a world of his own 6.awo.0030 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  Coming home, Victoria West spots her husband, playwright Gregory West, through the window sharing a drink with Mary, an attractive blonde. But when Victoria barges into the room, Mary is nowhere to be found.

Gregory explains to his wife that if he describes anything into his dictation machine, he can cause that thing to suddenly appear in his study. To make it disappear, all he has to do is throw the tape into his fireplace. He demonstrates this, first with Mary and then an elephant in the hallway. Gregory discovered this talent when a male character he had put a great deal of effort and attention into approached him as a real, flesh-and-blood person, shook his hand, and thanked him.

Believing none of this, Victoria tells Gregory that he is insane and she is going to have him committed. In response, Gregory takes a tape from his safe and explains that it contains her description. Victoria snatches the tape away from him and throws it on the fire to prove he is insane— and promptly begins to feel faint. “You mean you were telling the truth?!” she cries, and disappears. Frantic, Gregory rushes to his dictation machine and begins to re-describe Victoria— then reconsiders and describes Mrs. Mary West. Mary reappears and mixes her husband a drink.

Serling appears on the set and says, “We hope you enjoyed tonight’s romantic story on The Twilight Zone. At the same time, we want you to realize that it was, of course, purely fictional. In real life, such ridiculous nonsense—”

“Rod, you shouldn’t!” interrupts Gregory, who walks over to his safe and pulls out a tape marked “Rod Serling”. “I mean, you shouldn’t say things as ‘nonsense’ and ‘ridiculous’!” he continues as he throws the tape into the fire. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
“Well, that’s the way it goes,” replies Serling, in a tone of “I guess I deserved that” as he fades away.

[edit] Closing narration

“

Leaving Mr. Gregory West, still shy, quiet, very happy— and apparently in complete control of the Twilight Zone.

”

[edit] Reception

This is the only episode in the first season in which Rod Serling appears on-screen and breaks the fourth wall. Serling’s cameo was so well-received, he appeared on-screen to introduce subsequent episodes.

[edit] Influence

The 2002–2003 new ‘Twilight Zone’ ran a similar episode: A graphic novel author, afflicted with writer’s block, creates a perfect girlfriend to help inspire him. However, she soon asserts her independence and starts hitting on other guys. Eventually, she reveals she is the real author, not him, and then erases him from existence.

Inside The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, there is an envelope with Rod Serling written on it much like on this episode. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

gatling 9.gat.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  In the cover photograph of Julia Keller’s book, taken in 1893, Dr. Richard J. Gat­ling poses in a dark suit and black derby hat, admiring at waist level, one hand on its crank, the latest model of the heroically phallic machine gun that bears his name.

It’s a pity that Keller neglects the sexual symbolism — one is tempted to say dimension — of Gatling’s obsession with his famous gun. But to her credit, she touches on almost every other possible aspect of his life, a life, she argues in “Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel,” profoundly representative of that generation of 19th-century Americans “who made the modern world, who took an overgrown, half-formed hunk of wilderness still broken and dazed by the Civil War and shoved it into the next century by force of will and wizardry of invention.”http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

Gatling himself had the same rather grandiose sense of context: his invention, he maintained, “bears the same relation to other firearms that McCormick’s reaper does to the sickle, or the sewing machine to the common needle.” And in many ways, this was no exaggeration.

The “revolving battery gun,” which he patented in 1862, consisted of six .58-­caliber rifled metal barrels arranged in a circle, mounted on wagon wheels and operated by a single crank; even this primitive version could fire up to 200 bullets a minute. In an era when many infantry soldiers were still loading their muskets at the muzzle with paper cartridges and ramrods, if Gat­ling’s “gat” had not quite “changed the world,” as Keller insists, it most certainly revolutionized the nature of warfare.

He invented it, he said in the gymnastic logic of gun makers, to save lives: its unparalleled firepower would enable one man to replace hundreds on the battlefield and thus “supersede the necessity of large armies.” And though the Gatling gun saw very limited action in the Civil War, afterward it proved extremely effective against Indians in the West, striking laborers in the East and anti-imperialist rebels all across the world.

Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic for The Chicago Tribune, pays due attention to the military significance of Gatling’s “terrible marvel” and its direct descendants in World War I and later. But her book is far more original when she links the events of Gatling’s life, large and small, to social history.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

In a fascinating digression on Gatling’s medical education, for example, she describes the connection between 19th-­century smallpox epidemics and steamship travel. She is properly amused (as a Chicagoan) when The New York Times, in 1863, installed a Gatling gun on its roof to drive away a mob of draft protesters. She discusses Lincoln’s little-known interest in personally testing new Army weapons and, in a brilliant passage, rhapsodizes about creativity and the Patent Office: “If a country can be said to possess a soul, then America’s is the patent system: the simple, fair method of staking claim to a new idea and getting the chance to make money from it.”http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

This thought leads her to Gatling’s other inventions (he made an early fortune with a wheat-seed planting device and worked on a flush toilet), the role of con men and carnivals in American business and, eventually, the paradox of post-Civil War Hartford as both a center of genteel culture — Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe lived there — and home to the Colt firearms factory and the Gatling Gun Company.

Keller loads her pages with interesting information: Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, started life as a Gatling gun instructor; the Buffalo Bill Wild West show ended with Gatling guns turned against howling Indians on horseback. She has a splendid eye for quotations: “Treat them to a little Gatling music,” The Times of London instructed the British Army. And her own prose can be vivid (John Sutter left behind him “towering debts and sputtering creditors”) and funny: “the kind of facial hair that seems to have a mind of its own.”

But these virtues are repeatedly under­cut by a rapid-fire breeziness of tone: “No, no, no. His head was too full of all the things he wanted to build.” Her images are often bizarre: “A dark shape is rising in Richard Gatling’s mind. He rides out to meet it.” And time and again she chooses exactly the wrong word: “The country was still young and petite.” Swords and sabers were “what made war special.”

Worse still are the maddening repe­titions and exaggerations. Twice in four pages she tells us that Lew Wallace was the author of “Ben-Hur,” and twice that Leonardo dreamed of a multiple-firing gun. Things are rarely said once: “Business was good. Business was very good.” Generalizations float away into absurdity: in 19th-century America, Keller asserts, speaking of assembly lines and factories, “people, like things, were unique and distinctive, created one at a time, knowable as discrete entities. That would change, of course. . . . The land of the second chance would give way to a country of interchangeable parts, interchangeable people.”

Like so many other purveyors of destruction, Richard Gatling appears to have been a bland, conventional, somewhat naïve personality. What inner demons drove him to create an instrument of mass slaughter — and keep “refining” it for 30 years — we will probably never understand. “We know him,” Keller concludes, characteristically and unhelpfully, “but we don’t know him.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

service 5.ser.00020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.  Michael Beaumier once took a job in the home section of a department store, selling “melon-ball fork sharpeners,” eight-piece copper-pot collections and other kitchenware. He soon discovered, though, that he wasn’t so much selling the goods as playing handmaiden to the way they were arranged and lighted. “These things practically sell themselves,” he was told by Adam, the store’s wizard of product presentation. Mr. Beaumier marveled that Adam “could set up a display of toothpicks and used Kleenex in the morning, and we’d have been sold out by midafternoon.” No other part of the store — not luggage, not clothing — offered goods that could be made to seem quite so voluptuous by the application of his talents, Adam said, although “shoes comes closest.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET

Now, it might have been interesting to find out more about the retailing alchemy that turns humble cooking tools into irresistible treasures for the home, but Mr. Beaumier is recounting his experience in “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” a collection of essays by writers who have toiled in the store aisles and behind the cash registers of the service economy and generally considered the work an ordeal. And so Mr. Beaumier, a frequent contributor to National Public Radio’s “This American Life” and the author of a book about working at an alternative weekly newspaper, must turn the spotlight on himself, particularly on his feelings. How did he feel? Diminished by the knowledge that when a knife collection is arranged just so, his efforts as a salesman are superfluous. Diminished by a lecture from Adam that “it’s not about you. It’s about the merchandise.“

