Obelisk Seven Blog

Fact overtakes fiction: Ecocide and Obelisk Seven

2011-10-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

In our novel, Obelisk Seven, we forecast that the world would one day have a new crime camed Ecocide, and that the international law enshrining that crime would pin liability not only on the companies that polluted, but on the chief executives who ran the company.

Now a mock trial has been run, using a hypothetical ecocide law:

The bosses of two of the world's biggest multi-national corporations were convicted by a jury of "ecocide" at the Supreme Court yesterday for destroying global ecosystems.
They were put on trial under international laws which establish ecocide alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression, as the most serious in existence.
The chief executives may have been actors, the corporations fictional and the trial a mock-up, but the circumstances surrounding the so-called "crimes" – the destruction of ecosystems during both the Gulf oil spill and the mining of crude oil in Alberta – are real. So is the call for a new law protecting the natural world, placing ecocide among the most heinous crimes known.
Both bosses, of Global Petroleum Company (GPC) and Glamis Group, were convicted on charges of ecocide relating to oil extraction in Canada, while one was acquitted of charges relating to the Gulf spill.
"Companies cannot be given a licence to spill and kill as long as they clean up the mess," said Michael Mansfield QC, appearing for the prosecution yesterday.
Experts witnesses said the Gulf ecosystem had become a "dead zone" after the Deepwater Horizon platform disaster last year.
Mr Mansfield claimed deaths and injury to more than 4,000 birds had been caused during oil spill, for which GPC accepted responsibility.
Controversially, though, the proposed law would place criminal responsibility on the respective CEOs Messrs Bannerman and Tench personally, rather than on the firms.

Nice to see that in yet another way the thriller we spent so long researching and then writing, is indeed ahead of its times. In our website we have a section which deals with the ways in which our novel's Hero seeks to fight global warming; the novel itself has many ideas for those who wish to do something to save our earth.

Wish us luck in our search for a publisher for Obelisk Seven!

eBook writers: Your market has doubled in 6 months, says Pew

2011-09-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

Twenty seven million, give or take a million.

That's the size of your potential market of people who own an eBook reader.

Not a bad market, eh?

But the news is even better: that market has doubled over the past 6 months, rising from just over 14 million to today's 27 million or so. That's just over 13 million new eBook reader owners in the past 6 months.

Anyone care to make projections for the size of your eBook reader owner market in 6 more months? Or in 12 months time? How about in 2 years time? Right now, there are 311 million people in the US, with about 229 million or so in the age bracket of 18 and older.

One thing you can bank on is that the market is exploding, faster than most markets for most other products. And if you have an eBook in mind, or already published (say, as a Kindle eBook), then these figures should make you view your future readership numbers more optimistically than ever.

More details in my other post - click here.

Join John Locke and the eBook revolution: How to Rebel

2011-08-14T15:57:00.001-07:00

Check out my new post on John Locke and how the revolution is helping authors like you to overturn the established order - click here!

Just who is John Locke?

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Locke is an international bestselling author of 9 novels which have sold over one million paid copies in the Amazon Kindle Store for eBooks. With is dramatic surge in sales, Locke has done two memorable things: joined the slected Kindle Million Book Club (along with the likes of Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins and Michael Connelly), and shown the world how to escape from the archaic paper-based publishing industry into the wave of the future.

Global warming: Permafrost ticking bomb ticks louder in Russia

2011-07-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

In Obelisk Seven our hero, Nick Kangles, discusses his concern about the catastrophe that awaits our world when the vast permafrost regions thaw, as they have started to do. This is an extract from his first discussion with Kate Stanton, nicknamed the Bug Hunter:

            "Sudden change," he said out loud, his voice emphatic.
            "What?"
            "Made by humans,” he said. “It reminded me of sudden change. Abrupt change. That could be what kills all of us."
            He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small map, smoothing it on the table. It was a polar view of the world.
            "Take one fact: the temperatures at the top of the permafrost layer have gone up a lot since the 1980's in the Arctic - by up to 3 degrees Centigrade."
            He broke off, staring at the map, and she waited.
            "It is the acceleration that really concerns us," he continued. "Things go faster and faster and pretty soon they can get out of control. Huge swathes of permafrost have been in the tundra of north America and Siberia for more than eight thousand years. There are one trillion tons of carbon in the earth’s permafrost and when it melts it releases methane, and methane is about 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It’s potentially the big killer. Right now, we have several kilometers of frozen earth there, so the gases stay trapped."
            He fell silent for a long time.
            Kate leaned over and touched his hand.
            “A penny for your thoughts?”
            Nick started, gave a faint sigh and came back to the present.
            "That catastrophe in waiting hidden in the permafrost really worries me, Kate. If it should ever warm up too much …" his voice trailed off.
            "Let's just hope that doesn't happen," she said softly, touching his hand lightly.

Now we hear that Russia may lose up to 30%of its permafrost by 2050:

Russia's vast permafrost areas may shrink by a third by the middle of the century due to global warming, endangering infrastructure in the Arctic zone, an emergencies ministry official said Friday.

"In the next 25 to 30 years, the area of permafrost in Russia may shrink by 10-18 percent," the head of the ministry's disaster monitoring department Andrei Bolov told the RIA Novosti news agency.

"By the middle of the century, it can shrink by 15-30 percent, and the boundary of the permafrost may shift to the north-east by 150-200 kilometres," he said.

If anyone still denies the probability of climate change posing a clear and present danger to the world, then they should read Obelisk Seven (when it's published), and this article.

Only an idiot can deny the ticking timebomb facing our earth.

Unfortunately, it will not just be the idiots who suffer when that bomb explodes.

Amazing Kindle eBook stories for children: The LittleTown series for only 99 cents each

2011-07-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

If you have a child who loves to listen to or read stories of action and adventure, with plots planned, dangers faced, friends helped, then they are in for a treat with my new LittleTown series.

The first three books in the series are now available on the Amazon Kindle eBooks store for the low price of only 99 cents each.

Each book has 10 stories, with lots of pictures.

There is also a section with pictures of each of the 19 little animals who star in the series and a write up of each animal: what they look like, how they behave, what kind of homes they build, what they eat.

Click here for my Amazon Author Page, which lets you dip into each of the LittleTown books by clicking on the covers.

The theme of the childrens stories is simple:

Imagine a group of small animals that decides to set up their own town and live their lives according to their own rules.

Now imagine the kinds of things that can go wrong!

Remember, these are small animals, with natural predators: wolves, owls, weasels.

"You caused all the trouble," Mr Bulldozer said

And many live in tunnels, which are open to snakes.

If your kids enjoy these stories, you might also treat yourself to my thriller, Silent Lips, a 100,000 action adventure set in New York, and priced at only 99 cents.

I hope you and your children enjoy the books.

They make great gifts, as well!

And you don't have to buy a Kindle or Kobo or Nook to read them: you can simply download a FREE app from Amazon Kindle which converts your desktop computer or laptop into an ereader – click here for my post on how to do this.

Enjoy!

Glenn Ashton

The Timid Twins upside down in a faint, from the LittleTown series

How to read Amazon Kindle eBook bestsellers with your own PC

2011-07-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

One little appreciated fact is that you don't have to spend more than a hundred dollars to buy an ereader such as the Kindle, the Kobo, the iPad etc in order to read the bestselling eBooks available on Kindle.

You can use your own personal computer – your desktop or your laptop – to read these bestsellers, thrillers, mysteries, romances and action adventure stories by simply downloading a F REE app from Kindle which sets up your PC as an ereader.

Click here to go to a site which provides the free download. Just click on the WindowsPC box on the right to download the FREE app which will make your personal computer a wonderful ereader.

Once you've done that, why not have a look at my 5 eBooks, all available on Kindle eBooks, and all for the low price of 99 cents each?

Click here for my Amazon author page.

You might want to dip into my thriller, Silent Lips, by clicking here for more details.

My "elevator speech" for Silent Lips is:

A 100,000 word thriller for 99 cents!

In this 100,000 word thriller, people inside and outside New York race against time to save the city from a genetically engineered virus created by mistake. While doctors in the ParkLab in Central Park try everything they can think of to cure people, the Prime Minister of Israel is smuggled into the stricken city to share its fate, and the President makes the most agonizing decision any US president has ever made.

Silent Lips is an absolute bargain at the low, low price of 99 cents! You can buy it to read, or you can give them as gifts to friends and relatives.

Enjoy your PC ereader, and the wide world of eBooks open to you on Kindle eBooks!

Glenn Ashton

PS Hint: I find reading eBooks on my PC best if I click on the box on the top to have it shown in 2 columns, and also use a smaller font with a sepia background.... My LittleTown series of kids books displays beautifully this way.

The Chicago Kid, from the LittleTown series

How to publish on Amazon Kindle eBooks and sell a Million Books

2011-07-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

This is part of a series on publishing your eBook yourself. This post summarizes the steps you need to take to launch your electronic writing career. It is a kind of Paint-by-Numbers list of steps.

My eBook thriller about New York City

Future posts on this blog will deal with particular aspects in more detail, including how to promote your eBook, but if you follow these steps you should be up and published within a day or so.

Click here to see my eBooks on Amazon Kindle eBooks.

THE KINDLE MILLION CLUB

And you could be on your way to join the small but select club of The Kindle Million Club – those authors who have sold more than ONE MILLION COPIES of their eBooks by publishing on Kindle.

Here are a few links to some of the Kindle eBook Millionaires:

The man who sells 2,000 eBooks a day and often makes £11,000 a month.

The woman who makes $600,000 a year from eBooks.

THE STEPS TO PUBLISHING ON KINDLE

Here are the steps:

First, create your account with Amazon / Kindle. Go to the Kindle site in paragraph 3 to get there.
Click here for the general Kindle site. You can also sign in by clicking at the top where it says new customer.
Or you can click here for the Kindle sign in site.
Click here for the Kindle publishing terms. Read these. You need to know them before you publish on Kindle eBooks.
Prepare your novel for publishing by doing the things set out below. It things go wrong, just take a deep breath and start again. The first steps are to load your book in Microsoft Word and start formatting it so that you can publish it.
Spacing and font size for your novel - Use single spacing Times Roman type size 11 or 12.
Indents - Do not indent paragraphs. Kindle automatically indents all paragraphs.
Paragraph spacing - Do not press enter to have a space separating paragraphs. Kindle automatically puts a space between paragraphs. Creating an extra paragraph yourself results in big spaces on various devices.
Saving your novel - Save your file in .doc not .docx. You might have to use Word 1997-2003 to save it as doc, as Word 2007 uses docx.
Other style items – You can use indents, bold characters, italics and headings. However, bullet points, special fonts, headers and footers must not be used.
Page Breaks: Enter a page break at the end of every chapter to prevent the text from running together. To insert a page break in MS Word, click "Insert" at the top menu bar and select "Page Break."
Image Placement and color: Images should be inserted in JPEG (or .jpeg) format with center alignment (don't copy and paste from another source). Select "Insert" > "Picture" > then locate te file on your computer and select the file. Although the Kindle device can display images, it uses a gray scale. You should use color pics because Kindle one day most likely will use color, and iPhone shows color pics.
Images size - Images should not exceed 127 KB. The Roxio Photosuite 5 program or the Photoshop program allows you to resize images to as to reduce them below 127KB.
Cover page - Prepare a cover page and save it as a jpeg file. Size to use is 926 by 1200 pixels. The cover page is uploaded separately into Kindle for publishing (see below) but you can also insert the cover image as the first page of your eBook. Make a note of where you saved your cover image because you will need it later on.
Justification - Kindle readers can justify the text of your eBook as they wish, so use left justification, as I do.
Headers and Footers - Do not use Headers or Footers as Kindle does not use them.
Page Breaks for chapters - All new chapters should start with an "Insert" and "Page Break" in Word.
Book structure - The structure of your eBook is usually this: Cover image, Cover page, Copyright page, Dedication page, Preface (if any), Prologue (if any), Table of Contents, then chapters, with the Author Details and author photo (if any) on the last page.
Table of contents – Tougher to do, so avoid them unless you really need one. Most fiction novels do not need one. Use one that simply sets out the contents without linkages to each chapter – see Silent Lips for an example. If you do want a TOC with hyperlinks to each chapter, then google for advice on how to handle a TOC.
Saving for publication – When you are ready to upload your eBook, save your Word file using Web Page, Filtered (*HTM & *HTML) format. You can find this format by saving using the Save As command from the top left corner of the Word program, and then clicking on the type on the bottom of the page – you are given a menu which includes this Web Page, Filtered (*HTM & *HTML) format. Answer Yes to any questions asked and then save it. Make a note of where you have saved your file.
The next step is to convert that file of your book into something that the Kindle program can work with; see the next paragraph for how to do this by downloading the very handy free MobiPocket Creator program. This program will help make your epublishing on Kindle hassle free!
MobiPocket Creator – This is the best program to use to Build your book so that you can upload it to Kindle. The MobiPocket Creator is an application that will convert your Web Page, Filtered (*HTM & *HTML) file into an eBbook. It can be downloaded by clicking the link above or by going to mobipocket.com. The site is http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscreator.asp
The following steps use MobiPocket Creator to build your book.
Open Mobipocket Creator and click on Import from Existing File – click on HTML document (your eBook was converted into HTML when you saved it as set out above).
Browse to the HTML file of your eBook (from the place you saved it and noted as per 20 above), and click it and then press "Import".
This will open the book editing function. Click on "Cover Image."
Click "Add a Cover Image" and browse your files to locate your eBook cover you prepared as a jpeg file.
Select your book cover and click "Update" to save your cover.
Then select "Build" from the Mobipocket Creator Menu.
On the "Build" page, click "Build".
Once Build is complete (it can take a few minutes), this message will appear: Build Finished.
Next, click the circle next to "Open folder containing eBook" and select "OK." You can skip this step if you want to.
The file will be in PRC (or .prc) format and open in your My Documents\My Publications folder. Your book will be located here for future reference. Make a note of this location for future use. Mine goes to C:\Users\Owner\My Documents\My Publications. Make a note of where your PRC file is saved because you will need it later.
This PRC file is what you will upload into the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). You do not upload doc files or any other kinds of files – the PRC file created by Mobipocket Creator is the best way to go in my opinion.
But first you can check how your eBook looks in Kindle and iPhone etc by using a Kindle previewer provided for downloading to your computer.
You can download the Kindle Previewer from this site http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Kindle-Previewer.shtml
When you have loaded the Kindle Previewer, run it, click on "File" and then click on "Open Book". Click on the right PRC file!!!!! Look at how your eBook appears in all the Devices (click on all of them and go page by page through your book). Make a note of what is not right about the layout etc. You are now pretty close to being published!
Revise your original DOC version to remove what is wrong as shown in the Kindle Previewer. Then go through all the above steps to reload the revised eBook by creating HTMP files and using MobiPocket Creator to create a PRC file and previewing it again in the Kindle Previewer. Do the revising of your .doc version until you are happy with how it displays in the Kindle Previewer.
The next few steps show how to upload your eBook on Kindle eBooks. You should by now almost smell the scent of victory! These steps are pretty easy to take as the Kindle form has clear instructions.
How to upload to Kindle - Then finally log into your Kindle account and upload your eBook. You do this by opening your Amazon/DTP account, by logging into it using your email and Amazon Password, then you click on "My Bookshelf". Then click the "Add New Item" button.
Type in your eBook title.
Type in the series title (if you have a series of books to publish) – mine is LittleTown, for my children's books.
Add a description of your eBook (written like the blurbs on the backs of novels) – google for some hints on how to do this, and check my later posts for ideas and examples.
Enter a category your eBook will be listed under (makes it easier for people to find it because readers search by categories).
Enter your prepared Keywords. See my later posts for ideas, and google Kindle keywords for an explanation and some hints. Keywords help readers find books on Amazon of the kind they are looking for.
Click the "Save Entries" button to make sure Kindle retains your information.
Then click on "Upload & Preview Book".
Select "Browse" to open [only the PRC file NOT the HTM or HTML file] a dialog box to locate the file you want to upload – this is the PRC file on your computer that the MobiPocket Creator made for you. ONLY USE THE PRC FILE – DO NOT USE ANY DOC FILE OR ANY IMAGES WILL NOT BE UPLOADED ETC.
The Kindle site then converts your book – this can take a while.
Click on the "Preview" button to see how your eBook looks. It should look fine when you go through it page by page. If it doesn't, fix what doesn't look OK in your DOC file and go through all the above steps again until you are happy. Chances are pretty good that your eBook will look fine in Kindle's preview!
Click on "Enter Price" and enter your price. I've used US$0.99 for my eBooks; you can charge more if you wish.
Click on "Save Entries" and then on the "Publish" button.
Congratulations! You should now be a published eBook author on the Kindle eBook site. Your first step towards joining the Kindle Million Book club has been completed!

