MetaFilter posts tagged with Alexandria

The Stranger in Alexandria

vacapinta — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:23:12 -0800

"Two people emerged from the ship, a man and his wife. .. Mrs. Wise immediately called for a doctor to look after the woman... The husband and wife were shown to Room 8, where the woman's condition continued to deteriorate... Eventually, the husband summoned the doctor, hotel staff and even the owner’s wife to Room 8 to ask a very unusual request: He asked that everyone present swear an oath never to reveal their identities." So, begins and essentially ends Alexandria Virginia's mystery of the Female Stranger. The woman died and the man with her commissioned an elaborate tombstone which still sits in St. Pauls Episcopal Church Cemetery. The tombstone he commissioned reads: To the memory of a FEMALE STRANGER whose mortal sufferings terminated on the 14th day of October 1816 Aged 23 years and 8 months This stone was placed here by her disconsolate Husband in whose arms she sighed out her latest breath and who under God did his utmost even to soothe the cold dead ear of death. How loved how valued once avails thee not To Whom related or by whom begot A heap of dust alone remains of thee Tis all though art and all the proud shall be To him gave all the Prophets witness that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins Acts. 10th Chap. 43rd verse” Was she royalty? The daughter of Aaron Burr? None of the people sworn to secrecy ever broke their oath.

"Some images of the spots that gave me the most tingles."

nebulawindphone — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:58:26 -0800

I though documenting my early sex life would be a perfect reason to use Polaroids to do something other than take naked pictures, yet to still play on the sexual identity of the medium. I lived in Alexandria from 1980 to 1999. These were my formative years and they determined the way I dealt with women. A guy documents the spots in his old neighborhood (SFW) where he got kissed, dumped, laid or confused as a kid, and tries to work out "what went wrong." (via, via — both NSFW)

The Alexandria Declaration

Ty Webb — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 21:55:13 -0800

The Alexandria Declaration. Between March 14 and 17, 2004, intellectuals, scholars, economists and activists from around the Arab world met at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt for the Arab Reform Conference. Among the recommendations of the conference was that all Arab governments should ratify "all international conventions on the rights of women providing for the abolition of all forms of discrimination against them."

jonah — Mon, 06 May 2002 14:50:18 -0800

Delete, Baby, Delete. I really enjoyed this short article from this month's Atlantic Monthly about the misunderstandings of document/records destruction. Some of the events discussed are the Iranian reconstuction of documents shredded at the U.S. emabassy and printed under the title Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den, the destruction of the Library at Alexandria and of course the Enron/Andersen document destruction.

It got me to thinking about cached web pages and the fact that you have to make sure Google doesn't cache your page if you don't want a permanent record there. It seems like no matter what you do on the web, odds are it's saved somewhere, wether it's google, the wayback machine or any other projects that I don't know about. If you wanted to entirely erase something you did last year on the web, what would you do?

MiguelCardoso — Tue, 30 Apr 2002 15:21:49 -0800

The Ancient Library Of Alexandria: Its long-awaited re-opening has been postponed, supposedly because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So it seems the age-old dream of historians and poets everywhere(Jorge Luís Borges comes to mind)will have to wait a bit longer... I wonder, though, if Egypt's ever-stricter censorship laws and practices will ever be compatible with a true, universal library such as, by most accounts, the original Alexandria Library was.[Via Nutcote]