When you are a dog owner you keep an eye on where you are stepping. So when I spotted this on the ground I was naturally puzzled and a little impressed....
Putting a ridge beam into place. I can now scratch that off my to-do life list. Darn things are heavy and awkward. When it slots into place with a nice clunk it is very satisfying.
The robotics team has continued to meet through the summer. The kids are doing actual productive things, building another test robot, upgrading the competition machine for an off season comp, that sorta stuff. I just arrange various outreach visits. The robotic Dog-n'-Pony show has so far been to:
3M. By the way, I usually take pictures of things after the main presentation. That's when the serious engineers all want to get toes up to the robot and ask the serious questions...
Phillips Medisize. This one was extra fun. One of our early days alumni works there. After the presentation we invited him to come down and operate the robot. I think he looks a bit rusty. We'd added settings that were specific to this venue. Could we get a game piece launched all the way to the back of the auditorium?
Our annual update for the School Board. This was just before they doubled my salary (2 x 0 = 0) and made my status as robot overlord official. Reluctantly we opted to not fire the shooter in this room. So much nice student artwork hung everywhere....
I've been working with kids and robots in our school district for a quarter of a century now. And finally.....
The team presented at the School Board meeting yesterday. The board is always a great audience. And in a touching gesture they voted to double my salary. Of course two times zero is still zero.
And I got a new ID badge that makes my long semi-official title actually, well still semi official, but I'll take it.
At this point the majority of you are saying "What the heck?", while a few oddball savants are saying "A bit early, isn't it?". For the second group I'll just say that given all the excitement in our political arena I'm not sure that one week after the election a story about putrid blubber raining down from the sky would stand out in the least.
So....
There is actually a considerable, er, corpus of data on dead, beached whales blowing up. Sometimes just by the natural, if disgusting, process of decomposition. But by far the most exciting example of the genre occurred back in 1970, and had the assistance of a poorly thought out half ton of dynamite.
A 45 ton sperm whale washed up on the beach at Florence Oregon on November 9th. After three days in which the whale got stinkier, it was decided that the best course of action would be to blow the whale up with explosives. The idea being that it would then be in smaller bits which would either be eaten by the converging mob of seagulls or be in small enough parts that hauling them away would be simpler. Beaches were at that time under the jurisdiction of the Oregon Highway Department, an outfit who had a bit of experience in blowing up obstructions. It did not go well. No, not well at all.......
Wisconsin has plenty of tidy little rural cemeteries. But sometimes you need to have sharp eyes to spot them. This one was a bit off the main road, and behind some unsightly junked cars.
Google Maps is a great way to plan alternate routes that go past little rural cemeteries. Welcome to Scott's Valley east of Eau Claire Wisconsin.
I like the way that the orange lichen fits into the flower motif. Plant life imitating art.
Still traveling down unfamiliar roads. Finding the cemetery outside of Osseo, Wisconsin took a bit of doing.
Here's a nice specimen with full "Woodsman" regalia. Also an unusual amount of "tombstone lichen".
Building a house from scratch. Hand tools, wood from the Amish. Time to call in the Old Guys.
Two walls up by the middle of day one:
A while back, while researching historic movie theaters in my community, I ran across the odd story of what seemed to be a silent movie actor linked to Chippewa Falls. If you are coming in late, here's the story of Bunny Smith.
Obviously trying to research somebody whose last name was Smith and whose first name was a nickname is gonna be some heavy lifting. But by cross referencing the movies he claimed to have been in, and allowing for uncredited roles, I've figured out that "Bunny" was acting under the stage name of Bert Delaney.
His real name was Bernard Smith. He was born in Minneapolis on January 16th, 1891. This would make him 25 years old at the time of his letter to the hometown newspaper. He attended Notre Dame University, presumably in roughly the 1909-1913 time frame. He spent some time working as the private secretary to the President of the Canada Land Company of Minneapolis. He was then said to have spent some time "on stage", presumably in vaudeville as movies were just starting to become popular in that era.
As to his cinematic career he started out "with Edison". That being of course Thomas Edison who effectively invented motion picture technology and even more effectively patented it against potential rivals. But in the time frame we are discussing the Edison company was in steep decline, so Bunny's switch to the Vitagraph company makes sense. Vitagraph was in business from 1897 to 1925, so no time line help there. His roles were presumably uncredited. These companies were based out of New York.