SOME GOOD SITES ABOUT PUBLISHING ON KINDLE

Read a few of these sites for other hints on publishing your eBook:

How to make books available for the Kindle platform:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Step-by-Step-Guide-for-Publishing-on-Kindle

Simplified Formatting Guide:

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A17W8UM0MMSQX6

This is a simplified guide to building Kindle Books using Microsoft Word.

Another good article here:

http://blogkindle.com/2010/11/how-to-publish-a-kindle-ebook/

MY eBOOKS ON KINDLE

So far I have 5 eBooks on Kindle eBooks: three from the children's series LittleTown, a book of Modern Proverbs, and a full length thriller named Silent Lips. Click here for more details.

This is my "elevator speech" for Silent Lips:

Silent Lips is an absolute bargain at the low, low price of 99 cents! You can buy it to read, or you can give them as gifts to friends and relatives.

IF YOU LIKED MY HINTS ON PUBLISHING, THEN PLEASE HELP BOOST MY SALES BY POSTING A REVIEW:

Once you've read Silent Lips, you can give me a huge boost by going back to Silent Lips on the Kindle site and sending Kindle a review – you do this by clicking on the Create your own review box at the bottom of the book's writeup.

The number of reviews eBooks get on Kindle are used to rank the book in Kindles Bestsellers lists; any book that appears on that list usually gets a big boost in sales!

Reviews can be short and sweet; do you like the book and why, would you recommend it to others etc.

HELP SPREAD THE WORD!

Please help my sales by sending a copy of this post to your friends, relatives and others who might be interested. If they buy Silent Lips they will be getting really good value for the very low price of 99 cents! I (hopefully, like you) am aiming at becoming a member of the very small Kindle Million Book club. You can help me reach this goal!

Thanks for considering this!

Glenn Ashton

OUR WEBSITE FOR OBELISK SEVEN AND THE OBELISK SEVEN BLOG

You might be interested in reading a bit on our website about another thriller we have finished, named Obelisk Seven, by going to this site: www.obeliskseven.com

Our Obelisk Seven "elevator speech" is:

What is the link between seven obelisks that are sending out signals, a TV show on global warming, and a microbe that threatens the world’s oil supplies? And who is willing to kill to prevent others finding this link?

When Nick Kangles, the host of a global warming TV show, microbiologist Kate Stanton and Egyptologist Gliffy discover that an Egyptian obelisk in Rome is sending out signals, they set out on an increasingly dangerous hunt across Europe, Egypt and America to find the secret of the signals.

Click here to visit our Obelisk Seven blog.

Chien and The Chicago Kid examine the plan - from the LittleTown series

A Kindle eBook thriller bargain for New York lovers

2011-07-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

Apart from the millions who live in New York, there are countless others throughout the world who have experienced the energy of this modern marvel. And now there is an action adventure bargain for all lovers of the city of New York.

A bargain priced at 99 cents!

Welcome to Silent Lips. What is the 100,000 word thriller about? My elevator speech for it is this:

Silent Lips is an absolute bargain at the low, low price of 99 cents! You can buy it to read, or you can give them as gifts to friends and relatives (along with the suspense the story will bring to them!).

You can do so by buying the book through Amazon's security protected purchase method.

Do I need a Kindle to read Silent Lips?

No! You don't need a Kindle to read the thriller: you can download a free app from Kindle to let you read it on your Windows PC, or your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android devices, and Mac. Details below on this app.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD A FREE APP FROM KINDLE TO READ Silent Lips:

Click on this site to get a free reading app that allows you to read the Kindle eBooks your PC, your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android devices, or Mac. It doesn't work for KOBO yet.

HOW TO READ MORE ABOUT Silent Lips:

Click on this site to go to the Amazon Glenn Ashton Author Page, and to order your very own copy of Silent Lips.

Click on Silent Lips for more details about this exciting suspense story.

MORE ABOUT THE STORYLINE OF Silent Lips

This book is dedicated to all who have visited or lived in the wonderfully vibrant city of New York, the premier city of our world.

During one of my visits to the city I was walking in Central Park when the thought struck me: What if something happened and this huge, bustling, energetic city was forced to shut its borders, to keep people inside and stop people entering?

That thought stayed with me for several visits until one day I sat down, pen in hand, and sketched out the story of Silent Lips.

It is the story of New York struck by a mysterious disease which forces the President to blockade the city. Nothing can leave; nothing can enter.

What is this disease? Where did it come from? Who made it? Can it be stopped? Is there time?

I thought of men and women inside the quarantined city, fighting to find the answer to the mysterious sickness that rages in the city, while still more men and women from all over the world volunteer to come to the city on one-way tickets to help it fight for its survival.

This is the story of a young man with a mission, a battered old VW Rabbit, and of scribblings in his tattered blue notebooks.

It is the story of the Prime Minister of Israel, smuggled into the city to share its suffering.

It is the story of President Charles Stanton, faced with the most anguishing decision a U.S. President has ever had to make.

It is the story of a young reporter, Naomi Jacobs, who is asked by the Governor to tell the world of New York's desperate fight and who ends up having to fight for her life.

Above all, this is the story of the people inside and outside the city who watch with anguish the mounting crisis.

I hope you enjoy Silent Lips.

Glenn Ashton

HOW TO BUY Silent Lips for only 99 cents:

You can buy it by clicking on the Buy now with One Click on the far right of the Silent Lips entry on the above site, or you can send it as a gift to somebody by clicking on the Give as a Gift box.

HELP BOOST MY SALES BY POSTING A REVIEW:

The number of reviews eBooks get on Kindle are used to rank the book in Kindles Bestsellers lists; any book that appears on that list usually gets a big boost in sales!

Reviews can be short and sweet; do you like the book and why, would you recommend it to others etc.

HELP SPREAD THE WORD!

Thanks for considering this!

Glenn Ashton

The London Obelisk: Cleopatra's Ghosts

2010-12-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

London Obelisk from the Millenium Wheel

The next time you visit London, walk from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben along the Thames Embankment until you are next to the seventy foot long Cleopatra's Needle.

At 186 tons, it weighs about ten times as much as the largest stone in Stonehenge, and was already 1500 years old before Stonehenge was built. Eight feet at the base, it is five feet wide at the top, before its seven foot high pyramidion starts.

Take a moment to admire the two bronze sphinxes that stand guard over her.

Your question to the Obelisk:

Then turn your eyes to the small pyramidion on the very top of the giant obelisk, and say out loud:

"I call spirits from the vasty deep!"

Listen carefully for an answer.

Before we tell you what you might hear, we need to touch on a fascinating tapestry of history and legend.

The tapestry thread:

This thread of mystery, and of ghosts, runs through and joins together Braveheart; the Gunpowder Plot; Thutmose III and his son, Thutmose IV; a stone slab between the giant paws of the Great Sphinx in Egypt; Cleopatra; the London obelisk; and a noble family we can call the Fighting Percy's, whose swords were ever close to hand throughout the centuries.

Knowing this thread of wonder that joins these people, events and times, you will never look on this wonderful obelisk the same way again.

Thutmose IV:

Let's start with Pharaoh Thutmose III, the maker of the Cleopatra's Needles which were moved from Egypt by Freemasons and are now found in London and Central Park in New York.

Sphinx by David Roberts

In Egypt these two obelisks had stood together. Gradually the restless sea closed in on the shore where they stood, and the obelisk which one day would grace London, teetered under the waves washing ashore, and about three hundred years ago it fell.

It served for a while as a bridge over a small ravine it had fallen over, while its twin – destined to be moved to Central Park - stayed upright.

When Thutmose III died, he left several sons including one who became known as Thutmose IV when he became pharaoh.

The Great Sphinx:

When we visited Egypt as part of our research for our thriller, Obelisk Seven, we paid a visit to the magnificent Great Sphinx. The biggest monument in a land of big monuments, the sphinx has a human head on the body of a lion.

Nestling between the huge paws of the Sphinx is a stone tablet, called the Dream Stela, placed there by Thutmose IV. The tablet tells the story of the younger son of Thutmose III who was hunting in the desert, and stopped to rest at the Sphinx, which was covered in sand up to its head. The prince fell asleep between the paws, and in his dream the Sphinx spoke to him, promising him the throne of Egypt if he would clear the sand covering it:

The kingdom shall be given to you ... The world shall be yours in its length and in its breadth, as far as the light of the eye of the lord of the universe shines... My countenance is gracious towards you, and my heart clings to you.

Thutmose IV cleared the sand, became Pharaoh when his older brother – who was first in line for the throne – died before he could inherit it, and ruled for just under ten years.

Glenn & one London Obelisk Sphinx

Now let's make the connection between Thutmose IV and the Great Sphinx, and the London obelisk. Look to her left and her right. Two seven ton bronze guardian sphinxes, nineteen feet long, six feet wide and nine feet tall, flank her, for her protection. In another post we talk about the shrapnel wounds in the body and paw of the sphinx to her right, from a German bombing raid during the First World War.

These two guardian sphinxes are copies of a small foot-long sphinx of Thutmose IV, in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle (pronounced Annick). The Alnwick Castle sphinx has the face of Thutmose IV, on a lion's body, with the tail curling around the right hind leg.

Alnwick Castle:

Alnwick Castle was used for interior and exterior shots of the Hogwarts Castle in the Harry Potter films. The castle is the second largest inhabited castle in England, and since 1309 – for 700 years - has belonged to the powerful Percy family. The Percys have had a long history of intrigue and warring for centuries, fighting their own king as well as the Scots. A cousin of the earl of Percy played a part in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, commemorated on Guy Fawkes Day each year. In 1297 Braveheart – William Wallace – launched an unsuccessful attack on the castle.

Alnwick, and Alnwick Castle itself, have links to ghosts.

Sphinx of Thutmose IV at Alnwick Castle

From the eleventh century A.D., the castle was famous for a vampire – known locally as the Creature from the Tomb, and formerly a lord of the estate – that lived beneath the castle, coming out at night to attack the villagers. The vampire caused an outbreak of plague, and the angry villagers dug it up from its shallow grave and burned its body.

In the village of Alnwick, the public house known as Ye Olde Cross has its own ghosts: a collection of bottles that are cursed. Touch them and you die. The bottles are now apparently covered up to prevent further deaths.

Enter Sir Lancelot:

Lancelot, the famous Knight of the Round Castle, lover of King Arthur's wife, Guinevere, and searcher for the Holy Grail, was sent to King Arthur's court by the Lady of the Lake.

As a young man, Lancelot, then known as the White Knight, came across a castle called the Dolorous Guard, guarded by the Copper Knight, ten knights at the first wall, ten at the second wall, and then the Copper Knight himself. But that knight fled; Lancelot is taken to a cemetery and shown a metal slab with writing on it.

Only one knight, says the writing, can lift this weighty slab, and his name is written on the other side of it. Lancelot flips over the slab and finds his name: Lancelot.

Lancelot then took the Dolorous Guard as his home, changing it to Joyous Guard; on his death, he was buried there.

Legend has it that Alnwick Castle is Joyous Guard, home and burial site of Lancelot.

Hotspur in Alnwick Castle

So: Alnwick Castle is home to ghosts, and to Sir Lancelot.

Young Prince Hotspur:

And it was home to the famous Harry Hotspur.

A statue of Hotspur astride his horse is found inside the castle.

In 1403 Hotspur tried to depose Henry IV and was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury when he raised his visor and an arrow penetrated his mouth.

His body was shown to King Henry IV, who wept. After his burial, rumors spread that he was still alive, so Henry IV had his body dug up, impaled on a spear, displayed in public, then cut into four pieces and sent around all of England; his head was then stuck on a pole at the gates of the city of York.

In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, Hotspur and his the Welsh rebel Glendower plot together against King Henry IV, and Hotspur mocks Glendower for his outrageous claims to control the devil and his spirits in the underworld.

And this brings us to the question you are to ask the London obelisk.

Glendower, in Henry IV, says:

I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur replies:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

If you listen carefully, you just might – if your quest is pure and the water of the Thames runs clean that day or night – hear a soft voice, seeming to come from one of the two bronze sphinxes, or perhaps from the obelisk itself, repeating what Shakespeare recorded that Hotspur had said.

Cleopatra's Needle Ghosts:

But look around carefully when you ask the question and wait for an answer, for there are legends of ghosts at the obelisk. The London obelisk is called Cleopatra's Needle, even though she had nothing to do with it. The iron cylinder which carried the obelisk from Egypt to London, and was lost at sea for a while at the cost of the lives of six sailors, was named the Cleopatra by the engineer who moved it, John Dixon.

Could it have been this association with Cleopatra's name that lead to the obelisk being called Cleopatra's Needle? Mythology is full of stories of the power of names:

Ancient Egyptians associated the name with the soul. It was believed that knowledge of a god or spirit’s name gave one complete power over that deity, and knowledge of a man’s name provided the power to do that man good or ill. A person could not exist without his name.

Perhaps this association with Cleopatra contributed to the legends about ghosts at the obelisk.

Some say that a curse fell upon this obelisk when Cleopatra, then only thirty nine, committed suicide, clasping an asp to her chest after the death of her lover, Mark Antony. Her love affairs with both Caesar and Antony ended in tragedy, when both of them lost power.

Cleopatra and the Asp

When Otavian took Antony's will from the temple of the Vestal Virgins, where it had been stored for safekeeping, he found out that Antony had planned to move the capital from Rome to the magnificent city of Alexandria in Egypt, to be closer to Cleopatra, and to found a new dynasty there with her; Octavian published the will, and the Romans turned against Antony.

