Back at the Digs

I've been back from the Vindolanda digs for a couple of months now.  But the work goes on.  Here's some clever small finds from Vindolanda and the sister site Magna.  

Here's an intaglio, a small carved semi precious stone that would be fitted into a ring.  These tend to drop off, especially in places like baths where the temperature might make metal expand more than the stone it was holding!

Here's a nifty belt buckle.  Some designs don't change much over the centuries.

Dice are a fairly common find, although I've not come across one yet.  Like most this one is made of bone.  Not infrequently these are "loaded" with either weighting or shaving of edges!

Sometimes really old craggy things turn up on site.  Here one such, Dr. Birley, holds a nifty bit of stonework.  It is felt to be a bit of household gods shrine.

You tend to find heavily encrusted iron "things".  Some sort of pan or ladle.  

Looking over these I can feel the warm sun, hear the distant bleating of sheep.  Makes me want a nice pint of celebratory ale.

Dog Sitting

A week in which I expect to be close to home a lot.  Here's why:

And here's why with a bit more detail:

We do try as a family to get together for fun stuff.  The 4th of July for instance.  Kids, their spouses, their kids, their dogs.  All the bipeds get along well.  But one of the dogs - a gangly puppy - decided to play really rough with my dog Hank.  It was WWF level of play, if by that you mean Woof, Woof, Lunge.

Well after a day or two of that Gangly Pup was limping.  Somehow she managed to fracture a toe.  I did not know dogs could do that, nor that the treatment involves a splint/cast for six plus weeks.

The problem is that most of the fam was getting ready to head off for a reunion of one of the northerly branches of the tribe.  Leaving me with the long suffering Hank, and his tormentor.  Now suitably chastened and in the Cone of Shame.

It's tough duty.  I'm wiping up floors more than once a day.  Can't really blame the puppy, although I do intone the dreaded words Bad Dog on occasion.  She's disoriented.  Her people have left her.  Hank don't wanna play.  Things look and smell wrong.  There has been thunder, road construction noise and a mailman that comes to the door instead of leaving things out at the mailbox.  Sigh.

Hank and I will manage.  Between feeding, cleaning up, walking and every two hours or so just getting out to the yard on spec, I won't do much more than that.

Mans Best Frenemy sometimes....

Den Four, Buddy.

 Oppressive summer weather kept me inside a bit in late July.  And put me onto some tasks only marginally nicer than sweating and breathing the horrid Canadian smoke that blew in for a while.  Closet cleaning and organizing.   Ugh.

But you find stuff.  Here's something I hauled home from the clean up of my parent's house.  It dates to my days as a Cub Scout.  Some of the photos have helpful date stamps and/or scribbled notes.  The cover is plywood, with the letters burnt in with a soldering iron or something similar.  Not exactly safety first back then.  Join me for a jump back in time some six decades.

Scouts were organized in a sort of military fashion.  A Pack of Cub Scouts would be like a Platoon in the Army.  A Den was a smaller group, like a Squad would be.  Oh, not in the cool sense of the word that Squad was used until fairly recently.  Here's Den Four.

Statistically speaking, a couple of those smiling lads are no longer with us.

Below is a moment in time.  February 1967 in the kitchen of my parent's old house.  Making paper Mache puppets.  I have a grandson about the age I am here.  His spelling and penmanship is better than mine. 

A guy in uniform.

This next one is an oddity.  Not the same paper or quality as the other photos, which were taken on an old Instamatic camera with 'flash cubes'.  

I think that's my older brother.  He appears to be just about to step on that model train car and fall on his butt.  These are the stairs going down to the basement.  My recollection is that we had a Scout activity that involved taking pictures with an old school camera - something like a Brownie - then developing them ourselves.  I can call up a memory of swishing moist paper around in stuff that smelled like vinegar.

Just random glimpses of an earlier time.  A time when most everyone had three or four kids.  Heck, the Catholic family across the alley had more.  And there was a solid culture of volunteerism.  My mom was a Den Mother.  Had a swell blue outfit and everything.  She was also president of the PTA and a bunch of other stuff.  This despite having four kids, one with special needs.

Now its much harder to rouse people to any volunteer efforts.  They wanna get paid.  Or they wanna just keep playin' with their phones.

The Siamese Twins of Chippewa Falls

In 1867 the population of Chippewa Falls was somewhere around 2000.  Given the nature of those times the ratio of men to women was quite high.  It's true that families were bigger then, but there would not have been that many babies born per year.  So what are the odds of twins?  (Supposedly 1% if you must know.)  How about Siamese twins?  Well those odds might be as extreme as 1 in 200,000 births.  But, odds or not, this could happen anywhere.  And in July of 1867 it happened at Chippewa Falls.

I ran across this story by accident, seeing it repeated in newspapers across the region.  Papers swiped from each other pretty regularly then.  My quick scan for the name of the parents involved found no mention in the local paper, which I found puzzling.

As it happens, there was a long, front page article, but it was sensitive enough to omit the name of the family involved.  You can read it in its entirety if so inclined, I present it for your perusal. 

The name was mentioned in reports from other newspapers.  John Clemens was a supervisor at the Mill.  His abilities were highly thought of.  Of his wife I can learn much less.

The article has the feel of a "silly season" bit of journalism, as far fetched tales seemed to be circulated widely in late summer.  But the poignancy of the tone, and the direct mention of the other people involved - the physicians in particular - give this credibility in my eyes.

Of the man who purchased the embalmed bodies of the twins to subsequently display for profit, I shall restrain my comments other than to say it's a famous name hereabouts.  He went on to become mayor. There's a street named after him. 

The Day the Storm Began

On this day in 1914 the Great War began.  Looking at the problems of our time its hard to avoid thinking of this as a hinge moment, the point when the modern world came crashing in on us.  Just consider the problems arising from maps drawn post war, especially in the Middle East and the Balkans.  Consider also the rise of poisonous weeds such as Communism and Fascism when the Established Order had proven its impotence.

Doing a bit of tidy up recently I came across something I don't think I've shown before.  When I was a volunteer at Hill 80, excavating a First World War battlefield site there were some strict rules.  Don't drop live ordinance.  Don't photograph human remains.  That sort of thing.  But regards artifacts it was way looser than how places like Vindolanda regard things.  There, every pottery shard is handed in for analysis.  At Hill 80, one of the archaeologists was collecting shrapnel and brass artillery shell bands with the intent of selling for scrap and putting one of his kids through Uni.  There was that much stuff....

So nobody objected when I put a few round lead balls into a pocket on my last day.  These were once packed into a shell and fired at the enemy.  A close up look shows dents and divots.  They hit something.

The Electrocuted Owl

OK, technically this both is and is not the right picture to go with the story that follows.  As I've documented previously the first actual dedicated movie theater in Chippewa Falls was purpose built as The Victor.  Later it was purchased by the Rex Brewing Company of Duluth and renamed, logically, The Rex.

It had a mix of movies, live vaudeville, community theater, boxing matches.  But for sheer oddity, how about this from 1923:

Alas, I scanned the newspapers for an image of the Electrocuted Owl and came up blank.

My Adventures as a Teen Aged Philosopher

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

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

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

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

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

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