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2003-06-28 - 5:35 p.m. I'm reading: In Watermelon Sugar I'm listening to: Jimmy Reed Quote O' The Day: Richard Llewellyn: How Green was my Valley: "But there was a look there that made me draw back from giving her a good smile. Her eyes were bright blue, with the white nearly all round and very white, and yet, for all their brightness and white, there appeared in them not a darkness, but an inner fogginess, as though she saw me, not as me, but as part of her thoughts." My nephew went to Iceland last week. This is his third summer there. He's an Archeologist and they found interesting stuff the first year. Seems nobody has bothered with Iceland much. It's a bunch of Viking stuff. Most of his early work was in the Four Corners area of The States. The desert is a nice place to dig holes even if it is hot, because it's dry. Iceland is cold and wet and wind blows off the Artic Circle. He e-Mailed me: "There is something disconcerting about a 'real' human skull, even if they are just lying around (as they are here). Since most of the sites here have graves or graveyards associated with them, I may get the opportunity to excavate a burial this year. I have been able to make a number of connections this year and can see myself working here or with Icelandic materials for a number of years. Archaeologists in The States don't want our services (paleoethnobotanists), but archaeologists elsewhere in the world are always looking for someone." If I wasn't to old to have a best friend, he'd be my best friend. I feel sad when he goes away every summer because I have so much fun and sometimes I think it would enjoyable to have his company. He has undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Biology. The Archeologist's here have degrees in the humanities, like Art History or something. Since they don't know anything about science, I think my nephew makes them uncomfortable. He can look at a thousand-year-old piece of shit, and a twenty-five-thousand-year-old piece of shit from the same area and tell if the people are the same people or different people, what they ate, when they got there and when they left. The Archeologists here want to look at the decorations on pots and guess about the people's culture. And when he finds ancient people who ate people, current people have trouble with that because they inject their feelings into it which in our current culture eating people is not such a nice thing. So he gets shipped off to Iceland so the Anthropologists here can draw their own conclusions about what the culture was like. A friend of his is Native American and she doesn't think he should be digging up bones. I've found a lot of people think that way. That's one of the things me and my nephew have in common, we don't believe in the supernatural. � 
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