Cleopatra persuaded Antony to commit suicide, which he did, falling upon his sword. When she tried to captivate Octavian, and failed, she realized that she would be paraded through the streets of Rome in chains, as part of Octavian's triumphal return to the capital city, so she chose death over such dishonor.

She was found dead on a bed of gold, dressed in all her royal ornaments.

Even today, there are more suicides near the obelisk than at any other point on the Thames River.

There have been claims that strange, mocking laughter is heard nearby, and some have mentioned seeing a naked man rush up to the obelisk, leap upon its base, and then into the water, without any splash being heard.

Click below for more photos of the London obelisk ...

Cleopatra's Needle in London - with boats

Sphinx guarding Cleopatra's Needle in London

Second World War monument close to the London obelisk

Guard at Aswan quarry showing how obelisks were cut out of granite using dolorite stone hammer

And the band played on ... with the London obelisk in the background

Cleopatra's Needle in London at dusk

Sphinx of London obelisk in summer greenery

Iron cylinder named Cleopatra with London obelisk inside leaves Egypt for London

Statue of Thutmose III - maker of the London obelisk

Sir Erasmus Wilson - the Freemason who bankrolled the move of the London obelisk from Egypt

The Vatican obelisk - one of the seven obelisks featured in the thriller, Obelisk Seven

Alnwick Castle - where the small sphinx of Thutmose IV is kept

Front view of sphinx of Thutmose IV in Alnwick Castle

Back view of sphinx of Thutmose IV in Alnwick Castle

HarryPotter and Hogswart Castle

Hotspur's Death

Strapped up London Obelisk - 2009

Hole in granite bedrock of Aswan quarry where an obelisk was cut out


Pink granite of Aswan quarry in Egypt that obelisks were made from

Victorian tourists and the Great Sphinx in Egypt

London obelisk being prepared for move from Egypt to London in the iron cylinder named Cleopatra

London obelisk in its iron container being rolled into the sea for move from Egypt

One of the two sphinxes guarding the London obelisk - from the Thames

Graciela Chichilnisky: From the Kyoto Accord to Carbon Catcher

2010-12-05T21:44:00.000-08:00

Graciela Chichilnisky

One of our Heroes fighting the Heat, Graciela Chichilnisky is an innovator. From giving the Kyoto Accord a massive boost in practical implementation of carbon dioxide reducing policies – through her invention of the Kyoto carbon trading mechanism – she has now applied her innovative mind to another means of reducing carbon in our atmosphere.

In our earlier post we spoke about her emissions trading breakthrough. This time she is fighting global warming by seeking to capture carbon in the air.

The pilot plant she is working on is the Global Thermostat – click here for its website – in Silicon Valley, California.

Waste heat from a solar-generating plant is captured and put to good use before being stored underground. The driver for this pilot project is money: Graciela believes that the pilot project should prove that the technology being used will cost less than other plants that capture carbon cost, and be an economic proposition.

Peter Eisenberger

The pilot project aims at proving her contention that it is possible to protect against global warming by reversing the current paradigm which aims at reducing energy use in order to reduce carbon emissions.

The project should, she and her fellow founder Peter Eisenberger believe, prove that it is possible that the more energy that is produced, the more carbon emissions are reduced.

The project captures carbon from the air by extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere, rather than from flue gases of power plants and factories:

The air capture process is known and requires separating carbon from ambient air, at low temperatures and at a concentration of about 400 parts per million, as opposed to high temperatures and 15,000 parts in the case of flue gas.
Air capture has gained momentum on both the policy and media fronts as a viable solution for reducing carbon emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced $2.3B in funding, including technology and research investment in carbon air capture technologies. This is the first time air capture has been explicitly called out as part of any DOE program... Air capture technologies are being introduced commercially on the market right now and there are several successful pilot demonstration plants. The first GT Pilot Plant has been erected at SRI International and a commercial demonstration plant is planned for the fall and winter months of 2010.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that Graciela pulls of another stunning triumph in the fight to reduce global warming.

Global Warming – Do You Know Your Neighbor's GWIQ?

2010-12-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

The old saying that What is measured, improves applies to global warming as well.

If you know your own global warming IQ score (your GWIQ), you can compare your consumption habits with those of your neighbors.

A good way to encourage people to reduce their pollution by reducing their carbon emissions is to provide people with the tools they can use to measure their own carbon emissions, and the emissions of their neighbours.

In our novel Obelisk Seven, we describe a method we devised for our global warming fighter hero, Nick Kangles, to use to encourage the viewers of his international environmental television show to encourage the reduction of global warming by encouraging competition between individuals, cities, states and countries.

People could launch the YouRateThem Internet site – a worldwide competition between cities to cut their emissions, with ordinary people rating their cities, states and countries using YouRateThem checklists, with cities etc. earning titles each year as the Coolest Cities, for reducing their emissions footprints.

If you want to find out how your own country's pollution compares to other countries, then click here for the Scorecard. You can use it to compare American counties and communities as well as states.

Another handy site named Opower shows people living in the United Kingdom how much carbon dioxide is emitted to heat water in their homes.

The Energy Savings Trust site gives suggestions for saving water and energy, and for cutting their carbon footprint.

The Trust points out that heating water in British homes accounts for a whopping 5% of the
country's total carbon emissions.

Who would have thought that taking a bath or shower could contribute so much to global warming?

The handy 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators across ten categories; you can use it to compare how well countries are doing to meet their environmental policy goals.

Want to know how much land and ocean is needed to sustain your own consumption, and absorb your own wastes? Then click here to see your Ecological Footprint on the myfootprint site, and to learn how to reduce your own personal impact on our earth.

A black footprint with a white CO2 on the ball of the foot is a badge which only those United Kingdom companies which take steps to reduce their carbon emissions can wear. According to the UK Carbon Trust:

According to a study by the Centre for Retail Research, the Carbon Reduction Label reached the £2bn-a-year sales mark when supermarket Tesco decided to add its own-brand pasta range to the scheme.
Euan Murray, head of footprinting at the Carbon Trust, said the label was designed to help shoppers understand what brands were taking steps to cut their carbon footprints.
"It means [consumers] are using their spending power to drive chains within businesses and supply changes, both here in the UK and right around the world," he told BBC News.
Products that are allowed to carry the footprint symbol have to commit to reducing their carbon emissions over a two-year period, or risk being thrown out of the scheme.
The trust says every stage of a product's lifecycle is assessed, from raw materials and packaging, to manufacture, transportation, sale to the end user, use and disposal.
The audit process is underpinned by a standard, known as PAS 2050 and managed by BSI British Standards, that is designed to offer a consistent assessment of the associated energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Now that's an idea that other countries should copy!

How about it, America? Canada? Germany? France? Sweden? Everybody?

Who believes in global warming?

2010-12-04T16:33:00.000-08:00

A Yale study of Americans found that more than half (52%) would fail an elementary test of knowledge about global warming. In fact, three out of four would like to know more about it.

And a sizeable majority (68%) would like to see global warming taught in schools.

Yale found in its study – Americans' Knowledge of Climate Change – that only a small fraction of Americans surveyed (10%) felt that they were very well informed on climate change.

In other findings:

It "found important gaps in knowledge and common misconceptions about climate change and the earth system. These misconceptions lead some people to doubt that global warming is happening or that human activities are a major contributor, to misunderstand the causes and therefore the solutions, and to be unaware of risks," the report said.
Half of Americans recognize that global warming is a result of human actions. Fifty-seven percent understand that the greenhouse effect describes gasses that trap heat in the atmosphere, and 45 percent know that carbon dioxide traps heat from the surface of the Earth. Just a quarter know about coral bleaching and ocean acidification, the study revealed.

For our other posts on people's knowledge of global warming and the difficulty in selling the dangers it poses, click here, here, here and here.

What is very clear about these surveys is that a lot of work needs to be done to enlighten ordinary people about the causes of global warming, and the impact on our societies of the climate change that is coming.

Tough Bugs: Conan the Bacterium

2010-12-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes significant discoveries are made by accident. Take Conan the Bacterium. Somebody opened a can of meat that had been sterilized using radiation and noticed that the meat was spoiled. This did not make sense – the radiation dose was designed to kill anything that could turn the meat inside the can rotten.

But rotten it was. So what had survived the radiation and rotted the meat?

Enter a genetically engineered microbe which proved to be very tough. The culprit was able to take a thousand times more radiation than we could, and survive. Some NASA admirers called it Conan the Bacterium.

It's a quick responder, because it can repair its own DNA within a day even if it is exposed to radiation continuously.

This fact parachuted the tough bug onto the passenger list of the first crew of Earthlings to fly to another planet: a Russian robot spacecraft blasted off to fly around Mars and then return to earth in 2012. Conan the Bacterium joined brewer's yeast, thale cress and water bears as part of the package of living things to make the trip to Mars as part of the LIFE experiment (Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment).

The aim of LIFE is to find out if living organisms can survive unprotected in space. If they can, this finding could support a theory known as panspermia, which says that simple organisms may be able to drift around space for years until they land on planets like earth.

Tardigrade or Water Bear

In other words, Conan the Bacterium could help us figure out if life really originated somewhere "out there" and drifted onto earth and sprouted here.

The fact that we have recently found tough bugs that can survive doses of radiation five hundred times greater than ones what would kill humans, or that can live in acid vents on sea floors or in other hostile environments supports the theory of panspermia.

The LIFE expedition uses a Russian space craft:

The Russian mission, called Phobus-Grunt (the Russian word for soil is grunt), will take 10 months to reach Mars and will then spend several more months in orbit round the planet before landing on Phobos. It will collect a sample of its soil and blast back to Earth, along with the Life capsule. These few scoops of material will become the first sample of extraterrestrial soil to be brought to Earth since the lunar missions of the 1970s...
The Phobos-Grunt mission will last for 34 months and will carry its samples of Earth's humbler life forms in a three-inch-diameter titanium case. These will include the bacterium deinococcus radiodurans, whose ability to survive intense radiation has earned it the scientific nickname Conan the Bacterium.

Other life forms will include thale cress; tiny water creature tardigrade - or water bear - which can also survive extraordinary extremes of temperature and pressure; samples of brewer's yeast, one of the most widely studied organisms on Earth; and some grains of permafrost from the Siberian Arctic. This last sample contains many different microbes and will be used to determine if a living colony of interdependent organisms are hardier and more resistant to radiation than a single microbial species.

Phobus Grunt

In our novel Obelisk Seven, our heroine works with tough bugs to find out where a new microbe that is eating the carbon in oil and coal deposits came from, and how to stop it before it seriously reduces fossil fuels we use to fuel our cars and factories.

A protein that emits infrared light found inside Conan the Bacterium has been genetically modified to make it brighter, and injected into mice. The glow emitted from these proteins could give scientists the ability to view inside living animals, and allow them to watch real-time biological processes take place.

Tough bugs they are, but useful bugs, too!


Mars


Conan the Bacterium

Nefertiti: From Queen of Egypt to Monarch of Germany

2010-11-26T21:58:00.000-08:00

What is the link that unites these six degrees of separation: a tattoo, a cage, a massive flak tower, the body of a queen, a desert find in 1912, and a lost monarchy?

The tattoo is a quote from Tennessee Williams: A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.

The cage is the one in the tattoo, and a Berlin bullet proof cage.

The flak tower is the one near the zoo in Berlin, built during the Second World War to protect the city from British, French and American bombers.

The body of a queen is The Body of the Queen: Gender And Rule in the Courtly World from the 15th to the 20th Century, the English translation published in 2006.

The desert find in 1912 is the discovery under the hot desert sands of Armana by the German Egyptologist, Ludwig Borchardt, of the bust of Nefertiti, the beautiful queen of ancient Egypt.

The lost monarchy is the royal family which ruled Germany until the last monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was forced to abdicate after Germany's defeat in the First World War.

And the link is the professor with a 1996 Ph.D. in German Literature from Humboldt University, Berlin, who wrote, among other things, the article entitled Digital Digs, or: Lara Croft replaying Indiana Jones. Archaeological Tropes and ‘Colonial Loops’ in New Media Narrative.

Meet Professor Doctor Claudia Breger, the Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, Indiana University.

Professor Claudia Breger

Breger is the author of the chapter in The Body of the Queen entitled The ‘Berlin’ Nefertiti Bust: Imperial Fantasies in Twentieth-Century German Archaeological Discourse.

Lara Croft is the fictional heroine of the very successful video game Tomb Raider. Beautiful, intelligent and very fit, Lara is an archeologist – similar to the Indiana Jones character – who faces countless hazards in her exploration of tombs and ruins around the world. Lara's trademark costume is a sleeveless tank top, calf-high boots, fingerless gloves, and two pistols thrust into holsters attached to her utility belt.

The tattoo is the one of the thirteen which Angela Jodie has, and is the one she and her mother each had done in a mother-daughter bonding moment. Angela Jodie is the partner of Brad Pitt; in 2001 her acting career as a female action star received a major boost when she starred as Lara Croft in the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, beating out Pamela Anderson and Demi Moore for the role.

Lara Croft

In our earlier post we quoted one of the Berlin Museum officials as saying that the Nefertiti bust deserved to stay in Berlin rather than being returned to her homeland, Egypt, because she was an outstanding example of how the foreign can be integrated into society.

In her article, Claudia Breger puts her finger on the real reason why the German governments have refused for 90 years to allow the bust of Nefertiti to return to Egypt.

She mentions an offer in the 1930's to exchange the bust of Nefertiti for a collection of other Egyptian objects; James Simon, the man who bankrolled the expedition of Ludwig Borchardt which discovered the bust in 1912, supported the exchange, because, he said the "unanimous judgment of the real experts" was that the objects offered in exchange were more valuable than the Nefertiti bust.

The exchange never took place, and many Germans flocked to see Nefertiti in the Berlin museum when word of the exchange leaked out.

What has made the bust of Nefertiti such a revered object for ordinary Germans, as well as those German officials who have a say over her continued stay in the country?

Claudia Breger says that Nefertiti has achieved "star" status, and simply put, is a surrogate for the monarchy which Germany lost after the First World War.

She writes:

The bust is thus exhibited [in her cage on the raised pedestal in the Berlin museum] as the royal object of a modern cult... The newspapers from 1930 were aware of the potential inherent in such figures of royal stardom, and thus the (image of) Nefertiti became the new monarch for the people of the Weimar Republic who had just been 'robbed' of their emperor.

Thanks to Claudia Breger for explaining just why the German government and museum authorities are so insistent on keeping the bust of Nefertiti. Their arguments might be based on the
legality of the acquisition when Ludwig Borchardt divided up the spoils of his excavations with Egypt, but we feel that the officials protesteth too much.

Nefertiti bust in Berlin New Museum 2009

Now, with Claudia Breger's explanation as our guide, we understand why Chancelor Angela Merkel is intent on keeping the Nefertiti bust behind the bullet proof glass of its brand new cage in the New Museum of Berlin.

Nefertiti has been co-opted by Germany as the queen they no longer have.

