Ixonia Wisconsin

In the study of words and language there are very few accidents.  If something sounds eerily familiar you can usually trace the word back through time, and if necessary across a few linguistic groups, and find a connection.

So I recently set out on such a hunt with great confidence.

Wisconsin has the dubious distinction of being an epicenter for Lyme Disease and other tick born illnesses.  They are a significant nuisance to all and a serious health matter to some.  Most of this unpleasantness comes to us courtesy of a little critter variously called the deer tick, bear tick, or blacklegged tick.  If you want to be both accurate and a bit formal, it is Ixodes scapularis.  Here's our little pal that causes so much mischief. 

One reason they are such a bother is that they are small....and the immature forms are even smaller.  Check as you might, you will miss a few of these buggers.

Diseases are often named after the geographic location in which they were first identified.  Ebola is one example that has been in the news  of late.  Even Lyme disease was named after Old Lyme Connecticut.  I bet the local Chamber of Commerce is pretty happy about that.

Tick species don't appear to have such a naming system but when I looked at the map prior to a recent road trip and noticed that there, right in the heart of tick country, was a little hamlet called Ixonia Wisconsin I figured there had to be some connection. Just had to be.

Here's a Google Earth view of down town Ixonia.  Loopy's tavern seems to be the main establishment.  It's next to the rail road tracks.

So, lets get into the etymology, not the entymology, of ticks.  Ixodes is actually the genus name and it is a Greek word.  It means "like bird lime - sticky, clammy".  Not particularly accurate as ticks have dry, hard shells.  But just look at that picture, does it not make your skin crawl a little?

And Ixonia?   Well.....

Township of Ixonia Organized

It was on February 12, 1841 when a part of Watertown, Towns seven and eight north of Range 16 were set off to organize the town of Union. It remained the town of Union for only five years and then was divided into two individual towns. Town 7 was called Concord without any disagreement, but a dispute resulted in the naming of town 8. To simplify matters it was agreed upon to put the letters of the alphabet on slips of paper and have young Mary Piper draw them until a name could be formed. As the result, "Ixonia" was the name given town 8 on January 21, 1846, and remains the only town bearing this name in the United States.

So there you have it.  A genuine linguistic coincidence.  When young Mary Piper drew random slips of paper back in 1846 she came up with Ixonia.  Ixodes scapularis had already been named, in a more systematic fashion, back in 1821 but I doubt Mary or anyone else in the room was aware of that fact.

Had they known one imagines another draw would have been forthcoming.

Circle of Life in the Backyard Pond

We have a modest back yard pond.  I built it years ago so we could enjoy a bit of nature out there.  But not too much nature.  It had become a great place for mosquito larvae to wriggle about and I was tasked to deal with the situation. Not being one to start tossing poisons about, I just went to the local bait shop and got a scoop full of minnows.  My fisheries biologist son suggested a type called "fatheads" would survive nicely and eat lots of mosquitoes.

Of course there were a few who did not survive the transition, but my rough count suggested that there should still be a dozen or so swimming about consuming mosquitoes.  One day later I saw three.  A week later it was down to one rather well fed but lonesome fathead.  My grandson suggested that minnows are very good at hiding but I did have some suspicions.

Second attempt then.  Back when my boys were youngsters we'd go down to the rocks below the local hydro dam.  In the spring there would be high water but when it receded there were ponds that I recalled being full of tadpoles.  And yep, still true.

Not my back yard pond, this is nicer.

Those little black things trying to hide, that's them.  These are the tadpole version of the American Toad, which I will continue to call Bufo americanus despite a recent name change.  I considered this a genius idea, the tadpoles themselves eat small bugs and then the adult toads might stick around and eat more.

This looked promising.  There were thousands of them and the water quality they were thriving in was way worse than our pond.  So I scooped up a bunch.  Some were tiny, others approaching toadlet status.  As seen below some of them got legs but so far don't know how to use 'em.

