When the First Farmers Arrived in Europe

Eight thousand years ago small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers were the only human beings roaming Europe’s lush, green forests. Archaeological digs in caves and elsewhere have turned up evidence of their Mesolithic technology: flint-tipped tools with which they fished, hunted deer and aurochs (a now extinct species of ox), and gathered wild plants. Many had dark hair and blue eyes, recent genetic studies suggest, and the few skeletons unearthed so far indicate that they were quite tall and muscular. Their languages remain mysterious to this day.

Three millennia later the forests they inhabited had given way to fields of wheat and lentils. Farmers ruled the continent. The transition was evident even to 19th-century archaeologists, whose excavations revealed bones of domesticated animals, pottery containing remnants of grain and, most intriguing of all, graveyards whose riddles are still being solved. Agriculture not only ushered in a new economic model but also brought about metal tools, new diets and new patterns of land use, as well as novel human relationships with nature and with one another.

The Fall of Man. Eve offered Adam not an apple but a stalk of wheat. Decolonize your colon.

 

‘Merit-making’ on hold as monks fail drug tests leaving Buddhist temple empty

A Buddhist temple in central Thailand has been left without monks after all its holy men failed drug tests and were defrocked.

The monks have been sent to a health clinic to undergo drug rehabilitation, the official said.

“The temple is now empty of monks and nearby villagers are concerned they cannot do any merit-making,” he said.

Merit-making involves worshippers donating food to monks as a good deed.

Mr Boonlert said more monks will be sent to the temple to allow villagers to practise their religious obligations.

Meth Monks of the Sky Temple sounds like a fantastic movie I watched on USA Channel.

 

I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream—flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating—surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal . . . and some were strangely robed . . . and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head. . . .

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

“The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931)
H. P. Lovecraft

 

So it starts raining at the wedding and everyone scrambles for cover, and then Stephanie Seymour is dead, like right after. She’s literally being buried in a wedding dress. So how did she die? Did the rain kill her? The cold November rain? Did she William Henry Harrison that shit? I’ve been confused about this for 30 years.

But speaking of big Khazar milkers…

Regina Spektor
“On The Radio”
Begin To Hope (2006)

This is how it works
It feels a little worse
Than when we drove our hearse
Right through that screaming crowd
While laughing up a storm
Until we were just bone
Until it got so warm
That none of us could sleep

And all the Styrofoam
Began to melt away
We tried to find some worms
To aid in the decay
But none of them were home
Inside their catacomb
A million ancient bees
Began to sting our knees
While we were on our knees

Praying that disease
Would leave the ones we love
And never come again

On the radio
We heard “November Rain”
That solo’s really long
But it’s a pretty song

We listened to it twice
‘Cause the DJ was asleep

This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t
You try until you can’t
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood

And walking arm in arm
You hope it don’t get harmed
But even if it does
You’ll just do it all again

And on the radio
You hear “November Rain”
That solo’s awful long
But it’s a good refrain
You listen to it twice
‘Cause the DJ is asleep

On the radio
(Oh, oh, oh)
On the radio
On the radio, uh oh
On the radio, uh oh
On the radio, uh oh
On the radio