It’s the holiday season and the world did not end (so everyone has to finish their Christmas shopping this weekend!). On the other hand, people will also have time to read these Friday quick hits and varia.
- Tomorrow will be the 10th anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death. In his honor, check out this NPR story and this Clash concert from Japan in 1982. And turn up London Calling or Streetcore really loud sometime tomorrow. (And notice the parallels between Strummer and E.P. Thompson…)
- A sweet bibliography on Roman trade with India (again for Strummer and Thompson).
- The CIA officially denied attempting to erase a letter in the Russian alphabet. Well, that’s nice of them.
- The coastal wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship will become a pretty awesome park (via Richard Rothaus).
- More Rothausia: An unknown bidder beat out the expected victor in buying the Nekoma, N.D. Safeguard Missile complex. So we have officially scrapped our effort to buy this amazing site for the future global headquarters of Trefoil Cultural and Environmental and the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.
- Elsewhere in North Dakota: Ukrainian Homestead Houses.
- A really nice (and Australian) collection of Environmental History podcasts.
- For folks who followed the bizarre, Indiana Jones inspired, package received by the University of Chicago admissions office, this is how it was resolved.
Wait, did you look at the 2012 archive already?
- Schools make particularly compelling subjects for abandonment porn. Consider the difference between how a closed school is commemorated on the web and the end of virtual worlds.
- The web we have lost.
- If you haven’t been reading Corinthian Matters recently, now is a great time to catch up and check it out. David Pettegrew has posted a ton of good stuff lately and some really useful datasets.
- Dumbarton Oaks talks about Metadata.
- North Korea at night.
- What I’m reading: G. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences. MIT 2005; R. Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: a billion squatters, a new urban world. Routledge 2005.
- What I’m listening to: The Clash, London Calling; Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Streetcore.
The Christmas Camel steals the show