text:
Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Bro's Favorite Indo-European Language

I can't believe someone else beat me to it! I have always thought about doing a Brofessor series on Norn. It's my second favorite language after Ket. Watch this video to learn about the Norsemen of Scotland, living on remote islands, speaking a Norse variety into the 19th century. Tell me if you would like me to do a series on this super-cool topic!

Monday, January 7, 2019

Cavemen Rock, Part VIII: Excalibur, or Homo heidelbergensis

Hi everybody, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant.  Today we have Cavemen Rock, Part VIII: The Quest for Excalibur!

Well, you’re probably thinking, I wasn’t expecting Bro to make that connection!  What does Arthurian Legend have to do with cavemen?  Well, if you’re a paleoanthropology nut like I am, then you already know!  If you don’t know what I’m referencing, don’t google it yet—that would ruin the surprise.

H. heidelbergensis

To start with, let’s ask RZA for the keys to the Time Traveling Elevator again, and go back this time to between 600 and 300 KYA.  Homo antecessor, whose, shall we say, atavistic behavior we discussed last time, has developed into—or been replaced by—the larger-brained Homo heidelbergensis, named of course for the German city of Heidelberg, where its fossils were first found.  Of course, as I like to pretend, the reality is that Heidelberg was named after him!

Now, the line of succession here with H. antecessor is a little fuzzy.  Was H. antecessor ancestral to H. heidelbergensis, or was H. heidelbergensis a separate line that arose from ergectus and replaced H. antecessor?  This is a matter of heated debate among the approximately seven people who care.

At any rate, by 600 KYA or so, we see H. antecessor replaced generally throughout Europe by H. heidelbergensis.  Due to the amount of material of this period that we have from Europe, we’re focusing on this part of the world right now.  That doesn’t mean interesting things weren’t happening elsewhere.  In Africa and Asia all sorts of crazy stuff was going on, much of which has just been discovered.  As we do more work in these parts of the world, surely more cool stuff will show itself!  And as for what we have seen from Africa and Asia during this period, we’ll cover that in future episodes.  For the moment, however, we’re focusing on Europe.

One thing that I really like about these heidelbergensis guys is that they were some of the first archaic hominins to look reasonably like us up close.  Remember, if you saw an ergectus from a distance, you’d recognize it as vaguely humanlike, but up close you would change your mind.  On the other hand, with H. heidelbergensis, you’d have to look much closer to see differences.  For one thing, H. heidelbergensis was the first human ancestor to be as tall as us.  On average, they stood at five feet seven, which is comparable to modern humans. For another, they, along with later H. antecessor, had reached the end of the process of body hair loss, which means that they might have been hairy, but no more so than my uncle Jim.  Everyone has an uncle Jim.  He’s the guy who has his wife shave his back every week.

So let’s see what these guys looked like.  We have a wonderful variety of individuals from H. heidelbergensis remains, as I’ll discuss shortly, so we get to see a good variety of variation.  In fact, we have enough data to put together whole family portraits:

By Kennis and Kennis

By Mauricio Anton

            These are two of my favorite pictures ever.  They’re so wonderful.  Of course the individuals these reconstructions are based on probably didn’t all live at the same time, but that’s not the point, doofus.  How wonderful it is to see them together in a community, and look at them as they looked at each other!  There is something almost mystical here.  These are the first human ancestors where I feel as though I could look into their eyes and see my fellow man, my brother or sister in the Romance of the Ages.  When I look at these pictures, even more than other reconstructions, I feel like I’m looking through a window in time.  I would love to hang out with these guys and be friends with them.  And I say “friends” deliberately—I can be friends with my cat or dog, but it’s not the same thing as being friends with another human.  But when I look at these pictures I have to imagine that if these guys and I got to know each other, we could actually forge something approximating a human friendship.

How did they behave?

            Could we be bros with H. heidelbergensis?  You might roll your eyes at the absurdity of this question, but it is an important one.  No matter how much we love our pets, our bonds with them are intrinsically different from our bonds with other people.  Could we have made a genuine human connection with these creatures?

            First of all, H. heidelbergensis was not behaviorally modern.  There is no evidence for art, symbolism, religion or any of the marks of a behaviorally modern society.  They probably could not speak to the extent that we can.  Still, they were certainly no dummies.  They stood on the shoulders of their H. erectus and H. antecessor forebears, who passed onto them the persistence hunting strategy, the Acheulean hand-axe, and the control—but not necessarily manufacture—of fire(2):

If they practiced persistence hunting, it follows that they knew how animal footprints worked.  That’s huge, because to understand how footprints work necessitates an implicit understanding of cause and effect.  That’s an incredibly complex mental process, and just like the pre-planned nature of Acheulean hand-axes, it would’ve taken thousands upon agonizing thousands of generations for everyone to get on board with it.  But by the time of heidelbergensis, they had been axe-planning and persistence hunting for a good million years.  Furthermore, the advantages of hand axes, persistence hunting, and their requisite cognitive abilities suggest that once developed, they would present an evolutionary advantage and spread quickly.

            Following the premise that, having had a million years’ trial run in fire, knapping, hunting, and fire, it is safe to assume that H. heidelbergensis would have had the cognitive ability to reliably and consistently:

·         plan outcomes (make hand axes);

·         anticipate cause and effect (follow tracks), and;

·         follow step-by-step processes (control fire).

Each of these abilities represents “a giant leap for mankind”: a successful jump over the yawning chasm between man and beast.  If H. heidelbergensis was able to perform these functions, he would finally, definitively, be more mentally like us than like a chimpanzee.  So I think it is safe to say that yes, you could forge a genuine human-to-human friendship with these creatures.  That is not, again, to say they are “behaviorally modern”.  H. heidelbergensis probably couldn’t speak like we do, or learn to read, or write a symphony.  But the groundwork was there, so I think that even if they couldn’t understand human friendship, they did feel it.

            Now, why am I waxing poetic about these guys?  After all, at a date of 400-ish KYA, these guys are still halfway between us and those wacky cannibals that we met last time.  Fair enough, but we do have evidence of something very deep down in H. heidelbergensis that resonates with us today.  It is possible—don’t get your briefs in a knot, I said possible, not certain—that somewhere around this time, H. heidelbergensis caught a glimpse, faint though it may have been, of the spiritual.

Atapuerca Findings

So let’s head back to Atapuerca, the mountain that isn’t really a mountain.  It is here that we find the MOST METAL PALEOANTHROPOLOGICAL SITE IN THE WORLD: La Sima de los Huesos, which is Spanish for…

Isn’t that name badass?  Earlier on I talked about how it’s a shame that there are lots of good Viking metal bands, but no caveman metal bands, at least as far as I know.  Well, if you’re starting that band, I’ve got your name right here.  Take it, it’s yours, just give me a shout-out at the Grammys.

Anyway, the Pit of Bones gives us a wonderful glimpse of this H. heidelbergensis population.  There’s a wide range of individuals that we can study, of both sexes, and of a variety of ages.  We can also find clues about their lives, just like with our H. ergectus finds.  One poor schlub sustained an injury on his face that healed oddly, rendering him goofy-looking for the rest of his life (1):

Fortunately, he was a good listener and had a really sweet personality, so he could still get dates.

But even more interesting, to me anyway, than the physical remains are the implications of their placement here.  If we find a pit full of H. heidelbergensis, it raises the possibility of these remains having been put there on purpose.  Could we be looking at an early form of deliberate burial?  If so, what are the implications for their behavior?  Could we even infer the presence of primitive religious beliefs and rituals?  If not, what are some other possible explanations?

For modern humans, the way we dispose of our dead is a practice that varies by religious or cultural tradition.  Whatever the method, however, every culture has some way of doing this.  Evolutionarily, this must have emerged because dead bodies bring disease and dangerous scavengers.  For modern humans, however, treatment of the dead has become infused with ritual, taboo, and beliefs about the afterlife.  It is therefore natural to jump to the conclusion of “this must be evidence of a funeral”.  We must, however, detach ourselves from our modern cognitive abilities and look at the Pit of Bones from the point of view of H. heidelbergensis.  There is no clear evidence of religious belief—or, indeed, abstract thought of any kind—at this time depth.  Even if the bodies were left there deliberately, he conclusion is unavoidable that H. heidelbergensis was not depositing of his dead here for ritual reasons, but rather simply because a giant hole in the ground is a convenient place to dispose of dead bodies.  Doing something with dead bodies does not necessarily imply the existence of religion, despite modern sensibilities.

And that would probably be agreed upon, if it were not for one important find.  As archaeologists dug through the pit, they made an amazing discovery:

            Not only is it well-crafted, but it’s aesthetically beautiful too.  It’s made of red quartzite, which would produce a beautiful sparkling effect in the sun.  What’s more, the material appears not to have been sourced locally, which means that it was brought from some distance away (I remember reading that somewhere, but can’t find the source.  Sorry).  These items took a lot of effort to make, and were the difference between life and death for their users.  Scientists, as a nod to its beautiful workmanship, have given it the name of Excalibur.