Oh, but it was about him. Mr. Beaumier became “progressively more depressed after that. A man is supposed to have value and substance, isn’t he? A man is not supposed to compare himself to a bunch of steamers and Crock-Pots and waffle irons and come up short, or be invisible compared to sterling silver corkscrews.” He began to “act out,” he says, and launched a guerrilla campaign, pointing lights away from displays, unscrewing bulbs, smudging glasses and dishes, driving a customer off by warning that an espresso maker was dangerous. “I loved it,” Mr. Beaumier says. “They fired me.”

His departure is hardly the only non-résumé-building job departure recounted in “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” which, as the title suggests, shows up for work with a chip on its shoulder. Editor Jeff Martin sets the tone in the introduction. Life in the retail business, he says, means dealing with annoying people at every level, from customers to bosses. But he doesn’t explain why they’re annoying; he just refers to them with a crude and all too common term that vaguely rhymes with gasohol.  http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET Throughout the book, obscenities substitute for wit — some of the obscenities larger than others, as when Mr. Martin trots out that old reliable thigh-slapper, the Holocaust joke: The book’s essayists are “retail survivors,” he says, and “the Employee Identification Number tattooed on their forearms is a painful reminder of the past and a source of motivation for the future.”

The Customer Is Always Wrong
Edited by Jeff Martin
(Soft Skull Press, 171 pages, $12.95)

Still, despite the overall tone of mirthless sneering in “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” the book does offer a few engaging pieces. One is Gary Mex Glazner’s “Tulip Thief.” It is ostensibly about the time he chased down and tackled a fleeing shoplifter, but its real subject is Mr. Glazner’s longing, after 18 years in the flower business, to find a more masculine line of work. In “The Popsicle Shop,” Jane Borden effectively evokes the suffocating atmosphere of a children’s clothing store in the wealthy North Carolina neighborhood of her youth. Kids were rarely seen in this “fantasyland” for mothers, Ms. Borden reports. She goes to work there as a teenager and soon realizes that, under the honeyed tutelage of the Popsicle Shop’s owner, she is being “groomed” to become one of those mothers. She eventually escapes to college and then to New York City but is wise enough to note that “a miniature pillow with eyelet-trim” from the Popsicle Shop that she still keeps on her bed is just one reminder that she has not entirely left behind her pampered Southern past.

That sort of close observation and introspection is rare in the “The Customer Is Always Wrong.” More common among the 21 contributors — whose number includes two comedians, a musician and a poet — is a thoroughgoing sense of resentment at having had to lower themselves to take a day job.

“I had a master’s degree and clips at national magazines and newspapers and my manager still thought I was an idiot,” writes Kevin Smokler in “Another Day at the Video Store.” In “The Final Facial,” Stewart Lewis wants us to know that, even though he was working at a day spa in New York for a mere $12 an hour, he was “a masters-degreed graduate from a top writing school.” Becky Poole takes a job at a wine shop, she says, because “I was sick of what I had known as the only way to make money for a B.F.A. drama graduate student in N.Y.C.: working freelance for Viacom.”

It turns out that Ms. Poole is the only one of the essayists who actually enjoyed her stint in retail.  http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET Then again, the wine shop was in the hipster-magnet Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and the store wasn’t so much a commercial enterprise as “a social club for wayward youths . . . a place for the interesting or eccentric, the harmless ne’er-do-wells and riffraff, to swap naughty stories, share thoughts, poems and songs.” Presumably the shop’s doors were not darkened by any of the suburbanite, overweight, well-to-do or elderly customers who come in for scorn elsewhere in the book.

