TuffyDog Blog

This is a nice little quiz from a gardening blog that I read. I am proud to be a Sunflower.

A recent Harris Interactive poll of American adults has found that the Bible is the most popular book in the country among both men and women. The rest of the top 10 are some of my favorites that have topped best-seller lists for years:

• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

• Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien

• Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

• The Stand by Stephen King

• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

• Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

This is copied from the Pinellas County Government website.

Buried in the sand along the shoreline, a prehistoric pine canoe was found on Weedon Island Preserve, located on the southeast region of the peninsula that is Pinellas County on Tampa Bay. With the ancient discovery, a mystery unfolds: how was quick-eroding wood preserved in the very aggressive salt and sand environment?

An early mode of transportation, the canoe is a unique artifact attributed to the late Weedon Island Culture of the Florida Gulf Coast dwellers of the Manasota Period. Measuring 39-feet, 11-in. in length, but believed to have been upwards of 45 feet in total, the pine canoe holds the distinction of the longest prehistoric canoe ever found in Florida. The canoe features a raised bow that indicates the canoe was used on open water. Under the canoe, a pine pole, used perhaps for paddling, poling, and/or docking the canoe, was also unearthed and dated to the same prehistoric period, approximately 1,100 years ago.

The principal archaeological investigator is Phyllis E. Kolianos, M.A., R.P.A, Pinellas County’s education center manager, who worked with local Pinellas County resident, Harold Koran was the first to discover the canoe. Since the discovery, Pinellas County has arduously taken every step to document, conserve and protect the canoe, the pole and the non-peat environment that is the archaeological site. Only a pre-excavation dig was performed, along with thorough radiocarbon dating and wood sampling, which confirmed the wood as pine, a prevalent local timber after which the county of Pinellas is named.

A comprehensive excavation of the canoe and museum preservation have not yet been determined as numerous resources, both financial and equipment, are needed.

“This discovery expands our understanding and the significance of the not-well-known people of the Weedon Island Culture,” said Dr. Bruce Rinker, Environmental Lands director for Pinellas County. “A tremendous thank you is owed to the team involved in researching and documenting this discovery, including Dr. Robert Austin, Dr. Donna Ruhl and the Friends of Weedon Island, who helped provide supplies and radiocarbon dating.”

History

Lasting some 800 years, the Weedon Island Culture evolved out of a segment of the Manasota Culture, an ancient population that settled along Florida’s rich estuaries and central Gulf Coast 2,500 years ago. The society increased in population and eventually changed in social structure to become the Safety Harbor Culture that met the first Europeans to the area. By the mid-1700s, the Creek Indians entered Florida from Alabama and Georgia and became known as the Seminoles. After the Civil War, Weedon Island became the homestead of early settlers and entered a colorful modern history until recognized and established as an important, historical Pinellas County preserve.

About Weedon Island Preserve and the Cultural and Natural History Center

Today, Weedon Island Preserve is an expansive 3,700 acres, comprised of marine habitats with some uplands—a site rich in Native American history. The preserve is open to the public from dawn to dusk seven days a week and offers many outdoor activities. The 17,000-square-foot Cultural and Natural History Center is open Wednesdays to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but closed Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays. Admission is free. The preserve is located at 1800 Weedon Drive N.E. in St. Petersburg. For more information on the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center and the Pinellas County Environmental Lands Division, call (727) 453-6500 or visit www.pinellascounty.org/environment.

See Weedon Island Preserve Pictures for more information about Weedon Island Preserve.

A prehistoric, pre-Columbian canoe has been found at Weedon Island.  It is made from a single pine tree and is 45 feet long.

Kolianos said carbon dating of the canoe shows it to be about 1,100 years old.

Long before Sunken Gardens and Tropicana Field and the Don CeSar, there was the Weedon Island culture, she said.

“This was a heavily populated area,” she said. The culture blossomed between the 3rd century and 1200.

The canoe first was found seven years ago when a beachcomber searching for old bottles spotted part of the vessel protruding from the ground.

Because the preserve didn’t have a history center at the time, the discovery went unreported for years, Kolianos said. Finally, it came to light, and a team of state and local archaeologists including Kolianos mounted a plan to excavate the vessel.

In December, about 10 archaeology students, volunteers and state archaeologists plodded through the mangroves to the site. They quickly built a makeshift dam with sandbags and plastic to keep the tide out, and they began digging. They uncovered the vessel’s rotting gunwales and dug beneath it to take measurements. Under the keel, they found a long pole about 3 inches in diameter. The pole could have been used to propel the canoe, or it might have been used to roll it onto the shore.

Read the rest and see the picture at tbo.com.

There is information and pictures of canoe trails and boardwalks on TuffyDog’s Weedon Island page.

We have been receiving a lot of backscatter lately.  There have not been any complaints from our visitors or anyone else but we want you to know that we do not send any unrequested emails to anyone.  This has been in the news a lot lately and we are just being clear about our policy.  You may read the privacy policy for TuffyDog.com here.

This is from a recent news story at Yahoo news:

100 E-mail Bouncebacks? You’ve Been Backscattered.

Spammers like to put fake information in their e-mail messages in order to sneak them past e-mail filters. Because e-mail filters now just delete messages that come from nonexistent domains, the spammers like to make their messages look like they come from real e-mail addresses. That means, if your e-mail address has been published on the Web somewhere, you’re a prime candidate for backscattering.

The spammer finds your address, or sometimes even guesses it, and then puts it in the “from” line of his messages, sending them out to hundreds of thousands of recipients. When the spam gets sent to an address that is no longer active, it can sometimes be bounced back… to you.

Although Sophos estimates that backscatter makes up just two percent or three percent of all spam, antispam vendors say these messages are on the rise lately.

Users often think that the backscatter may be a sign that their computer has been hacked and is sending out spam messages, said Brad Bartman, a global support manager with Text 100, a public relations consultancy. “They look at it and they’re like, ‘Whoa, is my PC infected with a virus?’” he said.

Read the rest.

Thank you and please enjoy your visit.  We do answer emails from our visitors.

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