7220 – insert subject header here. or not.

Busy week ahead. Dinner with the Momster, blood donation, cocktail party. Next time to really relax is Friday.


I woke up with the words “Millennium Spheres” in my head. What are they? Fuel for a time machine? All I know is that I had to get them, or something awful would happen. Nothing specific, but I needed at least two, preferably more, if I could bring ’em back. I was given a messenger bag to tote them safely… I have no idea if it was special in any way… temperature controlled or lead-lined or whatnot.

Speaking of time travel, the New Dr Who leaked onto internet Yup. If you’ve got Bittorrent, it’s here.

I liked it just fine… The Sci-fi channel saying the quality was poor sounds more like “we don’t want to pay for good outside syndicated stuff, when we can produce really smelly dung in-house.” Nice job, and a megaton better than the Y2k thing they did on fox way back when.

The actor playing the Doctor is really good, his sidekick is cute, The Tardis is cool, he’s got a sonic screwdriver, and they cover “First Episode – Backstory” stuff really well. Plus, scary store manikins. (Rework of the Autons, if you want a spoiler, click.) The budget is low, but what the heck, it’s Dr. Who. Tin foil and paper mache has always been the norm, and it’s really not that bad.

I’ll be snatching more episodes until the quality drops to standard Sci-fi channel fare. (Like … Mansquito. He’s big like a man, but sucks blood like a mosquito! thanks, greenelvish!)


I am a d12

You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you’re someone who can be depended on.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com


I am doomed to never taste the Take 5 candy bar. I won’t stop trying.


LJ is using terminology that I find incredibly cumbersome. Interestingly, longtime lj-bud leftyrok ventured the question. “What’s the Difference Between MB/MiB and GB/GiB?


Earth2 – We3


Jack Benny Radio Archives.


What Really Happened to the Donner Party?

A newly discovered cache of bones may shed light on one of the most ghoulish and enduring mysteries of the West — whether members of the Donner party resorted to cannibalism during their snowbound months of starvation atop the Sierra Nevada, and if so, how they carried out the macabre deed.

Armed with the latest high-tech forensic tools, scientists are poring over fragments of buttons, mirrors and teacups, hoping to develop the most detailed accounting yet of those final days, the dark end to a grueling cross-country journey that began in Springfield, Ill., in spring 1846.

The scientists and scholars — drawn from universities across the West — say their analysis will offer the first concrete proof of what happened. If cannibalism took place, they want to gain a clearer picture of who engaged in the taboo practice as well as better explain why so many died.

The team members also hope to humanize the men, women and children involved in one of the most gruesome episodes in the history of the 19th-century American frontier.

“There is nothing more powerful than decorated teacup shards coming out of the earth,” said University of Montana historical archaeologist Kelly Dixon, who is co-directing the dig in the Tahoe National Forest, about 80 miles northeast of Sacramento, Calif. “Instantly, these objects provide the vision of someone sitting around the campfire sipping on a teacup.”

But scientists, who hope to release their findings later this year, will be looking for evidence of other cooking activities besides tea-making around the campfire.

“To establish cannibalism, you look for the ‘three B’s’ — burning, breakage and butchery,” said G. Richard Scott, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno and a member of the dig team, which includes archaeologists, anthropologists and other specialists from a half-dozen universities.

“The burning is when the bone has been charred to some extent. The butchery is cut marks and marks, and the breakage is where … a heavy stone smashes open the bone to get the marrow.”

Archaeologists will also be checking for a fourth “b,” boiling, which can be established by finding “pot polish” — microscopic smoothness at the ends of bones caused by rolling around in boiling water.

“Cannibalism is the best-known feature of the Donner party, but it is the least understood,” said Kristin Johnson, the team’s historian. People “have the idea that the Donner party went crazy and they killed one another for food and it was a feeding frenzy.”

The Donner party story, splashed across newspaper headlines as soon as the survivors limped off the mountain, began in April 1846 when George Donner, a successful farmer in his 60s, his wife, Tamsen, and five daughters left Springfield. Along with 24 others, they joined thousands of pioneers in a historic 2,500-mile trek to California.

