ArchaeoBlog

Not to mention totally cheesy 1970s video:

That’s a promo (or so the caption says) for Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. I only recently found out that it was an album first, then a musical. This is Murray Head who played Judas, arguably the center of this story. Probably gave the best performance on the album as well.

UPDATE: It is a promo or perhaps even a regular “music video” although I’m not sure if videos were used solely for promotion back then or not. Found out a bit more about it though: the song in the video, Superstar, was the main single associated with the album along with I don’t know how to love him by Yvonne Elliman. The latter was eventually a bigger hit, but they tended to promote the former more. The backup singers were the “Trinidad Singers” who look to be the ones in the video.

Did you know he also did One Night in Bangkok? I didn’t.

I never would have made that connection.

Wine tasting is bullshit. Here’s why.

The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit?

There are no two ways about it: the bullshit is strong with wine. Wine tasting. Wine rating. Wine reviews. Wine descriptions. They’re all related. And they’re all egregious offenders, from a bullshit standpoint.

Via Althouse.

I. . . .mostly agree. With some caveats. I’m reasonably certain that, were one to conduct some double blind tests, that most wine experts could probably tell the difference between cheap and more expensive wines and probably distinguish quite a bit of variation within that range as well. Absent all of the visual cues that might skew their opinion, such as the experiment with the same wine in different bottles described therein. We tend to look at enthusiasts as engaging in a lot of BS — the point of the article — and they do a lot of that, obviously, but there is still quite a bit of skill development as well that manifests in at the ability to differentiate in some finer detail than non-enthusiasts. I come at this from the perspective of an “audio enthusiast”: I can usually differentiate the characteristics of different, say, loudspeakers for example, whereas others wouldn’t immediately hear much of a difference. And most audio enthusiasts can, at least broadly, describe those differences fairly accurately, e.g., “soft in the middle octaves”. OTOH, some take it to the ridiculous extremes. Used to be (probably still is) a controversy over large-bore gold-plated connector cables: the true ‘audiophiles’ used to proclaim that they could tell the difference between $10 speaker cable and $150 high-end gold-plated speaker cable. Of course, every double-blind listening test put the lie to this.

So, I don’t throw out the expertise baby of ‘enthusiasts’ out with the bathwater, but realize that a lot of it is, in fact, BS.

I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet

And everything started out great, let me tell you. I did stop and smell the flowers. My life was full of serendipitous events: real life meetings, frisbee, bike rides, and Greek literature. With no clear idea how I did it, I wrote half my novel, and turned in an essay nearly every week to The Verge. In one of the early months my boss expressed slight frustration at how much I was writing, which has never happened before and never happened since.

I lost 15 pounds without really trying. I bought some new clothes. People kept telling me how good I looked, how happy I seemed. In one session, my therapist literally patted himself on the back.

Via Althouse.

My first though upon reading this was “I wonder if back when the printing press first got going people were fretting about everyone wasting so much time reading books?” Some of the commenters didn’t think much of the guy, but I actually thought he was quite perceptive, although he seems to have had a somewhat skewed view of life without the Internet: Kind of being paid to not do much of anything except write some stuff every day. But I enjoyed the read, since I’ve been thinking about doing a week without technology at some point as well. I thought he had some interesting observations. Ferinstance:

The practical things like maps and offline shopping aren’t hard to get used to. People are still glad to point you in the right direction. But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house.

I sometimes wonder how we ever arranged meetups without email! I guess back when we only had F2F and telephones we just figured things out in advance or on the spur of the moment or just didn’t do them. I, too, find it much easier to send a quick email than make a phone call, and I don’t really even text. Even being without cell phones these days would be difficult to arrange meetings since you’d have to get someone at home to answer the phone.

There’s so many other ways I use the Internet as well, that I realized when I first started thinking about my “’70s Week” idea. Need hours for the gym? Online; otherwise, I’d have to find a phone book, find their number, and call them up and if they’re not open when I call I’m out of luck. How to get to a store? Same thing. Research before buying something? How the heck would you do that? GO to the library and check Consumer Reports or trade magazines I guess.

