Free Republic

The Democrats are at it again. An e-mail that they are sending out is encouraging people to claim that Edwards won tonights debate. Letters to the editor, on line polls, etc. They are stacking the deck in their favor before the debates even begin. The following is the letter: Dear Dan Zachary, An "online coup d'etat." That's how CBS News described your efforts after the debate last Thursday. John Kerry did his part with a powerful performance that showed America they can expect strong and principled leadership when he is our commander-in-chief. But it was your efforts that kept the...

From the issue dated October 4, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i06/06a01801.htm A Lost Buddhist Literary Tradition Is Found Scholars decipher a stunning findan unknown canon in an ancient dialect By PETER MONAGHAN Seattle In certain cliffhangers on late-night television, dashing and strangely underdressed archaeologists in faraway places unearth artifacts of uncertain provenance. The discoveries cast new light on an ancient civilization. In reality, archaeologists are less swashbuckling, but once in a great while they do turn up objects -- ancient manuscripts, say, inscribed in little-known languages -- that have that effect. Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscripts here...

Reganbooks Barbara Parsons Lane. Inmates Can Keep Money From PEN Literary Award By WILLIAM YARDLEY Published: April 17, 2004 HARTFORD, April 16 - Barbara Parsons Lane will be one of the stars of the PEN 2004 Literary Gala, to be held at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday, honored for her starkly honest autobiographical essays at a ceremony emceed by Tom Brokaw and attended by a spectrum of celebrities from the publishing world, including Salman Rushdie and Tina Brown. Ms. Lane, however, will not be able to attend the event. She is serving 10 years in a Connecticut state...

Dispute: A heralded linguistic deciphering of an extinct hieroglyphic script accomplished in the 1990s is under attack by two researchers. FOR LINGUISTS, it's like hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win the World Series. Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson struck that blast in 1993 when they cracked one of the planet's few remaining undeciphered writing systems - a hieroglyphic script from the mysterious Isthmian civilization, which occupied southern Mexico 2,000 years ago.

A mysterious ancient stone mask from Mexico has spoken but apparently only to say that its people's written language remains undeciphered. BYU's Stephen Houston holds a copy of ancient script from Mexico. He disagrees with claims that "Teo Mask" words have been deciphered.Stuart Johnson, Deseret Morning News A study by Brigham Young University archaeologist Stephen Houston and his colleague from Yale University, Michael D. Coe, say the mask disproves earlier claims that the language had been cracked. Their paper is to be published in "Mexicon," a journal about news and research from Mesoamerica. The title is "Has Isthmian Writing Been...

Source: Brigham Young University Released: Fri 09-Jan-2004, 17:30 ET Mesoamerican Relic Provides New Clues to Mysterious Ancient Writing System A previously unknown ancient mask from southern Mexico contains an inscription that shows the language used there prior to the Maya civilization remains undecipherable, according to a new study by Stephen Houston and Michael Coe. Newswise — A previously unknown ancient mask from southern Mexico contains an inscription that shows the language used there prior to the Maya civilization remains undecipherable, according to a new study by Brigham Young University archeologist Stephen Houston and Yale University professor emeritus Michael Coe. Translating...

"The Little Contest with Big Hollywood Connections." MONTEREY, CA - Valuable Hollywood contacts are being offered in the 9th annual Monterey County Film Commission "Hollywood Connections 2004 Screenwriting Competition." A nationally recognized jury of film industry professionals will judge the final selections in the contest. Three winning scripts will be read by leading film industry professionals including Joel Freeman (producer, Shaft) and Michael Hertzberg (producer, Entrapment). Each of the top screenwriters gets the opportunity to meet with at least two of the judges in Los Angeles, and receives valuable film industry exposure for their screenplay. Other awards offered in the...

I am new here! Just getting my feet wet. I suppose I should have worn boots so my shoes and socks don't get wet. I really wanted to introduce myself and beg of you to visit my cartoon and humor writing web site. www.stephenkramer.com If you like The Far Side by Gary Larson, you will like The Near Side by Stephen Kramer. More than 270 original, off-the-wall, simple, award winning cartoons by yours truly. Then, take a detour to my humor writing link under my writing link and read my humorous fake headlines. And read my eBook (online book) "America's...

Alabama Woman Wins Worst Writing Award Thu Jul 17, 9:45 AM ET By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer SAN JOSE, Calif. - A lizard lover from Alabama won an annual contest celebrating bad writing with a ghastly simile comparing doomed romance to processed cheese. Mariann Simms of Wetumpka, Ala., won $250 in the 22nd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a parody honoring the writer of the worst beginning to an imaginary novel. "They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being...

