The Poppy Fairy

The Poppy Fairy
is the centerpiece of a quilt that listener is making
for her goddaughter's baby soon to be born.

It seems that in this election cycle, with so much struggle in the world
it is Beauty and Imagination that restore us.

Bath Cat

listener painted this Kitty on her wall at home,
to surprise her granddaughters and to cheer any bloggers who visit.

Stone Age Graveyard in the Sahara

A paleontologist looking for dinosaur bones in the Sahara desert instead stumbled across the largest Stone Age graveyard ever found. The human skeletons, tools and other remains were left by two groups of people, the Kiffians and the Tenerians, who lived in the area between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, when the Sahara was a swampy wetland.

Links
Stone Age Graveyard (slideshow) - The Online News Hour
Stone Age Graveyard Unearthed In Sahara - NPR

Only the slideshow is up at The Online News Hour, no transcript of Jef Brown's interview with Paul Sereno. I'll check again later in the evening...

Voice of Palestine Silenced

Darwish, poet of the Palestinian cause, dies after surgery
By Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah
Monday, 11 August 2008

Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry encapsulated the Palestinian cause, is to get the equivalent of a state funeral in the West Bank following his death this weekend – an honour only previously accorded to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

Tributes for Darwish poured in yesterday, a day after he died, at the age of 67, from complications following heart surgery in a hospital in Houston, Texas.

"He translated the pain of the Palestinians in a magical way," said Egypt's vernacular poet Ahmed Fouad Negm. "He made us cry and made us happy and shook our emotions. Apart from being the poet of the Palestinian wound, which is hurting all Arabs and all honest people in the world, he is a master poet."

Darwish's funeral in Ramallah tomorrow will be the first sponsored by the Palestinian Authority since Arafat died in 2004. The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning. People gathered on Saturday night in the darkened streets of Ramallah, holding candles and weeping.

May he rest in peace. And, may his people find peace and freedom.