First of the first anniversaries

Today is the first anniversary of my brother's first heart attack, the heart attack that led to his death in his sleep in the early morning hours of December 12, 2003. And so, understandably, I'm finding it extremely hard to concentrate today (and it's not yet 6:30 a.m.).

My oldest daughter has a Hero's Journey paper due Monday, one which has to be based on a movie, and she's chosen "Finding Nemo," which we finally bought on DVD the other day, so I'm going to help her with the project--maybe, maybe, that'll keep my mind busy...

I always heard that the holiday season is the hardest after you've lost someone you love, and in my brother's case, it's so true. He died in December, so the month itself now has negative and sorrowful connotations. I once loved the song "Once Upon a December" from the animated version of "Anastasia"...Now, it brings tears, and memories of my brother...

He was just 34 when he died, and my parents and myself are still struggling with the entire thing...In light of the new blog I began last night, a blog about missing children, I have to say that, dealing with this when the cause is known and when the person in question is 34 years old, is difficult enough. I cannot even begin to imagine the grief the parents of missing children feel...

Okay, enough mindless prattle. Off to face the day...

Headless bodies found at pyramid

Not modern bodies, but still, this is gruesome...

Headless bodies found at mysterious pyramid
By Brian Winter

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The discovery of a tomb filled with decapitated bodies suggests Mexico's 2,000 year-old "Pyramid of the Moon" may have been the site of horrifically gory sacrifices, archaeologists say.

The tomb at Teotihuacan, the first major city built in the Americas, whose origins are one of history's great mysteries, also held the bound carcasses of eagles, dogs and other animals.

"It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of clean, symbolic performances -- it is most likely that the ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed with sacrificed people and animals," Saburo Sugiyama, one of the scientists leading the ongoing dig, said on Thursday.

"Whether the victims and animals were killed at the site or a nearby place, this foundation ritual must have been one of the most terrifying acts recorded archeologically in Mesoamerica."

Of the 12 human bodies found, 10 were decapitated and then tossed, rather than arranged, on one side of the burial site. The two other bodies were richly ornamented with beads and a necklace made of imitation human jaws.

The Aztecs came across Teotihuacan's towering stone pyramids in about 1500 A.D., centuries after the city was torched and abandoned. It is not known what language its inhabitants spoke, but the Aztecs named it "The Place Where Men Become Gods," believing it was a divine site.

A major tourist site, it lies about 35 miles (56 km) northeast of Mexico City.

After 200 years of excavations, archaeologists are still largely in the dark about the origins of the city, which is believed to have housed 200,000 people at its peak in 500 A.D. -- rivalling Shakespeare's London, but a millennium earlier.

Sugiyama said the nearly complete excavation indicates the Pyramid of the Moon was significant to its builders as a site for celebrating state power through ceremony and sacrifice.

The sacrifices were carried out during the expansion of one of the city's major monuments, suggesting the government wanted to symbolize growing sacred political power.

"Contrary to some past interpretation, militarism was apparently central to the city's culture," the excavation team said in a statement.

The master-planned city-state collapsed around 700 A.D., an event as mysterious as its formation.

It was the site of a modern-day controversy earlier this year when protesters fought and lost a battle to keep the Mexican unit of retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a new store a half-mile (800 metres) away.

"Memory mapping" project

This sounds kind of cool!

Where have you been? Think of the first place you remember living. Think of the streets, pathways, bodies of water, train tracks and intersections that you remember. Try to remember the relationships of each. Find the farthest edges of each in your mind.You are invited to participate in memorymapping, a public project compiling a world atlas of collective and individual experiences of place. Add your maps to the memoryBase, to share your version of a complex story of what constitutes "place" and "home."

The link: memorymapping - [expandedfield.com]

Fast food cereal

I saw a spot on this company on the Today show a few days ago, and it made me crave a bowl of cereal! I'm going on the Cereality website and seeing if they have mail order...

