James McMurtry:
Dancing in the light
Entrain:
Water fountain
Tuneyards:
Copper canteen
Had brunch with a musician friend yesterday who just saw James McMurtry perform songs from his latest album, “Complicated Game” up in NYC and said it was so powerful, he sat there and wept. (My friend was embarrassed.) So I urge you to check it out:
Happy Hour: Westend Blues – Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five …
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Sensitive New Age guy
The making of Sgt. Pepper
Ancient hair
See, I just love this stuff:
Her coiffure queries began, she says, when she was killing time in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore back in 2001. A bust of the Roman empress Julia Domna caught her eye. “I thought, holy cow, that is so cool,” she says, referring to the empress’s braided bun, chiseled in stone. She wondered how it had been built. “It was amazing, like a loaf of bread sitting on her head,” says Ms. Stephens.
A hairstylist by day, Janet Stephens has become a “hair archaeologist” studying the intricacies of ancient Greek and Roman hairstyles. As WSJ’s Abby Pesta reports, she’s been published in the academic community on her research, which she says proves the intricate hairstyles were not wigs.
She tried to re-create the ‘do on a mannequin. “I couldn’t get it to hold together,” she says. Turning to the history books for clues, she learned that scholars widely believed the elaborately teased, towering and braided styles of the day were wigs.
She didn’t buy that. Through trial and error she found that she could achieve the hairstyle by sewing the braids and bits together, using a needle. She dug deeper into art and fashion history books, looking for references to stitching.
In 2005, she had a breakthrough. Studying translations of Roman literature, Ms. Stephens says, she realized the Latin term “acus” was probably being misunderstood in the context of hairdressing. Acus has several meanings including a “single-prong hairpin” or “needle and thread,” she says. Translators generally went with “hairpin.”
The single-prong pins couldn’t have held the intricate styles in place. But a needle and thread could. It backed up her hair hypothesis.
In 2007, she sent her findings to the Journal of Roman Archaeology. “It’s amazing how much chutzpah you have when you have no idea what you’re doing,” she says. “I don’t write scholarly material. I’m a hairdresser.”
John Humphrey, the journal’s editor, was intrigued. “I could tell even from the first version that it was a very serious piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would have been able to write,” he says.
He showed it to an expert, who found the needle-and-thread theory “entirely original,” says Mr. Humphrey, whose own scholarly work has examined arenas for Roman chariot racing.
Ms. Stephens’ article was edited and published in 2008, under the headline “Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles.” The only other article by a nonarchaeologist that Mr. Humphrey can recall publishing in the journal’s 25-year history was written by a soldier who had discovered an unknown Roman fort in Iraq.
Big oopsie on Lyme disease
Wow. There was yet another major assault on Lyme victims by the medical establishment about six months ago, insisting none of this was true. Why, you would almost think patients could be trusted to tell the truth!
Bad news first? Mistakes were made counting Lyme disease cases. Big mistakes. According to the CDC, its previously reported numbers were short by a factor of 10. The more accurate total is 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease per year.
More bad news? In multiple studies, antibiotics typically used to treat Lyme disease have been proven to not eradicate all of the Lyme bacteria in animals. More recently, these same antibiotics, doxycycline and amoxicillin, were also proven to be unable to kill all of the Lyme bacteria in the lab.
In other words, people treated for Lyme disease based on the Infectious Diseases Society of America treatment guidelines may continue to suffer from symptoms caused by an active infection.
It is reported drugs with the highest activity against Lyme persisters do not work against the actively growing spirochetes that cause Lyme disease, according to Lucy Barnes, director of Lyme Disease Education and Support Groups of Maryland. This means to kill all of the Lyme bacteria in its various stages a combination of drugs would be necessary for an undetermined length of time.
The good news? A follow up study published by Johns Hopkins confirmed eradication of the Lyme bacteria in the lab was achieved using a combination of three drugs — daptomycin, cefoperazone and doxycycline.
People with Lyme disease who experience symptoms after standard treatment now have a legitimate reason for their complaints, an ongoing infection.
Many patients treated by the IDSA’s insurance friendly protocols were mistakenly told they were cured and were denied further treatment even when suffering from continuing, relapsing or worsening symptoms. Many were reported to be malingerers, or were inappropriately referred for mental health counseling, or were prescribed anti-inflammatory medications and told to begin an exercise program, or worse yet, were prescribed steroids to mask their symptoms, rather than receiving appropriate antimicrobial treatment for a chronic, disabling and sometimes life-threatening infectious disease, Barnes said.
With Lyme tests still missing 75 percent of those who are infected, many of these people have since been misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, MS, Parkinson’s, ALS, anxiety, heart conditions, depression, ADD, autism, cancer, arthritis and a host of other conditions with no known cause and no known cure. Chances are good that a new combination of FDA approved drugs already on the market may help those with chronic Lyme and other maladies that mimic the later, more expensive and extensive, disabling stages of Lyme disease, Barnes said.
I couldn’t even get treated the first time when, despite having all the classic symptoms (including the bite ring), the highly inaccurate blood tests kept coming back negative. God only knows what the little bastards have done to me after all these years.