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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

-------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

Early Thaw

It's been a few years since I made a snowman with grand kids.  In a warm stretch a couple weeks ago the latest addition to the family and I got out and built one in the front yard.  An odd late January thaw hit it hard.  Seasons.  They come and go unpredictably.

 This guy is now lurching forward, parts falling off.  Sort of a Snow Zombie.  It reminds me of the demented snow creatures that used to show up in Calvin and Hobbes!

Kingman Reef

Interesting times politically.  Some people are happy, some unhappy.  But there is certainly change in the air.  One thing that happens with every new administration is that political appointees are expected to tender their resignations.  Which are almost always accepted.  Ah, but what about other government employees, the theoretically non partisan ones?  It can be a lot more work to move them out.  It's simply hard to fire people in Washington D.C.

So, many of them just keep their jobs.  But if the new administration really does not like you or your work, they can always reassign you somewhere else.  Alaska gets mentioned.  As does Iowa.  I've been to both places and they are just fine.  Well, not Alaska in the winter I guess.

But if you want to send a pesky bureaucrat off to the farthest reaches of American territory, off somewhere so remote that you won't hear from them again, I suggest Kingman Reef.

Never heard of it?  Well, its the smallest piece of real estate under the US flag.  It has much nicer weather than Alaska, and sandy beaches that would be the envy of Iowans.

It is about halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa.  So my Off the Map tag is apt.

Even for an out of the way spot it did not get noticed for a long time.  An American sea captain discovered it in 1798.  I assume this was related to whaling, back in the Moby Dick era its about the only reason people were out that far into the South Pacific.  Another captain named Kingman got around to actually describing it in 1853.  He named it after himself.

Now, I've mentioned the Guano Act a few times before.  Big thick layers of seabird droppings were a serious commodity in the 19th century.  Great stuff for fertilizer.  Also for high explosives.  So its no surprise that the United States Guano Company claimed Kingman Reef in 1856.  The fact that there was no actual guano there was considered a technicality.

Not much happened after that.  Occasionally a ship would run aground.

Then in 1922 a certain Lorrin A. Thurston showed up and read a Proclamation declaring the Reef to be American territory.  He seems like a bit of a character.  In addition to various business ventures he was a "volcano enthusiast" and was deeply involved in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.  One assumes he brought along a flag to raise.

And that's about it.  It was very briefly used as a stop over for Pan Am clipper "flying boats" until a fatal crash.  Today it is a wild life preserve.  Nobody lives there or in fact, is allowed to visit.  

The entire island is 3 feet above water and a little over seven acres in size.  

It seems a pleasant enough place to relocate pesky bureaucrats whose job performance is deemed execrable.  They certainly can't cause much mischief there, and at last there would be a bit of guano being generated, although the United States Guano Company has long since gone bankrupt.

Going to the Dogs

It's been a while since my last "Time Capsule" post that looks at random artifacts that have found their way to me.  Given the degree of decluttering that is actually necessary I should be finding things like this on a daily basis.

Here's a classic:

Even if your interest in Americana is minimal you probably recognize this as a piece in the genre of "Dogs Playing Poker".  This particular one is called "His Station and Four Aces".

We had this in a frame of uncertain vintage.  When it was removed it had a strip of thicker cardboard across the top, identifying it as part of a calendar.  Of course lacking the helpful dates.

So what can we learn here?

This is a print, of an original from 1903.  The artist, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, would also have to be considered an original.  His bio is worth a quick read.  In addition to being a painter he was at various times a cartoonist, a druggist, and tried to start both a bank and a newspaper.  Sometime in the 1890's he started painting pictures of dogs doing human things.  

He became popular after the turn of the century, mostly thanks to the efforts of the Brown and Bigelow company of St. Paul, Minnesota.  Lets zoom in on the picture, shall we?

In addition to fun details like the dog wearing a pinky ring, you can just see the copyright logo, B & B, St. Paul.

Brown and Bigelow was founded in 1896.  They were, still are in fact, an advertising firm.  In 1903 they commissioned C.M. Coolidge - "Kash" to his friends - to paint a series of  sixteen"Dogs" for their use.  The mutts do more than play cards.  They go dancing, play baseball, smoke and drink, appear in court.  They are whimsical in the best of ways....we see ourselves in our Best Friends.  Two of the original oil paintings in the series were sold as a pair in 2006....for $590,000!  "Poker Game", an 1894 version that predates the Brown and Bigelow series did even better.  It got $658,000 when it sold at Sotheby's of New York in 2015.

