Ripperology

I must confess--I, too, have always been obsessed with this case. I personally think Cornwell nailed it, however--her book is extremely convincing.

Why are we obsessed with Jack the Ripper?
By Finlo Rohrer BBC News

A shadowy figure clad in a top hat and cape, carrying a shiny leather bag through the London fog, the popular image of Jack the Ripper continues to be iconic 116 years after he terrorised the East End.

This week, press reports of tests on a watch led to the finger again being pointed at James Maybrick, a 19th Century Liverpool cotton merchant.

It is a criminal case where a year rarely goes by without a new development or conspiracy theory, but those investigating admit it will almost certainly never be solved.

So why do legions of Jack the Ripper enthusiasts, known as Ripperologists, remain obsessed by the identity of the killer who mutilated prostitutes in the area around Whitechapel?

For Paul Begg, author of upcoming book Jack the Ripper: The Facts, the killer has become more than a match for any fictional figure from the world of horror.

"There are an awful lot of people, particularly in the States, who don't believe Jack the Ripper actually existed. They think he is a fictional character along with Frankenstein and Dracula.

"For most people Jack the Ripper personifies the fear that we all have of the lurker in the shadows, that thing we can offer no defence against."

Sickert row

New books are released every year, many of them identifying a new wealthy Victorian candidate for the crimes and an elaborate conspiracy theory for the Ripperologists to gorge themselves on.

They populate the message boards of the comprehensive Casebook website and argue endlessly over the multitude of competing hypotheses.

But US detective novelist Patricia Cornwell has perhaps gone further than any other Ripperologist in her search for the truth.

Spending as much as $6m researching her book, she named celebrated British artist Walter Sickert as the murderer.

THE SUSPECTS
Prince Albert Victor - grandson of Queen Victoria
James Maybrick - Liverpool cotton merchant
Walter Sickert - Artist
Aaron Kosminski - Polish Jewish immigrant
Michael Ostrog - Thief
Montague John Druitt - Barrister and teacher
Francis Tumblety - US quack doctor
Joseph Barnett - Boyfriend of victim
Countless others

She generated outrage in the art world by having a Sickert painting cut up, and purchased 31 other works in her quest to prove the artist was the killer using a barrage of forensic tests.

But despite the definitive title Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, she was unable to prove Sickert's guilt and her theory was widely dismissed by leading Ripperologists.

To Trevor Marriott, a retired murder squad detective from Bedfordshire, not only will the case never be solved, but all of the facts will remain disputed, even down to whether the Ripper killed more than the five women attributed to him.

"There are a hardcore of people throughout the world who will always be interested. There are people who live and die the Ripper.

"I sometimes wonder whether they want the crime to be solved. There are some people who won't accept any facts. Nothing's ever going to change them."

Mr Marriott, who has spent more than a decade researching the killings since his retirement in 1988, said he had sympathy for the officers who had failed to catch the killer.

"A lot of my police service was at a time when we didn't have modern forensic methods. These methods have come to the forefront in my time.

"It was good old fashioned police work, which was all they had at the time of the Ripper murders.

WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
3 April 1888 - Emma Elizabeth Smith
7 August 1888 - Martha Tabram
31 August 1888 - Mary Ann Nichols*
8 September 1888 - Annie Chapman*
30 September 1888 - Elizabeth Stride*
30 September 1888 - Catherine Eddowes*
9 November 1888 - Mary Jane Kelly*
20 December 1888 - Rose Mylett
17 July 1889 - Alice McKenzie
10 September 1889 - Unknown woman
13 February 1891 - Frances Coles
* Usually identified as the Ripper murders

"As a detective something like this is always of interest. You try to apply modern day investigative techniques. If I had been around then, what would I have done differently. They seem to have missed a lot of avenues of inquiry that I would have pursued.

"I regret not having now the power of a police officer to go to places and demand things. It does prove difficult."

For Neil Storey, author of A Grim Almanac of Jack the Ripper's London, the rise of the iconic imagery of the killer is tied into the rise of the "gutter press".

"To writers at the turn of the century, the East End was a Third World in the most powerful empire in the world, with poverty akin to the poorest corners, it was a phenomenon.

