Vindolanda 2026 - Day Eight

The days are winding down....

Current place I'm excavating is the apartment of the centurion.  His room was always the largest and always at the end of the barracks block.  Here's an overview.  I know, making surfaces look interesting in a photo is a challenge.

The very observant among you might note that the floor is not buckled and bowed like the other barracks rooms.  In addition to quite probably better maintenance, it seems likely that the earlier wall that "broke the back" of the other rooms is not present at this end of the building.

Various small things turned up.  Not all that exciting.

Lumpy iron thing.  Probably a nail, but outside chance of it being a low grade "bow brooch".  It goes in the general finds bag with the pottery, glass, bones, and, yes, nails.  Let post ex figure it out.

This one I had figured out right away.

It is an iron ring...with a rust stained stone stuck in the middle.  Use? Ah, who knows.

And lacking knowledge I can have a little fun with speculation.

One of the ladies digging the same trench is from New Zealand.  In the course of chatting I learned that she had a side gig as an extra in movies filmed over there.  Of which there are many.

In one production she wore pointy ears and was part of a fantasy genre.  She had signed an NDA and so could not tell me which one. * But it got me to thinking......

Hmm, hobbit sized person.  Comes from as close to Middle Earth as you can get on this planet.  And I find a mysterious Ring.  Knowing that The One Ring can change sizes based on its wearer it is probably for the best that there was a stone wedged in there.  Otherwise I supposed I would by now be turning dark and hissing about "MY PRECIOUSSS...."

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* she showed me a photo of herself in full makeup and costume.  At which point I asked if I would have to watch the execrable Rings of Power series on Amazon to see her.  Thankfully, no.

Barking at The Hobyahs

Hank the Dog has many good qualities.  In particular he takes his duties as Watch Dog very seriously.  Too seriously I've often thought, raising a loud Red Alert if he sees someone wearing a shirt slightly suggestive of a mail man two blocks away.

But maybe I've misjudged him.  I'm sure he regards me as a worthy Master but clueless as to the dire perils of the world.  Some people claim that dogs can perceive things beyond our senses, and I suppose they could be right.  Which brings me to The Hobyahs.

As I've had to pick through the Detritus of my parents' household, all manner of old artifacts and old memories are unearthed.  Here's one:

At Lowell Elementary School the reading material on hand was dated and, how can I say this, not always up to modern sensibilities.  So I definitely remember reading about Little Black Sambo.  There were tigers involved.  It became an unfortunate thing to mention with regards to Black America.  In a sense this was incorrect.  The story of Sambo was written and illustrated by a Scottish author who had lived in India for many years.   But that's not related to Hank.  He'd turn tail and run at the sight of a good sized cat, never you mind a tiger.

No, I recall another story.  That of Little Dog Turpy and the Hobyahs.  I thought it was a West African tale.  Basically an old man, an old woman, and a little girl live in a small house with their Little Dog Turpy.  Every night evil creatures called Hobyahs come and say they are going to devour the adults and make off with the little girl.  Sheesh, I guess it took more to "trigger" people back in the 1960's.

Turpy barks, well, barks his fool head off and the Hobyahs run away  His foolish master cuts off Turpy's tail as punishment.  On subsequent nights this happens again and again, each morning the really stupid master chops off a leg, etc, until eventually Little Dog Turpy loses his head.  Literally.  That night the Hobyahs break in and do all those horrid things.  (The little girl does eventually get rescued).

This was in story books for grade school kids!!!!!

As it happens, the story is not West African.  Yep, another one from Scotland.  Supposedly it was included in a collection of fairy tales compiled by a Mr. S.V. Proudfoot.  Who learned it from somebody in Perth Scotland.   Hmmmm, something seems a bit off here.

If you know your Tolkien, oh and I do, there is a family of Hobbits by the name of Proudfoot.  Somebody once asked JRR if he knew the Hobyah story, and if it had anything to do with his creation, the Hobbits.  He denied it, saying he'd never heard this particular fairy tale.

