History of English (combined)

Game Theory: Making Room for the Women - NYTimes.com

Game Theory: Making Room for the Women - NYTimes.com

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Inn Generator)

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Inn Generator)

Salty Falcon

Staff

Rooms Available (1/6)

4 servers and 2 bouncers

Barkeep

Pasarin Farshot (F, Elf, 134)

Class (Common)

Room: 5sp/day, Common Room: 2sp/day

NPCs Present (124)

2 Bards, 35 Commoners, 16 Merchants, 8 Military Elite, 12 Nobles, 10 NPC Adventurers, 4 NPC VIPs, 4 Priests, 9 Shady Characters, 8 Town Guards, 16 Other

Today's Special

Locale (Swamp)

Roast pheasant in oyster sauce, High spirits

Atmosphere (Boring)

The food is bland and uninspired, as is the drink. No one seems capable of cracking a smile or talking to one another.

Topics of Conversation (4)

• Tankards click together in memory of a friend long passed away. Tales and memories are shared.
• Two patrons quietly negotiate a small business deal involving the sale of various local commodities.
• Half-drunk patrons grumble about their tithes and taxes.
• A server chuckles as a customer whispers into her ear—something about a "moonlight stroll."

Randon Events (3)

• A wonderful flowery smell wafts past you as someone moves by.
• There’s a screech as a server accidentally steps on the tail of a cat that has wandered into the area. The cat darts under tables and out of view.
• After dropping her fork, a customer curses as she knocks over her drink while trying to pick it up.

Guide to "Les Puces" the oldest Flea Markets in Paris | Atlas Obscura

Atlas Obscura's Guide to "Les Puces" the oldest Flea Markets in Paris | Atlas Obscura
Atlas Obscura's Guide to "Les Puces" the oldest Flea Markets in Paris

by Laetitia / 26 Oct 2012

In his 1928 novel Nadja, Andre Breton, leader of the French surrealist movement, describes the experience of finding an object in a fleamarket as capable of

“admitting ( him ) to an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes particular to each individuals of harmonies struck as though on the piano, flashes of lights that would make you see, really see.”

Breton illustrated the chapter in his book with surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard's picture of the Saint Ouen Fleamarket, which in turn became a symbol of surrealist ideology: a place full of possibilities for chance encounters.

The story of Saint Ouen Fleamarket started in the 1870s when ragpickers, evicted from the center of Paris for insalubrity - in other words for being unwholesome and unhealthy - the ragpickers installed their bazar in Saint Ouen, situated in the capitals northern periphery.
The first draft of the market was truly anarchic. Items, usually founds in upscale Parisian garbage, were piled directly on the dirt or towered in stacks alongside the road. To rectify this chaos , Saint Ouen's municipality reorganized the settlement in several markets along Rue des Rosiers, providing the bric a brac dealers with water and electricity and the possibility to rent a wooden stand to display their goods.
In 1908 , with the opening of a metro station, Saint Ouen flea market's becomes a highly popular attraction, drawing in hundreds of Parisians each week, all thrilled by the eccentric displays and the opportunity for a good deal. With a steady flow of patrons to the fleamarkets “Guinguettes” - a type of small bar and restaurant where one could drink cheaply - and other entertainment venues began appearing. Music, above all Manouche Jazz, became a fundamental part of the faubourg or "suburban" atmosphere.
Ageless venues like La Chope des Puces hosted tremendous parties where Django Reinhardt, his Hot Club de France quintet, and generations of gypsies musicians have come to get wild and swing the place to the rafters.

Nowadays the flea market has changed, having grown more touristy, with entire sections selling nothing but T-shirts or new shoes. But don't be discouraged if you see only hippy jewelry and street-wear, it simply means you are in the wrong market.
The best “Marchés” are to be founds in a labyrinthian set of streets all merging to Rue des Rosiers. The most ancient, Marchés Vernsaison, remains the closest to the old time antique hodgepodge that the flea market was a hundred years ago. Named after its founder Jules Romain Vernaison, this market and its tortuous alleys presents an unlimited variety of randomly wonderfully odd things: japanese woodcuts, dolls, hybrid taxidermy, china, ancient devices…the only rule being the perennial "early bird catch the worm" at least if you want to find treasures for reasonable price.

