"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. [more inside]
posted by vacapinta on Dec 4, 2008 - 47 comments

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)
posted by nebulawindphone on May 7, 2008 - 13 comments

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."
posted by Ty Webb on Mar 29, 2004 - 5 comments

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?
posted by jonah on May 6, 2002 - 20 comments

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]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Apr 30, 2002 - 9 comments