The Old Prof

Well, Inside Edition has done it again. Getting the big scoop. As it turns out,

they've discovered that the internet may not be the best place to find love. It

may even be dangerous, according to their report. According to their sources

men lie, but when on the internet men lie even more. Apparently some people

post pictures of more attractive people while claiming those pictures to be

representative of themselves. Here's a teaser for their report which i found

posted on their website:

Check-a-Date

There's an old country song about looking for love in all the wrong places ... and for some people, the internet -- with all it's promise for online match-ups -- has turned out to be the wrong place to find love. Inside Edition has the story and has some tips what you can do to help keep your dates safe.

As an internet personality I want to be sure that my reader(s) can trust in my

image and persona. I want you to know that I am exactly who I claim to be.

So, I decided to post some recent photos of me. Anyone can fake a photo, but

you can't fake a whole photo album.

This is me the other day. I was trying to hail a cab and my friend snapped one off of me. And by "one" I mean a photo, not a cold one. I don't know if you can technically snap a cold one off of someone.

This is me playing soccer. I'm a total soccer nut. Did you know that in England they call it football? I know, weird.

Here is a picture of me with some friends at a karaoke bar. It was my roommate's birthday and we just went wild. My friends are so crazy! I love it!

Finally, here's a picture of me, just being me.

I just want you all to know, i will never lie to you. Especially if you're a hot young woman with lots of money and/or material assets.

Posted by Old Prof at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, Inside Edition has done it again. Getting the big scoop. As it turns out,

they've discovered that the internet may not be the best place to find love. It

may even be dangerous, according to their report. According to their sources

men lie, but when on the internet men lie even more. Apparently some people

post pictures of more attractive people while claiming those pictures to be

representative of themselves. Here's a teaser for their report which i found

posted on their website:

Check-a-Date

There's an old country song about looking for love in all the wrong places ... and for some people, the internet -- with all it's promise for online match-ups -- has turned out to be the wrong place to find love. Inside Edition has the story and has some tips what you can do to help keep your dates safe.

As an internet personality I want to be sure that my reader(s) can trust in my

image and persona. I want you to know that I am exactly who I claim to be.

So, I decided to post some recent photos of me. Anyone can fake a photo, but

you can't fake a whole photo album.

This is me the other day. I was trying to hail a cab and my friend snapped one off of me. And by "one" I mean a photo, not a cold one. I don't know if you can technically snap a cold one off of someone.

This is me playing soccer. I'm a total soccer nut. Did you know that in England they call it football? I know, weird.

Here is a picture of me with some friends at a karaoke bar. It was my roommate's birthday and we just went wild. My friends are so crazy! I love it!

Finally, here's a picture of me, just being me.

I just want you all to know, i will never lie to you. Especially if you're a hot young woman with lots of money and/or material assets.

Posted by Old Prof at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The most potentially humiliating thing a man can do is to write a paper complaining about someone else’s grammar, punctuation or proofreading. I don’t even like to use the words in polite conversation. I complain about them and their usage all right, but only to my wife, and privately at that. Worse, and far worse is to not just complain about but to mock someone’s mistake. I just did that with the results I should have anticipated. While reading a pamphlet on how to write a history paper I came across a section that used quotes from great speeches to illustrate what could be learned about writing by reading. And there, in the reading selection, just as the author should have anticipated, was a glaring error.

“And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our fore bears fought are still at issue…”

“Hah!” (?) I yelled. “Look at this nuttiness”. Some idiotic proofreader (probably just using spell check and neither knowing the actual words nor their derivation) is involved in a double mistake. Not only is it not our fore bears, like some sort of hairy omnivorous beast that goes before (“the word shouldn’t be separated into two words”, I said), but the actual word is forbearers, as in those bearers of our genetics who preceded us. How I chuckled as I told my wife of the ludicrous mistake. She looked at me speculatively and said, “do we have a dictionary”? That should have been a warning like “Dive, Dive” would have been to a submarine crewmember sunbathing on the deck. But no, not to me. “Dictionary? I don’t need no stinking dictionary”, I said with the metaphoric water rising foaming about me and the hatches slamming shut. “Fifty percent isn’t bad” I repeated as the waters closed above my head and I sank to my doom clutching the damn dictionary. Who writes those things anyway? Say….wait….its not who writes the dictionary but who proofreads it. I feel better already. Have fun.