Marché Paul Bert possess a less anarchic layout and installations are more fastuous and artful. Some dealers's displays, like Pierre Bazalgues's, embrace a refined curiosity cabinet esthetic, provoking astonishment and pure visual pleasure. Rue Paul Bert is itself full of surprise: after a moment of tropical disorientation at the nearby Colonial Concept at No. 8 - a menagerie of taxidermy, fossils, and other natural wonders - you'll find a thousand and one treasures at every price on the tables of the street sealers, from 60's french records to "Ex Ossibus" (from the bones) relics.
Visiting St Ouen Fleamarket on a spring Sunday, sitting at the terrace of a Manouche Jazz guinguette to sip a expresso, is for a lot of parisian people, a highly esteemed sunday ritual. Saint Ouen's dreamlike, surrealist beauty created through an accumulation of mysteries and amazements, serves as an outdoor museum that gathers both curious object and curious people.
Travel Notes: It is useful to get a map of the area. Try to be very discrete with your cellphone, wallet, and money in general: the way between the metro and the actual antique market is paved with thieves and warm gambling game encouragements.

Above is a map of the various flea markets and below is a list of five of our favorite stops when visiting "Les Puces" or The Fleas as they are commenly called.
No. 1: François Richard's Scientific Devices and Odd Machinery - Marche Vernaison, Rue des Rosiers, Allee 3, Stand 107
A charming flea market shop dedicated to scientific equipment and retrofuturistic apparati in general, it is something of a holy temple for obsolete modernity and a wonderful trip down a clanking, humming, hissing and wondrous memory lane. If you have questions about what anything is be sure to ask François.

No. 2: Francois Daneck 's Colonial Concept - 8 rue Paul Bert, saint Ouen, Saint-Ouen

Collection of antique taxidermy and natural specimens, complete with a polar bear in the piano room, alligators on type-writers, and a general assortment of natures wonders (all antique) beautifully arranged.

No. 3: Alain Baroux 's Antique Curiosity Cabinet - 99 Rue des Rosiers , Stand 90 - Allee 5, Saint-Ouen
An antique curios dealer and hybrid taxidermist, Monsieur Baroux sells naturalia, exotica and others traditional curiosity cabinet items but his real specialty is his own creations transforming dusty mounts into fantastic creatures that will make the standard two-headed duckings and jackalopes pale in comparison.
No. 4: Pierre Bazalgues Macabre Antique Stand - rue des Rosiers, Stand 221 - Allee 4, Saint-Ouen
Skeletons, medical artifacts, and other obscure and precious treasures all displayed in a wooden pharmacists cabinet. A true "Memento Mori" specialist, Pierre Bazalgues eye for the morbid brings together animals skeletons, plaster ecorches and human skulls into breathtaking dispays.
No. 5: La Chope des Puces: Temple of Gypsy Jazz - 122 rue des Rosiers, Saint-Ouen
After walking through the complex of 2,500 to 3,000 flea market stalls, winding your way from Colonial taxidermy, through medical specimens, among mysterious science antiques, and between the skulls and skeletons, one can grow quite exhausted. There is no better place to rest ones feet and drink a beer than La Chope des Puces an iconic and eccentric bar home to the origins of "Manouche" Jazz music.
If you are lucky you may catch a Gypsy Jazz show in progress!

BBC News - Roman settlement remains found at Kingskerswell bypass

BBC News - Roman settlement remains found at Kingskerswell bypass

Roman settlement remains found at Kingskerswell bypass

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Pottery was among the finds in Kingskerswell

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The remains of what is believed to be a 2,000-year-old Roman settlement have been uncovered at the construction site of a new bypass.

Artefacts discovered in Kingskerswell include fragments of pots thought to be imported from southern Europe. Trenches used for defence were also found.

Devon county archaeologist Bill Horner said it was an "exciting find".