            Looking at this frankly amazing piece, one has to wonder what it was doing at the bottom of…

            You almost don’t want to say this, because it would be such an incredible development, but…could it have been left there on purpose?  Are we seeing in Excalibur the first rumblings of humanity’s belief in the afterlife?

            I know, I know, it sounds crazy.  Besides, it could’ve just been that some guy was exploring the cave, and he fell down the pit along with his trusty hand axe.  I acknowledge that this is possible, and perhaps even probable.

            Still, looking at the exceptional quality of this hand axe brings to mind the haunting possibility that we could be looking at some kind of funeral offering.  What could this have looked like?  Let’s get in the Wu-Tang time-traveling elevator and find out:

The Emergence of “Shouldness”

             It was 400KYA.  A tribe of H. heidelbergensis lived in the forests and plains of what is now northern Spain.  They hunted animals like elk and wooly rhinoceros by following their tracks, running them down, and killing them with spears:

This spear, for example, was found in Germany and dated to 400,000 years ago.

These spears were mostly sharpened sticks but they may have worked out the idea of sticking a hand-axe on the end.  Hand-axes were extremely important items, and to be good at making hand-axes was to be evolutionarily successful.  They had no language, and communicated perhaps through onomatopoeic vocal calls, or occasional utterances of isolated proto-words.  They had no music or art, but they could recognize, and liked producing, audible rhythms and visual patterns without understanding why.  They felt, but had no concept of, love.  They valued courage, intelligence, and altruism, again without having any comprehension of these abstract ideas.  Behaviors like hugging, waving, and hand-clapping probably existed among them and were done in specific times and places.  They had also realized that dead bodies attract scavengers, so they had a habit of disposing of their dead:

Art: Mauricio Anton

The most convenient place was a big pit, which was found at the back of a cave where nobody lived.  It was here that they habitually deposited bodies, thereby avoiding scavengers and pestilence:

A scale model of the Pit of Bones…in Lego!

            After a few generations, this habit became so ingrained that even if it would’ve been convenient to do so elsewhere, they were still disposing of the dead in this place.  It had become a tradition in the community.  It was the place of death, where children placed their fathers, and were eventually placed themselves.  They may have had some vague idea of their own mortality, and an idea that they too would someday drop into that great darkness.  That they mourned their dead is virtually certain, since mourning behavior is present in both humans and chimpanzees(4).  Could it be that certain specific actions were performed, in the course of mourning, in association with the disposal of the body?  Perhaps certain vocal calls were made that were exclusive to disposal of the dead.  Perhaps bodies were always disposed of by the same member of the community.  Perhaps even a primitive taboo had developed wherein this place, the place of death, was avoided by the living.

Finally, one day, somebody was disposing a body, and it just seemed right to toss his friend’s hand-axe down with him:

Whoever did this wasn’t sure why, but he had the feeling that he needed to do it, the feeling of shouldness.  He felt that he should dispose of the dead in this place.  He should make the designated ululations at the time of death and when carrying the body, ululations that he should not make at other times.  And he had a deep, gut feeling that he should leave the hand-axe with its owner.  Perhaps—just perhaps—this feeling was developed enough that he could conceptualize some idea that his friend’s death was not really the end, and left him his favorite tool in that hope.

But given the isolation of this occurrence, it does not seem that the community was consistently depositing grave goods with the dead, and thus it seems that they did not consistently have the cognitive ability to sense the need for them.  But one day, somebody was getting rid of his loved one, and he thought something like, “Wherever he’s going, I should leave him this.”

There’s that should again.  The shouldness that this individual felt was the first stirring of the human conscience, of morality, and of religion.  That individual stood, though he did not know it, at the precipice of perhaps the most important development in humanity’s behavioral evolution thus far observed.  If you are a theologian looking for a date to the Fall of Man, I would put it around here someplace.  Shouldness is not mustness, and necessarily gives us free will, the option always being there not to do as you should.  A sense of shouldness, therefore, is a prerequisite for the ability to sin.  It is in this sense, demonstrated by a primitive funeral offering, that we are seeing the first stirring of the conscience, that noblest of Man’s faculties.

Now before you neckbearded basement trolls rev up your keyboards, I’m not saying that this is definitely evidence of funeral practices, or even of deliberate burial.  I’m just saying that it could be, and wouldn’t it be cool if it was.  I don’t know.

So this, I think, is the verdict: we still could not interact with H. heidelbergensis the same way we interact with each other.  But we almost could.  While they could not speak, perhaps their nonverbal communication was humanlike.  Important physical actions at the core of our being, like hand-clapping, pointing, or whistling, would have had some meaning to them.  They probably laughed and cried like we do, for the same reasons.  And I believe there was that shouldness which we call a conscience.  So on the big stuff, we connect with these creatures.  We have crossed the behavioral Rubicon, and have by this time almost certainly had embarked on the path to behavioral modernity.  By this time if not earlier, our ancestors were behaving more like us than like our primate cousins.

Before I go, there’s one thing I want to leave you guys with: under the direction of the man, the myth, the legend, the towering badass Svante Paabo and his team of science nerds, we can now study scraps of H. heidelbergensis DNA, potentially giving us more clues about their story.  I would be interested to see whether this genetic data could give us any clues to their behavior.

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Bro Does His Laundry

My apartment, as I said in my last post, is generally ok, but there’s one problem.

            I don’t have my own washing machine, which means that once a week I have to take my clothes to the laundry mat in the strip mall.  Of course, the only time I have time for this is on weekends, when the bus doesn’t run.  Which means I have to walk.  That wasn’t a problem at the beginning of the semester, when I could just stick my stuff in a suitcase and wheel it along behind me.  It worked for a time, but I knew those halcyon days wouldn’t last forever.  I knew the snow would come.

            Which, of course, it did.  And with it, my life has taken a surreal, Jack Londonesque turn.  My fifteen-minute stroll to school has become a desperate struggle through a blinding white void.  The mile walk to the laundry mat has become a tactical expedition through sheets of blowing snow and howling winds as cold as death.  My poor suitcase, designed for a carefree career of being rolled across marble airport floors, is not quite up to the challenge.  The snow gets stuck in the wheels, and you may as well be dragging the stupid thing.  So I take a plastic sled and some rope, tie the suitcase (with the laundry in it) to the sled, and then drag it behind me through the snow.  Which sounds ridiculously annoying, and it is, but I also get to pretend I’m a Ket hunter dragging his sled through the endless forests of Siberia.  Which is fun.

            Fun Ket fact: the traditional Ket unit of land measurement (like a mile or km) was the itaŋ, literally “day-drag”: the distance a man could drag a sled in one day.

            So the other day I got my sled and suitcase together as usual and set off for the laundry mat.  I walked for what seemed like an eternity.  The cold pierced through my coat, but I trudged on, leaning into the freezing wind.  Time and space blended together in the storm’s rage.  Somewhere in the distance I could hear Yes playing “South Side of the Sky”:

            I staggered on, and in the corner of my eye, visions of Vikings stepped from the snow and beckoned me to join them.  Tall and proud they stood in their horned helmets and chainmail loincloths (ouch).  Fair rang the song of the Valkyries, wheeling above my head.  My time had come, they told me.  They beckoned me to join them, to let the storm consume me, that I might take my place at the feasts of Valhalla!

But no…I hadn’t finished my quest to become Midgard’s mightiest comparative philologist!  My journey was not over yet.  My eyes met the Viking chief’s, and I shook my head.  My road did not end here.  He nodded, understanding my quest yet regretting the loss of such a mighty ally in the war of Ragnarok.  A single tear rolled from his battle-weary eye.  I adjusted the laundry sled’s rope on my shoulders, and turned my back on the gates of Valhalla.

I looked around me, hoping to fathom some landmark in the void, something to tell me where I was.  Somewhere in the distance, a vague outline could be seen through the whirling snow.  It was…my mailbox.

I was standing at the end of my driveway, perhaps fifty feet from my front door.

            Screw this.  I turned around and headed back inside.  It’s time for the big guns.  Deep in the recesses of my closet I unearthed a misshapen cardboard box, and took out my secret weapon against winter: my Mongolian winter robes:

            Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, a winter deel.  Used in Mongolia by the world’s baddest-ass nomads, this is a garment that not only keeps you warm when eagle-hunting/Eurasia-conquering in thirty-five below, but it also makes you look good doing it.  Quilted on the inside with wool felt and topped with a padded hantaaz jacket, the warmth of this thing is only exceeded by the jaw-dropping awesomeness of freakin’ cool as hell dragons woven in freakin’ gold silk.  In fact, when I’m wearing it, I have to go outside right away or I start sweating.  But just to be safe, underneath I layered with long underwear, fleece, sweatshirt and a camel-hair vest (also Mongolian).  Around my neck I wound an Andean llama-wool scarf, and put rabbit-fur mittens on my hands.  Upon my head I placed a Russian hat that had once been something alive and cute.  Thus attired, I stepped back outside, astronaut-like, into the frigid vacuum.

            Except it wasn’t a frozen white void anymore, it was a frozen black void.  It was 2:45 PM, you see. The sun had gone down.

