Monday, July 30, 2012

Some Quotes From Carl Sagan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by 
which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. 
Carl Sagan 

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or 
even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to 
guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. 
Arguments from authority are unacceptable. 
Carl Sagan 

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, 
no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother 
those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of 
knowledge are permissible, and which are not. … 
— Carl Sagan 

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from 
authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance 
hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) 
— Carl Sagan 

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the 
suppression of ideas. 
— Carl Sagan 

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just 
the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is 
the pathway to a dark age. 
— Carl Sagan 

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or 
in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no in the 
endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover 
fundamental insights. 
— Carl Sagan 

[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to 
critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. 
I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." 
That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the 
ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons 
on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better 
explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor. 
— Carl Sagan 

“...extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” 
Dr. Carl Sagan 
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Friday, July 27, 2012

Amazon Suicide Cult Tribe

here's an excellent vignette on the lost tribe:Lost Tribe
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New Lost Amazon Tribe

Government officials in Brazil have confirmed the existence of an uncontacted population in the Amazon rainforest after the tribe of 200 was spotted by satellite.
Three large clearings were identified in a southwestern area near the Peruvian border this week, but the tribe's existence was only verified after airplane expeditions in April gathered more data.
Local government agency the National Indian Foundation uses the aircraft to avoid disrupting isolated groups.,,

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2007528/Brazil-confirms-lost-Amazon-tribe-goes-missing-drug-gang-attack.html#ixzz21qguFKDVOriginal Article
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Some Debunking to Keep It Real Part I

The Archyfantasies channel on Youtube does a really good job to dubunk a lot of the Ooparts that keep floating around. I was going to do a blog post "to keep it real" and point out the alternative (and more likely) explanations for many of the ooparts (out of place artifacts) that we see coming up on pseudo-archeological websites and programs, but I found that this nice lady had done a lot of the work for me. First, here is the website from where  she draws the subjects of her criticism, at least  for the first few videos.
Top 10 Most Puzzling Ooparts

Here are the episodes of her debunking channel, with my notes below.

Top 10 Not-So-Puzzling Artifacts- Grooved Spheres

1. They are by no means perfectly spherical
2. They are hematite, not a man-made alloy, and by no means stronger than steel. Steel varies considerably in hardness, and hence the argument is proven to be an unscientific comparison aimed at laymen.
3. The claimed "vibrating qualities" of the spheres stem from a misquote, and no actual experiments have been done that prove these qualities. The spheres moved in a closed environment for the researcher because blasting was going on at a quarry in the area, and he was in fact commenting on this. The quote was removed from context to bolster pseudo-scientific theories.
4. Explains the geological process by which the grooves are formed. Happens all over the world in the southern hemisphere.

This artifact has been debunked since 1996 put still persists on the internet.

Ica Stones

Inca Stones : Volcanic stones with petina on them, scraped away to reveal images.
Bought most of them from villagers, who made them to make money. People have confessed to making frauds. Brontosaurs were debunked, and yet they show up on Inca stones, sometimes with predator teeth and fins. Chines style dragon depicted, etc. Petina on the stones has been proven to contain motor oil or to have been made with dung. Scrapings are extremely fresh and sharp and had to have been made relatively recently. More...

Dropa Stones

None of the people or organizations that appear in the story have records- essentially, they did not exist. Only one very poor pictures exists of the stones, and it looks just like a known asian artifact, the "bi discs," which is not an oopart. Forgotten language with no ties to other languages but text was supposedly translated? No local stories about the caves. All we have is a suspicious sounding story, no records or evidence.

It looks like the channel will be going down the lists debunking the top 10 and has other interesting podcasts talking about various Ooparts and misconceptions.

Archeological Fantasies

It's very interesting to me that her videos have less hits than many of even the most poorly researched pseudo-scientific videos. Debunking hoaxes and mis-identified ooparts just isn't popular because Americans especially want to believe in aliens, Atlantis, and/or a Creation history that adheres to modern religious interpretations of the Bible (as opposed to the Bible itself).

The blogger hasn't gotten to the footprints of humans with dinosaurs yet, but I'll go ahead and point out that many researchers don't think the "dinosaur footprints" look like dinosaurs, and even if they are actual animal footprints, that giant birds and lizards lived alongside man in many places during the Pleistocene.