Well, there you have it.  I shall conclude with two observations.  As I am planning our spring trip to the UK there is some discussion of a side trip up into Scotland.  Out of curiosity I took a look at where Perth actually is.  The first thing that came up on Google was a Lost Dog notice!

And finally, as no actual description of the Hobyahs seems to exist, I guess I'll just have to keep trusting Little Dog Hank to keep them away.

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.

Tolkien and the Romans Part Two

 

 

This odd looking thing is the Ring of Silvianus.  It was found by a farmer in 1785.  The front has a recessed portrait and the letters NVS and VE.  This is a signet ring, designed to be rolled onto hot wax and leaving a raised "signature".  Around the band is the inscription SENICIANAE VIVAS IN DEO.

Although this contains a typo and some sketchy grammar it essentially says:  "Seniciane lives in God".  It is the sort of saying that was current in early Christian communities in the 4th century AD, which is the presumed date of the ring.  

There is no actual documentation that Tolkien ever saw the ring or knew about it, but he was both very erudite and a bit closed mouth about his work, so....maybe.  But he does factor into the story.

In the early 19th century, and about a hundred miles from where the ring turned up, a "Curse Tablet" was found.  These are folded up bits of lead with an inscription on them.  Usually you'd hire someone to fashion it, dedicate it to a god, and leave it in a sacred place.  This one reads:

For the god Nodens. Silvianus has lost a ring and has donated one half [its worth] to Nodens. Among those named Senicianus permit no good health until it is returned to the temple of Nodens

Here's a sketch of the tablet.  

Note the name Senicianus.   Silvianus sure thought he'd swiped a ring, and for it to be a matter of importance it sure would not have been a bronze trinket.  The inscription on the band would be new, but the rest would probably be original.  

Tolkien was consulted on the collection of artifacts that included this tablet, and wrote a detailed report, particularly with regards to what sort of deity Nodens was.  He did not mention the ring, but the man who commissioned the study was aware of it and I think would have mentioned it.

It's an interesting theory.  Is this where JRR got the idea of a ring that would be a curse to those who stole it?  And of course from the perspective of Sauron, all future possessors of The Ring would have been thieves.

As theories go it is nice and neat.  Too neat.  Senicianus apparently was a fairly common name in 3rd century Brittania.  It even turns up on other curse tablets!  And Tolkien - remember he was not a particular fan of Roman stuff - was said to be more influenced by Nordic sagas in which cursed, magical rings - occur.  And perhaps by The Ring of Gyges, as mentioned by Plato.  It was also magical and gave its owner the power of invisibility.  I don't think the Silvianus ring does that, but I do note that there do not seem to be any photos of museum curators trying it on!

For a more scholarly look at the tablet and ring question I refer you to one of my erudite excavation colleagues who runs a site on the Roman Inscriptions of Britain.  He thinks there is no link. 

One final thought.  The Ring of Silvianus is unusual in that it is too large to wear on a normal finger.  It seems to have been designed to wear over a gloved hand.  Odd.....and if Peter Jackson's writing and research people knew about this artifact and worked it into the movie, well, I salute them.

Tolkien and the Romans Part One

As of this writing I am in limbo regards excavating in the UK next year.  We'll see if it works out.  I confess, my mind does wander back frequently to the stone ruins of Roman forts.  It's very thought provoking.  

Of course I'm not the first person to feel this way.  One of the earliest descriptions of the ghostly ruins of Roman Britain is called "The Ruin".  Written in the 8th or 9th century and included in a later compilation of works, it sums things up nicely.  Here's the first couple of lines:

"These wall-stones are wondrous —
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins."

Of course it was written in Old English:

Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,

If you pay very close attention a few of the archaic words make sense.  "Wyrde" has become Weird, a word for Fate that Shakespeare dredged up for his "Weird Sisters".  "Gebraecon" evolved into "broken", and "Torras" for towers.  But what about that word "Enta"?

If it seems a bit familiar its because J.R.R. Tolkien borrowed this word for Giants for his Lord of the Rings "Ents".  Later in the poem the word of "Orthanc" also appears, and became the name of Saruman's tower.  