And here actually is our back yard pond, new denizens carefully transitioned into it.  I don't know much about the buoyancy properties of defunct tads but eight hours in all I could see were apparently happy, live tadpoles eating algae and bugs.  I put the cement frog there as a sort of protective totem.  Bufo the Great in the eyes of the tadpoles when they first emerge as toads....

The Tadpole Colonization project was accomplished on the longest day of the year.  That means the shortest night.  So when my wife went down for coffee at first light an interesting sight was beheld....

Raccoons!  Notorious eaters of pretty much everything.  The Mystery of the Fatheads solved.  I hope the tadpoles are craftier...
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Update.  Most of the tadpoles seem to be gone.  I don't think they are better at hiding than minnows.  Alas.

FIRST Robotics - A Laser Summer Afternoon

Although the FIRST robotics season runs from early January into spring tournament time really good teams get that way by off season work.

This year we are facing an unusual situation.  About half of our current team just graduated. So we have "job openings".

We'll do some recruiting at the high school level but for our summer project we are  working on developing the "farm system" in the middle school ranks.

We invited kids to attend summer sessions based on participation in assorted middle school robotics and programming activities.  

We had 16 take us up on the offer and for our kick off session I think we had 13 of them on hand.  This is a very good turnout for a lazy summer afternoon.

And there is some talent down on the farm.  We had sessions on materials used in robot building, on ways to fasten metal parts, on simple Lego Robot programming and on CAD design.  All areas went well but the CAD group really surprised me.

The software was new to them all.  But after about 90 minutes they had read a blueprint and generated a CAD model that could be put on the laser cutter and made.

Here it is:

Ah, the one in the foreground.  The other part is still a bit beyond them.

A simple part but this is the sort of skill most students only learn much later.  These are kids just finishing 6th and 7th grade.

We are looking forward to having them make it to the Big Club soon.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Dog

(which to be fair he never actually wrote, but should have).

Although I went to a fairly good high school, and in an era when scholarship was perhaps held in higher esteem than of late; I don't recall studying Alexander Pope at all.  This seems odd, he was a thoughtful poet and a very quotable one.  In fact he trails only Shakespeare with regard to entries in many compilations of quotes.

I think the omission was intentional.

Pope was handicapped in life both by a spinal condition that gave him a very hunched over stature, and by being a member of the Roman Catholic faith, then out of favor in England.  Perhaps these combined to put a bit of extra bite in his writings.

No, that understates it.  Alexander Pope may well have been the most vicious writer in the history of the English language.  He frequently unloaded on the many enemies he made in both personal and professional matters.  Consider this gem: 

"Wit pass’d thro’ thee no longer is the same,
As meat digested takes a diff’rent name;"

Yes, you can see why exposing high school kids to that level of sarcasm would not go well at all.

So I only discovered Pope as an adult, and it has been a treat.  My favorite work of his is The Essay on Man.  In it Pope ponders man's place in the universe, musing at length about where Man sits between God and Angels above, and dumb beasts below.

Pope was, of course, a dog lover.  Because he had many enemies he had to, for his own protection, go about with a brace of loaded pistols and a gigantic Great Dane named Bounce.  As Pope in his crippled state was only about 4'8'', the dog loomed protectively over him.

Among Pope's many quotable lines is this one:

"Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends."

I was musing on some of Pope's themes the other day when I stopped by to visit with my pal Bear who lives across the alley.  If Pope had ever gotten around to writing "The Essay on Dog" I think Bear would be an exemplary narrator.  But instead lets just settle for some minor reworking of a few lines of the Essay on Man.  

Great poetry?  No.  Doggerel?  Why, yes...

"Hope Springs Eternal in the Canine Breast.

"Man eats the pork chop, but throws away the rest."

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"Oh, blindness to the future! kindly giv'n, 

That each may fill the circle marked by Heav'n, 

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A Hero perish, or a sparrow fall,

Atoms of system into ruin hurled, 

And now a bubble burst, and now a SQUIRREL!!!!"

The KISS Monolith

I mentioned last time that I've gotten pretty good at figuring out the history of a small town by walking around it.  I thought I had Cadillac Michigan neatly categorized as I walked along its lake shore park system.  The basic elements were all there.  Band Shell. check.  Renovated train station.  Check.  Memorial cannon.  Check, and I could tell from quite a distance that it was American, 105mm caliber, WWII vintage.