            I walked along the forest trail—that’s right, in Alaska the laundry mat’s on the other side of a frozen Forest of No Return, full of angry wolves, bigfeet and, for all I know, wooly mammoths.  But at least I didn’t have to worry about the cold anymore.  The blizzard unleashed its fury on my deel; it did as much to me as much as a gentle wind to a stone pillar.  What was I thinking earlier—this, cold?  You call this winter?  Pathetic.

            In fact, I was hot.  Wishing Fairbanks would get some cool weather for a change, I took off my dragon jacket, badass as it was.  I continued on through the heat of the day (night?), unfastening my top buttons to let a little air in and cool off.  Global warming.  We used to have real winters when I was a kid, not these wimpy death-rattles of an ecosystem destroyed by the avarice of Man.  I didn’t come to Alaska to die of heat exhaustion.  If I wanted that, I’d go back to Hangzhou.  Ridiculous.

            I made a triumphant entrance in the laundry mat that day.  Ice clung to the rims of my glasses, and I dusted snow from my princely Mongol garb as I stepped in.  Around my shoulders was lashed a rope leading to a plastic sled carrying an oversized suitcase.  The owner of the establishment, always one to choose his words carefully, regarded me for a moment over his newspaper.

            “What the fuck’s this?” he said by way of greeting.

            I paid for a machine, threw my clothes in, and sat down in a plastic chair.  On the TV a courtroom drama was playing.  Year-old People magazines littered the table in front of me.  I exchanged awkward nods with the fat man next to me.  I could have been in any laundry mat in the country, and compared the manner of my laundry trip to that of a reasonable, well-adjusted person.

Damn, I thought.  I didn’t bring a book.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Bro Goes to Alaska

                So as a few of you guys might know, I’m currently in Fairbanks, Alaska to do grad school.  This is my first time in Alaska, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Same as any other American town, I figured, just colder.  So I got an apartment about a fifteen-minute walk from school, but on the very edge of town.  There’s a bus stop, which is fortunate because there’s no other way to get to the supermarket unless you feel like walking for hours in subzero wind.  But there’s no true civilization nearby, except a strip mall a mile or so away from my apartment.

                Speaking of my apartment, it’s quite a place.  My landlord decided to take an old single-family house and turn it into an apartment building.  To get to my apartment, you go inside, down the stairs, and take a right.  That is to say, I’m a denizen of the lower depths.  The underdark.  I am…a basement dweller.  Not in the sense that I’m living in my Mom’s house having 3:00 AM online arguments with strangers about Boba Fett, but in the sense that my apartment is literally in the basement and all you can see out the window is dirt.  Frozen dirt actually.  Permafrost.

                My apartment is an ok place to live, if you don’t mind the front door not closing and the bedroom door not existing—“an open-concept apartment”, they said.  The hole in the front door’s frame doesn’t match up with the doorknob, so it never really closes.  When I leave in the morning, I just set the deadbolt, which I tell myself works just as well.  I sleep on an air mattress and have exactly one plate, one glass, one fork, and one beer stein that I drink oolong tea out of.  But that’s ok, because I’m in grad school and this is apparently how it’s supposed to be.

The apartment has a fireplace (that doesn’t work) and tile floors, which of course is great to walk on barefoot when it’s freezing.  Still, it turns into a decent enough place with a six pack in the fridge and a Conan the Barbarian poster on the wall:

It really ties the room together.
Being as it is on the edge of town, my place is on a dirt road in the middle of this great little redneck wonderland that somehow got transplanted from the Ozarks.  My neighbor on one side is a guy with a “Don’t tread on me” flag and an upside-down jeep in his lawn.  Across the street the house is surrounded by a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire.  Perched on the roof is a satellite dish almost as big as the house itself.  This, I can only assume, was installed the purpose of intercepting transmissions between Bigfoot, the Pentagon, and their alien overlords.  Behind the houses is the vast, eternal forest stretching far, far into the distance.  I like reminding myself that if I started walking west from my apartment, I would not leave this forest until I reached Norway.  The forest behind my house forms part a circle around the world,  the immensity of the Canadian and Alaskan subarctic.

                It’s an interesting neighborhood.  A couple months ago I was coming home from school.  I walked up my driveway and I saw my neighbor standing in front of my house:

                JUST KIDDING THAT’S A MOOSE.  A MOOSE WITH HORNS.  A BULL MOOSE IS IN MY LAWN.  I didn’t notice him until there couldn’t have been more than twenty feet between us (picture taken later).  It was huge.  Each noticed the other at the same time, and froze with the same jolt of adrenaline.  Our eyes met.  These things charge people, don’t they?  I thought.  Shit.  I moved as fast as I could without making sudden movements behind my landlord’s car.  There now being a physical barrier between us, I backed away down the driveway, and into the dirt road.

                Well, what do I do now?  There he was, blocking my building’s front door, gnawing cheerfully on a shrub.  I decided I wouldn’t try to scare him away, since I didn’t feel like getting killed.  But I couldn’t get inside with him in front of my door.  All I could do was wait in the street.

                I must’ve stood for twenty minutes, watching him eat.  His bored, dumb eyes mocked me.  So, moose, I thought.  Despite the toys and contrivances of Man, you have defeated me.  it was then that the door opened, and my landlord stepped out.  His eyes, too, met the moose’s, and they regarded each other with what I can only call a bored acknowledgement, like when you see a coworker on a Tuesday morning.  There clearly being some mutual understanding between them, he walked out the door, perhaps five feet from certain death, and asked me what I was doing standing there.  “He won’t hurt you,” my landlord said, rolling his eyes at the effete delicacy of people from the Lower 48. “Just walk by him and go inside.”  I looked back.  The moose had moved to about ten feet from the door.  Just walk by him…

So, gathering up my courage, that’s what I did, more than meeting my recommended daily intake of mortal danger.  Sure enough, the moose didn’t bother me at all, probably because my landlord told him I was cool.

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Cavemen Rock, Part VII: Stay off My Lawn

Hello again friends, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant.  Today we’re continuing Cavemen, but I’m changing the name.  The new name of this series is “Cavemen ROCK,” since, obviously, rocks, cavemen, ha ha ha.  It’s so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this.  Even now, my friend suggested this to me.  Oh well.

Anyway, let’s move on.  We last talked about the species known respectively as Homo ergaster and Homo erectus in the context of African and Asian assemblages.  I’ve also hear the expression “African H. erectus” used, but I’m not sure what the difference is here with H. ergaster.  If you know, please tell me!

Ergectus, as I’ve recently taken to calling them, held on from almost 2 MYA until well into the last five hundred thousand years—maybe even as recently, relatively speaking, as 150 KYA.  During time we have seen the emergence of true hunting and gathering, sporadic fire use, and maybe even primitive seafaring.  We also see the very first glimmerings of human consciousness as we know it: care for the elderly and infirm, family units, and maybe even a sense of the aesthetic in their wonderfully knapped hand axes.  According to Iain Davidson at the University of New England, by the ergectus era our ancestors were able to control our vocal utterances independently of our emotional state(1)—and, indeed, the vertebrae of the classic Turkana boy specimen show humanlike vocal capabilities.  These creatures may have had names for the things around them, or even had names themselves—though I doubt they had anything close to what we would call “articulated language”.

Still, as with H. habilis, I don’t think we could have interacted with ergectus the same way we interact with each other.  Although, as evidenced by Grandpa George and Turkana Boy, that they cared for infirm members of their own groups, they probably hadn’t yet mastered the art of not tearing each other apart when meeting new acquaintances—this will factor in today’s discussion, so keep that in mind.

It was into this milieu, around 1.2 million years ago, that one European strain branched from the ergectus lineage.  Unlike ergectus, these guys had more humanlike facial features, especially in, according to Smithsonian Magazine, “the shape of the nasal region and the presence of a facial depression above the canine tooth called the canine fossa”(2).  That sounds like a small difference, but these features are more gracile than those of ergectus.  These creatures, attested from the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, were christened Homo antecessor, or “Pioneer man”, by modern science.

Atapuerca is an important site, so let’s familiarize ourselves with the area.  This is a mountain range in Northern Spain, although to be honest, it looks more like a hill to me.  Maybe the name comes from Don Quixote’s fevered imagination:

“Behold, Sancho!  Mountains, soaring up to the heavens!  Surely, these peaks must hide the secret of Dulcinea’s enchantment!”

Or, maybe I’m just a snob, being as I am from the heart of Colorado’s majestic Rocky Mountains!  At any rate Atapuerca has a number of sites stretching across prehistory, from the lower Paleolithic to the Bronze Age.  The finds here are quite remarkable for their diversity of time depth!

H. antecessor, documented from this site, was present between 1.2 and 0.78 MYA.  Behaviorally and technologically, they appear not to be markedly different from their ergectus brethren, in that their tools are a continuation of the Acheulean industry(3).  We can tell by examining their teeth that they subsisted on tough, difficult-to-chew foods (4).  This implies that, like H. erectus, they did not have (regular) access to fire.  There is little else we know about antecessor’s behavior, apart from one more point that I’d like to bring up now.

In fact, this is a bit of an elephant in the room.  I don’t want to spend too much time on this, because it’s not that big of a deal, and it’s not very nice to think about.  Here goes: the bones of some antecessor specimens had had the muscles removed with stone tools, before the bones were scattered among those of game animals.  The implication is that these individuals had been hunted, butchered and eaten by other H. antecessor.

