I guess anybody in a Buster Brown ‘do starts to look like the Golem after awhile.
Odd Lots
- Back when I was in college in the early 70s, a woman friend told me, “The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you’re too damned happy!” Maybe this is the answer.
- Numerous people have sent me links to “St. Patrick Drives the Snakes Out of Ireland” cartoons, and while they’re all good (use Google Images and you’ll see them) they’re not the one I remember, which I’m now pretty sure was published in National Lampoon circa 1974.
- I misunderstood what my sister said about Crayola crayons in my March 13, 2009 Odd Lots. Crayola (once made by Binney & Smith, now part of the Hallmark empire) manufactures a line of washable crayons, and these are what Gretchen prefers that Katie have, given my elder godchild’s penchant for seeing all the world as her coloring book. The washable crayons have no particular smell to them, but the other day when Gretchen and Bill and the girls and I were in the Mount Prospect Hobby Lobby, Gretchen opened a conventional box of 16 Different Crayola Colors and let me sniff them. Yup. That’s the one. Perhaps some things really are forever.
- I’ve thought that the name of the Sci-Fi Channel has been an embarrassment for 16 years. (Actually, so have most of their house-bred feature-length films.) But now, they’re changing their name to…Syfy. And adding professional wrestling to the lineup. The dork-in-chief over there says that he’s been trying since the 1990s to “…distance the network from science fiction.” Mission accomplished, dood.
- From Baron Waste comes a largish drawn panel by Dusty Abell that somehow represents (as far as I know) every significant SF TV show to come out of the 70s. It’s a good proxy for how much TV you watched at the time, muddied by what you may have seen at cons in the middle of the night in intervening years. I can name perhaps a quarter of the shows represented, so I guess I wasn’t particularly tuned in. (I will admit with some embarrassment that the first whose title came to mind was “The Greatest American Hero.”) And although that little robot golem looks familiar, I can’t place the show that it was on.
- From Pete Albrecht comes a page introducing the Decatron tube, which presents for display a circle of thirty neon-lit points that can be configured to move a group of three around the circle each time a pulse enters the circuit. (Follow the links for more detailed information, especially this one.) The tube “remembers” which group of points is illuminated, and so it can be used to build a decade counter, or a divide-by-10 prescaler for slower mechanical counters. Very slick, and reminds us that technology was perhaps a little more sophisticated in 1954 than we remember–because much of it didn’t sit in the corner of the living room.
- Here’s a new kind of egoscan, at least for technical writers: Search Google Patents for your name. I’ve been cited 27 times in patent filings.
- Rich Rostrom reminded me (after I reported close encounters with numerous tumbleweeds on the plains heading out to Chicago) that tumbleweeds are Eurasian imports that hitched a ride along with shipments of agricultural flaxseed from Europe in the 19th Century. Along with other things that we consider iconically American, tumbleweeds actually came from somewhere else. (I guess that makes us the Ecosphere of Immigrants.)
- I didn’t know that Global Warming™ has made it impossible to build good violins. Um…I still don’t.
Top O’ the Genome To You!
St. Patrick’s day, albeit one marred by a headcold due to lack of sleep. I had one (very) Irish grandmother, and St. Patrick’s Day was always a big deal at our house, though less so since my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann left us in 1965, and my Aunt Kathleen (Sade’s daughter) in 1999. If I don’t get too wobbly today, I’ll be going over to Gretchen’s this evening for a corned beef feast. I’m not quite Irish enough to be wild about boiled cabbage, but corned beef, bring it on! (We’ll be having Diet Green River on the side–sodas don’t get no greener than that!)
I wish I still had a cartoon I cut out of a magazine many years ago, of a mitered bishop behind the wheel of a convertible, with the back seat full of goofy-looking snakes, and the caption, “St. Patrick Drives the Snakes Out of Ireland.”
And I sometimes look out at the pantheon of ethnic saints and wish there were one for thoroughgoing mongrels like myself. I had an Irish grandparent and a German grandparent, and ostensibly two Polish grandparents–but my Polish grandmother is said to have had a French mother (this has not been proven) and they both had Austrian citizenship, though what that may mean ethnically is unclear. So I’m all over the map. Is there a St. Heinz somewhere, with eight great-grandparents of entirely separate ethnicities? How about a St. Heinz’ Day feast, in which no two items can be from the same country?
