And no doubt you followed the ups and downs of her short marriage to Paul Simon and knew every word of the song he wrote for her:
But she was accomplished off the screen as well, having written several books including a novel and an autobiography.
But she was perhaps best known for her starring role in millions of young men’s (and no doubt quite a few women’s) fantasies as Princess Leia Organa
Well, not so much for the look of that chaste diplomat but more for this outfit that she regrets not having resisted:
It all really took off in the 1990s. Carrie was responsible for fixing up Hook in 1991, Sister Act in 1992, Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992 and The Wedding Singer in 1998. In 1992, Entertainment Weekly called Carrie Fisher “one of the most sought after doctors in town”—high praise, and one of the only accolades that Fisher would ever receive in printed form, given that she was not credited by name as a writer for any of the films which she rescued.
But not even she could save the Star Wars prequels.
On Boxing Day 2006 my friend Pablo Heising walked out of the Cole Café, laughing at a joke told to him by the Captain of Park Station SFPD, took a sip of his morning latté, and died.
The cop gave him CPR but Pablo was probably dead before he hit the ground. Dying while laughing with coffee on your lips? It doesn’t get much better than that. As a former US Army medic who has seen people die, I have to say, “Oh Hell YES!” I’ll take that way off this mortal coil any day. (I used to hope I’d be shot by a jealous 20 year old husband but I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed)
According to most history books, the Islamic empire came to an official end with the Mongol conquests of the Middle East during the mid-13th century. Although by this time the empire had well-surpassed its Golden Age and had entered into a general state of decline, this conquest served as the final nail in the coffin. End of story. Or is it?
According to research conducted by the EU-funded IMPACT project, the influence of the Middle East’s Mongol moment far exceeds the textbook definition of merely marking the end of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. Instead, it marks the beginning of a protracted era of enlightenment where, in the face of fundamentally changing socio-political realities, Muslim philosophers set off to redefine the very core of Islam.
Despite the intense change happening, the period between the dissolution of the Abbasid Caliphate and the establishment of the early modern regional states of the Ottomans (in Turkey), Safavids (in Iran) and Mughals (in India-Pakistan) remains one of the most understudied periods in the history of the Nile-to-Oxus region. It is this historic middle section that was the focus of the IMPAcT project.
A collaborative effort
As a result of the rise of Persian and Turkish as literary languages, in addition to Arabic, one must have a wide linguistic knowledge to be able to scrutinise the texts produced during this period – which makes studying the 13th to 16th centuries a challenge. ‘As a consequence, the majority of the texts from this period remain unpublished – and this was the core focus of our research,’ says Project Lead Judith Pfeiffer. ‘Our objective was to overcome the current fragmentation of the existing expertise across Europe, the Middle East and North America.’
To accomplish this, the project collaborated closely with other projects happening in related fields, often bringing a wide range of experts together for international workshops and conferences. The project also focused on encouraging and engaging with young researchers by providing graduate students travel grants and establishing post-doctoral research positions. The project was further supported by the editing and translating of key texts and the publication of important monographs. ‘As a result of these combined efforts, IMPAcT enabled associated researchers to devote themselves to the in-depth study of a specific topic for an extended period of time without the distractions of academic administration,’ says Pfeiffer.
A database of insight
The cumulation of this expansive research is the launch of an open-source, open-access and fully searchable database. Here, for the first time, future researchers can find a plethora of published and unpublished Arabic, Persian and Turkish works on the rational sciences dating from 13 – 16th centuries.
Qur’an with Turkish translation / Incomplete at the beginning and at the end. Missing at the beginning of the Mushaf are Surah al-Fatiha, Surah al-Baqara and the first twelve ayahs of Surah Ali Imran, and at the end 14 short surahs following the Surah al-Adiyat.
Qu’ran at the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, Istanbul
‘By studying the texts, authors and intellectual networks of the 13th-16th century period of the Nile-to-Oxus region, we have made this crucially important, but much neglected, part of history accessible,’ says Pfeiffer. ‘We successfully bridged the gap between the much more heavily studied classical and modern periods of Islamic intellectual history, thus enabling scholars to study the intellectual and political history of the period, both in its own right and in a holistic manner.’