Posted by at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I thought it appropriate to post something for the anniversary of the most shocking event I've experienced in my young life. I remember waking up on September 11th 2001 to my ringing cell phone. My roommate Justin was calling from work to tell me that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. I immediately turned on the television news to watch in disbelief as the first tower poured thick dark smoke into the air. Moments later I watched live as the second plane dispeared into the other tower. I will never forget that day.

I decided that I would post a couple of things I wrote that were inspired by these events. Actually, the first piece is something that I wrote well before (July 2001). I wasn't really writing about anything I was just putting things down as they came to me. Some time after 9/11 I came accross this and it was kind of eerie. It seemed somewhat pertinant after the fact. The other piece is one that I wrote after the events of 9/11 occurred and were inspired by them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the beginning of a war (July 2001)

I'll tell you now, though i know you're not listening

the beginning of a war is at the very door

and no one will be left to stand

no guard will be left undropped

no vessel of blood and water unburst

no nightmare unrepeated

every triad overturned and balancing on the point tentatively

eyes have filled the room but no room for ears

to gather attentively to lips with torn out tongues

I tell you there is a war

and hell, mouth open wide, inhales

try and throw your stones, but harder than that

a dent or a scratch is hardly noticed

but a mile gets further and further to walk, further to run

thick gray smoke puts its hands over your eyes

puts its fingers to the back of your throat to scratch

there is lead in the bloodstream forming a candlestick

to hold a shaft of wax without a candlewick

there is nothing incandescent to campare to the expiring moon

and the thinness of the air is a brilliant strategy

the placement of the sun, obtrusive and defensive,

an advertisement for light

my turniquet loosed, the blood rushed, the concrete gasped for air

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9:11 a.m. (nothing but a sterile page of paper)
Oct. 2nd, 2001

the four frames

holding the earth in place

are twisting in commotion

earth separating from ocean

and land becoming sea

a worthless worry

why my hands can't

stop my eyes from bleeding

leaving salty stains to mark this

separation

(of matter, of mind, of spirit)

my thoughts, quieted enough,

most resemble this image of you

in the kitchen, at the table

staring through the saline

at my picture

i laid up for days

with nothing but a sterile page of paper

and a broken pencil

trying to write a letter

and it's been hell and five days of waiting

to find you (named as a survivor,

i waited in hell for five days

just to know if i could write her)

under a blind focus

and blistering heat

the city's bones upon my back

a melting earth beneath my feet

my sinews twisting on the rack

and silence

the air as still as the broken ocean

for days, for hours, then...it ends

memory ripples in

sends you through me in a shiver

makes waves follow wave

and back again

brings me to you like a whisper and

spills onto me like the rain

you are the strength still remaining in my diaphragm

and the air its pulling in

the ground beneath my blisters

splits and separates

under the wave of wings still beating

and this incredible climb is like

a lifetime chasing after the light of the new moon

in the whites of your bloodshot eyes

just keep singing and

i will find you by the breeze

the body heals and the heart is a compass

pointing home

where you, in the kitchen, at the table

still set a place for me

+

Posted by Old Prof at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought it appropriate to post something for the anniversary of the most shocking event I've experienced in my young life. I remember waking up on September 11th 2001 to my ringing cell phone. My roommate Justin was calling from work to tell me that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. I immediately turned on the television news to watch in disbelief as the first tower poured thick dark smoke into the air. Moments later I watched live as the second plane dispeared into the other tower. I will never forget that day.

