MG and ‘The Joshua Files’
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the spectacle of the equinox at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza (one of the New 7 Wonders of the Ancient World).
I had a look on Youtube and indeed there are some videos of the event. Nice, saves us all having to join the madding crowds.
Here’s my pick of the crop:
Paco, a Mayan guide at Chichen Itza, explains the whole thing to a TV reporter.
Atmospheric little Chichen-equinox movie, with Pink Floyd music.
Chichen Itza
Originally uploaded by Aleksu
The results are in – it was the final days of lobbying wot done it!
The Mayan city of Chichen Itza has been named as one of the official ‘New’ 7 Wonders of the World.
The photo is one of Aleksu’s – a contact of mine from Flickr who takes gorgeous photos. He’s been urging people to hit the 7 Wonders Website voting for Chichen.
Chichen Itza was the first Mayan ruin I ever visited, aged 15, on a hugely memorable trip to Yucatan with my father, stepmother and three sisters. We were driven there on the slow dusty road from Cancun. Not by my father – who stayed in Cancun to play golf – but his chauffeur. This was before cars routinely had aircon. It was a sweltering August day – at least 45 degrees Celsius and close to 100% humidity. and the site was crowded – even in 1981 it was Mexico’s most popular archaeological site after Teotihuacan. My sister Pili passed out from heat stroke in the ladies’ bathroom.
We walked around the site in stunned, exhausted silence. I was nursing my usual sunburn and was in agony most of the time. (Sunblock didn’t work in those days; I always forgot to wear a T-shirt for a critical hour or so, for which I always paid in tears of pain). I tried climbing the main staircase of tht Temple of Kukulcan aka El Castillo (pictured above) and got about twenty stairs up before I turned around and had an attack of vertigo. I knew without a shadow of doubt that if I climbed to the top with my sisters I would have to be helicoptered down. I managed to climb back down those 20 stairs but my legs were shaking all the way down, even though I used the trick of descending on a diagonal.
I went into the tunnel in El Castillo to try to climb the Temple of the Jaguar that sits under the newer, flashier Toltec-influenced pyramid. There was a crowd of tired, hot, breathless tourists waiting patiently to ascend a tight staircase just wide enough to permit a line of people going up and a line of people going down. It was like a steam oven in there; everyone was being slowly poached. The skin on my shoulders felt like it was on fire. I took one look up that staircase and felt like I’d got as close to hell as I ever wanted to be. A wave of claustrophobia gripped me; I almost shoved people out of my way on the way out.
Chichen isn’t my personal favourite of the Mayan sites. I prefer something more Classic Mayan, with the Puuc or Rio Bec architecture, ideally in a more jungle-setting, like Palenque. However Chichen has two sites, including an older, Classic Mayan site which is Puuc style.
Chichen’s buildings are spectacularly preserved – by now all four faces of El Castillo are restored, when I first visited it was just two. This pyramid is precisely aligned to capture the sun on the sides so that it lights up triangles on the main staircase and the serpents head at the base. This happens only on the Spring and Winter equinoxes and it has the effect of creating an undulating serpent-of-light on the staircase. I’ve never visited then because the crowds at that time of year are insane. (There must be a Youtube video of it…I’ll check).
Despite the constant pain of my sunburn I was impressed beyond anything I’d ever experienced. I’d never visited any Mexican pyramids before, for some reason I’d never been taken to Teotihuacan (near Mexico City). I’d had a fascination with the Maya since aged 11 my father took us to stay at the Acapulco Princess, fashionable in the late 1970s/early 80s, and – I was told – built in the style of a modern Mayan pyramid (although the website says Aztec but still…) But to see the real thing, to experience something of that atmosphere, to imagine the citadel filled with warriors and priests, ball-players and sacrificial victims…was quite, quite amazing.
We returned late that evening to the hotel in Cancun. I went into the hotel bookshop and bought the shortest book I could find about the Maya. It turned out to be one of those Erich-Von-Daniken type books about ancient astronauts and their supposed influence on early civilisation. I lapped it up. I hardly slept that night.
If any of you read ‘Invisible City’ next February you will see just how far that day left its indelible mark on me.
Ancient Knowledge at the Ice Cream Cafe
Originally uploaded by mgharris
I have become a Flickr addict, I admit it. Especially since this morning when another member added me as a contact. I favourited some photos yesterday and a few were this guy’s amazing photos of Mexico. This morning I spent ages admiring the rest of his work…check out Aleksu on www.Flickr.com
I started looking around at other stuff you can do on Flickr. Pretteh, pretteh, pretty cool! You can upload to you blog via email. Which means that if you are like me, also a CrackBerry addict, you don’t need to pay to moblog!
