With the weather starting to turn and the calendar creeping up on October, I thought I would dedicate a post to the upcoming holiday. You know the one; it's the time of year when adults act like children and children, hopped up on sugar, act like monsters. It's the scariest time of the year, with the exception of August's humidity and freshly-cut bangs... But I digress. Behold, an homage to the cowgirl, my current costume of choice for Allhallows Eve:
This makes me want to go out and rent a bunch of western movies. It's been ages since I've seen some of them, and there are several classics I've never seen. It's not like me to commit to a costume this early, so I won't. But I'm pretty stoked on the idea right now.
Did anybody see the article in the NY Times this week about this adorable man who spends his days hunting for treasure in England with a metal detector? It just goes to show, you never really know what's out there to be found!
When the discovery in Staffordshire was announced Thursday, experts described it as one of the most important in British archaeological history. They said it surpassed the greatest previous discovery of its kind, a royal burial chamber unearthed in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. That find shaped scholars' understanding of the warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of 1,300 years ago that ended up as the unified kingdom of England.
The new trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included dagger hilts, pieces of scabards and swords, helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals like eagles and fish.
Archaeologists tentatively estimated the value of the trove at 1 million pounds — about $1.6 million — but say it could be many times that. And they took a vicarious pleasure in noting that the discovery was not the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal detector.
“People laugh at metal detectorists,” Terry Herbert, 55, who made the find, said Thursday at a news conference at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, where the objects will go on display on Friday for two weeks. “I’ve had people go past and go, ‘Beep, beep, he’s after pennies.’ Well no, we’re out there to find this kind of stuff, and it is out there.”
Mr. Herbert spent 18 years scouring fields and back lots without finding anything more valuable than a piece of an ancient Roman horse harness. Now, under British laws governing the discovery of ancient treasures, he stands to get half the value of the booty. When his discovery was announced on Thursday, he kept his wish list modest, saying he would like to use some of his windfall to buy a bungalow.
Since the July day when his detector picked up traces of the hoard beneath a field in Staffordshire, a Midlands county that was at the center of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, Mr. Herbert said, he has been seeing piles of gold in his sleep. Awake, he has quietly celebrated his triumph over all the people who mocked him in the years when a typical day’s finds amounted to little but scrap.
As for his fellow hunters in the Bloxwich Research and Metal Detecting Club, he said, “I dread to think what they’ll say when they hear about this.”
He said that on the day of his discovery he reworked a mantra that he regularly used for good luck. “I have this phrase that I say sometimes — ‘Spirits of yesterday, take me where the coins appear’ — but on that day I changed ‘coins’ to ‘gold.’ I don’t know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening.”
From the Birmingham museum, the Staffordshire treasure, much of it still encrusted with dirt, will go to the British Museum in London, where the artifacts will undergo months, possibly years, of study by archaeologists and historians. A court ruling this week declared the finds to be treasure, meaning that they belong to the British crown, which is expected to offer them for sale.
The crown’s practice, established in part by the many shipwrecks recovered off Britain’s shores, is that a reward equal to the value of the items — likely to be set in a bidding war among British museums — will be divided between Mr. Herbert as the finder and the farmer who owns the field where the discovery was made. His name and the location of the farm — beyond the fact that it is around Lichfield, north of Birmingham — have not been disclosed, to allow archaeologists to continue searching the area for more treasure.
...
by John F. Burns
This is probably going to read like a really cheesy post, but I feel compelled to write it anyway. I ended up in the ER yesterday and am much better now, but it really made me realize how important my health is. I don't know what I would've done without my sister, who helped me during the whole ordeal; it's really scary when you're so sick that you can't rely on yourself. I mean, I think if you're a generally healthy person, you just don't really think about all of the amazing mechanisms that keep your body running day-to-day. On top of that and without getting into the very heated healthcare debate, I just have to say that I'm completely dreading the hospital bill that is sure to come in the mail in the next few weeks. God, and I even have insurance...
With all of this gorgeous weather we've been having in New York City lately, I've been skipping out on one of my most favorite pastimes: going to the cinema. Known in common American parlance as "the movies" or in antiquated phraseology as "the pictures," I prefer to refer to spending two hours in front of a large screen full of moving images and characters of varying degrees of relatability as America's favorite pastime. I know this will put me at odds with baseball fans, but seriously - think about it.
Anyway, aside from my somewhat feeble attempt to rather narcisitically pronounce one of my favorite activities as that of America's, I thought I would include some references to films I'm looking forward to seeing.
What could be more fun than an inside look at the manueverings of Vogue? You're probably thinking 'baseball...'
Matt Damon + quirky spy caper comedy = must see
A romance about breaking up? That's pretty much the life story of every 20-something I know!
I may be the last person I know who has yet to see this movie. I've been hesitating about it given the level of gore that Quentin Tarantino brings to his films, but it seems like one of those movies that's going to enter the collective knowledge of popoular culture, so I think I should probably see it.