I decided that I would post a couple of things I wrote that were inspired by these events. Actually, the first piece is something that I wrote well before (July 2001). I wasn't really writing about anything I was just putting things down as they came to me. Some time after 9/11 I came accross this and it was kind of eerie. It seemed somewhat pertinant after the fact. The other piece is one that I wrote after the events of 9/11 occurred and were inspired by them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the beginning of a war (July 2001)

I'll tell you now, though i know you're not listening

the beginning of a war is at the very door

and no one will be left to stand

no guard will be left undropped

no vessel of blood and water unburst

no nightmare unrepeated

every triad overturned and balancing on the point tentatively

eyes have filled the room but no room for ears

to gather attentively to lips with torn out tongues

I tell you there is a war

and hell, mouth open wide, inhales

try and throw your stones, but harder than that

a dent or a scratch is hardly noticed

but a mile gets further and further to walk, further to run

thick gray smoke puts its hands over your eyes

puts its fingers to the back of your throat to scratch

there is lead in the bloodstream forming a candlestick

to hold a shaft of wax without a candlewick

there is nothing incandescent to campare to the expiring moon

and the thinness of the air is a brilliant strategy

the placement of the sun, obtrusive and defensive,

an advertisement for light

my turniquet loosed, the blood rushed, the concrete gasped for air

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9:11 a.m. (nothing but a sterile page of paper)
Oct. 2nd, 2001

the four frames

holding the earth in place

are twisting in commotion

earth separating from ocean

and land becoming sea

a worthless worry

why my hands can't

stop my eyes from bleeding

leaving salty stains to mark this

separation

(of matter, of mind, of spirit)

my thoughts, quieted enough,

most resemble this image of you

in the kitchen, at the table

staring through the saline

at my picture

i laid up for days

with nothing but a sterile page of paper

and a broken pencil

trying to write a letter

and it's been hell and five days of waiting

to find you (named as a survivor,

i waited in hell for five days

just to know if i could write her)

under a blind focus

and blistering heat

the city's bones upon my back

a melting earth beneath my feet

my sinews twisting on the rack

and silence

the air as still as the broken ocean

for days, for hours, then...it ends

memory ripples in

sends you through me in a shiver

makes waves follow wave

and back again

brings me to you like a whisper and

spills onto me like the rain

you are the strength still remaining in my diaphragm

and the air its pulling in

the ground beneath my blisters

splits and separates

under the wave of wings still beating

and this incredible climb is like

a lifetime chasing after the light of the new moon

in the whites of your bloodshot eyes

just keep singing and

i will find you by the breeze

the body heals and the heart is a compass

pointing home

where you, in the kitchen, at the table

still set a place for me

+

Posted by Old Prof at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is in response to the Amishrobot post entitled: WASP In which he says:

How come no one ever taught me the proper level of fear a man should have for wasps?

