June 07, 2004

Atlantis? Yet another person thinks he's found it.
  • I heard there's already a Starbucks there, compleat with snooty bean-burning employees.
  • So in order for this to be true, they need to fudge measurements and translation? That seems a little silly. However, I still think this is cool.
  • Newsflash: Satellite photographs show Atlantis, if you draw a picture of Atlantis on top of them.
  • Fes, Starbucks started there, and the employees are of atlantite ascent (which explain their snotines and contempt for the rest of humanity). The starbucks empire is just part of their plans to reconquer the known world.
  • Sounds a lot more reasonable than the idea that Antartica was Atlantis.
  • I've always hated Atlantis. "Jagged Little Pill" - God, what a fucking stinker of a record.
  • *makes check mark next to kid's name*
  • This possible explanation sure makes a lot more sense than "an island of mystery that sank in the middle of the ocean." Still skeptical, but at least this is much more plausible.
  • Flashboy made me laugh and tQK made me snort. This is really cool, though. I love the whole searching for lost cities thing, crazy theories and all. Another favorite.
  • I went to Atlantis on vacation last year. It's seriously overrated. And yeah, they really push that Original Starbucks thing -- putting the logo on the currency is really going too far if you ask me.
  • Aha - Nutter! Explains a lot.
  • shinything -- ah, yes... looking for Mystery Ubar...
  • c1: hee hee!
  • Boooooooooooo, Some 1, just booooooooooo
  • looking for Mystery Ubar Shame! Shame!!
  • An anthro professor I had at SMSU is one of the archaeologists who's gone digging for Ubar. He was interviewed for Nova, if memory serves. Wacky guy, good professor.
  • I've always hated Atlantis. Ironic.
  • Interesting, but seems the verdict has to be: Not proven. At least for now.
  • Ironic. Yeah, like rain on your wedding day. Or a tidal wave that washed your island away.
  • Quid - that's a little too ironic, don't you think?
  • Oh, and... I don't think that the verdict is so much "interesting, but unproven" - I think it's a lot closer to "don't be so bloody daft; anyway, your day job is being a crank physicist, not a crank archaeologist, so enough already and let the proper, qualified wacko trowel-fiddlers do their thing." Or words to that effect. I've always been puzzled - the Atlantis thing is kicked off by two of Plato's dialogues, and even there it's mentioned in a semi-mythical sense, being used as a conceptual prop, no? Why should anybody treat this as an historical source (especially in relation to embellishments like geographical and architectural details)? You might as well spend your life searching for an encyclopaedia for Tlon. That it ties in with the common occurence of a 'flood story' in the cosmologies of most major Eurasian cultures should not be surprising. The rise of sea levels that occurred during the development of civilisation in many of these areas is pretty well established - why some people reamin attached to the idea that there should be one single "Atlantis", when the submerged caost of the Med and the Black Sea are littered with loads of little Atlantii, is unclear...
  • You're right, flashboy - I don't think Plato himself meant the story to be taken as literal fact, but it obviously has some amazingly powerful memetic force - wish I knew why. This is a reasonable sceptical discussion.
  • And another famous flood legend. Middleclasstool: Juris Zarins?! You lucky monkey! I read about him here. He sounds like the coolest guy.
  • Yep, that's him, Dr. Zarins. He's a helluva guy. I had his anthro class at eight in the damn morning, and he always woke me up, never failed. I almost considered switching majors because of him. You'll never meet a man who's more passionate about what he does.
  • HEY! I FOUND ATLANTIS! Its at the bottom of this here hole!
  • That damn hole will follow us until the day we die. Wait. Wrong hole.