"When this series of murders come along that are incredible, are unsolved, it ties in with this mysterious world of poverty, and it rings all the bells that that the various media had.

"Pure unadulterated crime and disaster [was the making] of the gutter press.

"He became a stalking bogeyman that children were threatened with, a folk devil. Kids had skipping rhymes and played catch games that mentioned him."

Along with Patricia Cornwell's controversial work, the most hotly disputed theory is that naming James Maybrick as the man responsible.

A diary, alleged to be that of Maybrick, and containing his confession to the gruesome killings, was made public in the early 1990s.

But it has failed to convince most of the leading Ripper authors, who accept that while it has not been proved to be a fake, it has also not been proved to be genuine.

And while Ripperologists continue their hunt, it is clear that Jack the Ripper will be imprinted on the consciousness of the English-speaking world for many years to come.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4042087.stm
Published: 2004/11/26 05:29:22 GMT© BBC MMIV

Of grail-shaped beacons

The never-ending search
By Brendan O'Neill

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that's made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding?

Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail - the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper?

That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield's Shugborough estate in Staffs.

Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd's Monument on the Lichfield estate.

The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin's paintings, and beneath it the letters "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M."

It has long been rumoured that these letters - which have baffled some of the greatest minds over the past 250 years, including Charles Darwin's and Josiah Wedgwood's - provide clues to the whereabouts of Christ's elusive cup.

Spot of bother

Poussin was said by some to have been a Grand Master of the Knights Templar, named after the order that captured Jerusalem during the Crusades and who were known as the "keepers of the Holy Grail".

Yet Oliver and Sheila Lawn, a couple in their 80s who were based at the code-breaking Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during World War II, have had a spot of bother with the Shepherd's Monument.

Mr Lawn said yesterday that deciphering the letters was "much more difficult" than cracking the Enigma code in WWII. He thinks it's a message from an obscure Christian sect, declaring their belief that Jesus was an Earthly prophet, not a divinity - while his wife Sheila thinks it could be a coded tribute from a widowed earl to his wife.

So yet another trail to the Grail seems to have run dry. What is it about the Holy Grail that so excites the popular imagination? And why are so many willing to believe that such an item exists, when there is a dearth of evidence?

Renewed interest

The Holy Grail is believed by some to have been the chalice used at the Last Supper, by others to have been a cup used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of the crucified Christ, and by others still to have been both. Some claim that Joseph may have brought the cup to Britain in the first century CE.

Stories about the Grail have been told for centuries. There has been a renewed interest since the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982, which claims, in a nutshell, that Jesus survived the crucifixion and together with Mary Magdalene founded a bloodline in France, the Merovingians, who were protected by the Knights Templar and later by the Freemasons. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, that book has been denounced as mad conspiracy-mongering by some.)

The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference Eric Eve

The Holy Grail has even turned up in Hollywood. In Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the eponymous hero both fights off the Nazis and finds the Grail.

Now Ron Howard, the Happy Days actor turned film director, is making a big-screen version of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's novel about how clues in Da Vinci paintings could lead to the discovery of a religious mystery, including the Grail, and shake the foundations of Christianity.

Brown's novel has become a publishing phenomenon over the past two years, feted and hated in equal measure.

Purely legendary

According to experts, this is precisely where the Grail belongs - in fiction and films. Eric Eve is a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University. He says he is unaware of any evidence for the existence of a Holy Grail.

"In the version of the legend I know, the Grail is meant to be the chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper, subsequently brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea. But there is no 1st Century evidence about what happened either to the chalice or to Joseph - assuming he's even an historical character.

"The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference. I would say it is purely legendary."

Richard Barber, author of The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend, published by Penguin next month, says the Grail legend came into being more than a thousand years after Christ's death.

"It is pure literature. It was imagined by a French writer, Chretien de Troyes, at the end of the 12th Century, in the romance of Perceval. His vision is at the root of all the Grail stories."

Conspiracy theories

Barber believes that 20th Century fascination with the Grail stems from "the revival of interest in medieval literature in the 19th Century, when Tennyson, Wagner and the Pre-Raphaelite artists were all enthusiasts for the Grail legends" - and that our fascination today has been boosted by the contemporary penchant for conspiracy theories and cover-ups.

