Is it safe to sit in a traffic jam on the M5 for hours yet? Better stay home and read this lot instead, just to be on the safe side 
Happy invoicing!
- Queen of the S.R.O. - ”In gritty 1980s New York, one West Village flophouse became a last-chance refuge for addicts, criminals, LGBTQ runaways, and anyone with nowhere left to go. And my mom was their queen.” Ray W. Hayden, who served as both a cop and a firefighter in NYC before retiring due to 9/11-related injuries, on the chaotic life of his mother.
- Nyiragongo: Limnic Eruptions, Explained - ”If you’ve been following the eruption of Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the past week, you’ve probably heard the term ‘limnic eruption’ mentioned a few times. I’ve been asked, by both members of the public and colleagues in the press, what exactly a limnic eruption is.” Robin Andrews explains the potentially deadly situation that might arise with Lake Kivu in the DRC.
- A Construction Mistake in Rome That Created a Lake and United a Neighborhood - Francesco Pasta explains how failed public administration and community action have led to a thirty-years-and-counting argument over the use of an area of Rome: ”Here once stood the textile factory SNIA Viscosa, one of the largest in town. The factory closed down in 1954 and the site lay empty until the early 1990, when a private redevelopment — including a shopping mall among other buildings — was proposed for the area… Digging for the structure’s foundations and underground parking, construction machines hit a ground water vein. Soon, the pit was flooded and an artificial stretch of water was generated.”
- Finders, Keepers - ”Deep in southwest Arkansas is a state park that charges visitors $10 to search for gems that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Pay your ten bucks and you get to keep all the diamonds you find - if you find any, that is
- Ancient cemetery tells a tale of constant, low-level warfare - ”When archaeologists in the 1960s unearthed a 13,400-year-old cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, it looked like they’d stumbled across the aftermath of a large-scale battle fought during the Pleistocene. At least half the people buried at the site, which straddles the banks of the Upper Nile, bore the marks of violence: broken skulls, arrow and spear tracks gouged in bones, and stone projectiles still embedded in their bodies.” But it now seems that there was no single battle, just regular conflict.
- A rare look at a perilous journey in the Caucasus Mountains - ”Year after year these Georgian shepherds guide their flocks to pasture and keep an ancient tradition alive.” Every year these sheep farmers move their flocks 155 miles from winter pastures in the Shiraki Valley to Tusheti.
- The Sheep Market - Speaking of sheep: ”The sheep market is a collection of 10.000 sheep created by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Each worker was paid $.02 (US) to ‘draw a sheep facing left.’” Despite such simple instructions, I’ve found at least one facing right
- Fifteen Years Forsaken - ”A true story of castaways on a lost and hostile scrap of land, all thanks to some meddlesome Frenchmen and terrible luck.” A tragic tale of shipwreck and the Indian Ocean slave trade.
- Revisiting the 15 Most Controversial Rolling Stones Songs - ”The Stones are one of those rare bands who have hung on so long that their early output, deemed scandalous at the time, seems tame by today’s standards, while some of their other tracks whose problematic lyrics didn’t raise any eyebrows at the time are no longer considered acceptable. With that in mind, in honor of Sticky Fingers‘s anniversary, we’re looking back at some of the Rolling Stones’ most controversial tracks, whether they were simply an example of prudish censors getting worked up over nothing or misogynistic tracks that have rightly been retired from their setlist.” You have to admit, the Stones have written some well dodgy lyrics over the years
- Voices from the Dawn - ”From the Stone Age to the Iron Age the ancient ancestors of the Irish made their marks on the land with great stone and earthen structure… The Voices from the Dawn belong to all who have been moved by the power of these ancient sites: the farmers who have lived in their shadows, the poets who saw in them images of time cast in stone, and the archaeologists who have made them a passionate vocation.” Great site about Ireland’s ancient monuments by Howard Goldbaum. This is the Proleek Dolmen:
Happy invoicing!
