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At a time when black magic was relatively common, two curses involving snakes were cast, one targeting a senator and the other an animal doctor, says a Spanish researcher who has just deciphered the 1,600-year-old curses.
Both curses feature a depiction of a deity, possibly the Greek goddess Hekate, with serpents coming out of her hair, possibly meant to strike at the victims. Both curses contain Greek invocations similar to examples known to call upon Hekate.
The two curses, mainly written in Latin and inscribed on thin lead tablets, would have been created by two different people late in the life of the Roman Empire. Both tablets were rediscovered in 2009 at the Museo Archeologico Civico di Bologna in Italy, and were originally acquired by the museum during the late 19th century. Although scholars aren't sure where the tablets originated, after examining and deciphering the curses, they know who victims of the curses were.
Kill the pig
One of the curses targets a Roman senator named Fistus and appears to be the only known example of a cursed senator. The other curse targets a veterinarian named Porcello. Ironically, Porcello is the Latin word for pig.
Celia Sanchez Natalias, a doctoral student at the University of Zaragoza, explained that Porcello was probably his real name. "In the world of curse tablets, one of the things that you have to do is to try to identify your victim in a very, very exact way."
Sanchez Natalias added that it isn't certain who cursed Porcello or why. It could be for either personal or professional reasons. "Maybe this person was someone that (had) a horse or an animal killed by Porcello's medicine," said Sanchez Natalias.
"Destroy, crush, kill, strangle Porcello and wife Maurilla. Their soul, heart, buttocks, liver ..." part of it reads. The iconography on the tablet actually shows a mummified Porcello, his arms crossed (as is the deity) and his name written on both of his arms. [See images of the curse tablets]
The fact that both the deity and Porcello have their arms crossed is important. Sanchez Natalias believes that the spell forced the deity, and thus Porcello, to become bound. "This comparison may be understood in two ways: either 'just as the deity is bound, so will Porcello be' or else 'until Porcello is bound the deity will stay bound,'" she writes in a recent edition of the journal Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
May all his limbs dissolve ?
The case of Fistus, a Roman senator, is also remarkable. The senate in ancient Rome was a place of great wealth and, earlier in Roman history, was a place of considerable power.
By the time this curse was written toward the end of the Roman Empire, the influence of the senate had diminished in favor of the emperor, the army and the imperial bureaucracy.
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Fistus would still have been a person of some wealth, however, and whoever wrote the curse had it in for him. The Latin expression for "crush" is used at least four times in the curse. "Crush, kill Fistus the senator," part of the curse reads, "May Fistus dilute, languish, sink and may all his limbs dissolve ..."
Again, Sanchez Natalias isn't sure of the motives behind the curse; but whatever they were, even by the standard of modern-day political attack ads, this was a nasty senatorial blow.
Sanchez Natalias' translation and study of the senator curse is detailed in two recent articles published in the German journal Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
? 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
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Mrs. Eastwood, star of a new reality show, talks family, boy bands and her famous husband in a candid interview about her newly-debuted television show on the E! network.
Mrs. Eastwood, star of new reality show ?Mrs. Eastwood & Company,? talks family and boy bands. In this Jan. 31, 2010 file photo, Clint Eastwood, right, arrives with wife, Dina Eastwood, on the red carpet in London.
Joel Ryan/AP
EnlargeDina Eastwood has heard the question repeatedly: Why put her family and superstar husband Clint Eastwood on display for a reality TV show, generally the province of D-list or wannabe celebrities?
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The answer is simple, she said. "Mrs. Eastwood & Company," the E! series debuted Sunday, is her bid for stardom ? not for herself, but for a vocal group, Overtone, that has become her passion.
"I had a midlife crisis and I adopted a boy band," said the breezily candid Eastwood. "I was edgy, I didn't know what I was doing. Clint was accelerating how many movies a year he was doing. Our youngest daughter was getting to the point she doesn't want to be around me as much."
Eastwood, 46, discovered Overtone at a concert in Capetown, South Africa, where her husband of 16 years was making the 2009 film "Invictus" with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. The six-member group ended up a prominent part of the movie's soundtrack and Dina Eastwood made the leap to manager.
"They're very good-looking and the best vocal group Clint and I have ever heard," she said. "I was thinking what a cute little reality show about a haggard mom who doesn't know what she's doing, leading this cute band around trying to ... get them successful."
Overtone singer Eduard Leonard said the group is awed by the opportunity and by their patrons, especially Clint Eastwood.
