As I said, it’s fun diving down the rabbit hole looking for historical documents. Since Facebook isn’t that old, even by internet standards, there is a lot of great info one can find that was posted way back when. Why is it fascinating? Because Zuckerberg and co., thanks to Fincher and Sorkin, is now infamous.

I don’t really care to drag out the old Zuckerberg sweated during this video link because, really, who cares? He sweat a little because his hoodie was too hot.

I like this sort of thing — an interview with Mark Zuckerberg in Newsweek in 2004 which opens this way:

Winter 2004 — Current Magazine recently spoke with Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of thefacebook.com—now at almost 300 schools and attracting one million users. Zuckerberg, currently on leave from Harvard, talked about the popularity of thefacebook, his latest project and his favorite Greek hero.

Currently on leave from Harvard! Love this quote:

CM: So are you a beer guy or a mixed-drink kind of guy?
MZ: Beer. [Laughing] But I’m underage. I don’t drink. And my friends all make fun of me because I don’t have a fake ID. They’re like, “You can make websites but you can’t make a fake ID?”

Two new movies about Facebook are coming out, or have come out, right about now. One is Catfish, and the other is The Social Network. The latter is, I think, probably going to be turn out to be 2010′s one true masterpiece to rule them all. Not sure. Inception is right up there too. And there are other great films 2010 has produced, like Blue Valentine, Another Year, Inside Job, etc.

But Social Network and Catfish involve real people. Catfish is a big pill to swallow that these filmmaker dudes actually had some faux online relationship with this woman pretending to be three different people. Well, the weird thing is that if you search for the woman’s name, Angela Wesselman-Pierce you will find a great many websites out there but most, if not all, have been removed. She has been scrubbed almost completely from the net. This is very bizarre. I don’t know how she managed to erase her paper trail but she did.

The even weirder thing is that her name will pop up as a cast member for the film Catfish. She supposedly was cooperating with them (money involved?) but has since pulled her name and is suing them. I don’t even have all of the facts. All I was trying to do was a little internet stalking.

I don’t really believe these dudes didn’t know what they were walking into. It all seems very staged to me.

And a Zuckerberg stalking DOES turn up interesting info. Like William Randolph Hearst, the Zuck in The Social Network is not the real dude. But it’s still fascinating to internet stalk him for buried info. WAY TOO FUN.

Angela Pierce or Wesselman-pierce has all sorts of weird blogs she started and they’re by invite only, like http://www.incrediblyordinary.com/

Here is her flickr photo stream –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40483951@N02/

And her painterly website:

http://www.artbyapierce.com/

It says this on her painterly website:

About Me
I’m a Mom.
I like to paint, take photos and write.
I like Blue Cheese salad dressing.
I thank God for giving me the talents I have and for giving me the strength to overcome the challenges in my life.
I hope you enjoy viewing my work as much as I enjoyed creating it.

I am going to blame the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast for my recent obsession with Queen Elizabeth and her randy poppa, Henry XIII. I think I was kind of fascinated with Queen Liz anyway, but something took hold of my imagination reading up on King Hank. It was just so weird and corrupt and tragic, all around – how Henry couldn’t have a son, but might have had a son with Mary Boleyn (this has been disputed but is the subject of The Other Boleyn Girl). Anne Boleyn herself is fascinating because once Henry executed her by chopping off her head, if you can imagine, it set a dangerous pattern. Henry, despite it all, wasn’t all that different from a royal serial killer, when you think about it. Of course, it was buried in God and duty and all of that. It’s strange that no woman could give him the son he so desperately wanted, but stranger still that the one daughter he did manage to bring into the world turned out to be none other than Queen Elizabeth, arguably England’s greatest ruler in history.

It is also strange and fascinating that she never married nor gave birth. Not so strange given what happened to her mother Anne, but strange in many ways nonetheless.

Anyway, so I’ve been reading this book:

By the way, Stuff You Missed in History Class is addictive. If you start listening to it you might never stop!

This is the most amazing thing. A teeny tiny humming bird built her little nest – which is about the size of a golf ball, if you can imagine that. And inside, are two little humming birds. They have to be about as big as a fingertip. I recently learned much about the precarious lives of humming birds on this PBS Nature episode, Magic in the Air.

Sad little facts about hummingbirds:

They have to eat nectar constantly or they can’t even survive the night.
They can hover, mid-air.
They have to lower their heart rate and puff up at night to prevent their own death.
They are great nest builders and the males have some really really cute behaviors for attracting a mate.

So, I got tipped off to the Phoebe-cam where you can watch her sitting on her little hatchlings.¬†¬† She’s so cute. Such a good little mommy. She must fly off, eat some food, fly back. I haven’t seen her feeding her babies in real time yet. But I’m sure I will at some point.