All-Cereal Restaurant Opens in Philly
Thu Dec 2, 3:30 AM ET
Health - AP
By JOANN LOVIGLIO, Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA - How's this for thinking outside the box: a cafe with jammies-clad servers pouring cereal day and night, topping it off with everything from fruit to malted milk balls, and serving it in "bowls" resembling Chinese takeout containers. It's all cereal. Seriously.

Cereality Cereal Bar & Cafe, which opened its first sit-down cafe Wednesday on the University of Pennsylvania campus, is a sugarcoated — and tongue-in-cheek — homage to what your mother always told you was the most important meal of the day. But she probably never dished out bowls of Froot Loops and Cap'n Crunch topped with Pop Rocks.

Behind glass-door kitchen-style cabinets at Cereality are 30 varieties of brand-name cold cereal.

Customers order from "cereologists," whose most popular mix is two 8-ounce scoops with one of 36 toppings, plus regular, flavored or soy milk for $2.95. Also offered are cereal bars and made-to-order cereal smoothies and yogurt blends.

Though some of the choices sound like a sugar overdose or a dental disaster to the uninitiated (or to those long past their college years), they're not all that indulgent.

"This is great because you can try all different kinds and not have to buy the whole box," said Penn freshman Erica Denhoff, 18, as she munched on a healthy concoction of Quaker Oat Squares, Corn Chex and yogurt flax bark with skim milk. "I'm on the track team. ... I eat cereal for breakfast and for a snack if I need energy."

Co-founders David Roth and Rick Bacher opened the first Cereality, a 200-square-foot kiosk in Arizona State University's student union, last year. Besides the 1,500-square-foot Philadelphia cafe in the middle of Penn's retail district, the Boulder, Colo.-based company wants to open more than a dozen Cerealities next year on campuses, hospital lobbies, airports and office buildings.

"We don't see this as (solely) a college concept, we see this as being relevant to the 95 percent of the American public that eats cereal," Roth said. If college students — "the most cynical market we can go after" — like it, Roth's confident that office workers and travelers will like it too.

Cereality also offers its own combos with names reminiscent of Ben and Jerry's ice creams. John Merz, a 27-year-old Penn employee, was bowled over by Devil Made Me Do It — an ambrosial elixir of Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, chocolate crunchies and malt balls, topped with milk.

"I'm always on a sugar high, so this doesn't make that much of a difference," he said with a laugh that sounded sugar-influenced despite his assertion.

"You're eating candy with milk on it!" chided his co-worker Caroline Couture, 42. After polishing off her Banana Brown Betty with hot oatmeal, bananas, molasses sugar and streusel topping, she said that she'd be having a salad for lunch — but that she'd visit Cereality again.

"We're all still kids, really," she said. "A lot of the foods you loved in childhood you still love as an adult."

In Philadelphia, customers can eat Apple Jacks and stretch out on a couch (Mom might not approve, but it's OK here), watch cartoons on a flat-screen TV or check their e-mail via free Wi-Fi access.

Like build-your-own salad bars with fattening and healthy foods side by side, "I think this is something that's as good or as bad as you want it to be," said Jeanne Goldberg of Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

American Dietetic Association spokeswoman Gail Frank agreed that cereals can be a good fast food because they're high in fiber and loaded with vitamins and minerals — as long as customers keep their sweet tooths in check and pick healthier toppings like nuts and fruit.

Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load.

"I think this would be a good place for a date," she said. "You could learn a lot about a person by what cereal they choose."

Washington State's top polluter

I lived in Bellingham, WA, for 5 years, and I still miss the air there, the smell of the ocean.

Mount St. Helens Is State's Top Polluter
Thu Dec 2, 3:32 AM ET
Science - AP

SEATTLE - Washington state's top polluter isn't a pulp mill, a power plant or refinery. It's the newly awakened Mount St. Helens.

Since the volcano began erupting in early October, it has been pumping out 50 to 250 tons a day of sulfur dioxide, the lung-stinging gas that causes acid rain and contributes to haze. At peak, that's more than double the amount from all the state's industries combined.

Normally, the state's No. 1 polluter is a coal-fired power plant owned by the Canadian firm TransAlta. The plant churned out 200 tons a day of sulfur dioxide until regulators demanded $250 million worth of renovations, bringing the level down to 27 tons a day.