Here is another website that debunks the footprints and many of the other popular Ooparts:

Bad Archeology

I've been looking for an explanation for the "genetic Disc" that is made of Lydite.
Alien theorists claim that we can't carve lydite (or basanite stone) even today. However, the actuality is that granite and basanite stone have actually been carved since at least 3000 BC, and there are techniques for turning stone temporarily soft for molding with the use of vinegar and also various plant materials. It is a known fact that hunter gatherers used such a substance to "mold" ivory long before the Neolithic, or even Msolithic eras. The other part that supposedly makes this an oopart is that images on the disc depict the male human sperm, which it definitely seems to do. However, there are many examples of lenses that date before the common era and it is not inconceivable that a primitive microscope could have been invented in ancient times and then fallen into disuse after succeeding cultures took over. Also, it's been proven that some women see more colors of the spectrum than most humans do, and that Neanderthals could both see better than humans (at least in the dark) and had more of their brains devoted to processing vision. It is not surprising that certain races (or hybrid races) of Hss might have needed less amplification (or lithic aid) than moderns to see things on a microscopic level. It's a remarkable object, and if not a fake it may prove the existence of an "advanced" culture, but the Romans were an advanced culture. So were the Aurignacions of 30 thousand years ago. It doesn't follow that this culture need be as "advanced" as modern culture in similar ways, or that the said technology need come from the stars.
Here is an interesting discussion on the subject:

Discussing the Genetic Disc


Joe Lyon Layden is a prehistoric fiction author and primitive musician. To receive a free copy of this entire novella "The Man from Parkho Khatune Bears Favor," as well as three free songs and monthly updates, freebies, and discounts on Joe's ongoing work, please sign up for the newsletter below.


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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Where are Meera and Jojen? In season three!

I was getting ready to be disappointed, but this came out a couple of weeks ago and I totally missed it!
Season Three Cast
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

New York Times Says Game of Thrones is "Boy Fiction"


A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms



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With the amount of money apparently spent on “Game of Thrones,” the fantasy epic set in a quasi-medieval somewhereland beginning Sunday on HBO, a show like “Mad Men” might have the financing to continue into the second term of a Malia Obama presidency. “Game of Thrones” is a cast-of-at-least-many-hundreds production, with sweeping “Braveheart” shots of warrior hordes. Keeping track of the principals alone feels as though it requires the focused memory of someone who can play bridge at a Warren Buffett level of adeptness. In a sense the series, which will span 10 episodes, ought to come with a warning like, “If you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of ‘Sex and the City.’ ”

More About This Series

ArtsBeat
Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.
Arts & Entertainment Guide
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Shot largely on location in the fields and hills of Northern Ireland and Malta, “Game of Thrones” is green and ripe and good-looking. Here the term green carries double meaning as both visual descriptive and allegory. Embedded in the narrative is a vague global-warming horror story. Rival dynasties vie for control over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros — a territory where summers are measured in years, not months, and where winters can extend for decades.
How did this come to pass? We are in the universe of dwarfs, armor, wenches, braids, loincloth. The strange temperatures clearly are not the fault of a reliance on inefficient HVAC systems. Given the bizarre climate of the landmass at the center of the bloody disputes — and the series rejects no opportunity to showcase a beheading or to offer a slashed throat close-up — you have to wonder what all the fuss is about. We are not talking about Palm Beach.
The bigger question, though, is: What is “Game of Thrones” doing on HBO? The series claims as one of its executive producers the screenwriter and best-selling author David Benioff, whose excellent script for Spike Lee’s post-9/11 meditation, “25th Hour,” did not suggest a writer with Middle Earth proclivities. Five years ago, however, Mr. Benioff began reading George R. R. Martin’s series of books, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” fell in love and sought to adapt “Game of Thrones,” one of the installments.
The show has been elaborately made to the point that producers turned to a professional at something called the Language Creation Society to design a vocabulary for the savage Dothraki nomads who provide some of the more Playboy-TV-style plot points and who are forced to speak in subtitles. Like “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” on Showtime and the “Spartacus” series on Starz, “Game of Thrones,” is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch, even if it is more sophisticated than its predecessors. It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful“Californication,” nearly all eroticism on television is past tense. The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange.
The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.
Since the arrival of “The Sopranos” more than a decade ago, HBO has distinguished itself as a corporate auteur committed, when it is as its most intelligent and dazzling, to examining the way that institutions are made and how they are upheld or fall apart: the Mafia, municipal government (“The Wire”), the Roman empire (“Rome”), the American West (“Deadwood”), religious fundamentalism (“Big Love”).
When the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. “Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.
END ARTICLE

My Comments:
Though this writer is a little bit better than the one that Slate hired to bash Game of Thrones, she also seems to have the egotistical tendency to project her own tastes and preferences on the population at large. First off, the books were recommended to me by a female, and one who has never been so nerdy as to belong to any book club. After seeing the series once, my own mother got HBO, and only watches that channel when Game of Thrones is on. She normally only likes crime series, like CSI.

