Mitt Romney, in a flight full of patriots in their way to DC pic.twitter.com/t9uq3vkCo5

— Non timebo mala (@AncPerl) January 5, 2021

The paper of record reports:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A congressional prayer at Capitol Building took over 24 hours to complete as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver concluded his prayer with amen, awomen, and amen variations of all 5,787 other genders.

“Amen, Awomen, Anonbinary, Agenderqueer, Atwo-spirit, Apolygender… this could take a while,” Rep. Cleaver said. “If anyone needs to go out and get some refreshments, feel free.”

“Adragonspirited, Abuildings, Atater-tots,” he continued, “Aagender, Agenderfluid, Adubstepkin, Agenderneutral, Atransmasculine, Atransfeminine, Awolfkind, Ademiboy, Astonebutch, Asquirrel, Amotoroil, Aqueenbae, Ababyyoda, Amermaidqueenking, Acaptainmarvel, Ahufflepuff.”

“Excuse me,” he said, taking a drink of water.

“Abenedryl, Aabacus, Atranspolyqueergreyacepokemon…”

After the prayer seemed to be finished, congresspeople tried to get up and leave, but Rep. Cleaver then said he was going to list all the gods he was praying to for clarification. “Yahweh, Allah, Joseph Smith, Brahma, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Thor, Odin, Isaac Asimov, Ra, Zeus, Loki, Isis, Xenu, the Force, the Lords of Kobol, Din, Nayru, Farore…” This went on for a while.

A new congressional rule will only allow Republicans to lead prayer for the sake of time, since they’ll pray to one God and conclude with “Amanlyman.”

holy shit it's real.https://t.co/0HKZlCkFaJ pic.twitter.com/20RMRmWpwK

— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) January 4, 2021

——————————–

So it turns out Kamala Harris lifted her "Fweedom" story from a 1965 Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, by Alex Haley. Much thanks to @EngelsFreddie for spotting the similarityhttps://t.co/zDONW4Ueqs pic.twitter.com/yQuWZHYEMz

— Q. Anthony (ɔpɛ asem) (@andraydomise) January 4, 2021

HT: Ed Driscoll.

Smithsonian reports on another British coin hoard. Metal detectors really work, don’t they?

This September, a British birder who’d stopped on the edge of a farmer’s field to watch a buzzard and a pair of magpies stumbled onto a trove of 2,000-year-old Celtic coins worth an estimated £845,000 (around $1,150,000 USD).

As first reported by Julian Evan-Hart of Treasure Hunting magazine, the unnamed bird-watcher—who is also an amateur metal detectorist—unearthed the stash of some 1,300 gold coins in a field in the eastern English countryside. Dated to between roughly 40 and 50 A.D., the cache is the largest hoard of Iron Age Celtic coins found in the United Kingdom since 2008, when a car mechanic excavated a stash of 850 ancient staters, or handmade money, in Suffolk.

“I saw the glint of gold and realized it was a beautiful Celtic gold stater, which made me sit down in sheer shock,” the birder tells Treasure Hunting, as quoted by the Daily Mail’s Luke May. “I then spotted the second coin two feet away and rushed home to get my [metal detector].”

Upon his return, the man found that his detector produced a “really strong” signal—a sure sign that more treasures lingered below the surface. Digging down about 18 inches, he extracted a copper vessel brimming with gold coins dated back to the era when Celtic queen Boudica led a massive uprising against the Romans.

“I had to sit down to get my breath back,” the treasure hunter says. “I had only come out for a walk and found a Celtic hoard.”

Once the man overcame his initial shock, he filled two large shopping bags with the cache of coins and returned home. Then, he promptly contacted local authorities to report the find. If experts deem the discovery treasure, they will offer it to a museum and potentially offer a share of the reward to the finder. (Current guidelines define treasure very narrowly, but as Caroline Davies reports for the Guardian, the U.K. government is working to expand these parameters in order to better protect the country’s national heritage items.)

