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POPSThe slow death of handwriting "The way handwriting is taught has undoubtedly changed. At Ms Florey's school in 1950s America, a nun beat time with a stick as the class copied letters from the blackboard. It was not a place for individuals. There was a right way to form letters and very many wrong ways. " More famous handwriting samples at BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7907888.stm
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POPSIs your English Pronunciation O.K.? I was inspired by the earlier clip on the difficulty of learning English to post this page. I first got a copy of a variation of this nearly 30 years ago. I've only included the first three verses here. There are are about 12 more verses like this one on this page. Check it out and let me know if you don't hung up on some of this!!
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POPSDecoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read "What do you do when you dig up an ancient inscription, but don't know what it means? New Scientist takes a tour of the world's tantalisingly undeciphered writings." Entire article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227106.000-decoding-antiquity-eight-scripts-that-still-cant-be-read.html?full=true
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POPSTop 5 Greatest Movie Monologues According to the author, the top 2 greatest movie monologues ever are: 1. Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove . 2. Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen in Network . Can you guess the other 3 without looking? Do you have some better suggestions? What makes a great movie monologue? Even more to the point, what qualifies as a monologue? Hamlet's soliloquy would certainly make the cut, but its origins didn't spring from film, so it's probably ineligible. Does a speech have to be a certain length to qualify as a monologue? Can it be addressed to someone who reacts or occasionally interjects something in the middle of the display? (Via kottke.org.)
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POPSBible-Era Mystery Vessel Found more (at source): From the objects that surrounded it, Gibson determined that the cup dated from some time between 37 B.C. and A.D. 70, when the Romans nearly destroyed Jerusalem after a Jewish revolt. Among the dig's other finds are ruins spanning the time of the founding of King Solomon's Temple, around 970 B.C., to the destruction of Jerusalem by Christian crusaders in A.D. 1099.
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POPSCarvings From Cherokee Script’s Dawn more (at source): It may be, as is often noted, that his achievement is the only known instance of an individual’s single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing. An archaeologist and explorer of caves has now found what he thinks are the earliest known examples of the Sequoyah syllabary. The characters are cut into the wall of a cave in southeastern Kentucky, a place sacred to the Cherokee as the traditional burial site of a revered chief. The archaeologist, Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati, said in an interview recently that this was “one of the most fascinating and important finds in my career,” yielding likely insights into “the genius of Sequoyah.”
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POPSDecoding Antiquity: Eight Scripts... in 1823, they extended the span of recorded history by around 2000 years and allowed us to read the words of Ramses the Great. The decipherment of the Mayan glyphs revealed that the New World had a sophisticated, literate civilisation at the time of the Roman empire. So how do you decipher an unknown script? There are two minimum requirements. First, there has to be enough material to work with. Secondly, there must be some link to a known language. It helps enormously if there is a bilingual inscription or identifiable proper names - the Rosetta Stone (see image), for example, is written in both ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, and also contains the name of the Ptolemy dynasty. If there is no clear link, an attempt must be made to relate the concealed language to a known one.
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POPSFiction has, once again, foreshadowed reality Certainly some of the parallels are coincidental. It is unlikely, for example, that the writers knew Mr. Obama had an affection for Bob Dylan when they made Santos a Dylan fan. But it is the unintentional similarities that make the DVDs of the sixth and seventh seasons, which at the time received mixed reviews, so rewarding to watch now. In both “The West Wing” and in real life, for example, the Phillies played in the World Series during the election campaign. :) more similarities inside...
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POPSBush admits AlQaeda wasn't in Iraq at first And says, "So what?" The Guardian comments: "it is still surprising that so many reporters can be polite and deferential with someone who has turned the US Federal Reserve into a giant Ponzi scheme and broken the world's strongest economy. They defer humbly to someone who has contrived the deaths of 4,200 US servicemen and women in Iraq"
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POPSThe Obama Hater's Silent Enablers "No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.” This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned."
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POPSJesus Killed Mohammed: Religious Extremism inside the U.S. Armed Forces Cont.... "“Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say." Who are the religious fanatics here?
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