"The Grail - because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination - is a marvellous focus for the new genre of 'imagined history', the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own - regardless of whether it has any basis in reality.

Even some of those who have written of the Grail as having some "basis in reality" admit that it is difficult to say what the Grail is, never mind where it is.

Erling Haagensen is co-author (with Henry Lincoln) of The Templars' Secret Island: The Knights, The Priest and The Treasure, which claims that "something" is hidden on the tiny island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.

"I do not know what the Holy Grail is," says Haagensen. "Something very important and with strong connections to the Holy Grail is hidden on the island of Bornholm. The Ark of the Covenant might theoretically be hidden there.

"But there is something even more important, which always followed the Ark of the Covenant, and which we can now prove is found at Bornholm. This will be revealed in our coming book," he adds, mysteriously.

Yet while some authors - and a host of conspiracy websites - believe that "something" will one day be found, even men of the cloth have little faith in the existence of the Holy Grail.

"It's all good fun but absolute nonsense", says Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh.

"The quest for the Holy Grail belongs with the quest for the ark Noah left on Mount Ararat or the fabled Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones is always chasing. There ain't any objective truth in any of it - but of course it's a dream for publishers, who know the world is full of gullible people looking for miracles and they keep on promising that this time the miracle's going to come true.

"Only it isn't - but the money keeps rolling in."

Story from BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4044765.stm
Published: 2004/11/26 11:07:07 GMT© BBC MMIV

Dog nurses kittens

This is so sweet! Not to mention heartbreaking, as well. And it just goes to show that, if more evidence were needed, animals are conscious creatures, capable of feeling loneliness and pain, capable of longing for children, capable of dreaming and hoping...

Dog Who Longed for Puppies Nurses Kittens
Tue Nov 23, 9:49 PM ET
EDWARDSBURG, Mich. - A Shih Tzu who, her owners say, longed for years to give birth — even to the point of going into false labor several times — finally is getting a chance to nurse some little ones: two stray kittens.

Owners Jean and Bill Schirf said the dog, named Geisha Girl, used to take a toy dog, wrap herself around it in her basket and mother it for a week or two.

Now she's doing the same thing with the kittens that Jean Schirf found two weeks ago in the woods behind her Cass County home just north of the Indiana border. The cats — a gray male and a gray-and-white female — appeared to be no more than 2 weeks old at the time, she said.

"She wraps herself around them all night long," Schirf told the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune for a story published Tuesday.

Not only did Geisha Girl start watching over and cleaning the kittens, which have been named Dilly and Dally, she started lactating within about a week — enough to provide them with some of the milk they need. Schirf helps out by bottle-feeding the cats 2 percent milk every four or five hours.

The dog, which the Schirfs bought from a pet store in 1991, never was spayed. She most recently went into heat about four to six weeks ago and never has been bred.

It's not unusual for such dogs to sometimes "have a false pregnancy and exhibit all the signs of being pregnant except for the fact of having puppies," said Dr. Michael Lampen, a veterinarian with the Bergman Animal Hospital in Cassopolis.

"They will come into milk and the whole bit. You have a dog with a false pregnancy and kittens who want a mother."

While the dog adores the kittens, the same cannot be said for the Schirfs' other pet cats, Demi Moore and Jasmine.

"They are jealous and sit back and watch them," Jean Schirf said.

She and her husband plan to find homes for the kittens after they are weaned from Geisha Girl.

Fine, Landon, be that way, see if we care :P

Landon Donovan is leaving the M.L.S. to play for Germany. Poopy. That means both him and Michael Ballack will be playing for Germany. Double poopy. Which means, as I don't have cable, I will have to wait for the next World Cup to see Donovan play, and even then the broadcast will be in Spanish, which I do not speak. Triple poopy. I shall now go and pout...

Extreme Makeover Home Edition in my town!

