Cryonic Monkey

As each of the grandkids has come along I've had a chance to spend time with them.  It's great.  My interactions with them tend to be on the silly side.  They'll get enough of the serious side of life by and by.  Around age 3, give or take a bit, each of them has had a toy that took on a life of its own.  With a little help from Grandpa they became tricksters, rascals, magicians.  Am I projecting aspects of my own personality?  Maybe.

First up, Possum.  He was actually a dog toy that GK#1 took a liking to.  Goofy lookin'.  Has two different "squeakers" that can actually play simple tunes.  A penchant for pushing things off shelves and laughing.  Sang some rather amusing songs.  Ultimate fate?  A visiting dog chewed him up.

Doll Baby.  Now this one's a real stinker.  Known for making insulting raspberry noises and pretending to be a punk teenager.  This was the best one to pose caught in various sketchy activities.  Ultimate fate?  Last seen at the bottom of a toy box.  Little girls move on from dolls.  And Doll Baby remembers this affront.  Oh yes, she remembers......

And for the latest addition we have Monkey.  Oddly enough Monkey does not speak.  What he likes to do is hide places.  I've gotten quite good at distracting the small human, tucking Monkey under my shirt and getting him repositioned somewhere on the sly.  His favorite hiding place is on the of the blades of the ceiling fan.  When you turn it on he goes flying off squealing.

Now, of the three of them Monkey is easily the least villainous.  He just wants to have fun.  So I was very surprised to find him looking like this on my latest visit.

I suppose the likely explanation is that he unwisely chose to hide in the vacuum packing machine.  But maybe....

Having yourself cryogenically frozen is a very Villain move.  Various B-grade sci fi movies have used this theme.  Khan from Star Trek, Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.  I'm seeing a trend.

Is Monkey just biding his time, waiting for a chance to cause more mischief?? 

The Taverns of Old Chippewa Falls, Part Two - Mother Fossler

Part one of our exploration of early Chippewa Falls taverns was fairly upbeat.  Peter Rosseau came to the area as an adventurous young man, became the leading figure of his little community of French Town, married, had a bunch of kids.  Yes, things were rough in the early days.  And French Town was fated to decline and vanish, but that was after his passing.

Our next story is, like Rosseau's, fragmentary.  And interesting.  But also less happy.  Pioneer life was hard.  Making a living running a bar/hotel (now it would be the hospitality industry!) has never been an easy path.  It certainly was not for "Mother Fossler".

In advance, apologies for the numerous spellings of her name.  That's just how it is with German names in the 19th century.  We have tough sledding ahead to make sense of this one folks, so lets dive in.... 

It's pretty certain that in the 1850's it would be hard to find a home, store or boarding house where you couldn't get a drink of whiskey!  But as to the first actual saloons, an interesting starting point is a sort of letter to the editor from 1913 that is simply signed AN OLD TIMER.*  In it he - probably not a she given the topic - has a lot to say on the topic of saloons.  In an article about Chippewa Falls that is mostly encouraging churches, businesses and construction of a nice public library he says:  "By the number and character of plague spots, it is growing better, for when I first knew it as a village of a few hundred inhabitants, there was but two saloons, Old Mother Fosslers and Mose Heberts...."

Hebert, or Old Moses, we've met before, but this was my first clue about an early saloon run by a woman.

She was then married to a man named Andrew, who appears on the muster list of the 1st Wisconsin Regiment as either Fosler or Foster.  His point of enlistment was Chippewa Falls, and it is known that Mrs. Fossler was one of the women of the community who sewed a flag for the home town company.  They carried it through entire conflict, and it was returned home tattered but proud in 1865.  

Andrew Fosler probably came back sooner, as he is recorded as being discharged due to disability in November of 1862.  But he now becomes peripheral to our main story.

Because curiously almost every subsequent reference to the Foslers I can find is centered on her.  For instance, in 1867 "Mother Fosler's" barn burned down, with arson suspected.  Mr. F. is not mentioned.

