he uncovered his polished bow of the horn of a wild ibex … of 16 palms; these the worker in horn had worked and fitted together, and smoothed the whole with care … This bow he set firmly against the ground, bent it, and strung it … Then he opened the lid of his quiver, and took out an arrow, a feathered arrow that had never been shot, loaded with dark pains and immediately he fitted the bitter arrow to the string … And he drew the bow, clutching at once the notched arrow and the string of ox’s sinew; the string he brought to his chest and to the bow the iron arrowhead. But when he had drawn the great bow into a curve, the bow twanged and the string sang aloud, and the sharp arrow leaped.

The bowman is Pandarus, son of Lycaon, the target is Menelaus, within easy range under a truce, Athena having induced the treacherous attack to ensure that there will be no peace settlement. The listener would have immediately recognised the weapon, not a simple wooden reflex bow but one of horn or with a horn belly to add compression energy. Only the weapon with which Odysseus kills the suitors in the other epic was a more powerful compound bow, with layers of dried horse tendon on the back to add tension to compression, but that weapon, a very rare import from the far steppe, could not be strung by bending against the ground because it is so powerful that it reverses itself when unstrung (Odysseus evidently knew how to pull in the horns with bastard strings, because he strung it while sitting down). But in the Iliad all bowmen are despised because they can attack from a distance, and treacherously too, as Pandarus did.
lrb
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Heike Monogatari struggles between the Taira (Heike) and Minamoto (Genji) houses...
ca 1131 - 1191

Gion Shõja no Kane no Koe
Shogyõ mujõ no Hibiki ari

‘The bell of Gion Temple recalls the impermanence of all things’

... next only to Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari
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Afghanistan...
? Do you form up a patrol and go after them? Do you periodically send harassing patrols after them? What do
you do?" As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain's head wheeled around abruptly
to look at the interpreter and then shot a look back to me with an incredulous look on his face
and literally laughed in my face, and said, "No! We don't go after them; that would be
dangerous!"
rollingstone
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American troops are reported to be staging and massing on Masirah and Socotra, one island located close to Hormuz and the other in the Indian Ocean. About 50,000 troops have been massed on the two islands, bringing boots on the ground to about 100,000 in the Persian Gulf region. ..This presages some sort of amphibious landing, because the United States will have to fight its way to Tehran to change its regime to prevent the collapse of arguably their greatest scam, the fiat petrodollar..


Masirah has some kind of airport (GoogleEarth) but Socotra has one dinky runway - hard to see where you'd put 50K troops

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c/o sparklepony
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tropical forests in America store around 118 billion tons of carbon, a fifth more than indicated by previous findings.
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Fukushima
Gee, all those old hot rods, ARE dangerous.... who knew?

: Rapidly dropping water level at Fukushima Daiichi No. 4 — Leak continues from Reactor Well/SFP/DS — Almost 3 times higher on Monday
February 3rd, 2012 at 9:48 am ET
enenews

The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns. [
enenews

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Microscopic, sponge-like African fossils could be the earliest known animals—and possibly our earliest evolutionary ancestors,..
The creature, Otavia antiqua, was found in 760-million-year-old rock in Namibia and was as tiny as it may be important.
"The fossils are small, about the size of a grain of sand, and we have found many hundreds of them," Anthony Prave U St. Andrews
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ping pong planets - ejected after thousands of yers...
nationalgeographic