If there’s no guy (or gal) like that in the Calendar of Saints, could we please canonize one soonest?
In the meantime, I will close with the first stanza of one of my favorite prayers, “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” which captures the faith that filled the man, and the gonzo exuberance that drove him:
I arise today by the power of heaven!Invoking the Trinity;
Believing in the Threeness,
Confessing the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation!
Amen!
Odd Lots
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: Chicanes are small kinks placed along the course of an auto race, to make the race more…interesting. Heh.You race. I’ll watch. (But not anywhere near a chicane.) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for teaching me this one.
- According to my good sister Gretchen, that very distinctive and extremely memorable smell of Crayola crayons was due to the animal tallow (probably beef) used in the waxy crayon base material. This is significant because Katie’s pumpkin-shaped bucket of new crayons has no smell at all. None! I may have to buy a set of “classic crayons” on eBay to smell that smell again. (Or maybe I can con my friends into each sending me one of their dupes. Unlike some people, I wouldn’t care if my set consisted of four Periwinkles, three Thistles, five Cornflowers, and a few scruffy Raw Siennas. Variety can be overrated.)
- And just in case you like the smell of classic crayons so much that you want to smell just like them, here’s Crayon Cologne. (Would using that make me a Person of Color?)
- Other kid smells worth recalling are Play-Doh and freshly sharpened pencils. My mother bought a canned wallpaper cleaner compound once in the 1970s that looked and smelled a great deal like Play-Doh. In sniffing around online, I found in Wikipedia that the Play-Doh compound was originally marketed as…a wallpaper cleaner. And even today, I occasionally pull the casing off my electric pencil sharpener and take a deep whiff.
- More kid stuff: Did any of you ever have a Puffer Kite? And if so, did you live in or near Chicago? The Puffer was an inflatable kite, something like a beach toy in the shape of a pork chop, with a grommet for a string. It was patented in 1967 and I had one while I was in college, circa 1973. I’m gathering what little information exists about the Puffer Kite, and it appears to have been a Chicago product, made by the Fredricks Corporation, precise address unknown. I’ve written to a man who may be the heir of the Fredricks operation, and we’ll see what comes of it.
- More than half of the boggling numbers of mortgage forclosures have occurred in only 35 counties across the US, with 25% occurring in only eight counties. (Alas, the crappily written article does not name them.) States like Nebraska, Kansas, and Kentucky (and most other flyover states) had no counties at all where there were over 20 foreclosures per thousand households, and yet people in small towns and rural areas are essentially bailing out big cities with their tax money. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the pointer.)
- One of the most wonderful collection of mad-scientist backgrounder material I’ve seen in quite awhile can be found at Mike’s Electric Stuff. Geissler tubes, Nixie tubes, and (do not miss this one!) what is arguably the world’s first integrated circuit, made in 1926 and providing resistors, capacitors, and three vacuum tubes in a single glass envelope!
- If you like your radios steampunkish, check out Sparkbench, with some of the most beautifully executed homebrew radios I’ve ever seen. More here.
- The longest-lived person on the Duntemann family tree so far is Alvina Duntemann Wille, who lived from 1880 to 1978. She was the daughter of Louis Duntemann, my great-great grandfather’s younger brother, and lived her entire life in Mount Prospect, Illinois, in a house that stood where the Busse Car Wash stands today, right on Prospect at Maple. My great-grandmother Martha Winkelmann Duntemann did all right too, and made it to 96, outliving all four of my grandparents. I hope to do as well.
Notes on the Great Kid Adventure
Well, last night I ran down to Midway Airport and picked up Gretchen and Bill, and calmly handed kids, cat, and household back to them after four interesting days. Carol and I then retired to the condo and slept for ten hours. We had a good time and learned a lot about small children, and I’ll put down some notes here while everything’s still fresh in my mind:
- Katie knows us as Kayol and Jep. Those are good enough names to use in an SF story someday. (Tucked away for future use.)
