Our Lady of the Crack House

Back in May when I was on my digging adventure in Belgium I made reference in a blog posting to the, um, unusual accommodations that were provided.  For the full tale, go HERE .  The place felt like a run down crack house, and in fact turns out to have been a pretty much abandoned building whose last use was as a film set for a TV series that was a sort of Belgian version of Breaking Bad.

The creepy visual motif hit you as soon as you stepped in the door:

I am very excited to have learned a bit more about our mystery woman, but first a short video from YouTube....I'm not sure why a German newspaper found our hovel interesting, they must have been doing a bigger piece on the project:

But getting back to that creepy mural.  

It is based on a picture called Tina that was painted in 1961.  The artist was a British man named Joseph Henry Lynch.  Now departed he was a mysterious figure about whom very little is known.  Various rumors - always interesting even when untrue - claimed he was a nun living in New Zealand or that he was in fact Mexican. He made a living painting a series of similar striking female images.  They seem to occupy a niche in the world of UK popular art that is roughly analogous to "Dogs Playing Poker". His work shows up in the background of assorted TV shows and movies.  Here for instance is a still from Stanley Kubrick's frightening 1971 post Apocalyptic masterpiece "A Clockwork Orange".

Ah my, good times.  Makes living in my very comfortable house back in the states seem just a little mundane.

Our Lady of the Trenches

Many things surprised me about my time digging at the Hill 80 excavation.  Among them was the prominence of religion to the soldiers who were there.  Soldiers of many nations fought and died but the biggest group of casualties we recovered were Bavarians from the 1914 fighting.

Some of them still had Bibles in their packs or in the disintegrating pockets of their uniforms.  We found crucifixes and Rosary beads.  And we found this:

This was at first thought to be pre-war.  Belgium of course like Bavaria was and is a very Catholic region.  But from its find location it seems likely that it was something rather different:

This is a contemporary photo.  The text says "Mary Grotto in Company (Ubichn.) Wytichaete.  The word in parenthesis is of obscure meaning - maybe the name of the commander - but the location, Wytichaete, is the German version of Wychaete, the village where our excavation took place.  So it seems that not only were there no Bavarian atheists in the foxholes, they actually constructed small shrines to the Virgin Mary right into the sides of the trenches.
--------------
(Robin Shaefer, who found the above photo in his archival hunts, says the word in parentheses is Abschnitt.  This means "section". And technically this is not the "German" variation of the town name but one of several older versions.  Belgium has a complicated situation with several competing official languages).

Terrifying German Children's Stories

I have not talked too much about my German class.  It is going well.  When you start out with a bit of vocabulary and have few misgivings about babbling away in front of your fellow students it is possible to learn quickly.  

I find occasions where I actually begin to think in German.  This first happened in the shower where I realized that I could tell the story of Hansel and Gretel in its original language.

This was a few days after our Professor had read us selections from an old German children's book called Struwwelpeter.  I was aware of it and actually had read it before in its English translation.  Horrid stuff really, German parents apparently told their Kinder tales in which children get bitten by dogs, set on fire when they play with matches and even get their thumbs cut off.  Rather powerful object lessons there I suppose. 

First published in 1845, it is still in print.  Above is the cover and the subject of one of the stories contained within; Shaggy Headed Peter.  He never combed his hair or cut his fingernails and so became very unpopular.

It is never a good day unless you learn something.  I had not known until recently that this book of "Funny Stories and Whimsical Pictures" had inspired a couple of medical terms.

Story number 8 is the tale of "Zappel-Phillip", or "fidgity Phillip".  He can't sit still and accidentally knocks his supper off the table and onto the floor.  In Germany Attention Deficit Disorder is colloquially called "Zappel-Phillip-Syndrom".

There is even a rare condition in which patients have thick, crazy hair that is impossible to comb.  It is of course "Struwwelpeter Syndrom".  *

As my hair gets thinner and so much easier to manage I think my odds of developing this one are dwindling fast.
----------------------------------------
* On an even better day you learn two things.  Albert Einstein is listed as a "possible case" of Struwwelpeter Syndrome!

Taking the Chill off - Automatically.

I usually arrive on campus 45 minutes before class begins.  Time for a bit of quick review and then often a stroll about.  Today I saw something that did not register immediately as odd....but did after a moment.

I saw a young lady sitting beside a fire pit that was putting out some nice warm looking flames on a crisp chilly morning.  

Well, I certainly was not about to go up and offer to share the warmth or anything, that would seem to be the duty of her age contemporaries.  But then I wondered....who gets a fire pit stoked up on campus on a Wednesday morning?

