Salem

Arts & Entertainment:

The Biggest Logic Fails in The Vampire Diaries Season 3, Episode 2: “The Hybrid” The Vampire Diaries is a show where witches can bring back people from the dead, vampires kiss humans instead of ripping their throats out, and werewolves have silky smooth chests when they haven’t transformed. And we accept all of this without the blink of the eye. Yet it’s the little things that make us scoff and say, “that would never happen.” Check out the biggest logic fails from Season 3, Episode 2, “The Hybrid.” Read full story from wetpaint.com

Headlines:

Witchcraft accusations and human rights abuses in Africa
Witch‐hunts have become epidemic throughout Africa. Although witch‐hunts have historically been viewed as gender specific, with a large percentage of victims still identified as elderly and solitary women, recent reports show that victims of witch‐hunts include both women and men of all ages. read full story from paganrightsalliance.org3

Whistle-blowing witch grounded by TSA (Source msnbc)
Here’s a situation for all you aspiring managers: If you were the boss at a U.S. government agency and one of your employees complained that she was afraid of a co-worker’s religious practices, what would you do?

**Toronto’s one-stop Occult Shop**The next time you’re satisfying a serious ice-cream craving at Dutch Dreams on Vaughan Road, wander a little bit north and you’ll find a large, white building containing an inconspicuous store framed by clouded windows. The red, weather-beaten, wooden sign hanging above the entrance reads, “The Occult Shop,” and despite its humble facade, the store serves as a gathering place for a range of spiritual subcultures in Toronto.

**PantheaCon 2011: Pan-pagan convention returns to San Jose on February 18**PantheaCon, an interfaith pagan convention that brings together thousands of people from across the United States, will be happening in San Jose, CA this coming President’s Day weekend.

The convention’s dates are Feb 18-21 and will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel. As usual for PantheaCon, they will be taking up the entirety of the hotel’s function space.

The theme for this year’s gathering is “Walking the Talk.” People who submitted presentations for the event were encouraged to focus on the meaning of that phrase for pagans in modern times. Read full story from examiner.com

Hub City Hogwarts? Magic classes on offer
MONCTON - Witchcraft class: for many, the term calls to mind a bunch of little wand-toting English kids running around yelling ‘Expelliarmus!’

Okay, so there’s no Hub City Hogwarts concealed in a secret dimension off St. George Street. But wannabe witches and warlocks are, in fact, lining up for local classes in witchcraft and wizardry.

The instructor is Tony Raven, a 36-year-old Moncton business owner and practicing witch for 20-plus years. The aim? Training credulous New Brunswickers in the basics of magic.

Masters of Math, From Old Babylon
If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?

Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties? Read full story from nytimes.com

Friends honor Wiccan with Halloween burial
BARNEVELD — On a warm, sunny Halloween day, a group of 20 people drove up a rural road at Circle Sanctuary, a nature-based pagan church and ecological preserve here, to spread and inter the ashes of one of their own.

Bruce Parsons, of Milwaukee, who identified as a Wiccan or pagan, died in June at age 63, but his Circle Sanctuary ceremony was held Sunday afternoon, coinciding with the sanctuary’s green cemetery dedication. Read full story from madison.com