orbis quintus

These are my links for May 31st:

• ABC News: Amazing Science: Apes ‘Talk’ to Humans – i’d prefer one of these apes to anchor the news rather than Charlie Gibson
• Call me Ishmael… | MetaFilter – i forgot this thread. Great first lines.
• Shock and gore | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books –
• Could Alberto Gonzales Be Disbarred? | The New York Observer – Please disbar him. I prefer impeachment in addition to disbarment though.
• Last Days of Man on Earth: DEVO Hardcore Volume One –

These are my links for May 30th:

• Microsoft unveils revolutionary device – Today: Money – TODAYshow.com –
• LinkWad :: Firefox Add-ons –
• Nobel laureate’s next project will marry words and pictures | News | Guardian Unlimited Books –
• Hints of past hot springs found on Mars | Science | Reuters – Bah, I believe there will be evidence soon found or revealed that hot springs exist now on Mars.
• Dry period in Spain explains Neanderthals’ last stand – earth – 18 May 2007 – New Scientist Environment –
• Plame was ‘covert’ agent at time of name leak – Politics – MSNBC.com – Again, for the record, she really was a covert agent.

These are my links for May 29th:

• wild hemmling back cover – Von Hemmling. For Elephant 6 completist.
• A predatory mind game – Books – Entertainment – brisbanetimes.com.au – “for whatever reason, furiously hate it” Because it’s a disappointment or outright bad. Don’t be coy.
• The Blotter – In principle, i support this idea wholeheartedly, except i want a real solution, not more fuck-ups.
• O’Reilly Radar > Yahoo! Pipes Adds Geo Data Support – I didn’t even know Pipes existed until minutes ago.
• Caution: Some soft drinks may seriously harm your health – Independent Online Edition > Health – soft drinks, pickles…. bah, i don’t drink soft drinks and don’t care for pickles.
• Human antibodies successfully treat bird flu – health – 29 May 2007 – New Scientist –
• Scientists find 28 new planets beyond our solar system | Science | Guardian Unlimited –
• ScienceDaily: Adult Brain Cells Rediscover Their Inner Child – newly grown neurons have same activity of child’s developing brain
• Facebook Launches Facebook Platform; They are the Anti-MySpace –
• Stone Pages Archaeo News: Turkmenistan: a cradle of civilization? –

The past few days have been an odd obsession with the Florida Parishes of Louisiana of nearly 200 years ago, mostly the land that became Tangipahoa, Washington, & St. Tammany. The original intent was to map out all of the Spanish headrights that were granted prior to the Republic of West Florida onto a Google Map, but Memorial Day weekend is a terrible time to start a project like this. Hardly any of the information is online, and the courthouses and libraries were all likely to be locked up tight.

Because this project took a turn into genealogical drivel, i’m a little burned out on the idea this morning, but i’ll be coming back to it.

I’ve talked trash about Samuel Hyde’s Pistols and Politics: The Dilemma of Democracy in Louisiana’s Florida Parishes, 1810-1899 before, but i’m appreciating it a lot more today. It’s damned hard not to be partisan when one starts delving too deeply in this. It still bugs me how the book turns into a narrative exploring the ancestor that Hyde is a namesake of, but it’s even harder to escape that i understood. The deeper that i dug into my own family’s past, the more that i figured out what Hyde had to resort to doing.

I was wrong wrong wrong about one assumption i made about the book years ago too. Although i’m still at the beginning of my exploration of this material, my family seems to have been allied with the powers that the Hyde family was allied to, the Courthouse faction. At the least, they wound up fighting some of the same people, perhaps for different reasons.

Hopefully, this won’t be another of my abandoned projects.

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• U.S. Security Contractors Open Fire in Baghdad – washingtonpost.com –
• Firedoglake – Firedoglake weblog » This is How It’s Done – Legitimate hero.
• Afghanistan: Reinstate MP Suspended for ?Insult? (Human Rights Watch, 23-5-2007) –
• Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One: Scientific American – so does this mean the info contained is stored like a hologram or not?
• AIATSIS – Aboriginal Aust. Map –

These are my links for May 25th:

• LA SEC ST/ARCHIVES-SPANISH COLONIAL – Charles Laveau Trudeau and those damned plats
• Louisiana Purchase: Historical Perspectives, 1682-1815 – The Trudeau plats interest me most right now. http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/purchase/history.html#settling4
• House OKs Penalty for Gas Price Gouging | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited – Of course Bush will veto it. The Iraq war was primarily cover to price gouge in Cheney’s camp.
• Secrecy News: Judge Walton Named to Foreign Intel Surveillance Court – The judge from the Scooter Libby trial named to FISA court. Interesting.

These are my links for May 24th:

• History of Washington Parish, Louisiana – Decent list of Spanish headrighters, with rough locations.
• “Not Merely Perfidious but Ungrateful”: The U.S. Takeover of West Florida: Publications: The Independent Institute –
• Wayhoo.com – GPS Waypoints / Geographic Coordinates –
• Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq | Iraq | Guardian Unlimited –
• Goodling’s lawyer told Dems to ask about AG – Capitol Briefing – Another instance of Gonzales lying under oath.
• Louisiana Historical Maps – I was on a quest for the 1806 Barthelemy Lafon map of Louisiana. Jackpot.

These are my links for May 23rd:

• Punk Zine Archive – i cannot believe that i actually own some of those Flipsides.
• Bulgaria: Ancient Bulgarian Sanctuaries “Older” than Egyptian Pyramids – “Bulgarian scientist will try to prove their hypothesis that the rock sanctuaries of Tatul and Perperikon in the Eastern Rhodopi Mountains are more ancient than Egyptian pyramids.”
• WOLFOWITZ AND GAL PAL SPLIT UP – Gossip | Celebrity Photos | Sightings – Oh no!
• The Blotter: Bush Authorizes New Covert Action Against Iran –

Does anyone else get the feeling that the landlord who “won” this auction should be hauled into the street, and beaten? $400,000 for all of those books and ephemera? That’s piracy!

The whole story reeks of incompetence and corruption. I don’t doubt that Brown screwed up in handling the finances, but the inventory of the Gotham Book Mart is worth far more than $400,000. The way that the auction was run sounds fishy too.

These are my links for May 22nd:

• Rage, Rage – Interesting theories. Oddly, i just borrowed some RATM from a friend, in reassessing the ’90s.
• Language isolate – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia –
• In a first, scientists develop tiny implantable biocomputers – nanotechnology cyborgs!
• NASA – Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence of Wetter Past – “The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water. “
• New fuel for 21st century – aluminium pellets? | Reuters –
• Publisher Struggles to Get Anyone to Notice Its Innovative Guerrilla Marketing — Vulture — Entertainment & Culture Blog — New York Magazine – Oops.
• Getting in Deeper… – US News and World Report – “And I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do? What if they get him to sign something? Do I intervene physically? What do I do?’”"
• The Tomb of Henu – “a completely intact tomb dating to about 2050 BC at the site of Dayr al-Barsha in Middle Egypt “