Retailers might take one look at “The Customer Is Always Wrong” and vow never again to hire anyone with an artistic bent, but that would be a shame. No doubt plenty of writers and performers who aren’t yet successful enough to be recruited for publishing projects like Mr. Martin’s are glad to find a job, welcome the chance to learn a few workplace skills, take an interest in the array of people they deal with every day and figure that, as so often happens in life, occasional irritations come with the territory. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Jerusalem 9.jer.00231 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

ABOUT two weeks ago Menachem Froman, the chief rabbi of this Jewish settlement perched on the edge of the Judean desert, had a dream.

In the dream, he recounted in an interview this week, he was sitting with the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat “as we used to.”

“It was like he was pushing me to continue in my efforts to make peace between our peoples,” he said.

Rabbi Froman, 63, is a founding member of Gush Emunim, the ideological, messianic settlement movement that sprang up after Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, with its biblical landmarks, in the 1967 war. He has been living here for 35 years, teaches at religious seminaries in Tekoa and in another West Bank settlement in the Hebron hills, and wears a black suit and white shirt, conventional Orthodox rabbinical garb.

But that is about where his similarity with other Jewish settlers in the West Bank ends.

Among his close friends, the rabbi counts not only Mr. Arafat, who was reviled by most Israelis by the time of his death in 2004, but also a wide array of Muslim sheiks. He believes in making peace with his Palestinian neighbors and has engaged in “thousands of hours” of dialogue, he said, with Palestinian leaders, including Mr. Arafat’s rivals in the militant Islamist group Hamas.

Rabbi Froman used to travel to Gaza for talks with Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas who was killed in an Israeli missile strike in 2004 after his group spearheaded a years-long suicide bombing campaign that killed scores of Israelis.

The rabbi said he used to shout at the sheik and tell him, “you will go to hell because you are taking Islam, a religion whose name has connotations of peace, and turning it into a religion of terror.”

The sheik would reply that he was only defending himself, Rabbi Froman said.

He still maintains contact with figures in Hamas. And while he clearly has no following among his fellow West Bank settlers, he has many acquaintances in the Israeli establishment and has direct access to several leaders, including President Shimon Peres and senior figures in the Defense Ministry. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

LAST February, together with a Palestinian journalist from Hebron, he drafted a comprehensive truce agreement for Israel and Hamas that called for the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who has been held for more than two years by the Islamist group in Gaza, in exchange for a substantial number of Palestinian fighters, and eventually, the release of all prisoners on both sides.

The Hamas government in Gaza could not accept the deal because the Israeli government rejected it, Rabbi Froman said.

Next, he said, he has an intriguing proposition for President-elect Barack Obama. The idea is to bring a delegation of two rabbis, two sheiks and two bishops from Jerusalem and the Holy Land to bless the new president on Inauguration Day, an effort to rekindle faith in the possibility of peace.

“I believe that he was elected by God,” Rabbi Froman said of Mr. Obama. “I want to create an opening for God to perform a miracle here.”

Rabbi Froman, who was born in the Galilee, was pulling hard for Mr. Obama, posting clips on YouTube and praying for his victory at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the day of the American election. Now, Rabbi Froman said, he wants to put some practical content into Mr. Obama’s concept of change.

It would be easy to dismiss Rabbi Froman, who peppers his speech with talk of miracles and references to mystical texts, as a maverick, an eccentric and a kook.

But the letter he sent to several of Mr. Obama’s policy advisers in late November outlining his proposal was co-signed by Gershon Baskin and Hanna Siniora, the Israeli and Palestinian executive officers of Ipcri, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, one of the most established nongovernmental peace institutes in the land.

Mr. Obama is “into symbolism,” said Mr. Baskin, explaining why he supported the initiative, adding, “We think it is really important that the Obama administration gets involved immediately” in the Israeli-Palestinian sphere.

Mr. Baskin describes Rabbi Froman as a “very esoteric kind of guy.”

“Maybe because he is so exceptional and authentic, a rabbi and a religious man, there are people in this country and around the world who listen to him,” Mr. Baskin said.