Kaiser Wilhelm II might have in his study in his place of exile in Holland a copy of the bust made in 1913 for him by James Simon, but Germany has in its new museum in Berlin a copy of their replacement royalty: Nefertiti, Queen of Germany, hidden in a flak tower in Berlin in 1941 to protect Her Majesty from the bombing raids of the Allies.

Tattoos of Angelina Jodie

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Ludwig Borchardt with wife Emilie 1929

Strike a blow for Nefertiti: Leave a Rose for the Imprisoned Queen

2010-11-25T16:45:00.000-08:00

Nefertiti bust - Old Museum, Berlin - 2009

On the 8^th of April 1930, the Berlin newspaper Der Tag reported on the crowds that gathered to see the bust of Nefertiti, and commented on the roses that were laid before her.

Today, Nefertiti stands in her bullet proof glass cage in the New Museum in Berlin, a solitary figure in a room built to showcase only her.

Her cage is raised, so that visitors look at her from below.

This is designed, according to Claudia Breger in a chapter entitled The 'Berlin' Nefertiti Bust – Imperial Fantasies in German Archeological Discourse, in The Body of the Queen, so that:

A museum visitor of average height is presented with the carefully lit bust at an angle from from below, which lends the face 'something majestic', as Borchardt remarked. The bust is thus exhibited as the royal object of a modern cult.

For the many who visit her and who believe she should be returned to her homeland rather than languish in this new jail of hers, we have a suggestion: do what the visitors in the 1930's did – lay a single rose before her bust, to register your views.

The choice of the color of the rose you lay before her will depend on the message you wish to send.

The color of a rose expresses emotions, so choose the color that will, on the day of your visit to the New Museum to see the queen, express your emotions.

If you want to express your love for the lonely queen, lay a single red rose on the floor before her.

If you wish to symbolize your protest at her continued imprisonment under the grey winter skies of Berlin rather than her return to her perpetually sunny deserts, place a black rose on the floor beneath her cage.

If you want all to know that you are aware of the possible deceit of the German archeologist, Ludwig Borchardt, and the German Oriental Company (or Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft) he worked for, when he removed her from her desert grave in Amarna in 1912 and took her to Berlin, then select a yellow rose, which significes deceit.

If you want the queen to know that you are fighting, in your own way, including by your laying of a rose before her, for a reconciliation of her image – the bust – with her homeland – Egypt – so that she may return home, then choose a white rose.

If you simply want to indicate that you love this forlornly beautiful queen, then place a simple red rose on the floor as you bow to her.

And when the New Museum authorities prohibit the laying of roses before the queen – something that is almost inevitable, because of the sensation a series of roses would cause – then you can consider resorting to a petal or two, which you can drop near her cage.

Just to let her know that she is not forgotten.

Writers: Use Your S.O.B. Meter

2010-11-21T22:17:00.000-08:00

A hint for writers: use the Glenn S.O.B. Meter to check the level of Suspension Of Belief your novel requires the reader to exercise.

Think of a scale with three levels of S.O.B. - one-third is colored Red and means there is very little to no S.O.B. required of your reader. The next third is colored Yellow and means some level of S.O.B., while the last third is colored Green and means a high degree of suspension of belief.

These three parts are equal to levels of S.O.B. that are Low, Some and High.

If your storyline (the plotline, the events, and the characters) falls into the Red third because it requires very little suspension of belief by your readers, ask yourself if this is an indicator that your story might be a bit on the boring side? Do your readers want to escape their world, and be absorbed in the world and characters you have created? If your answer is Yes, then consider whether to move the needle higher up the S.O.B. Meter.

The ideal part to be in is the High portion, but if you end up there, you have to make sure that your novel has not lost all credibility with readers.

London 1917: The Night of Terror for Cleopatra's Needle

2010-11-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

After centuries of peace on the banks of the Nile River, the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle was moved to the banks of another river – the Thames, in London.

And here, on the night of 4 September 1917, the German air force launched a bombing raid, and the obelisk base and one of the two sphinxes was hit by shrapnel.

Zeppelin raids on London in WWI

Enter Kaiser Wilhelm II

During the first World War French planes bombed German towns, and Kaiser Wilhelm II agreed that the German air force should retaliate, and allowed Zeppelins to be used in bombing London for the first time on May 31, 1915.

Enter the Count

The first large-scale builder of airships, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838 – 1917), had served a stint in the Union army during the U.S. Civil War, and conducted balloon trials there as a military oberserver.

He spent his life building the rigid dirigibles, with the first successful flight of his airship in 1900; within eight years Zeppelins were delivering mail and passengers over Germany.

Enter the German armed forces

In 1909 the German army used the first Zeppelin; during the first World War they used 115 Zeppelins for various missions, including bombing raids – the Zeppelins bombed England at the rate of about two per month. Of the 115 Zeppelins, 53 were destroyed and another 24 so damaged they could not be used again.

With a little bit of help from the cows

The airships used an outer envelope and several separate gasbags inside, containing helium; about 200,000 sheets made from the intestines of cows were used to make the goldbeater's skin of the gasbags of each airship.

The Zeppelins flew so high above London that the British fighter planes could not reach them, and when they did, their ammunition did not damage the airships – it was only in mid-1916 that the British planes were successful in using the new explosive bullets to punch holes into the outer skin of the Zeppelins and the incendiary bullets to set them on fire.

Only about ten percent of the bombs dropped from the Zeppelins hit their targets because bomb aiming was inaccurate, but the psychological impact of the airship raids was significant.

Gotha bomber - World War One

And now for the Gothas

When Zeppelin losses mounted, the German forces switched to airplanes, including the Gotha biplane aircraft, which flew at night and sometimes reached 20,000 feet, beyond reach of the British fighter planes.

Landing a Gotha was tough – one estimate attributes 70% of Gotha losses to bad landings.

The first flight of a Gotha took place only 13 years after the Orville Brothers first airplane flight in the Kitty Hawk. Gothas made 22 raids on England, and lost 61 aircraft.

The Harvest Moon raids

Starting in September 1917, the Gothas and another large German bomber, the Giants, began what was called the "harvest moon" raids, attacking London nearly every night for a week. Some shops let their staff go home early to escape the raids; some people gathered in parks to watch the raids, while others slept in the Tube stations.

The Obelisk's Turn

On 4 September 1917 the Gothas made their first night-time raid on London. Four bombs were dropped around the Charing Cross station near the Strand, with one landing on a tram traveling along the Thames Embankment.

The bomb crater broke through the road's surface, exposing the circle/district underground line beneath the road.

Shrapnel from the bomb punched holes into one of the two large sphinxes that stand guard over the obelisk, and damaged the base of the obelisk - see our two photos below. The obelisk itself was not harmed.

Gotha bombing raid in WWI

Zeppelin watery end in WWI

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin stamp

Cleopatra's Needle, London: Gotha bomb damage to sphinx 1917

Shrapnel wound to Sphinx of London obelisk - 1917

London obelisk - sphinx with shrapnel wounds from Gotha bombing raid in 1917

Loraine and Sphinx of the London obelisk

Save the Cat: Blake Snyder on the role of The Board

2010-11-19T17:33:00.000-08:00

In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder talks about a writer needing the beating ability –he describes it as a battle cry of Let's beat it out!

What's with the beat?

It's about structure, Blake says: something he learned only after writing screenplays for years:

It's a skill you must know... The craftmanship it akes, the patient work, the magic of storytelling on film, all come together in how you execute and realize structure.

He tells how he came across Syd Field's Screenplay and found something that saved his career:

Oh! Three acts! Imagine that? And yet, it was not enough. Like a swimner in a vast ocean, there was a lot of open water in between those two Act breaks. And a lot of empty script space in which to get lost, panic, and drown. I needed more islands, shorter swims.

His solution was to develop the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet – click here to see the actual beat sheet. As the number of pages in the average script runs at 110, there are 110 beats (pages) in the Beat Sheet, divided into 15 parts.

The Blake Snyder Board

How do you get to the beat sheet? You use The Board.

The Board lets you see what goes where, which character does what, and whether you need all the scenes or need new ones.

The Board is a blackboard or corkboard or notebook that divides the screenplay / book into 4 equal parts: Act One, first part of Act Two, second part of Act Two, and Act Three. In Blake's words:

It is the workout space where, using index cards, pushpins ... you can try your best ideas and see what they look like, and then begin to winnow them down. If done right, you'll end up with 40 scenes that make a movie ...

A similar approach is taken by Jennifer Jensen in her article Storyboards Help Track Plots and Subplots, and in the article The Board by Isaac.

So if you want to make your lot as a writer much easier, buy Save the Cat! and use Blake's Beat Sheet.

You might be pleasantly surprised by the results this discipline imposes on you.

Another version of The Board:

The Board

The Venice of Red Spies, Black Spies and Ruthless Doges

2010-11-19T14:36:00.000-08:00

Venice - by Edward A. Goodall

The climax of our novel takes place in the Doge's Palace in the heart of Venice. Our research surprised us: we had not realized how powerful Venice was for so many centuries, nor did we know that the Venetians were very tough defenders of their unique democracy.

The Tough Venetians

They were tough on their powerful families, tough on their Doges, tough on their citizens, and tough on their enemies. They elected Doges using white balls and black balls, as well as a child, and they used spies to keep their citizens – including their leaders - under tight control.

The Council of Ten

Way back in 1310 the powerful Council of Ten was created. There was a conspiracy by a member of one of the families which ruled Venice - the Tiepolo conspiracy - against the Doge, but he fought it off and razed the palaces of the conspirators to the ground; then the Venetians decided to give the Council the job of protecting the Republic against crimes against the state.

Starting in the 1500s, three of its members served as State Inquisitors, known as the Supreme Tribunal. They had a secret police, and a network of spies all over the Republic.

Spying was institutionalized in Venice from a very early time.

The Spy system of Venice

The Big Three spies from the Council of Ten had the power to try and convict Venetians for treason. They built a huge network of spies inside Venice and in other countries.

One of the three State Inquisitors was known as the 'red one' because he was chosen from the Dogal Councillors, who wore robes of scarlet. The other two were chose from the Council of Ten, and were known as the 'black ones'. It did not matter what color their robes were; they were all powerful, ruthless, and believers in swift justice. They could torture anyone, or give amnesties to anyone. You never saw the face of your judge, when they hauled you in.

Council of Ten Chamber in Doge's Palace in Venice

The Doges were usually old men when they were chosen as the supreme leader of the republic of Venice, and they could not leave Venice unless at least two members of the Council of Ten accompanied them. The Republic was held together by the glue of suspicion.

Crackdown on a Doge

The Council of Ten would not tolerate even a Doge getting out of hand.

There's the case of Doge Fosari, back in 1423. He started taking too much power into his hands and the Council decided to teach him a lesson in humility.

They targeted his son, and accused him of treason. The charge was false, but that did not matter.
They exiled the son, then allowed him back into Venice. Then they tortured him and exiled him again.

The Doge, who had been appointed for life, tried to save his son from further mistreatment by offering to resign but the Council refused his request. Only when they had made their point about where the power lay very clear to every citizen of Venice did they let him resign, and stop mistreating his son.

Black balls and white balls and a child

Another measure of the suspicions that governed the republic of Venice is the check and balance built into their complicated way of choosing the Doge, using black and white balls and even a little child.

All the electors were given a little black ball of wax, and thirty of these had the word Lector inside it, on a small piece of paper.

Gondola in Venice

They each broke the ball, and those with the piece of paper inside went into another room. There the thirty men made balls of black wax, and inside nine of them was inserted another piece of paper, also with the word Lector in it. They then chose balls randomly, and the nine with the paper inside stayed behind in the room, while the others left.

Those nine then chose forty Venetians.

These forty then gathered and made yet a third set of black was balls, and inside twelve of them they placed a piece of paper with the word Lector written on it.

Then they put all forty balls inside a hat, and a child was brought in, and handed out the balls to each of the forty men.

These men broke open the balls, and the twelve with the paper inside then chose another group of men, and this process of black wax balls and selections continued for several more times, with the final group of men choosing the Doge.

This was a tough system for any person who wished to become the Doge to game.

Click here and here for our posts on Venice.

Venice Carnival - masked woman and gondolas

St. Mark's Square in Venice - two masked Carnival revellers

Venice at night

Robert Redford says: Fight Back – Take polluters to court

2010-11-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

Robert Redford - guns blazing

The star of The Great Gatsby, Barefoot in the Park, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Candidate, and The Way We Were, among others, advocates that people come out with legal guns blazing to fight those who pollute our earth in the courts.

In his blog on the Huffington Post, Robert Redford has supported an organization known as NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), founded in 1970 by a friend of his, John Adams.

In his blog post, Redford praises Adams:

I am a firm believer in the ability of citizens to stand up for themselves and fight against the tide of corporate pressure. But sometimes, we need an expert to help carry our voices into the courtroom and into Congress.
For four decades, John Adams has been one of those voices. Since he helped launch NRDC in 1970, Adams has been the toughest, most tenacious champion of the notion that Americans should be able to drink safe water, breathe clean air, buy products free of toxic chemicals, and protect our natural heritage.
In a new book called A Force of Nature, Adams and his wife Patricia explain how they helped build the modern environmental movement. Their account of how NRDC wrote the laws and won the battles that cleaned up the environment is galvanizing -- a bracing reminder of how much can be accomplished by dedicated individuals.
I have known Adams since 1973. Back then, lots of environmental organizations were springing up, and I worked with many of them. But when I met Adams, it was clear that NRDC had a unique power: They could go to court. You have to remember that holding polluters accountable in court was a new idea in 1970. There were only a few environmental laws on the book back then, and only a handful of attorneys in the country viewed themselves as environmental lawyers. Adams hired most of them.

NRDC is now one of the leaders of the American environmental movement.

In an interview, John and Patricia Adams talked about the organization and their book:

John & Paricia Adams of NRDC

GB: Husband-and-wife writing teams don't always work smoothly. There must have been some bumps along the way.
PA: Well, guess what: our marriage actually survived! We developed a working method where John and I would talk about the particular cases or events, and then I would line up interviews with the people involved, be it lawyers, scientists, other staff, or board members. Before we were done, I had conducted about 150 interviews. And then you joined our team. I think the book is like NRDC: it's a team effort.

They talk about the need for corporate America to do its part:

We are not a little band of warriors off in a corner. And we're not going to have an environment that's worth anything unless corporate America plays a big role. We've seen a very important transition toward much better behavior. There are still lots of problems out there like BP, so we need to be careful. Our first obligation is to the environment. If people want to protect the environment, we'll support their efforts. If not, we'll play hardball.

And they have a message of hope for all those who believe the earth is under threat from global warming, and despair about the lack of action from so many at the moment:

I actually have a lot of belief in the human race -- that mankind does not want to destroy itself, and there will be ways found.

The Artist, the Engineer, the Dinner & an Obelisk for London

2010-11-18T20:45:00.000-08:00

Edward A. Goodall

What on earth did an English artist, who thought parrots made an excellent soup and was accused of being a Russian spy in the Crimea, have to do with the move of an obelisk from Egypt to the Thames Embankment in London?

