Old-timers around here will remember the lunchtime/coffee break/mid-afternoon distraction that was the midday open thread. Really old-timers will remember its predecessor, plain old open thread, the automated prompt to talk amongst yourselves and provide filler for when the front-pagers were all in our outside day jobs and could sneak away to post. It’s astounding how things have changed.
I’m okay with that, actually, but with a minor exception. We used to take turns compiling the midday post, which we always called the “linky,” because it was always a collection of stuff we found interesting, or thought-provoking, or funny, uplifting, whatever. I still find myself hoarding tabs of this esoterica with no place to put it.
These days it’s often archeological stuff that grabs me. On a tip from Mark Sumner, mcmom and I pandemic binged on Time Team, the U.K. series in which a team of archeologists, environmental scientists, historians, and the like explored the mysteries just under the plow soil of that history-packed island—and had just three days to do it! (Yes, I’m all in on the reboot as a Patreon, because I owe it to them for providing such a great distraction from the COVID nightmare.
Anyway, this linky might be a little heavy on that side of things, but feel free to add your own random thoughts, sparks, and musings. (But do not jump in with a first comment of “first.” Do people still do that anywhere?)
- The ancient Egyptians had HR divisions, and you had to report to them when you couldn’t come to work. “A tablet held by The British Museum and dating to 1250 BCE is an incredible window into ancient work-life balance. The 40 employees listed are marked for each day they missed, with reasons ranging from illness to family obligations.” One of the excuses used for not coming to work? Needing to brew the beer. Also, being stung by a scorpion.
- In the archeological vein, the field hasn’t escaped two of the worst 21st-century culture war scourges—science denial and white supremacy. Netflix unfortunately helped, streaming the pseudo-documentary “Ancient Apocalypse,” an “an eight-part conspiracy theory that weaponises dramatic rhetoric against scholars,” as one archeologist describes it. It does feature Joe Rogan, after all. In a nutshell, the non-scientist Graham Hancock, who has lots of money and a seething resentment of actual archeologists, posits that an advanced ice-age civilization was—call it Atlantis—was wiped out in a giant flood 12,000 years ago, the result of multiple comet strikes. A handful of people (white people) supposedly survived and they brought civilization and higher thinking, including math, architecture, and agriculture to all the world. How’d this even get produced by Netflix? “Hancock’s son, Sean Hancock, is Netflix’s senior manager for unscripted originals,” Jason Colavito writes in The New Republic.
”As hard as it may be to believe, this is much more about contemporary politics than prehistory: Hancock’s show, and the attendant sparring its sudden popularity has spawned, has leapt from its weird pop-paranormal lane into the seething culture wars fomented by an American right wing that’s
marching steadfastly into a new zone of high weirdness.”
- In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, a decades-long conservation management effort has achieved a remarkable goal: the return of a rare butterfly, the tiny Fender’s blue. The butterfly exists only in this valley and had been thought extinct from the 1930s until it was spotted in the 1980s. It was listed as an endangered in 2000, when only a few thousand remained. But since then, the population has quadrupled, and it’s slated to be relisted to threatened. That would make it just “the second insect to have recovered in the history of the Endangered Species Act.”
- Need another nice story? Meet Herman Cruse, a school bus driver for Middle Township Public Schools in Cape May Court House, N.J. All he ever wanted to be growing up, he told the Washington Post, was a bus driver. Now he’s that, and a reading tutor to a few dozen children after discovering one of his young charges was having a hard time getting help at home learning to read. “So he read to me, I read to him and we read together, and from there, it took on a life of its own,” Cruse continued. “A second student wanted to read to me, then a third. All these kids were going to the teacher asking, ‘Can I read with Mr. Herman?’” Everyone reads with Mr. Herman now.
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Here’s another one: Van Gogh, the one-eared rescue pit bull (his backstory is enraging and heartbreaking), is becoming famous as an artist. There’s not a lot of contemplation and inspiration to his works—just peanut butter—but it’s a sweet story about resilience and love and healing. All the dogs are good dogs.
- If you missed the last full moon of 2022, you can see some lovely images of it here. The “Cold Moon” coincided (more pics there) with the lunar occultation of Mars, when Mars is also directly opposed to the sun and thus extra visible. It was cloudy where I live, but the pictures are great.