Here are some screen caps of the little babies:

It all started when I found a book on homesteading. It just so happened that the book I picked up had some letters from members of the Donner party. And that was all it took. Down the rabbit hole I went in search of all available information on the Donner party – who were they, how did they get into such bad straights? Where exactly were they when most of them died frozen and starving in the snow? Did they really resort to eating human flesh as has been rumored? Were the recent stories about there being no proof of cannibalism to be believed (turns out, no, they’re not). The letters specifically said that many of them stayed alive by eating flesh. Those who didn’t felt proud of this fact.

I found many great sites on Donner info, like the Donner Party Library, but the best one is the Donner blog.

The Donner doc done by PBS’ The American Experience is on YouTube. You can watch the whole thing if you’ve a mind.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1ceO0gtlJ4[/youtube]

I thought when that quieted in my mind it was all over with. But then I happened to catch the film Alive on cable recently. It all started over again. The plane crash in the Andes mountains in 1972. The movie isn’t bad – Ethan Hawke has never been better, really. Oh and if you think you’re afraid of flying…I hate planes. I am not emotionally mature enough to tolerate the intense fear. Anyway, so here’s a cheery clip of Alive. I think you can actually watch the whole film on YouTube as well:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyoh84rdOrk[/youtube]

After a very long week, at long last Storm Over Everest aired on Frontline last night. I must say, as excited as I was about this particular Frontline (though I do love the series) I had mixed feelings about the Breashears doc. It was an interesting and perhaps untold account of the tragic day on the mountain in 1996, especially since a couple of the participants spoke of the events for the first time, most notably, Sandy Pittman. It looked like Breashears was telling what Jon Krakauer didn’t with his magnificent Into Thin Air. The problem with that, though, is that the doc didn’t do what Frontline does best – it didn’t investigate what went wrong but rather told how scary and frightening it was. We needed that tell-tale Frontline narrator asking key questions about what went wrong.

Also, I don’t know why they didn’t talk about Rob Hall’s famous final words to his wife. Was it because most people interested in the story have already heard what Hall said? Or was Breashears more interested in the participants’ experience of the events than the events themselves? Either way, he made a stunning film, one I will probably watch again very soon.

The choice to re-create the high winds on the mountain that night was truly the best thing about Storm Over Everest. Who hasn’t imagined what it must have been like, how bad it must have been to grind the climbers to a halt. Breashears did a great job of showing, rather than telling. I suppose I felt that with the appearance of Sandy Hill and all I expected more of the controversies to be discussed and they were just sort of left out. It was, perhaps, a kind decision by the filmmaker but it came at a cost.

The website is a wealth of Everest resources. You can also watch the entire film online.

With my obsession with all things Everest continuing without pause, I am happy to report that Frontline will be airing Storm Over Everest this Tuesday night, May 13. Dang, talk about timing! The doc was made by David Breashears, who was the guy on the mountain back in 1996 on the IMAX team. His team ended up helping many of the stranded climbers, especially when the hideous South African team failed to offer up any help at all. Breashears has summited Everest 11 times by now but he says that tragic day in 1996 continues to haunt him. I’m not sure if Jon Krakauer or Sandy Hill will be interviewed. Hill was a bit of a joke in social circles after Krakauer’s book outed her to be a socialite only there to get Scott Fischer some publicity. She was seen being short-roped up the mountain at a crucial juncture.

At any rate, good old Beck Weathers will be interviewed. This is a guy who laid in the ice and was left for dead. Snowblind and frostbitten he somehow rose from near-death and walked back to camp. It was for Weathers that a brave pilot chose to fly up there and risk his own life. What a night that must have been to live through; it is no wonder that Breashears and others remain haunted by it. I myself am haunted by it anyway. I’m trying to prevent myself from re-reading Into Thin Air. Emma, my lovely child, re-reads books all the time. I think she’s read The Deathly Hollows at least three times. My younger sister also has been known to re-read her favorite Stephen King books. I don’t think I’ve ever re-read a book. I’ve certainly watched films repeatedly.

I probably will read the Krakauer book again in case I missed some crucial details the first time. And anyway, there isn’t a lot of information about that Everest tragedy. A few movies and a couple of books. The TV movie of Into Thin Air is pretty awful. Someone could make a magnificent one with enough money, although it is pretty sad. The sinking of Titanic was sad too and look how that turned out.

It’s a funny thing, I often find myself with an obsession of one thing or another. I’m never aware of it until it strikes and it always strikes hard. Once I’m infected I must find out everything there is to know about the thing, whatever it is. It was most recently knitting. Once I have satisfied my curiosity I either continue to be obsessed for years, sometimes decades, or else it drops off. Knitting has dropped off, I’m sad to report but perhaps I will pick it back up again. No, this week, this day, it is Mount Everest. More to the point: the desire to climb, the mystery of and most importantly, the ease with which the mountain seems to take the lives of climbers both experienced and inexperienced. My brother-in-law gave me Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air which is what sparked the present obsession with all things Mount Everest.

