“It is Memorial Day weekend and we are in a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where about 350 members of the autonomous Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem have gathered to mark the 900th birthday of the Knights Templar. Members of the charitable organization, known by the unwieldy abbreviation SMOTJ, regard themselves as spiritual descendants of the original Templars.”
Tag: 07.18
The Woman Who Was Kidnapped And Forced To Impersonate Aretha Franklin Before Thousands Of People
In 1969, Mary Jane Jones, a 27-year-old single mother in Petersburg, Virginia with a big, spectacular voice for gospel, was tricked – by a small-time James Brown impersonator – into traveling to Florida, where he threatened and bullied her into giving a series of performances that he sold to the black public in then-segregated cities as appearances by the Queen of Soul herself (who was the same age). Then Aretha, who was singing in Miami, found out – and so began a strange series of events that ended up with Jones performing (as herself) with Duke Ellington.
How Subatomic Physics Is Helping To Read The Ancient Scrolls Carbonized By Mount Vesuvius
“The scrolls [from Herculaneum] represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. … Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal. Over the years, various attempts to open some of them created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed. And it probably would have remained that way except for an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky.”
Why Gossip Is Actually Good For You
“A significant body of research suggests that gossip may in fact be healthy. It’s a good thing, too, since gossip is pretty pervasive. Children tend to be seasoned gossips by the age of 5, and gossip as most researchers understand it — talk between at least two people about absent others — accounts for about two-thirds of conversation.”