I was hoping for additional clues on the back of my specimen, but alas this was not to be.  From the size, the cardboard edging on the top, and the general condition, I'd say what I have is the image cut off the top of a calendar from the 1950's or 60's.  Something like this:

Cassius M. Coolidge has attained a degree of lasting fame.  I think he deserved it.  He had an eye for humor, and wisely picked dogs as his material.  I just don't think cats would cut it.

Another, albeit smaller degree of lasting fame goes to one of the earliest internet viral videos, Ultimate Dog Tease.  If you've not seen it, well here it is.  Its in the same spirit as the poker pups...

211 million views.  Its just a great dog.  Sadly the star - Clark G. - passed away last year.  I hope, no, I believe, he's now in a dog paradise where he gets "the maple kind" of bacon three meals a day.

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Three

Time for another "day by day" report.  We continue to have members out for illness....

Monday

An odd day.  School was out for teacher's in-service but we could have practice afterwards.  Three of our really dedicated students took the opportunity to come in during the morning and help one of the tech ed teachers get up to speed with the cnc router the team purchased and donated to the school.  Best way to do that was to make more parts.

For the actual build session, things coming together nicely.

Lets zoom in for a detail.  It is the details in the end that actually count.

This is the mechanism for the "wrist" that positions the main manipulating gadget.  It already has the sensors built in, which will allow positioning to within less than a degree.  And the odd black rectangular bit is a belt tensioner.  We are trying to use timing belts instead of chain, both for weight conservation (we'll need to watch that) and reliability.

Tuesday

School and practice cancelled, as it was Ice Age level cold.

Wednesday

We usually don't meet this day of the week, but this year's team is not easily deterred.  A small crew, made smaller by the bothersome wave of illness going through the community, came in for an extra session.  Their goal was to get the elevator rigged and operational.  And they got it close, although there are some pesky friction points somewhere yet to be found.

Thursday

Starting to look like something.  We can power the elevator up and down, although there are a few hiccups to figure out.  The manipulator is big and scary.  It looks like it won't tolerate any nonsense from uncooperative game pieces.

Murder in Old Chippewa Falls - Part Five, Was Justice Served?

If you are coming to this story late, here's the tale of Murder in Old Chippewa Falls from the start:

Part One - The Wrong Corpse

Part Two - The Suspect

Part Three - Arrest

Part Four - Escape and Recapture

Felix Fourboul Junior was convicted of second degree manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in the State Penitentiary.  He was released after four.  

It seems a light punishment for patricide, and the matter of escaping from jail seems to have just been ignored.  Some newspaper accounts actually sounded a bit admiring!  From time to time there were reports on his life in prison, as in this short bit from 1915.

I'm not sure why the lesser charge was pursued instead of say, murder.  Perhaps the account of a fight between father and son, along with the injuries Felix came away with, gave doubt as to premeditation and motive.  And who knows, perhaps Felix Senior was not as nice a guy as he was portrayed.  In a small town people know such things.

As to the other characters in our little tale....

Mrs. Fourboul vanishes from view.  From an off hand remark by her step son it sounds as if she was from Canada.  With poor health and no remaining ties to Chippewa Falls I suspect she went back there.

As mentioned earlier Orrin Fuller, the apparent brains behind the jail break, was also never heard from again.  He must have been a resourceful fellow.  His would be a story well worth the knowing and the telling.

Mrs. Alice Bertrand also gets no further mention in the local papers.  Bertrand is a common enough name in this town, so perhaps the various other Mrs. Bertrands were just being precise when they always listed their first initial.  Or, given the allegations, perhaps they wanted it known that they were certainly not THAT Mrs. Bertrand.  There is an Alice Bertrand, nee Germain, buried in Chippewa Falls.  She lived from 1877 - 1971.  This would make her 28 at the time of these events, so the servant girl might have been onto something with her suspicions.  

So what ever became of Felix Fourboul Junior?  I wish I could tell you.  I find no burial record in either the US or Canada.  Newspaper archives are always hit and miss, but essentially I find no mention of a Felix Fourboul anywhere in North America following the events of this story.  Its an unusual enough name that changing it to something simpler, and ditching connection to a sordid past, would only be sensible.  Essentially Felix did his time, then appeared at the offices of the Chippewa Independent on October 20, 1915.  He paid the bill for the paper he had been receiving while imprisoned, walked out the door and vanished to history.  As it happens, his is only the second most remarkable escape from the Chippewa Falls Jail, but that's a story for another day.

And Felix Senior?  He also makes a final appearance in 1915.  After a fashion.  In an article describing the need for a new courthouse much is made of the crowded and dilapidated state of things.  I don't know what to add to this quote:

Presumably his mortal remains were eventually interred in a pauper's grave.  Perhaps his final resting place is under one of the small, unmarked stones in the cemetery associated with the County Poor Farm.

