The Bawdy Cloister

And the winning city is...

Mrs. T and I have been taking weekend roadtrips to various cities and towns in recent months scouting potential homesteads.  I know, we just moved, but that move was unexpected and it was from one rental to another.  We're talking now of "The Big One," the move that will come complete with a mortgage and, even more, raise me to a whole other social echelon, The Landed Gentry.  That's right, I'll finally be able to vote for real, like the framers of the Constitution intended, as a property owner.

Since my office is in my house we're not bound too close to where we are now.  I did rule out Beijing for obvious reasons.  (I'll be drinking RC and eating at Burger King quite a bit this summer.  For a full list of companies I won't be doing business with check out this page.)  But I digress.  Most of my jobs are in south Texas though, so about a year ago we started researching areas around San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, Houston and all the little towns in between.  As we'd visit places, we'd strike them off our list.  Very few places we visited stayed on our list.  By this morning we only had a handful of places left.  So when we hopped in the car this morning I was bracing for another let down.  But when we arrived at our destination, Mrs. T and I agreed we had found our home.  And the winning city is...

Round Rock, Texas!

Round Rock is a town of about 100,000 people just north of Austin.  It's close enough to Austin that we won't miss special events.  It's got a great school district.  It's got an IKEA.  But most importantly, it's got the grave of a famous train robber that The Acolyte just loves:

Estimated move-in date: December 2009.

In the Pool II

Just a quick update.  I was never called onto a panel yesterday and was sent on my way.  Since I showed up and sat there for the better part of a day though I got $6 and a certificate saying I'm free from duty for the next three years.  Hurray.

There is one little story that came out of the whole ordeal.  99.9% of folks I was sitting with brought some form of reading material.  There were a lot of books and just as many newspapers.  As for myself, I brought along my copy of Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics.  By the time we were released I'd read the thing cover to cover.  More on that later.  My point is, most folks sat quietly reading.  That is, except for a group of five people sitting near me who talked very loudly.  Most of the banter was about local news, a recent fire that swept through some stores, and who knows who that knows someone effected and what not.  But then the conversation turned to travel.

The lady next to me works for some eco-tourism lodge in Costa Rica.  She claims she flies out of country a lot for work.  The others around her have flown a time or two also and everyone started bemoaning how flying is no fun anymore now that security is so ramped up.  Stories of missed flights and so forth were shared.  Then the lady who flies "a lot" stated that the last time she went through Dallas they had this new machine that she had to walk into and it blew air on her.  She said, "I still have no clue what its purpose was."

I don't fly much at all, but even I knew she was talking about the explosive detection device known as the "Puffer," more formally called an Explosive Detection Security Portal or EDSP.  It's purpose, of course is to detect trace amounts of explosives on terrorists who forget to change clothes and shower after building a bomb.  As someone who hardly ever flies, I just assumed that the basic function of the gadgets was common knowledge.  Apparently not.  After the lady posed the question, two people said they had no idea what it could be.  A third said it was probably related to explosives, then added, "The air probably sets off the explosives and the chamber contains the explosion."  I damn near bit off my tongue trying not to laugh as I overheard that one.  But then a fourth person chimed in, "No, no, that's not it."  For a second I thought he might be a voice of reason coming to the rescue, "The air blows all the dust out of your hair and clothes to make sure you're not contaminated by foreign microbes."  The other four nodded in agreement, one muttered, "Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.  That's probably it."  "I'm sure it is." the fourth guy proclaimed.

Not more than 10 minutes later, the fourth guy's name was called to decide the facts in a legal case.

And now, as promised, here's what I took away from my book on Chinese Eunuchs--

Stay far away from Hung pills!!!

The Way of Hung consisted of a secret formula for producing Hung pills, which were also known by a more euphemistic name (Hsien T'ien Tan Ch'ion).  The menstrual discharges of beautiful maidens, thirteen or fourteen years old, were gathered in gold and silver vessels and transferred to a mortar, where wu mei shuei, a compote of smoked-half-ripe plums, was added.  In such cases, maidens with course hair or throaty masculine voices or those who had been sick were carefully avoided.  The strange concoction was then dried seven times and finally heated after adding powdered milk, cinnabar, imported pine resin, and dried and powdered human waste....

[T]he Emperor's addiction to Hung pills had ill and far-reaching effects.  For instance, Emperor Mu Tsung, his successor, became a regular user of the pills at the advice of the eunuchs and, as a result, let his genius run to waste.  Emperor T'ai Ch'ang, in whom the people placed great hope, died the same night he took these pills during an illness. 

--Chinese Eunuchs by Taisuke Mitamura, pp. 120-122

Rowdy's Roadtrip in Review

Back in August I wrote a post anticipating my meeting with Lucy.  Well, that day has come and gone.  A few weeks back I packed the wife and kid in the car and drove them to Houston to see the exhibition.  I was impressed.  In addition to Lucy, they had a number of skulls from various hominid species, some I hadn't even heard of.  Granted, just about all I know on the subject comes from Donald Johanson's book, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.  Johanson is the guy who discovered Lucy back in 1974.