WASHINGTON - A new computer program can determine the sex of an author by detecting subtle differences in the words men and women prefer to use. For instance, female writers tend to choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do. "Women have a more interactive style," said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the program. "They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader." Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such...

Lowering FCAT passing scores will allow 1,000 to graduate (Tallahassee-AP) -- The lowering of the passing score for seniors who took the F-CAT will allow about one-thousand who originally flunked to go ahead and graduate. The F-CAT is given in 10th grade but a student who fails can take the test again five more times. Nearly 14-thousand seniors have not passed the F-CAT, a requirement for grduation. About 4-thousand of those wouldn't graduate even if they did pass the F-CAT because they don't have the grades or haven't taken all the required courses. Seniors have another chance to take...

'Earliest writing' found in China By Paul Rincon BBC Science First attempt at writing .. on a tortoise shell Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists. The symbols were written down in the late Stone Age, or Neolithic Age. They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years. The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC. But the discovery has already generated controversy, with...

Receipt for girl reveals Roman slave secrets By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent (Filed: 22/03/2003) The first evidence of Roman Britain's slave trade has been unearthed: a receipt for a young French girl bought for the equivalent price of a small sports car today.Faint scratchings on a wooden writing tablet show that a wealthy slave working for the imperial household bought a girl named Fortunata (Lucky), a member of a Celtic tribe living on the borders of Normandy and Brittany. The silver-fir tablet had been preserved in wet London soil for 2,000 years.Although many Roman slaves were forced to work...

FAMILY FEUD The manuscripts and their classifications and reading will be studied in later pages. What we shall do now is closely scrutinize the centers from which our extant manuscripts have originated. It will be revealed in later study that Biblical manuscripts(MSS) are divided into two major groups. These two groups have been found to disagree with each other in many areas. Every English Bible in existence today will be found to proceed more or less from one of these two groups. The fact that there is ONE God plainly tells us that there cane only be ONE correct reading...

College Students Can’t Write? What a “scoop.” By Stanley K. Ridgley The Chronicle of Higher Education recently discovered something that parents have known for at least the past 15 years — America's universities don't teach college kids how to write . . . at least, not how to write very well. In fact, hundreds of thousands of recent college graduates today cannot express themselves with the written word. Why? Because universities have shortchanged them, offering strange literary theories, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and other oddities in the guise of writing courses. They've offered everything, really, but the basics of clear writing....

<p>IRAKLIO, Greece (AP) -- Researchers on the southern Greek island of Crete have unearthed the fossilized tusk, teeth and bones of a Deinotherium Gigantisimum, a fearsome elephant-like creature that might have given rise to ancient legends of one-eyed cyclops monsters.</p>

HOWELL, Mich. (AP) -- A charge against a man accused of scrawling obscenities on a check to pay a traffic ticket has been dropped after a judge said he didn't want to commit any more of the court's resources to the case. District Judge John Pikkarainen dismissed the contempt of court charge against Eric Wilmoth on Thursday. "I'm definitely relieved and very happy," Wilmoth told The Ann Arbor News. "I was pleasantly surprised by the judge's decision." In his opinion dismissing the charges, Pikkarainen wrote, "If the words written by the respondent were uttered in a courtroom setting before a...

w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m Sensation or forgery? Researchers hail dramatic First Temple period finding An inscription attributed to Jehoash, the king of Judea who ruled in Jerusalem at the end of the ninth century B.C.E., has been authenticated by experts from the National Infrastructure Ministry's Geological Survey of Israel following months of examination. The 10-line fragment, which was apparently found on the Temple Mount, is written in the first person on a black stone tablet in ancient Phoenician script. The inscription's description of...

Surveying the Walls of Uruk Can Technology Discover the Ancient City of Gilgamesh? German archaeologists working at the ancient site of Uruk (modern Warka, just east of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq) have begun mapping the canals, walls and building foundations of the sprawling, buried city—without even lifting a spade. Over the past two winters, a team headed by Margarete van Ess of Berlin’s German Archaeology Institute has laid out a grid system over the site and begun to map the buried ruins with a magnetometer an instrument that measures differences in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field...

Translators unravel old scroll's secrets 2003-01-07 By Diane Clay The Oklahoman On a dry day 2,000 years ago, a worker charged with mummifying a body among the tombs of Egypt preserved what would become one of the largest ancient literary finds in history. Experts, including Cincinnati professor Kathryn Gutzwiller, said the worker cut and molded a piece of papyrus -- what to him was a scrap of paper -- into a chest cover that resembled papier-mache. The cover formed a hard layer on the mummy before intricate decorations were added. The mummy was entombed, along with the papyrus, until 1992,...