The Beginning Dinner

It seems that the artist held a dinner which had momentous consequences for an ancient obelisk that had fallen down on the seashore in Egypt, at the foot of the one that was moved to Central Park in New York City:

At a dinner held at the home of Edward A. Goodall, several artists were invited including John Dixon the engineer. Conversation eventually centered on Cleopatra's Needle in Egypt and John Dixon suggested that it be brought to England by private means since the government had estimated that the cost would be too great. He said that if he had the money he would do it himself. Shortly thereafter, Sir Erasmus Wilson the celebrated surgeon and Freemason, called on John Dixon and offered the money to bring the obelisk over.

In 1865 Edward Goodall was living at 3 Fitzroy Rd., Regents Park, in London and the St. George's Square house, which Edward owned, was his studio. In 1884 he and his wife moved to 57 Fitzroy Rd. where they remained.

The Dixon Brothers

John Dixon (1835 – 1891), a civil engineer, and his younger brother, Waynman Dixon (1844 – 1930), also an engineer, moved the obelisk to London. In 1876, Sir Erasmus Wilson, a leading surgeon and Freemason, agreed to pay John Dixon 10,000 pounds to move the obelisk, with payment only to be made if Dixon erected the obelisk on the Thames Embankment.

The Dixon brothers had been involved for some time in Egypt, mostly on engineering tasks, and Waynman Dixon had also spent time accurately measuring the Great Pyramid (he found some ancient relics which the original builders had left inside the pyramid, and John sent them to England).

The obelisk was first erected in Egypt by Pharaoh Thutmose III - the pharaoh who, according to the Royal Annals – saw around 1,500 B.C. fires in the sky above the desert, and centuries later was gifted to the British government in 1819 in recognition of Nelson's victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.

From one Freemason to Another

Included in A Short History of the Egyptian Obelisks, by William Ricketts Cooper, published in 1877, is a short narrative by Erasmus Wilson of his first meeting with John Dixon, including this:

As a sailor's son I took an interest in the matter ... I soon found that Mr. Dixon was a Freemason, hence, all formality and ceremony were at once banished. He told me that he had
long contemplated bringing the obelisk to England, and he hoped some day to do it himself, when he should be rich enough ... He then said, I should enclose the monolith in boiler plate, and then roll it into the sea ... and tow it to England.

Erasmus Wilson liked Dixon's idea of encasing the large granite pillar in iron, and hired him to do the job.

The Wanderings of Goodall

Edward A. Goodall (1819 – 1908) was an interesting man. He was a landscape and orientalist painter, the eldest sone of Edward Goodall, the well known line engraver; his brother was the celebrated Royal Academy painter Frederick Goodall.

In 1841 Goodall joined a Government-sponsored commission which was to define the boundaries of British Guiana, tasked with sketching the landscape, flora, fauna and inhabitants. It was here that he had parrot soup, and once, when food ran low, ate a spider monkey. He also singed his eyebrows , eyelashes and hair when gunpowder that was being prepared to salute departing members went off.

And he fell in love:

The entire party was much taken with the beauty of the local women, but Goodall must have been more so than most as he impetuously asked the father of one of them if he could marry her.

It seems that Goodall wore his rejection by the father well, and in 1854 he went to the Crimea as artist correspondent for the Illustrated London News, which was the most widely read journal in Britain, with 150,000 copies sold.

Edward A. Goodall - home at 3 Fitzroy Rd., Regents Park

Goodall had access to the frontlines and battlefields, and observed the battle of Balaclava – scene of the famous Charge of the Light Brigade against the Russians on 25 October 1854, captured so eloquently by Lord Tennyson's poem - and the siege of Sebastopol:

At Inkerman in the spring of 1855, Goodall witnessed the melting snow reveal the bodies of dead Russian soldiers who had lain unburied throughout the winter. Crocuses were seen growing between the fingers of dead soldiers.

He had a short-lived spot of trouble due to mistaken identity, though:

Even so the [Naval] Brigade could not save Goodall from being arrested on suspicion of being a Russian spy. Ironically, the officer who arrested Goodall turned out to be a friend of Goodall’s brother, Frederick.

Cloeopatra's Needle arrives in London

Goodall stayed in the Crimea for a year, and then travelled widely, paying fifteen visits to Venice, as well as sketching and painting in France, Portugal, Morocco, Italy, Gibraltar and Spain.

In Egypt in 1870 Goodall was on the Nile riverbank sketching ancient Memphis when he saw a woman bend down to fill her pitcher, and tumble into the river. He jumped into the Nile and after a struggle brought her safely to the riverbank:

The next day she received several offers of marriage, being considered under "Divine protection."

Queen Victoria liked his work and gave him permission to paint from any window in the palace.

Cleopatra's Needle being raised in London

Cleopatra's Needle on the Thames Embankment, London

Cleopatra's Needle being placed in iron cylinder in Egypt by John Dixon

Cleopatra's Needle in London viewed from the Millenium Wheel

Cleopatra's Needle in London - from book by Erasmus Wilson

Cleopatra's Needle - Cover of book by Erasmus Wilson

Edward A. Goodall's studio was here at St. George's Square

Erasmus Wilson's grave at Swanscombe, Kent

Raising of Cleopatra's Needle - from the London Illustrated Times

Bridge of Sighs in Venice by Edward A. Goodall

Venice scene by Edward A. Goodall

Budge's Snippet: Amelia Edwards - Fighting vandalism from a houseboat in Egypt

2010-11-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

Amelia Edwards

In 1873 a young English woman named Amelia Edwards (1831 – 1892) made a trip up the Nile River, following in the footsteps of many others who had journeyed to this land of fabulous history to see for themselves the treasures of the past.

Who was this young woman?

In England she ended up known as the godmother of Egyptology because of her dedication to the Egypt Exploration Society she founded, and her funding of the Edwards Chair in Egyptian Archaeology at University College London. In 1883 the Fund sent out a young man who would gain fame as an Egyptologist – Flinders Petrie.

She was impressed by the young man and she fixed things so that he would become the first occupant of the Edwards Chair by providing in her will that the appointment had to go to someone younger than forty, and that no-one from the British Museum could occupy the chair.

A talented woman gifted in music, art, wrting and public speaking, she tried her hand at four different careers in her lifetime.

She loved travelling, and wrote two of the most successful travel books of all time; she wrote her first story at the tender age of four, and by twelve was an accomplished writer and illustrator.

She said it took her about two years to research and write her novels, and her last one, published in 1880, was so popular that it had fifteen editions.

The Houseboat on the Nile

Her trip up the Nile with friends was in a manned houseboat, and they reached Abu Simbel where they stayed for six weeks. When she returned to England she wrote A Thousand Miles up the Nile, which she illustrated with her own drawings, and it became a bestseller. She undertook a 120 stop
lecture tour of the USA in 1889, to raise funds.

Edwards dedicated herself to preserving the ancient monuments of Egypt. She was buried in St. Mary's Church in Henbury, Bristol, and her grave is marked by an obelisk with a stone ankh at its foot.

From Budge:

We read on the Rock the names of many travellers who, in their day, were famous for their Egyptian travels, and among them the name of Miss Amelia B. Edwards, who in England always protested loudly against such "vandalism."

In the winter of 1873-4 she made a trip up the Nile with a few friends under very pleasant circumstances. The country and climate and monuments exercised so strong an influence over her that when she returned to England she abandoned her craft of novel-writing, and devoted herself whole-heartedly to the advancement of Egyptology.

I saw her often in the Museum, when she came to Birch for help in the historical parts of the narrative of her journey which she was writing.

In 1877 she published this narrative under the title of "A Thousand Miles up the Nile," and her book was deservedly an immediate and great success. Her energy, enthusiasm, and zeal brought about the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882, and for some years it owed its success entirely to her tact and work and extraordinary power of organization.

Profiting by her acquaintance with Birch, Maspero and Naville, which she cultivated assiduously, she acquired a good knowledge of Egyptian history and archaeology. She was large-hearted, kind, and sympathetic, a delightful companion, and a good friend. Birch thoroughly enjoyed her visits, and would sit for an hour at a time listening to her fine descriptions of Nile scenery, and sunrises and sunsets, and the subtle differences of appearance which the monuments exhibit at different times of the day.

I never met anyone who had so thoroughly absorbed the mystic and magical influences of Egypt past and present, and who could clothe the impressions which they make upon the mind in such well-fitting and expressive words.

Bartlett sketch of Abu Simbel - 1880's

Flinders Petrie

Abu Simbel by David Roberts

Nefertiti – Torn between the Iron Lady and "Raider" Hawass

2010-11-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

"Raider" Hawass

Is it High Noon in Berlin? Has the head of the Supreme Council of the Antiquities of Egypt exposed a deep fear of the Chancellor of Germany?

Perhaps.

Dr. Hawass' Question

Dr. Zahi Hawass had this question for the Chancellor, when his request for the bust of Nefertiti to be loaned to Egypt was refused:

“They think we will be like the Raiders of the Lost Ark, that we will take it and not return it,” said Mr Hawass, who has been a vociferous champion for the permanent return of Egyptian artefacts.

Is this what the Iron Lady - as Chancellor Angela Merkel has been called - fears? That Hawass will don his famous hat, put on his dusty boots, strap his pistol to his waist, pick up his trusty horsewhip, and beat off any attempts by the Germans to have the Nefertiti bust returned to Germany after the loan period expires?

Part of the German family?

It seems that the Germans have decided that the Beautiful One is fitting in well in Berlin, according to one Museum official:

The bust, [Dietrich Wildung, head of the Egyptian Museum], says, has become globally famous in a way that it would not have had it stayed in Egypt. “Nefertiti has become an outstanding example of how the foreign can be integrated into society,” Dr Wildung says. “She is accepted, not assimilated. She keeps her separateness and her uniqueness, yet she belongs here.”

The Fragile Queen?

And the Germans raised another reason why they just could not allow the bust of Nefertiti to be sent to Egypt for a short vacation in her homeland:

German officials say that the bust is too fragile to travel. “Nefertiti is not a pop star that can simply go on tour,” a senior official said.

Angela (Iron Lady) Merkel with Nefertiti Bust

So the bust is too delicate to travel home for a vacation? The bust that survived being buried in the hot desert sands of Egypt for over 1,500 years, that was then dug up in 1912 and taken to the home of James Simon in Berlin in Germany, hidden in flack tower and later deep down in a salt mine during the Second World War to avoid Allied bombing, then after the war ended was moved first to Frankfurt then to a central warehouse of the Wiesbaden State Museum, then back to Berlin to the Old Museum and now to the New Museum?

She sure sounds pretty tough to me!

Chancellor Merkel, who lives just across the street from the New (Neues) Museum, Nefertiti's new prison in Berlin, can pop in to see her any time she wants to, but the people of Egypt have been denied the chance to see their famous queen for a few weeks.

The Nefertiti Standoff

Nefertiti's bust is one of "Raider" Hawass' Famous Five targets for return to Egypt (another one is the Rosetta Stone).

It seems we have a standoff between the German Iron Lady and the Egyptian Raider.

Our view - Set Her Free

Our view is in our novel, Obelisk Seven – click here and here to see it: Nefertiti should be set free, and returned to her home. Our compromise between the "No negotiations" stance of Chancellor Merkel and the "Unconditional Surrender" of Dr. Hawass is set out here (it uses something Kaiser Wilhelm II owned as part of our solution).

It is time for people of good will thoughout the world to rally behind "Raider" Hawass and insist on the return to Egypt of the bust of Nefertiti.

Set her free, Chancellor Merkel.

Let her go home.

James Simon - backer of Ludwig Borchardt who found Nefertiti Bust

Berlin flack tower - home of Nefertiti bust in 1941

The Egyptologist & the Mythologist parallel: Howard Carter versus Joseph Campbell

2010-11-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

Two men reached back over tens of centuries in search for ancient truths, and both were successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Joseph Campbell

One man followed his bliss, at one time during the Depression spending five years with nine hour days of independent reading, before writing his first solo book – The Hero with a Thousand Faces – which has endured as his most lasting masterpiece.

The other began his career at the tender age of seventeen, and then discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen, and the beautiful golden mask of the young pharaoh, which is his most lasting contribution to Egyptology.

The discovery in the Valley of Kings in Egypt was made after his financial backer had wearied of the lack of success, and given him money for one last season of digging:

He wired Carnarvon to come, and on 26 November 1922, with Carnarvon, Carnarvon's daughter, and others in attendance, Carter made the famous "tiny breach in the top left hand corner" of the doorway, and was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He did not yet know at that point whether it was "a tomb or merely a cache", but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. When Carnarvon asked him if he saw anything, Carter replied: "Yes, wonderful things".

What drove these two men? A shared passion for the past, and a deep ambition to share the past
with the present.

Howard Carter

When Howard Carter entered the tomb of King Tut he carefully stepped over an alabaster cup, in the form of a white lotus, with petals carved in delicate relief around its surface, and with hieroglyphics spelling out a wish for a long life for the king.

These same words from King Tut's Wishing Cup (Carter's name for it) are engraved on Carter's gravestone:

May your spirit live,

May you spend millions of years,

You who love Thebes,

Sitting with your face to the north wind,

Your eyes beholding happiness.

Two men who brought the past forward for us to consider, and learn from.

Wishing Cup of King Tut

Pharaoh Tutankhamun gold mask

Your Double Life: Kari Marie Norgaard on How to become a global warming Denier

2010-11-15T14:10:00.000-08:00

Kari Marie Norgaard

Welcome to the woman who enjoys pretty much any excuse she can get to sleep on the ground, calls her husband Salmon, and is a sociologist who's studied public attitudes towards climate science.

The Five Questions

And who knows the answers to these questions:

Do we know why well educated and relatively privileged people have failed to act on the threat posed by global warming?

Do we know why information about global warming alone does not seem to persuade people to take steps to fight the threat?
Is the problem that people do not care about global warming because they are either too greedy or too selfish to bother about future generations, or don’t think it will impact them?
Are people doing very little because they believe that everything is just fine, for 1 or more of 4 reasons (because they think global warming is not really happening, or that their government will take care of the problem, or that international agreements will happen and cure the problem, or, perhaps, because we will find innovative ways to solve the problem)?
Are people comfortable about talking about global warming?

Norgaard, whose book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life is due out in March 2011, says the answers to these questions are: Yes, Yes, No, No and No.

Banksy

Why we live in a bubble

In her May 2009 paper entitled Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change, Norgaard reviews some recent papers on climate issues, and comes to some fascinating conclusions, based on these papers and on her own research.

Norgaard says that although climate change is real and is an issue of global environmental justice, for urban dwellers in rich Northern countries climate change is seen as background noise, requiring no steps on their part.

She has studied the questions posed above, and concluded that many of us live in a bubble of denial:

In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we’re constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant.

For us to live in some comfort in this bubble of denial, we practice some of the methods used by those who deny that global warming exists, or is a threat that requires action on our part to overcome.

What to do, what to do ...

How does one get past these denial-tactics, so that we can win the support of millions in the
wealthier nations in the fight to save our earth? This is the question our hero, Nick, faces in our thriller, Obelisk Seven; as the novel progresses, he finds means to answer the question, some of which fit right in with the suggestions made by Norgaard in her 2009 paper mentioned above.