Today, December 21st, would have been my mother’s 99th birthday and of lesser import it is also the Solstice, the first day of winter in the north and summer in the south. To celebrate, watch this amazing timelapse video tracing the Sun’s apparent movement over an entire year from Hungary.
Over the course of a year, a fixed video camera captured an image every minute. A total of 116,000 exposures follow the Sun’s position across the field of view, starting from the 2015 June 21 solstice through the 2016 June 20 solstice. The intervening 2015 December 22 solstice is at the bottom of the frame.
The timelapse sequences constructed show the Sun’s movement over one day to begin with, followed by traces of the Sun’s position during the days of one year, solstice to solstice. Gaps in the daily curves are due to cloud cover. The video ends with stunning animation sequences of analemmas, those figure-8 curves you get by photographing the Sun at the same time each day throughout a year, stepping across planet Earth’s sky. Video Credit & Copyright:György Bajmóczy
It pleases me greatly that I have lived long enough to see that modern scientists have come to understand that before it was tropical rainforest the Amazon was a cultivated landscape. A huge complex of cities and farms connected by advanced roads and irrigated by huge, carefully planned water management systems. And occupied by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of sophisticated and technologically capable people.
That it took the massive deforestation of the Amazon to discover most of this is unfortunate. But learning that it was not an Edenic wilderness offers opportunities for regional planning for the future.
Most likely, the structures may have served as a large solar calendar, built by ancient civilizations more than a thousand years ago.The Rego Grande archaeological site was discovered by the naturalist Emilio Goeldi (1859-1917) at the beginning of the last century, and houses monolithic stones strategically placed in the ground.The site was named after the Rego Grande River that borders it and consists of more than a hundred blocks of granite.
Like the British Stonehenge, one of the most intriguing Neolithic sites in the world, it must have been special in its time, when it was the scene of ceremonies full of offerings, some astronomical.
After conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European conquest of the Americas began.
One of the rocks in the area of almost circular shape is a sheet of granite 3m (10ft) high, with an opening in the center with about 30cm (a foot) in diameter, called “Hole Stone” (1).There is another stone aligned in relation to this (2) and demarcating the exact sunrise on the December solstice.Another board shaped rock – which measures 2.5 m (8ft) in height (3) is on a slope such that during the December solstice, the apparent movement of the sun seems to “walk” according to the slope of the rock, as if it “draws the way.”Thus, the projected shadow has the same thickness of the rock and points to the east, while the sun goes down in the west.At other times of the year, the rock shows that the sun is further north, since the sun is at its southernmost position.We can see the perfect alignment between Rock 1 with Rock 2 by sighting through the hole.
Rego Grande and other sites with megaliths have traces of having also been used as cemeteries, another characteristic typical of this type of prehistoric structure. Funeral urns made in the aristé pottery style, marked by red designs on a white background, or dotted with engravings made on clay that was still damp, were found in these places. Pieces of decorated vases, found with the urns, indicate that the dead may have been buried alongside offerings. “The sites with large megaliths must have been reserved for the most important people in the tribe,” says Brazilian archeologist João Darcy de Moura Saldanha. The problem is that pottery in this style has been regularly found in prehistoric sites that have no stone monuments. Common along all of the northern coast of Amapá and in French Guyana, the elaborate aristé pottery stopped being produced after the Europeans arrived in the Americas and, according to Mariana, it cannot be associated with any current indigenous people from the region.
About 10 years ago, after securing public funds to cordon off the stones, Brazilian archaeologists led by Ms. Cabral and Mr. Saldanha began excavating the site, which is shaped roughly like a circle. They soon identified a portion of a river about 3.25km (2mi.) away where the granite blocks may have been quarried.
They also found ceramic burial urns, suggesting that at least part of the Rego Grande site may have been a cemetery, while colleagues from Amapá’s Institute of Scientific and Technological Research discovered that one of the tall stones seemed to be aligned with the sun’s path during the winter solstice.