I know, I know!  That’s disgusting, and I hate to even mention it.  Also, it’s annoying to talk about because this stuff gets heavily sensationalized by non-academic media.  There’s this deeply-ingrained disgust we feel at the idea of cannibalism, be it survival, mortuary or otherwise.  So that’s what the non-academic press likes to jump on, I guess as a kind of clickbait.  We also see it in caveman movies, from “Quest for Fire” to “The Thirteenth Warrior”.  I don’t know why it’s such a big deal in our popular perception of cavemen, but there it is.  It may be related to the racist image of the “cannibal savage” used to justify Western imperialism during the Age of Exploration.  That is to say, focusing on this behavior among our ancestors may be a way of distancing ourselves from them and making them out to be inferior to us.  I don’t know, and it’s a gross, strange thing for everyone to dwell on as much as they do.  I wouldn’t have mentioned this point at all, if it didn’t have an important implication for behavior.

First, eating these guys appears not to have been ritual or funerary behavior, which is unsurprising, since the mind of H. antecessor probably wasn’t quite there yet.  We know this because the bones were treated exactly the same as those of game animals.  So, what exactly happened here?
One easy explanation is that if one of your bros keels over and dies, eating him is kind of a convenient thing to do, since it gets rid of the body and you guys don’t need to go hunting that day.  You can stay home, crack some cave-brews and play Cave Mario Kart.  That’s possible, but why don’t we see evidence of this with, say, Grandpa George or Turkana Boy?  Did H. erectus not connect the dots that far?  Furthermore, I have yet to see evidence of pathology in the bones of these individuals.  That doesn’t mean they didn’t die of illness or injury, but there’s no published evidence thereof from the fossil remains—which we have with Grandpa George and Turkana Boy.  The latter was old and weak, and the former died from an infection.  Neither was cannibalized.  That said, H. antecessor is almost a million years, and thousands of miles, removed from Grandpa George and Turkana Boy, so perhaps it’s not appropriate to bring them into the discussion.

Another possibility is that there was a famine or something, and there was that thing that happens in cartoons where they looked at each other and their buddies turned into talking steaks.  But by all reconstructions, the environment of the time wouldn’t have made a very difficult place to live(5).  That said, there’s always the possibility of a lean season.

Let’s look again at the individuals that became dinner.  Examining the butchered remains, we realize a commonality shared by the victims: these individuals were children, as young as ten years old.  Again, disgusting and disturbing, I know, sorry.  But that fact is important because we see a parallel behavior among chimpanzees: male chimps, when patrolling their territory, will kill and eat infants that they come across(6).  We could be seeing a similar behavior here.  The juvenile H. antecessor specimens that were eaten could have been members of an out-group encountered by adult males on patrol.

One problem with this scenario is, of course, that ten years old isn’t exactly an infant, unless we’re  speaking French.  Indeed, we know from other specimens, one of them being Turkana Boy, that archaic hominins reached adolescence faster than kids today.  Turkana Boy was eight when he died, but had adolescent skeletal morphology.  H. antecessor was about 800 thousand years after Turkana Boy, so even if the rate had slowed somewhat in the intervening time, it would still be reasonable to guess that a ten-year-old antecessor might have already entered adolescence.  In that case, this situation would differ even more from that of modern chimpanzees, since killed infants of outgroups are eaten, but for some reason killed adults are not—at least, such behavior has not yet been observed.  For this reason, it’s important not to discount the in-group death or famine hypotheses.  Still, the “Patrol Hypothesis” seems to me to be the most probable, or at any rate the least improbable.  That is to say: the cannibalized H. antecessor remains found represent the same phenomenon observed among male chimpanzee patrols.  This has serious implications for our attempt to reconstruct H. antecessor behavior.

If in fact the Patrol Hypothesis is true, it provides a serious counterpoint to the various baby steps we’ve seen in the progression toward modern behavior.  We’ve seen ergectus care for its elderly and sick, knap symmetrical tools, probably use fire, and very possibly use rafts and simple word-like utterances.  But for all that, the discovery of these poor kids demonstrates starkly that raw animal instinct still had a heavy influence upon these creatures, at least in terms of their dealings with out-groups.  Deep down, they were in many ways quite far from “human” in terms of cognition.
Do you remember way back at the beginning of this series, probably a year ago now, when I talked about a mark of “peopleness” as being morally responsible for your actions?  If the Patrol Hypothesis explains this incident, Homo antecessor and its ergectus predecessors were not morally responsible for what they did.  Chimpanzees don’t think about cannibalizing the infants that they kill on patrols, they just do it.  In the same way, they don’t think about not cannibalizing the adults that they kill.  It’s simply something that’s hardwired into their brains, and may have been hardwired into the brains of early Homo.

How could we test if the Patrol Hypothesis is true?  We would have to look at other fossils of the same time period and before, with a special eye toward both juvenile bones and those which show evidence of having been butchered.  If there is an overlap, perhaps this hypothesis is worth considering.

So, here’s what I think happened: one day, some H. antecessor males were walking around on patrol.  They knew that there were other groups in the area, with whom they occasionally clashed in conflicts not unlike those between modern chimpanzee troops.  Along they came, minding their own business, when in the distance they saw some punk kids skateboarding on their driveway—or the Lower Paleolithic equivalent.  The kids knew that they should stay off the other group’s territory.  However, they were acting with the same rashness and impulsiveness characteristic of today’s twelve-or-thirteen-year-olds, and they paid the price.  The patrolling males ran them down, killed them, and ate them without really considering what they were doing.  They acted entirely on impulse.  Had the victims been adults, the patrol would have simply killed them and left the bodies, but juveniles, for whatever evolutionary reason, triggered a different response.  Whatever explanation this behavior had, it is the same thing that we observe today among chimps.

So, to sum up: here was a creature that was capable of touching tenderness toward members of their in-groups, but remained quite aggressive toward members of out-groups.  Which, if you think about it, is quite human in a way!  Goodness knows that we have enough trouble with racism and xenophobia in our time.  But, unlike them, we have gained the amazing ability to think through our actions, and consciously decide to cooperate with members of out-groups, rather than instinctively kill them.  I think there’s a lesson here for us today—when we give in to prejudice toward those who might not be in our “tribe”, we are stooping to the same level as H. antecessor all those years ago!

In my discussion of Grandpa George and Turkana Boy, I talked about how these two cases demonstrate how the goodness of humanity predates “humanity” itself.  Well, the antecessor finds show us that humanity’s bad side goes back a long way too.  So, to any Paleolithic kids out there: stay off Old Man Antecessor’s lawn!


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: text/html

WARC-Type: response

text:
The Brownfield Chamber of Commerce is here to promote your business. Learn about your membership benefits!

Becoming a Member of the Brownfield Chamber of Commerce

Why should you become a member of the Chamber? Because membership has its benefits! Making the connection to our business network provides you access to our pool of contacts and resources.

If you’re starting a new business or would like to promote your existing business, the Chamber can help. We can help you build new relationships with key people. The only thing you have to lose is the business and attention you’re not getting by
being a Chamber Member!

New Business

Starting a new business is a lot of work. The Chamber is here for people just like you. We want you to know that we care about your success! One of the most challenging parts of starting a new business is “getting the word out.” Our new member program is designed to do just that. Here’s how it works:

1. Download and complete the Membership Application

2. Turn it in and make a request  for an official “Ribbon Cutting”

3. We’ll rally our volunteers to give you a Chamber Welcome and invite The Brownfield News to  photograph the event

4. The day off is your opportunity to begin meeting local business people and showcase your business.

5. Featured in our quarterly Chamber newsletter

Existing Business

What if you’re already in business? If your business is already established, you can still benefit from joining the Chamber. Membership is a great way to increase the visibility of your business. There are several added benefits of membership that we think you’ll find of great value. Take a look at the following:

1. To show your support as a  community conscious business

2. It provides opportunities for you to network with other local business people and community leaders

3. Be added to our membership directory which is distributed throughout the city, to new residents and touring travelers

4. Members are exclusively considered for special recognition through our award programs

5. Featured in our quarterly Chamber newsletter

Our Members

warcinfo:
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-09
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-151-171-77.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

text:
RedStrong Red (default) BlueCalm Blue GreenFresh Green

Chose your color scheme.

Archive for June 2007

The Death of your Satisfaction!

Posted on June 28, 2007 by under Life, News.

Customer Care is dead. Thatâ€™s right; Customer Care and Customer Satisfaction are dead. They have ceased to be an important part of todayâ€™s corporate philosophy and are quickly being replaced with a “we donâ€™t care what you think, give us your money, you have no choice” attitude. Let me detail for you the events that have happened in the last few months that have given me my current perspective on Customer Care.

