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Excavating Hattusa
The German Archaeological Institute has a website detailing their excavations at Hattusa, formerly the capital of the Hittite Empire. There is a brief summary of the city's history to get you started, or a somewhat more detailed one if you're feeling keen.
plants in sanskrit poetry
Seasonal Poetry in Sanskrit
: The blog Sanskrit Literature has been running an excellent series on plants that appear in sanskrit poetry. Some examples : Jasmine (malati), Lotuses and Water Lilies, Mango.
Great Sports Calls, chosen by Posnanski
Greatest calls in sports
is a selection of 32 great calls in broadcast sports, chosen by Joe Posnanski, obviously US-centric but featuring some good choices. Want some elation this Friday?
Name a piece, anyone...!
Richard Grayson is a (now retired) composer and classical improviser. To give you just a taste, Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in the style of a Tango, "Heart and Soul" a la Mahler, "Take the A Train" as a Chopin Funeral March.
Can a double positive ever make a negative?
Repetition needn't be redundancy.
Contrastive focus reduplication (also lexical cloning, the double construction) is a little studied type of syntactic reduplication found in some languages. The first part of the reduplicant bears contrastive intonational stress, hence the name. [Via]
Shattered
Hey Mick, why don't you start singing Gimme Shelter at the mixing desk in the middle of the a huge crowd and then leisurely stroll to the stage. Nothing bad will happen. (SLYT)
Another brick off the tower of Babel
As part of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project, Gregory Anderson, K. David Harrison and Ganesh Murmu travelled to Arunachal Pradesh to document the Aka and Miji languages - and in the process, they found a previously undocumented language, Koro (not to be confused with Koro, Koro or Koro). The NG site has a video and gallery; you might also be interested in this interview given by Harrison to NPR, which includes a small audio selection of Koro words and phrases.
An animation involving a dog, a girl, and imagination.
SLYT
Something I found last night that I thought was quite wonderful and appropriate for a lazy Sunday.
I was really impressed with the way they handle sense in this, and it made me warm and fuzzy. I hope this isn't too terrible for a first post.
What will future generations condemn us for?
Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses honor, moral revolutions, and the condemnation of future generations. His new book The Honor Code chronicles how the concept of honor has been crucial in the fight against immoral practices like dueling, foot-binding, and slavery. (See also 1, 2)
Everlasting Blört, 10 years, 10,000+ posts
10 years and 10,000+ posts old yesterday. The web creation of MetaFilter's own, quonsar and madamjujujive, Everlasting Blort, - a compendium of the web's weird underbelly, updated daily with links to the strange, absurd, bizarre, humorous.
Meet Mutt and Jeff, the Trenchcoat Robbers...
A simple tale of the biggest bank heist in U.S. history.
Still In Business
This Summer’s Sexiest Images From Saturn.
From a billion miles away, the Cassini spacecraft continues to send spectacular images of Saturn and its moons. Cassini has been flying since 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004 after flybys of Earth, Venus and Jupiter. Its mission was originally slated to end in 2008, but it got its first 27 month extension to witness Saturn’s equinox. This year, it was given another life extension until 2017 to keep exploring until Saturn’s northern hemisphere summer solstice. [previously]
U! RU! URU ACHIM!
The one song played at every bar mitzvah isn't "Celebration," or "I Gotta Feeling," or even "New York, New York" -- it's "Hava Nagila." But what is it? A 9-minute documentary tells the story of how a wordless meditative nigun became a song everybody in the world, Jewish or not, could sing. Seriously, everybody. Harry Belafonte and Danny Kaye. Harry Dean Stanton with Bob Dylan backing up on harmonica. Polish metal band Rootwater. A guy who plays the ukulele behind his head. The Modern Female Choir of Zhejiang. The Dark Knight. What appears to be a group of comedy fiddlers ("featuring John and Pancho") from John Hagee's church in San Antonio. Even ... um... this guy. (Previously on MetaFilter: The closest you're going to get to the Beatles covering "Hava Nagila.")