“The coins form a substantial if not enormous contribution to our academic numismatic knowledge and will undoubtedly be subject to much assessment over the coming year,” says Jules Evan-Hart, editor of Treasure Hunting, in a statement quoted by the New York Post’s Hannah Sparks. “It is possible that [the coins] may form a deposit as a ‘war chest’ for Boudica’s eastern campaigns.”

RTWT

The Sun reports that you can be an ordained Methodist minister and be elected to Congress and not understand the meaning of the word “Amen” concluding Christian prayers.

A democratic congressman has sparked fury after ending a prayer with “amen and awomen”.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, an ordained United Methodist minister from Missouri, also mentioned the Hindu god Brahma while praying at the opening of Congress.

He said: “We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and ‘god’ known by many names by many different faiths.”

“Amen and awomen,” he said as he closed the prayer.

RTWT

Amen comes from Old English, via ecclesiastical Latin, via Greek amēn, from Hebrew ‘āmēn ‘truth, certainty’, and is used adverbially as an expression of agreement. It adopted in the Septuagint as a solemn expression of belief or affirmation.

Colossal has photos of the recently discovered Amazonian petroglyphs: Tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans, made up to 12,600 years ago, found on an eight-mile rock surface along the Guayabero River in the Colombian Amazon.

The paintings include drawings of large mammals, birds, fish, lizards, handprints, and masked figures of dancing humans. The ancient paintings also record interactions between humans and extinct species of giant Ice Age mammals like mastodons.

Alison Krauss with Yo-Yo Ma.

A shockingly well-preserved woolly rhinoceros has emerged from the thawing muck of the Russian permafrost, reports Valeria Sukhova for the Siberian Times.

Valerii Plotnikov, a mammoth researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, tells RT’s Jonny Tickle that this may be the best-preserved example of the extinct Ice Age mammal ever found.

“There are soft tissues in the back of the carcass, possibly genitals and part of the intestine,” he tells RT. “This makes it possible to study the excreta, which will allow us to reconstruct the paleoenvironment of that period.”

Plotnikov tells local Russian outlet Yakutia 24 that the woolly rhino specimen includes all four limbs, its horn and even some of its woolly coat, according to report from Reuters. The scientist also says wear marks on the horn suggest the creature may have used its bony protrusion to gather food, perhaps scraping away snow to reach tender greenery underneath.

Wear marks on the horn suggest the creature may have used its bony protrusion to gather food, perhaps scraping away snow to reach tender greenery underneath.

Plotnikov tells the Siberian Times that the animal looks to have died young at three or four years of age and likely drowned. “The gender of the animal is still unknown,” he adds.

The prehistoric beast was found in the Yakutia region in August and is thought to have roamed the Arctic plains between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago, Plotnikov tells the Siberian Times. The Associated Press reports that radiocarbon dating tests should deliver a more precise estimate of its age once the ancient carcass reaches a lab.

Emma Hughes, in the inestimably excellent Country Life, looks at the literary cure for the common hangover.

First, she quotes Kingsley Amis’s description of the unhappy problem:

‘Dixon was alive again,’ it begins, with biblical solemnity. ‘Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.’

Of the proposed cures, myself, I’d prefer Papa Hemingway’s formula:

If Jeeves’s remedy is the liquid equivalent of a rap on the knuckles, Ernest Hemingway’s is a karate chop to the kidneys. True to form, he christened it Death in the Afternoon. ‘Pour one jigger of absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness,’ he instructs—and then, even more ominously: ‘Drink three to five of these slowly.’

Death in the Afternoon

This one might sound tempting in the wake of Christmas parties, when you’re feeling festively emboldened and actually have the component parts to hand. However, all but the steeliest are likely to take one look at the noxious brew and heave it straight down the sink. Still, the very act of mixing a Death in the Afternoon is guaranteed to perk you up a bit—if only because it reminds you that things could be an awful lot worse.

RTWT