Historians and archaeologists have, of course, worked hard to find and document lost human history.
Their work, to me, is fascinating and surprising and I have to admit this article had high levels of both.
Honestly, I never considered the idea of who is the first person in history whose name we actually know, and this article offers the answer to that question as well as several other very early historical names.
I don’t want to give away the information as I truly believe the article is worth reading, but not only the names presented are interesting, but so too are their stations in life.
That much I’ll give away: The name was found on this tablet which was, in turn, found in Iraq:
The tablet describes a shipment of barley and the first person in history whose name we know acknowledges receipt of this shipment and “signs” for it on the tablet. Get this: The first person in history whose name we know was essentially…an accountant.
The article goes on to describe the second, third, and fourth oldest names ever found, also on a tablet found in Iraq. The people named on this second tablet are a slave owner and the names of his/her two slaves.
But enough of me offering a Cliff’s Notes version of the article. Click on the link and read what the oldest known, as well as the second, third, and fourth oldest names, known to us!
If you had met me in the 1970’s, 80’s, or 90’s and asked my opinion of Clint Eastwood, I would have said something similar to what I’d say now:
He’s one of those very few actors with a screen presence so magnetic/electric that no matter how bad the film he’s in is, his mere presence makes it better.
Looking over my digital films, I suspect I have more Clint Eastwood films in my collection than films featuring any other actor. I have almost all of them, from his “Man With No Name” trilogy to Where Eagles Dare (a criminally underrated WWII action fantasy) to Kelly’s Heroes (a criminally underrated WWII…comedy?!) to his Dirty Harry films to The Eiger Sanction (Mr. Eastwood doing an “American” James Bond) to High Plains Drifter to The Outlaw Josey Wales to…
Well, I could go on and on but hopefully you understand: I’m a HUGE fan of Clint Eastwood, actor. And while I may not like all his directed works quite as much, he’s proven to be at the very least a good -and at times great- director as well.
But what my younger self probably never would have conceived of is the fact that as he’s aged, Mr. Eastwood, the individual, has become the living embodiment of the cranky “get off my grass” old man. Or, as the Simpson’s so ingeniously put it:
“It will happen to you”.
It seems to most certainly have happened to Mr. Eastwood and it seems to have started a few years back, when he famously tried to bash President Obama at the Republican Convention nominating Mitt Romney for President by speaking to an empty chair…
The speech, which Mr. Eastwood later stated was intended to be absurd humor, instead landed with a wet thud and, reportedly, Ann Romney, Mitt Romney’s wife, was furious as the speech was happening as she knew it would be -along with Mr. Romney’s campaign- ridiculed.
I suppose those were the good old days when it comes to Mr. Eastwood as he’s given an interview to Esquire magazine and some of the things he says are…jeeze…how to put it? Weird. Strident.
Ed Mazza for Huffington Post (yes, a for the most part liberal publication so take that as you will) highlights some of Mr. Eastwood’s comments:
Among some of the highlights of what Mr. Eastwood said:
“You know, (Donald Trump)’s a racist now because he’s talked about this judge. And yeah, it’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican parents or something. He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody—the press and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, well, that’s racist,’ and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.”
First, Donald Trump hasn’t just stated one insulting thing against one judge. He has offered multiple racist statements. While “both sides” say dumb things, Donald Trump specifically, has made multiple inflammatory comments regarding Mexicans and Muslims. So far the worst I’ve heard from Hillary Clinton against Mr. Trump was that he was “ill tempered” to be President (something I agree with, btw). Meanwhile, Mr. Trump and his crowds that have called her a “bitch”, someone who should go to jail, or, in at least one case, labeled her the “devil.”
This quote, also presented in the above article, is even more illuminating:
“(S)ecretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist. And then when I did Gran Torino, even my associate said, ‘This is a really good script, but it’s politically incorrect.’ And I said, ‘Good. Let me read it tonight.’ The next morning, I came in and I threw it on his desk and I said, ‘We’re starting this immediately.’”
Curious how he mentions Gran Torino in the article. While I enjoyed the film and thought it was intended to be a “final” Dirty Harry film in all but name, what I found most intriguing and disappointing about it was the fact that it didn’t have the “guts” Mr. Eastwood seems to imply it has to “go there” with political incorrectness.
