Now to get on to blogging today. Excuse me while I...we are experience some technical difficulties right now, please stand by while we fix this problem...wow, it feels so good to be finished with junior year!
Josh Beckett started the game yesterday for the Red Sox and it was not so pretty. Jonathan Papelbon was selected as the AL Rookie of the Month. Papelbon, until yesterday, had pitched 21.1 consecutive scoreless innings. He is the first player in MLB history to get 10 saves in April after starting the season with no prior saves.
Are there parallels between VP Gore and President Nixon?
What is James Carville up to?
Who has called on Donald Rumsfeld to resign?
Time Warner has rejected an offer from EMI.
There's a revolt dealing with YouTube.
Ted Lerner has purchased the Washington Nationals.
Masada, historic to Judaism, is a popular tourist site. But could it fall again?
Masada is one of the most renowned symbols of Jewish endurance.That's all for now.
Rising 750 feet above the Dead Sea valley, the site of a mass suicide of Jewish Zealots in 73 C.E., it is, next to Jerusalem, Israel’s most popular tourist site. Elite units of the Israel Defense Forces hold special ceremonies atop its heights, pledging, "Masada shall not fall again."[...]
"Masada has been degrading for 2,000 years," says Hatzor, head of BGU’s Rock Mechanics Laboratory and founder of the geological engineering team working on the problem.
"There’s no imminent danger," he adds. "Nothing is collapsing. We’re talking about long-term preservation of a World Heritage site."
The imposing, reddish-gold mountain sits directly on the Syrian-African Rift, an active fault line. Since Herod the Great built his luxury palace on the mountain’s northern face more than two millennia ago, at least five major earthquakes have hit, causing rock slides and some damage to the man-made structures. Harsh desert weather continues to impose its own disintegrative effect.
"The terraces of the palace were much larger than what they are today," Hatzor says. "There have been failures and erosions since Herod built it. We can see deterioration of the stones due to rain even in the time period we have been involved in preservation efforts on the mountain."
Masada is not one solid rock. It is composed of horizontal layers of sedimentary rock, and is fractured by vertical cracks or "joints" formed by tectonic stresses in the earth’s crust. These horizontal and vertical joints give the mountain its particular wall-like appearance of huge irregular bricks piled one on top of the other. They also make it vulnerable to seismic tremors.
Work began in 1998, when Israel’s National Parks Service began construction of a new cable car to ferry greater numbers of visitors up Masada. They called in Hatzor to evaluate the mountain’s stability, something that had never been done before.
Who is your pick for the Derby?
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