottery and even boats -- and archaeologists are trying to evaluate the artifacts before water levels rise again.

Archaeologists said there have been no large-scale digs in Lake Okeechobee; most of the finds have been easily spotted along the surface, some by passers-by who called in what they found.

Palm Beach County Archaeologist Chris Davenport said scores of bone fragments ranging from only a few inches to 8 inches long have been spotted in Lake Okeechobee, the second-largest freshwater lake in the continental U.S., behind Lake Michigan. The lake is at its lowest level since record keeping began in 1932, at about 8.96 feet deep on Monday. That's about 4 to 5 feet below normal, exposing many areas for the first time in years.

Full article here.

Polynesians (and their chickens) in the Americas

Why did the chicken cross the Pacific Ocean? To get to the other side, in South America. How? By Polynesian canoes, which apparently arrived at least 100 years before Europeans settled the continent.

That is the conclusion of an international research team, which reported yesterday that it had found “the first unequivocal evidence for a pre-European introduction of chickens to South America,” or presumably anywhere in the New World.

The researchers said that bones buried on the South American coast were from chickens that lived between 1304 and 1424. Pottery at the site was from a similar or earlier time. A DNA analysis linked the bones, which were excavated at El Arenal on the Arauco Peninsula in south central Chile, to chickens from Polynesian islands.

From the NY Times, which also notes:

Scholars found it disappointing and puzzling that the Polynesians who landed at El Arenal left nothing more than chicken bones. Pottery at the site is in a local style. Perhaps the visitors ate and ran . . .

Yet another reminder that absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Oldest beads found?

The international team of archaeologists, led by Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, have found shell beads believed to be 82,000 years old from a limestone cave in Morocco. . .

Similar beads have been found at sites in Algeria, Israel and South Africa which are thought to date back to around the same time or slightly after the finds from Taforalt.

Full article here.

New fresco restoration recipe

A salad dressing-like mixture of water, a bit of oil and a sugar-like molecule can safely clean ancient frescoes, according to a new nanotechnology research.

Scientists at the University of Florence, Italy, have discovered that the oil-in-water microemulsion — basically tiny droplets of oil suspended in water — can penetrate a painting’s pores and scrub away grime and acrylic resins.

The potion has proven particularly effective in cleaning frescoes that had been coated in thick layers of paraloid, an acrylic copolymer widely used by conservators in the 1960s. While the paraloid was intended to offer a protective coating for artworks, it turns out the aging of the acrylic, and reactions with calcium salts beneath the coating, produce a disastrous effect decades after the treatment.

Ah, how much of a restorer's time is spent undoing the effects of previous restorations! This recipe seems quite benign, however:

Using the microemulsions is rather simple. The researchers protect the painting with thin Japanese paper and pour the microemulsions — in the form of a paste or a gel — onto the wrapped artwork. After 10 minutes to a couple of hours, the paste or gel is removed, and with it, any grime and paraloid.

"It is a cheap, simple and environmentally friendly way to clean masterpieces. Using just one percent of oil, we basically managed to make water a very aggressive cleaning agent," Baglioni said.

From Discovery News.

More fake Chinese pharmaceuticals

Heard a story on this topic this morning on NPR. Fake antimalarial drugs are now all over the place in Myanmar and Thailand -- a hotspot for development of drug-resistant strains. No surprise, in that the fakes sometimes contain small quantities of real antimalarial drugs: too little to kill the parasites, but enough to promote development of drug resistance. The irony is that the latest weapon against malaria, artemisinin, is of Chinese origin. China gives, and China takes away.

FDA bulletin here; a recent article from the Boston Globe here. The same area is also of major concern for the development of drug-resistant strains of TB.

Filthy breaks

An open secret: water quality at many popular surf spots leaves something to be desired. The NY Times reports:

Many Southern Californians find contentment just looking at the ocean from their sun decks, grateful for their views and the clean air. But there are those who persist in braving the water, never mind the historic counts of bacteria from fecal matter and other sources that can cause skin rashes, ear infections and gastrointestinal ailments, or the signs that spell out the dangers with warnings like “contact with ocean water at this location may increase risk of illness”. . .

“You get all your shots, you stay away certain times,” said Mr. Gross’s father, Paul, 60, another longtime surfer who comes out three to four times a week. He matter-of-factly detailed his post-surf regimen: “You take showers here and put hydrogen peroxide in your ears and gargle with hydrogen peroxide diluted with water.”