By some accounts JRR Tolkien was not a big fan of the Roman Empire.  That being said, he certainly baked elements of Rome into The Lord of the Rings.  The kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor being split and one conquered, basically reflect the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire.  Even Gondor (ok nerds, Minas Tirith)  as a city with Seven levels of Walls has a bit of the "Seven Hills of Rome" in it.

And what about The One Ring?  It is after all the central plot device for the entire trilogy, and is what links it to the earlier Hobbit.  We shall cover that next time...

So....I Might Become an Orc.....

Idle Hands....you know what they say about 'em.

In this interval where robotics is ramping down but England is still a ways off my attention wanders here and there.

Recently one of my geocaches was found by someone whose note indicated he was in town to watch his son play for the Eau Claire Orcs Rugby Team.  I had no inkling that there was such a thing.  It brought back memories.

When my boys were in the high school/middle school age bracket I took a couple of them over to England for a visit.  The oldest came back and decided to start an informal rugby league.  In his role as Commissioner of Rugby he did get a couple of teams together, and they played with enthusiasm and a loose understanding of the rules.  The fad ended when one of his pals broke both wrists.

Fast forward a couple of decades....

Here's The Orcs, or as they sometimes style themselves, The Horde.

A redoubtable looking crew, with no casts or splints visible.  I do wonder about the guy in the front row who has some kind of mouth guard in place.  Perhaps to prevent him from biting people?

Their facebook page does have a form you can fill out if you are interested in playing.  That would be.......well, all sorts of adjectives could serve.  Fun, Brief, and Ill Considered are the first few that occur to me.

So I'll probably settle for just getting a shirt.  This one is pretty cool:

But I opted for the simpler T shirt version.  They are being printed locally and I can save delivery costs if I pick it up from a guy whose name is unfamiliar to me but is presumably The Head Orc.  Perhaps that's him in the team photo wearing a jersey with a gigantic White Hand of Saruman on it?!

Looking around for a photo of one of these "White Hand" orcs from Lord of the Rings I ran across what looks to be a photo of a cast member on break.   Art imitates Life I suspect....

Woke Fantasies Streaming Forth

You should hold political beliefs that are in accord with how you see the world.  I'll do the same.  Discussion is often interesting and a way to expand one's viewpoint.  But argument never really changes minds and is not a productive use of time.  This general approach means that I  appreciate perspectives different from my own, and while I might consider them curious or perhaps even misguided I don't regard them as "invalid".  

I guess that is at the core of what has come to be called "woke".  As the term has increasingly been used in a derisive sense even my Progressive friends seem to be using it less.  But the concept - that if you are a heteronormative person of a particular pigmentation and chromosomal makeup you de facto CANNOT have a valid perspective on some questions - remains.  For our culture this is unfortunate.

This has increasingly been seen in popular entertainment.  

To be clear there is merit in looking at under represented groups and cultures of current and past society.  And even in recasting roles from Greek theater or Shakespeare or the Marvel Comic Book universe with different sorts of actors.  But all such efforts are ultimately judged by box office receipts, and increasingly, when these are just poorly done, over messaged dog's breakfasts, they lose money.  You can lecture people on how you think the world should be, but it only works if you can get them into the theater seats.

This is all a leadup to my opinions on a couple of Fantasy series now on streaming.  Amazon spent something like a billion dollars creating a Lord of the Rings prequel called "The Rings of Power".  And Netflix just came out with something called "The Witcher - Blood Origin", a prequelish sort of entry that expands their interesting "Witcher" series.  Originally this was from Polish source material and starred the very watchable Henry Cavill.

It's winter and I'm a bit under employed, so I tried to wade through both of these series and in each case stalled out after a few episodes.  They have things in common.

1. Fantastic visuals.  The CGI, makeup, and general production values are astonishing even on my small screen.

2. A loose connection with their successful predecessors.  Amazon did not get straight up rights to Tolkien's pre-LOTR works, just a general go ahead to use some characters and concepts.  Their writers are not in the same universe as JRR Tolkien, and do not even approach the lesser but still notable talents of Peter Jackson.  And as to the Witcher prequel it was apparently so bad that Cavill took a look and decided he was done with the franchise when his current contract ran out.

