[click to enlarge photograph - courtesy of the Wash. State Digital Archives]
In this photo (courtesy of the Washington State Digital Archives), you see armed members of the Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party on the steps of the Legislative Building.
The Seattle Black Panthers, led by Elmer Dixon gathered on the steps of the Capitol in Olympia in February 1969 to protest a bill that would make it a crime to exhibit firearms “in a manner manifesting an intent to intimidate others.”
No one was arrested, apparently there were no confrontations, and they left under their own power when they were finished. It kind of makes you wonder what would happen if someone did this today, forty years later. I get the feeling it might not have turned out so well. . .I mean, you can hardly even build a mosque these days. . . ---o0o---
My friend Hira found this on the wall of an examining room at Yale (she's in medical school, becoming a PA). She had seen it numerous times, but one day realized the characters resembled the ones in my (Jack's) faces drawings series...the faces all similar to mind, and done in the same sort of format--squares on a grid, with each portrait a shoulders-up head shot. It is a little eerie, but easily explainable when two people who like to draw, but being unschooled, use an approach more closely rooted in comics and folk art than in the studio portrait tradition. It will look like this (artist unknown--click to enlarge):
At a festival this weekend (the annual Gathering of the Juggalos), organized by Insane Clown Posse, ICP made the apparent mistake of booking Tila Tequila. Ms. Tequila was pelted with rocks, various pieces of garbage and cascades of human excrement while fans badgered her to take her top off (and when she finally did, the barrage only increased in frequency and vehemence). The hecklers/assailants used nearby Port-a-potties as a source of ammo.
Tequila ended her performance quickly and ahead of schedule. A witness told CNN: "the crowd of about 2,000 was immediately angry toward Tequila and she was unable to turn them around. She was taunting them,” he said. “She didn’t know how to handle them. She didn’t understand the dynamic. She took her top off and they got really violent,” he said.
Ms. Tequila tweeted this weekend that she would be suing the organizers (e.g., Insane Clown Posse) for everything she can get her hands on.
We saw these signs at the home of a homeowner on Seattle's Lake Union. Clearly this is someone who is hurting inside. These photos maybe capture half of the signs we saw there...
I've only seen the northern lights once in Seattle, many years ago. Periodically, we should be able to see them, but, alas, they are almost always hidden by overcast skies. Just last week, we once again missed them behind the clouds. National Geographic has a great gallery right now of Northern Lights images, along with an explanation of some of the science behind this awesome northern phenomenon. Check it out here.
Alas, no northern lights, but this week we did get the Perseid meter shower...
By Pablo Fanque All This Is That National Affairs Editor
One-term Vice President Dan Quayle's son Ben says Obama is the worst President ever. BQ is running against a dozen candidates for the US House of Representatives in Arizona's 3rd congressional district. [Thanks Jeff Clinton for the news tip].
Dad
The 33-year-old says "my generation will inherit a weakened country." He asks the voters in his ad, "What's happened to America?" Asking for their vote, he says "I love Arizona. I was raised right."
"Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place."
Son
Quayle, a Scottsdale attorney, calls himself as a family man. He was recently photographed with two kids for a recent campaign flyer. But then, he later had to admit that they weren't actually his young 'uns. . .
Apparently this poster was created as a PSA sort of thing in Seattle, according to http://www.shtig.net/muses/condom_subvert.jpg, "my uncle worked on the design team for that, and I got a framed original. They were for a community thing in Seattle promoting condom usage and only around 2,000 were printed, so it's a pretty rare artifact."
All This Is That has returned to using word verification for comments. It kind of cuts against our ideas of creative anarchy and freedom, but we are seeing increasing--and skankier--spam all the time. So, you'll have to answer the word challenge to post a comment. Sorry about that.
Fifteen years ago, Jerry Garcia passed away. We got to see him a couple of times on his last tour with the dead, in Seattle in May, 1995. The photo below is from that show, I still miss the man and the music.
A few Garcia quotes:
"Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. "
"For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part. "
"I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like. "
"Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?' "
"Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. "
"It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. "
"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
"What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place. " ---o0o---
The Antikythera Mechanism has buffaloed scientists and technologists ever since sponge divers found it on a sea floor almost 110 years ago. As a largely unexplained mystery, it has also inflamed the UFOlogists. Was it the work of brilliant ancient Greek Scientists, or a gift from our cousins, The Greys? Well, I'm really good either way. As an even potential contribution from the Greys, it qualifies for inclusion as another tidbit of Alien Lore. . .
The Antikythera mechanism may be an ancient Greek sort-of-clockwork device that has taken longer than a hundred years to understand. And we still don't really understand it. The mechanism is housed in the Greek National Archaeological Museum in the Greek capital and is regarded to be the single most complex antiquity in existence. I saw it at the museum in Athens two years ago, but really didn't think a lot about it until Jeff Clinton recently pointed out several articles and videos about the science and origins of the device.
The question you have to ask: were the ancients really smarter than us (in that we haven't figured it out yet), or was the device something left behind by Our Cousins, The Greys? Anytime we can't really explain why or how something happened, there is a group of people who will attribute it to aliens, or The Greys. Gene Rodenberry was particularly cranky about this--saying something to the effect that every time we can't explain something, or we find something particularly brilliant and ancient, people say it came from the aliens. It's didn't, he said, we're smart!
The Great Pyramids are often attributed as the work of Visitors. Rodenberry believed this happens because we somehow can't accept that our forebears weren't just knuckle-dragging troglodytes. They were, in fact, smart--wickedly smart. So smart that this device used some of the same techniques and technology that we wouldn't come around to until we began to construct the first serious and powerful analog (e.g., mechanical) computers in the 20th century.
Research is still ongoing--we keep learning from and analyzing the device. The device is stunningly complex. People originally thought it was some sort of clock, but when Greek inscriptions were found using advanced technology, it turned out to be an engine for predicting eclipses and moon phases and the positions of the planets. Scientists say it seems to be 1,000 years ahead of its time.
On the other hand, the device seems to mainly track the five planets known at that time. Wouldn't The Greys, having flown to earth, been aware of the other planets in our little solar system?
From various articles, you learn that the machine was able to perform computational tasks 1400 years or so before the time when crude machines of this sort probably appeared. What sort of tasks? Well, using 37 gears or so, it can do subtractions, multiplications and divisions to show the cycles of the moon, predict eclipses, and who knows what else? It even has an adjustment you can make for Leap Day, since the calendar it employs requires you to catch up with reality once every four years.
From The Wikipedia:The mechanism is the oldest known complex scientific calculator. It contains many gears, and is sometimes called the first known analog computer,[8] although its flawless manufacturing suggests that it may have had a number of predecessors during the Hellenistic Period which have not yet been discovered.[9] It appears to be constructed upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers and it is estimated that it was made around 150-100 BC.
The most recent findings of The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, as published in the July 30, 2008, edition of Nature also suggest that the concept for the mechanism originated in the colonies of Corinth. We know the Corinthians were no 'tards.
When a date was entered via a crank (which we did not recover), the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon, or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets. Not bad,