Best I can determine the Foslers moved to Chippewa Falls in 1855, making them very early settlers indeed.  They appear to have lived "at the foot of River Street", putting them well out of the orderly community centered around the saw mill and company store.  Indeed, it seems likely they lived just across the river from the dubious hamlet of French Town, and conveniently next to the ferry that went there.  This area was also called "Comstock Landing".  

But that seems to have been a bit later.  Thomas McBean, the go to source for history of the early town, had a few things to say in 1897.  He mentions that "Old Fosler" had lived in one of the boarding houses near the Falls called "Battle Row", which burned in 1857.  He then says that "..his relic still lives in the lower end of town."  Battle Row, by the way, is said to have gotten its name from the ongoing squabbles of its female inhabitants!

One very odd feature of this situation is that at some point after Andrew Fossler vanished from the scene he was replaced by a man often called John Fossler, but whose actual name was Klinsch.  Supposedly little was known about him other than that he came here from Luxembourg in 1855.  That's the same year as Mother Fossler. Did she remarry a fellow early settler after Andrew left her?  And when did the actual saloon get started?  Perhaps after the fire in '57 that made them relocate?  John seems to have been associated with it from an early date.  From his obituary comes this memorable passage...

This sure sounds like the pre-Civil war era, so I assume "Mother Fossler's" establishment was on south River Street.  Actually it is very close to my home, and I walk my dog past it almost every day.  The area has been much altered by flood control measures and road work, so there is realistically no prospect of pin pointing its location.

I think this is the spot, that lone building at the bottom of the hill.  This is from an 1886 Birdseye view.  It shows a two story structure all by itself.  River street no longer goes there due to a re-routing of the railroad tracks.  That outbuilding behind might be the "little shack" referred to above.  It was a sad and lonely place by the late 1880's.  Literally on the other side of the tracks, and not far from a swamp that was used as the city dump.  The flat spot on the river bank is where the ferry used to run.  It had been discontinued years earlier as bridges were built.

The same spot today....  Ironically the colorful stuff on the left is a mural depicting early Chippewa Falls history.  The high school kids who did this had no idea how historic this spot actually was.

So what to make of the two "Mr. Foslers"?  In the 1860 census we find Andrew, his wife (her name was Catherine by the way) and their son William living in Chippewa Falls.  Occupation, "keeps boarding house".  So that fits.  Husband and wife were from Baden, Germany.  I can't find a John Klinsch, or anything like that name, but to be fair the copies are hard to read, and I'm getting used to this crew being sneaky with names!

John "Fosler" dropped dead in the street in 1895.  He had been little noticed in the paper before that, other than being arrested for what sounds like public drunkenness.  My difficulty finding him in 1860 census suggests a bit of confusion on the part of the later writers, who might have mixed him up with Andrew Fosler.  I've had no luck so far in tracking down Andrew, who I suspect may have reverted to the alternate name Foster that sometimes is listed.  There is a fellow of that name and about the right age who lived in Menomonie, so maybe that's him.

Catherine Fosler got a brief bit of publicity in 1893, when it was reported that she was destitute and near death in her unheated shack.  Neighbors later denied this and the sheriff confirmed that she had been seen as usual, about town with her bucket of beer.  In one of these exchanges some rather harsh things were said:

Ouch.

Although I have yet to find an obit, Catherine Fosler apparently died in 1896.  Old Settlers usually got a bit more grace from the later citizens of Chippewa Falls, but her dubious marital status, her penchant for drinking, and general lack of success in the world were apparently held against her.  Well, as it says above, let her sufferings - of which she had quite a few, cover her faults.  Which were probably also numerous.

_____________________

* OLD TIMER may well have been Thomas McBean.  It's not as if there were that many people still alive at this point who had seen Chippewa Falls in the mid '50's, and McBean did like to write letters to the newpaper...