In Tables 4, 5 and 6 of that paper, she sets out a How-To list for climate change activists, with details of the problems caused by the bubble of denial, and with good, solid, practical recommended courses of action. Those three tables are worthy of study by you if you are an activist.; many of them are consistent with our ealier posts on the same issue – click here, here and here for them.

Norgaard writes:

Data from the above studies indicate that people DO care about climate change, and do support stronger climate policies. The notion that people already want to “do the right thing” is an extremely hopeful piece of information which can and should be used as the centerpiece of developing successful policy.

The presence of such support has been masked by our misinterpretation of the psychological mechanisms of denial ...

In order to counter the fact that people don’t like to feel powerless, we must not only design policies in which citizens appear more powerful, but we also need to provide a playing field upon which their actions actually do matter.

A little taste

Now for a taste of some of her How-To ideas:

What can we do about cognitive dissonance (people block information about global warming so as to maintain coherent meaning systems), and about people's desire to protect their individual identity (because they avoid threats to that identity)?

Her answer is that we must frame the climate message in non-threatening ways, and provide information that participation opportunities that build on a favorable view of the self.

How do we overcome negative emotions as response barriers of people (global warming evokes this response, and thinking about it leads to negative emotions and is disempowering to the individual)?

Her answer is to create positive associations, such as through providing opportuniies to participate in response efforts; she gives a list of actions you can take to do so.

What do we do about denial by people? She says we should create a set of realistic opportunities for paticipating in positive actions; in doing so, forget about focusing too much on information and rather focus on what can and should be done, while emphasising that it is not too late to do anything and we can still make a difference.

Some other pieces of advice include providing information on how local events are connected to global warming (make it personal); and discussing future scenarios for specific places at specific dates so that they can be better visualized.

Her positive conclusion

Her conclusion is positive:

Because the majority of people are already concerned about climate change and how to make a difference, individuals and communities CAN be mobilized for response, if negative psychological pitfalls are to be avoided.

Check out her BBC interview here, and take a few minutes to read her paper – it's pretty interesting- and her website.

Thanks, Kari!

NIMBY and the Chindia Problem

2010-11-14T17:27:00.000-08:00

A NIMBY mutation stalks the halls where diplomats from all the nations try to decide who should do what to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This variant is uttered by the major developed nations (USA in particular) and it is a bit like this:

Not-going-to-take-any-steps In My BackYard unless everyone (meaning especially that other big polluter, China, and the potentially big polluter, India) does the same.

In return, China is framing the issue as one of rights: developmental rights of developing countries.

They say that the West is trying to deprive the poorer nations of this developmental right when they try to force them to agree to mandatory emissions levels. First let us exercise our developmental rights until we have reached economic parity per capita with the West, and then perhaps we can talk about cuts in emissions, they say.

It's a tough argument to counter, because it smacks of an appeal to fairness.

The Nub of the Tussle

The tussle in the diplomatic halls revolves around two things:

· numbers: Who has to reduce emissions, by what dates, and from what levels, and who is to pay the costs, and

· obligations: Is everyone going to be legally bound to reach those targets by those dates, or will a country's best-efforts undertaking be enough?

The U.S., under both Bush and Obama, want equal treatment with China in that neither was and is prepared to have the USA legally bound to targets unless China is also legally bound.
China and India are arguing for legally binding commitments by the developed nations, but lesser commitments by developing nations, and they put themselves in this category.

To Cap or Not to Cap, that is the Question

The West has argued that everyone must agree to a total cap on global emissions of greenhouse gases, which the developing nations have resisted:

Developing countries have repeatedly resisted calls for a global cap on emissions, because they deduce - accurately - that it implies a cap on their collective emissions: total cut minus industrialised countries' cuts equals their cuts.

The maths says that when all is said and done, this would result in them accepting lower per-capita emissions for decades than Western nations, which they see as hindering their chances for equitable development.

In our view

In our view, these disputes will not be resolved because no one nation believes that it has to agree to anything that is not in its best interests.

To reach agreement therefore will depend on one of two possible things happening: whether the leaders of the bigger nations can agree between themselves on a deal which all can sign, or whether pressure will be exerted on the bigger polluters to stop their pollution of the globally-owned atmosphere.

The first course is improbable, in my view.

The Need for Pressure

The second course – individual nations reducing their own emissions without any global agreement to do so – is more likely, and will only come about due to pressure within such nations for their leaders to do so.
Such pressure will come from each such nation's citizens, exerting upwards pressure at local, state and federal level.

The dialogue of the deaf

In both cases, the dialogue of the deaf has to be changed so that people start talking about what principles should be applied to the resolution, rather than simply repeating their positions. Getting to Yes in this case means principle-based negotiations, rather than position-based ones.

Who has to do what to save the earth. We should not and cannot escape this central question.

Our Hero's ideas

In Obelisk Seven we have Nick Kangles, the hero, raise these issues in the international television show on global warming that he is using as his personal vehicle to raise awareness of the threat of global warming.
He does it partly by introducing a segment in the show which he calls playing the game of Is it Fair?

We borrowed a few ideas for our novel from the EDCC - the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change - which was established by the Rock Ethics Institute of PennState University.

The EDCC deals with the approach which every person and every nation should take in considering its own role in saving the earth from global warming. These are the questions we posed in our novel based on that Program:

Is it fair that the people who will be most harmed by global warming did very little to cause it?
Is it fair that the poorest will pay the highest price for global warming?
Is it fair that everyone should bear the burden of reducing emissions, rather than those who pumped out most of the greenhouse gases paying a higher price?
Is it fair that the developed nations have decided to allocate most of the global atmospheric commons to their corporations to pollute, instead of first agreeing that the air of the earth belongs equally to all humans, not mostly to those in the northern part of the earth?
Is it fair not to take steps to reduce emissions, if this failure to act has a good chance of harming future generations?

Some guiding facts

And any discussion of who has to do what to reduce global warming must also consider these guiding facts:

Fact one is that the developed countries have pumped out most of the carbon dioxide which is still in our atmosphere, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until today.
Fact two is that those who will be harmed by global warming live all over the world, not just in the south.
Fact three is that those who will be harmed the most, did relatively less to cause the rise in emissions.
Fact four is that there will be a change in the near future, with China and India pumping out more greenhouse gases than most countries, if they continue to expand as they have been for the past twenty years or so.

Let's hope that enough local groups take up the challenge to persuade their local, state and federal governments to take immediate, positive steps to reduce their own emissions, and to adopt similar guiding principles when discussing relative responsibilities with other cities, states and nations.

Global Warming – The Tough Sell

2010-11-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

What does an elephant have to do with whether the number of Americans who believe global warming is a problem is – according to some polls – dropping?

Plenty.

George Lakoff wrote a brilliant analysis of the use of framing in his book Don't Think of an Elephant. He challenged his students not to think of an elephant for the next five minutes while they did something else and not one of them was able to do so. This illustrates the power of framing. Framing is a way of describing things in such a way as to influence the debate.

So what?
How does this affect whether fewer Americans now believe global warming exists?

Simply this: The way a question is framed in a poll affects the answer. And the answers to some of the recent polls are wrong, because the questions are wrong.

Who says so?

The Woods Institute for the Environment sponsored a series of surveys by Professor Jon Kronsnick, professor in Humanities and Social sciences at Stanford University:

"Several national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people," Krosnick said. "But our new survey shows just the opposite."

There has been a drop – but these changes are mostly climate skeptics:

"Our surveys reveal a small decline in the proportion of people who believe global warming has been happening, from 84 percent in 2007 to 74 percent today," Krosnick said.

"Statistical analysis of our data revealed that this decline is attributable to perceptions of recent weather changes by the minority of Americans who have been skeptical about climate scientists."

What do Americans want?

The surveys showed that a majority of Americans want the federal government to limit the air pollution that businesses emit (86%), and limit greenhouse gases emissions by businesses (76%), and only 14% said
the USA should not take action to fight global warming unless other major emitting countries (such as China and India) did so as well.

However, most Americans wanted tax credits to be used as the lever, rather than tax increases on electricity or gasoline.

How Important is Global Warming to Americans?

Another Woods Institute study examined how many Americans thought fighting global warming was the most important issue facing the USA. The study found that the answer was that global warming came far below the economy, but that if the question was changed, the rankings changed, with global warming being viewed as a the most serious issue.

This study looked at the traditional question asked in past decades by Gallup in its MIP survey (Most Important Problem). If the question was changed to use the word serious instead of important, and to cover problems facing the world rather than just the USA, and to talk about seriousness if not stopped, the results were dramatically different.

The revised question they tested was:

“What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?”

The conclusion was:

In fact, global warming and the environment were the most frequently mentioned problems when people were asked the new question wording.

Furthermore, we found that 76% of Americans in late 2009 wanted a lot or a great deal of government effort to be devoted to issues that will affect the world in the future if nothing is done to stop them.

Therefore, the new, future-oriented MIP question helps to provide a fuller picture of the agenda items to which Americans attach significance.

The Denial Problem

And there are psychological reasons why many people do not believe that global warming is serious, as explained by Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, in a December 2009 interview with Wired.

The reason is that such people are in denial:

Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way...

Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant...

If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.

Norgaard says part of the reason is our sense of hopelessness (click here, here and here for our earlier posts on this topic):

And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able.

Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnock has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.

Any lessons for us?

Lessons to be learned from these studies is to be careful about the results of surveys which do not ask the appropriate question, and to ensure that any dialogue about global warming present solutions – hope, not just despair.

Bug chimneys in the Black Sea

2010-11-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

JAGO submarine in the Black Sea

We find Tough Bugs all over the place. A small submarine prodded a thirteen foot high chimney in the Black Sea and confirmed that it was made up of tough bugs – microbes.

Microbes make up a third of all life on earth, and we know very little about them. In our novel, Kate researches microbes which eat methane, in her bid to find out what is eating the carbon in oil deposits. In real life, scientists use a small submarine to probe the secret of the microbes beneath the sea:

Diving in a little German submarine called Jago, peering through an acrylic porthole several inches thick, he saw a fog of floating particles.
Then, looming out of the dark and into the sub’s tight halo of floodlight, through curtains of rising bubbles that made it seem as if the sub were driving through champagne, Seifert saw chimneys—black, knobby spires, the tallest rising more than 13 feet off the seafloor. Chimneys made by erupting volcanic minerals are common at hot springs in mid-ocean ridges. But this was not a hot spring, and these chimneys were not built of volcanic rock.
The pilot prodded one with Jago’s hydraulic arm. It was soft, like flesh. He knocked one over, felling it as if it were a tree to reveal its cross section. Under a black outer layer there was a thick layer of pink and a core that was harder and greenish gray. The chimney had been made entirely by single-celled microbes. The microbes formed the outer layers; the hard core was a carbonate mineral they had secreted.

Many of the microbes living under the seafloor do not need oxygen to live. They are little methane-making machines, and scientists speculate that some of the mats of microbes might be thousands of years old:

Many of these tiny creatures make so much methane gas that if even a small proportion of it
is released, we might be overwhelmed by huge tsunamis, runaway global warming, and extinctions.

The Jago submarine used its mechanical arm to scoop up samplesand took them back to laboratories for further study:

To keep these exotic organisms alive during their trip to the laboratory, the researchers designed special containers that resembled the microbe's 'home' environment—cold water with no oxygen but lots of methane. Back in the laboratory, the researchers confirmed their suspicion that the microbes were eating methane.

Where did we get our ideas for Obelisk Seven from? In many cases, from real life, as in the case of these microbes. Tough bugs form an important part of our novel.

Your Adams & Eves: We needed you – the Venetian

2010-11-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

Gondola in Venice

Our man in Venice ended up taking on a life of his own, and we found ourselves simply having to follow him as he lead us through the canals of his home city.

Our Venetian character in Obelisk Seven is one of the minor characters, but the role he plays supporting the Big Three (Nick, Kate and Gliffy) is an important one.

As soon as we decided that we wanted our novel to climax in Venice, we realized that we needed someone there to act as the conduit for the information dumps we had to add to the novel to move it along.

Our visit to Venice had been a real highlight of our train tour.

Neither of us had appreciated the powerful position that Venice had occupied for so many centuries, and the unique nature of her democracy.

As soon as we set foot for the first time in St. Mark's square we lost our hearts to this wonderful city.

And then we lost them again when we glided beneath the bridges on our gondola, and walked beside the canals, admiring the ancient palaces that still exist, despite Venice's periodic floods.

So Lorenzo made his entrance, and came with a five hundred-year history, his own palace, and his very own Mouth of Truth.

And he arrived early on in our novel, and stayed until almost the very end.

A very welcome character.


St. Mark's Square, Venice

Venice from the sky

Venice Carnival Mask

Mouth of Truth in the Doge's Palace - reformatted

Glassblower's Art from Venice

A hint - Dan Brown's Seven Points for Writers

2010-11-13T17:19:00.000-08:00

In 2005 Lisa Rogak published The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code – An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown.

She describes the outline for Seven Powerful Tips used by Dan Brown on his website (but since scrubbed from that site).

She writes that the outline provides a revealing look at how Brown "plans and crafts the flow of his own novels."

Here, briefly, are his Seven Powerful Tips:

Setting – reveal new worlds to your readers.

In and out scene building – keep things moving.

A sole dramatic question – use a single brick for your foundation.

Tension – create it with the clock (fast passage of time to speed the novel); the crucible (apply your heat to your constrained characters); and the contract (make promises to your reader and keep them).

Research – learn the specifics you will need for your novel.

Weaving of information - dole it out in small bites.

Revision – go back and play with your first draft.

If you would like to read about Dan Brown hanging upside down in gravity boots while writing, click here.

Twice Buried – The Finding of Nefertiti's Bust

2010-11-13T16:39:00.000-08:00

Bust of Queen Nefertiti - reformatted

A beautiful bust of a beautiful queen was buried under the hot sands of Egypt for 1,500 years, dug up and moved – surrounded by controversy – to Berlin in Germany in 1912, and then reburied, only this time in a salt mine.

Read this short extract from Chapter 15 of Obelisk Seven, about the discovery of the long-buried bust of Queen Nefertiti (click here if you want to read the full story of this famous queen and the mysterious history of the discovery of her bust):

"After his death, Nefertiti simply vanishes from the scene. The city where Nefertiti lived is swiftly emptied. It falls into ruins and most of it is covered by the desert sand over the centuries."
            Gliffy paused. He had them completely now.
            "And then the revisionists start their campaign. They use chisels to carve out the names of King Tut's father and his mother and the new sun god, Aten, wherever they can find them. They even delete his father's name from the List of Kings, so that Nefertiti and her husband disappear from Egyptian history for more than three thousand and five hundred years. Poof!"
            His bunched fingers exploded.
            "One pharaoh gone."
            The exploded hand turned and moved gently sideways through the air.
            "And life moves on," Gliffy said, "until, one hot day in the year 1887 AD, a peasant woman starts digging among some ruins which peek through the hot desert sand, looking for old bricks which she can grind into a fertilizer for her garden."
            Kate shivered, feeling goose bumps on her arms. She folded them and leaned forward to stare once more at Nefertiti.
            "The peasant finds what becomes known as the Amarna Letters, around three hundred baked clay tablets with diplomatic correspondence on them. Other odds and ends are found and slowly the story of the missing royal couple is pieced together and the chisels of the ancient censors are overcome. The legend of Nefertiti starts to be reborn."
            "What happened? How did they find it?" Lorenzo asked, pointing at the bust.

