The new award-winning book, The Sentimentalists, features the fictitious town of Casablanca, Ontario, Canada, which has been intentionally flooded, and submerged and, well, buried under water, as part of the Saint Lawrence Seaway project, back in 1958. While the town of Casablanca is not real, the fact that ten towns were actually intentionally flooded, submerged, and forever buried under water is all too real. Yes, the St. Lawrence Seaway project actually killed 10 towns. Known as “The Lost Villages”, the flooded and buried villages were Aultsville, Dickinson’s Landing, Farran’s Point, Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Santa Cruz, Sheek’s Island, Wales and Woodlands.

The background is that as the construction of the Moses Saunders Power Dam was being planned, negotiations to relocate the families who lived in the ten villages were underway. In the end, these families were compensated, and relocated, and their villages went to a watery grave.

The negotiations weren’t all smooth, however. Many felt that the value of real estate had been depressed by the upcoming construction of the dam and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the compensation awarded to those relocated was based on those deflated property values.

In any event, it is the history of the Lost Villages that gave birth to Skibsrud’s flooded Casablanca, as one of her main characters, a Vietnam vet, is relocated to the shore of the lake that is Casablanca’s final resting place, by his daughter.

The critical reviews of the book, which is a first novel, have been superlative (if often with the caveat “for a first novel”), while reader reviews have been mixed. Frankly, we think that the reason that Skibsrud’s novel one the coveted Giller Prize is because it treats the issue of the Lost Villages as an integral underlying theme, but that’s just our hunch.

You can get The Sentimentalists from Amazon, where you can buy The Sentimentalists in hard copy or a version of The Sentimentalists for Kindle

You can read more about the Lost Villages here.

Ok, here it is. A brand new, unopened iPad 2. 64GB 3G AT&T. Black. Pics below.

Bid by submitting a comment - that way it will be time-stamped.

Payment by Paypal, or cash if you are local to Boulder, Colorado.

These sell new at the Apple Store or online from Apple for $829 plus tax (and shipping if you order it online) plus you will have to wait more than a month for it to be delivered. So bidding starts at $950. We stood in line for *4* hours to get this (got it while I picked mine up)! Here’s a picture of the line this morning:

Bidding will close tonight at midnight, and I will ship it out tomorrow morning. If you want to have it shipped out today, make me an offer privately, and if it’s enough, I’ll close out the auction and let you have it now. (Email me at amitchell at isipp.com to submit private offers.)

Enjoy! I *love* mine!

First Pluto is excommunicated as a planet, now the signs of the zodiac are given new dates, meaning, say some, that the sign of the zodiac under which you have believed all along you were born is the wrong zodiac sign. Can we rely on nothing celestial?

It seems that due to the moon’s influence on earth, says the Minnesota Planetarium Society, the signs of the zodiac, assigned millenia ago, are no longer accurate. So do you need to change your sign based on the new zodiac dates? Or are the new signs of the zodiac dates just an interesting through experiment?

The zodiac as we know it was developed by ancient Babylonians as long ago as 600 years or more before the birth of Christ. In the past 2500+ years, the moon’s effect on the earth, which creates a bit of a wobble (or, in astronomical terms, “precession”) has caused our points of reference to have shifted some. And so, says Professor Parke Kunkle, on the board of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, “When [astrologers] say that the sun is in Pisces, it’s really not in Pisces.”

And the reason you should care, if you want to care, is that the astrological sign under which you were born is determined by in what sign the sun is on the day of your birth.

Prof. Kunkle expounds:

“In science we deal with a long tradition of fact based investigation. We are not in the business of interpreting the purported relation between the positions of planets and human affairs.

The Earth spins and, like a toy top, the spin axis moves around, pointing in different directions. Today, Earth’s spin axis points toward the pole star, Polaris. Around 3000 BC Earth’s spin axis pointed toward Thuban. Wait 26,000 years and the north star will again be Thuban. Astronomers call this motion of the spin axis precession. About 130 BC, Hipparchus noticed that the Earth’s spin axis had changed directions, so astronomers and astrologers have known about the Earth’s precession for over 2000 years.

But this means that if the sun was “in” a certain constellation on a particular date, it is in a different constellation on that date today. For example, the sun was in Pisces on March 1, 2000 BC but it is in Aquarius on March 1, 2011 AD.”

However, not everybody agrees with the good professor. In fact, says one commentator, pointing out that the very Babylonians who created the zodiac also were very aware of precession, “The stars are markers that drift, but our main points of reference are not directly the stars. They are the equinoxes (both spring and vernal) and the solstices which altogether make the four cardinal points of the zodiac which in turn determine the signs. The stars help us locate those points which define the SIGNS of the Zodiac which remain constant in relation to the equinox point. The CONSTELLATIONS do move about and we take that into consideration when locating planets.”

That said, in case you care, here is the new set of dates for the signs of the zodiac, as propounded by the Minnesota Planetarium Society:

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11
Pisces: March 11-April 18
Aries: April 18-May 13
Taurus: May 13-June 21
Gemini: June 21-July 20
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23
Scorpio: Nov. 23-Dec. 17
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20

And here is the traditional set of zodiac dates:

Capricorn Dec. 22-Jan. 19
Aquarius Jan. 20-Feb 18
Pisces Feb. 19-March 20
Aries March 21-April 19
Taurus April 20-May 20
Gemini May 21-June 20
Cancer June 21-July 22
Leo July 23- Aug. 22
Virgo Aug. 23-Sept. 22
Libra Sept. 23- Oct. 22
Scorpio Oct. 23- Nov. 21
Sagittarius Nov. 22-Dec. 21