In July of 1915 he started working for Thanhouser, first as an uncredited extra but in roles that eventually could be characterized as lead. In his letter Bunny says he was more or less "discovered" by someone working for Thanhouser. Specifically that he looked enough like their main "juvenile roles" actor Nolan Gane that he could step up to that job description when Gane died. That happened in February of 1915, so this seems to fit.
Smith/Delaney made movies for Thanhouser in 1915 and 1916. Mostly in their Florida winter season studios. The lone 1917 listing seems to have been a remake and re-issue of an earlier film. In the unstable film industry of the day Thanhouser, briefly a major player, was in turn on the way out.
So what came next? In a short but intriguing news article from the Florida Metropolis of May 24, 1916 we learn that Bert Delaney, as they knew him by that name, was: "...formerly connected with Thanhouser" and was joining the "Lasky Company of players on the West Coast." From this I think we can conclude that many of his 1916 movies were shot early in the year and were released later. This would fit the pattern of high volume production especially in Florida during the winter.
At this point you might be wondering what ever happened to Bernard Smith/Bert Delaney? I really don't know. In 1917 his address is given as "Care of Screen Club, New York City". This is not helpful at all. The Lasky Company eventually became Paramount Pictures, and there are sources that describe some of their early actors. But it was a big, sprawling, growing industry, and a small timer like Bunny does not seem to have been noticed. Indeed, maybe the whole story of heading off to Hollywood was bunk. This was after all the Industry of Illusions.
And what about his local connection? It seems tenuous. Although the editor of the paper in 1916 describes him as "..a product of Chippewa Falls..". I don't believe he ever lived here.
His mother, Mrs Jane Smith, is mentioned periodically in the local paper starting in 1910. Usually it was in connection with visits to and from her various children. In September of 1911 it is reported that "Bunny Smith of Minneapolis is the guest of his mother in the Taylor house flats". This would seem to be when you'd expect him to be a 20 year old college student.
And three years later......
That's really about all the information the local papers can provide up until that lengthy, biographical account he sent to the editors in January of 1916. Interestingly, just two days after it ran, Mrs. Jane Smith and her daughter Miss Irene Smith, moved back to Minneapolis after a farewell party thrown by their friends. So while I had at first considered this to be a sort of "cheer up" story for his (presumably) widowed mother and for his sister with frail health; it seems instead to have been part of the send off festivities. I mean, what mother would not love to brag about her movie star son?
So how do these stories end?
I've had no luck tracking down Mrs. Jane Smith of Minneapolis. Or for that matter her son, under either his real or stage names. I'd guess he kept the latter for whatever length of time his professional career continued. Or who knows, maybe he picked a new one? I prefer to just assume all parties involved went on to have long, happy lives. With of course an elderly gentleman telling his grandkids about how he was in 21 movies in just a bit over one year; including such timeless silent era classics as "Peterson's Pitiful Plight" and "Clarissa's Charming Calf"!
Well, that's not the kind of election we're gonna have this time around. There has been effectively no Primary process by which candidates are tested and the field winnowed. Biden and Trump are both very well known, and each man is loathed by approximately 50% of the electorate.
And its hard to look to the VP's as a tie breaker. I believe Kamala Harris is considerably sharper than she is portrayed. Some of this is the unenviable role of a Veep....don't show up The Boss. If I were to apply my standard criteria to rating her she does come up a bit light. She got her prior jobs as Attorney General and US Senator by political patronage in the One Party State that is California. Her Presidential bid in 2020 was so lame that she had to bail before the first actual votes were cast. You'd like to think that she's learned a few things in the last three and a half years. But of course the question for her, and indeed for Biden and Trump, is whether she's learned the right lessons.
Trump's VP selection is not yet known, but will in the tradition of the day immediately be derided as some combination of evil and stupid, somehow even worse than he is, and that's sayin' something. Who this person is, and what her (?) qualifications actually are will not be relevant.
So we have a classic Lesser of Two evils scenario. I don't like these. I've voted over the years for Democrats, Republicans and Independents. I've had times when my choice won and disappointed me, and others when their opponent has won and turned out to be quite good. Those who have been sworn in as President since my first rodeo in 1976 have varied wildly in both character and in competence. The last genuinely good men I've seen in the White House were Ford and probably Carter. The most effective politician was, despite his moral failings, Bill Clinton. I'm leaving Obama aside for now....it takes a while for the perspective of history to come into focus.