I did my best to inform you Josh but I suppose no kid can remember every story. It was a dark and stormy night. And… No wait. It was a bright, sultry summer day in East Mill Crick. I stood beneath a Cherry tree in the midst of a quarter acre of others of the same ilk. This in the days when there was nothing else in East mill Crick but me and miles of sage brush, alfalfa fields and fruit trees. You could hear the silence. It was so thick it hummed like millions of insects in the heat. The mountains hung over it all and miles away the smoke of the city obscured the Great Salt Lake. Eight years old. Far away I heard the sound of a car coming up the dirt and gravel road. That was the signal. Now all that remained was to spring to the lowest branch of the Cherry tree, nip up and be at the top before the car could get there and victory would be mine again. High above, the wasps waited in their funnel shaped hall of death and pain. It was this for which they had been born and they waited in hushed expectation, evil leers curling their lips, their little hearts beating faster, eyes aglitter. So much could go wrong. Up, up the tree until my head smashed into the nest and half flattened it against the branch. I thought I assessed the situation coolly and dispassionately. A twenty foot fall was nothing compared to what was happening and likely to continue to happen if I stayed where I was. With eight stings on my head I took a deep breath and crouching to get better trajectory and distance I launched myself up, backward and out, arms splayed in cruciform (proper wasp diving technique). My grandmother, a good hundred yards away, picking raspberries, said she thought I had been hit by a car which coincidentally passed just at that moment. I had apparently used the deep breath to announce to the world that those damn wasps had stung me. She used the word scream but I’m sure that in the excitement of the moment she was over stating the situation. Did you know that mud can be remarkably soothing, especially if it is special mud which my grandmother assured me it was and would take the sting out of the lumps on my head almost immediately. Oh, and I was gratified to find I had killed “a lagre number” of wasps when I landed flat on my back on top of those wasps who noticing the head was already taken had decided to sting me on my back. I have been blessed with goodly ancestors. Grandfather knew how to take care of the situation, both the potential for further hurt and the hurt feelings. I watched intently and mud daubed. Grandfather got a long stick, several yards of cloth which he tore into one inch wide segments about five feet long. He then got the kerosene can, stoppered with a potato, I believe. The excitement mounted. He wrapped the cloth round and round the end of the stick. Then carrying the stick and the red kerosene can he walked to “the tree of the wasps”. I squatted at his feet and watched intently as he sopped the cloth with kerosene and drew a match from his pocket. High above the evil wasps watched with mounting excitement. You could sense it in the increased rate of the “Hum”. Grandfather ignited the kerosene and reaching high held the flaming bundle below the nest. Revenge may be a dish best taken cold but there was something profoundly gratifying in the all-consuming conflagration that put stop to the wasps that ever memorable day. A little late I guess Josh but ….

