Wildlife: A big female deer ran past the rear deck at sunset last night. It's time to wrap the tree trunks with wire fencing. Damn creatures caused some damage last fall.



Visit: A Tale of Two Movies
Watch for the Update SOON

Weather: Pleasant, but none of that predicted rain has fallen yet.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help SIX different charities.

Media Watch: The devastation in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast is terrifying. You have to see some of it, even if you don't want to, but you don't have to obsess about it either, or start shooting from the hip, assessing blame, either.
I finished the book about the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Northern Newfoundland by Dr. Helge Ingstad (neither an archeologist or geologist, but a fair writer and fund-raiser). His wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, did most of the work, but she did it well.
The dispute if the site is Leifur Eiriksson's house in Vinland continues perpetually, but L'Anse aux Meadows would have been easy for Greenland mariners to find. The sagas were correct in saying that Vikings landed in North America, even though they didn't suspect that it was the tip of a whole other continent stretching over half the globe, a hemisphere away.
The Norse didn't have maps, or a workable written language for another hundred years, so the Vinland Sagas weren't even contemporary with the real events, and were preserved as legends more than history.
Another thing the sagas indicate to me is the natives (Skraelings) were numerically stronger than the Viking colonists, which dampened the latter's desire to settle, or return very often for rather meager gains. Christianity was quickly spreading among the Northmen too, the age of widespread plunder had ended, and their kings were much more interested in consolidating their realms in Europe rather than expanding into distant, dangerous, disputed forest lands, so there would have been no backup forces to continue their invasions.
I started reading Bertrand Russell's Mysticism and Logic -- a group of essays written and presented before WWI. In one passage he describes the tension between inspiration and the hard slog of science necessary to prove an insight true. Einstein isn't mentioned, and I doubt that Russell had heard of him when he wrote these articles, but there are strong similarities to other writings by the great German physicist about related dilemmas when developing his new model of the Universe. I wonder if Einstein was reading the already-famous Russell in the years between Special Relativity and General Relativity?
Hey look at this! The cover is by Milt Glaser -- before Push Pin Studios.