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82Cremations and Ashes: Urns or Art?
We all know what cremation is. No doubt you've heard the gruesome stories about people attempting to scatter the ashes of a departed loved one, only to have said ashes blow back into their face or stick to...
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73Googie Restaurants: That 1950s Look
In the early 1950's, Douglas Haskell--a Yale professor of architecture--was being driven down Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. He passed an odd-looking coffee shop named the Googie, shouted to his driver, and...
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73Art and WPA: A Vanishing Heritage
During the Depression, employment rose to 32 %. People were desperate. It wasn't just stockbrokers who found themselves out of a job. Companies folded, laying off all their workers. Nothing was being built--no...
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71World's Oldest Flute
The flute at right was assembled from 31 pieces found in the Geissenkl
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70Movie and Radio Museums--Who Has What?
Museums everywhere slug it out for dibs on artifacts. Sometimes their fights make the front page--as when Italy went after the J. Paul Getty Museum, threatening its former curator with jail because of certain...
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63Albus Dumbledore, the Gay Blade
Thankfully, something has moved Britney from the headlines. Dumbledore's gay! OMG! Please do not lose any sleep over this. After all, this is a fictional character we're talking about. Salon.com carries an...
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54Norman Mailer's Advice on Writing
Norman Mailer, while brilliant, often seems unapproachable. I loved Ancient Evenings, his huge saga-like novel of Egypt under Pharaoh Ramses the Great. OTOH, I could not get more than half-way through his last...
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71Gemstone Trivia
Rubies and sapphires are actually the same mineral: corundum (aluminum oxide). It can be colorless, but when traces of elements sneak in (like chromium,which interacts to make red) the color changes. If the...
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66My Favorite Autobiographies
Biographies tell someone's life story. They're not my favorite reading, but even worse are autobiographies, in which the subject of the book is also the person writing it: "Then I did this...then I did that....
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64Doris Lessing: SciFi Author Wins Nobel Prize!
Doris Lessing, at 88, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature after a lifetime of far-reaching, speculative novels that cross genres, pose unanswerable questions, weave stories around cold characters, and turn...
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