First there are the Fast Food, Movie Theater, Gas Station Attendant, Grocery Store, Bank Teller, type of reps. Weâ€™ll call them â€œStandersâ€! These â€œStandersâ€ have never been trained in Customer Service, never been trained on how to make a customer happy or deal with an escalated situation or even how to present them selves to the customer on a face to face basis. No, they are simply given a uniform and told to stand in one place and do Job-A or Job-B, nothing more! I understand the difficulty of providing the people that come in with, what I would consider as Adequate Customer Service Training, due to the increasing amount of turnover with the young people of today. However, the supervisors of these establishments should be taking more pride in where they work (weather they like where they work or not). This means that they should be giving there new employees a simple run through on Customer Service Skills, Ways of Communicating, proper Presentation of Oneâ€™s Self in a public atmosphere and above all, How to handle a difficult customer. Some other points that should be trained are Appearance and Pride in your Work-Place. All of these skills are being pushed to the wayside. As I see it the only reason is that the corporations are more interested in making the all-mighty dollar instead of building solid relationships with its customer base. What they are failing to realize is that if you build that customer relationship up you will gain more revenue. This is because the happier the customer is to come to the establishment the more they will come and the more money they will be willing to spend. You may have to make a few short term sacrifices to gain long term goals but so what. So you have to give a few tickets away to a few customers, comp a few meals or return a few over draft fees. If this is handled correctly the customer will walk away feeling refreshed that his concern was met, his situation was resolved and he was compensated for the inconvenience. What is happening instead is that the customer is walking away more aggravated and more irritated than when he first filed the complaint! This is in part due to the supervisors thinking that if they make this persons experience unpleasant they will A.) Never return and they wont have to face them again or B.) If they return, they will never complain because they will not want to re-live the previous unpleasant experience. Sooner or later these companies are going to experience a decrease in there customer base, this will be directly due to the customers that they have driven away. With Blogs and personal websites becoming more and more popular and Pod-casts becoming the next generation in evolving news and gossip, you run into a situation where you get a disgruntled customer that voices his opinion over the web and it is relayed to several others that have had similar experiences, then they voice there opinions and so on and so on. Then you have Forums telling people where to go and where not to go. This is all something that Corporate America is overlooking. If anything with the ease of Web base complaints and the flow of information from the customer base these corporations should be ramping up there Customer Service Training and trying harder to gain that customer base and keep the flow of customers coming. But, enough on the â€œStandersâ€ for now! Lets move to the worst Customer Service industry of all and the one that will be the most difficult to train. That would be the Medical profession. Weâ€™ll call these folks â€œSittersâ€! These people have nothing to loose because we are always in need of Doctors, Optometrist and Dental professionals. They can treat you like crap because they know that they will continue to have a customer base regardless of the amount of people that they piss off. The worst part is you canâ€™t train these people. Most of them have been doing this for so long that they will refuse to be trained no matter how hard you try. And to make matters worse, they will train a whole new generation of people that will be taking over there job to handle customers in the same way. These â€œSittersâ€ have no fear of you not returning and in some cases are happy if you choose to never visit them again. There employment is not based on customer satisfaction, they donâ€™t hand out surveys that say â€œHow am I doingâ€ and allow you to drop it in a box for there management to see. They simply exist to process the information for the Officeâ€™s and Insurance companies. The thought of calling a patient to tell them that there appointment was canceled over a week ago never crosses there mind. They will let you take time off of work, drive all the way out there andÂ then tell you at that point your appointment has been canceled. The people have been conditioned by the years of service in this industry to have no remorse for there actions. They are devoid of any and all emotion when they encounter an upset patient. I really feel for some of the older or more handicapped individuals that plan for these appointments. They have a hard enough time getting around there own home much less driving across town to a doctors office. To be told at the last second as you walk in that your appointment has been canceled is just outrageous. However, you will not see any change in this field. They will continue to treat each and every person like crap because thatâ€™s all they know how to do.

So as you see, the world of Customer care and Customer Satisfaction are truly dead. At least from my perspective! Now donâ€™t get me wrong, I am not saying that EVERY place on the planet is like this. I have run into some very friendly places and when I do I take a moment and let them know how good of a job they did. Then I make sure to tell as many people as I know how good the Customer Service was at that place. I do the same for the bad places. This way word of mouth spreads the information like it has for yearsÂ and the customer base hopefully goes to the correct (good) places and away from those that do not deserve it. I hope that the people from Corporate America read this, and feel free to give me your comments about your feelings toward the Customer Service of today. I have a feeling that I will find several people that have the same thoughts as me.

No Comments

Warren Theaters Pisses me off AGAIN!

Posted on June 27, 2007 by under Family, Life, Movies, News.

Warren Theaters has a knack of pissing me off. Below is an e-mail I sent to there coperate office. I think the e-mail explains everything.

Just for the record this will be the third time that the event that I will lay out to you has happened and the 2nd time that I have filed a complaint about it.Â

I am very disappointed in the way that your theater is currently conducting business. As I stated before this is the third time that I have had this problem. Iâ€™ll start by telling you that I am an avid movie watcher and probably visit your theater about 5 to 6 times a month, and most of that is balcony seating. Each time I call and ask your customer service when the tickets will be on sale. Lately I call several times a week because each time I call I get a different answer. The first time I called it was about the last â€œPirates of the Caribbeanâ€. I stopped by after work on Wednesday the week before the movie was to start and was told that the tickets would be on sale the following Tuesday. I show up on Tuesday and find out that Tickets had been on sale since the previous Thursday, the day AFTER I came up and inquired about when the tickets would be sold. Needless to say I was very upset and almost did not get any seats. The second time was with the second â€œFantastic 4â€. Again, I called on Wednesday and asked when the tickets will be sold. They advised me on the phone that it would be on Tuesday. This time I stop by the next day and see if the tickets are on sale (Just in case they are sold in advance again). And I was told Tuesday again by the man at the counter. So I figure that Tuesday is good and show up after work on Tuesday and ask for tickets. This time Iâ€™m told that tickets would not be sold until Wednesday or Thursday. Again, I was frustrated at the misinformation that I was told. My wife was frustrated enough that she filed a complaint on this web site and provided my number for the contact. I was called by a very rude supervisor that told me that they have never sold tickets on a Tuesday (Which is incorrect because I have been coming to this theater for years and have purchased tickets on ranging from the week before to the Tuesday of) and that I was mistaken in the information that I heard. Not that I was misinformed but that I heard the information incorrectly. This infuriated me that this supervisor would treat me in this manor. Now the current issue, I had called On Thursday again and asked when the tickets would be on Sale for the 4th of July. They stated on the phone that it would be Wednesday. So I call today before I get off work and was told by a lady that the tickets for â€œTransformersâ€ were on sale. I specifically asked if they were on sale for the 4th of July and was told yes. I looked at your website and saw that the show times were available for the 3rd, 4th and 5th of July for â€œTransformersâ€. So I go to the 13th ave Warren (this is where all this happens if I didnâ€™t mention it before) and go to the counter and ask for tickets. This time I am told that the tickets are not on sale until Friday, maybe Thursday â€œIf Iâ€™m Luckyâ€. At this point I think maybe he was not aware of the web site displaying the tickets being on sale and pointed that out. He said that it didnâ€™t matter what the web site said, he could only sell tickets for the 2nd (a special showing). I immediately asked for a Supervisor. About 10 minutes later a Supervisor showed up and I explained that I had called today 15 min before I drove up there and asked if they were selling tickets specifically for the 4th of July and was told yes and that when I got here I was told no. She tried to tell me that itâ€™s not in the system and they didnâ€™t have any Showtimeâ€™s available. I explained to her that the web site showed all times for the 3rd 4th and 5th. She had to take a min and go downstairs and check the computer for herself. She then came back up with a series of printouts and could not explain why the Showtimeâ€™s were there and not available in the system. She just told me that they didnâ€™t know what they were going to drop yet and that this was the proposed times for the movie. She took my name and number and stated that she would call me when the tickets became available for sale (Iâ€™m not holding my breath for a return call).

Needless to say I found that this is a form of false advertising. You are claiming that you have something for sale that is truly not for sale. I will purchase tickets for â€œTransformersâ€, to be exact I will be purchasing 8 balcony tickets (this is pretty standard, I have several family and friends that go to the movies with me). However, this will be the last time I purchase tickets from your theater. The turnaround time from theater to DVD is fast enough now that I can patiently wait for it to come out on DVD and enjoy it in my home with out the hassle and frustration that I am currently going through. If you want to call me about this then I would be happy to discuss it with a member of your corporate office. If you are going to have one of your supervisors from the 13th ave Warren call me then save it. I have already talked to them and it has yet to be a pleasant experience.

Dinner and Bowling

Posted on June 23, 2007 by under Family, Flickr.

Dinner and bowling tonight was a lot of fun. It turned out better than I expected.

Last month, Brian and I received a free dinner certificate from Kobe. It was addressed to Brian for his birthday. Neither of us could figure out how they got his information. I mean, they knew his name, date of birth, and our address — that’s a lot of detail considering that it has been a few years since we’ve been there.

When Jen was over picking up some clothes last weekend, I mentioned to her that Brian and I would be dining at Kobe’s sometime to redeem his free birthday dinner certificate. She thought it would be a great opportunity for everyone to get together. Mom had mentioned getting together for some bowling so we all agreed to do it on the same night.