The artefacts will eventually go on show at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum.
Locals 'Romanised'
Demolition work began in October to clear the route ready for the road linking Torbay and Newton Abbot.

The quantity and the quality of the finds suggested the people who lived there would have been part of the local ruling elite who were becoming "Romanised", Mr Horner said.

Remains of medieval buildings were also found

He said: "The Romans conquered the South West and, for much of the later 1st Century AD, the area was a military zone.

"After the army moved north to conquer the rest of the population, the native elite were becoming more Romanised, and assimilating into the Roman Empire and economy."

As well as the Roman finds, archaeologists also turned up evidence of 800-year-old medieval buildings.

The discoveries are not expected to delay the construction of the £110m, 5.5km (3.4 mile) bypass, construction managers said.

Devon County Council hopes the road will be completed by December 2015

New finds made in Staffordshire Hoard field

New finds made in Staffordshire Hoard field

In the same field in Hammerwich where three years ago metal detectorist Terry Herbert found the massive 3,900-piece collection of Anglo-Saxon gem-studded gold and silver known as the Staffordshire Hoard, archaeologists have now found another 90 pieces of gold and silver. Archaeologists excavated the find site right after the initial discovery in 2009 and thought they had recovered everything there was to find. The dig was closed.
This November the field was plowed for the first time since the discovery. On November 19th, a team of archaeologists aided by metal detectorists with experience in scanning delicate archaeological sites and a phalanx of volunteers from the Hammerwich and the Stoke-on-Trent Museum Archaeology Society examined the entire 13.69-acre field. First the metal detectors surveyed the field, then the archaeologists and volunteers walked all 13.69 acres of it looking for anything the machines might have missed. Wherever artifacts were discovered, archaeologists excavated the sites. The dig ended on December 1st.

“We think these items were buried at a deeper level which is why we didn’t find them first time around,” said county council archaeologist Steve Dean.
“We always wanted to come back and look for other items – pottery, other metalwork – so we always had the intention of coming back once the field had been ploughed.”
“We will be keeping an eye on the field and we would, with the farmer’s permission, like to go back in a couple of years when he ploughs again to see if it turns up anything else,” he added.

Most of the 90 pieces they discovered are small pieces, fragments that weigh less than a gram. Some are probably mounts from Anglo-Saxon weapons similar to the ones in the Staffordshire hoard. There are two mounts of particular interest: one shaped like an eagle and another shaped like a cross. The largest piece looks like it may be a cheek guard from a helmet. One very much like it was discovered in the original hoard, so this might just be its missing companion.
The artifacts are still in the process of being cleaned and X-rayed. Researchers can’t definitely state at this point if these newly discovered objects were part of the original Staffordshire hoard, nor has their age been determined. We won’t have long to wait before an official determination. The South Staffordshire Coroner Andrew Haigh will hold an inquest on January 4th to decide if the gold and silver pieces are part of the same hoard discovered three years ago and whether they should be declared treasure.
If he rules that the artifacts are treasure (which is basically a given) and that they are part of the Staffordshire Hoard, it will be a new windfall for the original finder and the landowner, Fred Johnson. The original find was valued at £3.3 million ($5.5 million) and, as per the terms of the Treasure Act, two local museums — the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery — raised the princely sum to secure the hoard. The money was then split, with half going to the finder Terry Herbert, who was on disability at the time, and half to Fred Johnson. Even though Herbert was not involved in this follow-up dig, if the gold and silver are ruled to be part of the hoard he found three years ago, he is still the finder as far as the law is concerned.
Because mo’ money mo’ problems, hitting the jackpot caused a rift between Herbert and Johnson which has yet to be mended. They were friends before the discovery. They are no longer. The details are murky, but Herbert says Johnson wanted to keep all the money for himself, which is weird because that’s just not how the Treasure Act works. The two men haven’t spoken in years. Depending on the coroner’s ruling, they might have a few hundred thousand pounds more to fight over.

