Tut tut

Most of you are probably familiar with the famous "King Tut's Curse."

The story goes that when British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the hitherto undisturbed tomb of King Tutankhamen, the "Boy King" of Egypt during the 18th dynasty, it unleashed a curse on the men who had desecrated it -- resulting in the deaths of (by some claims) twenty of the expedition members.

Tutankhamen was the son of the famous "Heretic King" Akhenaten, and died at the age of eighteen in 1341 BCE.  Some archaeologist speculate that he was murdered, but current forensic anthropology seems to indicate that he died of a combination of malaria and complications from a badly broken leg.

Be that as it may, shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus.

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And now historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his soon-to-be-released book, London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End (available for pre-order here), Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, the self-proclaimed "Wickedest Man on Earth," was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who had founded a society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Screw anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley -- almost everyone in London at the time did -- and at least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not remains to be seen, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  I will definitely read Benyon's book with interest when it comes out, and may have more to say about it after that -- and until then, we'll just file this under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."

Coming soon to a catastrophe near you

As part of my ongoing inquiry into Reasons To Spend Your Life Quivering In Mortal Fear, today's topic is: Death Meteorites.

Astronomers have recently generated some serious buzz on this topic by reporting that the euphoniously-named asteroid 2005YU55 was going to be making a near pass, which it did without incident last night.  At its closest approach, the 400-meter-wide block of rock was 324,600 km from Earth, and traveling at 29,000 mph -- which is pretty impressive.  And even if 324,600 km seems like a long way away, in astronomical terms it's a close enough shave that there have been several fairly hysterical articles recently describing the havoc that could ensue if one of these things hit the earth.

To be sure, the Earth does get hit regularly.  On June 30, 1908, a stony meteorite estimated to be only 50 meters in diameter hit the earth in the Tunguska region of Siberia, creating a tremendous fireball and radially flattening trees for miles around the impact site; it registered on seismographs in London.  Artist's renditions of the event, reconstructed from eyewitness accounts, show a brilliant streak across the sky ending in an enormous explosion that for a moment outshone the sun.  It was fortunate that it landed in a fairly unpopulated area, and not in a city or even in the ocean, where it would have raised a tsunami that would have dwarfed the December 2007 Indonesian catastrophe.

A 1.2 kilometer wide rock slammed into the earth around 15,000 years ago, leaving a large pockmark in the Arizona desert aptly named Meteor Crater.  Given that this is already high desert, it's a little hard to imagine how the area could be any more desolate than it already is, but a collision of this scale must have devastated thousands of square miles.

This, of course, is nowhere near the 10 to 20 kilometer wide meteor that left Chicxulub Crater north of the Yucatan, ending the Cretaceous Era with a (literal) bang and leaving a layer of dust to mark the event in sedimentary rocks worldwide.  The devastation that caused is of an unimaginable scale, to me at least, but once again artists have attempted to paint the event as it might have appeared (from a safe distance).  This seems to have been the final death knell of the majority of dinosaur clades, with the exception of the one that includes birds.  (Yes, birds are dinosaurs. That point is literally beyond question now, since proteins from Tyrannosaurus rex fossils have been successfully sequenced and shown to be unequivocally related to bird proteins.  Whether they tasted like chicken remains to be seen, but evidence from bone homology has pointed toward a relationship between birds and deinonychid dinosaurs for years; this is just the final nail.  Give that some thought next time you're feeding the chickadees.)

Anyhow, the open question is how soon will another collision will occur, and how big the collision will be.  One the size of Tunguska apparently strikes once every century or so.  Meteor Crater sized rocks are less frequent, on the order of one every 10,000 years (meaning that we're overdue, not that these events work on any sort of predictable timetable).  Era-ending rocks the size of the one that created Chicxulub strike only once every 100 million years.

All of this, however, is only talking about average strike intervals, and you know the problem with averages; if you have one foot in a pot of boiling water and the other encased in ice, on the average you're comfortable.  Averages really tell you nothing about actualities, and the reality is that a meteor could strike downtown Detroit tomorrow (undoubtedly doing millions of dollars' worth of improvements), or we might not have one strike for another million years.  No way to tell.  How's that for a cheery thought?