A Back to School Surprise in California
"Out of the blue, in the middle of a recession, the phone rang. What would it cost, the caller asked the founder of DonorsChoose.org, to fund every California teacher's wish list posted on the Web site? The founder, Charles Best, thought perhaps the female caller would hang up when he tossed out his best guess: "Something over $1 million," he told her. A day later, Hilda Yao, executive director of the Claire Giannini Fund mailed a check of more than $1.3 million to cover the entire California wish list, 2,233 projects in all, with an extra $100,000 tossed in to help pay for other teacher needs across the country. (DonorsChoose: previously on MeFi)
The mother lode of contaminated sites
NASA once sent a robot in - and nobody ever saw the machine again or collected any scientific data from it...
90 years from the streets of Budapest
Fortepan
is a collection of 4973 found amateur photos sourced mainly in Budapest. Pick a year and browse - photos are organized in chronological order from 1900 to 1990, accessible via a slider. "Users are encouraged to use, copy, send to friends, clip or paste the photos, which are free for they are not our property." (via Szanalmas, sometimes nsfw)
Chicago is the place
Sounds from Tomorrow's World: Sun Ra and the Chicago Years, 1946-1961 is an exhibition drawn from the collections of the University of Chicago's Chicago Jazz Archive.
Russian Types
"During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian 'types.' These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation."
A Soviet Space Odyssey
Road to the Stars (Doroga k Zvezdam, 1958) was a remarkable Soviet documentary about the future of space exploration, directed by the "Godfather of Star Wars" and still admired for its impressive miniature effects. Watch the entire film.
What am I myself but one of your meteors?
"A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone" Walt Whitman wrote these words in the poem Year of Meteors, 1859 ’60. Not until this year did a team of forensic astronomers at Texas State University, with the assistance of a painting from the Hudson River School, figure out what he was really talking about.
Don Ringe on Indo-European
The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe (and what happened to it)
DIY Jazz Wall Art, just add printer.
Between 1938 and 1948, William P. Gottlieb wrote about and photographed the jazz world. In 1995, the Library of Congress acquired his collection of approximately 1500 photographs covering more than 250 jazz musicians. While discussed here seven years ago, not mentioned at that time was the fact that Mr. Gottlieb agreed to transfer his copyrights into the public domain 15 years after acquisition. Fast forward to 2010, and you will find that the Library has added high resolution TIFFs download links to the image pages (click on the thumbnail images to get to the TIFF download links).
A few pictures to whet your appetite: Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Les Paul, Django Reinhardt, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong.
Long hard times in space
"Tubes of space borscht are on sale in the museum gift shop. “There are white and black tubes. On the white is written: ‘BLONDE.’ On black one: ‘BRUNETTE.’ "
Astronauts relate challenges of life in space.
You see all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day beneath you.
The writer has—has been stricken with the—the passion and beauty of life, the world, and a—a demon-driven need to—to express that, to put it down on paper or cut it into marble or into music, and with that foreknowledge that he has only a limited time to do it, he may be dead tomorrow—he's got to do it all while he can still breathe, and it's a—a desire, a need, to put the whole history of the human heart into any and every word, every paragraph that he writes, and the obscurity comes from a belief which I hold, that—that there is no such thing as "was."In the late 1950s William Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Extensive recordings of readings, reflections, and classes are now online. NPR summarizes.
Fiona and Emily: your new favorite band
With their no-frills, earnestly deadpan delivery, excellent pitch and diction, crisp guitar work, impeccable rhythm and sweet harmonies, Fiona and Emily are sure to become your favorite classic rock cover band. Honky Tonk Woman, Pinball Wizard, Ticket To Ride, Surfin' USA, House of the Rising Sun, Help, Johnny B. Goode, and last but certainly not least, I Am the Walrus. Woooooooooo!
Metafilter: Self-Effacing Wit with Homespun Charm
"My web site will encourage kindness among those who support it, and creative punishment for those who do not."
Mefi's own Shepherd "got a little carried away" creating his blog's under construction placeholder page. The result is a terrifying dystopic epic. [via mefi projects]
Ruling Party
Burundi's election, in three acts. It was literally no surprise that Burundi’s president Pierre Nkurunziza won reelection on Monday. He was, after all, the only candidate.
A lengthy engagement
"Wow, what a long engagement that was!"
During a chance second encounter in Baltimore in 1945, Henry Schalizki, now 88, and Bob Davis, now 89, met and fell in love. More than six decades later, the couple finally legalized their union.
Last Call at the Velvet Lounge
Fred Anderson was a monster on the tenor sax.
