My Adventures as a Teen Aged Philosopher

Some of the stuff I retrieved from my parent's house last year just got tossed into a box. In some cases I looked briefly at an object, said "ugh" but felt it needed to be kept.  This is one such.  

I attended Minnehaha Academy for high school.  A private school, it likely gave me a better education than the public high school on our end of town.  It even had classes in religion, philosophy, etc.

I took a philosophy survey class as a junior or so.  It was a small group, maybe four or five of us students.  It was taught by a man named George Fisher, who had been a Catholic priest.  Here's the cover of the notebook from that class....

There was an awful lot of doodling and marginalia in this book.  Some of it related to philosophy, note the yin/yang.  Other stuff I'm not sure.  I might have been taking geometry at the same time to account for some of the shapes and formulae.  It starts out fairly coherent...

But towards the end I was clearly going off the rails.  I think Neo Platonism pushed me over the edge.

The class probably did me some good.  In this world sometimes you have to be philosophical and if you can't square it with Plato, maybe St. Thomas Aquinas will suffice.  The only student I remember, and the only one who seemed to understand this stuff, was named Winston Cavert.  I got to wondering where he ended up....turns out he also went to medical school but had a rather more impressive career than your humble scribe.  He went into infectious disease and became a Professor.  Cheers, Winston, if you stumble across this!

Aghast and Appalled.

I'm of fairly even temperament, so it is not common for me to be either Aghast or Appalled.  But I was wondering the other day, do these words have a common ancestor?  Or at least a common theme?

I guessed correctly that aghast had to do with ghosts.  It hearkens back to circa 1100.  It means "..terrified, suddenly filled with frightened amazement."  The "h" came along circa 1700, perhaps a bit of Dutch influence.  The original root word is very old, as indeed most basic and primal concept words are.  It comes from somewhere back in the origins of Germanic language and exists in various forms such as Geist in modern German.

You would probably gasp when you see a gast, but the words do not have a common ancestor.  Gasp and gape, well, that's another story.

A Pall is the cloth used to drape over a coffin.  So if you saw a figure covered in one you might reasonably assume it was a ghost and be aghast.  But pall has a gentler origin story.

It hearkens back to Latin.  Pallium was a cloak or covering.  Tertullian, an early Christian writer indicates that the faithful wore it as an alternative to the toga.  The word had various antecedents including pellis meaning "skin".  See also, one assumes, "pelt".  The creepier connotations to a pall did not turn up until the 15th century.

By the way, at the sight of a ghost you might run away. Perhaps so vigorously as to be "pelting".  Not related to the above, pelt in this form is one of those words of unknown origin that has come to mean hitting repeatedly as with feet pounding the ground in hasty retreat, or the rain that is scheduled to keep me indoors on the nice summer day....

AI is getting better by the way.  This is legitimately creepy.

Murder on the Old Eau Claire Road

Like most communities from the lumber era of Wisconsin, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls were where they were because of the water.  Specifically the Chippewa River.  This was both the highway down which prosperity flowed - in the form of log drives - and the power source that turned timber into cash.

But the same things that make for a good lumber town also complicate other forms of transportation.  You'd imagine that commerce between the two places would be carried out with boats...until you remember that there water levels were extremely variable.  Despite the big dam at Chippewa being able to regulate things a bit, it would often be the case that the river was too low for practical boat transport....or at other times such as spring, too high.  To say nothing of full of tens of thousands of logs!  And in the winter everything froze.

So for reliable, year round transportation the two communities were linked very early on by road.   

Its course is a little hard to track.  It came out of the north side of Eau Claire and roughly followed the course of modern day Hwy 53.  That would of course be Old Hwy 53, now redubbed Business 53.  It certainly arrived at the National Presto Plant - once a maker of pressure cookers and earlier of artillery shells - the location of a hostelry known as Halfway House.  It then swung over to where Lake Hallie connects with the Chippewa River, as this was the site of an early lumber mill.  Then after being lost in what is now suburbia and gravel pits it reappears near modern day Casper Park and arrives at the former site of Frenchtown.  The ferry there took you across to Chippewa Falls.  Very little remains today.  

Here's a map showing the course of the road.  This map is probably circa 1878.  The railroad is shown - it came in '74, but Frenchtown is still standing before the floods of '80 and '84.

The road went through some lonesome places.  It still does today.  At one such place murder most foul occurred in 1872.

Rolfson was traveling from Minnesota.  Arriving in Eau Claire he inquired about the price of the stage to Chippewa Falls.  Feeling the price was a bit steep he decided to hike it.  Somebody knew he was carrying a large sum of money, and was waiting for him.  He tried to save a dollar.  It cost him his life.

Despite a very hefty reward I can find no evidence that the guilty parties were ever brought to justice.   

Note:  It is not clear that the 1870's stage service ran on the same road Rolfson took.  If you study the map you can see that a less direct route did run on the west side of the river.  This was a later addition, in the heyday of Frenchtown before the Civil War there was only what is now called The Old Eau Claire Road.