Before we knew it, there was twelve of us going to dinner. Brian’s parents came, Chad, Ray, Jen, Jan, Carla, Paul, mom, and dad all came. I was actually amazed that we got dad to come out. He usually doesn’t ever leave the house. Dinner was great. The food was pretty good and our chef wasn’t bad either. Probably the only thing that could’ve made it better was if I were able to drink. 😉

Jan didn’t go to the Alley with the rest of us because one of the puppy buyers was potentially coming over that evening to get Tips and Walnut. Donna and Carla decided not to bowl, but the rest of us did. I was actually surprised that dad decided to bowl. He gave up bowling a couple of years ago. I guess he couldn’t just sit and watch. He rented shoes and found himself a house ball. It was fun. Dad had the highest score on the first game (amazing considering he was using a house ball), and Ray had the highest score on the second game. Ray almost bowled a 200, but even though he didn’t (he ended up scoring a 184) he still smoked everyone.

I didn’t do too badly considering it has been at least three years since I bowled last. My first game was a 134 and my second game was a 154, so I bowled about my average. Mom is right, you don’t really lose it. It’s just like riding a bike.

I think I’d like to get into bowling again. When I get out of school and I have more spare time, maybe. It would be fun to join a league… Or maybe just bowl for fun more often than once every three years. I probably won’t be going to the Alley for bowling, though. Their rates are much higher than everyone else’s.

Anyway, it’s a thought.

Celebrating with Family

Posted on June 17, 2007 by under Family, Flickr.

Here are some select pictures from our family gathering yesterday. We were celebrating Brian’s birthday, his grandmother’s birthday, and Father’s Day all in one. You may view all the photos here.

Everyone met up at B&C BBQ for lunch. Everyone being Brian’s grandparents, Brian’s parents, Chad, Brian and I. Mom and dad came, too. So that was nice. It usually takes an act of God to get dad out of the house. I’m really glad they could make it.

We gave everyone their gifts which Brian and I purchased and wrapped almost a month ago. We went the easy route this time and just got movies for all the dads. We got Happy Feet for grandpa, Smokin’ Aces for Dave, and The Greatest Game Ever Played for my dad. Since everyone is getting into golf, Logan and Jen included, we figured it would be appropriate. Plus, it is such a great movie. (more…)

Curse of the Golden Flower

Posted on June 16, 2007 by under Movies, Reviews.

Curse of the Golden Flower

“Who told you this movie is good?” That was Brian’s first reaction upon watching Curse of the Golden Flower. I guess he didn’t like it. I liked it, though. If you think your family is dysfunctional, you ought to watch this movie. It will make you feel better. LOL.

Hey, at least this movie is dubbed in English so Brian didn’t have to endure reading subtitles. Unlike Pan’s Labyrinth. Brian’s main complaint on that one was that it should have been dubbed in English. I’m sure they’ll release an English-dubbed version eventually.

Despite having to read subtitles, Brian paid enough attention to the movie to recognize the religious references. He commented about Ofelia’s true father, the king, being a God-like figure; her mother being a metaphor for Mary; and her infant brother being a representation of the baby Jesus. While his observation is on a more literal or physical level, I observed something similar. Taking it a step further the story line itself reminds of biblical, religious stories about the origin of man I was often told as a child. Only this time, you add fantasy and special effects and turn it into a fairy tale.

Princess Moanna, the daughter of the king of the underworld, ventures to the human world above to experience what it is like to be mortal. While living on the surface, she forgets about her previous life. She grows old and dies as a mortal, but the king believes that her spirit will return someday. Her spirit returns in the form of Ofelia. Ofelia has to pass several test in order to prove that her “essence is intact” before she can return to live with her father in the underwold.

Basically, Ofelia represents the children of God–mortals like you and I living in this world. We came from the heavenly kingdom but now we are here. Before we can return to heaven (for those folks who believe there is such a thing), we must prove ourselves. We face trials and tribulations each day of our lives. These are like the tasks or tests that Ofelia had to complete. Our choices demonstrate what we are made of, whether we have moral fortitude–whether our “essence is intact” so to speak. In the end, how we have lived our lives determines if we are worthy of returning to our Father in the heavenly kingdom.

Anyway, I was telling this to Brian and his reaction was “Have you been smoking dope and why aren’t you sharing?” Of course, I haven’t. The parallels just seemed glaringly obvious to me. Watch the movie and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It makes perfect sense.

Beyond the surface of the movie (a fairy tale loving child with a wild imagination cannot cope with the environment that she has been cast into and has gone completely insane) there is a definite religious tone. I think the closing throne scene with the mother, father, and baby–how the scene was costumed and presented–hammers this idea home. Like, if you don’t get the moral of the story we’re going to hammer it into you real obvious-like.

I don’t know. You watch the movie and tell me what you think.

« Older Entries «


text:
Where healthy mouths and beautiful smiles lead to better lives.

Restorative Therapy

Brushy Creek Dentistry offers a wide range of treatment to help restore your smile to a functional and esthetic state. At times, a cavity, gum disease, missing teeth, or an infection in a tooth can damage your smile. Below are treatment options we recommend and perform to restore your smile. Please call our office if you have any questions regarding any of these services.

Tooth Colored Fillings

If Dr. Hamamcy finds that you have a cavity and are in need of a filling to restore the tooth, she will use a tooth-colored resin composite material. This material will allow for her to create a natural-looking filling that is nearly invisible to the naked eye as well as strengthen the weakened tooth as it is bonded to the enamel. The composite material used in tooth-colored fillings is bonded directly to the existing tooth, allowing for a better fit and an increase in the structural strength of the remaining tooth.

If you have silver or mercury fillings and are interested in replacing them with tooth-colored restorations, call our office and schedule an examination. Dr. Hamamcy will determine if it makes sense to replace your existing fillings and discuss a plan for your treatment if it is appropriate. Our goal is to improve your overall health, so we will take care in recommending the correct course of treatment for your specific needs.

Image result for composite dental fillings images

If your tooth has decay that is too large or too close to the nerve to restore with a traditional filling, Dr. Hamamcy may recommend a crown. A dental crown is sometimes also called a cap and it covers the entire visible portion of your tooth. This restoration is then cemented in place so it will look and feel like your natural tooth. Crowns can also be used when your tooth has been fractured and will restore the original form and function. These crowns can be made of many materials, but are most commonly made from porcelain. Ask Dr. Hamamcy about the different options available for crown materials and how they can affect the look of your smile.

Image result for crown and bridge

A dental bridge is used to replace one or more missing teeth with lab-fabricated artificial teeth. These restorations allow you to correct “holes” in your smile and can literally bridge the gap between your remaining teeth. Like a crown, a bridge can be made from many materials, including porcelain, gold, alloys or a combination of these. Replacing missing teeth can help to maintain the shape of your face as well as prevent further dental issues by keeping your remaining teeth in their correct alignment. Ask Dr. Hamamcy if a bridge is the right option for you!

Image result for crown and bridge

Dentures and Partials

If you’ve lost all of your natural teeth, a complete denture can replace your missing teeth and give you back your smile. There are many reasons for tooth loss. Regardless of whether you have suffered from periodontal disease, tooth decay or even an injury or trauma, replacing your missing teeth will benefit your appearance and your health. A denture will give your mouth and jaw the structure it needs to keep your face looking healthy and natural. Your teeth and gums keep your facial muscles in place. Without dentures, these muscles start to sag and typically make a person appear older.

Removable partial dentures usually consist of replacement teeth attached to pink or gum-colored plastic bases, which are connected by metal framework. Removable partial dentures attach to your natural teeth with metal clasps or devices called precision attachments. Precision attachments are generally more esthetic than metal clasps and they are nearly invisible. At Brushy Creek Dentistry, we believe that it is important to save your natural teeth whenever possible. A partial denture will allow Dr. Hamamcy to replace the missing teeth while maintaining as much of your natural smile as possible. Schedule your visit with our office today to find out more.

Image result for crown and bridge Image result for removable full denture

Our Office

15534 Ranch Rd 620, Ste 300
Round Rock, TX 78717

Contact Us

15534 Ranch Rd 620, Ste 300
Round Rock, TX 78717

p. 512.580.9200
f. 512.580.9201


text:
Home   |   About Bucks   |   Site Map     Twitter Facebook

Bucks County News

Office of Public Information

Bucks County Issues "Code Blue" Weather Declaration From Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2017 to Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018

December 26, 2017

The National Weather Service has predicted extreme cold throughout the upcoming week, an extended period of time that portends frigid conditions. Given that forecast, the Bucks County Emergency Management Agency (EMA) joins the County Health Department and Advocates for the Homeless and Those in Need (AHTN) to issue a “Code Blue” declaration. This Code Blue declaration will cover the period of 7 p.m. on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 through 7 a.m. on Tuesday, January 2, 2018.

The EMA has notified the December, 2017 on-call churches, Emmaus Rd. Lutheran Church in Levittown, Neshaminy Warwick Presbyterian Church in Warminster and Quakertown Masonic Lodge to activate their emergency shelters. Beginning on January 1, 2018, the host church in lower Bucks will be Woodside Church in Yardley. The on-call church volunteers will coordinate transportation, temporary shelter, food and other necessities.