The key was to start off just as the spring rains ended and get over the mountains before snow hit.

But steered onto an unproven and disastrous “shortcut,” in what is now Wyoming, the exhausted Donner party wagon train, which now numbered about 80 pioneers, had already lost precious time and resources when it reached the Sierra Nevada mountains in October, the only remaining significant barrier to its destination.

Disaster struck in the form of snow that stranded the travelers in the mountains for a brutal winter with few supplies. The wagoneers camped at two spots — at what is now known as Donner Lake and at Alder Creek, where the Donner family stayed. It wasn’t until the very end, when they were finishing off rawhides they had resorted to eating, that survivors probably began dining on some of the 36 who died, Johnson said.

The last of the 45 survivors were rescued in late April. All five Donner daughters endured the winter but not their parents.

In 2003, Dixon and University of Oregon archaeologist Julie Schablitsky, the dig co-director, began examining a site with their team in Tahoe National Forest identified in the 1990s by archaeologists as the area where Donner and his family made their last camp.

They eventually unearthed a hearth with the shattered detritus of that desperate winter, the largest cache of bones and artifacts ever found by archaeologists immersed in the Donner party story.

“We have fragments of teacups. A writing slate. Bottle fragments from condiments, buttons from people’s clothing,” Dixon said. “When you begin to look at these collectively, you are reminded they were normalizing their situation. … The mere existence of these artifacts alone has the power to revise the story.”

The fragments of slate, for instance, will be analyzed for evidence of writing, she said.

“Tamsen Donner was a schoolteacher,” Dixon said. “It is feasible that she was perhaps teaching her children along the way. Who knows whether we can actually find some [writing] … on the writing slate? Or [if] the children had to write on or doodle or express themselves or keep busy.”

Among the most valuable finds are those bone chips, thousands of them, many charred, most smaller than a thumbnail.

Guy Tasa, a member of the dig and a human osteologist at the University of Oregon, will sort through the fragments and try to identify which are human. That’s easy when the pieces of bone are large, but with tiny bits, it’s very difficult, he said.

“I am hoping something out of these thousands and thousands of pieces of bone will be human,” Tasa said. The largest pieces are a couple of inches long. “Still very small,” he said.

Some pieces thought to be human will be sent for mitochondrial DNA testing — analysis specially used to detect genetic material in degraded tissue — which may identify which person it belonged to by comparing it to the genetics of living Donner descendants.

After the bones are sorted and identified, archaeologists will attempt to tell what happened to them.

Many of the fragments show evidence of being cooked in a fire for a long time, Tasa said.

“It does indicate they were cooking some of the bone, either with meat on it, or doing what we would call bone grease manufacture,” he said. That’s when people process bone to extract the last bit of nutrients from it, sometimes making a broth from it, he said.

To the Donners and their peers, cannibalism would have been abhorrent, said Scott, who believes that the survivors did eat the bodies of the dead.

“Some people … could never overcome their aversion to it,” he said. “But some people did. And once somebody did overcome their aversion, it would be a simple matter to keep chomping on Uncle Milt.”

The price of survival, however, could be devastating. Some Donner party survivors refused to speak about their ordeal, and others were branded as cannibals.

“There was a social abuse,” Scott said. “It gave them a bad name.”

The will to survive and the lengths people will go to do so fascinate Scott and remain an essential part of the Donner party story.

Exactly what those harrowing months in the snow looked, felt, smelled and ultimately tasted like is what archaeologists and scientists hope to discover as they comb through the remains of that final camp in the Sierra Nevada.

“We will never have all of our questions answered about the Donner party,” Dixon said. “As much as we can, we will come up with a more complete picture. We would love to be uncovering the truth.

PBS American Experience site on the Donner party


1 year ago – motorcycle Chernobyl tour, led mug, jk to revise hp, dan tech slips, bluto song, haiku

2 years ago – palm pics travel, WWII thoughts, site down

3 years agoNewtosill, Daffy duck, Morning here, dreams, poem tag, bubblegum alley, cute animals

4 years ago – The bed, Cool old comic books, disclaimer, OJ

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