Well, the week has come to a close, and the camera crew has left town. My hometown of Arvada, Colorado, was fortunate enough to host the "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" show this week, and my daughters and I spent loads of time out at the site. We have pics of us with Eduardo Xol, the new guy, and my gawd does he smell good! He's, like, 7 feet tall and delicious! We also met Paul DiMeo, and got to hug him; met Constance Ramos, who is a darling; and met Tracey Hutson, who is a sweetie. The girls met Ty, and were able to get his autograph, so we're all sharing it. We had enough signatures from Eduardo, Constance, Tracey and Paul to be able to have one each.

It was freezing cold for most of the project, though the projected 9 inches of snow for Sunday's big reveal failed utterly to materialize, and the sun was warm and bright. The project is a duplex, sort of a homeless shelter but not really. It's a house where two families can stay until they're on their feet. The crew also built a neat little park called Renaissance Park, and a small rec center across the street (that was Ty's special project). Oh, and a basketball court, complete with murals, was dedicated by the official Denver Nuggets mascot.

All in all, it was a very moving experience. I had been sceptical, knowing full well the "magic of television", and so didn't really expect to see the design team actually working (when in fact they worked their asses off) or actually caring (when in fact Paul cried). What you see on the telly is how they really are, and they are amazing people. Ty was working three jobs simultaneously (here, one in Seattle, and one I don't know where) and so had very little time to press palms, but when he was able to come over to the crowd of onlookers he was unfailingly cheerful, upbeat, and kind.

Dolphins protect swimmers from shark

This is neat! How can people think that animals aren't intelligent? And this shows not only intelligence--with more than a hint of abstract thinking--but it shows compassion as well. Pretty cool.

Dolphins Protect New Zealand Swimmers from Shark
Mon Nov 22, 9:52 PM ET
Science - Reuters

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A pod of dolphins circled protectively round a group of New Zealand swimmers to fend off an attack by a great white shark, media reported on Tuesday.

Lifesavers Rob Howes, his 15-year-old daughter Niccy, Karina Cooper and Helen Slade were swimming 300 feet off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when the dolphins herded them -- apparently to protect them from a shark.

"They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA).

Howes tried to drift away from the group, but two of the bigger dolphins herded him back just as he spotted a nine-foot great white shark swimming toward the group.

"I just recoiled. It was only about 2 m away from me, the water was crystal clear and it was as clear as the nose on my face," Howes said, referring to a distance of 6 feet.

"They had corralled us up to protect us," he said.

The lifesavers spent the next 40 minutes surrounded by the dolphins before they could safely swim back to shore. The incident happened on October 30, but the lifesavers kept the story to themselves until now.

Environment group Orca Research said dolphins attacked sharks to protect themselves and their young, so their actions in protecting the lifesavers was understandable.

"They could have sensed the danger to the swimmers and taken action to protect them," Orca's Ingrid Visser told NZPA.

Yahoo! News - Dolphins Protect New Zealand Swimmers from Shark

Vatican opens Inquisition archives

Nov. 20, 2004, 6:55PM
Vatican opens its Inquisition archives for study
By PHILIP PULLELLA
Reuters News Service

CHURCH JUSTICE
• Beginning: Pope Gregory IX created the Inquisition in 1233 to curb heresy, but civil authorities took over prosecutions.
• Ending: It reached a peak in the 16th century to counter the Reformation.

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican is opening up more of its archives on the Inquisition as part of unprecedented study of the effect the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to control religious belief had on medieval and modern history.

The new project, announced last week, will see the Holy See cooperate with Italy's Culture Ministry and universities to catalogue thousands of documents about the Inquisition.

"Such a vast project has never been attempted before and it will be of great importance to respond to the new trends in international research of the control of religious ideas in medieval and modern Europe," a Vatican statement said.

Last week's Vatican statement said the project would catalogue documents concerning both the Roman Inquisition and the Spanish Inquisition.

The Vatican sponsored an academic symposium six years ago, and in 2000 Pope John Paul asked forgiveness "for errors committed in the service of truth through use of methods that had nothing to do with the Gospel."

One of the best-known victims was the astronomer Galileo, condemned for claiming Earth revolved around the sun. He was rehabilitated under John Paul in 1992.

But the new project appears aimed at studying what the pope has called "wounds to the collective memory" that remained open for centuries.

The Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478, led to the expulsion of the country's Moors (Muslims) and Jews in 1492. It was one of Europe's most traumatic events.

Iris Chang and depression

Deep, desperate depression can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time. I have suffered through raging bouts of it myself, first when my biography failed to find a publisher due to the machinations of my subject's family, second when members of my family began dying in droves. Perhaps that's one reason I continue to be troubled by the death of Iris Chang.

Author's depression so severe, son, 2, sent away

Only a few of those close to her knew she was severely depressed in the last few months.

But Chinese-American author Iris Chang, who was found dead in her car not far from her home in California last week, had become a changed person.

She had apparently shot herself.

The depression had got so bad that she and her husband decided to send their 2-year-old son, Christopher, to live with his paternal grandparents in Illinois.

To the outside world, the tall, striking Madam Chang, 36, seemed to be a woman in supreme control of her successful life.

She was a bestselling author and spokeswoman for a growing movement to seek compensations from Japan for World War II atrocities.

But Madam Chang was reportedly hospitalised recently after returning from Kentucky on a research trip for her latest book project.

'She was a wonderful person and she'll leave a huge void in everyone's life,' Mr Brett Douglas, her husband of 13 years, told the Mercury News.

Mr Douglas, a design engineer for Cisco Systems, declined to discuss specifics of her depression 'to respect the privacy of her family'.

He would only say that 'it's been really, really difficult.'

She had also asked her parents not to discuss her depression with others.

In April, she went on a 21-day, 28-city US tour to promote her latest book, The Chinese In America.

She would call every day to chat with Mr Douglas and their son.

But it was a gruelling schedule and took its toll on her, he said.

'She was never really the same after she got back.'

NO-ONE KNOWS

No-one knows 'what brought it on, but it developed suddenly and progressed rapidly,' said Susan Rabiner, her editor and literary agent.

'She had been in hospital, but she never really stabilised.'

She had gone to Ms Rabiner 'as a young kid' on the advice of a professor from Johns Hopkins University, where she had earned her masters degree in writing.

When Ms Rabiner learned that she spoke Mandarin, she asked her if she was interested in writing a book about Tsien Hsue-shen, an American space pioneer who was accused of being a communist and deported to China and went on to developed the Chinese missile programme.

The result was Thread Of The Silkworm, published in 1995.

Madam Chang's sudden death came as a blow to her colleagues in the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition.

'We're pretty shaken up because we've lost someone who was for us the symbol of hope, the symbol of truth,' said Ms Julie Tang, co-chair of the group.

Ms Tang, a Superior Court judge in San Francisco, remembers her fierce resolve, her focus on fighting against injustice.

But at the same time, 'I've always felt that there was a kind of emotional fragility about Iris,' she said.

When she first read The Rape of Nanking, Madam Chang's bestselling book on Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, Ms Tang said she wondered: 'How can anybody endeavour to write about something so horrific and not be affected?'

But Ms Ami Chen Naim wrote in Metro, a Silicon Valley weekly newspaper that Madam Chang 'did not just see the Japanese army in China as evil, but recognised that evil is possible for all human beings'.

http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/top/story/0,4136,77784,00.html

Simultaneous ceremonies for Iris Chang

Mourners pay tribute to Rape of Nanking author
Sat Nov 20, 8:58 AM ET
Entertainment - AFP

LOS ALTOS, United States (AFP) - The acclaimed Chinese-American author Iris Chang was eulogized in simultaneous ceremonies in northern California, Washington and Nanjing, China, after her apparent suicide earlier this month.

The 36-year-old writer and journalist, who chronicled the rape and massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops before World War II, was found shot dead in her car on November 9.

Family members said she suffered from depression and had been hospitalized for it.

Speakers at a ceremony prior to her burial here said her haunting bestseller, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," may have contributed to the internal anguish that led to her death.

"She felt other people's suffering so intensely, to the point that it made her suffer," friend Barbara Masin said during the 75-minute memorial.

US Representative Michael Honda sent a representative to read a tribute that he presented in Congress earlier in the week.

"Her fierce pride of her Chinese-American heritage empowered others with the certainty that they were truly Americans despite their ancestry," the tribute said.