In addition, County Emergency Management Director Scott Forster and Health Director Dr. David Damsker have notified local public safety officials of the Code Blue declaration. They advise all residents to be aware of another period of severe weather conditions. County residents are urged to check on their elderly neighbors and pets during this period of extremely cold weather.

Bucks County On-Call Churches for Code Blue

December 1, 2017
December 31, 2017

For more information on shelters:

Advocates for Homeless and Those in Need:

Coalition to Shelter and Support the Homeless:

Upper Bucks Information:

Emmaus Rd. Lutheran Church
2185 Bristol Oxford Valley Rd.
Levittown, PA 19057

Starting January 1, 2018
Woodside Church
1667 Edgewood Rd.
Yardley, PA 19067

AHTN Number: 215-550-3868

(Doors open at 9 p.m.)

Neshaminy Warwick Presbyterian Church
1401 Meetinghouse Rd.
Warminster, PA 18974

Central Info: 866-390-0291

(Doors open at 7:30 p.m.)

Quakertown Masonic Lodge
(Permanent Location)
501 W. Broad St.
Quakertown, PA 18951

Upper Bucks #: 267-450-5191

(Doors open at 9 p.m.)

For additional shelter information, please call the homeless hotline at 1-800-810-4434. For general cold weather information, please check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website: www.emergency.cdc.gov/disasters/winter


text:
Who was Dr. Budwig?
Recommended Books
Share Your Recipes
How You Can Help
The Making of the DVD
In the Media
Contact Us
Life-saving! It clearly shows how a coffee enema, a cottage cheese and flaxseed oil mixture, etc...
Fabulous!!!! Easy to read, well organized, full of beneficial information...

Colorful Egg Salad

< see more recipes

Colorful Egg Salad

Ingredients for 2 servings:

  • 3 hard boiled eggs
  • 1 small yellow pepper
  • ½ bunch of radishes
  • ½ bunch of chives
  • 80 g fat quark
  • 5 tablespoons of omega-3 oil of your choice
  • 6 tablespoons milk
  • 2 tsp Dijon mustard
  • 1 tablespoon tamari or other mild soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • ½ tsp acacia honey
  • freshly ground pepper
  • some seasoned salt

Grab the eggs from the pan and coarsely chop them. Peel, wash and dice the pepper. Wash the radishes and cut into slices. Wash the chives, cut into small rings and mix everything in a bowl together.

Make a salad dressing from the fat quark, milk, omega-3 linseed oil, mustard, lemon juice, Tamari sauce and honey. Quickly whisk all ingredients together until no more oil is visible for a smooth consistency.

Now add the salad dressing to the eggs and vegetable mixture and stir gently. Season with a little salt and possibly pepper to taste and serve.

Add something mild like curry powder and chopped coriander to the salad dressing for a fine, exotic touch.

European Residents: You can buy Dr. Johanna Budwig Omega-3 DHA mit Zitrone at dr-johanna-budwig.de

from the Budwig Foundation, Germany

Add a Comment
©2010 UEscher Productions. All Rights Reserved.


text:
Friday, April 15, 2011

A New Church

Posted below, you will find a narrative from Bruce Wood, followed by a set of plans for the new church. A set of plans is also on display at the Parish House.

Please take some time to review the plans before May 1st, when the entire congregation will be meeting to vote on them. If you have questions, please post a comment here, or send an email to We strongly encourage you to ask as many questions as possible, so that Bruce can be prepared to address them on May 1st.

Thank you!
The Building Committee

1 comment:

  1. Will there be explanation/discussion of the committee's apparent decision to abandon the timber frame portion of the plan? In my view this is a huge decision of far greater importance than many of the small details of design that received lengthy discussion. It is also a stated part of Bruce's proposal on this page, which I thought was what was voted on by the congregation.
    Thanks, John Bye


text:
Thursday, December 22, 2011

Making progress

Construction on our new church is coming along nicely! Conrad Liebenow, our chairperson, has put together a graphic schedule of when each phase of the project will be completed, and has also included a number of photos from the construction process thus far. All of this is at the Parish House, for your viewing pleasure.

We'll be posting Conrad's photos on our blog soon, so that you can see how far along the building has come. The sitework and drainage channels are complete. The foundation has been poured, insulated, and dressed with stone. The floor system, trusses, and walls will go up in the next couple of weeks, so very soon, you'll be able to see the progress from Route 9. Now that the foundation is set and backfilled, Kent Hicks and his crew will be able to continue their work into the winter, getting the structure closed in so that work on the inside of the building can continue.

Stay tuned for more frequent construction updates in the new year!

  1. May I ask how things are going? I hope the new church is rising from the ashes and the community is excited about its return.

  2. Hi, Rod!
    Thanks for checking in. We've made quite a lot of progress; this blog isn't updated as frequently as our Facebook page is. You may want to check out some of the photos there (see the link in the post above).

    All the best,
    The BC


text:
I hope I won’t be to cliché if I say all humans want to be heard and accepted the way they are. As much if not more we want to be heard in Tango. I came to tango to learn how to listen to another person through following. Years later I started leading and learned it also requires listening to your partner.  Regardless of role, we are all looking for a similar connection and experience the moment we embrace. Upon reflection, it was determined that we need terms for the Roles that reflect truth the most, that define only the sides of each role that are truly different.

As we see it, one initiates the movement, so we call them Initiator. And their partner completes the movement, so we address them as Completer. This new terminology is the beginning of an exciting project for us and hopes for all.

We are intrigued and excited to use these terms for our marathon and invite you to also consider new possibilities for tango dancers and the evolution of the dance. ~Iryna

Initiator = Leader. Completer = Follower.

Marathon Pass is $140 per person and $280 per couple.

All followers and couple passes are SOLD OUT. There are few LEADERS passes are still AVAILABLE. Do not miss is register NOW! Followers are welcome to join the waiting list by sending email to We apologize for the inconvenience.

During payment please do not check the “Paying for goods or a service” box so that we may receive the full amount for your registration.

You will receive a confirmation email immediately after registration is complete. Please check your inbox (and don’t forget spam folder). If you have not received an email, contact us at

Individual Registration

Your Primary Role
Initiator (leader)

I agree to have my first name and country/state included on a public list of attendees

Refund policy

Payment is fully refundable until December 1, 2018, 50% refund from December 2 through December 15. No refunds starting December 16, 2018. Passes can always be transferred to a dancer in the same role (initiator/completer)

id=”349″ title=”Tango_initiator”


text:
• date_rangePosted On :   May 09' 2010
  • location_cityCity :   Singapore
  • languageCountry :   Singapore
  • content_pasteEnquiry No. :   B-105761

We require wasted plastic bag
For immediate buying decisions,
Could you please send us your current products available including
CIF/FOB prices, delivery times, minimum order quantity
and payment terms via email.
Look forward to hear from you soon.

Ready to buy Packing Bags

date_range Feb 15' 2019/  UK

Ours is a Beauty Salon offering Haircut, Nails art, Beauty, Skincare, Makeup and Aromatherapy Massage etc. Please have a look at our website for further details.We need to buy...
Wanted Flat Handle Kraft Paper Bags

date_range Jan 23' 2019/  Estonia

We are Estonia based company. We are advertising gifts & goods importer and wholesaler of various products. Please have a look at our website for more details. We are searching suppliers...
Paper Carry Bags

date_range Jan 09' 2019/  Israel

We are Israel based agency engaged in import export activities. Presently we need to import Brown Kraft Paper Bag of weight 70 grams having flat handles. We would prefer to...
Buying Eco friendly Mesh Bags

date_range Jan 02' 2019/  Saudi Arabia

We are a venture of young entrepreneurs. We supply best and verified date palm tissue culture from Saudi Arabia. Please make a visit to our website for further details. We...


text:
Dolac Home
Buying FAQ
Email Me
Browse: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Alt

Buy Dolac Online
No Prior Prescription Required

Dolac is a medication commonly known by the generic name Ketorolac. It is also marketed globally under the names Acular, Dolotor, Findol, Ketorol, Ketorolaco, Ketorolacum, Lixidol, Supradol, Toradel, Toradol, Trodorol as well as generic Ketorolac.

Dolac (Ketorolac) is used to relieve pain and reduce inflammation (swelling). It is used for a short time to treat headache, dental pain, sports-related injuries, and other painful conditions. Your pharmacist may know of alternate uses for Dolac (Ketorolac). Click for more Dolac details. shows potential sources for you when buying Dolac online. You can buy quality prescription Dolac at substantial savings through international pharmacies, leaders in discount drugs online. International pharmacies may not require you to provide a prescription, and may provide one if needed. *Please verify your local import regulations; the ability for a pharmacy to offer a medication without a prescription does not negate any local requirement you may have.

