Interesting Dead Person of the Day

[houseisland]

Murdered Bog Men Found With Hair Gel, Manicured Nails

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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[MobilePCPhysician]

Affectionately known as my ex-wife

[houseisland]

Infertility link in iceman's DNA

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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Grauballe Man


Grauballe Man, found in 1952 ... had his throat cut from ear to ear and his skull cracked. His body concealed another mystery: Researchers found that his gut contained traces of ergot fungus, which produces an effect similar to that of LSD. Was Grauballe Man deliberately drugged? Or was he killed because he was believed to be bewitched or possessed when he displayed convulsions and hallucinations?


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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[TripleRLtd]

Affectionately known as my ex-wife

[houseisland]

C.J. Jung

Jung was a bit of a mystical dingbat, brilliant but a dingbat nonetheless.

Always liked this quote:

"One cannot be too cautious in these matters, for what with the imitative urge and a positively morbid avidity to possess themselves of outlandish feathers and deck themselves out in this exotic plumage, far too many people are misled into snatching at such "magical" ideas and applying them externally, like an ointment. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practise Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world -- all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls."


C.G. Jung

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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Lise Meitner

Female and Jewish: Two Strkes and You're Out -- No Prize for You!

"[Otto] Hahn believed nuclear fission was impossible until [Lise] Meitner demonstrated to him that it had happened. She was the first person to realize that the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts. .... It was politically impossible for the exiled Meitner to publish jointly with Hahn in 1939. Hahn published the chemical findings in January 1939 and Meitner published the physical explanation the following month with her nephew, physicist Otto Robert Frisch, and named the process 'nuclear fission'. Meitner recognized the possibility for a chain reaction of enormous explosive potential. .... In 1944, Hahn received a solo Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. In the opinion of many scientists, Meitner should have shared the prize."

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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Harald Hardråda


Harald Sigurdson / King Harald Hardråda

When the Norwegian King was killed in battle in 1015, Harald Sigurdson, one of the King's half brothers, was forced to flee Norway. Harald was only fifteen, and he was wounded.

He made his way to Russia and eventually to Constantinople, where he became the leader of the Varangian Guard, an elite mercenary unit which served as the Byzantine Emperor’s personal bodyguard. Harald became wealthy.

In 1045 he returned to Norway and became King.

In 1066 he invaded England. He was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge on September 25. The Norwegian defeat was the end of the Viking era: it is estimated that of the 300 ships which brought Scandinavian troops to England only 30 were required in the escape of the battle survivors; a substantial portion of the adult male population of Scandinavia died at Stamford Bridge.

Harold Godwinson, the English King, had force marched his troops north to meet the Norwegian invaders. His army also suffered heavy losses. Four days after the battle, William of Normandy landed his troops in the south of England and was, not surprisingly, completely unopposed. Harold had to march his battle weary troops south again. On October 14, the English army was defeated at Hastings.

Timing is everything. Had Harald Sigurdson waited a couple of weeks, we might all be speaking Norwegian.


Heimskringla


Stamford Bridge


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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Juanita


Juanita, a 12- to14-year-old girl, had been the victim of the capa cocha, the Inca's child sacrifice ceremony to mountain gods. The Incas, one of the most powerful civilizations of the western world before Spanish invaders destroyed it in 1532, believed that the Ampato god supplied water and withheld avalanches in return for human sacrifices.


Juanita at Wikipedia

Inca at National Geographic


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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Ben Jonson


If it were not for the misfortune of having lived at the same time as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson would have been famous, his name recognized in every English-speaking household. As a poet and playwright, he was brilliant, and with the possible exception of Chaucer, he dwarfs most other literary figures before and after his time. But then there is Shakespeare..., and history is not always kind to second bananas.

Jonson was a self-made man from a menial background. He was the stepson of a bricklayer, and he was educated on a scholarship to a charity school. He was a large, fearless man with a quick temper, and he had a large appetite for alcohol and women. He served as a soldier and is reported to have killed in battle. He also once killed a fellow actor in duel. He eventually received direct patronage from King James I, the highest of literary honours and a large accomplishment for someone of his social background, a man who had worked at a trade.

His work was complex, intellectual, political, and controversial. He was often in trouble with "the powers that be" and risked imprisonment, execution or disfigurement. His satire was savage and brutal. By comparison, the episodes of social justice portrayed in Shakespeare's comedies are relatively gentle, and they usually end in reconciliation. In Jonson's plays the social justice meted out to fools is cruelly harsh, and the very real humour in it all is disturbing as one finds oneself enjoying Jonson's knife work, laughing as the knife is twisted again and again. And there is, of course, no reconciliation.

Jonson's tragedy, Sejanus, His Fall (1603), should be required reading for any political science course. It is possible to read it as an allegory for almost any period of political intrigue -- there are things in it eerily reminiscent of McCarthy era politics and perhaps even of current politics.



Ben at Wikipedia



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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[houseisland]

Please feel free to jump in and post an interesting dead person of your own.

The field is wide open -- no shortage of subjects.

[Guts3d]

A true humanitarian and scholar. "He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world." - Epitaph on the grave of George Washington Carver.

[houseisland]

A true humanitarian and scholar. "He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world." - Epitaph on the grave of George Washington Carver.

Cool. Carver was on my mental list. Everyone in North America who stayed awake in elementary school should know of him -- he was certainly part of the British Columbia shcool curriculum.

[houseisland]

Kennewick Man

This one is an odd choice for Interesting Dead Person of the Day -- Kennewick Man, deceased now some 8,400 years, is most definitely dead -- there is no denying this -- and thus he qualifies on this point. But he is not particularly interesting in and of himself -- we know next to nothing about him. However, the modern political controversy he has sparked is of great interest.

In 1996, his skeletal remains were found in the bank of the Kennewick river in Washington State. He was problematic right from the start. Anthropologist James Chatters, who looked at the skeleton initially thought, "I've got a white guy with a stone point in him.... That's pretty exciting. I thought we had a pioneer." The skeleton was of the Caucasoid type, and it had a stone point embedded in its pelvis. The problem was with dating. Both radio carbon dating of the skeleton and stylistic dating of the stone point indicated a date way too early for the bones to be those of a white pioneer.

The skeleton opens up many issues. There is the Clovis/Folsom technology debate. There are the arguments about migration of first peoples to the Americas -- some theorists hold that Europeans, using Clovis point technology, were the first humans in North America -- see Wickipedia. Washington State First Nations peoples, who, like aboriginal peoples everywhere, have no good reason to trust anything that white (or other foreign colonizing) people do or say, have stopped the investigation of Kennewick Man by claiming him as an ancestor -- even though it is patently obvious that his remains are completely dissimilar to their physiology. It is all too touchy. If Kennewick Man were a "white guy," there are probably people who would use him in an attempt at discrediting aboriginal land claims, etc. So once again the pursuit of "truth" is perceived as a threat, and it is sacrificed to preserve an ethnocentric "Political/Mythological Truth." It is disappointing, but in the end humans are humans, and aren't we all highly skilled at self-deception and self-rationalization, especially when feeling threatened?

We may never know "the truth" about Kennewick Man. He is Caucasoid, but this does not necessarily mean he was a white European Caucasian. There are Asian Caucasoid peoples.

Further Reading


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It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[street1]

http://www.youtube.com/results.php?search=skeleton

Little Richard in 50 years.