What I’m referring to is the fact the character of Walt Kowalski is presented as an old generation person who, like Mr. Eastwood in real time today, bemoans political correctness and is perfectly fine spewing racial epithets yet curiously never once says the biggest racial epithet of them all.
You know, the one referring to black people that starts with the letter “n”.
I wondered why this “politically incorrect” film would, in Mr. Eastwood’s vernacular, “pussy” out of doing that. I mean, the character was meant to be a gruff, politically incorrect “old school” man who didn’t give a shit about all that stuff, yet at no point in the film does Clint Eastwood have his character say the “n” word.
Why? Its only too obvious.
Racism, like many things in the world, is tolerated by some as a matter of degree. For Mr. Eastwood, people like Donald Trump can get away with calling a woman a “bitch” or a “devil”. He can get away with labeling Mexicans “murderers” and “rapists”.
But even someone like Mr. Eastwood who decries “political correctness” knows there’s this bright line drawn when calling black people the “n” word. Suddenly, the stark, revolting reality of racism is apparent for all to see.
I suspect had Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino said such a word even once during the course of that film audiences might well have turned on his character.
Instead of finding Mr. Kowalski a crumudgeon with a “heart of gold”, we’d might well have cast him as a vile racist.
What really intrigued me was this photograph, found in the article, which shows these skeletons:
Eerie, no?
The article offers theories archaeologists have regarding the identity of these corpses, believing they might have been on the losing side of a political uprising and were rounded up and executed for their actions.
Is their theory correct? It certainly is possible but what I find most intriguing is this points out one small pocket of human history concealed from us…until now.
Makes you wonder just how much more history awaits our discovery, buried beneath layers of dirt.
For those still left, the situation with Donald Trump is perhaps one of the more fascinating to come around in recent times.
Terrifying, I’ll grant you, but fascinating nonetheless.
There were many, IMHO, highlights in the Democratic Convention from last week, from the emotional and beautiful Michele Obama speech to Cathy Giffords. But there was one speech that reverberated above almost all others, that of Khirz Khan and his wife, who lost their son back in 2004 while serving in Iraq…
Bizarrely and perhaps all-too-expectedly, Donald Trump went after Mr. Khan and his wife. Thus far (its Monday, August 1st), he hasn’t backed down.
As I said above, that was perhaps to be expected. If nothing else, Mr. Trump is an attacker. He attacks anyone that tries/dares to go after him in any way. And let’s be very clear here: Attacking has helped him considerably up to last week. They certainly helped him when he brilliantly took down party favorite Jeb! Bush by calling him “low energy”.
However, we’ve moved beyond the primaries and, as is often the case, when you get past the party’s most faithful and begin addressing the country in general, things that may work on the smaller scale of a primary might not work on a larger one.
It appears this may well be happening to Mr. Trump.
Suddenly, he has to answer questions regarding the world in general and, at least so far, his “answers” regarding things like Russia have been troublesome. Further, while Ms. Clinton is certainly a prime target to fight, going after people like the Khans is unwise and, to many, beyond the pale.
Because he is the figurehead/candidate for the Republican party, many “big” names in that party have been very reticent to directly criticize Mr. Trump’s more outlandish comments. While Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan offered criticism, they did so without mentioning the highly important identity of who they came from.
Which gets those cynical with politics in general shaking their heads.
The Republicans (and Democrats in their own way) look after their own, even if they have to hold their nose while doing so.
All is not lost, however. This morning, John McCain becomes the first high level Republican office holder to not only criticize the comments of Mr. Trump, he mentions him by name:
…the real campaign for Presidency, obviously, begins.
I’ve made my opinion of this Presidential race pretty clear and don’t want to dwell on too much of what went on these two weeks (there are people far more eloquent than I all over the internet and TV to offer fascinating opinions) but I will say this much: The Trump convention looked like a cheap carnival show compared to the far more polished, optimistic, and buoyant Clinton convention.
Just my opinion. Whether these conventions frame the race to come, we will see.
There were so many interesting moments -good and bad- from both campaigns and I could go over them but instead choose this one tidbit of absurdity, presented on syracuse.com and written by Geoff Herbert:
The upshot of this article is that some people were upset to see Bradley Cooper at the Democratic Convention, especially since he played the lead in what many feel is a red-blooded “Republican” film, American Sniper.