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Six. Or thereabouts

 A fair bit of work has gone on since we took the robot for a trial scrimmage a week ago.  Things continue to break and be fixed, with the trend going towards the latter.  This is a pretty complicated critter this time around.

In general, the mechanical side has proven very robust.  One major design decision early needed to be revisited.  We now acquire the game pieces by a roll in from the side system.  It works pretty well but is still rather janky lookin'.

The team member standing on the desk is just being prudent.  There have been a few interesting events, such as when the on board gyroscope failed.....

We have some swell looking bumpers this year.

The primary mission of the robot is acquiring those white plastic pipe sections and parking them on various levels of the "tree".  We are actually best at the highest branch.  This is also the most points.

At the start of each match there are these big green bouncy balls in the way.  They need to be removed, with some points gained by parking them in a slot.  At the practice event we did not see this attempted often.  Or done well.  Here's our method:

So....how's it gonna play out in Duluth later in the week?  If we don't break anything major, and if the various lighting and orientation markers are similar to what we practiced with, we should do OK.  Then we'll have a few weeks to tune up, fix up, or if necessary, tear up before we get to do it all over again.

The Taverns of Old Chippewa Falls - Part One. French Town.

Wisconsin has a "Tavern Culture".  There's good and bad to this of course.  Some people get themselves in trouble with alcohol, and when we made the move from a shoe leather and horseshoes based transportation system you had the horrible issue of drunk drivers.  But those problems aside, its like the Pub Culture of England.  Its nice to have a local establishment where you can go, have a glass of beer, maybe something to eat, maybe watch a ball game.

Oddly, it is difficult to put taverns into their rightful place in local history.  They were on the fringe of respectability in the era of the Temperance Movement, and were mostly an all male domain.  The writers of newspaper columns and official histories darn well knew all the watering holes in town and had a plenty of stories, but its not as if they were going to put them down on paper for the whole world - their wives included - to see!

So as I try to bring the early days of Taverns in Chippewa Falls into focus I can say at the onset that this will be nothing more than a series of glimpses.  All historians are travelers from afar.  Not in distance but in time.  So think of me as a visitor strolling down the streets of a frontier community, peering into the windows of some fascinating buildings while trying to figure out what goes on in there!

Part One of this study has to begin in French Town.  In terms of anything other than a "company town" this was the original community here.  It is, or was, on the south side of the river.  As its name suggests this was an early French Canadian settlement, or more properly, French Canadian guys and their mostly Native American wives.  Nobody seems to know when it got started, and indeed, there have been fur trappers and such coming here since the 1700's.

But just about the earliest name and date I can put to the place happens to be part of our tipsy tale.

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Peter Rosseau was born in Canada in 1815.  He is said to have been in this part of the world early enough to help build the first mill in 1832.  The account suggests this was down stream a ways, but it's likely he was living in French Town in the 1830's, with the first sawmill here being built in 1837.  At what point does a house with a friendly owner, who'd put you up for the night and offer you a drink become a tavern/hotel?  The "Rosseau House" was certainly present in some form in the early 1850's, and I'd not rule out an earlier date.

Just about the first documentation I could find was an offhand reference to a rather unsavory murder.  A man named Wylie had a jealous streak.  When his wife walked by a saloon in French Town in 1857, something impolite was said.  The next day the man who had offended her was found with his head bashed in.  This sort of thing happened every few years in the French Town of the pre-Civil War era.  Wylie by the way was not charged, but decided it was prudent to skip town for parts unknown soon after this incident.

Another 1850's reference to French Town and Rosseau comes from a man who remembered the place when he came to the area in 1854.  "Peter Rosseau kept a boarding house there.  Rosseau was the king there and owned everything around."

The Rosseau House went for a bit of respectability later on.  An 1869 mention in the Chippewa Falls Democrat: "Peter Rosseau's well known hotel in French Town is now in full running order and ready to accommodate guests.  Bar and stable in connection with the house".