- One wonders what posessed A. A. Milne (apart from simple ignorance of future cultural conventions–how dare he!) to call a teddy bear “Pooh” in a world of still-diapered but rapidly linguistifying children.
- Joe’s O’s are a standard at Gretchen’s house, and Katie calls them “yoats,” which is as good a generic term for the genre as I could think of beyond “oat toruses.”
- I built a Sphinx for Katie out of supersize Mega Bloks, and while I was still puzzling out how to attach a head, Katie grew impatient and asked, “What is?” I agonized over how to answer a question like that when baby sister Julie crawled over and demolished it. Problem solved. Whew.
- The one sure way to make Julie quit fussing and smile is to get in her face and sing do-wop songs. I got very good at singing the intro to the Marcels’ cover of “Blue Moon,” if half an octave higher than their seminal bass man. “Ba-ba bomp ba-ba bomp ba bom ba bom bomp…” She also responded well to “On the Road to Shambala,” at least the parts without genuine words other than “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.”
- We watched a lot of videos. Katie is very fond of Rocky & Bullwinkle, who (by the way) will be 50 years old later this year. She didn’t have the CD set with the Metal-Munching Moon Mice, but we did see the counterfeit boxtops adventure, which sent an eerie shiver down my spine. Swap in bankers and the Fed for Boris Badenov and see what you get.
- Pertinent to the above: The infectious Muppets cover of Mah-Na Mah-Na (see my entry for April 15, 2007) was the very first musical number on the very first episode of the Muppet Show (1976). We saw it several times this weekend, mon dieu.
- I had forgotten how much I admired the Muppets brand of comedy. Something definitely went right in the 70s. Even the guest star fashions weren’t as bad as I had expected, though I saw things I hadn’t seen in a while. (Does anybody even remember what “espadrilles” are?) And watching one of the Muppets slobber paint on a taciturn, toga-clad Candace Bergen was worth the price of admission.
- Katie seems to like kites, though Carol thinks that “fly kite!” (as Katie puts it) is now code for running around in circles in the big field outside their back gate. No matter–we didn’t have ideal kite weather, and the kite we were trying to fly is arguably an antique and probably not up to much rough handling. When we’re here in better weather, I will build a kite tailored to 2-year-olds and we will wait for a dry and blustery day.
All in all, a complete success. Carol and I are now fairly sure we made the right decision in not having children of our own, but borrowing them occasionally may not be a bad idea.
Baby (and Non-Baby) Talk
Managing small children is a gene I think I was born without, so it’s as remarkable to me as to you that Carol and I are spending a long weekend in Des Plaines looking after our two newest godchildren, aged 27 months and 10 months. Their parents are taking their first (short) vacation together absent offspring since Katie Beth’s birth in November 2006, and although we were well-briefed on things like which girl got what foods and where the mother lode of baby socks is, we knew it would be quite an education.
Katie is picking up language with frightening speed. When I last saw her she was just discovering the bare bones of complete sentences and most of her words had to be understood from context if they were to be understood at all. Now, well, we’re on the verge of genuine conversation.
Example: Yesterday we were sitting on the couch and looking at the photo montage my mother had on her wall the last few years of her life. When I asked Katie, “Where’s mommy?” she she pointed unerringly to Gretchen’s face on their 1994 wedding photo. Ditto “Where’s daddy?” and Katie’s finger pointed to Bill. The montage is short on recent photos of certain people (like me) and when I asked her, “Where’s Uncle Jeff?” she pointed to a photo of my father instead of a shot of me in college, when I still had abundant hair. I chewed my tongue for a second but let it go; she was born five years after her last grandparent died, and the whole notion of “grandparents” may have to await the birth of abstract reasoning.
So we went on to the other photos in the montage. “Who’s this?” I asked, pointing to a 1957 photo of Gretchen at one year.
“Baby,” said Katie, referring to her little sister Julie, who in truth strongly resembles her mother at that age.
“No, that’s mommy!” I said.
She looked at me very funny. “What you talk about?” was her response.