3. Both put Diversity over Coherence.

In a fantasy production you get latitude.  But you just can't get away with tiny female warriors wielding swords, axes and miscellaneous weaponry with such kinetic energy that both their beefy male opponents and the laws of physics are immediately destroyed.  We have limits to how far our disbelief can be suspended.  A four foot tall female dwarf swinging a war hammer that would - were it were not an obvious Styrofoam prop - be about half her actual mass goes too far.

I'm vaguely aware of the concept of Intersectionality.  It more or less establishes a hierarchy of sorts.  "Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage."  Practically speaking this determines who you can cast as Good or Bad characters.  If you mess this up you will be Cancelled, or as they used to say "Never work in this town again".

In the Fantasy genre this seems to mean the following:

All female characters may be flawed, but are always Good and Implausibly Capable.  In the modern era it is necessary to have at least one Gay couple in your script.  Characters of Asian heritage should be sprinkled here and there and it is still OK to have them in stereotypical roles such as martial arts/swordspersons.  This is less a Woke thing than a tug of the forelock to the all important Chinese market.  Black characters have been emphasized for so long that it is now considered acceptable to have them be either Good or Evil.  I call this the President Morgan Freeman Rule. Most really evil parts of course still go to White Men 'cause reasons.

To this latter point I was fascinated to note one actor who appears in both of the aforementioned productions.  A certain Lenny Henry is a wise Hobbit in The Rings of Power:

And he turns up as the main bad guy - at least in the first couple of eps - in the Witcher.  He's an elf this time.  Maybe he actually has pointy ears?

The fancy bling and the dark lighting were early clues as to his nature.  He's actually a good actor.  I'm glad he's finding work.

So my reviews of Rings of Power and Witcher - Blood Origin?  I can only base this on the episodes I saw before deciding to let them go on without me.   

Rings of Power is a complicated mess.  Too many characters, too many concurrent plots, and just enough connection to the beloved LOTR trilogy to be confusing.  Fabulous visuals notwithstanding I give it a pass.

The Witcher - Blood Origin does not have the same baggage of preconception, and keeps a simpler plot line.  It is also slightly tongue in cheek from the giddyup, the introductory sequence has a bard straight up saying "Oh, heroes uniting to defeat Evil?  Boring.  It's been done too often".  It then goes forward and tries to subvert the negative expectation.  It also has Michelle Yeoh who is playing a character way, way out in Mary Sue range.  She can perceive foes coming up behind her and smite them fatal blows behind her back without looking or even paying attention.  This would be, and in fact is, quite ludicrous but I give her a pass from her amazing tour de force in the recent "Everything Everywhere All at Once" where she becomes a character literally able to do anything specifically because she is in real life a person who does nothing competently!  She seems to be having fun in everything she acts in.

Just for the "Hot Dog Fingers" alternate Universe I'd give Ms. Yeoh a pass for a half dozen lesser efforts!

Man Versus Algorithm - Part 94039

YouTube is part of the All Seeing Eye of the Internet.  Like a predatory Santa it "...knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake...".  On the internet I strive to not Be Bad.  So it is interesting to see what this Eye of Sauron gleans from my on line life....and what it suggests I might want to see more of.  Here's the list:

Music, Archaeology, Live (again I assume music), Electric Motors, Wilderness, Tools, Model Trains, Robot, Tourist Destination, Mixes, Electrical Engineering, Gaming, Baseball, Basketball, Amber Heard, Trucks, Gardening and Comedies.

When I hit the refresh button a bunch of times the offerings vary slightly.  Music always is number one or two although Mix is sometimes changed to New Age or even Bossa Nova.  Rain, Trails, Consumer Electronics, NBA, Baking, Dogs, Eating and such make tentative appearances.  Amber Heard will not go away.  Videos pertaining to her are like the One Ring that cannot be destroyed.

Well now....