The History Blog » Blog Archive » New finds made in Staffordshire Hoard field

Resurrecting the ancient city of Laodicea

Resurrecting the ancient city of Laodicea ~ Roman News and Archeology

Monday, December 17, 2012

Resurrecting the ancient city of Laodicea

Monday, December 17, 2012 Jean Noël Tribolo No comments

Cranes, excavators, teams of workmen in hard-hats and foremen shouting into their mobile phones are a ubiquitous feature of today's Turkey, a country where, in spite of a global economic slowdown, new buildings continue to be erected at a staggering rate. Take a trip to Laodicea, however, and you'll see a “building site” with a twist. For here a long abandoned Greek-Roman city is being resurrected wholesale from its ruins by … construction cranes and teams of workmen in hard-hats!

Sprawling across a low hill between the prosperous textile town of Denizli and the iconic travertine formations of Pamukkale in western Turkey, ancient Laodicea is generally overlooked by the vast majority of visitors, who tend to be drawn instead to Pamukkale and its associated site of Hierapolis, or the wonderful remains at Aphrodisias, not too much further away. Only bible groups, attracted to Laodicea because it is one of the Seven Churches mentioned in the New Testament's Revelation of John, buck the trend.

That Laodicea is relatively little visited is hardly surprising given its press. The current edition of Lonely Planet Turkey says “there's not much of interest left,” the Rough Guide to Turkey doesn't even mention the site. A late 1980s version of the more specialist, archaeology and history-orientated Blue Guide writes of Laodicea, “Much of its worked stone has been removed for building purposes and, unfortunately, little is being done to preserve its remaining structures from further damage.”

Columns, capitals and freshly cut marble

The author of the latter guide particularly would be gobsmacked at the momentous changes under way at Laodicea in late 2012. Everywhere you look across the broad, uneven hilltop site are recently re-erected columns, many of which were once an integral part of the colonnades lining the city's grid-plan streets. The carefully grooved columns are surmounted in many cases by flamboyantly carved Corinthian-style capitals, hefty flared blocks decorated with acanthus leaves. Of course you can see re-erected columns at many similar sites across western Turkey, but visit Laodicea today and you can actually see how the reconstruction work is done, with cranes lifting the marble column drums up to the workers on a scaffolded section of colonnade, and blue-hatted workers maneuvering them into position.

Turkey Laodicea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Inevitably, where a column drum has been lost to the vicissitudes of time, re-erecting the complete column necessitates the insertion of a new one. Add to this the fact that many of the original parts have been cleaned up to blend in with the new, and the overall effect of the gleaming white marble reconstructions can be rather off-putting, for most of us are both used to -- and rather like -- seeing our ancient remains romantically tarnished by the weather and crusted with lichen. But thinking about it, isn't this how the city would have looked like when it was first being built back in the mid-third century B.C. by the Seleucid ruler King Antiochus II for his wife, Laodicea, or rebuilt in even grander fashion following one of the many quakes that devastated the region in the Roman and Byzantine periods, with freshly cut and polished marble dazzling ancient workmen and idle onlookers alike?

A new Ephesus?

To reconstruct ancient buildings or not is, of course, an argument that has long divided archaeologists and historians. Purists argue that ancient sites should be excavated and records kept of what is found but that they should be otherwise left as they are -- if for no other reason than that those involved in the reconstruction might get it wrong. Liberals counter that reconstruction enables both experts and ordinary people alike to better appreciate a building or site, and fosters an interest in the past among the general public that can only be of benefit to the preservation of the past. Fortunately the liberals appear to have won the day at Laodicea, where the excavation and reconstruction work is being carried out under the aegis of Denizli's Pamukkale University.

Newspaper talk of a “second Ephesus” may be a little premature, but there is no doubt that this is going to a major site on western Turkey's tourism circuit -- especially given its proximity to Pamukkale and its New Testament associations. For despite the numerous earthquakes that leveled the city from time to time, it nonetheless prospered and grew to be, at its height in the second and third centuries A.D., a major settlement covering some five square kilometers. Its wealth derived from its location controlling a major trade route between the Aegean and upland Anatolia, the production and export of fine quality wool, and because of the presence nearby of an important shrine to the moon god Men and its associated healing center, which drew in many pilgrims. The city retained its importance until the early sixth century, when it was abandoned after a particularly severe earthquake.