There wasn't as much sex in the books, so sex can't be the only reason why women like the stories; I have three female friends who have read all of them and none of them are nerdy, anachronistic, or even fantasy nuts. One is kind of new age, lots of tattoos and married to a biker...another is an advertising exec and a mother of three, and another is a college student on exchange from Germany. Lots of my female Facebook friends watch the show, mostly the 30 something ones with college educations and kids. Groups of mixed sex friends at the local college watch the show religiously, and even have drinking games made up for it.
The journalist's inability to understand plots and casts of characters more complex than "Sex and the City," which she alludes to in the opening paragraph, lets us know that we're not dealing with an aesthete here, however. If Game of Thrones seems complicated to her I'd hate to see her try and tackle Faulkner or Joyce, and I wonder how she became a journalist for such a huge mag with such sophomoric taste in the field of literature!
I'd like to tackle her next statements individually:
"When the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. "
Uhh...HBO has instincts? And you know what they are?
I remember when HBO just had movies and some really stupid kid's series that came on in the afternoon. During the daytime HBO was down in the early days- it was a blank screen until around 4PM. 
Much later it introduced REAL SEX and NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS as original series. Basically soft porn thinly veiled as one of the first reality shows and a slapstick humor news parody show. They had some original movies, and most of them were pretty poor. 
So I'd like a further explanation from her on how going from porn, kid shows, and slapstick humor to the fantasy literature generally agreed upon by critics as being THE MOST IMPORTANT SINCE TOLKIEN is somehow "cheap."
And I'll add that "going away from their instincts" has paid HBO big dividends. True Blood and Game of Thrones have probably made them more money than anything else has in the last 15 years!! There are lots of people who only subscribe when the series is airing!!
“Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot."
Someone who has read the books knows that there are much greater ideas than these within the stories. Of course, there is no way Miss Ginnia could know this because she has only seen the series, not read the books themselves...and the series has only barely introduced the themes and ideas and intrigues of the larger story. We're only in season 2, which is roughly analogous to Book 2; there are five books so far and all of the plots and subplots will not be resolved until the final book, which hasn't even been written yet!
Furthermore, those of us who enjoy the story don't find it confusing; probably because we're a little smarter than Miss Ginnia- after all, she is actually entertained by "Sex and the City." That's not a very demanding intellect or imagination.

" If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary."
This is advise from a fool. For instance, my father is an accountant and hates Dungeons and Dragons. The only fantasy book he's ever read is Tolkien. He can't stand true Blood, abhors Sex in the City. But he thinks Game of Thrones is the best show on television and watches it with my mom every week. My father has a 145 IQ and can ALWAYS tell you the plot spin of a movie half-way through- not so with Game of Thrones. The plot ingenuity is that far above any other plot presented on the screen today, on TV or in theaters. 
There are fantasy fans on the forums who can't stand Tolkien and bemoan the prominence of the fantasy genre's Dungeons and Dragons aesthetic. But they love game of Thrones because it's so fresh and original. There are scores of college kids who have always made fun of fantasy and the nerds who love it, but who can't get enough of Game of Thrones. Sorry, Ginnia, but people a lot of people are sick of cutesy plotless indulgences like Sex and the City who are looking for something with actual merit, and Game of Thrones is going to last for a lot more seasons than Sex in the City did.


Also, "getting back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary" at the exclusion of anything else is a pretty close-minded thing to do. That means that not only can't you watch or read any well-made speculative fiction, but you can't enjoy anything that's set in a culture for which we don't have written records, either. That's a very narrow time frame and territory in human history for which you will allow the stories you read and view to be set in- most languages that men have created have been lost to time, though evidence of their cultures still exist. 
Certainly everyone who doesn't like Dungeons and Dragons is not so closed-minded and lacking in imagination!!
It's ludicrous for her to say that only Dungeons and Dragons fans are capable of reading anything that is set outside of the time frame of recorded history, or outside of cultures that are literate! 
But we do appreciate the compliment, Miss Ginnia...