A few of the offerings have some basis in reality.  Robots, Archaeology, Electric Motors, all good stuff.  Some of the others must just be dreck they try to serve up to everyone.  I am for instance a fairly non musical person.  I have zero interest in either Live or Mixed versions of such entertainment.  

A couple are peculiar.  Model trains?  Is anyone really interested in them?  I subscribe to a YouTube channel where a friend of mine makes things out of junk.  I recall he built a little rail line in his back yard.  This must be the slender reed that the TubeBots have grasped.  Likewise I have an interest in baseball but the Internet seems to assume that a carry over interest in basketball must be present.  It is not.

And my interest in Amber Heard is less than zero.  I'd be happier with no perception of her existence or the existence of  beings akin to her.  Including Mr. Depp truth be told.

Boxing...Restaurant "Rescue" shows....Meditation music......Hero Animals.  Back in the early days of the internet I used to salt my profiles with various fake information just to see if I would get ads in Portuguese, spam email from tailors in Denmark, stuff related to Icelandic scrimshaw art.  The only entry on the above list that might still be carrying over would be the Bossa Nova music!  I of course have all "notifications" turned to the OFF setting but another account in the household did not.  Maybe that's where gardening came from.

But it seems to not matter.  My efforts to punk the algorithms seem unnecessary, they autopunk themselves.

Enigma Two. Ciphers and Barbarians

 Week two.  Time to get trickier....

Enigma Lesson Two 

VLRDR  VPJBI  IYXAU

Well now, that was not a very nice thing for Julius Caesar to say about the Barbarians!  Although it was of course quite true.  Perhaps that is why he wrote it in a special letter code.  This "Julian Cipher" was one of the earliest such codes and would serve to make written messages unreadably to casual observers.  You of course are considerably smarter than a batch of 1^st century BC Barbarians, so it won’t take you long to figure this out.

 We will talk today about the easiest ways to break this kind of code, then the trickier ways it usually has to be done. 

Paper, pen, blackboard…..of course after a while people got even smarter and started to create machines to help encode and decode.  Some of these are simple and fairly well known.  Once upon a time special “Secret Agent Encoder Rings” came in boxes of cereal.  We will work with some home made versions of this device to send and receive messages to each other. 

Like everything else in the modern era these code machines kept getting trickier and more effective.  Until the code breaking machines caught up. 

Ever wonder why this course is called Enigma?  Go.

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The first cipher they worked on was the famous "Julian" or "Caesar" cipher.  It is a simple 3 space rotation cipher where V becomes Y, L becomes O.  The initial message read "YOU GUYS SMELL BAD".

This led to a brief etymologic side trip into why Caesar Salad is called that and to how what was basically a nickname evolved into a title that has been in continuous use until fairly recently.  (Czar, Kaiser, etc).

All rotational ciphers can be solved pretty simply.  I taught them the Brute Force method and they were able to easily take on another cipher called Rot-13.  This cipher is still in fairly common use.  The geocaching website uses it to encrypt hints.

A bit harder challenge next, a random cipher.  I told them I'd make it a bit easier by giving them lots to work with and breaking it down into words instead of standard five letter sets.

For this they had to look at frequency analysis, which is basically how frequent certain letters are in the English language, with considerable help from the small number of one, two and three letter words that are in common use.  The message was not that important, it said something along the lines of "I will make this easier by giving you lots to work with and breaking out the words".  Which is almost a direct quote.  But, it gave them the key to use on the next cipher which was in the same code.

The answer was:  BILBOBAGGINSLASTRIDDLE.  Shockingly none of them had read the Hobbit.  My work to repair the shortcomings of modern education is far from done.  But I allow limited use of the internet and soon they were asking me:  "What do you have in your pocket?"

The combination, obviously.  Or is it?  I was mildly disappointed that none asked in a Gollum voice, but you can't have everything.  

For those coming in late, the code unlocks a treasure chest with some better grade snacks.  The kids were able to get all this done in one hour, which I think is pretty good especially considering that this is an after school class and their brains have been numbed since about 8am.

