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I read this article today, it’s about how archaeology isn’t actually as exciting as Indiana Jones makes out.

“There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don’t think he would be a member. Not in good standing, anyway,”

“I spent a lot of time walking in cornfields and soy bean fields in the Midwest, and nothing very dramatic ever happened while I was out looking for artifacts,” said Rose of the Archaeological Institute

“I wish he’d take more notes and things. What’s his publication record?” Zimansky said. “But I don’t think anybody ever bought the ethos of Indiana Jones as a real career track.”

The cynical side of me thinks that perhaps these guys are just trying to keep down the number of people that become adventure-archaeologists. Seriously, there are only a certain number of minotaur filled labyrinths, holy grail death temples and zombie filled pyramids. They want to keep the goodies for themselves.

I’d also like to see a series of articles like this on different jobs, for example astronauts could explain that a shuttle flight isn’t really like Star Wars, a zookeeper could explain that chimps are not actually as big as King Kong and a computer programmer could tell us that you don’t program computers like in the Matrix (he can see through the code, man).

Finally, probably my favourite thing about the article is that it lets us know that the only people who do any real archaeology in the films are the nazis, and Indiana Jones kills loads of them and steals artifacts

“The one thing we do worry quite a bit about is the looting aspect, because archaeological looting is really a serious issue,” Murowchick said. “This kind of glorifying of breaking into a tomb and snagging a crystal this or golden that feeds into the notion that these are valuable objects, and we should all get it while we can.”

Today I stumbled over something absolutely, beautifully strange. It is the line of succession to the British throne. The rules for choosing our monarch are incredibly archaic and convoluted

• A person is always immediately followed in the succession by his or her own legitimate descendants (his or her “line”). Birth order and gender matter: older sons (and their lines) come before younger sons (and theirs); a person’s sons (and their lines), irrespective of age, all come before his or her daughters (and their lines).
• The monarch must be a Protestant at time of accession, and enter into communion with the Church of England after accession.
• Anyone who is Roman Catholic, becomes Roman Catholic, or marries a Roman Catholic is permanently excluded from the succession.
• A person born to parents who are not married to each other at the time of birth is not included in the line of succession. The subsequent marriage of the parents does not alter this.

This pretty much boils down to “No bastards, or catholics in our club please”. I think it really underscores how absurd the whole situation is if we look at a few entries in the line of succession to the British throne:

• 62: King Harald V of Norway
• 84: HRH Princess Margarita of Romania
• 93: HRH Prince Philip of Yugoslavia
• 111: Grand Duke George Mikhailovitch of Russia
• 135: HRH Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia
• 186: HM King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden
• 215: HM Queen Margrethe II of Denmark
• 228: HM Queen Anne-Marie of Greece
• 807: HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
• 1236:HRH Prince Boris of Bulgaria

I guess I’m a bit surprised that people care enough to calculate lists of the first thousand or so people in line for the British throne, but the really shocking thing is all of those different countries in that list. The heads of state of about a dozen European countries are all related by blood, one extended family living it up on the taxpayer’s money.

Holy crap.

One final thought, if the first 479 people on the list were to die in a horrible plane crash then we would get HRH The (hilariously racist) Duke of Edinburgh as our king.

Just imagine it! We would have a king who in 2002 asked an Indigenous Australian businessman, “Do you still throw spears at each other?”; Who said to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary, “You can’t have been here that long – you haven’t got a pot belly.”; Who after accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen replied, “You are a woman, aren’t you?”; Who when visiting China in 1986, told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”; and perhaps bet of all, in 1987, wrote in his book If I Were an Animal that “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

Article in the New York times here. Fear of street crime in Japan has driven one designer to create camouflage clothes:

It’s like magic! One second she’s there, the next second. Boom! She’s completely invisible. However, I see two obvious problems with this:

1. What if the rapist is thirsty?
2. I would probably mug somebody just to get these awesome clothes

Take the “manhole bag,” a purse that can hide valuables by unfolding to look like a sewer cover. Lay it on the street with your wallet inside, and unwitting thieves are supposed to walk right by. There is also a line of knife-proof high school uniforms made with the same material as Kevlar, and a book with tips on how to dress even the nerdiest children like “pseudohoodlums” to fend off schoolyard bullies.

Is your child in danger on the street? Let him turn into a convincing fire extinguisher:

Hahahahahaha. The only thing this bag does is guarantee that the neighbourhood bullies are going to punch your face in even more.

However, the fact that they [the camouflage clothes --cmb] were greeted here with straight faces, or even appeared at all, underscores another, less appreciated facet of Japanese society: its fondness for oddball ideas and inventions.
…
“These ideas might strike foreigners as far-fetched,” she added, “but in Japan, they can become reality.”

Understatement of the fucking year.

late edit: I just figured out the proper way to use the vending machine clothes. If you feel threatened, get inside the vending machine and then run at the suspected mugger, making angry robot noises.

even later edit: These would also make a great tool for muggers, just stand next to a row of vending machines and wait for a victim to stray too close

A: It is a scene from the documentary Jesus Camp that they did not want you to see. The scene where Jesus returns in the form of a velociraptor.

Nowhere in the bible does it explicitly state that Jesus is not a raptor.

Courtesy of everybody’s favourite news source, Fox news, here is a poll about the execution of Saddam Hussein:

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Think I’ll probably do a bit of both.

“Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher is “greatly saddened” by the death of Augusto Pinochet”

(here)

late edit: Yes, I know that old Thatcher was orders of magnitude less evil than Pinochet. Still, fucknauts, both of them

…so just click this link

Highlight the text below if you don’t trust me enough to go clicking random links without knowing what is on the other end:

“Naked man smokes crack and fights an 11-foot aligator. He also looks like this; and in court he “told deputies he was smoking crack-cocaine at the adjacent park, but it was unclear why he was naked or why he was attacked by the alligator. ““

_{(link via boingboing)}

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