China's Vice Consul General Ciu Xuejun attended the burial along with hundreds of mourners, including Tim Yip, a 38-year-old fan.

"She helped me fill in the gaps about why my parents and their parents came to America," Yip said. "She helped me understand."

Chang was seen as a leading US non-fiction author and was widely known here and in Asia for her studies of Chinese immigrants and their descendents in the United States.

"The Chinese in America: A Narrative History," was published last year and traces more than 150 years of Asian American history.

But her best-known book was the 1997 "Rape of Nanking," which details the slaughter of Chinese civilians by the Imperial Japanese army that occupied China in the late 1930s.

It was the first major full-length English-language account of the atrocity and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

Celestial soap opera

God, I'm a geek...I find this kind of thing absolutely fascinating.

Imagine That! Star Patterns to Ponder
Fri Nov 19,11:29 AM ET
Science - Space.com
Joe Rao
SPACE.com Night Sky Columnist
SPACE.com

In our current evening sky we have one of the earliest soap-operalike stories, with two independent plots becoming intertwined into one. Perhaps we could call it the celestial version of "All My Children."

One of the key characters is Cassiopeia, the Queen, a zigzag row of bright stars. In terms of popularity, she probably ranks fourth among the star patterns behind the Big Dipper, Orion and the Pleiades. Certainly her shape is easy to remember: an irregular letter "M" or "W" formed by its five brightest stars, depending on how you look at it.

At this particular season, with Cassiopeia hovering high above Polaris, the North Star at around 9 p.m. local time, the "M" shape is most recognizable. When two fainter stars are added, the seven together outline Cassiopeia's chair or throne which was set close to the Pole of the sky.

Cassiopeia and Ursa Major (the Big Bear) appear to whirl around opposite to each other from Polaris. In the fall and early winter evenings when the Queen is high, the Bear appears to be hibernating near the northern horizon.

For many years I have looked at Cassiopeia's outline a bit differently than most of the standard astronomy texts and stargazing guides. To me, she resembles not an "M" or "W" nor a chair or a throne, but rather the Queen's face in profile.

The face is best viewed as soon as it gets completely dark, about 90 minutes after local sundown, with Cassiopeia standing high in the northeast sky.

The zigzag row of five bright stars would mark the outline of the Queen's crown. The bright star, Schedir would be the Queen's eye, while a nearby fainter fourth-magnitude star, Zeta, would mark her nose. Finally, a fifth magnitude star, Theta, not usually plotted on most popular star charts of this region of the sky, marks the Queen's chin.

You could even embellish this scene a bit by pretending that the faint stars Kappa, 48 and 50 Cassiopeiae compose the Queen's scepter, hovering just above the Queen's head.

It wouldn't be the first time, incidentally, that a star pattern referred to as a scepter has been placed in this part of the sky. Not too far from Cassiopeia is a group of stars that once supposedly formed the obsolete constellation of the Scepter and the Hand of Justice, created by Augustin Royer in 1679. Today, those stars officially belong to the constellation of Lacerta, the Lizard, named in 1687 by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius. It is a small constellation, with no bright stars, but just imagine going from a regal implement to a lowly lizard in the span of just eight years!

Cassiopeia's husband was Cepheus, the King of Ethiopia, who during early November evenings seems upside-down. Rather than a king, he seems to resemble a church with a steeple or perhaps an Alpine ski lodge with a steep, snow-shedding roof.

In our celestial soap opera, Cassiopeia had offended the sea god Neptune by boasting that her beauty rivaled that of the Nereides (sea nymphs).

Since the Nereides were goddesses and disliked being compared to a mere mortal princess, so they complained directly to Neptune. Neptune in turn, answered Cassiopeia's boasts by flooding the seacoast and sending a vicious sea monster (Cetus, sometimes also called the Whale) to ravage the land. Nobody was able to fight the monster, and there seemed to be no way to get rid of him.

To save Ethiopia, Cepheus followed the advice of the oracle of Ammon in Libya and chained his daughter, the princess Andromeda (now overhead) on the rocky shore as a sacrifice. So Andromeda was chained to a rock by the sea and left to her fate. Presently, Cetus emerged from the waves to swallow her.