Exploring the site

But apart from the colonnades already mentioned, what is there left to see of this once important city? Once you've negotiated the entry point (admission TL 10, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except Monday) the most obvious place to start, just beyond the parking lot and café-cum-souvenir shop, is the southeast gate, also known as the East Byzantine Gate. Using masonry from previous Roman buildings, the gate was part of a defensive fortification thrown up around the city in the late fourth century A.D., a sign that the region was less secure than it had been during the preceding Roman period. The gate opens up onto the city's main thoroughfare, near one kilometer-long and impressively broad Syria Street, its large marble paving flags still in remarkably good condition. Lined on either side by imposing columns, it's every bit as impressive as any Roman street surviving in Turkey bar, perhaps, Curetes Street at Ephesus.

Probably the most intriguing remains are those rather prosaically known today as Temple A, on the north side of Syria Street. Some 19 columns of this temple and its sanctuary area have been re-erected, giving some idea of the vast scale of this place of worship. Enter the well-preserved doorway leading to the main body of the temple, which would have contained a statue of a deity in ancient times, and you find yourself, rather alarmingly until you get used to it, walking on tempered glass set in a steel canopy covering the arched vault below, still littered with finely carved marble statuary.

Further along Syria Street are the remains of the marketplace or agora, right at the heart of the settlement and the focal point of any Greek-Roman town. Just south of it are the so-called Central Baths, the typically monumental structure comprising the changing, warm, hot, super-hot and cold-plunge rooms of a typical Roman bath, very much the model for the later Turkish hamam. The holes where the metal pegs used to fix the marble cladding to the interior can still be seen and, in one spot on the east wall, a fragment of the marble itself is still in place, clinging to the original plaster.
Marble jigsaw puzzles

Over to the northwest, heading towards the westernmost of Laodicea's two theaters, are neatly piled and labeled stacks, some of marble fragments, others of brick, tile and sections of terracotta water pipe. Recovered from the site by the excavators, these oversized jigsaw puzzle pieces will be painfully pieced back together in whichever building they came from -- or stored in a museum depot somewhere until their fate is decided. Close by, when I visited a couple of weeks ago, local workmen stood in the bottom of deep trenches cut into the accumulated debris of a couple of millennia or so, uncovering a jumble of marble column drums and other architectural pieces from long-tumbled buildings. Above them a massive crane was poised, ready to hoist the remains up and away, its driver listening to shouted instructions from a young, bearded archaeologist, while a tractor and trailer was loaded with earth from the dig.

It was rather a different scene to the one recorded by Society of Dilettante member Richard Chandler, who visited Laodicea in 1764 to record its antiquities. Although he reports seeing many remains, they were either “in a confused heap” or else covered with “risen soil.” The reconstruction of the ancient city and subsequent hordes of tourists envisaged by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Denizli's mayor were then unimaginable. Chandler and his party camped on the ruins of the desolate city and he wrote: “All was silence and solitude. Several strings of camels passed eastwards over the hill; but a fox, which we first discovered by his ears peeping over a brow, was the only inhabitant of Laodicea.”

A sight well-worth seeing

There is much else to discover in this sprawling site, from the massive outline of a 25,000-seater stadium to several basilica churches, and it would be easy enough to spend a whole day here. Although the sprawl of Denizli is encroaching upon the environs of Laodicea in the form of skeletal electricity pylons and the like, it remains a beautiful spot, raised up above the valley floor, with grand views across to the mountains on either side. The great white smudge on the hillside to the northwest is the travertine terraces of Pamukkale, behind which lie the remnants of Laodicea's northern neighbor, the spa-city of Hierapolis.

When the excavation and reconstruction work is completed -- which won't be for many years judging by the amount of architectural material still jumbled about the place -- Laodicea may just give Ephesus, another of the Seven Churches mentioned in Revelations, a run for its money in tourism terms. For the moment it is quiet and uncrowded. This sense of solitude, combined with the chance to see an ancient city resurrected, piece by piece, makes Laodicea a “building site” worth seeing rather than avoiding.