Their findings, along with other archaeological discoveries in Brazil in recent years — including giant land carvings, remains of fortified settlements and even complex road networks — are upending earlier views of archaeologists who argued that the Amazon had been relatively untouched by humans except for small, nomadic tribes.
Unfortunately, diseases brought by Europeans to the Americas wiped out an estimated 95% of the indigenous population long before explorers ventured into the interior of either North or South America.
Living in San Francisco one learns to not get too excited about our planet’s celestial shows. In the summer and winter it is often overcast so the Leonid and Perseid meteor showers are almost never visible.
So watching the live Northern Lights webcam from Churchill, Manitoba (where tonight it’s -18ºF/-28ºC) is a great way to enjoy the show.
I’ve posted links to Explore.org on here before. Their Bear Cam which shows Alaskan brown bears catching and eating salmon is wonderful to watch.
A new species of peculiarly shaped spider has been named after the owner of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat.
‘Eriovixia Gryffindori’ is a newly discovered species of spider, found in India, which bears a strong resemblance to the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films. Photo: Javed Ahmed / Indian Journal of Arachnology
It’s almost as if the Sorting Hat apparated to a forest in southern India where it was transfigured into a spider. The spider was discovered the Kans forests of central Western Ghats, Karnataka, researchers report in a paper published in the Indian Journal of Arachnology.
The newly discovered spider species Eriovixia gryffindori bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films.
In profile, the spider bears an uncanny resemblance to the Hogwarts sorting hat as depicted in the Harry Potter franchise films.The spider has been named ‘Eriovixia gryffindori’, after Godric Gryffindor, the character who originally owned the Sorting Hat.
In a section in the paper on the etymological reasoning for the new spider’s name, the authors wrote: “This uniquely shaped spider derives its name from the fabulous, sentient magical artefact, the sorting hat, owned by the (fictitious) medieval wizard Godric Gryffindor, one of the four founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
“Eriovixia gryffindori is nocturnal and during daylight hours its shape and colouring give it camouflage to blend in with dead, dry foliage.
The curious shape of E. gryffindori, which is only 7 mm (3/16″) in length, allows the spider to camouflage itself among the thick vegetation in the Western Ghats mountains, stretching for about 990 miles along India’s western coast.
E. gryffindori
The mountain range is home to a wide array of the country’s species and is recognized as one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity, according to UNESCO. But they have been threatened by the coffee, tea, rubber and oil palm industries or have been logged, reported Earth Touch News Network.
Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) is seen here at age 32 in a triple-threat sendup of the 1890s “New Woman” — smoking, drinking, showing some leg.
Best known as a prolific chronicler of Southern architecture. The thumbnails below are just a few of the hundreds of her photos in the Library of Congress Photo and Print Catalog.
In this brilliant essay John Broich ofCase Western Reserve University details how badly the US Fourth Estate failed to appreciate the dangers of 2 of the 20th century’s worst dictators (though they weren’t much better on Stalin). In nearly every instance you can replace the names Hitler and Mussolini with Trump and the words ‘brownshirts’ and ‘blackshirts’ with ‘Tea Partiers’ and the neofascist ‘alt-right’ it would apply today.
How to report on a fascist?
How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?
These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
And I believe will be repeated in the next 4 years.
(btw- I think the frequent comparisons to his gesture and those of his followers to the Nazi salute are a bit disingenuous. A ‘real’ Hitlergruß is with fingers closed, elbow locked, and held in position for a count of one second. Some* of those in the crowd are clearly doing that and probably mean it as a Nazi honor but I doubt that most do.)
And in the comments below that essay is this comment by one Hans Thielsen that is equally brilliant and compares the events of today with those of 85 years past. I have posted it in its entirety:
This is a very pertinent article and it’s exactly what needs to be written now.
Most Americans, including the media, don’t recognize Trump as a fascist because they don’t really understand what fascism is or know much about its dark, monstrous history. But the story of fascism is as fascinating as any thriller, especially now that we are watching fascism raise its ugly head again today in America.
