8/15/16 Report - Flintlock Pistol From Treasure Coast Beach. Thoughts On Religious Relics. World Wide Web 25 Years Old This Month.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Flintlock Pistol Found After Hurricanes of 2004.
Photo submitted by Darrel Strickland.

Lately I've been showing some noteworthy treasures that were found a few years ago, especially after the hurricanes of 2004, which was some of the best hunting we've had since the legendary Thanksgiving Storm of 1984.  A lot of treasure was found by a lot of people after Francis and Jeanne. You've never heard of most of it, and I'm only showing a few pieces.

The flintlock pistol shown above was found by Tom K., who found the pistol "at Wabasso Beach going north towards Golden Sands in the wet sand near the water's edge."  Thanks for sending the photo and email Darrel.

I don't know if Tom ever got the pistol cleaned up or not, but he wasn't in a hurry to clean it at the time because he thought it might be damaged in the process.

Tom also found some rings that day.

Here is charm or rosary piece found back then too.

Photo submitted by Darrel S.

I've shown some of the famous religious pieces found by the salvage divers, and Laura Strolia has provided authoritative research on some of the most fascinating ones. Click the following link to go back to a post containing some of Laura's research on the Pelican of Piety.

  http://treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com/search?q=pelican+piety

Before Laura's research was published, the gold Pelican of Piety was often mistakenly referred to as a reliquary.  A reliquary is meant to contain a relic.

I recently found an article about first-class relics being sold on the internet.  A first-class relic is an item or piece of an item directly associated with event's of Christ's life or the physical remains of a saint, for example bone or hair.

One person wrote an article about selling first class relics and wants the practice stopped. The author of that article, Ryan Scheel, had the following to say.

The listing of first class relics “is incredibly insensitive to the Catholic faith in way I doubt would be tolerated for other religions,” Scheel said. 

“But also...common decency should tell eBay that profiting off of the sale of body parts is ghastly and unethical, no matter who the remains belonged to in life.”That's why Scheel decided to launch a petition calling for eBay to remove the listings of the first class relics. He hopes to obtain signatures from at least 25,000 Catholics in order to alert the site of the illicit sales.”

Here is the link to that article.

http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/US.php?id=14075

---

Did you know that August 5 was the 25th anniversary of the first web site.  That web site described the WorldWideWeb project and said the following.

"The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents," the world's first public website reads, going on to explain how others can also create their own web pages.

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone."

I found that information on thehackernews.com, which is a good site for those who want to stay informed about computer security.

Many large corporations have been hacked by China.  Google admitted they were hacked.   If Google, who has all of those bright computer scientists, couldn't prevent being hacked, who can?  If you don't maintain the finest security practices and if you have anything that the major players might want on your computer, you probably have been hacked, whether you know it or not.

Computer security isn't all technical.  A lot of it is behavioral.  Hackers take advantage of natural and naive human behavior.

On a side note, the Stuxnet super-virus was created to damage Iran's nuclear centrifuges, and it did its job fairly well even though the controllers were isolated.  Somebody had to use a USB or some other portable storage device to install it the virus.   More powerful versions are now being developed.

I started this post talking about a centuries old flintlock pistol, and ended it with cyber warfare.  How things have changed!

---

Here is one note on old rings that appear large enough to be worn by a giant or on a big toe.  They were made to be worn over a glove.

---

There are no storms right now, and the surf will run around one or two feet for the next several days.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net