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Troy Patterson of Slate Says the Game of Thrones is "Quasi-Medieval, Dragon-Ridden Fantasy Crap"

Quasi-Medieval, Dragon-Ridden Fantasy Crap Art thou ready to watch Game of Thrones? By Troy Patterson
|Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2011, at 9:38 PM ET (My Comments Following the Text)

 What the F? Where the hell is the FedEx? The reviewer charges at the steeply overflowing mail bin, where the screeners and everything make a tall heap. The mail pile is a mystical tower from whence a series of UPS logos glint like the shields of a sun-addled phalanx and DHL bubble-bags cushion deep mysteries—a perilous structure built unthinkingly by the PR girls of the noble publishing houses of Midtownne (creatures more enchanting than the maidens of Ephesus), who despatch little brown envelopes and big random invitations and such. Its packages sigh with Time Sensitive Material. Where the F is the FedEx with the new TV show? The edges of the envelopes rise helically, like the worn stone of a spiral staircase curving up to a tuffet-strewn turret. But here the steps lead only to the widow's walk of an L.L. Bean catalog, and trembling frustration. O HBO ... Advertisement Hey, here we go. Game of Thrones (Sundays at 9 p.m. ET) is snug as a hug in a drawer of the entertainment center. The backs of the discs flash like clean vorpal blades. It appears only that the jewel boxes, each splintered at a corner, have suffered in express transit. This makes sense: Owing to the natural laws of hype, the culture has chucked the show at us with unholy force. Every TV season requires that one show be voted Most Anticipated, and this spring we in the entertainment press, goaded by discerning geeks, are supposed to try to get stoked for this one. It's HBO's first big fantasy series, according to some, though perhaps not Carrie and Aidan. Thus does the reviewer feel daunted to face an old nemesis at a late hour. You see, Game of Thrones—adapted by David Benioff and Dan Weiss from a series of novels by George R.R. Martin—is quasi-medieval, dragon-ridden fantasy crap. That's not a comment on its quality but a definition of its type. The reviewer happens to have an anti-weakness for that general sensibility and those armor-clad generic trappings. Hey, his loss, he knows, but, for instance, he cannot trust his taste to tell him if the Harry Potter books are written well. An undergraduate attempt to learn to read Middle English led to naps in multiple Chaucer seminars. He recalls the emotional pain he suffered one lunch period back in the Reagan Era—the pain of wasting the time experimenting with icosahedral dice. Once, bowing to peer pressure, he lyingly implied that he thought Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings to be in the same league as Lawrence of Arabia, when the honest answer was, "I don't care." Many, many years ago, before escaping the provinces, he was horribly unchivalrous in canceling a date at the last minute. Word was going around that the lady in question made like a serving wench at many a Renaissance Festival, and he called off the plans for their Olive Garden rendezvous. Sorry. The quest is to complete a six-hour marathon of Game of Thrones—to stay conscious through a clear majority of the first six parts of a 10-episode season. It does not help matters that the series—where the meaty head of a drunken king lies uneasy, where plotters are overplotting and courtiers go a-courting in mutters—proceeds in a style that bears all the most punishing hallmarks of close fidelity to its literary source. There are unscalable slabs of expositionistic dialogue clogging the forward movement of the story. Sonorous and/or schmaltzy talk substitutes for the revelation of character through action. There is the sense of intricacy having been confused with intrigue and of a story transferred all too faithfully from its source and thus not transformed to meet the demands of the screen. For long stretches of each episode, the reviewer hangs on to consciousness only by trancing out on the strings of digits of the anti-counterfeiting watermark at the top of the screen, hanging on to the serifs by the nails. The sex and violence also add interest, the former being unhealthily kinky, the latter abusively deft, both conducted with adolescent passion. No matter how dull the body of each installment of Game of Thrones, it pulls itself together for a meticulously choreographed finish that builds its own discrete tension. The episode endings create anticipation like small marvels of cliff-hanging that erase the torpor of foregoing knightly knonsense from memory and get you hankering for the next look at the opening title sequence (which is a little masterpiece of welcoming design). Many of these cliffhangers depend on the infliction of imaginative horrors on women, precocious children, and four-legged animals, often with quite a light touch. The sex, less subtle, includes brother-sister incest, omnipresent masochism, and sundry other curiosities, with Peter Dinklage starring as a dwarf whoremonger and the many fetishistic displays of fur harkening back to the dark ages of pay cable, the late nights of Howling II and Clan of the Cave Bear. One scene, luxuriantly offensive, involves what is either a gladiatorial rape tournament or a Jersey Shore homage. At points, the soundtrack departs from its strongest mode—cool semi-serialism, a hybrid of Milton Babbitt and Hey, is that my phone?—and the presence of dusky tribal drums signal that people are doing it doggie style. I was just making a note that a nubile royal—whose goofy name I will not risk misspelling and whose nipples are destined for immortality—is shot to appear to be really a bit young when the girl got to talking with a handmaiden who mentions that she, the handmaiden, began training for her erotic career at the age of 9, but took three years to learn the art. Will it take what's-her-name three years to gain the same knowledge? "No," is the lusty promise, and soon we see it kept. Good for her. Too bad for HBO. "Three years"? Could have been a spinoff. End Article