When I posted Help Wanted in 2016 I described then longshot candidate Trump as "..a large angry man with orange hair." He is without question an objectionable man with dubious morals and a tendency to bully. His record is hard to judge due to the distortions of Covid and the continuous efforts of what is referred to as The Deep State to sabotage him. He also made many poor choices in selecting people for his Administration. He remains large, orange and angry, and he will want to get even with some people. Some of whom, in my opinion, have it coming. But pre-Covid the economy was good, we did not engage in many foreign misadventures and whether you liked it or not, we did have leadership.
President Biden on the other hand, is cognitively and perhaps physically impaired. The clues have been abundant in the last couple of years. Sheltered from demanding appearances, slurring and misspeaking, confusing the names of world leaders. When the real villains of the world see the Commander in Chief stumbling and falling repeatedly they take notice and are emboldened to greater malicious actions. The real time implosion of the myth of Biden Competence in the recent debate was shocking even as it was unsurprising. It can't be unseen. Softball taped and edited interviews with friendly journalists won't help. Moderate ability to read off a teleprompter is not enough. Every time he now appears wearing his Cool Dude aviator sunglasses the instinctive reaction is going to be that he is hiding weird, unblinking eyes. I have a career in medicine and the experience of two parents with dementia, I've seen this movie. It never has a happy ending.
We've had impaired presidents before, and it has gone badly. Ronald Reagan was not well during the latter part of his second term. We got Oliver North running an illegal, spooky foreign policy on the side. Woodrow Wilson seriously botched the reorganization of the world in 1918-19. We are still paying the price for that. The parallels between Edith Wilson and the current First Lady are unsettling.
I think the current administration - and it is with difficulty I avoid the term regime - has seen this coming for a long time. And like all desperate factions has been willing to do anything to stay in power. We've never had a President send armed agents to raid the home of his main rival. Professions of non-involvement aside, the efforts to keep Trump off the ballot, tied up in court, maybe actually in jail, are the stuff of banana republics. Once normalized by success they would be repeated.
So I'm hoping for the best. As of now Biden vows to fight on. It's about even money whether that will soon change and Vice President Harris gets to make her case. Ideally she'd tap a running mate to reassure those of us whose votes can be swayed. Trump could and should do the same. He's sharper than Biden, but he's not young either.
Perhaps we'll see Harris-Beshear vs. Trump-Stefanik. Each team would have a fair bit of baggage to unload, but our Republic would be better served by this option than what is barreling down the road at us presently.
My previous Help Wanted posts....
2020 The Covid Election - with bonus Woodrow Wilson insights
Fourth of July, 2024.
As has often been the case in recent years, we took in a small town's parade. The Grand Marshal was a WWII vet. Once these were common, the default mode of our fathers. Now they are vanishingly rare.
Fewer parade floats this year. I'm thinking I'll have the robotics team build a base platform that we can modify for various themes. Slap on a fish, or a pumpkin, or whatever sort of small town festival you are in.
There were a bunch of people on bikes. They ranged from grandparents to tykes.
You see small children in the front row. That's because candy is often thrown to the crowd. I bet they were really excited when this rolled up!
Parades always end with fire trucks. Every small town in the area brings theirs. It would be a bad time to have a fire somewhere.
But as such things are still happening in the background I've been pondering my every four year feature called: Help Wanted President. If I can come to grips with it, perhaps I'll have thoughts along these lines next week.
But today America is just enjoying another Happy Birthday.
This is another in the Strange Roads series. On occasion I have both an atypical destination and a few minutes of extra time on my journey. Easy enough to hit Googly Maps and look for a cemetery. In the river town of Prescott Wisconsin it is in an out of the way corner of town.
As is usually the case, there are Catholic and non Catholic cemeteries adjacent to one another. Separated by a fence and the Reformation. Oddly the Catholic one did not have any "trees". On the Pine Glen Cemetery side however, we find this:
This marker commemorates the Wiggins family. It has obviously been cleaned in recent years, note the nice condition of the inscription area.
I've been traveling down some unfamiliar roads this year. Grand kid sporting events are one cause. Also, helping the Homesteaders in a rural location to which there are several scenic alternate routes. This takes me past little cemeteries I did not know existed. This one is near Cameron, Wisconsin.
Here's a nice tree shaped tombstone.
Gattin Von Rauchenstein threw me a bit. In a general sense adding Von to your name means not the literal, that you are from a place, but that you were some level of nobility. But Gattin Von is just a bit different.
It just means "Wife of". Oh, and down at the bottom "Ruhe im Frieden" is Rest in Peace. A cemetery in Germany would be called a Friedhof, literally a "peaceful place".