One of Rabbi Froman’s closest Hamas-affiliated associates in the West Bank declined, with profuse apologies, to comment publicly on their relationship. The circumstances were too sensitive, he said.

Rabbi Froman’s home in Tekoa is almost devoid of worldly goods. Other than shelves of well-worn holy books, the only ornaments in the sparsely furnished lounge are a series of small, unframed paintings, mostly of the local biblical scenery, by his wife.

“The Holy One tossed me into Tekoa,” he said, “because from the rooftops there is 2,500 years of Jewish history looking down on us.”

A settlement of about 250 families just south of Jerusalem, Tekoa has a reputation of being relaxed, with a mixed population of religious and non-religious Jews. It is in the shadow of the flat-topped hill of the Herodion, a fortress cum palace built by Herod the Great.

Biblical Tekoa was the home of Amos the prophet who, according to the rabbi, fought for social justice and against Jewish arrogance and pride. The letters of Shimon Bar Kochba, who led the Jewish revolt against the Romans from A.D. 132 until 135, were found in a valley nearby.

Rabbi Froman, who is active in interfaith circles, sees his mission, too, as fighting “Jewish arrogance.” He said he could comprehend why Israel, a modern, fast-developing state with liberal, sometimes decadent Western values, could be seen by more conservative Muslims as “a permanent insult.”

He mentioned that one of his 10 children lived in the desert canyon behind the settlement, in a cave. Another built a stone house with his own hands in Tekoa D, an unauthorized outpost of the settlement slated for removal.

As such, the settler rabbi’s vision of peace does not conform to the standard one of the past 20 years, involving the creation of a Palestinian state in a settlement-free West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

He said he would refuse to leave his home in the case of such a deal. The government “has no right to uproot people from their homes,” he said.

Instead, because the Jews and Arabs are “so mixed up,” Rabbi Froman proposed the establishment of two countries without borders, or two states in one land.

“From all my long talks with the Palestinians,” he said, “I came to the conclusion that while the problem is also political, about control over territory and so on, the core of the problem is religious.”

The quest for peace “won’t succeed without a religious, spiritual basis,” he said.http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/members/louis-j-sheehan-esquire.html – vmessage171
So, contrary to the current Israeli position that the status of Jerusalem should be left until last because of its complexity, Rabbi Froman puts Jerusalem first in negotiations with the Palestinians.

“The key to peace is peace in Jerusalem,” he said, “to re-establish Jerusalem as the capital of peace in the world.”

Rabbi Froman envisages a shared Jerusalem where the Old City, containing the main sites sacred to Muslims, Christians and Jews, is ex-territoria, a Jerusalem that houses the headquarters for international institutions.

It sounds like utopia — and at this point, as realistic as anything else.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Biblical David 9.bib.12708 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Overlooking the verdant Valley of Elah, where the Bible says David toppled Goliath, archaeologists are unearthing a 3,000-year-old fortified city that could reshape views of the period when David ruled over the Israelites. Five lines on pottery uncovered here appear to be the oldest Hebrew text ever found and are likely to have a major impact on knowledge about the history of literacy and alphabet development.

The five-acre site, with its fortifications, dwellings and multi-chambered entry gate, will also be a weapon in the contentious and often politicized debate over whether David and his capital, Jerusalem, were an important kingdom or a minor tribe, an issue that divides not only scholars but those seeking to support or delegitimize Zionism. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com

Only a tiny portion of the site has been excavated, and none of the findings have yet been published or fully scrutinized. But the dig, led by Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is already causing a stir among his colleagues as well as excitement from those who seek to use the Bible as a guide to history and confirmation of their faith.

“This is a new type of site that suddenly opens a window on an area where we have had almost nothing and requires us to rethink what was going on at that period,” said Aren M. Maeir, professor of archaeology at Bar-Ilan University and the director of a major Philistine dig not far from here. “This is not a run-of-the-mill find.” http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com
The 10th century B.C. is the most controversial period in biblical archaeology because it is then, according to the Old Testament, that David united the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, setting the stage for his son Solomon to build his great temple and rule over a vast area from the Nile to the Euphrates Rivers.