Curiously, this also appeared in 1869:

It's hard to make much of this.  Baumgarth was a dealer in Wines, Liquors, Cigars and Groceries over on the "respectable" side of the river.  He was also County Treasurer.  Mondelert must be a mis spelling of Mandelert, a common enough name in these parts to be a dead end.

I don't have any information on the origin of this photo, so all I can say is that some claim it is a picture of the Rosseau House.  Date unclear.

I've been a bit skeptical of this one in the past, but seeing the Harness Shop in the context of "Bar and Stable..." maybe its legit.   I could see that fancy overhang on the right side of the picture being a hotel/tavern.  My prior dismissal of a street light in an obscure back water of town is probably not valid.  I've found evidence of them being installed pretty early in more isolated spots.  The long, wide straight road.  Does it have a parallel on this 1874 illustration?

This image by the way is just about the only reliable plan of French Town.  There are three buildings big enough to be the Rosseau House.  I thought I had another one identified as a second known early tavern, but as it turns out, I was wrong...........

Peter Rosseau died in 1871.  Despite being one of the first settlers of our community he seems to have passed with little notice.  To be fair, newspapers of this time period are intermittently available and not very good.  I'm sure for his wake there was a serious bash at the Rosseau House.  Perhaps the apparent management changes in 1869 reflected poor health?  

At about the same time another man comes onto the saloon scene in French Town.  And despite turning up a generation later and only tending bar for a short while, we know a lot about Valentine Blum.  And no, you can't see his establishment on the 1874 view.

Valentine, or sometimes Valentin, Blum was born in Germany in 1844.  He moved to Wisconsin in 1860 and to Eau Claire in 1864.  His main work then became....river pilot!  He was the guy who steered big rafts of logs down the Chippewa River.  And evidently he was good at it.

In 1870 the census lists him as working at the mill in French Town.  And, starting in the spring of 1870, also running an establishment in French Town that combined saloon, restaurant, bowling alley and "lager beer fountain"!  

Sounds like a fun place.  I'd go there.  But it does not appear to have been a success.  It seems to have gone out of business in 1871.  In October of that year the owner, the fascinating E.R. Hantzsch, was advertising for a new tenant as the place had been "unoccupied for some time".  A month later it burned down.  These things happened often in places built out of and heated by, wood.  Maybe more often if there was insurance money involved.  Just sayin'.

After his year or so running a sort of 19th century entertainment center Blum went back to working in the saw mill.  1873 finds him sounding rather respectable, he was an election official in Eau Claire where he presumably lived.  But then there's that other matter.  Also in 1873 a batch of rowdy lumberjacks turned up in Chippewa Falls and "..got upon a right lively bender...".  The police who were sent in to quiet them down were met with fists, thrown objects and abuse.  They retreated for a time and things really got out of hand.  And it is reported that: "Valentine Blum, a resident of this place but now running the French Town mill was shot through the neck."  It was pointed out that he was "...taking no part in the affray", making him sound like an innocent bystander.

He survived, and on his death in 1896 was considered a highly respected Old Pioneer.

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Not sure when I'll have time to take on the Taverns of Old Chippewa Falls (other side of the river), but it might be a few weeks.  Busy times and a complicated subject.

 

The first Baseball in Chippewa Falls

Looks like spring is on the way.  And, although I no longer follow it closely, that means baseball.  I've been meaning for some time to write a bit about early baseball in my town of Chippewa Falls, and was pleased to find an Old Timers reminiscence in a 1905 newspaper that basically did my work for me.  It discusses the purported arrival of the game in 1867.  After a few preliminaries it begins:

Some prominent names on that list.  Coleman has a street named after him, Stillson a school.  Taylor ran the ferry across the river and was the fire chief.  

The comment was made that most of these men were former soldiers, and that they played without mitts or masks; with a somewhat larger ball that was thrown underhand.  The playing field was improvised, just an open space between Bridge and Bay streets.

