debitage
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Or not solved ... it can't have been a single archer. What about the feathers that people saw coming from that icy knoll? It's a conspiracy, I tell ya. Crap. I don't know enough about the Kennedy assassination conspiracy-mongering to do a proper parody.
First, the happy stuff. I whittled a squirrel today. Second .. well, I can't talk about the second. Not online, at least. Maybe later. Third, my plans to attend the Upstate Brunchmeet are becoming shakier. I had counted on staying at Michele's apartment the night before the Brunchmeet, then taking the bus to Ithaca. Then I'd stay at her house again the night after, since I can't move in to Cushman until Saturday. But today Michele emailed me and told me her plans have changed and she won't be in Hamilton for that week. Crap. Now I need to find some other place to stay, if I want to make it to Brunchmeet. Fourth, poke the bunny.
For one, Mosaic law was only supposed to apply to the Israelite people. Second, it seems a bit hypocritical when these same people go around violating other Mosaic laws, like the prohibitions on pork and charging interest, or the command to give your firstborn son to God. And most important of all, there's a little story in Acts 10:9-23. God comes to Peter and basically says, "You're worrying about sticking to the law at the expense of actually following the spirit of my message. So just forget I ever gave you those rules." My friend Suzanne avoided telling me she had become a Wiccan for quite some time, out of fear that I would hate her for it and think she was going to hell. I think the thing that bothers me the most about that is that her fear was far from unfounded. There are too many people who skim the Bible for quotes instead of actually trying to understand what it says.
Today was the day the reporter from the Christian Science Monitor showed up. She was escorted the whole time by the Oneida Nation's media relations guy, who has to be present anywhere Oneidas are being interviewed, so that he can cut off questions and responses that tread on sensitive ground and could create political complications for the Nation. But apparently there was an oversight. One of the girls working at the project is the daughter of an Oneida Clan Mother, but for some reason is not enrolled as an official member of the Oneida Nation (we couldn't figure out how she could be not enrolled yet still allowed to participate in the dig). So she was not allowed to be interviewed. A few years ago she was on the dig and was interviewed by a local paper. When her name showed up in the paper, she was kicked off the work crew. But somehow neither she nor the media relations guy realised that there would be anything wrong with her giving an extensive interview to the CSM reporter. But all the other kids knew. Dana and Ali, the two working on my pit, complained extensively about the fact that the reporter was conducting a forbidden interview. They also complained that the reporter was spending too much time interviewing the boys (which makes a certain amount of sense, as Dakota was the one who was most interested and most successful), and implying that there were ulterior motives to her interviewee selections. This evening I was headed to Tops to purchase milk, and I encountered a jazz concert on the lawn of the Baptist church. When I arrived they were in the middle of some mediocre song I didn't recognize. I stuck around a bit, and the next song they played was Thelonious Monk's "Well You Needn't". I was pretty excited, as I love Monk. Then they played Horace Silver's "Song For My Father" -- one of my favorite songs of all time. It was at this point that I realised I was becoming inexplicably giddy about the whole affair. Unfortunately I could only stay for one more song (another Monk tune) before I had to go.
Thought the second: I went outside to cool off a bit (ha ha) and I saw the neatest thing. I wanted to videotape it and send it to Rabi so that she could describe it properly, because I know I'll never do it justice. It was pretty hazy out. As I looked down Broad Street, I could see a green glow coming from somewhere behind the roof of Gamma Phi's porch. As I watched, it turned yellow. Then red. Then green again. Thought the third: The woods is horizontal, and the field is vertical. Everything in the woods is spreading out sideways, trying to create the biggest surface to catch the most light. The plants on the forest floor make this floating platform an inch off the ground, threatening to swallow up any small objects you might drop there. Even the trees send out their branches sideways and grow big flat leaves. But in the field, everything is growing up up up. Each stalk of grass or thistle or Queen Anne's lace has its own narrow column of airspace, and it jabs straight up through it. Anytime anything branches, it's a Y instead of a T. I feel like I should take my sketchbook and my conte crayons along tomorrow and record it, but I know I won't get it right, especially if Siobhan and Vanessa and Jason are all watching.
We often use "evil" to mean "very wrong." But in a philosophical context, I use "evil" and "wrong" to describe two different concepts. Acts can be right, wrong, or neutral (in various combinations of various degrees of those elements), depending on their contribution toward the ultimate goal of the most net benefit for the most people for the longest period of time. Motivations can be good, evil, or selfish (in various combinations of various degrees of those elements). An act is good to the extent that its rightness makes it more attractive to the actor. An act is evil to the extent that its wrongness makes it more attractive. And an act is selfish to the extent that its benefit to the actor (regardless of whether it is right or wrong) makes it more attractive.