And to make your day even happier, two questions remain: (1) Will we see a potentially devastating meteor coming? and (2) if we do see it, will we be able to do anything to deflect or destroy it?  The answer seems to be no to both.  Given that the asteroid that played chicken with the Earth last night is 400 meters wide, and the one that struck Tunguska was only 50 meters wide, you can see that it doesn't take a particularly huge piece of rock to wreak havoc.  It's entirely possible that a Tunguska-sized meteor would be missed until it was only days away from striking, and maybe not even then.  Given that kind of lead time, there's no way we could send any kind of rocket up to meet it, deflect it, blow it up, whatever.  With a bigger rock, we'd see it sooner, and might have more time to react, but the problem is that in that case it's... a bigger rock.  Even if we successfully shattered it, the fragments would still pose a hazard, and they would continue on largely the same course as the original rock had (Newton's First Law being strictly enforced in most jurisdictions).  Deflecting it using a retrorocket-like device is at least a possibility, but I wonder if we're technologically capable of doing such a thing.

In any case, it's not likely, certainly not soon.  Astronomers have most of the near-earth asteroids of any size catalogued, their trajectories predicted for several centuries hence, and they have assured us that no collisions are imminent.  There's really no reason to lose any sleep over the fact that there might well be a Cosmic Death Asteroid Hurtling Toward Your Village, and There's Nothing You Or Anyone Else Can Do To Stop It.

Have a nice day.

Full disclosure

So now, a bunch of conspiracy theorists calling themselves the Paradigm Research Group have presented the White House with a petition containing 17,000 signatures demanding that the USA come clean about its knowledge of aliens.

The petition said that its signatories were asking that the government "formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and immediately release into the public domain all files from all agencies and military services relevant to this phenomenon."

Well, if I were a government official, and I received such a petition, I can tell you that my immediate response would have been:  ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  I almost always have that reaction to people who think that X-Files: The Movie was a historical documentary.  It doesn't help that the name of their organization includes the word "paradigm," which I've found almost always indicates that the people involved either (1) have a tenuous grasp on reality, or (2) are involved in educational research, which frequently (3) go together.

But I digress.

What's interesting is that the petition garnered 17,000 signatures.  On their website, the PRG seems to feel that this is some kind of point in their favor, following the truth-by-consensus model - that the more people that believe something, the more likely it is to be correct.  You'll hear creationists using the same sort of argument, as if the fact that they have successfully convinced a significant percentage of Americans with their specious fairy tales means anything other than that people can be awfully gullible at times.  The PRG goes on and on about how the American people are demanding "full disclosure" -- in fact, there is a ticker on their homepage that says how long President Obama has gone without disclosing our contact with extraterrestrials.

And now the White House has responded.

Phil Larson, senior space policy and communications advisor to the president, sent the PRG a reply considerably more courteous than mine would have been:

The US government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.  In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye.

Many scientists and mathematicians have ... come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.  Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them -- especially any intelligent ones -- are extremely small, given the distances involved.

But that's all statistics and speculation. The fact is we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.

An AFP reporter who commented upon Larson's response wrote that this was a "blow to conspiracy theorists everywhere."  My feeling is: not really.  It's not like the "full disclosure" people are going to read this and go, "Oh.  Okay, then," and find another hobby.  That's not how conspiracy theorists operate.  Denial by the government is what they expected.  That a senior space advisor would respond at all means that he's hiding something.  And of course, there's always the tactic of picking apart what he said, looking for hidden information:  how do we know the distances involved, if we haven't been contacted?  If there's no "credible evidence," might there not be incredible evidence?  Ha!  We knew something was going on!

If I'd been the president, I'd have just told my senior space advisor to ignore the petition and advise me about something else, such as reassuring me that the asteroid that's making a near pass of the Earth today is not, in fact, going to play a cosmic game of Whack-a-Mole with Baltimore.  And then I'd tell him to pop the movie Contact in the DVD player, and get me a beer.  That's the kind of space advisor I'd hire, if I was president. 

For sale: One haunted lighthouse

Looking for a great property to purchase?  Strutt & Parker, LLP, of London, has the place for you.

Upsides:

(1) Awesome ocean view.
(2) Two acres of private beach.
(3) Picturesque.
(4) Ready to occupy immediately.

Downsides:

(1) It's a lighthouse.
(2) It's haunted.