Posted by at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

“Don’t know much about Pre history” or the French I took A brief review of some statements in some book or other Which it amuses me to take In the worst way possible “Life during the Old Stone age was, as Thomas Hobbes imagined it to be, ”solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” [Those are pretty well all traits that my wife has attributed to me at one time or another] Survival beyond the age of 40 was rare; life expectancy averaged 25 years. Of four or five children born, only two or three would survive to maturity. Hmm. If there were 500 people at any one time and they had two children then that works to keep it at replacement levels. But if three routinely survived how long could there be just 500 (see below) in all of Britain? Is it possible that in one generation the land would no longer support the population and we are back to 500 again? Was there an equal division between men and women. Were women more likely to survive the first few years of life? And is this women to men ratio then negated by the dangers of child birth but balanced by the dangers of hunting versus root gathering? This seems like an important question. What are the ramifications of an unequal balance of male and female? Is this where solitary comes in? What size groups did they hunt gather and huddle in? I think what I need is another book. This one just skims as preparation for its main body, not prehistory but History itself. Instead of preparing me it leaves me with major questions. Oh, I have one. Is life expectancy calculated, based on, the number of children born who didn’t survive? That is, if we are including the two to three of five who didn’t make it, it skews the life expectancy curve for those who did. If you made it past age ten could you still expect to only live on the average to twenty five, or did the survivors make it to seventy plus but the infant mortality rate drop it to twenty five on an average? This is perfectly possible and makes the shortness a shortness for the childhood era and not the adult one which may have been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and long. “The man spent the day tracking animals " That would be a little hard to prove however, even if you had written records or diary entries. “Yep, that what I’ve been doing ok. Tracking animals. Yep. That’s it.” Its quite possible that with so many animals and so few humans, animals were not as skittish as they are now. It might not have taken all that much tracking if herds came wandering by the rock you were sitting on as you watched all that root and grub gathering down in the valley. And you have to suppose that they don’t just track animals, like it was some end in and of itself. What happens when they find one? As a former hunter I can tell you the fun is all in the tracking. Once the animal is “down” then the work begins. It can often be a long long drag home. And the “processing” of the successful hunt is no fun at all. That however is what it is all about. I suspect that the women and children helped in that too. "While the women and children gathered fruits, roots, and grubs. “ You could tell how much they had been doing of that by the amount of grubs etc. that were gathered when you came home from doing whatever you really had been doing while you claimed you had been tracking animals. (I wonder how prevalent grubs were. “Why shore honey, the girls and I have been trackin grubs pretty well all day. Whew! Whut a day! Illusive little critters.) I wonder if it was easier to trail snails. “Because it requires 200 square miles of land to support one person in a hunting society, there were probably no more than 500 people in all of Britain. “ Now theres a statistic you can drop into casual conversation! Two hundred square miles to support one person! Why that’s almost like needing four hundred for two persons. I don’t think I’d marry. That would keep you hopping, or tracking as the case might be. Though Garraty says “ An acre of woodlands fed two or three hunters or foragers; that same acre, planted in corn, provided for as many as two hundred people.”( p. 11 The American Nation vol. 1) My guess is that we are talking Pre woodland here and probably something like Tundra. Even there you want to know the number of animals per acre. And was it like the caribou migrations so that the animals weren’t always in the same general location? You have to hope that, if that is true, the hunters moved with the game when it was afoot. "They huddled in caves, starved when drought drove away game, died of infectious diseases, and fled south when the ice advanced.” You also have to hope the caves were in the same place the animals wandered. Otherwise the two hundred square miles thing makes it sound like a long walk back to the huddling place. I kind of thought of hunters as migrating with the herds. Were there a string of caves they huddled in seasonally? Daily? Or perhaps they felt grumpy and didn’t huddle. And when the cave fire was too hot perhaps they spread out in uneven solitary informality. And how far could animals get driven by the drought on a small island. (Was it an island at this time?) Did the animals scatter out from a central place toward the peripheries or drift to a wetter area. Wouldn’t the humans drift with them and find them in greater concentrations in the new local, assuming a limited amount of land on an Island? Where would they, the animals, go? And when they got there wouldn’t some one of the 500 notice the new concentration? So would drought be a bad thing for humans. I mean where is away located and to where could the animals go. I would have thought that in a hunting society the humans followed the animals rather than locating in one spot and roaming out from there. One wonders at the juxtaposition and concentration of animals and people in the era of advancing ice. Perhaps the animals huddled in small groups. At this point of what sounds like massive animal