Aside from the derogatory nature of calling the Bush Administration "Bushies," the article has it right. I suppose I wouldn't call support of missile defense "theology" -- implying, as he does, strong belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- either. I also wonder about calling Saddam Hussein "evil." Sure, he's a terrible leader who has deliberately done a lot of horrible things to the people of his own country and other countries. But I don't think that necessarily qualifies him as "evil." To me, evil is doing wrong for the sake of doing wrong. I would suspect Saddam is not oppressing his people because he thinks it's wrong. He's probably doing it in spite of the fact that it's wrong, or because he thinks it isn't really wrong. I can't be certain how Saddam thinks about his treatment of his people. But almost 21 years of observing human nature suggests that he rationalises it somehow -- "It's wrong, but it's necessary to ensure my absolute power over Iraq," or "It's wrong, but I get a kick out of seeing them starve," or even "It's not really wrong, because opressing people is part of a ruler's job." Any of those are horribly wrong, but not precisely evil. Wow, that's quite a tangent from one offhand remark in the article. So yeah, missile defense is a waste of money.
Most of the time we spent at the Shako:wi Cultural Center, doing an orientation for the kids. Professor Kerber went over the very basics with them -- what is archaeology, how is it different from history, when did the first people come to North America, and so on. One girl insisted that we can't possibly know for certain that humans and dinosaurs never coexisted. Which I suppose is technically true, but given the 61 million year gap between the last dinosaurs and the first humans, I think we can take a wild guess. Then we went out to Dungey to see the area that we begin excavating tomorrow (provided it doesn't rain). It turns out cows came through one section of the site and ate the flags we put out on Friday to mark where we wanted to excavate. The cows didn't seem terribly happy that we were on their side of the electric fence. The other supervisors seem to be a pretty cool bunch. I already knew Vanessa from University Church. Jason, who I met for the first time on Friday, seems to be a good guy. It's a shame Colgate waitlisted him and made him head for the University of Kansas. He's also extremely knowledgeable about the archaeology of this area. It's really weird to think about how little I really know about Upstate New York archaeology, or American archaeology in general. I only lived in Australia for five months, but I know more about precontact Aborigines than about precontact Native Americans. Thurston and Lambert Farm are just names to me, but I could ramble for hours about Lake Mungo and Malakunanja II. I couldn't name an influential Haudenosaunee archaeologist, but I have intelligent opinions on the work of a dozen Australians. Anyway, to wrench this post back on topic, the final member of our team is Siobhan Hart '99. She also appears to be a great person, and I'm very jealous that she got to spend the last two years making Harvard's Peabody Museum, the largest collection of Native American materials outside the Smithsonian, NAGPRA-compliant. If I can get over the fact that the pronunciation of her name makes it sound blatantly French to me, all shall be right with the world. Or at least with the ability of the four supervisors of the Oneida Archaeology Workshop to get along. I also tried to practice again today. My lips were still dead from yesterday, so that didn't work so well, but I did get to walk home in the rain. Summer rain is a great thing.
"Almost every single country stayed in the protocol," Olivier Deleuze, the chief European Union negotiator, said. "There was one that said the Kyoto Protocol was flawed. Do you see the Kyoto Protocol flawed?" Granted, they had to weaken a number of provisions to get an agreement. Countries can now claim extensive credits for good forest management in order to ease their emissions reduction targets. And at Japan's insistence, the penalties for noncompliance were dropped. But it is a definite step forward. To quote Deluze again: "I prefer an imperfect agreement that is living to an imperfect agreement that doesn't exist."
Today I learned that going for a month without practicing your instrument is a bad idea. I finally dragged my trumpet up to Alumni Hall (the archaeology lab is the best place I've found for practicing, since the actual practice rooms aren't open in the evenings. I hadn't lost range, or volume, or tone so much as I lost endurance. After 40 minutes, I could barely squeak out "When the Saints Go Marching In" in C major. I need to practice much more regularly, considering band camp is less than a month away. Don't want to embarrass myself in front of the new folks, who are all probably much better than I am anyhow (although it's not hard to be better than me -- you'd think I'd have some kind of skill after 12 years playing this thing...) And Amanda .wav-ified the .ram of q'ili q'anra. So as soon as I get some free time, I shall begin constructing the Dirty/Clean song.
- From Reuters
Q'ili q'anra. Mana q'anra. Q'ili q'anra. Mana q'anra. Then, Amanda came to the rescue. She managed to make a decent sounding .wav of mana q'anra by way of a tape recorder. She went to bed before she could do q'ili q'anra (and you need both dirty and clean to make the dirty clean song), but the possibility of creating the dirty/clean song is now alive and well. Huzzah! RealPlayer: count yourself lucky. If it were not for the intervention of Amanda, you would be in the kiosk as we speak. |
This sound editing is both more fun and harder than I anticipated. And it doesn't help that my musical knowledge is about nil.