A smart and fun group.  Next week I'll challenge them a bit more......

The Caves of Maribel

Road trip opportunities have obviously been limited in 2020, but recently I was looking for an excuse to go visit one of my sons who lives on the eastern half of the state.  Bringing a big batch of cookies and other foodstuffs from his mom was almost enough justification....

But looking about for destinations I ran across a fun one.  Maribel Caves State Park.  Outdoors, easy to socially distance, and as upcoming posts will show, there was a lot of other interesting stuff in the area.  

Time to dive underground...

Several of the bigger caves were not open for tours, Covid and all, but there were a half dozen or so smaller caves you can crawl into.  

When we set out from the parking lot I was chatting away - it had been a while since we'd seen each other - and I forgot the handy little "cave light" that I always keep in the car.  So photo quality was variable as we used flash camera and phone light settings.  

Later I fetched the light which did make for better photos...although that annoying "white dot" problem that I've seen in brewery caves cropped up in this one.  It seems to be a combination of dust, flash setting and humidity.  If I'd remembered to carefully clean the lens of my indestructible travel camera I might have done a bit better.

Among other things my son had recently been online with a Dungeons and Dragons game that one of his friends runs.  So we rated each cave for how likely it was that orcs or other nasty creatures from the Tolkien world might be lurking in them.  As it happens we were better off without the brighter light.  Because when we re-explored one cave (Cooper Cave if you are planning a visit) we noticed that the brighter light revealed large numbers of very creepy spiders....and they were none too happy about it!

Shelob in Cheeseland....

 

Chetek Wisconsin - Podiums with Logs

I would like to have a better name for these monuments.  Nothing that quite matches shows up in the few contemporary catalogs I've been able to consult.  There's an open book sitting on a podium.  A few small logs provide a distant link to the classic "Tree Shaped Tombstones" that make up this series.  

Here's a nice one, I suspect it has been cleaned and perhaps re-carved a bit as it is in much better shape than the rest of the examples we'll see.

Nice, and you were clearly able to customize them.  Sometimes the book would have a phrase.  This one says Rests in Peace in German.

On some other examples the book was left blank.  You could also have a design on the front.  This monument indicates that it's owner was a Woodman, specifically a member of Modern Woodmen of America.

But some of these have the front pattern so reduced in legibility that it is almost gone.

To zoom in closer and play with the lighting a bit:

It looks like the Pearly Gates of Heaven with an anchor above them.  The lettering is so weathered that I can't make it out.  I can think of no reason for them to be obliterated on purpose, bashing out things on monuments as a "Damnatio Memoriae" went out with the Roman era.  I suspect it was just some design flaw where the combination of water running down the front along with whatever stone this was, just made things dissolve.  

I suppose someone out there other than me will look at this and be reminded of the Doors of Durin from the Lord of the Rings.  I admit I did not strike the stone with a staff and speak the password.  Perhaps if I had...

Invasion of the Army Fleas

OK 2020, you can stop any time now.  Murder hornets, monkeys stealing Covid-19 blood samples, the entire Presidential campaign to date....look, I can take a joke but this is getting mean spirited.

Recently we were up enjoying a visit with the grands.  Their large back yard is a great place for Nature, abounding in frogs, grasshoppers and other amusing life forms.  But recently a series of peculiar "crop marks?" began to appear.  Long, greasy black streaks on the lawn.  

If you are blessed/cursed with an active imagination it looks very much like an invading army on the march.  

And when you zoom in as close as the camera allows the resemblance to orcs does not entirely go away....

At various times of the day these marching - well actually just randomly crawling - columns of critters form and reform into assorted lines of battalion and regimental strength.  How many solitary loners are just creeping about elsewhere is unclear.  Also creepy.

My cursory attempts to ID these on the internet have been inconclusive.  Even this Gallery of Horrors did not give me a clear answer.  Chinch bugs, maybe.  My wife knows a "bug guy" at the county extension service that could likely give us the correct name but "Army Fleas", "Lawn Orcs" and anything else you'd like to suggest should be equal to better monikers.