The 2016 election has all the earmarks of a neofascist coup d’état, not unlike the 1933 German election that led to the rise of Hitler. Only this time around, it wasn’t done by brown-shirted thugs, but by what is in effect a hostile takeover of the United States government by global Wall Street interests. But the end results are very similar.
Both Trump and Hitler came to power with a minority of the vote. In fact, Trump actually got less of a mandate than Hitler did. The Nazis came to power with about 35% of the vote. Trump was ‘elected’ by only about 25% of eligible voters. He lost the popular election by nearly 3 million votes.
Trump’s agenda involves a Wall St. practice called ’asset-stripping,’ where a corporation, or in this case, the U.S. government, is taken over and its assets sold off or, in this case, privatized or ‘corporatized.’
This system is also the basis of fascism.
Most people naturally think of fascists as far-right extremists, goose-stepping around with jackboots and swastikas. And Nazis are definitely fascists, but they didn’t invent fascism. Fascism was begun by Benito Mussolini, the brutal Italian dictator who founded the first fascist state in 1922.
A violent, cynical opportunist, Mussolini was kicked out the Socialist Party in 1914 and a few years later formed the brutal paramilitary gang known as the Black Shirts, which he led in his famous ‘March on Rome,’ where he ‘persuaded’ the Italian government to make him Prime Minister.
Mussolini soon became dictator by making a deal with wealthy Italian bankers & industrialists who wanted to take control of Italy. The deal was that Mussolini would rid them of opponents, labor unions, liberals, social democrats, socialists and leftists. In return, they let him swagger around, make speeches and wage highly profitable wars. But the real power always lay with the bankers and industrialists behind the scenes.
Trump has been making similar deals, only this time with shadowy global interests like Russia.
In his book, “The Doctrine Of Fascism” Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatized government;” that is, government that has been ‘privatized’ and run like a corporation, by and for the corporate owners.
Corporatizing government means public democracy is dissolved and replaced by a corporate state bureaucracy that is no longer answerable to the people, who cease to have any power or say, and simply become hapless cogs in the corporate state machine.
Trump’s new corporate state bureaucracy will be owned and run by these global billionaires and industrialists solely for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the American public.
This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s simply the kind of corporate collusion that Wall Street routinely engages in and what the GOP has advocated for years. When Republicans talk about “privatizing government and running it like a business,” this is what they mean.
Public services, agencies and public trusts that Americans have relied on for many decades will be eliminated. Vital services like Social Security, Medicare, education, consumer and environmental protections, etc., will be abolished or privatized, putting the public totally at the mercy of private profit-driven companies whose only concern is profits.
Priceless public assets and resources, public lands, national parks, etc., will be auctioned off to global strip-miners and plunderers to be stripped of natural resources, timber, oil, natural gas, clean water, etc.
Fascist corporate states rely on hyper-militarization, aggressive war, militarized police, hyper-nationalism, institutionalized bigotry, a complicit media and a frightened, confused, obedient public under constant surveillance to suppress opposition and enforce corporate state authority.
If we allow this to succeed, American democracy will be effectively done away with and Karl Rove’s stated goal of making the GOP the “permanent majority party in America” will be a reality. In effect, a one-party authoritarian state.
Once authoritarians take power. they never willingly give it up. Mussolini ruled Italy with an iron fist for 20 years and ultimately destroyed Italy, as fascism usually does where it is allowed to take hold.
In the end, it took the Allied invasion of Italy in WW2 to break Mussolini’s grip, and Italians who had long had their fill of fascism caught him, butchered him and hung him up by his heels from a meathook.
Over 400,000 Americans died in WW2 to rescue the world from the ‘corporatized’ fascist states in Germany, Italy and Japan, which were based on essentially the same kind of system now promoted by Trump & co.