 I don't think this journalist actually said much in the text of this article except that he doesn't like fantasy, and that he is close-mindedly afraid of what other people might think of his sexual partners. Most of the sentences in the article are vague attempts at humor, I suppose. He might be saying at the end of the article that he does not like non-American, non-20th century sexual practices being mentioned in books or movies, but he may just be mentioning the inclusion of said practices because he didn't know how to finish up- the world will never know. The confusion probably stems from the fact that he's not a very good writer, and that his thoughts don't seem to be very comprehensive. He admits that he slept through Chaucer, so I think it's not too unlikely that he slept through English 101 as well...the class where they show college students how an essay or article should be written in order to connect with the reader and put forth a comprehensive idea or argument. You will find neither connection nor comprehension here. There is no idea or argument in the entry; just a below average writer shooting out some random thoughts in order to get a very small pay check. Clearly this writer's editor was overworked or extremely slack in order to have assigned this article to someone so inadequate for the task.
Troy does actually provide a little bit of content in the article, between admitting his inadequacies as a writer (as well as with the understanding of the opposite sex and sexuality in general) and providing poorly written humor. This last is in the form of quasi-fantasy writing about UPS and the CDs he received; these were presumably vomitted onto the page in order to reach word-count requirements. Unfortunately, that content consists mostly of lies based on assumptions about ALL viewers/reviewers and readers on the planet- assumptions which most likely stem from his own individual tastes. Most of us don't think any episode of Game of Thrones is dull. It's the only series on any channel that is interesting enough to me that I actually watch it, for instance. Neither do most people agree that the mere act of being a fantasy story, having dragons in in the story, or being "armor-clad" makes a story generic. Fantasy stories have become incredibly diverse, dragons are a universal archetype in the consciousness of mankind, and people wore armor in the history of our past- I can't see why literature would censor that setting just because one metrosexual doesn't think it's cool. One could likewise say that stories set in modern times are generic because they all have modern clothes and technology or because they all involve other modern universal archetypes. He also seems to believe that the wearing of fur is fetishistic, prompting speculation that he slept through history 101 as well, or is Freudishly preoccupied with sex. When he states that "One scene, luxuriantly offensive, involves what is either a gladiatorial rape tournament or a Jersey Shore homage" I am not sure what point he is trying to make; a gladiatorial rape tournament would be a pretty shocking thing to watch a dramatization of, and I don't think it's ever been dramatized before....so maybe he's saying the scene is highly original? Jersey Shore is a reality show, so maybe he's saying that the scene is realistic? Dunno. But Slate will need to higher some journalists one day if they want to survive as a periodical.

What a shock it will be to people with a hatred of fantasy to have to review, in the future, stories which READ like fantasy but are actually better fitted in the "Historic Fiction" or "Prehistoric Fiction" genres! I wonder if he will then designate those two genres into the "kiddie stuff" compartment along with the science fiction and fantasy genres that he's already placed there?
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Thursday, July 12, 2012

Minatogawa Man

Eastern Neanderthal? Closest Ancestor
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Ainu Tradition Sites

Here are some informative items about the Ainu and their folklore and traditions: Exorcism Alone with the Hairy Ainu The Old Boat Goddess Ainu History
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Manhattan sized pre-Columbian city found in Ontario!

Manhattan sized pre-Columbian city found in Ontario! Check It Out
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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Free G.R.R. Martin Short Stories!! Dunk and Egg The Hedge Knight The Sworn Sword


Here are all the free ebooks and short stories from G.R.R. Martin I could find, to keep you warm and cozy until "Winds of Winter" is released.

                                                 First, the Dunk and Egg Stories:


And then a little bit of the sci-fi Material:


The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr

And Here's a youtube reading of the Ice Dragon, which some say is also a prequel to A Song of Ice and Fire
The Ice Dragon


If you enjoy the works of G.R.R Martin, there's a good chance you'll like the the stories that I write too. People have been calling them a "Prehistoric Game of Thrones." I definitely list Mr. Martin as one of my biggest influences, along with Robert E. Howard, Herbie Brennan, Stephen R. Donaldson, and J.R.R. Tolkien.



Click the button above to get the free novella that won me a few contests- it's the prequel to my upcoming novel "The Oracle of Lost Sagas," and it has a very Martinesque twist at the end...


Joe Lyon Layden is a prehistoric fiction author and primitive musician. To receive a free copy of his entire  novella as well as three free songs and monthly updates on The Oracle of Lost Sagas, Game of Thrones and other speculative fiction series,  sign up for the monthly newsletter below!.


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