For many Jews and Christians, even those who do not take Scripture literally, the Bible is a vital historical source. And for the state of Israel, which considers itself to be a reclamation of the state begun by David, evidence of the biblical account has huge symbolic value. The Foreign Ministry’s Web site, for example, presents the kingdom of David and Solomon along with a map of it as a matter of fact. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com
But the archaeological record of that kingdom is exceedingly sparse — in fact almost nonexistent — and a number of scholars today argue that the kingdom was largely a myth created some centuries later. A great power, they note, would have left traces of cities and activity, and been mentioned by those around it. Yet in this area nothing like that has turned up — at least until now.

Mr. Garfinkel says he has something here that generations have been seeking. He has made two informal presentations in the past month to fellow archaeologists. On Thursday he will give his first formal lecture at a conference in Jerusalem.

What he has found so far has impressed many. Two burned olive pits found at the site have been tested for carbon-14 at Oxford University and were found to date from between 1050 and 970 B.C., exactly when most chronologies place David as king. Two more pits are still to be tested.

A specialist in ancient Semitic languages at Hebrew University, Haggai Misgav, says the writing, on pottery using charcoal and animal fat for ink, is in so-called proto-Canaanite script and appears to be a letter or document in Hebrew, suggesting that literacy may have been more widespread than is generally assumed. That could play a role in the larger dispute over the Bible, since if more writing turns up it suggests a means by which events could have been recorded and passed down several centuries before the Bible was likely to have been written.

Another reason this site holds such promise is that it was in use for only a short period, perhaps 20 years, and then destroyed — Mr. Garfinkel speculates in a battle with the Philistines — and abandoned for centuries, sealing the finds in Pompeii-like uniformity. Most sites are made up of layers of periods and, inevitably, there is blending, making it hard to date remains accurately.

For example, several years ago the archaeologist Eilat Mazar uncovered in East Jerusalem a major public building from around the 10th century B.C. that she attributes to David’s time and was perhaps even, she believes, his palace. While she found pottery, it was in a fill, not sealed, making it hard to know how to relate the pottery to the structure.

Still, how this new site relates to King David and the Israelites is far from clear. Mr. Garfinkel suggests that the Hebrew writing and location — a fortified settlement a two-day walk from Jerusalem — add weight to the idea that his capital was sufficiently important to require such a forward position, especially because it was between the huge Philistine city of Gath and Jerusalem.

“The fortification required 200,000 tons of stone and probably 10 years to build,” he said as he walked around the site one recent morning. “There were 500 people inside. This was the main road to Jerusalem, the key strategic site to protect the kingdom of Jerusalem. If they built a fortification here, it was a real kingdom, pointing to urban cities and a centralized authority in Judah in the 10th century B.C.”

Others say it is too early to draw such conclusions. “This is an important site, one of the very few cases from the 10th century where you can see a settlement fortified in a style that is typical of later Israelite and Judean cities,” said Amihai Mazar, a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University. “The question is who fortified it, who lived in it, why it was abandoned and how it all relates to the reign of David and Solomon.”

The Philistines had a huge city, Gath, some seven miles away, but pottery found there looks distinct from what Mr. Garfinkel has found here. He says the David and Goliath story could be an allegory about a battle between the two. Seymour Gitin, an archaeologist and a director of the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, a private American institution, who has seen the finds, said: “The real value is that there was an urban center in the 10th century. You can extrapolate and say this helps support a kingdom, a united monarchy under David and Solomon. People will rightly use this material to support that.”

That is happening. Financing for the dig is now being raised by an organization called Foundation Stone, run by a Los Angeles-born Israeli named David Willner, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat and said the point of his group was “to strengthen the tie of the Jewish people to the land.” The group’s Web site says that it is “redrawing the map in Jewish education,” and that its activities are “anchoring traditional texts to the artifacts, maps and locations that form the context for Jewish identity.”