"Egyptologists rush to explore the city of Amarna. Over years, the city is uncovered from the sandy desert," Gliffy continued. "One of these teams comes from Germany and is lead by the famous Egyptologist, Ludwig Borchardt."

Ludwig Borchardt with Nefertiti Bust in Egypt

Ludwig Borchardt (1863 – 1938) was an Egyptian archaeologist, discoverer of the Nefertiti bust and expert and Old Kingdom temples. He founded the German Archeological Institute in Cairo in 1907. He began excavating in Amarna, and discovered the workshop of the sculptor Djhutmose, and in it the bust of Nefertiti, which is now in the New (Neues) Museum in Berlin.

The bust was buried once more in a salt mine in Germany, to protect it from Allied bombs during the Second World War.

Click here for more details in our website on the Nefertiti bust, and here for links to websites dealing with Nefertiti. We also have pictures of Nefertiti in this gallery of our website. Our earlier blog posts on Nefertiti are here, and here.


Bust of Nefertiti

Amarna Tablet - which lead to discovery of Nefertiti Bust

Emilie & Ludwig Borchardt - discoverer of bust of Nefertiti

General George S. Patton in Egypt during WWII

General Patton's Third Army with Nazi gold in Merkers mine - DailyMail

Three Blurbists reject us

2010-11-12T21:48:00.000-08:00

We are what the Cheese Doctor called Happy Losers. That means that we are dogged, determined and tireless in our quest for a publisher for Obelisk Seven.

Dr. Rapaille

Before we started that quest, we thought it might be a good idea to seek out some knowledgable people to see if they would wish to read our thriller, and perhaps write a short note encouraging others to do the same – we could use the note as part of the cover blurb, and in advertising.

And, of course, we would be using it to entice publishers to call for a copy of our manuscript ...

Three of our best rejections are:

The Principal Private Secretary to HRH The Prince of Wales wished us every success, after advising that The Prince of Wales, although delighted that we are using our book to highlight the threat of tropical forest destruction, could not recommend or endorse a novel.

Tony Blair

Tony Blair's office sent us a polite note that he declined to write a blurb for our novel as he receives many requests for endorsements.

Mrs. Lovelock advised that James Lovelock, the Gaia Guru, was very busy writing his new book, and so had to decline our request for him to consider writing a blurb for Obelisk Seven.

These rejections were very formal, and very polite, but none of them had the poetic brevity and velvet touch of an earlier rejection I had received – see here for a description.

I just loved that rejection! It was almost worth being rejected.

Set Them Free! But keep the Kaiser's copy ...

2010-11-12T21:07:00.000-08:00

We invite you to stand a while, and think.

Stand on the embankment of the Thames on a sunny weekday afternoon, Big Ben at your back, the Thames to your right, and watch the crowds scurrying past the twin Sphinxes standing guard over Cleopatra's Needle. Observe how people stop and stare at the two giant statues, and then let their gazes drift upwards, to the small pyramidion on top of the obelisk.

Or stand on the plaque marking the spot where the guillotine first tasted blood during the French Revolution, and watch the cluster of people beneath the beautiful obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, and then let your gaze wander from them to the huge fountains with their leaping waters, and on past them along the most attractive street in the world, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, up to the proud Arc de Triomphe.

Or stand before the uncarved beauty of the obelisk in St. Peter's Square in Rome, and see how the colonnades sweep outwards to embrace the granite spear.

And think of these monuments, torn from their desert homeland and moved to these foreign spots.

By what moral right are they kept there?

The sight of these lonely giants, standing lost in the peace of millenia amidst the hustle and bustle of the huge cities they now find themselves in cannot but move you.

They moved us.

And so as part of our novel Obelisk Seven, we are hoping that we can add to a movement to Set Them Free. To return them – along with the bust of Nefertiti now in her new Berlin prison – to Egypt.

We are proud to join the company of H. Rider Haggard (1856 – 1925), the famous author of She, and King Soloman's Mines, in calling for their return.

Haggard, whose book She sold an incredible 83 million copies, wrote his first novel while struggling as a newly admitted lawyer, and established a genre of lost worlds. Haggard wrote She in a "white heat", he said, in February and March 1886.

In The Days of My Life, Haggard describes his meeting with Budge (click here for our earlier post introducing the Budge Snippets):

Only ought not the thing to stop somewhere? For my part I should like to see the bodies of the Pharaohs, after they had been reproduced in wax, reverently laid in the chambers and passages of the Great Pyramids and there sealed up for ever, in such a fashion that no future thief could break in and steal.

Haggard writes poignantly about the scene which E.A. Wallis Budge (1857 – 1934) found in one ancient tomb he had opened:

Dr. Budge told me of a certain tomb which he and his guide were the first to enter since it had been closed, I think about 4,000 years before. He said that it was absolutely perfect. There lay the coffin of the lady, there stood the funeral jars of offering, there on the breast was a fan of which the ostrich plumes were turned to feathers of dust. There, too, in the sand of the floor were the footprints of those who had borne the corpse to burial. Those footprints always impressed me very much.

H. Rider Haggard

In Obelisk Seven our hero, Kate, argues for the return of the obelisks to Egypt. She suggests that one way to do this is for the current host countries to provide the funding for Egyptian carvers to cut out of the granite quarries on the banks of the Nile new blocks of stone, and – using the old techniques – to carve exact copies of the obelisks. These copies the host countries could move to London, and Paris, and Rome, and New York, and then return the originals to their rightful places in Egypt.

We have a suggestion for the bust of Nefertiti. It, too, should be returned to Egypt. However, there is a copy already in existence – the one made in 1913 for James Simon when the bust was taken to Berlin in 1912 and gifted to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Why not let Berlin keep the Kaiser's copy, and return the original Nefertiti bust to her homeland?

Hallie Ephron on Pacing your Novel with a Pacing Table & Dotty Pictures

2010-11-12T19:56:00.000-08:00

Hallie Ephron

I was lucky enough to attend the presentation by Hallie Ephron at the Surrey International Writers Conference (SiWC) on how to pace your novel.

Raised by screenwriters, author of six acclaimed novels, crime fiction reviewer for the Boston Globe, and author of the how-to book, Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ‘Em Dead with Style, Hallie sprinkled gems during her lecture.

One thing really grabbed my attention: her use of a Pacing Table for analysing the pacing in a novel, along with a graphical representation of the creation and release of tension.

The Pacing Table has three columns.

In the first one you block out the scene by describing the action taking place in the scene, using simple words.

The next two columns each have columns numbered 1 to 5, with the first column headed Slow (being 1) to Fast (being 5), and the third column headed Easy (=1) to Tense (=5).

The Pacing Table

Description:	Slow				Fast	Easy				Tense
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5

You use simple words to describe the action in the description column, and then you circle a number in the second and third columns, depending on your calculation of the speed and tension in that action.

Once you've done this for every action in the scene, you are ready to portray the results graphically. To do this you turn your page sideways and connect the dots in columns 2 and 3.

Voila! There you have it: two graphs, one showing how the pacing of the scene's component actions changes from slow to fast and back again, and one showing what happens to the tension (easy to tense, with tension rising and being released).

Now you can sit back and consider whether those two graphs represent what you the author want the scene to do. If you think it needs to be slowed down, you do that; if you need more tension, or a release of tension in a different spot, you do that.

It's interesting to see just how much information you can glean from the two graphs (after all, isn't a picture worth a thousand words?)

Some other snippets from her Pacing your Novel presentation. There is no direct correlation between speed and tension – even slow scenes can be tense. Tension is important, because it's the force that pulls the reader forward.

You can add tension to a fast scene by slowing it down – take a fight, for example: think cinematically, and slow your writing down as if you were shooting the fast scene in slow motion, as we see so often in movies. The slow motion actually makes the scene faster!

One key takeaway from Hallie was that EVERY scene had to have an arc – rising tension followed by a
release of tension. The rise and release need not be dramatic, but there must an such an arc or else the scene is flat, listless and boring.

A few pointers from Hallie's bag of pacing tricks:

you introduce characters slowly, with detail but no big detail dumps (they slow down the story)
arguing? happens fast
you can write a scene fast and slow it down in reflection
staccato rythms create speed
underwrite a scene to create speed
verbs, verbs, verbs in a row create speed
questions raise tension
stop time with sensory descriptions
longer sentences slow things down and vice-versa
humor reduces tension
conflict increases tension.

A lot of info, crammed into a short hour and a half. Click here for a short interview with her, and click here for her website.

Thanks, Hallie!

The Gayer Anderson Cat – Our first sight

2010-11-12T15:24:00.000-08:00

In London Loraine and I set out to see for ourselves the wonderful Gayer Anderson Cat, that our research had unearthed, and just like our quest to see for ourselves the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, it seemed that the fates had conspired to prevent us doing so.

The British Museum - home of the Gayer Anderson Cat

We marched into the British Museum, straight up to the main desk, and asked if we could see the Cat. The woman behind the desk clicked through the computer and announced in a no-nonsense voice that the Gayer-Anderson Cat was not on display, and probably would not be on display for many months.

Disappointed, we joined our museum tour group, and trailed through behind our guide. When we had a moment at the Rosetta Stone, we asked the guide if she knew where the Cat might be. No, came the answer. She had been guiding tours through the museum for almost two decades, and had never heard of, never mind seen, the Gayer Anderson Cat. Perhaps we were mistaken ...

Twice disappointed, we followed her to a large statue of Rameses the Great. Loraine slipped behind the pharaoh, and soon popped back into sight, a broad grin on her face as she beckoned to me. I pushed through the crowds and she motioned behind her.

There it stood, in all its glory: the famous Cat. And milling around her, snapping photographs furiously, were dozens of tourists.

Gayer-Anderson

We spent half an hour admiring the Cat, reading about its x-rays, photographing it from all angles.

Once again, the gods had smiled on us.

Or should we say, the cat goddess, Bastet?

Don't forget to click here for links to websites on the Gayer Anderson Cat, and here for photographs of the Cat in our website.

Cat mummy from Ancient Egypt

Our research unearthed several interesting facts about cats in ancient Egypt. The Persians knew of the love the Egyptians had for cats, and so during a battle in 525 BC or so they placed cats before their army; and the Egyptians left the battlefield because they feared that they might harm the cats if they fought. The Egyptians never worshipped the cats as such; they did see echoes of their god Bast in them, though.

Cats had an important place in Egyptian life because they protected Egypt's granaries from rats. The goddess Bastet - she was the goddess of family and protector of cats - is often shown with a woman's body and a cat's head; she sometimes had the eye of Ra, a wadjet, in her left hand - the all-seeing eye.

Loraine & the Gayer Anderson Cat

In the later period of ancient Egyptian history people who wanted a favor from the cat goddess would go to the Bastet temple to buy one of the cats kept at the temple. The priest would break the cat's neck and have it embalmed before stuffing it into a jar and burying it in the cat cemetery. The theory was that the cat would then seek out the goddess Bastet in its afterlife and deliver the petitioner's message to the goddess.

Cat's were significant to families, and a family would mourn its death. They would shave off their eyebrows as a sign of their grief, and chant. Sometimes cats would be buried with their owners.

Gayer Anderson Cat with its guardian in British Museum

Gayer Anderson Cat from the side


Gayer Anderson Cat - photoshopped

Gayer Anderson Cat with base

Gayer Anderson Cat from side on its base

The Eye of Ra

NASA & Strange Lights in the Egyptian Sky

2010-11-11T22:14:00.000-08:00

Is there a link between something a pharaoh saw above the Egyptian desert thousands of years ago, and a leaked report in July this year from a NASA satellite mission?

The Royal Annals list the ruling pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

Pharaoh Thutmose III

What Thutmose III saw in the desert

According to one source, in 1,482 B.C. pharaoh Thutmose III was out in the desert with his troops when he saw a circle of fire in the sky; a few days later he saw more of them – they were just over a hundred feet long and hundred feet wide – before they flew up into the sky, out of sight.

Tulli's find in the Cairo bazaar

A former director of the Egyptian section of the Vatican Museum, Professor Alberto Tulli, found a manuscript in 1934 that is now known as the Tulli papyrus or manuscript after him, in a bazaar in Cairo, and it was then given to an Italian-Russian Egyptologist named Prince Boris de Rachewiltz for translation.

The Prince and the Poet

The prince had married the daughter of the American poet, Ezra Pound, whom Hemingway had tried to teach to box (Hemingway later wrote that he was never able to teach Pound how to throw a left hook). Pound was caught and spent 25 days in an open cage at a US Army base north of Pisa; he was later accused of treason during WWII because he had sided with Mussolini against the US, but was found incompetent to face trial and spent 12 years in a mental institution. When Pound returned to Italy in 1958 he stayed at the Prince's Castle Brunnenburg. He died in his home in Venice.

The Prince was a respected Egyptologist, and his translation became a sensation, because people could now read about the circles of fire which Thutmose III had seen around three thousand years ago in Egypt. The only problem is that the original papyrus has never been found, so everyone has to rely on the Tulli copy and on the Prince's translation. Apparently Tulli left all his assets to his brother, a priest in the Lateran Palace in Rome, but the priest also died and his assets were distributed to his heirs, and the trail of the papyrus goes cold there. A lot of people take it as proof that Thutmose did see UFOs, mostly because they can't see why the Prince would be party to a hoax, but others are skeptical.

Brunnenberg Castle

There you have it – a pharaoh in the desert, circles of fire in the sky, a prince as a translator, who is married to the daughter of a man convicted of treason.

Does this mean that pharaoh Thutmose III had a visit from beings from another world? If so, what evidence do we have of "other worlds"?

A bit of breaking news ...

This year we learned that "Earth is not a fluke", courtesy of a leak from a NASA mission.

NASA launched the Kepler mission in 2006 to check if there were "other worlds" out there somewhere:

Are there other planets, orbiting other stars, with characteristics similar to earth? The Kepler Mission is designed to find Earth-size planets in orbit around
stars like our Sun outside of the solar system. Launched on March 6, 2009, the scientific goal of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems, with a special emphasis on the detection of Earth-size planets. It will survey the extended solar neighborhood to detect and characterize hundreds of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the "habitable zone," defined by scientists as the distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface.

Leaks from Kepler

In July this year some surprising results leaked out about the Kepler mission's findings:

NASA didn't plan it this way, but earlier this month a co-investigator on the Kepler satellite mission in the hunt for other Earth-like planets announced to a conference in Oxford, England, that "planets like our own Earth are out there. Our Milky Way galaxy is rich in this kind of planet." The announcement ... was especially striking because it was largely based on Kepler data that team members had been allowed to keep to themselves for further analysis until next February. So, traditionally, such data would be released formally with all involved scientists onboard...

At 8:15 into his 18-minute talk, Sasselov showed a bar graph of planet size. Of the approximate 265 Kepler planets represented on the graph, about 140 were labeled "like Earth," that is, having a radius smaller than twice Earth's radius. "You can see here small planets dominate the picture," said Sasselov. Until now, astronomers' exoplanet finds had been more like gas giant Jupiter than rocky little Earth...