Then I looked at the second identical unit.  And next to it was this:

Flip that little lid up and underneath is a dial.  You can set it for variable lengths of time and the gas powered fire pit starts up automatically.

Winter is not far off.  I'll take all the help I can get.
-----------
Update.  One a chill morning in early November I went back.  On each of the units I pushed the start button and was rewarded not with heat but with the smell of a gas leak.  I figure the igniters have already failed.  I really don't like to think about how much money was spent on this interesting concept that stops working as soon as it is exposed to, oh I don't know, actual weather......

Middle School Robotics Update

Your average middle school is such a hive of noise and chaos that the normal flow of time seems to be suspended there.  So I looked up the other day, actually I looked down...at my calendar, and realized that over half the time for the kids to build their three pound combat robots had slipped away.

It did not help that I had to give up half of our first session to some silly "team building" exercises.  Oh well.

Progress is ongoing but the more complex, powered weapon robots will go right down to the last minute....assuming the kids don't have absences....or that we God Forbid have an early snow day.

Wheels cut from dense foam.  This stuff was FIRST robotics leftovers.

Here is the first machine to actually be driven.  Simple, but simple is actually good. A bit of armor to protect the electronics might be nice.

Three machines running now, and an impromptu scrimmage in progress.  That biggest one looks like a coffee table.  It is sturdy but will be a beast to try and maneuver in real combat.  

Monkey Island Memories

I'm not sure how I got to talking about the Como Park Zoo.  It was I suppose a natural topic to get to eventually, as my grandson is very, very interested in animals and many of the books we read together reflect this.  One of his favorites for a time involved Naughty Monkeys (actually, is there another kind?) at a zoo who reach out and grab the hats of visitors.

It brought to mind a time very long ago, when I was maybe 7 years old and my class at Lowell Elementary school went to visit the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul.

I don't recall much, just snippets.  There was a Galapagos tortoise you could ride. There was a big, languid gorilla; you could put a dime into a vending machine and it would cast a plastic sculpture of "Casey" for you to take home.

And there was Monkey Island.

It was like a big cement swimming pool.  I remember the bottom as being painted turquoise.  The central area was a jumbled pile of rough stone.  The inhabitants were monkeys, seals and alligators.

Each had a role.  The seals swam round and round making rude noises and begging for bits of fish.  These were conveniently for sale.  The monkeys scampered about.  Probably kids also threw them snacks but I don't recall seeing this done.  And the alligators just sat in the sun.

Naturally my young brain saw alligators and monkeys in close proximity and envisioned the possibilities.  Mind you, I did not want the monkeys to get eaten but I did want to see them tease the alligators enough for them to take a lunging snap, followed by general monkey howling and the throwing of sticks and dung!

 

The last photo no doubt shows a school group much like that in my memories, but a decade or two earlier.

It has long since been renamed Seal Island, the simians having been moved out to sweller digs that have no murderous reptiles to add dramatic effect.

For the best I suppose.

Incidentally, Monkey Islands were once quite common.  Like the Como Park example many were WPA work projects during the great depression.  Changing attitudes towards the care and treatment of our distant cousins seems to have relegated most of them to obsolescence.  

Hmmmm, I could see adding another category called Monkey Island to my subject listings, and start hunting them down with the diligence I have previously devoted to Brewery Caves.......

Bring me the Head of the Stinky Cheese Man!

There are a lot of fun aspects to being a grandfather.  You get to revisit the fun times of having young children around but without any of the worries that come from direct responsibility.  It's kind of a do over in a sense, you do all the old fun things again. Including reading favorite books.

Of course we have most of the books from when our kids were young.  One of my all time favorites was and is this one:

It is a retelling of old fairy tales in a snarky modern style.  In the one of the stories the Ginger Bread man is made instead out of "stinky cheese".  Naturally nobody is trying very hard to catch him.

My grandson loves the story.  I read it - heck, I could certainly recite it without reading - in an impassioned style and with six or seven distinct voices.  The story ends poorly for Ol' S.C.M. he gets dunked in a river and dissolves.  I usually add a post script to the story not found in the original, it involves dead fish floating down stream.

On a recent grand kid visit this little wedge of foam rubber promoting Wisconsin Cheese turned up.  Just right for adding a few details and making it the head of the Stinky Cheese Man.  It kept turning up all over the house.  And at least my son and I played along, holding our noses and saying "PU!" every time it was brought to us.