From the story, by Rae Johnston at Gizmodo Australia:
…the Transport Accident Commission has collaborated with a leading trauma surgeon, a crash investigation expert and a world-renowned Melbourne artist to produce ‘Graham’, an interactive lifelike model demonstrating human vulnerability.
Graham is a representation of what a human body geared toward surviving car accidents would look like. As noted in the article, our bodies, through years of evolution, can survive hitting a wall, for example, while running at it but vehicular accidents are (obviously) beyond the range of what our bodies can handle without any kind of safety harness/features.
Therefore, the design of Graham is a suggestion of what our bodies might look like if they could withstand harsher/faster impacts.
So, what would people “designed” to survive car crashes (and Donald Trump rallies) look like?
Glad you asked:
There are more photos available at the above link above, if you’re curious.
A very weird concept and topic yet one that nonetheless proved intriguing to me.
When I woke up this morning and heard Melania Trump had plagiarized portions of a Michelle Obama speech in hers last night, I figured it would be a line or two.
I was wrong.
Truly, I’m almost at a loss for words.
While I’m absolutely terrified of the idea that Donald Trump is this close to being a possible President of the United States, I have no opinions, good or bad, regarding his family and wife.
It seems pretty obvious that whoever helped Melania write this portion of her speech (assuming it wasn’t Melania herself, as she has stated she wrote most of the speech on her own), deserves to be fired.
I mean, if you tried to screw her over, and by extension Donald Trump, you couldn’t have picked a better, bigger venue than this speech.
The Trump people today claim she didn’t plagiarize the speech but come on. You can ignore reality only so much.
Yesterday I reviewed the new Ghostbusters film and found it a solid, enjoyable comedy that did not, in my opinion, reflect the extreme negative comments people made on the internet regarding it.
Today, I find this article on CNN.com, written by Sandra Gonzalez:
All I have to say about this is the people who are going out of their way to insult Ms. Jones are nothing more than cowards and bullies.
I suspect the people insulting her are among those who claim Ms. Jones’ portrayal in the Ghostbusters movie was nothing but a “loud, annoying, street-smart stereotype”, as I mentioned yesterday.
First, those who have seen the film should know her character is not presented this way. Secondly, her character proves very useful because her “street-smarts” involve knowledge of New York’s HISTORY. She is the one who knows what happened in certain parts of the city, knowledge that eventually helps the others understand what is going on.
I will repeat what I wrote yesterday regarding those slamming Ghostbusters from way before its release: If you don’t like something, why focus so much on it?
Couldn’t you spend that energy doing something more productive?
This, my friends, is but an example, IMHO, of why the Republican party is in as much trouble as it is. The amendment, offered by Mary Forrester, a delegate from North Carolina, makes the mistake of conflating child pornography with pornography, as if the two were somehow completely and totally interlocked. The former is clearly illegal and anyone involved in such activities deserves, other than the innocent underage victims, deserves to get jail. The later is an activity conducted by consenting adults. I’m not saying everyone who has ever been involved in the porn business comes out of it “fine”, but there are many in the business who enjoy what they do and have few regrets.
As far as child pornography, it is indeed illegal and I’ve read more stories than I care to about people -some who present society with a respectable face- being caught in stings thinking they were about to hook up with an underage individual or were caught with child pornography in their computers.
Again, child pornography is insidious and ILLEGAL and it should be. But child pornography does not define pornography in general, and if one has to explain that to people, well, jeeze.
But perhaps the worst part of this story is its timing. Here you have the Republican party platform announcing pornography is a “public health crisis” and a “menace” and yet, given the frightful news of the past weekend…where does this party stand on the issue of guns?
You know, those items too many crazed individuals -actual menaces– have used to barbaric effect to kill people? To, you know, create a “public health crisis”?
If pornography, to the Republican Party, is a “public health crisis” and a “menace”, then what about all these weapons?
On the one hand you have a few police officers who clearly should not have had the job caught on camera committing the most heinous of actions against black citizens. It sounds incredibly stupid to say, yet there you have it: You should not lose your life for a broken tail light.
On the other hand you have a deranged few take advantage of the raw nerves and anger and, at a peaceful protest, target police officers…as if these deranged fews’ violent, criminal acts will accomplish…what exactly?