Of course, (2) under the "downsides" might actually deserve to be (5) under the "upsides," depending on your attitude toward ghosts.  Me, I think that'd be a selling point.  I've always wanted to live in a haunted house, or at least stay in one for a while.  For one thing, it would allow me finally to check out the whole phenomenon first-hand, without having to rely on evidence of such dubious provenance as "My Uncle Fred's ex-wife saw a ghost in this room!"  Of course, being (to put not too fine a point on it) a wuss, if a ghost really did appear to me, I'd probably wet my pants and then have a stroke.  Especially if it was of the gruesome, blood-streaked kind, the sort made popular by movies like The Sixth Sense.  Just watching that movie made me want to hide under the bed, except that's where the little girl that her stepmom poisoned was hanging out, and she's not exactly the sort of company you want in those circumstances.

But I digress.

The property in question is the Point of Ayr Lighthouse in Wales, and looks like a pretty cool place.  (See a photograph here.)  It has that lonely, windswept ambiance that definitely lends itself to ghostly occupation, and is a steal at £ 100,000.  However, you might want to hear something about your potential roommate before you lock in a downpayment.

The ghost in question has been seen on the balcony and also on the lower floors, and is usually dressed in work clothes.  There have been voices heard, calling out someone's name, and more than one instance of "spectral laughter."  Dogs apparently routinely refuse to go into the lighthouse.  One witness, Adam Corkill of Stockport, reports seeing a man up on the top of the tower who "appeared to be fixing equipment," but upon investigation the place was locked and empty.

I don't know about you, but having someone fix stuff in my house for free would be welcome, even if he was a ghost.  And that goes double if he's willing to mow the lawn.

However, before you jump you might want to consider the testimony of one Neil Hayden, of Birkenhead:

When I was 16 me and my best mate used to go and visit a relative of his in Talacre.

The occasion that sticks out is one day while on the beach, we saw what we can only describe as one massive footprint, like nothing human size.  The footprint was pointing towards the lighthouse, and as we stared at each other and panicked, there was an almighty bang on the inside of the lighthouse door, we ran back towards the dunes, and turned round to see someone shining a torch at us, this was about eight o’clock at night, just going dusk. 

Not only did the torch business frighten us but the footprint too, which believe it or not disappeared within the 15 minutes it took us to go get a witness.  No high tide, no one on the beach and no sign of the footprint being rubbed out.

So, I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty creepy.  Fixing the equipment and hanging around in jeans and blue chambray work shirts is one thing; making gigantic mysterious disappearing footprints and larking around with flashlights is another one entirely.

So, on the whole, it seems like a mixed bag.  Unfortunately for a variety of reasons, I don't have £ 100,000 just hanging around, or I'd consider it.  It'd be nice to have a vacation property in Wales, which is a lovely place, and I like being near the ocean.  I'd also like to have a chance to see if someone who is as generally skeptical as I am would have any sorts of paranormal experiences there, and also to see if my dogs would "refuse to enter."  I happen to know that one of my dogs, whose name (Grendel) and junkyard dog appearance mask a personality that is best described as "Cream Puff," is a bigger wuss than I am, and if he sensed anything weird about the place we'd have to drag him inside bodily.  So he'd be a pretty good gauge of the general atmosphere.

On the other hand, it's not the most practical of properties.  For one thing, it very much gives the impression of not having central heating, which would be a serious disadvantage in a climate such as that of coastal Wales.  For another, I'm not sure we're ready for the upkeep, even with a ghostly workman assisting us.  We have enough trouble with light housekeeping -- I don't think we're ready for lighthouse keeping.

Star Drek: On the nature of change

Prompted by my son, who seems to have a never-ending appetite for goofy science fiction flicks, we started a while back rewatching the original Star Trek series on Netflix.  I remember these well from watching them when I was a kid, first as a regular series when I was about seven years old, and then in (seemingly infinite) reruns.  I also remember loving them.  For the record, I never was a "Trekkie," filling my room with memorabilia, action figures, "Making Of" books, posters, and the like, but I did find the show a lot of fun.  Like many boys my age, I liked Mr. Spock best of all -- with his super-human strength, faster-than-light brain, and ability to subdue an opponent with a well-aimed shoulder pinch.