As Cetus approached, however, Perseus, the Hero appeared on the Winged Horse, Pegasus. Perseus was returning from a mission to slay the Gorgon Medusa, who had snakes for hair and whose hideous gaze turned the viewer to stone. Perseus removed her severed head from his pouch and held it front of Cetus, petrifying him. So Andromeda was saved and became betrothed on the spot to Perseus. Then the two went off into the sunset on Pegasus and presumably lived happily ever after.

This all supposedly happened thousands of years ago, but on chilly November evenings you can see them all in the sky as constellations: the King, the Queen, the Princess, the Hero, the Flying Horse and the Sea Monster. They're all in the same region of the sky, and when Cassiopeia is high up, all the other characters in our soap opera can be seen as well.

Basic Sky Guides
Full Moon Fever
Astrophotography 101
Sky Calendar & Moon Phases
10 Steps to Rewarding Stargazing
Understanding the Ecliptic and the Zodiac
False Dawn: All about the Zodiacal Light
Reading Weather in the Sun, Moon and Stars
How and Why the Night Sky Changes with the Seasons
Night Sky Main Page: More Skywatching News & Features

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York

Ancestor of apes and humans found

This has certainly been a banner year for anthropological finds!

'Original' great ape discovered
By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter

Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas.

The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.

Details of the sensational discovery appear in Science magazine.

The new specimen was probably male, a fruit-eater and was slightly smaller than a chimpanzee, researchers say.

Palaeontologists were just getting started at the dig when a bulldozer churned up a tooth.

Further investigation yielded one of the most complete ape skeletons known from the Miocene Epoch (about 22 to 5.5 million years ago).

Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and colleagues subsequently found parts of the skull, ribcage, spine, hands and feet, along with other bones.

They have assigned it to an entirely new family and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.

Monkey business

Great apes are thought - on the basis of genetic and other evidence - to have separated from another primate group known as the lesser apes some time between 11 and 16 million years ago (The lesser apes include gibbons and siamang).

It is fascinating, therefore, for a specimen like Pierolapithecus to turn up right in this window.

Scientists think the creature lived after the lesser apes went their own evolutionary way, but before the great apes began their own diversification into different forms such as orang-utans, gorillas, chimps and, of course, humans.

"Pierolapithecus probably is, or is very close to, the last common ancestor of great apes and humans," said Professor Moyà-Solà.

The new ape's ribcage, lower spine and wrist display signs of specialised climbing abilities that link it with modern great apes, say the researchers.

The overall orthograde - or upright - body design of this animal and modern-day great apes is thought to be an adaptation to vertical climbing and suspending the body from branches.

The Miocene ape fossil record is patchy; so finding such a complete fossil from this time period is unprecedented.

"It's very impressive because of its completeness," David Begun, professor of palaeoanthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, told the BBC News website.

"I think the authors are right that it fills a gap between the first apes to arrive in Europe and the fossil apes that more closely resemble those living today."

Planet of the apes

Other scientists working on fossil apes were delighted by the discovery. But not all were convinced by the conclusions drawn by the Spanish researchers.

Professor Begun considers it unlikely that Pierolapithecus was ancestral to orang-utans.

"I haven't seen the original fossils. But there are four or five important features of the face, in particular, that seem to be closer to African apes," he explained.

"To me the possibility exists that it is already on the evolutionary line to African apes and humans."

Professor David Pilbeam, director of the Peadbody Museum in Cambridge, US, was even more sceptical about the relationship of Pierolapithecus to modern great apes: "To me it's a very long stretch to link this to any of the living apes," he told the BBC News website.

"I think it's unlikely that you would find relatives of the apes that live today in equatorial Africa and Asia up in Europe.

"But it's interesting in that it appears to show some adaptations towards having a trunk that's upright because it's suspending itself [from branches].

"It also has some features that show quadrupedal (four-legged) behaviour. Not quadrupedal in the way chimps or gorillas are, but more in the way that monkeys are - putting their fingers down flat," he explained.

During the Miocene, Earth really was the planet of the apes.

As many as 100 different ape species roamed the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4014351.stm