Gollum and The Faith of Fifty Million

The Minnesota Twins start post season baseball tonight.  Nowadays there are rounds of Wild Card, Division and League playoffs as preliminaries but 100 years ago the top finishers in the American and National Leagues just got together and played the World Series.

Hmmmm.  100 years ago.  Ah yes, 1919.  The Year of the Black Sox Scandal.

In The Great Gatsby this attempt to “fix” the Series was alluded to in the line:  “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people..”   

A century ago the Unthinkable Act was that players would dishonestly attempt to perform at less than their human abilities.  Fast forward to the 21^st century.  Now we wonder if players might be attempting to perform at more than human abilities.  I’m talking PEDs, or Performance Enhancing Drugs.

I shall be very careful to not allege anything that is not a matter of public record.  It is for instance simple fact that of the seven major league players suspended for PEDs in the 2018 and 2019 seasons, two are Minnesota Twins.  It is also true that of the players suspended in recent years about 70% are from the Dominican Republic.  The stories are always basically the same.  “Some guy gave me a diet supplement.  I did not know what was in it.” Yah, that pretty much sums it up.  Implausible of course but in general the League and the individual clubs involved accept this.  It is after all a matter of maintaining that “Faith of fifty million”.

There are a number of compilations out there…photos of players before and after admitted steroid use.  The ones of former Yankee slugger Jason Giambi are particularly impressive.  A skinny kid turns into a hulking Neaderthal.  But what I remember is how weak and ineffectual he looked when he came back post suspension.  Most PEDs are very bad for you long term.  And coming off of steroids in particular is physiologically brutal. 

For a time there was a pair of identical twin brothers playing pro ball. One was widely acknowledged to be “juicing”.  The other was more of a scientific control specimen.  Until later he too was implicated.  Both are retired now and they once again look like twins.  (Not it must be said, like Twins). 

So why do they do it?  Why reach for that forbidden Ring of Power that corrupts the soul and tortures the body while promising you abilities beyond that of mere mortals? 

Desperation perhaps.  In particular the players coming from the Dominican are generally from poor backgrounds.  This is their big chance in life.  Desperate people take bigger risks for lesser chances every day.  They and their children will get on leaking boats and cross oceans for an opportunity to live in a better refugee camp. 

But tonight none of this will be mentioned or thought of.  The lights of Yankee Stadium always shine extra bright in the crisp fall air of October, leaving no darkness where shadows lie.  The Twins and the Yankees, two of the best teams in baseball will square off in something that is clearly more than just a game.  It will be glorious and exhilarating, and the pinnacle of many professional careers.

And somewhere in tin roofed sheds on muddy back streets there will be lean, intense young men watching on beat up old TVs….and dreaming.  Dreaming of that World Series Ring.  And never seeing the fiery letters that might be burning on it.

The Treasure Cave

J.R.R. Tolkien said it best:

"The legend of Bilbo's gold excited both curiosity and hope; for legendary gold (mysteriously obtained, if not positively ill-gotten), is, as every one knows, any one's for the finding - unless the search is interrupted."

Today we will be visiting a "Treasure Cave", one of several such sites around the Midwest where legends of gold have been exciting curiosity and hope for generations.  I shan't be identifying the exact location because the owners don't want curious hobbits or humans tramping about and getting themselves into difficulties.  Honestly, if you had not taken the trouble to speak with the owners the chances of your finding the spot would be pretty much zero anyway.  When one of your landmarks is to look for a picnic table, and when half an hour's walk into the wilderness has not revealed it...well you'd probably give up.

And miss a magnificent view.

The stories associated with this place are varied.  All can't be true.  Probably none are.  Was the treasure Spanish doubloons, or French gold, or a payroll destined for American soldiers at a frontier post?  Were the thieves Indians or river pirates?  In most versions of the story a survivor of the attack hid on shore and saw treasure being hauled up a slope and stashed in a cave.  Maybe this one.