The first game was refereed by a visiting agent for the Chicago Times who supposedly gave it a big write up in his paper and left with a long list of new subscribers.  The Chippewa team played regularly, almost every afternoon in fact.  But of course a challenger was not long in arriving:

We need to read between the lines a bit here.  It seems as if the local boys played a spirited style of baseball in all senses.  Old Mose Hebert has turned up a few times in my historical writings.  He ran one of the first and most patronized saloons in town.

In some fashion the Eau Claire team tried to get their Chippewa rivals drunk past their usual levels.  Alas, to no avail.  And it turned out to be the Eau Claire nine that came up on the short end of the score, and with the bigger headaches the next day!

That seems to have been the high point of the 1867 season.  Soon afterwards:

Baseball has been played every year since then, although these days it has a fair bit of competition from soccer and other sports.  A complete history of it would be a major undertaking and probably of limited interest.  But one final snippet.

I spend some time studying old maps.  On a "Birdseye View" from 1906 - one year after this historical rambling - you can see what I think was the first official ball field in town.  Its on the south side of town and is labeled "Athletic Park"

I can't say how early it went back, but I can report that a ball field was still there in the early 1990's when my son was playing.  It was seldom used, there being newer and better facilities around, and was tucked in behind the City Shops and yard waste dump.   The field is now gone, with the last remnant - a disused concessions stand - finally being removed just a few years ago.

WEEK ZERO

The robotics team has a big tournament coming up. In fact, two weeks from today it will be done.  This is in what is called Week One of the FIRST robotics competition season.  Five more weekends events follow.

If you have your robot working, or more commonly, mostly working, there are opportunities to run it in a pre-season event called a Week Zero.  The field is a bit more plywood than aluminum and polycarbonate, but close enough for a practice event.  

Last year we could not make it.  Our robot was falling apart.  The year before, ditto.  Over the roughly ten seasons of the team's existence we've only managed a Week Zero twice.  As it is an excellent way to see what  works and what does not, its pretty valuable and attending one was not just a goal this year but a Prime Directive.  So off we went.  

Some things worked, some needed work.

Here's the on the field drivers meeting at the start of the day.  40 teams signed up, but a few were kept away by a spate of nasty weather the night before.

And out onto the field.  We managed to "answer the bell" for the first match of the season for anyone!

We knew our software team had not yet had time to get most of the control systems tuned up, or in some cases operational at all.  On the other hand, our mechanical build seems rock solid.  If you are, in effect, a big clumsy oaf crashing into things it helps to be durable! 

Our system for intaking those sections of PVC pipes is particularly twitchy.  Unexpectedly, when teams "miss" - and often as not this was us - and they pile up in front of the station, it gets hard to acquire them.  A short lived and very unsuccessful kludge solution was tried.

A good trip, much was learned.  We have a lot of work to do in the next ten days but we know what it is.  As software did their secret rituals in another corner of the room the 5826 pit crew was able to briefly engage in their traditional idles moments Uno game.

History Underfoot

I'm doing another community ed talk next month.  It's called History Underfoot, and will cover the archaeological record of our town.  If you are local and interested, contact: Cardinal Community Learning Center.  I'm told sign up is such we'll be moving to a bigger space.

Of course a place that was started in the 1840's and was a boom town during the lumbering era will have History, but much less that what I encounter on my annual archaeology jaunts to work Roman sites in England.  But that does not make it less interesting, and it is fascinating to compare early accounts, early images, and what the record of artifacts actually shows you.

Did lumberjacks coming to town really blow their wages on booze?  How early do you start finding evidence of women and children in the community, and what would that consist of?

It's all "underfoot" at least in places where newer buildings and public works have not destroyed it.

In earlier days I spent a fair bit of time excavating trash pits, cisterns, and yes, outhouses to see what had been tossed heedlessly or dropped and regretted.  

In the course of prepping the talk I looked at, for the first time in decades, pictures of my friends and I circa mid 1980's, happily digging away.  It's interesting stuff.  

Ah, good times, good times.  So, could my 68 year old self still grab a shovel and go straight down six or seven feet?  Heck yes.  I in fact still have the short handled shovel seen in the above vintage pics.  It's been repaired a few times, but still sits patiently in the corner of the garage just in case......

Oafs of Middle Earth

J.R.R. Tolkien probably does not follow my writings.  He did after all die in 1973, about when I discovered his work for the first time.  But you never know.  As a devout Christian who did much to promote the faith I'd give him decent odds of being in Heaven where he could probably pick and chose.  Or, eternal justice being a bit opaque, maybe he went to Hell and he's being forced to read this.  You just never know.

So I'll ask, not exactly expecting a reply, J.R.R., why did you decide that the oldest, wisest, most far seeing race in Middle Earth should be called The Oafs?

Well actually, The Elves, but it is the same word.  And Tolkien being a master of etymology would darn well know this.

You have to think of early Germanic cultures as a fairly consistent grouping, whether they were found in Scandinavia, northern England or back home in Germany.  And in such places there were some odd pre-Christian beliefs.  If a child was not turning out as expected it was sometimes assumed that it was a Changeling, a creature left by malicious non human beings who swiped the real baby and swapped in....something else.  It's not a nice concept.  Who knows what was really going on.  Did a previously peaceful child develop severe colic and keep the parents up for months at night?  Did the little bald head sprout red hair?  You could certainly see why both his black haired parents might use this as a go-to answer, although the mother and Sven the red headed guy who lived in the next hut might very well know better.

The beings that pulled off this hoax were variously called yrf, alf, alp, or of course, elf.

Sadly the extension of this concept to children who were not just inconvenient to Frida and Sven, but defective in various ways caused them to be called auf or opf.  Dating to the 1600s it meant 

 "A changeling; a foolish or otherwise defective child left by the fairies in place of another carried off." 

Tolkien's elves were not perfect.  They tended to be a bit smug for instance.  But you could not see them pulling off nasty pranks like this.  A good reminder that while it would be great to live in Middle Earth, living in the Germanic world that inspired it would not be very nice at all.

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Five

Robot needs to be operational on some level for a pre-season scrimmage on Saturday.  As of Thursday last week we had the manipulator systems working pretty well.  Here's video proof, albeit with humans pushing the thing around.  We've seen the drive base be capable for a week or so already.

The two halves of the robot were being bolted together at the end of Saturday session.

So, its coming along.  There's a whole bunch of wiring to do over the next few days, and we really hope everything works together as well as it did separately.  With a bit of luck - and of course more hard work - we'll get to the point where at least the adult coaches don't have that much to do.  This is actually a hard skill to master, but some of us are practicing up....

Greenland is not for Sale

It was a surprise to hear from him.  But it always is.  My mail, like everyone's these days, is mostly junk.  But there it was, an actual letter.  It was covered with odd stamps and had as the return address:  Badger Trowelsworthy, Arsuk Greenland.

The old scoundrel makes the occasional appearance here on Detritus of Empire.  A while back he may have even been incautious enough to have a photo taken...

I quote the peculiar missive with the usual caveats....Lord Trowelsworthy lives a life that sounds like poorly written fiction.  The things he clearly fibs about might actually be to make it sound more plausible.

As usual it was assembled from cut up books and magazines.  I've never actually seen a sample of his hand writing.

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Dear Tim

Hope you remain hearty and hale in that rustic backwater called Wisconsin.  I really should drop in some time, but there is the pesky matter of the Statue of Limitations.  Congrats on the addition of a third grand child.  I've no doubt this one will be as endearing and Promising as the first two.  You've rejected this offer many a time, but as always, if there is ever a need to do something on their behalf - a bribe here, the threat of a broken knee cap there - say the word and it's done.  

As you know, my current residence is in Greenland.  By Jupiter I've not seen the place get so much press in ages.  Hard to believe that Don really wants to buy it.  But fear not.  I've told him its not for sale.

