Stuff below the fold

Professor Mary Beard explains why all those documentaries on ancient Greece are so positive: If you film there, they censor the scripts.

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Tom Shippey discusses Uncle Orson's 30 years of scifi writing:

What Mr. Card does especially well... is deal with "folk of the fringe,"...folk very much like us muggles, sharing nearly all of the disabilities of our humanity, but commanding just that magic something extra that we all wish we had too.

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Cowboy frog: called that because of the spur on it's heel.
Photograph courtesy Paul Ouboter via Conservation International

From Nat Geo.


Now if only someone can tell me why the NatGeo includes three links to the Huffpost on it's side column, two of which are articles on animal rights hysteria? That site best known for it's anti vaccine hysteria...


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Syria: The end game doesn't look good.
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when truth is replaced by opinions and opinion polls. Linked for a later thoughtful reading.
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The future of Catholic health care? Replace the catholic with the name "dignity", post the abortion clinic next door, and starve conscious and talking handicapped folks to death?

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Kazaks to Borat: we can make films too.

of course, Borat was a slav ethnic (according to his accent), not a native Kazak, in his satire.

Kazakhstan factoid of the day:

.Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is short novel centering on one prisoner's experiences during a single day in a Soviet labor camp identified as HQ.The author of the novel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, based it on his own experiences in a labor camp at Ekibastuz, a town in the northeastern region of present-day Kazakhstan, which was part of the Soviet Union until 1991.

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US Seals rescue two aidworker hostages.

When I read this, I wondered why they didn't do it the day before the SOTU speech by Obama so he could take all the credit ...then I realized that he might have been worried the hostages would be killed, so scheduled it the next day, just in case...

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StartswithaBangBlog has great photos and explanations of the solar storm that is hitting earth...