Watching them again forty years later, however, I was immediately struck with how poorly the show has aged.  Shatner's overacting is painful to watch; the plots are contrived and predictable; and the portrayal of women -- which, I suppose, was fairly progressive when the show was filmed, back in the late 60s -- is cringe-worthy.  Even some of the little touches -- Yeoman Rand's miniskirt and conehead-combover hair style, for example -- are more funny than futuristic.

So, this has me wondering about our perceptions of media, and why shows like Star Trek have not held up so well against the ravages of time.   On the surface, the aforementioned highly dated treatment of women pegs it as a product of the Cold War era.  The "technology," too, is fairly amusing in its attempts to be "24th century."  The communicators look like cellphones (Nathan commented that when Kirk flipped his open, he kept expecting the Captain to type in "kthxbai.")  On one episode we watched, "Bones" McCoy was repairing a patient's abdominal wound with what appeared to be a crème brûlée torch.

But I think it's more than that.  I think our expectations have changed.  When you compare some of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the old classic version, it's evident that we don't see drama in the same way. The old Star Trek, even the better episodes (and there were a few that weren't too bad) were moralistic, giving you an answer to the crew's ethical-dilemma-of-the-week that in the end was virtually rammed down your throat.  The ship's crew provided a touchstone for ethical purity -- Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and the rest were never in the wrong, were always on the side of Truth, Justice, and The American Way.  (And in a few, completely ridiculous episodes, they really were fighting for the American Way, out there in space.)

Contrast The Next Generation.  That series was full of ethical gray areas, questions without answers, clashes between cultures in which there was no clear Good Side and Bad Side.  Captain Picard wasn't always the hero figure -- he had weaknesses, made wrong decisions, was forced to take the lesser of two evils.  Even the Federation -- the stand-in in the original series for the American Government -- sometimes acted immorally.

I wonder if this is a reflection of our view of reality.  Art, after all, usually mirrors life.  In the 60s, most of us were heavily invested in seeing our government as the arbiter of morality in a dangerous world, filled with Bad Guys who were determined to do us (the Good Guys, of course) in.  When it became obvious -- although the transition was gradual, over the next two decades -- that our own beloved American government had done some things that would put the purported Bad Guys to shame, we were left anchorless.  Most of us have by now accustomed ourselves to the thought that governments in general are no better than the people we elect to run them, and that the world is really one gigantic gray area, but that was not the view of the majority in the 60s.

So The Next Generation, no less than the original series, is a product of its time -- filled with conspiracies, alliances that form and then dissolve through treachery, and moral ambiguity.  I suspect that its view of life in general is more realistic than that of the old series -- myself, I tend to think the world is fairly absurd and confusing, and that there really isn't a single, comprehensible pattern that will make sense of it all -- but who knows?  It would be interesting to fast forward (through a rip in the space-time continuum, no doubt) to 2050 and see the series through the eyes of someone from that time period.  They might well view it as being as ridiculous as we now see Captain Kirk's patriarchal, Federation Über Alles universe.

Time marches on. As Scotty has been known to point out, ye canna alter the laws of physics. Nor, it seems, can you stop change in its tracks. We like to think that our generation has a bead on reality, but I doubt this is true, any more than it has ever been true, back to the earliest times our ancestors pondered such notions.

Yoga and demonic possession

I bet you thought that yoga was a great way to improve flexibility, stretch and tone your muscles, and relax?  Little did you know that by practicing yoga, you're risking your immortal soul.

This from Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll, who in a long, rambling directive to his flock, says,

Giving sound teaching on yoga is important because there is increasing adoption of yoga by our culture, with over 15.8 million people practicing yoga and nearly every store you go into selling all kinds of yoga products.  It’s gone mainstream.  As such, Christians are also adopting it as a healthy aspect of exercise and lifestyle—complete with things like “Holy Yoga,” which is an oxymoron.  Saying yoga can be Christian because you do it for Jesus is a bit like going into a mosque, going through the worship practices, and then saying you’re not a Muslim because you’re doing it for Jesus.  They don’t mix.

He said about Christians trying to inject Christian beliefs into yoga that "you cannot redeem such a thing... (it is) unchristian, against scripture, and thus demonic in nature."