But that wasn’t the best of it. Earlier this week, just after we had arrived in town and come by with QBit and Aero, QBit hit the jackpot when he discovered a very stale scone that Katie had dropped behind the livingroom couch eons ago. Carol took it away from him, and in a fit of pique he decided to go hunting. We saw him make a beeline for the stairs to the second story, and I ran right after him, remembering certain adventures up there last summer when he had dug a dirty diaper out of the wastebasket in the bathroom and was furiously shredding it to get at the gooey chocolate center. Katie ran after the both of us, and as I reached the top of the stairs and almost had QBit in my grip, Katie announced at the top of her little lungs: “Doggie chew poop!”
Except that this time, I had grabbed him before he reached the bathroom, and nothing got chewed. Doggie spent most of the rest of that evening in his kennel, but I found it remarkable that Katie would remember an event that had occurred eight months earlier, when she was only nineteen months old and spoke primarily in monosyllables. (Especially the ever-popular “No!” which QBit can’t say and rarely understands.)
We flew Gretchen’s 25-year old winged fabric box kite at the playground yesterday, while Julie chewed the plastic reel holding the string and Katie chased the kite’s shadow on the grass. It’s hard work, this kid stuff, even for the kids–and we all slept very well last night. This morning at breakfast, Carol grabbed Katie’s piece of toast to cut it up for her, and Katie made her wishes plain: “Come back with that!”
The next time we’re here, well, she may not be quoting Shakespeare, but she may be quoting Space Cat. We’ll do our best to make it so.
Reaping the Wind
Whew. Got to Chicago intact. I’m already dug in at our condo, blasting away at my book revision, but I wanted to take a moment to mention a trend we saw on our now-familiar blast across America on I-80: Wind farms. The first was just north of I-76 near Sterling. We had not seen it the last time we took this run, in August 2008, and it wasn’t just one or two towers, but by my estimate well over 100. They were not close to the highway, and by my estimate at least 5-8 miles away. We could discern them on the horizon, but they wouldn’t make for good photos, and so we didn’t stop. As best I can tell, what we saw was the Peetz Table project, near Iliff, Colorado, which when finished will have 267 turbines and produce 432 MW of electricity when the wind blows. And there, at least, the wind blows almost all the time. (It damned near blew us off the road, and provided some legendary tumbleweed activity.)
The next day, as we passed by Adair, Iowa, home of the Smiling Water Tower, we realized that there was a swarm of wind turbines south of I-80 that we had not seen before. These were much closer than the ones we’d glimpsed in Colorado the day before, and could not have been there when we last passed by in August. However, I do remember seeing many oversize loads hauling down I-80 at the time, bearing the generator heads, columns, and blades. The Adair project went up fast. It was only announced in July, 2007, and construction began in April, 2008. A little further down I-80 we saw another huge crop of turbines near Walnut, Iowa. That one is even newer, dating back to June 2008, and has (so far) 102 towers up and running.
New capacity is coming online all the time and so actual figures have the half-life of exotic isotopes, but as best I can tell the US is now the world’s largest producer of wind energy. And among states, Iowa is third, after California and Texas. This was very good to see; I’ve been a big fan of wind energy since the early 1980s, when I attended a lecture in Rochester NY by a guy who had built his own wind turbine from old auto alternators. That was less interesting than some of his basic research on harvestable wind in places like Texas and Colorado, where the winds blow with enviable steadiness compared to piker states like Illinois, where the winds are as faithless as its politicians. Wind isn’t enough, of course: We need nuclear and need it badly to replace our coal plants and handle growth in energy demand. (If you don’t think so, I’ll hear your numbers. If you don’t have numbers, this isn’t the sort of debate I want to take part in.)
The Great Tumbleweed Migration
I worried needlessly. By the time we got on the road at 10 AM, the sun had dried out I-80 completely, and we did the 410 miles to Des Moines without incident, though the temps did not get above 20F. We’re now kicking back and taking it easy; less than 350 miles remain, and at this point I could do that standing on my head.
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was the Great Tumbleweed Migration on I-76 in the northeast corner of Colorado. We had a strong wind out of the north, and for a 20-mile stretch past Julesburg, the weeds were rolling across the Interstate by the hundreds like some weird animals, in many sizes and shapes. Carol tried to get a video, but it’s not as impressive as I’d hoped, and certainly not good enough to post. When we hit a rest stop in Nebraska I found pieces of tumbleweed stuck in my bumpers and there’s probably plenty more elsewhere under the chassis.