Tough to get those kind of results from a volcano.

"You can't put a cork in it," said Greg Nothstein of the Washington Energy Policy Office.

Because the area around St. Helens is so sparsely populated, officials say they haven't heard complaints about respiratory problems linked to the emissions. But people with breathing ailments probably would feel the effects if they lived close to it, said Bob Elliott, executive director of the Southwest Clean Air Agency.

"We are very fortunate, in terms of the impact on human health, that Mount St. Helens is pretty remote," Elliott said.

Worldwide, sulfur dioxide emissions from volcanoes add up to about 15 million tons a year, compared to the 200 million tons produced by power plants and other human activities.

The arrival of the blog

And we ain't never leavin'...

'Blog' Tops Dictionary's Words of the Year
Wed Dec 1, 9:08 AM ET
Oddly Enough - Reuters
By Greg Frost

BOSTON (Reuters) - A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year.

Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year.

Eight entries on the publisher's top-10 list related to major news events, from the presidential election -- represented by words such as incumbent and partisan -- to natural phenomena such as hurricane and cicada.

Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster compiles the list each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity.

The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

"That is what occurred in this year's election cycle ... with voluminous hits for words like 'incumbent,' 'electoral,' 'partisan,' and, of course, our number one Word of the Year, 'blog,'"
Merriam-Webster President and Publisher John Morse said in a statement.

Americans called up blogs in droves for information and laughs ahead of the Nov. 2 presidential election.

Freed from the constraints that govern traditional print and broadcast news organizations, blogs spread gossip while also serving as an outlet for people increasingly disenchanted with mainstream media.

It was mainly on blogs that readers first encountered speculation that President Bush wore a listening device during his first debate against Democrat John Kerry. The White House, forced to respond, called it a laughable, left-wing conspiracy theory.

Bloggers also were among the first to cast doubt on a CBS television news report that challenged Bush's military service.

CBS later admitted it had been duped into using questionable documents for the report. Last week CBS anchor Dan Rather said he would step down in March, although the network said the move was unconnected to the scandal.

A Merriam-Webster spokesman said it was not possible to say how many times blog had been looked up on its Web sites but that from July onward, the word received tens of thousands of hits per month.

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

The complete list of words of the year is available at
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/04words.htm

Thanksgiving

All in all, we had a pretty decent Thanksgiving this year, though since last Thanksgiving was my brother's last, this one was a bit...odd. Strained. And it made me wonder, not for the first time, exactly how that mythical first Thanksgiving really played out. The word "strained" has to come close to describing it, doesn't it?

Okay, maybe I'm feeling sorry for myself as today is my eldest daughter's 16th birthday--where in hell did time go?--and therefore I am, today, feeling old and icky. Perhaps that's coloring my view of most holidays right now? Although, for some perverse reason, I am really looking forward to Christmas this year.

Wow, okay, that was rambling and nonsensical! I want to research holidays and their origins right now--it's been a while since I felt like really delving into anything, and this should be fun! If anyone reads this and has some website suggestions, let me know!

What I'm thankful for--my family, my friends (and included in those are my online friends!), my health (gawd, does that sound like an old lady, or what?) and the mind with which I function. Sounds odd, but there it is ;) I am supremely grateful that I am able to do the delving I do, like some sort of mole, ever on some new scent, some new trail. I am grateful that I am curious, that I am not content with the status quo, that as a born-and-bred Catholic I can at my age decide to look deeply into Hinduism. Grateful, I guess, that I am very, very alive...

Hugs, Bloggerverse!

Oldest printed porn to be auctioned

17th Century British Porn to Be Auctioned
Fri Nov 26,10:11 AM ET
Oddly Enough - Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's first known piece of printed pornography, described as the "quintessence of debauchery," is expected to reach up to 35,000 pounds ($65,040) when it is auctioned next month.

"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line."

"We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery," Peter Beal, Sotheby's book specialist said.

"It is one of the most notorious publications in literature and makes most pornography written 300 years later seem tame."

The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.

The book, the only surviving copy, will be auctioned on December 16.