The obsession has become such that I am currently monitoring the present expeditions, of which there are many, this being the time period that most climbers take to the highest peak in the world, and the target summit push for most of them is May 10, which is, of course, when 12 people died during the tragic 1996 climb, which is what Into Thin Air is about. We are approaching the big moment and this website has links to all of the current expeditions, among them, Mountain Madness, which was Scott Fischer’s company making a big show that Spring. Fischer was the only one on his team who died and he was quite famous and beloved in the world of mountaineering.

Have I ever been climbing? Nope. Do I ever want to climb Mt. Everest? Well…that’s a tough question. I can understand the desire to do it, to take on something that challenging. In all ways, I understand it. But I am probably too old to start now and as a mom I can’t really take the risk. But I will say that I understand it.

Into Thin Air follows Krakauer’s assignment by Outside Magazine to cover this idea of guided tours up the mountain. Rob Hall, the leader of his expedition (also died), believed he could, with proper planning, bring anyone to the top of Everest. With the help of Sherpas (a bizarre part of the whole thing I think you have to witness to really understand), Hall’s plan included a two-month trek. First, get to Base Camp. Next, slowly make your brain and blood and body used to the high altitude. That part of it does not sound fun and is, in fact, what makes this kind of climbing so dangerous, among other things. Our bodies, nor the bodies of any mammals, were not made to breathe at such low oxygen levels. I told you I was obsessed.

So they were to climb up to Camp 1, then back down. Then up to Camp 2 and then back down. They bravely took on the Icefall, where pillars of ice can come crashing down at any time and kill you. They did all of this until at last, around midnight, when they were all sick as dogs, dizzy, skinny and almost dead already, they had to do the final push towards the summit. Naturally, so many things went wrong. Among them, a freak storm that came out of nowhere and was so severe climbers could only see about two feet in front them, this on a terrain where one wrong turn can send you tumbling down the face of the mountain, thousands and thousands of feet.

Another problem, they didn’t stick to their plan to turn around, no matter what, by 2pm. They couldn’t because of various other problems, like too many climbers hitting the same spot at once and delaying things hours – every delay meant more badly needed oxygen gas in the tank wasted. The Sherpas had not gone ahead and laid the rope line, as they were supposed to have done and that meant the climbers had to do it, which meant more delays. No one could have known the storm was coming and maybe without the storm they would have all been fine. There is no way to know.

Krakauer was one of three of his team to hit the summit by 2pm and he was given permission to head back down. As he writes, it isn’t the going up that kills people most often; it’s the coming back down. In their “summit fever” to get to the top they use up all of their reserves of oxygen, of energy and thus, often there is nothing left to get them back down again. Krakauer had a very difficult time making it back to his tent. By then, he had become delirious, another bizarre effect of altitude sickness and not one of the worst but can be deadly.

The storm hit just before he got to his tent and by then, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and many of the other climbers were up high on the summit or near it and stuck in the dangerous storm. Eventually, Hall and many others were simply die. Krakauer and the survivors lived to tell the tale and continue to be haunted by the events of that day on Everest. It is so fascinating to me I ran to ebay and bought the IMAX DVD (an IMAX team was also heading to Everest that season to make the movie about it), a 2001 movie of Into Thin Air, which I know is going to be really bad, and a Discovery three-part series on the dangers of climbing Everest.

So, why am I so obsessed with this? Because it’s there. No, I don’t really know why. I know that these past few days my daughter and I were stricken with walking Pneumonia. Breathing has been difficult for me and so I felt a kind of kinship with those sucking for breath. But part of it is Krakauer’s writing. He’s so good at it and makes it all so interesting I wish I had the book to read all over again. I may also read Into the Wild but it’s an even more depressing story because at least Everest is something I can understand – being a dumbass and abandoning life for the wilderness does not really appeal to me. What amazed me about Into Thin Air was how Nature so badly kicked Man’s ass. These guys were not idiots – they were famous, expert climbers. They did everything right yet did everything wrong. It’s not unlike the Titanic in that way. Again, Nature Kicked Man’s ass that time too and it also involved freezing cold ice.

I would love to hike to Everest’s base camp and just stay there. I don’t even need to climb up the mountain, although if I were twenty years younger I might attempt it. Two things have occurred to me about this. The first is that, if you gotta go, dying on Everest is not a bad way to go. You go numb, you lose consciousness and you’re probably kind of happy, maybe lonely. Death feels like sweet relief. The other thing that occurred to me is that taking someone up Everest could be the perfect murder. Think about it. Let’s say you want to kill your husband. It wouldn’t be that hard as survival is so utterly fragile up there. Removing his oxygen tank, for instance. But there are many ways to do it. I’m surprised no one has ever thought of it before. It would be impossible to investigate and you’d totally get away with it. That is, if you survived.

I have no idea how long my obsession with all things Everest will last. But I can tell you right now, it ain’t going anywhere for a while. I’ve got the DVDs coming. It’s a shame that someone already made Into Thin Air into a movie because I think it could really be an incredible film, certainly a hell of a lot better than the one no one saw.