For plenty of cinema-goers, the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt as a loincloth-clad hero is enough to encourage them to see the film, which opens in the UK on Friday. But many others will want to know whether there is any truth in it all. Did Troy exist?
Its makers Warner Bros are no doubt hopeful that their latest sword and sandal epic will bring home the Oscars as Gladiator did in 2001.
The "book of the film" is The Iliad, reputedly written in 800BC by the blind Greek poet Homer.
Woman led fight for Native American burial rights
On Monday, Maria Pearson will be recognized as a quiet hero exactly one year after her death. That evening, a small group of family members will gather at the Storey Memorial Gardens south of Ames to remember her in their own way.
It also is the day Pearson will be honored by the Ames Noon Rotary with one of The Tribune's 2004 Unsung Hero award.
For some, the memorial service will be the first time they look at her picture or speak her name since her death, which is Native American tradition.
Porn!! Treasure-trove on Commons Beach
Archaeologist Robert McQueen holds up a brown, brittle reel of 8-mm film to the light. A faint image of a naked woman drying her hair next to a sink, each pose slightly different from the last, appears on the series of aging frames.
A 1930s stag film isn't exactly what archaeologists monitoring the Commons Beach construction project expected to find. But out of the 30 artifacts collected at the beach last summer, the celluloid is perhaps the only surprising discovery. The rest of the relics, dating from the 1870s to the 1950s, represent Commons Beach's various uses throughout Tahoe City's early history.
"Nothing was really unexpected," said McQueen. "We knew the railroad went through there, and there was a pier and the beach was a common area."
Well, it got your attention anyway. Of course, now this blog will be listed whenever anyone types 'porn' into Google. . . .
Rebuilding begins at Mission San Luis
They are recreating the past at Mission San Luis. Again.
Following a dispute that had to be settled by formal mediation, workers have begun to rebuild two 17th century replica buildings at the state-owned Mission San Luis historical site.