Wednesday Weird: The Baghdad Batteries

Taking a break from creepy creatures or what-have-you popping up in windows and doors, today we have something much more normal. But still weird.

In 1936, while excavating a 2000 year old village near Baghdad, a small, strange vase was discovered.
The vase was 6 inches high and made of bright yellow clay. Also, the clay was dated back two millenia.

On top of that, the vase contained a cylinder of sheet copper 5 inches by 1.5 inches and the edge of the copper sheet was soldered with a lead tin alloy similar to today's solder. The bottom of the cylinder was capped with more copper and sealed and the top was sealed in order to hold in place an iron rod suspended in the center of the copper cylinder. The rod had been corroded in places by acid.

Archaeologists examined the artifact and came to the surprising conclusion that it was, in fact, an electric battery, made 1800 years before their invention in 1799.

Replicas made of this battery (and others found in roughly the same region (close to a dozen in total)) show that the batteries could produce from .8 to nearly 2 volts of electricity.

Unfortunately, no one really knows what they were used for. Some people think they were used for pain killing, though opium and other, better, pain killing options were already in use at the time.
They could have also been used to electroplating - transferring a thing layer of metal onto another metal surface - but there hasn't been any artifacts discovered in the region with this kind of decoration or effect.
Or maybe they were just used as some sort of magical ritual. If you don't understand the science you created, it would be easy to say that touching an idol would give you a tingle.

Either way, it certainly changes the way, once again, we think about the past and the people who lived there.

Thoughts?

In Which I Have Lunch

So, as mentioned on my 2013 Goals post, one of the things I plan to do this year is to seriously consider getting my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Lucky for me, I was invited to a luncheon at Hamline to learn more about their low-residency program. I thought about not going, but then Twin more or less smacked me upside the head and told me I should go and I realized she was right and I was mostly just trying to be lazy.

So anyway, I went to the event on the 19th. And man, am I super glad I did!

So the way the low residency works is, you're assigned a mentor (a published author) who works with you the whole year. You have a packet, which is, more or less, monthly assigned work. And then twice a year you attend an 11 day residency at the campus.

The luncheon event took place during one of the days of the current winter residency, so the prospective students (me and about 8 others) got to sit in on two of the lectures, then have lunch with some of the faculty, alumns and the director of the program, and then we were invited to stay for the rest of the day.

The lectures were great (I'll probably post more on them next week with specifics) and there were about 45 students currently enrolled in teh MFAC program. And it was clear they were an awesome little community of writers. And I totally want to be part of it.

Lunch was great. Well, the food was no big deal, but I sat next to a girl who also wrote YA novels so we talked a lot, and then we got to ask questions of the faculty and director.

When lunch was done, myself and two others walked out to our cars together (none of us had planned on staying) and the three of us talked about how awesome the program seemed. I know for me, it made me wish that I was already enrolled.

So as it sits, I'm pretty sure there's a high probability I'll be applying for the MFAC program for the 2013 winter semester. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to talk about in the future.

Friday Fun (not really)

Whoops! Bad post!

Friday Fun

Yay! The weekend! How you must have missed it, ape-friends!

Of course, moi, Yvie, am (is?) a dog, so therefore pretty much everyday is like a weekend for me. Because I can nap whenever I want to and eat the same good food every day.

It's exhausting

But because of that, I have time to gather funnies from around the Internet for you.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Wednesday Weird: Hopkinsville Goblin Case

On August 21st, 1955, two families (11 People total, 4 of them children) were staying together at a rural Kentucky farmhouse. Around 7 pm, one of the men went outside to get a drink of water from the well (the house had no plumbing) and saw lights and an object in the sky.

Excited, he ran inside to tell the others but no one believed him.

About an hour later the people in the house began to hear strange noises and a dog that had been tied up outside began to bark frantically. Two of the men armed themselves and went outside to investigate. The dog hid under the house and didn't come out until the next day.

Then shit got real, so to speak.

The men saw two strange creatures, humanoid, with long arms, legs that seemed atrophied and silver skin. The men shot at them (because why not?) and the creatures flipped over and fled into the woods. The men said the bullets sounded as if they had struck a bucket.

sketch made by one of the witnesses

When the men returned to the house, though, the creatures returned as well. They would pop up in the windows, or in doorways, and each time the men would shoot at them, to seemingly no effect. The residents of the house could hear the creatures on the roof and the children were quickly reaching a state of hysteria when the 11 people finally decided to get into a car and flee to the police station.

