Stuff around the net

My computer is now working but I need a new battery: until it comes, I can only use it connected to the electricity...

so light blogging continues.

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I'm not sure what this means but the Cosmic winds are changing direction.

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NotCot has the recipe of the day: Egg and avocado sandwich.

In Africa, we didn't have avocado trees, but when I did my weekly visit to Holy Cross mission clinic, which was 500 feet higher than our mission, they had them there, and Sister would pick a few for us. We used them like butter on our bread....

I'm not sure if they will grow here: Chano bought an avocado in in Manila and we have sprouted the seed...but it might be too rainy for it to actually survive.
 Instructions on sprouting avocado seeds HERE.

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Latin words in South Africa? repeated genetic mixing for 3000 years?

Well, the Portuguese were there in 1500, and the Muslim slave traders mined the area for 1500 years, and Memnon and his fellow Ethiopians were at Troy, so who knows. People moved around a lot  more than people used to realize, one could travel across the Sahara with a horse as late as early Roman times, and African archeology is still in it's infancy.

Wilbur Smith's book "the Sunbird" , about a lost Phonecian colony, is supposed to be based on H Rider Haggard's stories, but Haggard incorporated a lot of "secret" history that he learned from the local N'angas, and if I remember correctly, Smith got part of the story from Credo Mutwa.

And in eastern Zimbabwe, entire mountainsides are terraced: Stone walls 1 to 2 feet high and flat areas about a yard wide. I have no idea what is grown with this type of terraces...And certain trees grow in the area which are only found in the Mediterranean.

Ironically, Chinese archeology is starting to discover all sorts of things (yet with their political pressure to be "superior", I'm not sure I trust them), but there is little written about SE Asia, partly because the heat and moisture ruined artifacts and also because bamboo etc. were used for storage and weapons instead of stone tools and pottery, and unlike pottery, bamboo is biodegradable.


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Everyone debates the Apocalypse, but are you aware that an alternative Apocalypse almost made it into the Bible? PeterJenkins blog discusses it here.

As he points out, it's vision of hell resembles that of Dante's Inferno, making one suspect the subject matter, like other tall tales from the books that didn't make it into the bible, was known to medieval scholars, perhaps via intermediate works...Jenkins, in other posts, points out that many of the non accepted "gospels" were known in the middle ages via popular stories, and only disappeared when the Protestants started insisting on a pure gospel...we prevatican II types still know the stories however as part of the folk catholicism/stories which is how religion and ethics was taught to catholics in the past.

Nor were pagan stories censored.
article on the Sibylline oracles here.

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Arsenic in your rice?

don't ask me, but there is arsenic in groundwater that occurs naturally: but not everywhere. The story is a bit vague on where the rice came from.

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The Diplomad comments on the talking points: Obama as JFK.

Actually, we here in the Philippines know that his laxness has invited Chinese aggression in Asia: Not only in the west Philippine sea against us and VietNam, but against India and Japan. 



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 Speaking of NSA monitoring: I am using Startpage to search, and Engineer Hamid recommends DuckDuckGo.com


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the WAGD article of the day: Monster Volcano discovered in the Pacific Ocean.

the good news? It's been extinct for a million years.

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