Sasselov did emphasize that these are candidates, not confirmed exoplanets. With further observation, half of them could well turn out to be false alarms. Many could also be Earth-like in size but orbiting so close to their stars that nothing but their size would be Earth-like. Sasselov said that astronomers will be able to identify at least 60 Earth-like planets. So the unauthorized presentation of preliminary results would seem to confirm that Kepler has succeeded in showing that Earth is no fluke.

Earth is not a fluke. Other earths are possible, if not probable.

I wonder what Pharaoh Thutmose III would have thought it he knew this when he saw the circles of fire in the sky above the Egyptian desert so many thousands of years ago.

Obelisk Movers – The Place of Blood & The Beautiful One

2010-11-10T20:09:00.000-08:00

Jean-Baptise Apollinaire Lebas, obelisk mover

In 1833, forty years after the guillotine blade first tasted blood in the Place de la Concorde, engineer Jean-Baptise Apollinaire Lebas moved the obelisk which had once proudly stood before the Luxor temple in Egypt, to Paris.

The place chosen for the Beautiful One, with its 3,300 hieroglyphics – the very center of the Place de la Concorde – was "highly contested symbolic ground" (according to OBELISK – A History). The authors describe the location this way:

No spot in Paris had greater ability to serve as a symbolic lightning rod.

The 21 acre octagonal square has been at the center of momentous events in the history of France. The Place de la Concorde is the largest public place in Paris, and lies along the Seine River, separating the Tuileries Gardens from the beginning of the two hundred and thirty foot wide Champs Elysée, which before the 1600s was an unhealthy swamp.

The King's Last Walk

A bronze plaque in the square commemorates the 21^st of January 1793 when Louis XVI was marched up the steps of the guillotine erected there during the French Revolution.

His executioners woke the King at five in the morning, and at eight he handed over his will. At nine, it was time for his last walk.

Through the window came the sound of the drums, roll following roll following roll.

All the windows around the square were closed. All the shops were shut. Only the carriage with the King inside moved through the streets, past the thousands of troops lining them, taking two hours to reach this place.
All around the guillotine were more soldiers, with cannons.

Louis XVI meets the guillotine in Place de la Concorde

He mounted the steps, and tried to speak to the crowd, held back by the soldiers, but a general ordered the drums to sound, and his voice was silenced.

The six executioners tied him to the plank, face down, and the blade swished down, ending the life of the thirty-eight year old king, the last of a line of kings who had ruled France for eight hundred years.

Samson and the King's hair

The chief executioner, a man named Samson, scooped up the king's head and dangled it at shoulder height, and the crowd roared. Some dipped their handkerchiefs into the blood of a king. Not all the details are clear. Some say it took only one slash of the blade to sever the king's head; others say it took two attempts. Some say the executioner Samson later sold locks of the hair of the slain king; Samson denied that he did so.

Before Queen Marie Antoinette was executed, they brought the head of her best friend before her, mounted on a pole.

Guillotine plaque near obelisk in Place de la Concorde

The Guillotine speaks again, and again ...

The guillotine was used against the leaders of the Revolution, as well. Danton climbed its steps, after a mock-trial was held by the Convention. Within months, the man who sent him to the blade, Robespierre, mounted those same steps, dirty linen holding up his broken jaw bone. Before the executioner - Samson, the same man who executed the King - dropped the blade, he tore off the bandage, and Robespierre cried out in pain. The crowd rejoiced at his death, for he was a much-hated man by then.

The smell of blood

During the Revolution the smell of blood was so strong in the square that it was said a herd of cattle refused to cross it. Some people wonder whether the ancient obelisk can still smell the blood spilled in the square it was placed in, forty years later.

The Flight of the Obelisk King

Louis-Philipe, the man on the throne when engineer Lebas erected the Beautiful One, did not
long enjoy his reign as king. During the July Revolution in 1830, Charles X was overthrown, and Louis-Philipe was offered the throne, becoming the King of the French. His reign lacked pomp, and at first he was very popular, being called the Citizen King, but as the plight of the poor worsened, his popularity plummeted. Following revolts, he abdicated in 1848, disguising himself as a civilian and, after rushing through an underground tunnel to his four-wheeled cab located in the Place de la Concorde, fleeing to England, where he lived until his death in 1850.

How to Unchop a Tree - Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

2010-11-10T16:40:00.000-08:00

Maya Lin

What does a 21-year old artist, whose major work was described as "a black gash of shame" but is seen by an average of 10,000 people each day – more than three million a year - with an attitude of reverence, have to do with the fight against global warming? And what movie inspired the man who set this train of events in motion?

Unchopping trees

Meet Maya Lin, who was born in 1959, read for her Master of Architecture degree at Yale University, has been awarded honorary doctors degrees by both Yale and Harvard, and while still an undergraduate beat out 1,420 competing submissions to win the mandate for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

Maya Lin has struck a triumphant blow in the fight to prevent deforestration, by asking one simple question, and providing a moving video answer to that same question. She said:

We can't unchop a tree. But we can not chop it down in the first place. Or we can plant a new tree.

The video – What is Missing? - takes three minutes to show several wonderful places in many cities which are thickly forested, and to explain just how many minutes it would take to chop all those trees down at the rate that trees today are being chopped down all over the world.

Vietnam Veteran Memorial

Watch her video here, and check her own website here for other works she has done, and recommend these to people you know who might enjoy their striking beauty, and awesome effectiveness.

If we are to save the earth from rising temperatures, we need to harness artists who can create this type of compelling and vivid message.

Black granite in memorial

Maya's aim with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a black granite stone wall with the names of 58,261 soldiers on it. Wikipedia puts it this way:

Lin's conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers.

Completed in 1982, the two simple but graceful walls designed by Maya are 247-feet long, sunk into the earth, and meet at a 125-degree angle. The names of the soldiers lost in battle convey a poignant sense of loss, with each name carved into the granite – like hieroglyphics on a modern oblisk - at just over half and inch high.

The names are arranged according to the year of death or disappearance, causing visitors who do not know the precise date to wander down the walls until they find the right spot. When they do, most reach out to trace the letters with a finger, their own faces reflected in the bright granite surface.

The Deer Hunter

In 1979 a veteran named Jan Scruggs watched The Deer Hunter, starring Robert de Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep. When he left the theater he decided that Vietnam veterands needed a memorial, and set about raising money for it. Not a cent was paid by the government.

Click here to read why Jan Scruggs thinks The Wall has the same come-back quality about it that the Pyramids and Eiffel Tower have.

And click here to read the fascinating details of the troubled history of the making of The Deer Hunter (including the fighting over the writing of the screenplay, how the six principal male actors carried a photo in their back pockets to enhance their togetherness while shooting the movie, and De Niro's insistence tha the revolver used in the famous Russian roulette scene had one live bullet in it, to heighten the intensity).

Hints from the World of Writing – The Odds Against

2010-11-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

Speak to anybody, and they will tell you that the chances of having your novel published are slim to nothing for most authors. So why on earth persevere in this long-shot business?

There are a couple of good reasons for you sticking to it. Remember the laws of probability that spell out that life is full of random surprises – both good and bad – as we saw in our earlier post on The Drunkard's Walk. And in that same post we saw fifty examples of iconic writers who were rejected – some of them many times – before finally being published.

The lesson from this is that randomness plays a part in your future as a writer. And if probability is involved, then another lesson can be learned: that probability might be helped by you doing a few things.

What kind of things can you do that would increase your chances of randomness falling your way?

For starters, don't give up – finish that novel. As Blake Snyder puts it in Save the Cat!:

Congratulations! You've followed my advice, you've done the prep, you've hit your marks like a pro, and you've finally written THE END... You are amazing! ... Finishing a screenplay separates you from five out of 10 would-be screenwriters who only talk about writing their movie ideas. You have increased your odds of success immeasurably by doing the work.

Another thing you can do to nudge the gods of randomness into your positive zone is to pay attention to your craft, by reading what others are doing, and seeing if they have any hints for writers like yourself.

A good choice to find the cream of the crop among all such hints and bits of advice, is to read the best blogs as set out in the top 25 writing blogs by Blog Rank. Blog Rank ranks blogs in several categories using 20 different factors, including RSS membership, Technorati ranking, and incoming links.

Getting to the day when you can type THE END on the last page of your novel requires discipline, and here you might find some hints in this blog, about the daily routines of dozens of writers. The blog entries contain good snippets of the working habits of successful writers, with details of the hours they work, the way they write, and their little rituals which mean so much to them and which spur them on.

Here are a few of the writers whose habits are examined: Simone de Beauvoir (workd from 10 until one, then from 5 to 9); W.H. Auden; Robert Caro (works seven days a week, and publishes once every ten years on average); Stephen King; C.S. Lewis; Gustave Flaubert (worked from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m.); Gunter Grass (writes 5 to 7 pages a day for first draft and less for later drafts); Anthony Trollope (set a target of 250 words every quarter of an hour); Fanz Kafka; Saul Bellow; John Updike (3 or 4 hours each morning).

Now for some other writers: Ernest Hemingway (6a.m. to noon, and stop at a place that you know what is going to happen next); Truman Capote (wrote first draft in pencil in longhand, and a revision, also in longhand); J.M. Coetzee (at least an hour morning very day of the week); Roald Dahl (10 to noon, and 4 to 6); Isaac Asimov (7:30 a.m. until 10 p.m.); Elmore Leonard (9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.).

Timothy Hallidan has some advice on his website for writers, encouraging them to finish their novels:

I’ve been writing novels (and teaching about writing novels) for twenty years, and one thing I’ve learned is how to finish. I’d estimate that 98% of all the novels people begin are never completed. Every person who abandons a book feels that he or she has a good reason, but my experience suggests that most of those books could have been finished – the writer just came up against something he or she couldn’t handle.

And finally click here for 25 best books on writing for writers.

Have fun, and keep on writing – who knows what the gods of randomness might do one day for you.

Tough Bugs: Ice Worms and the Poet

2010-11-09T16:16:00.000-08:00

Ever heard of a tough bug that only lives in glaciers, shuns daylight as much as vampires do, and has a mysterious hole in its forehead whose purpose is unknown?

And that inspired a poem by the author of The Shooting of Dan McGrew? Or a man named E.J. "Stroller" White, who worked for the Klondike Nugget and invented some tall tales?

The Ice Worm appears

Welcome to the ice worm. Discovered in 1887 in Alaska, this tiny little creature (it grows up to an inch, and is petty skinny) is an extremophile. It's found on glaciers in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, and to date hasn't been found anywhere else.

Stroller White and a story

But let's start with the young man named Stroller White, who wrangled a job in 1898 with the Klondike Nugget but had to deliver increased sales or face being fired. So Stroller invented a new creature he called ice worms, and started writing about them after a huge storm. He claimed that the ice worms lived in caves in glaciers, and chirped noisly as they basked in the sun.

Stroller ended one letter he wrote to a government official curious about ice worms:

The chirp of the ice worm is not made with the mouth but from a whistle on its tail. The head end is always too busy to engage in vocal exercise, being constantly at work boring more house room in the solid ice in order that it may have room for growth and expansion.
Dictated by E.J.W.
Typewritten by Ann Jones.
Mending of all kinds. Buttons sewed on while you wait.

Stroller said the worms grew to four feet in twenty days. Their fame spread, and bars started offering Ice Worm Cocktails. Stroller boosted sales of the Klondike Nugget so much that he kept his job.

The story of Stroller's ice worms might have reached the ears of Robert William Service (1874-1958), who wrote poems which became very popular, such as The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. He offered a publisher $100 to print a book of his poems, but the publisher handed the money back and offered him a contract. He earned so much from the poems that he could quit his job as a banker – over the years he made half a million dollars from the poems and could wander the world at will.

In 1940 Service published The Ballad of the Ice Worm Cocktail, about a boastful Brit who was mocked by the locals when they challenged him to earn the title of Sourdough by drinking one such cocktail.

Extracts from the Ballad appear in quotes below, among the little bits of information about the real ice worm.

Global warming poses as threat to the ice worms, because as they glaciers melt, the area they can live in shrinks. Unlike other living things, this will doom them, because they never leave the glacier they were born on – they die if they leave it - and so every glacier has its own set of ice worms.

They want to make you, honoured sir, a bony feed Sourdough.
The same, some say, is one who's seen the Yukon ice go out,
But most profound authorities the definition doubt,
And to the genial notion of this meeting, Major Brown,
A Sourdough is a guy who drinks ... an ice-worm cocktail down.

Ice Worms

The ice worm's behaviour should earn it the right to be regarded as the worm equivalent of vampires. They, too, shun the sunlight, and if an ice wormis unable to drill down - using little bristles growing out of their sides - into the glacier to escape warmth, and its temperature soars from the zero degrees centigrade it prefers, then the ice worm simply melts. Their Latin name is "solifugus" which means "sun-avoiding".

Yet all is clear as you draw near - for coyley peering out
Are hosts and hosts of tiny worms, each indigo of snout.
And as no nourishment they find, to keep themselves alive
They masticate each other's tails, till just the Tough survive.

These little worms, which can recognize light and dark even though they are eyeless, look like pieces of dark thread on the ice. Snacking on snow algae and pollen carried by the wind, the ice worms congregate in colonies numbering a few hundred thousand to an astounding twenty million each, with some colonies covering up to thirty acres.

Then deeply in a drawer he sought, and there he found a jar,
The which with due and proper pride he put upon the bar;
And in it, wreathed in queasy rings, or rolled into a ball,
A score of grey and greasy things, were drowned in alcohol.

The ice worms burrow into the glaciers, and some have been noticed up to six feet or so below the surface.

Their bellies were a bilious blue, their eyes a bulbous red;

Their back were grey, and gross were they, and hideous of head.

Related to the earthworm, they exist in astounding numbers – one glacier is estimated to be home to seven billion of the little worms. They also crowd together on the surface of the glaciers, with between 30 and 300 ice worms counted per square meter.

But with a gesture of disgust the Major shook his head.
"You can't bluff me. You'll never drink that gastly thing," he said.
"You'll see all right," said Deacon White, and held his cocktail high,
Till its ice-worm seemed to wiggle, and to wink a wicked eye.

How long do the ice worms live? Nobody knows, and some estimates are between five and ten years; ice worms in laboratories can survive for just over a year without any food.

It must be done . . . He swallowed hard . . . The brute was at his throat.
He choked. . . he gulped . . . Thank God! at last he'd got the horror down.

Nobody knows why ice worms don't freeze at zero Celsius – perhaps it is connected to the type of antifreeze which some scientists believe the ice worm secretes to allow it to burrow through the glacier.

And ere next night his story was the talk of Dawson Town,
But gone and reft of glory was the wrathful Major Brown;
For that ice-worm (so they told him) of such formidable size
Was - a stick of stained spaghetti with two red ink spots for eyes.

The large hole on the top of the ice worm's head might be used to excrete some kind of salt, to help them melt the ice in front of them, or some kind of lubricant, to make them slippery so that they can squeeze through crevices in the glaciers. Nobody knows for sure what it is used for.