I own it and I'm keeping it.

I suppose this will come as a surprise to you.  How after all does one buy a country?  I mean without (too much) assistance from various organizations known only by their LETTERS?

Greenland is a small place.  I've been coming here since the 1920's.  So the tally of my children, grand children and great grand children is a not inconsequential percentage of the electorate.  Oh, not enough to get a majority in the Inasitsart but still a powerful political force.  But perhaps you've heard of the Voldugur Graelingur Party? (TW note: I had to look it up, it translates to The Mighty Badgers).  They had great success introducing a bill entitled - in translation - "Sod off, Orange Boy" that established a sovereign wealth fund to buy, well, everything.  It's true that the stuff in the footnotes about the entire transaction being financed by a crypto currency called BadgerCoin has been controversial......  And that's part of why I'm writing.  You will almost certainly be getting visits from unhappy and unimaginative officials who wonder why your name is on a whole batch of contracts and legal briefs.  Sorry, I'll make it up to you.

Lets get together soon.  Ideally in some happy place without extradition treaties but in a pinch just drop by our humble abode in Arsuk.  My current wife - and by Hera, I don't believe you've met this one - cooks up a mean Seal Tartar.

Until then;

Deny All

Your friend, mentor and fan,

Trowelsworthy

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You can believe as much of that as you care to.  In the interests of full disclosure I must mention that the letter smelled vaguely of sun screen, and that when I pieced together the cut out magazine bits (because I have learned a few things over our long acquaintance) it seems as if some of them came from the menu of a beach front sea food shack in Barbados.

With a bit of searching I found this image of it in the background.

punctuation-space-space-capital

I learned something recently.  As part of the robotics team's tournament prep we are doing a reference book to keep in the pit.  It's for judges coming around who want to see what we did and how we did it.  We've done something along these lines in the past, but this year we are making it more comprehensive, better illustrated, and hopefully loaded with material that will get the judgey types intrigued and coming back to learn more.

We are a fairly small team this year, so the student power available to do this is limited.  Actually building the robot takes priority after all.  So part of what I'm doing is interviewing the students working on various aspects of the project, taking notes, and hammering them into something readable.  Hey, you try to get busy kids to sit down at a keyboard.  Now try it with software types...

I'm the humble scribe, it is the students doing all the real work, which includes the photos and layout for the "pit book".  And our layout person asked me something interesting the other day.  "Did you know that you put double spaces between sentences?"

I said yes.....and then asked "Doesn't everyone?"  And the answer is no.  No they do not.  In fact in English class they now are taught to use single spaces.   Huh.  Never a good day unless you learn something.  Of course wanting it to be an even better day, I had to learn more.

Evidently using double spaces this way is a relic of the days of manual typewriters and I think, manual type setting for old style printing presses.  Since about 1950 there has been a trend to prefer the single space format.  So how did I miss this?

Well, I'm sure I heard about the new fangled way at some point.  But when?

Not at Lowell Elementary School.  Good grief, the beginning reader texts there were "Dick, Jane and Sally" books.  I even remember a notoriously inappropriate book involving a young person of color and some tigers.  Modern writing?  Nothing of the sort.  They were still trying to teach us elegant cursive.

So how about middle school?  It was called Junior High back then and I remember it being a modern day Bedlam in which I learned very little.  I did, however, spend a little time in Industrial Ed class setting older than old school metal type for printing.....

I did attend a high school that took academics more seriously.  So why didn't any English teacher raise this point?  I think its because we wrote our assignments by hand.  Ah, but I took typing class.  Yes, surely it would have been mentioned then?  Nope.  The teacher was both old and old school.  I remember her having a beehive hairdo.  I might have been a bit of a teacher's pet, being the only guy in the class.  What I learned there has served me well.  The fingers know what to do, and I can generally think and type simultaneously.*

Although the single spaced mandate has gone out, it seems to be inconsistent.  Plenty of books written in recent years still double space.  And since I'm now paying close attention to this, I note several of my colleagues, who are younger and have less excuse, do also.