If fascism is allowed to take hold here, one can only wonder:
In the 1990s Carrie Fisher was the ‘Go-To’ script rescuer
As the therapist in Austin Powers 
As Phoebe Cates’ best friend in Drop Dead Fred 
Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness 
Most Americans, including the media, don’t recognize Trump as a fascist because they don’t really understand what fascism is or know much about its dark, monstrous history. But the story of fascism is as fascinating as any thriller, especially now that we are watching fascism raise its ugly head again today in America.
The 2016 election has all the earmarks of a neofascist coup d’état, not unlike the 1933 German election that led to the rise of Hitler. Only this time around, it wasn’t done by brown-shirted thugs, but by what is in effect a hostile takeover of the United States government by global Wall Street interests. But the end results are very similar.
Both Trump and Hitler came to power with a minority of the vote. In fact, Trump actually got less of a mandate than Hitler did. The Nazis came to power with about 35% of the vote. Trump was ‘elected’ by only about 25% of eligible voters. He lost the popular election by nearly 3 million votes.
Trump’s agenda involves a Wall St. practice called ’asset-stripping,’ where a corporation, or in this case, the U.S. government, is taken over and its assets sold off or, in this case, privatized or ‘corporatized.’
This system is also the basis of fascism.
Most people naturally think of fascists as far-right extremists, goose-stepping around with jackboots and swastikas. And Nazis are definitely fascists, but they didn’t invent fascism. Fascism was begun by Benito Mussolini, the brutal Italian dictator who founded the first fascist state in 1922.
A violent, cynical opportunist, Mussolini was kicked out the Socialist Party in 1914 and a few years later formed the brutal paramilitary gang known as the Black Shirts, which he led in his famous ‘March on Rome,’ where he ‘persuaded’ the Italian government to make him Prime Minister.
Mussolini soon became dictator by making a deal with wealthy Italian bankers & industrialists who wanted to take control of Italy. The deal was that Mussolini would rid them of opponents, labor unions, liberals, social democrats, socialists and leftists. In return, they let him swagger around, make speeches and wage highly profitable wars. But the real power always lay with the bankers and industrialists behind the scenes.
Trump has been making similar deals, only this time with shadowy global interests like Russia.
In his book, “The Doctrine Of Fascism” Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatized government;” that is, government that has been ‘privatized’ and run like a corporation, by and for the corporate owners.
Trump’s new corporate state bureaucracy will be owned and run by these global billionaires and industrialists solely for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the American public.
This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s simply the kind of corporate collusion that Wall Street routinely engages in and what the GOP has advocated for years. When Republicans talk about “privatizing government and running it like a business,” this is what they mean.
Public services, agencies and public trusts that Americans have relied on for many decades will be eliminated. Vital services like Social Security, Medicare, education, consumer and environmental protections, etc., will be abolished or privatized, putting the public totally at the mercy of private profit-driven companies whose only concern is profits.
Priceless public assets and resources, public lands, national parks, etc., will be auctioned off to global strip-miners and plunderers to be stripped of natural resources, timber, oil, natural gas, clean water, etc.
Fascist corporate states rely on hyper-militarization, aggressive war, militarized police, hyper-nationalism, institutionalized bigotry, a complicit media and a frightened, confused, obedient public under constant surveillance to suppress opposition and enforce corporate state authority.
If we allow this to succeed, American democracy will be effectively done away with and Karl Rove’s stated goal of making the GOP the “permanent majority party in America” will be a reality. In effect, a one-party authoritarian state.
Once authoritarians take power. they never willingly give it up. Mussolini ruled Italy with an iron fist for 20 years and ultimately destroyed Italy, as fascism usually does where it is allowed to take hold.
In the end, it took the Allied invasion of Italy in WW2 to break Mussolini’s grip, and Italians who had long had their fill of fascism caught him, butchered him and hung him up by his heels from a meathook.
Over 400,000 Americans died in WW2 to rescue the world from the ‘corporatized’ fascist states in Germany, Italy and Japan, which were based on essentially the same kind of system now promoted by Trump & co.
If fascism is allowed to take hold here, one can only wonder:
Who will rescue America from fascism?