"At first it was terribly intimidating to be in his presence," Leonard said. "We still have to pinch ourselves."
Although Dina Eastwood pitched "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" as a showcase for Overtone, she decided the gender balance, of a half-dozen men and her, was off. So the "& Company" was expanded to include Morgan, her 15-year-old daughter with Eastwood, and her stepdaughter Francesca, 18, (Clint Eastwood's daughter with actress Frances Fisher).
The teenagers were game ? reality TV is in their generation's DNA, as Dina Eastwood sees it ? but the Eastwoods and Fisher vetted the girls' involvement before deciding it was appropriate for them, she said.
Also in the mix are Groucho Marx's granddaughter (married to Dina Eastwood's brother, Dominic Ruiz, Overtone's road manager); a tart-tongued housekeeper who could have come straight from Sitcom Central Casting; a pet menagerie including a tortoise and a pig; and access to the Eastwood's Carmel home on California's greatest stretch of coastline.
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by Jason Jenkins, Investment U Research
Monday, May 21, 2012
No Social Security. No Medicare. No pensions. Higher life expectancy. Retirement income is harder to attain than ever, but it can be done.
A generation ago, it was easy. Case in point: My Dad spent 35 years working for Bethlehem Steel. He was a union man that knew his pension and retired health benefits were coming after he called it quits. On top of that, he would also file for social security to give him an added boost in retirement income. And that?s how it would be for the rest of his years.
Then that reality changed. For the most part, the private sector realized that pensions ? and the actuaries that ran them ? put a hurting on their bottom line. Workers would be OK because those 401(k) plans that Congress created finally started to really catch on in the 1990s. Thirteen or 14 years ago a 401(k) would burst off the charts with tech funds and when you wanted to play it safe a money market fund would give you 5%. This saving for retirement stuff wasn?t so hard. Can you say, ?The good old days???
Let?s fast forward to 2012. We just saw the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression four years ago. The ball game has changed. Gone are the days when retirement was just simple math. You knew exactly how much retirement income Social Security, savings and your pension would deliver. Then, you would cut back any unaffordable expenses when you hit 65.
With Social Security and Medicare?s future uncertain due to our budget crisis and a market that makes your employer benefit retirement plans remind you of a rollercoaster, the retirement planning process went from pretty simple to very complicated.
The current landscape has caused a great deal of pessimism concerning the retirement years. This new retirement reality is reflected in the fact that only 14% of Americans polled in the 2012 Retirement Confidence Survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute said they were ?very confident they will have enough money to live comfortably in retirement.?
?Will I or we have enough money to maintain a comfortable lifestyle and make adjustments that may be necessary once I stop working?? This question is a burden weighing on the hearts of many. More than half of those surveyed said they had not even tried to calculate how much retirement income they will need.
As you enter that stage where you?re really thinking about how to use retirement money for living expenses, you probably need to come up with a spending plan. Figure out the income you will have and what costs you will be paying out to help make your retirement income last over the long haul. This plan cannot be based on wishful thinking. Let?s be brutally honest. Let?s take into account the following:
There is a risk these days of your nest egg running out while you are still alive and kicking.
Technology and the knowledge of how to live better have us living longer. According to the Society of Actuaries, at age 65:
To sum it up, this money better last cause chances are that you will.
Given your investments, rates of return, life expectancy and amount of risk you?re taking in your 401(k) portfolio, how much money will you need? The run-of-the-mill retirement model will tell you to assume you?ll need to replace 80% of your pre-retirement income. For most people going through this process, many find that there is a gap between projected income and expenses during retirement.
Your plan?s possible ?funding gap? will show that some changes in behavior may be necessary to meet objectives. This could be accomplished by increased contributions to retirement plans, a larger allocation to stocks or greater outside savings. It is essential that you determine how you will fill the gap through creating your retirement spending plan.
You need to determine a strategy for using all of your investment accounts and IRAs to bridge the gap. You might want to start by taking the following steps:
For the moment, all of this is preliminary planning because Social Security and Medicare are wild cards.
If your gap really scares you, you also can take these additional steps now:
Allocate your retirement assets to accomplish the complementary strategies of asset preservation and growth. You?ve heard this from Investment U before. Because different asset classes are imperfectly correlated ? some zig, while others zag ? our approach allows you to boost returns while reducing your portfolio?s volatility. True Asset Allocation should be the foundation stone of your whole investment strategy. It?s critical to your long-term financial health.