Dog Names in Chilly Times

It's January.  So of course it has been darned cold lately.  It's even been moderately unpleasant in the UK, which has prompted at least one of my friends to jaunt off to the warmth of the Canary Islands.  

Oddly, while there are canaries on the Canary Islands, the bird is named after the location, not the other way around.  While the islands are named after dogs.  Maybe.

The islands have been known, if not known well, from far into antiquity.  It would be hard to miss them, as the ones nearest to the African coast are visible from same on clear days.  Exactly who came and went - Greeks, Phoenicians, etc. - is somewhat obscure, but the Romans for sure were there for a while at least to do a bit of trading with the locals and collect material for making dye.  They were called the "The Fortunate Isles" in Classical Texts, although it is the Latin Canarie Insulae, or Island of the Dogs, that has stuck.

Was it a reference to actual dogs?  Maybe, they do get around.  Or as some speculate to monk seals, aka "sea dogs", which laze around on the beach in a fashion not without parallel in modern British tourists.

And to be clear to my wide traveling friend Anthea, not trying to draw any direct comparison.

It got me thinking about how the Latin word for dog has not survived much into our modern world.  Maybe that which is right at our elbow becomes familiar and naturally picks up new names in every culture.

"Dog" is suggested to come from "docga" a middle English word that is somewhat suspiciously described as "rare".  It nudged out the Germanic word "hund", still current in that language and which survives as "hound".

When conversing about our dog Hank I try to use words other than dog, as he knows that one.  Some of the other terms and their origins:

"Cur" from the Low German "korren".  The name is said to be echoic, which means it imitates the growling of a dog.

"Mutt", seems to be a shortened version of "mutton head", a term less used with changing diets, but designating a dummy with either two or four legs.

"Mongrel" sounds a little unkind, but other than the Latin is perhaps the oldest word of the lot.  It comes from Proto-German "managjan", which meant to mix together.  Eventually this went through Old English "gemong" and gave us both "among" and "mingling.  The Modern German word "mischling" to mean a mixture of various dog genetics preserves this long and distinguished concept.

Anyway. It's cold.  The dog wants to go out anyway, and I wish I were on a tropical island off the coast of Africa looking at these cute little birds.  I'd try to not annoy my fellow beach lollers with etymology lectures.  It's not what they are there for.

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Two

When doing my weekly updates on the hectic FIRST robotics build season I sometimes go back to previous years....where were we at?  How confident did I sound?  It can be sobering...

So here's a few images from Week Two (of practically speaking, five) to get 'er done.

Base frame and elevator assembled.  Additional supports and braces were added the next session.

In the background are various other things including the field element we interact with and the two main manipulator devices in prototypical form.

In the software room a version of Helios, last year's robot, is our test bed for new and updated electronics, and to go forward with more sophisticated vision tracking.  Note the camera looking back at you.  The robot being mobile, and still under iffy control, it has temporary bumpers made of some foam we did not select for later use.  I call this "Helios the White", and was pleased that at least a couple of the students got the Tolkien reference.

This year the robot weight limit is 115 pounds.  We are at 85, but don't have everything piled on the scale yet.  The nuts, bolts, wires, and who knows what else always add up.  Stay tuned, you'll see this view again.  We've been burned before, so our scale now has a sign on it:

We'll have some fun Youtube video up in a couple of days, showing our prototype mechanisms takin' care of business with the objects they are designed to handle.  Perhaps the best way to close out the week is with an elevator now ready to be rigged with cable and motors...

Murder in Old Chippewa Falls - Part Four, Escape, Capture and Trial

Let's continue the story of Felix Fourboul Jr. and Senior, and Murder in Old Chippewa Falls.  For those coming in late:

Part One - The Wrong Corpse

Part Two - The Suspect

Part Three - Arrest

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When Sheriff Lund turned up at the Chippewa County jail on Monday November 4th, 1905, one of the inmates - who was also awaiting trial for murder - asked him if he'd seen the big hole in the wall.  Indeed, the jail now had a new exit.  What it did not have were Felix Fourboul Jr. or Orrin Fuller.  

Evidently somebody had slipped them a hacksaw, possibly through an opened window.  Over an undetermined period of time the duo had sawed through a bar to the extent that it could not only be dislodged - giving them access to an outside wall - but then used to chisel away at the stone of a window sill and create a hole big enough for them to get through.  Hmmm....maybe this is why Felix seemed so cheery when he appeared in court two weeks earlier!

Fuller was felt to be the brains of the operation.  But in another puzzling detail, he was in jail only for a relatively minor forgery charge and would have soon been released.  Outside help was strongly suspected.

