Year: 2007

Ashurnasirpal

I recently found a replica of one of my favorite pieces of art and history, the statue of Ashurnasirpal II in the round from the Temple of Ishtar.

Ashurnasirpal was the ruler of Assyria in the 9th Century BCE and a very interesting historical figure. My little book published by Yale University Press last year (Asia Has Claims Upon New England) was about the artwork in his palace in Nineveh as well as the journey it took from ancient Assyria to modern day New England.

And here is the description of the original (including pictures) from the British Museum site (the original is in London now):

A rare example of an Assyrian statue in the round

Neo-Assyrian, 883-859 BC
From Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), northern Iraq

This statue of King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) was placed in the Temple of Ishtar Sharrat-niphi. It was designed to remind the goddess Ishtar of the king’s piety. It is made of magnesite, and stands on a pedestal of a reddish stone. These unusual stones were probably brought back from a foreign campaign. Kings often boasted of the exotic things they acquired from abroad, not only raw materials and finished goods but also plants and animals.

The king’s hair and beard are shown worn long in the fashion of the Assyrian court at this time. It has been suggested that the Assyrians used false hair and beards, as the Egyptians sometimes did, but there is no evidence for this.

Ashurnasirpal holds a sickle in his right hand, of a kind which gods are sometimes depicted using to fight monsters. The mace in his left hand shows his authority as vice-regent of the supreme god Ashur. The carved cuneiform inscription across his chest proclaims the king’s titles and genealogy, and mentions his expedition westward to the Mediterranean Sea.

The statue was found in the nineteenth century by Henry Layard, the excavator of the temple.

I am a complete dork.

British Museum – Statue of Ashurnasirpal II

Brewgrass 2007

Brewgrass is a fantastic annual festival held here in Asheville, NC. As you can tell from the name, the main focus of the festival is combining great micro-brews from across the US with bluegrass music. I highly recommend if you’re into either of those noble pursuits.

Here’s a quick vid I took at the festival yesterday:

Visiting Dura Europos

I look forward to visiting Dura Europos myself one day.  Here’s a fun travel-logue by a traveler: 

Dura Europos was certainly the most attractive archaeological site I visited in Syria. A ruined citadel sits atop a ridge overlooking the river and a large city wall that is still defined in several places bounds the entire site. Numerous temple remains dot the site but virtually nothing remains of any of them, with the notable exception of the Christian church, which I was able to find. This is rather exciting because it is the oldest church of certain date in the world. Overall, the site is really quite impressive, and aesthetically, it was my favourite ancient site in Syria.

nathanaels: The Desert, the Euphrates, and Mesopotamia

Chupacabra Found??

Chupacabras are a popular part of the (fascinating) cryptozoology scene.  This looks more like a coyote or feral dog to me, but I’m no expert…

But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.

Has a Mythical Beast Turned Up in Texas? – AOL News

Money Means More than Our Nation’s Health to Some Republicans

Thanks, Bush… 

In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

The formula industry’s intervention — which did not block the ads but helped change their content — is being scrutinized by Congress in the wake of last month’s testimony by former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona that the Bush administration repeatedly allowed political considerations to interfere with his efforts to promote public health.

HHS Toned Down Breast-Feeding Ads – washingtonpost.com

Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created

Wow… great news: 

“A new online translator that can translate Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphics (1 of the 3 types anyway) has been developed. This is the first time I ever saw a translator for cuneiform. Something like this would be great for translating interesting historical records like the Amarna Letters.”

Slashdot | Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created

ABC Drops Linux Support for Online Viewer

I really enjoyed catching up on shows that I missed via ABC’s streaming online viewer.

However, I use Ubuntu (a flavor of Linux) and now ABC has dropped it’s support of that…

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That’s just stupid.  It’s a flash based player, and they are actually having to do work to exclude Linux users since it’s an OS agnostic player.  Wonder how much Microsoft payed them?

As the users in this Digg thread about the subject point out, Pirate Bay and tvtorrents.com are still working on my Linux world wide web, so I guess I’ll be watching ABC’s shows that way (and without the ads).

Wildflowers

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I’m listening to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers tonight.

It’s an album that still just as relevant and awesome as it was in 1994. I remember the first time I heard “You Don’t Know Kow It Feels”… Petty was on Letterman and had altered lyrics (“so let’s hit another joint…”) and it was an epiphanic moment for me.

It was one of the first albums I looked forward to coming out (along with In Utero from Nirvana that same year). I was a geeky dorky high school sophomore and not quite sure of my place in the world. I was heavily into Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots at the time, but I knew that I’d like this album. I’m glad I stuck with it 13 years later.

I know it’s cheesy to like Tom Petty… but this album kicks my ass every time.

“Sometime later, getting the words wrong, wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme…”

Thoughts on Redneck Liberation Theology

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Earlier this week, Rion sent over an article on the concept of “Redneck Liberation Theology.” I was and continue to be floored by the piece. It reminds me of the first time I heard Thelonious Monk in a beer stained dorm room in Spartanburg, SC.  “Fiery little apocalypses.” Stuff that grabs you by the kidney or some other random but needed interior organ and won’t let you go. A gnawing realization that something is different after having read it, and no matter what you do, you can’t undo what has happened.

Perhaps that what life and fate really mean. Instead of living in the present, our minds are constantly focusing on what just happened or what happened hours, days, weeks, months or years ago. That’s what seperates us from the other animals, right? We can remember back beyond just a few seconds and form decisions based on those experiences. I doubt some of that theory, but in this case, that fiery little artice really did influence all sorts of future decisions in my head.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been re-reading WJ Cash’s The Mind of the South at the behest of my friend and mentor, Larry McGehee of Wofford College. The themes and clever positions Cash takes are echoed very much in Joe Bageant’s piece referenced abov. Cash was indeed a tortured soul with a troublesome spirit, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t share more in common with him than I’d prefer. The constant self-doubt, the stubborn inability to find a suitable profession… the constant gnawing to speak out about the virtues and vices of the people that you love and identify with in a grand meta-context like “Southernor.”

After all, Cash wrote THE Mind of the South, not A Mind of the South. There’s a huge epistemological difference that goes beyond semantics there. He was speaking on behalf and against all of us in very much a country lawyer meets hellfire preacher fashion.

Bageant picks up Cash’s alter call and reverberates it through our (my?) ribcage. It’s downright scary because it makes so much sense. Redneck liberation theology. What a goddamn blessing and a curse all at the same time because that is the essence of where my academic career has been heading up to this point. All the Old Testament infatuation with the prophets, all the wonderments over the reception theory behind ancient Assyrian artifacts in the context of a evangelistic 19th century call to the ministry… and the Golden Leaf of tobacco that still hangs on my wall to help me not forget Mullins, SC.  It was all pointed there. A Rose Line in the Asheville clay.  Wonderment.

It’s a curse because I’ve got to go out and develop this now. You can’t sit on something like redneck liberation theology and study it from a left wing academic point of view or from a country pulpit.

Al Gore and the Internet as Conversation on the Daily Show

I’m watching the Daily Show with John Stewart and Al Gore just called the internet the “greatest hope to cure the ailments” of the modern media and to “bring back the conversation” that is lacking.

Has Al Gore read the Cluetrain Manifesto?

Or has Steve Jobs turned him on to Winer, Scoble and Rubel?

Great interview… hopefully the video will be on YouTube Comedy Central’s site soon.