A brand of Dolac labelled as Acular by Allergan, 2care4 Aps, and Allergan Phar/Cals Irel, Errkes Ey.Dro.Sol produced by Verisfield Uk Ltd, and Ketovision manufactured by Omnivision are at Goldpharma

Acular0.5 %5ml solution$14.17Order
Acular3.39 mg3x5ml solution$67.65Order
Acular Eye Dr.Sol0.5 %1 suspension$8.95Order
Errkes Ey.Dro.Sol0.5 %10ml solution$7.53Order
Ketovision3.39 mg5ml solution$32.69Order

A brand of Dolac labelled as Acular Ls, Ketanov, and Ketorol are at Freedom Pharmacy

MedicationStrengthQuantityPriceFreedom Pharmacy
Acular Ls0.4% w/ v2 x 5ml eye drops$53.30Order
Acular Ls0.4% w/ v4 x 5ml eye drops$66.43Order
Acular Ls0.4% w/ v5ml eye drops$46.69Order
Ketanov10 mg100 tablets$79.01Order
Ketanov10 mg200 tablets$115.49Order
Ketanov10 mg400 tablets$164.35Order
Ketorol10 mg200 tablets$98.42Order

Select product to buy or click here to look for Dolac sources

|Home| |About| |FAQ|

Copyright 2014.

NOTICE: By using this site, you agree to verify and comply with your country's rules and regulations should you undertake to purchase from any of the listed pharmacies.


text:
The Buzz

All markets and investing news all the time

SolarCity surges to new high

May 13, 2013: 11:24 AM ET

SolarCity's stock has nearly quadrupled since the company went public in December.

Talk about a warm-up.

Investors can't seem to get enough of companies that harness the sun's power. Shares of SolarCity (SCTY) soared to an all-time high of $31.89 on Monday.

The company has only been public for five months and shares have nearly quadrupled from their $8 IPO price back in December.

Related: SolarCity CEO talks the future of solar power

SolarCity, which installs solar panels, is still among the smaller players but it does have Elon Musk as its chairman. Most people associate Musk with electric car maker Tesla (TSLA), which has also been on a tear.

Solar companies have struggled in recent years in the face of rising competition from cheaper solar panels manufactured in China.

SolarCity will issue its second quarterly report as a public company after the market closes Monday. Analysts expect SolarCity to report a loss of 26 cents a share on $29 million of revenue.

Investors are already looking beyond the quarter to see what SolarCity, and other solar firms, plan to do next. Most recently, SolarCity completed two projects in Sacramento and announced plans to install solar panels on up to 6,500 homes in Marine and Navy bases in Hawaii.

Shares of other solar firms were energized by SolarCity Monday. Shares of First Solar (FSLR), SunPower Corp. (SPWR), LDK Solar (LDK) and ReneSola (SOL) were on the rise.

StockTwits traders had plenty to say about solar.

Solar on fire today. $SPWR $FSLR $TSL $GTAT $YGE $CSIQ all trading w volume greater than 1 million today! $JASO & $SCTY at .5M

$SCTY i warned shorts on saturday...did they

Ahhh yes. Who could forget about the shorts. Fandango, you might have a point here. It will be interesting to see what happens after the bell.

$SCTY $TSLA eventually the hype around Musk will come back to reality, when everyone realizes that these companies have financial statements Bearish

Everyone's a critic. Though I can't completely disagree. The forecast for SolarCity is for a loss, and yes, while Tesla is on fire for now, will the Model S be enough to keep that momentum going?

Only time will tell.

The "Elon Musk" ETF making new all-time highs again. Keep in mind that $SCTY reports after the close today.

$SCTY wonder if there were some dumbo front running shorts made big bets the last few days? time to rev up the chain saw

Between shorts and Musk, some traders are opting out of the rally...for now.

$TSLA $SCTY If Solar City misses or meets expectations we should see a pullback in both stocks on Tuesday. Looking for reentry then.

Fear & Greed
Sponsored by

To view my watchlist

Not a member yet?

Sign up now for a free account
Stupid Stock Move of the Day
#StupidStock Move of the Day! Yes, Urban Outfitters may be finally turnings things around. But $URBN up 17%? Seems a bit excessive, no?
Most Popular
Powered by VIP.


text:
24-Year-Old Lady Sparks Envy after ‘Overprotective’ Dad Goes to Bar Party to Keep Her Safe

It is said that no matter how old you might get, you will always be a baby to your parents’ eyes – and that’s a sweet thing, actually.

One lady who hails from Tamnag, Sultan Kudarat in southern Philippines recently went viral after her ‘overprotective’ dad accompanies her to a bar party to keep her safe.

Xiannie Delfin wrote on Facebook:

Photo credit: Xiannie Delfin / Facebook

Ang papa kong overprotective

Iba talaga basta pulis yung tatay mo kahit sinabi ko na mag chichill lang kmi ,sasama talaga sya kasi daw baka malasing ako.

Hindi ko alam kung maawa ako sayo kasi parang ang lonely mo tingnan or, mahihiya ako kase kahit 24 years old na ako, meron akong body guard na kasama haha

Photo credit: Xiannie Delfin / Facebook

A lot of netizens gushed over the post, commenting that they wished they had parents like that who many might think as strict for accompanying their grown up daughter to the bar with friends but are actually just doting parents who want to make sure their children are alright.

Xiannie further revealed:

Before mo pina andar yung sasakyan hinanap mo pa kung saan yung cap mo, ang purpose mo pala is para hindi ka makikilala sa inuman (huli ko na nagets)

Before umalis ng bahay ang sabi mo lalayo kalang saakin para hindi ako mahihiya, pag dating don, lumayo ka ngang talaga

Thank you pa.

True enough, the photos she shared show that her dad sat far away from their group and pretended he didn’t know them, letting them have fun on their own while he still kept a watchful eye. Should the group get drunk at the end of the party, he’s there to make sure they get back home safe.

Photo credit: Xiannie Delfin / Facebook

After some time, her dad messaged that he ordered sisig and she could get some for the group. He also said he paid for the items he ordered.

Isn’t it sweet to have such a wonderful dad protecting you, even if you’re already an adult?

Photo credit: Xiannie Delfin / Facebook

True enough, the post went viral with over 28k reactions (mostly ‘love’ reactions) and 7.7k shares.


text:
‘Eat Bulaga’ Scholar Goes Viral, Tops November 2018 Civil Engineering Board Exams

Many students have proven for years that poverty is never a hindrance to success. You can find many ways so you can still go to school even if your parents could not afford to send you to school.

Recently, a young man who is proud to announce that he is a scholar of GMA’s popular noontime show “Eat Bulaga!” went viral for topping the November 2018 Civil Engineering Board Exams.

Jaydee Niere Lucero graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. He passed the board exams with a rating of 97.20%, topping the list of over 6,000 exam passers. The board exams for Civil Engineering were held last November 10 and 11, 2018.

Out of 13,887 takers, only 6,262 examinees were able to pass the rigid tests.

After passing the board exams and topping the list of examinees, the new civil engineer posted a heartfelt “thank you” letter to the people who had helped him reach where he is now in life.

First, he thanked Eat Bulaga! for supporting him the past 9 years he spent in school.

Photo credit: Jaydee Lucero / Facebook

Sa Eat Bulaga, sa pagpapaaral ninyo sa akin (at sa aming mga EBEST scholars) for the past 9 years. Hindi ko marahil mararating ang tagumpay na ito kung hindi dahil sa inyo, thank you po!” Lucero wrote.

The young man also thanked the many people, Facebook groups, and teachers/reviewers who were instrumental to his success.

Sa UP Diliman, especially sa Institute of Civil Engineering (at sa thesis adviser kong si sir Hernandez) for bringing out the best in us, at sa suporta. Maraming salamat din po!” he wrote.

Sa Camarin High School, Camarin D Elementary School at Wisdom Kindergarten Haus, at sa lahat ng mga teachers ko na humubog sa akin through the years, salamat po!

He also thanked those who let him borrow calculators for the review and board exams as well as those who gave him inspiration throughout his studies and review days.

At sa lahat ng mga taong nagbibigay ng support at motivation sa akin (hindi ko na kayo mamemention lahat kasi marami kayo), maraming maraming salamat po!

Source: Jaydee Lucero / FacebookGood News Pilipinas


text:
Free Sunny VrayforC4D Interior Scene

Download this free VrayForC4D Sunny Interior scene, which I guess was also created by the official vray team.

What does the download contain?

- Scene setup as seen in preview

- All Vray C4D Materials and Textures
- Lightning Setup
- All 3D Models

0 reacties:

Een reactie posten


text:
Stax is a global strategy consulting firm, with an international clientele and a well-defined set of proficiencies in private equity due diligence and corporate strategy. Stax hired Cabengo to re-develop its current, dated website into a more effective marketing and information resource that would enhance the firm’s reputation among clients and prospects, help directors in their sales efforts, recruit talent, and showcase Stax’s thought leadership across multiple industry verticals.

Cabengo worked closely with the client team to define business goals and user needs as well as articulate the firm’s positioning, messages, and key differentiators in the context of competitors. We prioritized target users and developed user stories to help articulate how target users would interact with the site and how the site could support their goals.
We then translated high-level strategy into specific requirements for content and functionality. Based on specifications, we developed a logical architecture and advised on content.

Cabengo created a crisp, clean interface for the public frontend, including an updated wordmark. To promote long-term design integrity, we created a series of flexible interior templates with pre-defined image sizes. To ensure consistency across media, we developed a suite of integrated marketing materials for print and digital collateral. We implemented the site using WordPress as the CMS.