Ramat Rachel 2 - Everything you know is wrong

Ramat Rachel
Originally uploaded by fifteeniguana

As I said, Yohanan Aharoni was the first archaeologist to dig here, back in the fifties. He thought he had found an Iron Age palace belonging to Hezekiah, king of Judah around 700 bc. Problem with that logic is who builds a palace three miles from their main palace?

Oded Lipschits is running the dig now and he has a different theory. Let me exlain the layout and see if you come to the same conclusion.

What we have here is a palace (or palatial buliding, anyway), a citadel (small fort) in front of itm and in front of that something unique in Judah: imported brown topsoil with water fountains and paths: a planned garden.

So, around 700 bce, the time Judah became a vassal state of Assyria, this impressive building went up three miles from, Jerusalem the capital. It looked down on the capital, and on major trade routes. It cotinued to be occupied as Judah was taken over by the Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks. Then the Hasmonean era began and Judah was free (think of the
Maccabees and Chanukah) and the Ramat Rachel palace was destroyed by fire.

Do you see it? Oded thinks (if I understood him ocrrectly) that this wasn't a Judahite palace. It was the adminsitrative office of the occupying power, close enough to the capital to keep an eye
on it, but not in-their-faces where it would draw trouble. And as soon as they Jews liberated their country they destroyed the
occupier's palace.

Anyway, that's Oded's theory at the moment. The interesting thing about archaeology is that tomorrow's dig may change it all.

For example, on the first day they gave us a tour of the site, telling us what they thought was going on each each area (there are about eight active sites this year's season). On Thursday night we repeated the tour for a review of the week, and at one
site everything they thought they knew had been overturned in four days work.

As I understand it they were expecting to find an extension of that garden. Instead they found a trench, maybe three meters deep, five meters wide and well, after establishing that it went at least fifty meters long they stopped for a think. The photo above shows Oded at the end of the trench.

Almost certainly it is the foundation trench for an outer walll, but no
one expected to find a wall there at all. Hmm...

Ramat Rachel 1 - Digging Israel

Ramat Rachel Site D1
Originally uploaded by fifteeniguana

My wife Terri and I just spent two weeks volunteering at an archaeological dig at Ramat Rachel Israel. I am going to put up several blog entries describing the experience, so be warned.

Ramat Rachel is about halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, less than three miles from each. It is so close to the political (but not geographical) West Bank that during the 1950s several archaeologists were killed by Jordanian border guards.

The name is modern, coming from the kibbutz. During the 1940s the kibbutz decided to build a water tower on the hill. That's when they discovered the ruins. Yohanon Aharoni was the first excavator and he discovered ruins from the Iron Age (circa 700 BCE) to the Early Muslim era (say 1000 CE).

The current dig is co-sponsored by the University of Tel Aviv and the University of Heidelberg. Oded Lipschits is the archaeologist in charge, alias the Boss Boss Boss.

The photo above shows an early morning at D1, the section of the site where I was working (click on it for more detail). Oded is the gentleman in the middle with the camera. If you are interested, read along and you will learn a lot more about the experience.
By the way, Keren, a volunteer with much more energy than me actually live blogged throughout the four weeks of the dig. Read it (with plenty of pix) here.

Zombies of the Comics Page

I subscribe to two papers. I recently discovered I could save time without cutting back on my Mirth Quota by skipping all the zombie comics. I define those as any comic strip that is neither written nor drawn by an original creator. Here are the ones in my two papers:

BC
Beetle Bailey
Blondie
Dennis the Menace
Frank and Earnest
Hagar the Horrible
Herman
Peanuts (okay, orignal writer/artist, but they are reruns)
Prince Valiant
Sally Forth
Shoe
Wizard of Id

If I'm wrong about any of these, I'm sure someone will tell me. Quite a lot, huh? No wonder the new cartoonists are all on the web.

Jesse's Rule

Reverend Jesse Jackson
Originally uploaded by gloperflicker

I am hereby putting all public figures on notice. I am drafting, codifying, and invoking as of today, a new law for the behavior of all politicians, preachers, business executives, entertainers, authors, and others in the public eye. It is called Jesse’s Rule in honor of the Reverend Jackson, the last person who will receive the benefit of the doubt, since he committed his offense before the law went into effect. Here it is:

Section 1. Just as all guns are to be considered loaded, all microphones are to be considered live.

Section 2. All public figures are assumed to be aware of Section 1.

Section 3. Therefore, any public figure who says something stupid, insulting, and/or vulgar in front of a live microphone will be assumed to have done it deliberately, and with malice aforethought.

Section 4. Any public figure who wishes to claim immunity from Section 3 will be required to go before live cameras and microphones and announce: “I forgot that all mics are to be considered live. I have the same IQ as gravel.”