concentration in a smaller area how much land was needed to support a hunting population? If ice advances down an island and the animals and humans advance with it there is going to be some concentration of both in the south. Further, is life expectancy going to fluctuate with the drought or ice conditions? People, many people, may even not have died of infectious diseases because those diseases seem to have arisen in large numbers only after the domestication of animals from whence the major infectious diseases arose. The Americas were said to be relatively free of infectious diseases till the white man came simply because the natives didn’t domesticate many animals or live in concentrations of humans. Infectious diseases work best in urban settings. On the other hand, if life was “solitary”, how much huddling did they really do? Well, perhaps huddling is not the same as cuddling. Solitary huddling does paint a bleaker picture. I guess I was picturing the football type of huddle. The less said about the cuddle the better. I also wonder if they ever huddled in wet, dripping, dark forests. Or was only cave huddling permissible. “Move along there, move along. No huddling in the streets. Get a cave.” “The attention paid to the burials suggests that humans were now aware of the briefness of their existence on Earth and guessed at the presence of unseen powers in the world.”It suggests all that, to the author, no doubt. Just why attention paid to a burial suggests that they were pondering the briefness of their existence escapes me. They may have thought 25 years was an eternity. Like “ when the –*Please supply your own favorite euphamisms—Sandra has edited out my own.--will all this huddling, grub eating, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish” root chomping -*----- life ever end. I am heartily sick of it. It seems like it’s going on forever!” (Have you ever noticed the passage of time relative to a toothache, versus some more enjoyable occupation?) “Where is an infectious disease when you need one?” “Mind you put my best knife in with me when and if this mess ever ends. I don’t want your brother getting it.” And why does attention paid to burial suggest that they are guessing at the presence of unseen powers in the world? (I’m convinced that anyone who can look at a burial. attended with the possessions of the dead individual or not and derive this kind of stuff is too smart to spend his live in archaeology and anthropology, cataloging potshards and postulating explanations) Perhaps an untidy, “undecorated” grave just offended their burgeoning esthetic sense that is seen so clearly by the attention they paid to burials. Perhaps it just became an art form or even a type of one-upmanship. And who knows what they were guessing? In the absence of written records one mans guess at what they were guessing is as good as another’s. How in -*---- do you look at a grave, full of going away presents or not, and say “You know it looks to me like they were guessing at the presence of unseen powers in the world.” And does your graduate student aide then say, “ why sure as *------, that’s exactly it. Why don’t you put that in your next text book?” I guess so. Forty years from now who knows what they may be guessing. For instance, “Forty years ago, prehistorians attributed almost all change in Britain to the migration of peoples and the diffusion of ideas, mostly Mediterranean; now they look to developments within the British Isles.” This looks like the burgeoning arguments between the diffusionists and the “non-diffusionists in the Americas. To suggest that the great societies of America were affected by ideas and cultures from Asia or elsewhere suggests that the native Americans were not capable of doing all this themselves and is, hence, racist and to be avoided lest one not get tenure. It does show that prehistorians historians are as capable of outrageous guessing as are prehistoric humans. And as capable of changing their minds and their guesses as those prehistoric humans probably were. Were there no atheists among them? (the prehistoric humans I mean) I guess not. Those graves are pretty definitive. And , commenting on “Profound changes “ which “occurred both in agriculture and metallurgy,” it is said that “archaeologists once attributed these changes to the migration of a new people from central Europe into southern England, but the evidence for such a migration is slim. Archaeologists now believe that this new culture, … was a native development caused by the exhaustion of the soil on the uplands.” That was my first thought too. I guess everyone thought of the exhaustion of soil on the uplands. How little we knew. Though how exhausted the soil was is problematic. It could never have been as rich as the lowland clay soils of the south and east, yet a study (in a book titled The Celtic Consciousness), involving setting up a re-creation of a Celtic farm of the Iron Age yields some surprising results. In an area just north of Portsmouth, on a spur of Butser Hill, which seems to be the uplands of the area, an experiment in prehistoric farming has been conducted on land which has “probably not been cultivated since the prehistoric period” (P.86) (I suppose it could have lain fallow and gathered heart in that long time though.) ““The basic wheat cereals of the Iron Age were Emmer (Tr. Dicoccum) and Spelt (Tr. Spelta ) wheats”. “At fruition the crops were a blaze of different colours, the red and purple of poppy, the yellows of buttercups as well as the golden grain.” [Now that’s a good guess. The fields of golden (or green) grain still blaze with poppies. Kind of takes you back.] And: “Average yield figures in excess of 15 cwts per acre. [ = 1680 lbs?]These figures, the first reliable ones to be achieved, make great sense of the documentary sources. They are incidentally better than the national average yield figure of 12 1/2 cwts per acre [= 1400 lbs ?] achieved in Britain in 1910”. [cwt = hundred weight = 112 lbs] [emphasis