While I have to concede that the single space rule is considered modern and correct, I also maintain that it is modern and foolish.  It may be part of why reading comprehension is atrocious these days.  Lets go through what writing structure used to be, and why.

Words.  They give you context.  I say "orangutan" and you start thinking of a big ol' orange monkey.

Sentences. They convey an idea.  Hopefully with clarity. "The orangutan threw a bowling ball at me."

Paragraphs.  This is where the actual story begins.  Ideas linked to other ideas.  "I was seriously hung over that Tuesday morning.  So when I stepped out the door into the blistering Moroccan sun I was unwary.  And it happened again.  The orangutan threw a bowling ball at me."

Each sentence is like flipping over another card.  It shows you something new which relates to what came before and what might come after.  Slurring these together even by a single space damages the timing of the entire sequence.  Think of this next time you hear a young person reading anything aloud.

Ah well.  Maybe it matters not.  What written communication I see in the younger generation is largely electronic.  Most texts are a single sentence.  Or a word.  Or a few letters and an emoji.  To actually care about how written narratives work you'd have to be old and eccentric.

Which I remain, and proudly.

* I'm finding that it is getting easier to simultaneously think of what to write and to type it at the same time.  Either my keyboarding abilities are improving with practice or my brain is slowing down with age.  

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Four

Robot building seasons have ebbs and flows, tides and landscapes.  The middle weeks get hectic, so I'm out of my usual Friday reporting mode.

I've mentioned more than once that a quarter century of doing things like this has given me the ability to "see" roughly two weeks into the Robot Future.  Oh, you think this is a good thing?  Trust me, its a curse.

I spent most of last week looking at work in progress and work projected and thinking....well that won't work.  Mostly due to weight limits.  The robot can only weigh 115 pounds this year.  And as its various components were being worked on separately I got more and more antsy.  Yes, I encouraged them to weigh things every session, but they found that a bother. It would get in the way of adding more cool things, bolting them on, wiring them up, maybe adding just one more motor or gearbox.  Nobody likes to listen to elderly eccentrics.  But I told them it looked to me like about 106 pounds without all the wiring and more critically without a sizable - but non mission critical - subsystem.

Eventually they got tired of hearing me whine and put it on the scale.  Which read 106 pounds.

It's fine.  The main systems have proven to be more versatile than expected, rendering the auxiliary subsystem (and it would have been about another 20 pounds!) unnecessary.  We can now proceed with a simpler, more robust, "cleaner" design, which admittedly still needs quite a bit of tuning and tweaking.

Heading into that always crucial long Saturday session, here's what we had:

Main assembly, elevator and grabber.  It's mounted on a temporary base that approximates the right geometry.

And the actual drive base.  Nice omnidirectional drive modules and most of the electronics.  The latter appear to be floating in mid air, but that's because they are mounted on nice, clean polycarbonate plastic.  It will look scruffy and Mad Max soon enough.  Maybe I like this view so much because until the scruffification you can imagine the electronics just floating (weightlessly, boy I wish!) on thin air.

Bring it on, Saturday.....

Well that's pretty fun.  Very speedy and more importantly, easy to control.  The one remaining subsystem to Prove is the "elbow" on the main manipulator.  We had it running briefly until it drew too much current and fried a wire connector.  We are going to lighten it a bit and increase the gear reduction on the motor that drives it.

From the early part of the season there had been a plan to have a ground intake device.  Alas, finally putting the robot on the scale it became clear that the mechanism as designed would put us over weight.  But...could you make a really simple, really light, really dumb device that could do most of the job?  Let's find out.

And so it goes.  We don't have everything working, but a lot of it.  We expect to have it all working together in about a week.  Enough time, but none to spare.  We just have to avoid any cancellations due to weather.  Fingers crossed.