Sleepy Hollow

I don't care that the show is insane or that the 'history' is cray-cray. Ichabod and Abbie are adorable.

I LOL'd over a tweet I read last night re: Sleepy Hollow complaining about Abbie not remembering the Roanoke colony becase (as per tweet) "That was the only interesting thing in early American history!" Perhaps an exaggeration, but, yeah, the "lost colony" is one of those things that intrigue kiddies in school.

Speaking of school, I wonder why Oxford is covering for Ichabod. It's not a Connie Willis novel, so I don't think that Oxford has the time travelling history department yet. ;) I amused myself with what was being left out of that call:

Oxford: We have an Ichabod Crane on record in 1769. But he's on leave since 1769, and is in New York since 1769!

(Or therebouts. I figured he needed a few years early in order to meet Jefferson and Adams (Unless he was in France. Can't wait for that whacked 'flashback!'). And I must say, I tend to think Ichabod had it backwards. Easier to believe that it was Adams who liked puns and Jefferson who liked inappropriate limericks. Everyone pretty much agreed that Adams was a tightly wound stick in the mud... The 'history' be cray-cray. Hee!)

First Cave Artists May Have Been Women

Neat!

From Smithsonian Blog:

Since cave art often depicts game species, a subject near and dear to hunters, most researchers have assumed that the people behind this mysterious artwork must have been male. But new research suggests that’s not right: when scientists looked closely at a sample of hand stencils, a common motif in cave art, they concluded that about three-quarters were actually drawn by women.

What they looked at, specifically, was the lengths of fingers in drawings from eight caves in France and Spain, National Geographic writes. Biologists established rules of thumb for general differences between men and women’s hand structure about a decade ago.


Women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, whereas men’s ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers.

[Archeologist Dean] Snow ran the numbers through an algorithm that he had created based on a reference set of hands from people of European descent who lived near his university. Using several measurements—such as the length of the fingers, the length of the hand, the ratio of ring to index finger, and the ratio of index finger to little finger—the algorithm could predict whether a given handprint was male or female. Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn’t especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow’s modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy.

The 32 hand prints he found in the caves, however, were more pronounced in their differences than those of the modern men and women he sampled. Based upon the model and measurements, he found that 75 percent of the hands belonged to women.

National Geographic points out that the mystery is far from definitively solved. While some hail the new study as a “landmark contribution,” others are more skeptical. Another researcher recently studied the palm-to-thumb ratio of the hand prints and concluded they mostly belonged to teenage boys, who, he told NatGeo, often drew their two favorite topics: big powerful animals and naked ladies.


Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/10/ancient-women-artists-may-be-responsible-for-most-cave-art/#ixzz2hnxLbp5w

U.S. House of Representatives + Ted Cruz...

"...We like to talk big, vampires do. 'I'm going to destroy the world.' That's just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. {...} But then someone comes along with a vision, with a real passion for destruction. [He] could pull it off." ~ Spike, BtVS

"...he would have the kingdom burn just to be king of the ashes." ~ Catelyn Stark, Game of Thrones.