the name of the word for it is called Haddocks’ Eyes
Thousands of Inca Mummies Raised From Their Graves
About 40 of the large mummy bundles are topped with false heads, known to archaeologists as falsas cabezas.
Can’t quarrel with that! (Cabeza is Spanish for ‘head’.)
The poet Tom Digby asks (on his own list):
Didn’t bards of old live largely on tips and free meals and such, rather than from some giant corporation pushing packaged “product”? Might the Internet move us back toward that model?
How do these PayPal tip jars work, anyway?
Am I the only one who remembers that in or about 1980 Robert Mugabe said frankly that his plan was for an orderly legal transition to a one-party state? Maybe it’s a false memory.
Recent reading: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Prima/Forum, 2002). Despite the title, this book is less about Lincoln himself than about his ambition, Republican policy in general, and the conduct of the war.
It needed a better editor; certain phrases turn up several times in a chapter, such as “at the end of his rope militarily” (Lincoln in 1862). But such tics fade in the second half.
The author’s libertarianism is embarrassingly shrill at times. On the other hand, given the thesis — that the leader of the pork-barrel party broke every clause of the Bill of Rights, murdered thousands, left a legacy of corruption, and got a halo for it — it’s not surprising that he should take Garrison’s attitude:
I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.
Some questions never addressed: If the legitimacy of secession was never seriously questioned before Lincoln, and was standard doctrine at West Point, why are no officers other than Lee mentioned as questioning the invasion? If the secession was (as this writer argues) all about taxes, why did the seceding parties say it was all about slavery?
But I did learn a thing or two: lots of juicy quotes here; and this is the first I’ve heard that, before the Fort Sumter incident, Davis sent Lincoln a delegation to make a deal for purchase of Federal property in the South and for the Southern share of the Federal debt — and Lincoln refused to see them.
Most Overrated Events of the 20th Century — as chosen by (what else?) a Web poll in 1998-9
The Economist (Mar.30) paraphrases a paper on “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” (by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, American Economic Review Dec.2001):
The harder it was for Europeans to settle a region, the greater the culture of exploitation created: finding a foreign land hard to settle, colonists preferred to exploit the natives from afar, rather than to build wealth. By looking at mortality rates of pioneering soldiers, sailors and bishops, the authors found a strong correlation between colonists’ death rates and modern measures of political risk and expropriation. Indeed, the authors estimate that these shortcomings account for nearly all the income gap between Africa and rich countries.