Despite an intensive search neither man was located.  Indeed, from the lack of mentions in later years of the paper I suspect Orrin Fuller got clean away.  It was easier to vanish 120 years ago.  Being a forger probably was a big help.

The trail went cold for years....

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There were of course plenty of rumors.  One early suspicion was that Felix had gone north to the Indian Reservation where he would be protected.  One commentor said that any attempt to take him from there would be met "..with a Winchester...".  I used to work near the LCO Reservation.  I'm inclined to agree with this idea.

In actuality Felix Fourboul wandered here and there.  Through North Dakota and up into Canada.  Eventually he ended up in the small town of Sioux Rapids Iowa.  Going by the name "John Compton" he used his previous experience working at the brickyard to gain employ at a similar plant that made brick and tile.  He was "hard working,  industrious and of good habits".  But evidently greed got the better of him.

The account in the paper is a little vague, but it sounds as if Felix still harbored thoughts that his father had done him wrong financially.  So he wrote to the Executor of Felix Senior's estate asking for any remaining money.  As it happens, this was John Therriault, his former employer who knew him well.  This started the wheels of justice moving, and through the cooperation of the postal and law enforcement folks in Sioux Rapids, Felix was apprehended on July 18th, 1910.  He cooled his heels a while in their local jail, where it was said that "He was visited by several women and girls who shed copious tears over his hard fate."  Again with the Bad Boy allure....

Fourboul was returned to Chippewa Falls where he went on trial in January of 1911.  On the 18th of that month he was found guilty and sentenced.   

But was justice done?

The Chippewa County Courthouse as it appeared in 1911:

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Underneath Madison Wisconsin

Brewery caves in large cities are not as interesting as those from smaller places.  In part because so few of them are accessible.  In a place where reckless visitors abound, caves were sealed up early and effectively.  But that does not mean they are not down there...

Consider Madison Wisconsin.  Founded in 1838 it became the capital of when the Badger State attained statehood a decade later.  And of course, legislating is a thirsty business.  Breweries started being built in 1848, but the two under discussion today were just a bit later.

The Capital Brewery was established by a Wm Voight in 1854.  Joseph Hausman bought it in '64.  It was located at State and Gilman.

A rather short distance away was a brewery started by Barnhard Mauz, or Mautz in 1865.  This was at State and Gilman and went through the usual ownership changes, ending up being owned by a guy named Hess.  Hausman bought out Hess in 1883, giving him two breweries about a block apart from each other.  Now, on to the issue of brewery caves.

There is an odd article in The Capital Times in 1923.  In part:

It is of course mixing up the functions of a brewery and a distillery, but hey it was Prohibition and they were getting nostalgic.  It goes on:

There are few contemporary references to brewery caves in Madison.  The city is built on an isthmus between two lakes, so it would be a place where ice houses would be practical.  And while I don't know the geology of the place I can report that it is pretty flat, none of the nice handy sandstone cliffs you have in other parts of the state.  Oddly one of the few references I have seen comes from right here in Chippewa Falls, where an early visitor to the Leinenkugel's brewery cave compared it favorably to that from the Rodermund brewery of Madison.  This was a different place, along the lake shore on Lodi Road.  Where their "vaults" were is a mystery, but they are also mentioned in news articles regards a bankruptcy sale in 1875.*

So returning to State Street,  lets take a look.  Chronologically of course.

State Street in 1867.  Mautz marked with red arrow and Hausmann with blue.

These early Bird's Eye views tend to be a bit idealized.  Here's a more realistic 1885 look:

Both establishments look to have grown, with Hausman in particular now occupying most of its block.  For even more detail, an 1885 Sanborn map:

Notice that the Mautz brewery is now gone, replaced by a stable/livery run by its last owner, a Mr. Hess.  Often the Bird's Eye views are a bit out of date.

So, are there indeed deep tunnels zig zagging about under State Street, linking these now vanished brewery sites?  Maybe.  If there is bed rock on the site and proper tunnels they are almost impossible to collapse.  Especially if you don't want to also collapse the buildings and streets above!  In many cities there are "Urban Explorers" who post camouflaged accounts of their underground adventures.  I've seen nothing relating to these tunnels in such fora.

So perhaps we'll never know.  Here's the site today, standing in front of the former Mautz brewery, looking down State Street past Hausmann's, and with the State Capitol in the far distance....

I have a certain ability to "sense" things underground, but it doesn't work from a Google Earth image.

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* The lake front has been heavily modified since the 19th century.  My guess is that Roderman's beer vaults were probably near, or under, the bridge where Johnson street crosses the Yahara river.