Whatever the beginnings of the story it took on a life of its own.  The secret was passed on from father to son on a death bed.  Or a rumor of it reached a far west mining camp.  Or it was divined during a seance.  Treasure hunters came.  They dug and dug, expanding a natural cave system into a warren of tunnels.

It is not an agreeable place.  The caves had a peculiar smell to them, perhaps there was a dead raccoon in there someplace.  And unlike the brewery caves I usually visit there was a tumbledown, irregular look to them.  I lack the imagination of the great Professor Tolkien, but it seemed to me the sort of place you might encounter Orcs.

Maybe all seekers of Treasure, or just of Treasure rumors, have nostalgia in their souls.  There is no reason that visitors to this place would favor candles over the far more reliable option of flashlights, but they seem to have done so.  Perhaps it is fitting that they use a technology that comes down to us from the days when river pirates hauled bags of Spanish doubloons up a cliff face.

Maybe.

Robin of Risingham - a Halfling Plumber?

When we have a day off from excavations a merry band of diggers usually sets off in search of obscure Roman remains.  On a sunlit day we stopped off to visit a certain "Robin of Risingham".  This is, or in a sense, was, a figure cut into a stone face.  It used to stand about four feet high and there are sketches of it and of a possible inscription dating back to the days of Gentlemen Antiquarians centuries ago.

Alas, as described in an 1827 edition of "A History of Northumbria", the statue was intentionally chopped off at the waist.  The farmer who owned the land was quite fond of it but his son - who comes across as an unpleasant lout - got tired of people walking across their land to see it and had Robin's upper half cut up into stone gateposts.  Here's Robin today.

Nearby is a modern reconstruction of what he used to look like.  This is half scale, so Robin is a Halfling in more than one sense.  He is suspected of being a British influenced version of Sylvanus, the forest god, but various other interpretations have been put forth.

The first photo I show here is a "before" picture.  Robin had accumulated a pretty good coating of the local moss.  We had a discussion about whether pulling this off versus leaving it on is better for the long term survival of the structure.  Below you can see the decision.

To be honest without the modern reconstruction you could interpret this a couple of ways.  My first thought was that Robin of Risingham was facing backwards here....basically mooning us.  As sometimes happens this led to another discussion.  It seems that one or two individuals on the excavation site could benefit - oh, hell, the entire crew would be the beneficiaries - of longer tailed shirts for bending over while working. I present without further comment a link to a company that might perhaps be contracted to provide special variants for the official excavation T-shirts we all receive on our first day of work......

Posters in the Halls of Academe - Part Two

I'm going to miss my wanderings through the halls at University.  I kept getting peculiar little insights into things.  Maybe not the insights that were always intended...

This poster obviously was put up before Halloween.  Because this is considered to be such an important matter we all got an email from the Dean of Students that said the same thing.  I'm sympathetic.  For college age students Halloween costumes typically are associated with alcohol consumption and obnoxious behaviour is not unheard of.  Sometimes people just go a little too far.

I also thought the people behind this poster went a little too far with a gratuitous reference to Immigrations and Customs officials and violence.  Political dust ups notwithstanding these are just folks doing their job.  How 'bout we speak out against Guy Fawkes masks and Che Guevera shirts maybe?  Revolutionaries do tend to perpetrate a little violence after all.

The Math Department shares a floor with foreign language classrooms.  This is logical.  The details on this poster made as much sense to me as if they had been written in Portuguese.  

Except of course for the phrase mentioned in the second line.  Boromirian rings I understand, even if they did spell it wrong!

There are a lot of posters with political flavor to be seen.  Sometimes the actual intent is hard to puzzle out.  This is from the Society of Professional Journalists.  Now, some of my conservative friends would say that modern journalists ditched their objectivity long ago, and would opine that many of them would provide spin/cover/excuses for their political pals for free.  Or maybe for table scraps like an obedient lap dog.

But the detail below seems a fairly conservative thought.  Rather a combination of "There ain't no Free Lunch" and the official motto of New Hampshire "Live Free or Die".

And lastly not a poster but a mysterious door.  Room 219.  The Human Laboratory. Perhaps this is where enormously tall basketball players are cloned....