Fred Anderson was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and his "home court," the Velvet Lounge, remains a place for Chicago creative musicians to find welcoming audience. Fred died June 24 in Chicago. A wake will take place from 5 to 6 PM this Tuesday (June 29) at Leak and Sons Funeral Chapel, 7838 S. Cottage Grove, followed immediately by Anderson’s Going Home service.
The Blogfather
Last year's unprecedented election protests in Iran, would never have been possible if it hadn't been for the pioneering efforts of their country's "Blogfather," (Metafilter's own) Hossein "hoder" Derakhshan. Hoder literally founded the Persian blogging movement in 2001 ("Weblogistan") that gave Iranians a way to speak out about their government on the internet and eventually would provide a global voice to the protesters. But for the last 600 days, Hoder has been imprisoned, interrogated and tortured by the Iranian government, ostensibly on charges he was spying for Israel. In reality his arrest was probably retaliation for "remarks he allegedly made on his blog about a key Shiite cleric and the third infallible Imam of Shiism." Yesterday, he had his first trial. But his plight is not unique.
as devoted as dogs, as independent as cats, the domesticated silver fox!
The silver fox, domesticated over 40 generations by the late Siberian scientist Dmitri Belayev. Belayev and his students started this experiment in 1959 by selecting specifically for human-friendly behaviors. More on the observed differences between domesticated and wild foxes in the original paper that appeared in American Scientist Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment (pdf).
Black, Brown & Beige
The New Yorker discusses Duke Ellington’s music and race in America, via Harvey G. Cohen's new book, Duke Ellington's America (excerpt). Music clips to accompany the articles inside the fold. (via Follow Me Here)
The Game of Their Lives - Part 둘
North Korea played in the World Cup in 1966 [BBC Documentary on YouTube].
The 1966 World Cup was the subject of bitter disagreement before a ball was ever kicked. Sixteen African nations boycotted the tournament in protest of a 1964 FIFA ruling that required the champion team from the African zone to enter a playoff round against the winners of either the Asian or the Oceania zone in order to win a place in the Cup.
Orthodox Muslims consider both Ahmadi movements to be heretics and non-Muslims
'Why Pakistan's Ahmadi community is officially detested.
When a Pakistani Muslim applies for a passport or national ID card, they are asked to sign an oath that no Muslim anywhere in the world is asked to sign. The oath goes like this: "I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad an impostor prophet. And also consider his followers, whether belonging to the Lahori or Qadiani group, to be non-Muslims."'Last month" "more than 90 Ahmadis were massacred in two mosques in Lahore". But Ahmadis are persecuted in many other countries. In Bangladesh 'Ahmadiyyas have become a persecuted group, targeted via protests and acts of violence.' Even in Indonesia, "religious conservatives put pressure on the government to monitor, and harass the Ahmadiyya community".
Palindrome Follow-Up
Mefite Jaltcoh sent me a MeMail the other day reminding me of this old comment in a thread about palindromes, where I say, “Gotta say, I’m a big fan of palindromes. My entire career, marriage and life might all be very different if not for palindromes. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime, say January 2, 2010.” In the MeMail, he asks, “It's now past January 2, 2010. What's the story?”
Forgot about that old post. With that big of a buildup, I wish it were a better story, but here goes:
Finding Nighthawks
Finding Nighthawks: Nearly seventy years after Edward Hopper finished what would become one of the icons of American art, Jeremiah Moss went in search of the diner that inspired it.
Southern Baptists and Race
In 1796, members of the largely black Portsmouth-Norfolk Baptist Church in Virginia decided that they wanted to participate in the Portsmouth Association conference, which oversaw Baptist churches in their region of the state. Soon after, however, they changed their minds. “The black people…soon repented and came and told the Deacons they were afraid that matters might turn up disagreeably to them and dishonoring to God, and said they would be subordinate to the white brethren.”
The US Navy in 1915
The US Navy in 1915,
a short film.
Misreading Tehran
Misreading Tehran: Leading Iranian-American writers revisit a year of dreams and discouragement.
"With a full 12 months now between us and the election, the time is ripe to start revisiting the hype and hope in a year of writing: which stories were overblown, what stories were missed entirely, and what can be gleaned about Iran's annus horribilis from a more thorough understanding. FP asked seven prominent Iranian-Americans, deeply immersed in both the English- and Persian-language media, to look through the fog of journalism at what actually happened in Tehran -- and why so many of us got it so wrong." [Via]