The police returned to the house and while they didn't see any creatures, they did note damage to the house and quite a few of them reported seeing lights in the sky. The closest neighbors to the farmhouse also reported seeing lights in the sky and that they could hear the weapons fire from the farmhouse.

The U.S. Air force investigated and would later rule the incident as due to "an escaped monkey, from a carnival, painted in silver paint". Because, right, that makes a lot of sense. Honestly, that almost makes less sense than something paranormal happening.

The owners of the house never wanted any publicity or money from their story, and in fact, stopped telling it to people who asked. A few months after the event, they moved, fed up with the attention from people who believed them and people who thought they were responsible for a hoax.

In 2002, a daughter of one of the men present for the encounter said this about her father:

It was a serious thing to him. It happened to him. He said it happened to him. He said it wasn't funny. It was an experience he said he would never forget. It was fresh in his mind until the day he died. It was fresh in his mind like it happened yesterday. He never cracked a smile when he told the story because it happened to him and there wasn't nothing funny about it. He got pale and you could see it in his eyes. He was scared to death. (source)

So, what do you think happen?
For me, I don't think it was a hoax. I really believe those people saw something that night. Though one police officer blamed it on moonshine, there was never any evidence attributed to drug or achohol use. And presumably the children wouldn't be drunk either.

I don't think we can say for sure what it was. If we're purely looking for a natural, common explanation, I think the closest theory we'll get is that the family mistook a pair of Great Horned Owls for gremlins, though that doesn't explain the inability to kill them.
But Great Horned Owls look a lot like the sketches and reports and will aggressively defend their nests. In fact, the Great Horned Owl is the only known owl species to have killed a human.

If you see this bird, do not confront it

Thoughts? Theories?

In Which I Rate Some Books

So. Here we are with a new year and a new year's worth of books to consume.

Which means it's time to look back on last year and pick my top 5 books I read in 2012.

In no particular order:


The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

I'd been hearing about this book for awhile. I think Alex Cavanaugh said it was one of his favorite books of 2011. And also, I'd heard Scott Lynch speak a few times at a local conference and he's kind of awesome and funny.
I was not let down by this book. I loved it hardcore. The magic, the debauchery, the violence, the characters. Even when horrible stuff was happening (and so much horrible stuff happens, guys) I couldn't put it down.


The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

My good friend TL Conway told me that this book kind of changed her life. So even though it was sort of on my radar, her rec bumped it up some.
It's a little slow to get into. And it's long. But oh so worth it.
I read the last third in a hotel in Madison (at the Wiscon conference) sobbing in my hotel room and using up all the Kleenex. Because even though I knew it would be sad (and there is plenty of warning in the book that specific bad things will happen) I wasn't prepared for HOW sad and heartbreaking it would be. I think this book made me cry more than any other book ever (even more than Where the Red Fern Grows).

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

Learned about this one from my good pal Teebore at one of our writing group meetings. I went home that night, downloaded it for my kindle, and started reading.
I think I finished it the next day. Then I made Twin read it. Then I bought it for Brother's b-day, even though he rolled his eyes at me (he loved it too).
I mean, a book where it's all about video games and pop culture from the 80s? Yeah. Sign me up for that. Sign me up HARD.
I really hope the movie happens, though it seems it has stalled out some since the crazyness of trying to snatch up the rights.

Fire - Kristin Cashore

I liked Graceline a lot. I mean, really, I loved it Hard. But Fire - Fire I loved even more. It had all the awesomeness of what I loved about Graceling (the adult fantasy themes which I frequently find missing in YA fantasy (ie: pregnancy, violence towards women, poverty, etc) but then the world building pretty much blew my mind. I mean, a place where monsters are animals (or people) that are so beautiful they ensnare non-monsters? And how monsters crave monster-flesh?
Awesome. And the characters. LOVED all the characters.
I kind of wish I was Kristin Cashore. But not really, because then I would miss out on reading her books.

The Lost Girl - Sangu Mandanna

I snagged this book at an SCBWI conference. There was only a small stand selling books, and this was the only YA novel they had for sale, and since I'll be damned if I don't buy a book when there are books for sale, I snatched it up, not really knowing much about it.
Oh man, totally a good decision.
This book also made me cry. It's broken up into 3 section, and I cried all through the middle. It's really a novel about loss, and grief and love and trying to learn your place in the world. I highly recommend it to everyone. It's wonderful.



So there you have it! What were some of your favorite books of 2012?

Friday Fun!

Woo hoo!

Yvie here, ape-friends! Because we've made it to another weekend.

Time to eat all the junkfood!

Now it's time to have some fun!