Section 5. In addition, any liberal public figure who does the live mic routine on Fox News and wishes to claim it was an honest mistake, will not be allowed to speak in public again until he has written out 5,000 times in longhand, “I am dumber than a chainsaw pedicure.”

Thank you for your attention. I’m sure you will agree the Republic is a safer place now.

Utah Phillips: Lost to all but memory

Utah Phillips
Originally uploaded by Patrick T Power

 The first folk music event my future-wife and I went to occurred one summer during the early 1970s. It was the Middletown Folk Festival in southern New Jersey.

It was probably the only time I have ever been to a festival and knew not one of the performers. We were greenhorns then and I think the only folkie names I would have recognized were Dylan, Baez, Seeger, Paxton, and Guthrie (Arlo, not Woody).

Parts of the show were great and some were not so much, but the highlight came when the MC came out and said: "We had this performer here a few years ago. We think we've recovered enough to have him back. Here he is, a rumor in his own time, the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest, U. Utah Phillips!"
And out came an old guy with white pony tail and beard under a cowboy hat, arms stuffed with muscles and tattoos.

Ha, The old man was younger then than I am now. But if I have lived longer than he had at that point, let's admit that he had lived wider and deeper.
I don't remember every song he did. I know he sang his tribute to a cattle drive cook, "The Goodnight Loving Trail," and accompanied it with one of his bizarre tall tales about Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, the true-life pioneers who created that trail.

By the time his set was over I was a committed, lifetime folkie.

In those days it seemed that he sang mostly about trains and hobos and the West. His Wobbly songs and more overtly political material came later. As he aged he would put more talking and less playing into each show. I think this was partly because his hands hurt and partly because he had so much he wanted to say.

What a songwriter. What a storyteller.

The last time I saw him he filled the brand new Seattle Opera House at Northwest Folklife. I remember him strolling onto the stage and looking around the magnificent hall. "We used to have a place like this where I live," he said, "in Nevada City, California. We tore it down and put up an old Indian graveyard."

That same night he talked about all the good news he heard as he travelled around the country - and how none of it made the mainstream media. "We could be winning and not even know it!"

On the first album I bought of his, "Good Though!" he had a song called "Old Buddy Goodnight," about finding a hobo who froze to death in a freight car. The last verse ends:

"Give him a line in your paper
and here's what I want you to say.
There's still some things worse than dying alone.
One of them's living that way."

Bruce Phillips died on Friday, with his wife by his side.

Utah Phillips lived surrounded by friends, fans, folkies, and fellow workers.

His songs will live a long time, if this crazy world manages to keep going. And if it does, he's one of the people we have to thank for it.

Inventive proposal

ring
Originally uploaded by watanabekanako

Maybe it's just because I was part of a wedding this weekend but I liked this one. A patent attorney proposed via a patent application. Tip of the iguana tail to Phosita.

Park and ride

Bicycle Parking
Originally uploaded by vormplus

I usually bicycle to work but last week I had a medical appointment and had to drive my car. While I cruised around the campus, sharklike, searching for a space for the jalopy, I remembered something that happened about ten years before.

We received a note from my daughter's school inviting us to some parent-teacher event. It was inoffensive until the very end. Then there came a sentence that had me muttering to myself for days. It read: PARKING IS LIMITED, SO...

We'll pause here. How do you think they finished that line?

PARKING IS LIMITED, SO PLEASE CARPOOL.
PARKING IS LIMITED, SO CONSIDER TAKING ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BUS ROUTES.
PARKING IS LIMITED, SO WHY NOT BIKE IT?
PARKING IS LIMITED, SO, PLEASE CONSIDER SAVING THE SPACES FOR THOSE WHO NEED THEM MOST.

No. Here's what my kid's school chose to advise:

PARKING IS LIMITED, SO PLEASE COME EARLY.

Think that one over, okay? Please come early.

I sent them a letter asking them what, exactly, they thought they were teaching my daughter with that letter. Because what I saw them teaching was this:

This world has limited resources. Please don't think about sharing. Don't be considerate. And for heaven's sake, don't try to think outside the box and look for alternative solutions. Just jump in and get your share before someone else takes it.
Maybe that's even good advice, but it isn't what I want the school teaching my kid. I never got a reply to my letter, which I suppose was immediately dropped in the Crank File.

And speaking of cranks, and gears, and handlebars, this Friday is Bike to Work and School Day in Bellingham. Get the ol' Mountain Bike or Racer or Hybrid out and dust it off. On your commute you may pass one of the Celebration Stations where volunteers will provide you with cookies, coffee, juice, candy, coupons, stickers, and tons of moral support. Hope for good weather.