Home » April, 2010
You are currently browsing entries posted in: April, 2010
Gene Savoy, the discoverer of Pajaten, was an explorer, not a professional archaeologist. He first heard tales of mysterious ruins in the Andes from Peruvian hunters and outlaws. Savoy had already suspected that the eastern slopes of the Andes had once been inhabited by pre-Colombian civilizations and, in 1962, he made a flight over the [...]
“…if we conceive the world in that vast extension you give it, it is impossible that man conserve himself therein in this honorable rank, on the contrary, he shall consider himself along with the entire earth he inhabits as in but a small, tiny and in no proportion to the enormous size of the rest. [...]
“Why did yankee doodle stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni? Back in Pre-Revolutionary America when the song ‘Yankee Doodle’ was first popular, the singer was not referring to the pasta ‘macaroni’ in the line that reads ‘stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.’ ‘Macaroni’ was a fancy (‘dandy’) [...]
Christina of Sweden( 1626-89) was the paradoxical monarch. ”Astrologers predict she will be a boy, and when she is born with a caul over her pelvis, she is believed at first to be a boy. Her mother rejects her because she is ugly and a girl; her father decides immediately, that she, his only child, [...]
Charles Dickens’s novels are far more crowded with orphaned children than the usefulness of having such malleable and pathetic agents in a work of fiction would seem to demand. In ”David Copperfield” , for example, Em’ly, Traddles, the Orfling, Mrs. Copperfield, Martha Endell, and Rosa Dartle are all orphans; Agnes and Dora have no mother; [...]
”But archaeologists are trained to keep their noses to the ground, preferably below ground. Their grasp of the nitty-gritty doesn’t allow them to see the wood for the trees. So they rarely find the genuine Lost Cities out in the bush and actually they hardly even go looking for them. It wouldn’t be scientific. The [...]
”There are many recorded tales and traits of the author’s infancy, but one small fact seems to me more than any other to strike the note and give the key to his whole strange character. His father found it more amusing to be an audience than to be an instructor; and instead of giving the [...]
The ancient marvels of bronze casting and sculpture could not be matched by medieval man. But, they were seen by Donatello, the sculptor who., like Ghiberti, bestrides the opening decades of the Renaissance. It was Donatello who created for the first time since antiquity a monumental bronze equestrian statue, modeled on the antique and representing, [...]
”His brief stint at the Blacking Factory haunted him all of his life — he spoke of it only to his wife and to his closest friend, John Forster — but the dark secret became a source both of creative energy and of the preoccupation with the themes of alienation and betrayal which would emerge, [...]
The late eighteenth and nineteenth century was an age that bred giants in the field of engineering. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the last and, surely, greatest of them all.His life was marked by hugely ambitious projects, unparalleled in engineering history, which tended to become even more ambitious as the years passed.Isambard Brunel ( 1806-1859 ), [...]