He [another person] pointed out that there’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality. When we use a phone or a computer we’re still flesh-and-blood humans, occupying time and space. When we’re frolicking through a field somewhere, our gadgets stowed far away, the internet still impacts our thinking: “Will I tweet about this when I get back?”

I think that’s also true, although at times I think perhaps you have to work at being “non” virtual. By that I mean treating other people online as, you know, people. I really try not to be too snarky and such here because I know the people I write about are mostly the same as me: flesh and blood people writing what they think. I always try to think of people I write about as if they’re actually sitting next to me reading what I’m writing.

Unlike most people, he probably didn’t go to a regular job where he’d almost have to use the Internet just to get anything done, so I suppose his experience is a little unrealistic. But I sympathize; I find myself occasionally getting into a rut of deflecting boredom by just surfing around and junk and find completely getting away from this thing for several hours, or even an entire weekend, to be very refreshing. “Put the keyboard down and just walk away. . . .for a while”.

So one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors, James P. Hogan, wrote a book back in the ’90s called Bug Park:

Eric Heber and his wife, Vanessa, are on the cutting edge of technology, using direct connection between the human brain and mecs–tiny insect-scale robots–to explore a whole new world of experience and knowledge. But someone is out to steal this bold new science and pervert it to their own uses. Eric’s teenage son Kevin and his friend Taki are caught up in these machinations and must convert their skills at playing with the mecs to the deadly serious business of outwitting the criminals and saving the life of Eric’s engaging lawyer, Michelle Lang. Hogan’s talent carries the reader from peak to peak in the story, while his knowledge of science and the meticulously drawn Seattle and Puget Sound locales constitute a splendid backdrop for the nonstop action.

It’s set in Seattle and is loosely based on the tech industry here (namely Microsoft), reframed as companies specializing in neurocoupling technologies — direct sensory input to the brain — along with micro-scale robotics. The Big Bad Company in question is named, not coincidentally, Microbotics.

Despite my description above as “one of my favorite authors” I only got around to reading this one recently, despite Mr. Hogan himself telling me about it several years ago; he was* a very personable author, corresponding with many of his fans via email, so there are many of us with fond memories of actually communicating with him. But, you know, I don’t read much fiction for the past many years, so it was only this past year that I finally took it up.

It was pretty fun reading a book actually set around here, and being able to recognize and really place in my imagination where the various scenes were taking place. One in particular caught my attention: the location of the “Garsten Law Offices” building. It’s described (p.250 of the paperback) as “a spacious single-family town residence, in the First Hill district, close to the Seattle University campus between Twelfth Avenue and Broadway.”

After some confusion with the location (initially had it mixed up with Seattle Pacific University which is in a different part of town), I realized it was only a few blocks from where I work! Could I maybe find a building, perhaps even the building, that was the model for it? I took a couple of walks (on sunny days, of course, which took a while to arrange around here) to see if I could find something. The location covers a wide area, but I think the most likely area was reasonably close to me: south of the campus. North of the campus looks to be far more commercial and built-up.

Here’s the description of the building itself:

The house had been restore to an immaculate condition as a property investment, painted pale yellow with white trim and a red tile roof. It stood set back from the street behind a white picket fence and secluding green of shrubbery, giving it an air of permanence and dependable confidentiality becoming of the profession.

So I wandered around a bit and found that it was a typical close-to-campus buildings: lots of big old houses that had been converted to student housing at some point. Being student housing, most were not all that “immaculate”. Another complicating factor was that this was all researched and written 15+ years ago. A lot could happen to a house in that time, and the area has also been heavily built-up in the last few years with newer high-density apartment buildings. So it’s quite possible that the house has since been torn down and replaced by something else.