This is an approach to unearthing the land’s past that disturbs Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and a prominent skeptic toward a Bible-based historical chronology. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com

“Some of us look at things in a very ethnocentric way — everything is Israelite or Judahite,” he said. “History is not like that. There were other entities playing a big role in the southern part of the country. And even if it belongs to Jerusalem, fine. So there is a late 10th-century fortified structure there. I don’t believe that any archaeologist can revolutionize our entire understanding of Judah and Jerusalem by a single site. It doesn’t work that way. This is a cumulative discipline.”

It is also a divided one. Mr. Finkelstein is among the most prominent advocates of what is called the “low chronology,” meaning those who date David and Solomon’s rule to closer to 900 B.C. than 1000 B.C. They argue that the kingdom was a minor affair that a later generation of Israelites in the seventh century B.C. mythologized for its own nationalistic purposes.

Ilan Sharon, a radiocarbon expert at Hebrew University, said another problem was that “we are working very close to the limits of measurement accuracy” when dealing with 3,000-year-old objects like olive pits.

He added in an e-mail message: “A measurement is expected to be within about 50 years of the correct date two-thirds of the time and within a century 95 percent of the time.” Given how hard it is to be sure that objects found near the tested items were from the same time, “you can see that this is a statistician’s nightmare.”

Put another way, basing an understanding of history on two olive pits — or even four — is risky. What is needed, he added, are scores or even hundreds of samples. Mr. Garfinkel is not arguing about that. He says with some 96 percent of this site still to be unearthed, a process likely to take 10 years, he hopes that more writing, more olive pits and more pottery will be uncovered, and add depth to what he believes is a revolutionary find.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

deposit 9.dep.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A new study of residents from Libby, Mont., the town where more than 1,500 people have fallen ill from asbestos-contaminated mines, links asbestos exposure with three autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com

Previous research found high rates of asbestos-related lung diseases, including the rare cancer mesothelioma, among miners in Libby. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com

The town’s mines once supplied the United States with most of its vermiculite, a mineral used for insulation and gardening. But that vermiculite was contaminated with asbestos also found in the ground there. Residents of Libby who didn’t work in the mines, and workers across the country who processed Libby’s vermiculite, also had a high incidence of lung diseases (SN: 7/12/03, p. 21: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030712/fob4.asp).

The new research links asbestos exposure with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and scleroderma. “We’re talking about a whole different class of diseases,” says study author Curtis Noonan of the University of Montana in Missoula. In these diseases, a person’s immune system attacks body tissues.

Former Libby miners older than age 65 were three times as likely as other Libby residents to have rheumatoid arthritis and were twice as likely to have any of the three diseases, the study shows. Former miners younger than 65 showed no increased risk, which suggests that prolonged exposure to asbestos increases the chance of illness, Noonan says. http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com

The team reached this conclusion by reexamining a survey given to 7,000 former and current Libby residents in 2000 and by analyzing a follow-up questionnaire sent to people who had reported having at least one of the three autoimmune diseases. In the 2000 survey, 6.7 percent of participants reported having at least one of the diseases. Noonan says that past studies have shown that less than 1 percent of people elsewhere typically have those illnesses.

The new work also found that Libby residents exposed to asbestos in the military had an elevated risk for having at least one of the three diseases, the researchers report in the August Environmental Health Perspectives.

“This might have implications for folks exposed to asbestos not like the type we’ve seen in Libby,” says coauthor Theodore Larson of the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta.

Given the unusually high asbestos exposure faced by Libby residents, these findings “still need to be confirmed in other studies,” says public health statistician Laurel Beckett of the University of California, Davis. Noonan and Larson agree.

Meanwhile, a separate investigation into the health effects of asbestos, released last week by the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., found evidence that the mineral causes laryngeal cancer and might be associated with pharyngeal, gastric, and colorectal cancers. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire