UPI says,

Italian scientists say CAT scans have helped them uncover an “inner statue” under one of the world’s best-known faces, the bust of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.

The bust, about 3,400 years old, was discovered in 1912 by German archaeologists in what had been the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. It is now in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

Franco Crevatin , an ethnologist at Trieste University, and Stefano Anselmo, an expert in the history of cosmetics, have created a computer-generated image they believe is closer to Nefertiti’s actual face than the one shown in the finished statue. Their findings were published this month in Focus Storia, a history journal.

The researchers added skin color to the image picked up by CAT scans and studied surviving Egyptian portraits of Nefertiti’s relatives. Their image makes the queen’s nose somewhat less perfect and adds laugh lines around her mouth. The cheekbones are less dramatic and the eyes shallower.

(via UPI and Jezebel)

 
We haven’t had a Stones related post in days now, time to remedy that with this fantastic live (not lip-sync) performance of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Keith Richards describes who inspired the songs cryptic lyrics

Jack Dyer, who was my gardener, an old English yokel. I once said, ‘ave you ever been to town? Town, to an Englishman, means London, right? He says, Oh Yea, I was up there when war finished. That cathedral’s something. He meant Chichester, the local big town, seven miles away…We’d been up all night and it was in the morning. Suddenly this sound of boots went by the window, clump clump clump and woke Mick up, What was that?! I looked out, that’s Jack, that’s jumpin’ Jack. Well he’s leaping about a bit. Yeah, I said, it’s “jumpin’ Jack” and then “flash” came and suddenly we were wide awake and we started to work, you know. You never know when they’re going to come.

Jonesborough resident Jim Stevens admits he?

 
Although most American?

 
Some provocative pictorial context for the swine flu, via InformationIsBeautiful (click here for a larger, more illuminating image).  Given that far higher spike on the left for cardiovascular disease, rather than line up for a flu shot, looks like you’ll ultimately fare far better by putting aside the Chunky Monkey.  Possibly even more revealing?  Death-by-swine flu these last 300 days ran neck and neck with death-by-leprosy.

Check out this (full-length, linked below) BBC Four documentary about Krautrock. The BBC says:

Documentary which looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war. Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal - a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past - but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.

Note the first: You are not into Krautrock unless you have heard Deluxe by Harmonia at least 800 times.

Note the second: You are not into Krautrock unless you have read Krautrocksampler by Julian Cope.

Note the third: You are not into Krautrock unless you ARE Julian Cope.

(Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany)

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the passing of poet Lenore Kandel, a SF beat and anarchist who provoked censorship furor with her graphic poetry compilation The Love Book:

Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful.

Ms. Kandel, a lyric poet and one of the shining lights of San Francisco’s famous counterculture of the ‘60s, died on Oct. 18 in San Francisco. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks earlier.

“I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the war in Vietnam,” said actor Peter Coyote. “Lenore was physically beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous plumpness about her and an absolute serenity.”

(Lenore Kandel via Arthur Magazine)

Via Copyranter:

Pretty scary Ad Creepage currently up in Rio de Janeiro for the Mayan calendar Apocalypse flick, (I hope Woody Harrelson bites it hard) opening here in the States on Friday the 13th, of course. First off, when the Evil Doers next blow up and flood an underground tunnel somewhere in the world, my bet is, that ‘somewhere’ will be ‘here.’ Secondly, our tunnels already leak just fine, thx.

Last night I almost hit a bus crossing in front of me with a giant 2012 sign on the side. Doesn’t get much funnier than that.

Aaaaand OK, I might as well throw in my 2 cents about this one since it’s a hot topic: 2012 is a transition and demarcation point past which our culture will hit a certain no-return-point in shifting towards spirit and away from matter (read, on one level, as: life becoming almost completely Internet-mediated, while economy and physical infrastructure continues to fall apart by dint of being less exciting than Twitter). It is NOT the end of the world and one of the more productive things to think about around the whole issue is why, exactly, people are so addicted to apocalyptic thinking (as Alan Moore pointed out somewhere?

Pastor Eddie D. Smith Sr. explains the use of the Hindu term Namaste to his congregation. Right on!

(Clip via Chai Pilgrimage)

Reverend Billy, an anti-capitalist activist turned anti-capitalist preacher, is a pillar of the New York (and American) activist community. A Coney Island resident, Reverend Billy leads a one-man crusade against consumerism. He even officially wedded a couple I know. Check out this excellent, in-depth interview with the Rev. Billy at Coilhouse:

Q: Where, when and why did you first become politically active?

A: We were always political, the Church of Stop Shopping, which became the Church of Life After Shopping during the recession. I was complaining to the choir that I was screaming ?