And of course, we left Colorado just in time for the temps there to start creeping up into the 70s. Not bad for February, and apparently our best-kept secret. (This is nothing new.) Golf at Christmas. Ski at Easter. And vice versa. I rarely appreciate it until I leave.
Heat of Fusion
Well, we’re off to Chicago again, driving that familiar I-80 corridor, and yesterday got as far as North Platte, Nebraska. The target was Kearney, or at least Lexington, but winter threw us a curve: As we left Colorado on I-76, the temperature started to drop, and the quick dusting of snow that had passed over the area an hour or so earlier was freezing on the pavement, making the left lane a first-order approximation of glass. In fifteen miles we passed two rollover accidents, and speed was down in the 45 MPH range. Driving that stuff in the light of an overcast sky was bad enough. Driving it at night was right out. So we stopped at a nice Holiday Inn at North Platte. The free broadband is about dialup speed, but at least it’s there.
As we took the puppies out for a walk last night in 15° temps, I tried to get a shot of the conjunction of the Moon and Venus on a dark, unplowed road behind the hotel. The shot above isn’t bad, considering it was a snapshot from a handheld camera (my new Canon G10) that I still don’t know how to use in any detail.
We’re about to load the car and get back on the frozen roads, wishing that the heat of fusion of water was a little lower, so that the Sun would clear the ice a little sooner. It’s +4° right now, and it may be a slow haul to Des Moines. We’ll soon see.
Odd Lots
- The dairy that delivered milk to our house when I was a kid was indeed Hawthorn Mellody Farms (as verified by the Sister of Eidetic Recall) which was unusual in several ways: They had an amusement park in Libertyville, Illinois, complete with a miniature train ride, a petting zoo, Western town, and pony rides, that was a famous destination in the 50s for suburban moms with station wagons full of Boomer kids. They were the first dairy to put pictures of missing children on milk cartons. And before they went bankrupt in 1992, they were one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the country.
- Also relevant to my entry of Febraury 24, 2009: Dunteman’s Dairy evidently existed before 1939. A page out of the 1937 Arlington Heights phone book from Digital Past shows an entry for Dunteman’s Dairy at 830 N. Dunton Avenue in Arlington Heights. The 1936 phone book shows a listing at the same address for “L. Dunteman,” so Lenard may have begun operating the dairy from his back yard (not an uncommon thing to do back then!) in that year. Prior to 1936 his listing shows yet a different address. I’ll have to see what’s at that address today the next time I’m in the area.
- Digital Past is a very good source if you’re doing genealogy research on Chicago’s northwest suburbs; awhile back I found the location and a photo of the headstone of Laura Brommelkamp Dunteman there, after looking in vain for some years. (She was the second wife of Henry Dunteman, founder of R. W. Dunteman Construction, which is still in operation in Chicago’s western burbs.)
- Well, grub is still plug-ugly, but it’s no longer difficult to configure. I’ve been using KGrubEditor for over a month now, and it makes the job a breeze. Highly recommended.
- Where’s my flying car? Well, it may be here: Yet another Skycar concept, but this time it’s more Mad Max than Flash Gordon. Put a big fan on the back of a go-kart, get up some speed, and then release the parawing. Off you go!
- Philip Jose Farmer has left us. Along with Heinlein, Clarke, and Keith Laumer, Farmer was one of the SF writers who inspired me to keep going and make something of myself in fiction. I still consider the Riverworld concept one of the most compelling ideas ever to surface in SF, even though the series wandered toward the end and would have been much better had it been three books (on the outside, four) instead of five.
- I was going to do a whole entry on this, but Cory Doctorow said everything I intended to say about whackjob Roy Blount Jr and the knucklehead Authors’ Guild, who want money from anyone who does text-to-speech. There’s nothing I can add, and as a longtime author who still makes money writing, I think I have a right to strong opinions about this. Let me quote Cory here, and cheer:
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Time and again, the Author’s Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online.