The upshot is that, while I initially expected to just see one that looked very similar with no problem, I soon realized that was a bit optimistic. Instead, I tried to find something that may have, minimally, served as inspiration rather than as a full-fledged model since nothing I could see really fit the bill to a T. The closest I could find was this one at the corner of E. Jefferson and 11th Ave:

There are problems, of course. It’s not really “set back” from the street, not in very immaculate condition, no red tile roof, etc. OTOH, it’s pale yellow, is one of the more elaborate and fancy of the old mansions, has a white picket fence, and despite their somewhat unruly current condition, has some shrubbery around. This is actually much closer than anything else I could find, and much of it could have changed in the intervening years: new roof, new paint, deterioration, etc. So while it doesn’t really line of exactly, it’s definitely in the ballpark, IMO.

You can probably go to Google Maps or something and check out the area for yourself. I was hoping there’d be a Street View of that area so you could virtually take a tour and look around, but it doesn’t seem to be there for that part of town yet. Matter of fact, when I was initially pondering this little project, it suddenly occurred to me that instead of actually going there I could just use Street View to do the work and imagined Hogan somewhere screaming at me “use the Internet, you idiot”. There is actually a red-tile roof building north of the campus around E. Union and 11th but that’s too far for me to check on with foot recon; the location and environs doesn’t seem very similar though.

So, no great moment of revelation where I raised my gaze and saw the living embodiment of the Garsten Law Offices. Still, it got me out and about into an area I probably wouldn’t haven’t gotten to otherwise; and, heck, I knew that JPH had probably wandered around the same place looking for a suitable “set” as it were.

* Yes, was, he unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. As a cautionary note, some years ago in one of our little email exchanges he mentioned he was going to be in Seattle at a convention and suggested I stop by. Well, I didn’t, figuring probably there’d be plenty of time for that. I was, as you can see, sadly mistaken in that assumption and passed up my only chance to meet him in person.

And not nearest neighbor: Space Archaeologists Call for Preserving Off-Earth Artifacts

When it comes to preserving history, a group of archaeologists and historians are hoping to boldly go where no archaeologist has gone before.

Researchers are increasingly urging humanity to protect off-Earth cultural resources. That may well mean preserving NASA’s Apollo landing sites on the moon as national historic landmarks, regarding far-flung spacecraft as mobile artifacts and even working to preserve some pieces of space junk.

Happily, most of it is way out of reach. Some of it (e.g., the Mariner and Pioneer probes) are probably permanently out of reach.

Internet Archaeology: Behold the Most Hilarious Abandoned Websites

In 2009, fearing that the web would lose a lot of great Flash-based pages – particularly with Yahoo’s shuttering of GeoCities – Ryder Ripps began archiving a lot of the best images from his favorite sites. Dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the internet” he set up Internet Archaeology and began archiving hundreds of images with the intent to “explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture.” As Ripps and his fellow internet archaeologists see it, web culture is just as important as any album, painting, film, or other cultural artifact and its preservation is essential to chronicling the birth of internet culture – as much for the historical record as for the creative one.

And let’s not forget The last page of the Internet.

The Best of Bond

Link might not work, Amazon is weird that way. It’s a collection of Bond theme songs through The World Is Not Enough. I thoroughly recommend getting it, if you are even vaguely into Bond stuff. It’s a fascinating little walk through pop culture history. Unfortunately, the songs aren’t in chronological order — which reminds me, I should make a Playlist in that order, hmmmmm — so you can’t really listen to them and get a sense of the different periods.

It’s worth it just for the main Bond theme (track 1).

Some I like better now than I did then, A View to a Kill (Duran Duran) for instance. Some I don’t even remember, but now I really like, Moonraker by Shirley Bassey for example (she does three of them).

My faves, in no particular order: Diamonds are Forever (Bassey), Thunderball (Tom Jones), From Russian with Love (Matt Monro). Not to confuse, of course, Shirley Bassey with Shirley Manson (Garbage, and The World Is Not Enough).