So, I wonder where you draw the line?  If you do a "downward dog" pose to stretch before a run, are the demons ready to pounce?  Does the lotus position somehow invite Satan to attack me because my feet are asleep, so I won't be able to run away?  (At least that's what always happens to me when I go into the lotus position.)  Is my wife's yoga mat infused with Demonic Energy?  What will happen if our cat sleeps on the yoga mat?  Will he become possessed by evil spirits?  (Actually, possession by evil spirits might actually be an improvement on this cat's current personality.)

What I find astounding about all of this is not that some wingnut has made a bizarre pronouncement.  That, after all, is what wingnuts do.  What I find amazing is that people still continue to attend his church and believe what he has to say afterwards.  If in my classroom, I started claiming that the Earth's mantle was composed of cherry pie filling, and that lava is red because of the cherry juice, my credibility would be compromised, to put it mildly.  But this guy can babble away about how practicing yoga is inviting demonic possession, and his congregation just kind of sits there nodding and mumbling "Amen, brother," instead of guffawing directly in his face and walking out, which is what I would do.

I guess that's the power of personality.  Driscoll is fairly well known as a charismatic speaker, and his views are labeled in virtually every source I looked at as "controversial."  And, of course, some people are easily led and don't question what they're told by an authority figure.  You put all of those things together, and you have a recipe for belief in crazy stuff, which to me is seriously scary.  Maybe all we have here is a group of worshipers who have been convinced to stop watching Lilias, Yoga, and You, and will have to find some other way to work out -- but in another context, this same human tendency creates a Jim Jones, a Mark Koresh, an Al Qaeda.  The only difference is scale and content.

To his ghostly mistress

One of my favorite poems is Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress."  The poem is a plea from a man to his lover to stop playing so hard to get.  It has some stunningly beautiful imagery, and a good message -- carpe diem, and don't miss chances, and all that sort of thing.  (Although a more prosaic English major friend summed it up as "Life's short, let's fuck," and said, "Of course you like it.  You're male.")

Near the end of the poem are the famous lines, "The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace."  However, we have a recent report from a woman in Ohio who might beg to differ.

Dianne Carlisle, of Euclid, claims that her four-year-old daughter Kimora was playing with her cellphone camera, and snapped a photograph of what appear to be two ghosts having sex.  (You can see a video clip that includes the image here; and for those of you who are concerned about such things, the clip is PG-13 or better, and was actually deemed appropriate to show on the local news.)

The spectral bow-chicka-bow-wow has aroused the interest of several local paranormal researchers.  David Jones, an Ohio-based ghost hunter, says that if the story checks out, this would be an "extraordinary development in paranormal research," and wonders, amongst other things, "how long it has been going on."

I think that's kind of a personal question, don't you?

Amy Allan, of The Travel Channel's "The Dead Files," says she's "skeptical."  "I've never seen two dead people who were conscious entities have intercourse," Allan told reporters.  "I have heard of people having sex with ghosts, but not this."

So, let me get this straight; you're doubtful that ghosts could have sex with each other, but willing to accept that a ghost could have sex with a living person?  All I can say is that your definition of "skeptical" and mine have a good many differences.

In any case, this is not the only experience that Carlisle and her family have had with her horny spectral roommates.  Her daughter saw "a girl standing in the living room, staring," on one occasion, and a photograph in a mirror shows another person besides the one holding the camera, despite the fact that there was supposedly only one person in the room at the time.  And Carlisle plays for the news report (if you watch the clip, you'll hear this as well) a voicemail that is allegedly from her deceased sister.  To me, the supposed message from the dead woman sounds like a bunch of static, but maybe more discerning ears than mine can make it out (Carlisle says the message is "I love you.").

In any case, Carlisle ends with a plea to to ghosts to keep the haunting G-rated, in consideration of the kids.  I dunno, think about it from the ghosts' point of view.  They're sharing living space, and sometimes they're gonna do what adults do, right?  I mean, here's this kid in the bedroom blundering around with a camera, snapping random photographs.  It's as much her fault as the ghosts, if you ask me.

So, anyway, that's today's story.  If it's true, it should be a cheering notion, that in the afterlife we won't be limited to rattling chains and going "Woooooo."  Much as I love Andrew Marvell's poem, I have to admit that the whole "... your quaint honor turn to dust/ And into ashes all my lust" thing is a little on the depressing side.