Here’s a poster I saw in G&D’s ice-cream cafe yesterday. This ancient knowledge stuff is all the rage, it seems, or la bomba as we Latinos say. Let’s hope it still is in 2008…to say any more might be a spoiler…
Emailed from my BlackBerry®
The publisher and I have agreed a deadline for Joshua bk 1 v3.0. I’m deep in the process of writing Jaguar though, and can’t let the momentum go. So I try to work on Jaguar in the morning at my desk, take a two-hour break to refresh and then it’s on with the editing, which seems to require a different skillset as far as I can tell.
Thank goodness for editors. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Mine is probably going to save me from being a laughing stock, if nothing else – hopefully a lot else but you can’t predict these things.
I like to take my manuscript out for little walks. I can’t be bothered going all the way to the Bod this time around – I’m only spending 2 hours a day on it, what with the Jaguar writing taking up all my morning brain activity. So I’ve been going to Summertown.
The above photo is taken of my set-up at the Summertown Wine Cafe, a bijoux little joint on South Parade which makes the best coffee in Summertown (there are many Italian coffee machines in Summertown, but few baristas who have a clue how to use them). Sadly however, they charge a small fortune for savoury food – best to stick to cake, I’m trying to avoid blimpdom so that’s out.
Blah, blah, blah. Nothin of consequence in this entry sadly. I’m just writing something to have to test in a new way to do an RSS feed. If you read this, you’ve just participated in an experiment.
Do you feel used?
I kind of miss doing experiments. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling feeling that a PROPER day’s work is what I used to pull off at the height of my keenness as a graduate student…a long day in the lab which ends with a successfully identified new DNA subclone to use in a lovely biological experiment.
‘Subcloning’ is a way of starting with a widgey little bit of DNA that is no use to anyone and two days later having bucketloads (as much as a milligram!) of the stuff that you can use to do biological experiments in tissue culture cells or even in unsuspecting fluffy creatures. (Some journals are so fussy that you can’t get published unless your results are in a live organism.)
You insert a piece of experimental DNA into a ‘vector’ of usually bacterial or yeast DNA which has the ability massively to replicate it. Then you can grow the ‘bugs’ in a 500ml culture overnight and in the morning extract enough DNA to ‘transfect’ cells which allow you to test the properties of your experimental DNA. The tricky bit is that when you try to stick your experimental DNA to the vector DNA, only a small fraction will combine to give you the subclone. The rest will just be vector DNA that sticks back to itself.
When I were a lass we used to pick at least 24 bacterial colonies in the hope that 2 or 3 would have the subclone. It could take up to a whole day, a day spent ‘doing minipreps’, as we used to call it. Sometimes you had to use radioactivity and horrible, ooky, gloopy, neurotoxic polyacrylamide gel to help identify the subclone.
(Any molecular biologists reading this, bright young things with your PCR, your DNA synthesisers and sequencing machines…it’s all very easy now, I’ll bet.)
But! Throughout most of career as a molecular biologist I noticed that although I was a good little scientist and picked my 24-48 colonies everytime I wanted to find a correctly subclone, more often than not, colony 1 (the first I picked with a sterile toothpick) actually had the subclone. i.e. I didn’t need colonies 2-24 and all the effort in ‘working them up’ was not actually essential.
Other people in my lab noticed this too. It turns out that in maths the number 1 is disproportionately represented (there’s some rule and it’s used as a way to detect fraud), well, in molecular biology this seems true too.
Don’t think we let that observation go to waste, either. Towards the end of my time in the lab, I would often just pick a colony right off, inoculate my 500ml flask and grow up the bugs without testing whether they had the subcloned DNA in them. It saved a whole day! Of course I tested a sample before I used it to transfect my tissue culture cells. Well, duh.
If you didn’t understand a thing I wrote in the last few paras, tell me. R1X did, so I have tried to rewrite it so that it makes sense.
This article in the Boston University Bridge caught my eye two years back and inspired a chapter in ‘Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist’, a chapter which didn’t make it to the first two drafts of ‘The Joshua Files’.
The article describes how a book collector came across a super-rare copy of a book by the explorer who kicked off the whole field of Mayan archaeology, John Lloyd Stephens. The bookstore didn’t recognise quite what they had in their shop, not having realised that the apparently insignificant inscription in the flyleaf was from the author to President Martin Van Buren.
Only two copies of this book (‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan’) would be more valuable and are in fact still missing…the author’s own copy and the one he gave to his friend and collaborator, the artist Frederick Catherwood.
In real life they are still missing. In ‘The Joshua Files’, however, one of these might be hiding, unnoticed in a second-hand bookshop in Jericho, Oxford…
And today, that deleted chapter (rewritten for Joshua) will be making its way into Invisible City version 3.0.
(Provided I don’t get tempted by something else, like an afternoon at the pool. Fingers crossed for rain…)