Anger Goose Does Not Approve

I've had four footed "grandkids" before.  Often young couples have a dog before they have kids.  I've gotten on well with these slightly spoiled canines.

But the youngest and his lady now have.....geese.  On one level they - the geese of course - can be rather cute.  They follow my son around making happy little honking noises.

Me on the other hand, they don't like at all.......

Darn things peck at my pants legs and shoes when they can get away with it.  This goose is actually named Rodan, after the Japanese rubber monster movie star of the same name.  I think the resemblance is eerie.

My Get Rich Quick Product Idea

Ah, getting older.  Well, it does beat the alternative.  But you do have to attend to more "maintenance" as the birthday cake candles glow a bit brighter.  

As a retired MD I'm a bad patient.  But there are things I believe in strongly enough that I even talk myself into them.  Like colonoscopy.  Turns out I have a bit of  family history, my grandfather dying of it at just a few years older than I am now.  So, there's nothing for it....

The procedure is not so bad.  I just insist on the good meds.  Much as Fentanyl has caused suffering and tragedy when used illicitly, it - in concert with its good pal Versed - makes for a dreamy, detached state. 

Now the prep, that's just not fun.  But necessary.

Suffice to say that you have to drink some stuff that gives you very kinetic, ate a bad burrito in Mexico level diarrhea.  Don't plan anything on that prep day.

The prep meds usually come in small - but deadly as it happens - colored glass bottles.  Now, on to my make a million bucks idea.

I used to be a fair home brewer.  And I'm pretty sure you could concoct a beer flavored prep solution.  Great beer?  Oh, no way.  But better than the horrid sensation of glugging down what tastes like concentrated Dead Sea water?  I think so.

But you'd have to market it well.

I've tried asking AI to show me some example "brands".  In some cases it was unwilling.  I mean, the obvious is BUTT LITE.  But that stuff can hardly be considered beer.....  So, how about:

This is actually almost spot on for the little green bottles of Affliction.  They are perhaps half the size but just that color.   

I actually enjoy the occasional Heineken, and once had a very memorable tour of their flagship brewery in Amsterdam.  For a variety of technical reasons there were some parts of the tour we could not take that morning, and each time we were promised "Well, that will give you more time in the tap room".

Apologies for the satire Heineken, I actually  think highly of your product.

Now, there are a number of US beer brands, current and historic, that would not need any alteration at all to be good colonoscopy prep names.  If, and this is a gigantic if, their copyright lawyers looked the other way and whistled, I could see several names being quite compelling just as they are.

Schlitz, Blatz, any others you'd like to suggest?

But perhaps your tastes do not run to European or US beers.  I've enjoyed some Mexican lagers as well.  Modello and Dos Equis do not sound immediately promising, but what about:

Should of course have a crown on the label, and actual Corona comes in clear bottles.

I've always felt that the silly times we live in make satire darn near impossible.  So who knows, perhaps somebody has already tried this concept....

Cache as Cache Can

With a bit of free time on my hands I've been paying attention to the string of geocaches that I have out in the world.  I mostly enjoy making and placing custom caches.  Finding them, eh, not so much.

Over time they tend to need maintenance.  Water gets into everything.  Put something inside a hollow tree and the tree blows over.  On occasion people who find the caches have their own eccentric ideas of how they should be rehidden.  

One cache I had near a ball field was called Brown Bat.  It was hidden inside a little plastic souvenir baseball bat.  I think it was something you could buy full of beer at the local minor league ball park.  Alas, it vanished, so I decided to replace it with something a bit more Lugosi themed...

That was a "one off", but I also have geocache series going.  Local History is rather unofficial.  Strange Fish is a long running series where I put a geocache - usually a custom container made to look like the species - where I caught some weird bottom feeding critter.  That's getting harder to do btw.  I'm up to 15 in this series.  HERE is an example.

Recently I started a new series that I'm calling Crossroads.  All at intersections of county roads.  For some reason these are designated with letters, and when they ran through the alphabet they started using double letters.   The juxtaposition of signs at such places provides, shall we say, opportunities.....

For instance......The House at Pooh Corner  What creative things could you do with semi random arrangements of two or three letters?

Robot Christmas in July!

Robotics involves lots of supplies.  Electronics, motors, aluminum and plastic stock.  Lots of it we now have in stock, but there are always things that are needful.  Because shipping costs extra we try to merge shopping lists into larger deliveries.  And I have always considered the day that big boxes of coolness turn up on the porch to be "Robot Christmas".  I of course need to open a few....just to make sure everything has arrived in good shape.

Our latest undertaking is a new spin on Robot School, our farm club at the middle school level.  And with a new venture we of course need new toys.  Lots of new toys.  FIRST Tech Challenge robots are about 15% of the size of the high school program machines, but they have lots and lots of small fiddly parts.  We are talking about hundreds of items showing up in a half dozen boxes....

Some of this stash came from a recent workshop where students had put some of the parts together in a basic frame...

Merry Robot Christmas!  I thought it would be fun to stack the hoard up into something resembling a Christmas tree.

01000111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01000010 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100001

The above is conversion to binary code of Tiny Tim's "God Bless us, every one!"