The book contains this chart:

It shows Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's species) as a common ancestor to two branches of the hominid tree.  The genus Australopithecus continues to include the species africanus and robustus and the genus Homo breaks off and includes the species habilis, erectus and sapien.  The chart also shows that the genus Australopithecus went extinct a little over a million years ago.

The book discussed several other species as well, but those listed on this chart were the ones I remembered most vividly after finishing the book. The problem was, the book was published around 1980 and hadn't been updated.  Therefore it didn't contain discoveries made in the past 25 years.  So you can only imagine how fascinated I was when I got to the museum and saw a chart that looked more like this:

To my delight, it contained three new genera: Ardipithecus, Kenyanthropus and Paranthropus.  Obviously the number of species had grown as well.

The book discussed the controversies that invariably arise when it's time to name a new genus or species.  The controversy usually isn't so much about what to call it, but whether it's truly distinct from one already acknowledged.  Needless to say, distinguishing where one ends and another begins can be tricky and paleoanthropologists don't often agree.  As a result, there's not always consensus and a skull might go by two or three names depending on the academic holding it.

The Institute for Human Origins has an incredible interactive documentary on its website called Becoming Human.  If you launch the documentary, click on "Lineages," then click on "The Human Family Tree" you can then select the name of an academic and the tree will highlight their theory.  It's pretty amazing.

At any rate, the exhibition was wonderful. 

So last night I found myself back at the museum in Houston, this time by myself, holding a ticket to hear Donald Johanson speak.  The lecture was conducted in the museum's IMAX theater.  He spoke for nearly an hour and a half and presented slides on the giant screen.  Me and about 400 other nerds sat enraptured the entire time.  We were the lucky ones.  I was told by one of the staff that the lecture had sold out almost immediately (I got my ticket on September 7) and that tickets were being scalped online for up to $400!

After the lecture I had a chance to meet Johanson and tell him how great it was to hear about all that's happened in the field since his book was published.  He then told me he's currently working on a book to be published in a little over a year that'll pick up where the last one left off.  Hurray!

R.T & Donald Johanson, Houston Museum of Natural Science, 6 Nov 2007.

V.I.P.

In case you've missed the news this week... Lucy, everyone's favorite Australopithecus afarensis, is visiting Texas now through April!

I now regret throwing out my Physical Anthropology notes from college.  Well, maybe not; 98% of the lectures were about my professor's unfortunate working relationship with and absolute disdain for rhesus monkeys.  A typical page of notes from that class would read something like, "Bad monkey.  Bad, bad monkey.... Caution: Don't wear Prada to the lab."  I remember I took the class because it fulfilled a science requirement.  I figured the subject's overlap with archeology would be right up my alley.  Turned out the intro course I took dealt more with DNA than digs.  But I digress.

The news about Lucy's arrival to the United States spread nationwide.  When I learned she was bound for The Houston Museum of Natural Science on the radio this morning, I nearly ran my truck off the road.  Once I got to work, I started flipping through my calendar to find a free day.  My last trip to the museum was unforgettable... I got within inches of Lady Puabi's Headdress and other artifacts from Sir Charles Leonard Woolley's excavations of Ur.  Ten years prior, I'd taken an archeology course from the great excavator and translator of ancient stadium graffiti, Mark E. Landon.  Among our assigned readings was Woolley's book The Sumerians.  The book contained black & white plates of many of his discoveries from Ur.  To finally see the treasures in all their gold and lapis brilliance nearly brought tears to my eyes.  Mrs. T and my Evil Little Brother, on the other hand, couldn't stop talking about the Body Worlds exhibition downstairs.

The official title of this new exhibition is Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia.  What makes this so incredible is that not only will Lucy be there, but also artifacts from Axum.  My knowledge of ancient Ethiopia and the Solomonic line of emperors is quite cursory.  A few years back I read through the Kebra Nagast along with a handful of critical articles on Oriental Orthodoxy, the historical roots of Rasta and the concept of Tewahedo (which at first glance might be wrongly construed as Unitarian.)  I don't know if I should be embarrassed by this, but it wasn't the ganj that piqued my interest in the subject.  Rather, I was exploring the the fall-out of a schism that occurred after some rough and tumble Christological debates at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.  Like I said though, I didn't delve as deeply as I could have.  But now that Lucy has embarked on a good-will tour in Texas, I feel compelled to read up on her home country's history a bit more before heading out to meet her.

Not Another Roman Orgy

Pulled from comments:

  Anyone else revolted by the new mini-series, "Rome"?  Portraying Octavius as if he were some daytime soap star has my bile boiling!!!
  Reminds me of those 1950s WWII movies where the German General Staff all spoke with plummy Oxbridge accents....DISGUSTING!!!!
                            Pax... Denver Jackson

I have to agree.  Anyone who's anyone knows that Octavius had bad teeth and his body was covered in spots (with birthmarks aplenty about his chest and belly.) 

Just look at him:   

How on earth did the pretty boy from Booze Cruise, Ben Whishaw, land this role?

Pretty boy, Ben Whishaw

I swear, I haven't been this frustrated with a casting decision since Jessica Simpson won the role of Daisy Duke.