supplied by me] further, grain was stored in pits (the source actually says they stored the grain ununderground pits! I’d love to see the above ground pits) and : “The average Iron Age pit has a capacity in excess of one ton, and the combination of these factors suggest that there was extremely successful arable farming at the time”I know this is Iron age stuff but it sounds like it is speaking of upland soils, of soils farmed before a turn to the southeast lowlands. Perhaps those southern uplands were just not farmed as extensively as the more northerly uplands. And that supposed migration to clay soils whether from the uplands of Britain or by the “new people from central Europe” may not have taken place before the development or introduction of the wheeled, countered and perhaps moldboarded plow. The light Celtic scratch plow won’t handle the clay soils of the southeast and no matter how exhausted the soils of the uplands are the lowlands are uncultivatible otherwise. The Celts of this Iron Age hill farm used the light scratch plow and got better yields than the average yield in British farms as late as 1910. And by the way, the wheeled plow that allowed movement to the soils of the south east, England’s so-called Champaign country, came to Britain from somewhere. It does not appear to be indigenous. Some suggest China, by way of Europe, as the ultimate source though evidence is slim. Furthermore, when you are trying to explain the inexplicable things get strange. For instance, “prehistorians once thought that the Beaker Folk brought a knowledge of metallurgy with them from the Rhine ,but archaeological evidence now suggests that they purchased their copper daggers and axes from an Irish metal industry that was already in existence. The art of metallurgy probably traveled originally form Egypt to Spain, from whence the megalith builders brought it to Ireland in late Neolithic times. Ireland possessed copper ore, which Irish smiths worked into flat axes and halberds About 2,000 B.C.E. they began to manufacture these implements in bronze, and alloy of tin and copper, using a ready supply of tin in Cornwall. I’m not going to argue with that. It seems likely that a line of identifiable artifacts can be traced in that direction, and lead to those conclusions. But when one says: “The Beaker Folk may have brought the idea of a bronze alloy, but they brought neither bronze implements nor the skill to make them. The Irish smiths may have seized on the idea.” Its hard to fathom the idea that the idea of bronze came to England with the Beaker Folk, proof of ideas being so ephemeral, and then to say that though tin and copper were available there in Britain, they instead took the Idea across the Irish Sea to Irish smiths, explained or in an unguarded moment divulged the idea to them and they, the Irish, thereupon used the idea to make bronze out of materials found in England. That makes the Beaker Folk exceedingly stupid. This sounds like prehistorians were once right when “prehistorians once thought that the Beaker folk brought a knowledge of metallurgy with them….”Here we are distinguishing between “knowledge of metelaragy” and “the idea of a bronze alloy” and that is not at all what our author seems to want to be saying. The ability to differentiate between knowledge of, and an idea about, something is very sophisticated. I suppose they mean that they knew what to do but not how to do it or what to do it with. Thus they did have the knowledge but just lacked the skill or the technology. What we probably can say is that the Beaker folk didn’t make bronze implements and the Irish did. And that’s why I don’t do much prehistory. Actually I quit doing it when the Swiss Lake Village thing went poof. There in all the history books was the picture of the beautifully reconstructed Swiss Lake Village. It was so compelling that I longed to have lived there. For forty years watery illustrations graced the pages of World History books. One pondered in awe at what archaeology and anthropology were able to reconstruct from just a few poles poking up from the mud of the bottom of a receding lake. There were marvelous houses, thatched and platformed. Boats were moored at the landing places. There men and women went about their business high above the lakes and there boys sat, dangled their legs and fished for their supper. They looked like they were having a really good time. This didn’t look poor, nasty or brutish. Those villages in the lake were marvelous, clever and it turns out totally imaginary. I’m really sorry. Those prehistoric guys had to give it all back. Well, for forty years it was great. And then…. Well, the loss of your faith is a gut-wrenching thing that can lead you to try to proselytize your former brothers in the faith and to bring them to the newer fragrant meadows of your obviously truer vision. It is now believed that the villages were built on the shores of the lake at a low water period, using poles thrust deep into the soil to stabilize the houses built about them. The waters then apparently rose covering the houses on the shoreline and when the waters again receded there were the poles sticking up out of the water, energizing the theoreticians. I now believe that archaeologists and anthropologists brought with them the idea of the Swiss Lake Village, superimposed it on the available data, but lacked the knowledge to accurately extrapolate and portray what was really going on. They should have taken the idea to Ireland and consulted with the Irish poets who having just that skill, needing only the idea, could have built a more beautiful conjecture. Well, perhaps they did. Who knows? In fact, I should be writing prehistory or poetry or something. By now you know there is another reason why I don’t teach “much” prehistory. “I don’t know much about the prehistory I took”. It’s just as well. It saves me from having to relearn it every forty years. Believe me that gets tiresome.

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