To do this, you use a special asset allocation percentage among large and small stocks, foreign shares, real estate investment trusts (REITs), gold stocks and three different types of bonds (high grade corporates, junk bonds and inflation-adjusted treasuries). The actual percentages run as follows:
Remember that just sticking your money in money market accounts and Treasuries doesn?t cut it anymore. According to the Society of Actuaries, from 1980 to 2007, annual inflation in the United States has averaged 3.5%, so keeping some of your money in equities is vital if you expect your retirement funds to last by keeping pace with inflation.
Finally, a good idea would be to keep your retirement funds in separate ?buckets.?
Choose the retirement assets that you will draw down first with consideration for tax advantages. Consider withdrawals from taxable accounts first and then tax-deferred accounts such as traditional IRAs, 401(k) plans, 457 plans and the like. Roth IRAs should be drawn down last to allow the tax-free earnings to continue growing as long as possible.
I hope this is a start and gets rid of some of that pessimism.
Good Investing,
Jason Jenkins
You Choose to Outlive Your Retirement Income,VN:F [1.9.16_1159]
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Miranda Leitsinger/msnbc
Nan Wigmore, 75, brought a walker and a sign to Chicago to protest at the NATO summit.
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com
CHICAGO -- Nan Wigmore brought her walker and packed her sign, ?Grateful Great Grandmas Circle The Wagons, Support Occupy,? and rode on a bus for some three days, sleeping in the same clothes, to make it to the NATO protests in Chicago.
The 75-year-old from Portland, Ore., says she couldn't imagine being anywhere else despite the discomfort of her journey.?
?My feelings are too deep to keep me in my old comfortable place, so I had to learn some new things and that means to move out of my comfort zone,? Wigmore said as she sipped a hot chocolate late Friday after a few hundred protesters met at a downtown Chicago plaza in the lead-up to the two-day summit that begins Sunday.
She was one of hundreds of demonstrators who got free bus rides from National Nurses United, a coalition of nurses unions that held a rally earlier Friday in Chicago calling for a transaction tax on Wall Street.?But Wigmore stands out from the crowd with her sign and walker.
A few protesters at the plaza greeted her and shared laughs amid the thunder of helicopters clattering overhead and people playing drums.?
After one man told her she was ?amazing? and a ?force to be reckoned with,? she later said: ?I?m a woman walking with a sign, period ? I?m following the heroics, the courage of generations back really, you know, we?re just continuing what was going on.?
Wigmore, who was an anti-nuclear activist, said she got involved in the Occupy movement as it picked up steam back home.
A great-grandmother to ?less than 15,? grandmother to 12 and mother of five, she said her youngest child called her ?hero? but there were others in her family who had differing points of view.
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For her, there was nothing more important than being in Chicago protesting against NATO, calling for money to go to health care, for example, and not to war. She said she was ?very serious? about her protesting and did not intend to stop.
?As a matter of fact, if I lose my life in the process of all this, it?s the best way I would let myself go,? she said.
And to those who may wonder why she is out on the streets protesting, she has a question of her own in turn: ?I?d say, ?Are you certain that everything is the way you want it??"
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DETROIT (AP) ? Chrysler is recalling nearly 87,000 Jeep Wranglers in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere due to a risk of fires.
The recall affects only Wranglers from the 2010 model year that have automatic transmissions and were built before July 14, 2010, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted Saturday on its website.
Debris can get caught between a plate that protects the transmission and the catalytic converter, causing a fire. A catalytic converter is part of the exhaust system and uses heat and precious metals to control pollution.
Chrysler knows of at least 14 complaints of fires caused by the problem with 2010 Wranglers. The company says it doesn't know of any injuries. It said debris can get trapped when the SUVs are driven off-road or through tall brush.
Chrysler, which makes the classic Wrangler and other Jeeps, will fix the problem free of charge by replacing the plate with a bar so debris doesn't get caught.
The recall affects about 68,000 Wranglers in the U.S., 6,000 in Canada, 1,500 in Mexico and about 11,000 in other countries, Chrysler spokesman Eric Mayne said. Chrysler will contact all the owners by mail. Recall work is expected to begin this month.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also checked Wranglers from the 2007 through 2012 model years and determined that only the 2010 models had the debris problem. Mayne said the 2010 Wranglers had a transmission plate and catalytic converter that were configured differently than the Wranglers from the other model years.
NHTSA said in documents that it had received 14 complaints of Wrangler fires from the other model years, but Mayne said there was no pattern or common cause in those fires.
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