So when I saw a black slab of stone adjacent to the high school/middle school complex I figured it was a memorial to some tragic event, perhaps a traffic accident?  Nope. Instead on closer examination I saw this:

If you are not inclined to squint at the small print, the story is as follows.  In 1974 the Cadillac High School football team was having a tough season.  In an attempt to get a bit more energy into the squad the coach started playing KISS - loudly - in the locker room.  For that reason, or maybe just because, they started winning and took the conference title.  Somebody told KISS about this and after some communication they agreed to come and perform at the school in the fall of 1975.  It was quite the event.

Homecoming Parade float....

Hanging out with cheerleaders......

And perhaps most surprisingly, Gene Simmons personally painted the face of the town's Mayor!   Ace Frehley was heard to muse "Is he going to get re-elected like that?"

Its a fun little story, one that I found mostly HERE   (Also the source for the photos above).  But it got me wondering.....did the Mayor get re-elected?  Did the head cheerleader run off with the band?

The answer to the second question, happily for all concerned, seems to be no.  I won't intrude on her privacy but the young lady seems to have gone on to a happy and conventional life.

But as to the Mayor....

He is not identified in the photo but his name was Raymond W. Wagner.  He was not re-elected, in fact he resigned in 1976.  His expression in the above photo is very hard to interpret.  Clearly he was having the most bizarre day of his political career.  But under the Kabuki makeup is there a hint of sadness?

He still had a long life ahead of him, but it had known tragedy.  He had two sons, one of whom - at age 33 - had died in October of 1974 just as the KISS story was getting started.  And his other son, although there was no way to know it in this picture, was going to die in 1979.

Perhaps my first instinct, that the black stone was a memorial of sorts, was not entirely wrong.

Tree Shaped Tombstones - Missing Pieces in Cadillac Michigan

When I am traveling I sometimes have a few free hours to just wander about a small town.  I have gotten pretty good at figuring out the history of a place by a walk down Main Street, with side trips to "the other side of the tracks", any open construction sites, and of course the local cemetery.

Cadillac Michigan I had figured out early on.  Logging community, post Civil War, later re purposing as a resort area.  I figured the local cemetery would have more than its fair share of "Tree Shaped Tombstones".  And it did.  Sort of.

It is fairly common to see a larger family marker, in a typical tree trunk shape, surrounded by smaller markers for the individuals.  Sometimes these would have names, sometimes just designations like "Mother".  Here's a few.

Note the interesting flower basket made with smooth pebbles.  This seems to be a local style.  And here below another odd planter, once a sort of tree shape now with the applied plaster flaking off.

And another batch of the small subsidiary tree/log forms.  But notice something missing?

Not a single example of the larger and more interesting family markers.  Just these little guys that you really never see in isolation.  Except in Cadillac Michigan.

I guess different cemetery associations can make whatever rules they like, but these would seem an odd stance to take.  Nor can I see any evidence that the family markers used to be in situ but are now gone.  Usually at least some trace of foundation would remain.

Circle of Life at the Petting Zoo

As the grandkids get older they naturally become more sophisticated.  Of course this is generally speaking a delight, but growing up is never entirely benign.

One of ours has been going to a nearby petting zoo for years now.  He has gotten to know many of the animals by name.  Recently we visited and he asked where Tully the Tortoise was.  Well.......

RIP Tully, not even tortoises live forever.  Much sadness ensued.  The proprietors of the establishment are old hands and have already added two smaller tortoises of the same type.  It's a good thing that "Charlotte's Web" was a recent bed time story.

Other transitions are less dramatic, and of more impact on grandparents than on still oblivious tykes.  Below is me with "Jack the Goat".  This was one year ago.  They usually allow a couple of the younger, cuter goats to roam free.  Jack really threw everything he had into the "I'm cute, feed me" routine.

Jack, June of 2019.  He's been demoted.  Now a gangly teengoat he is in the main goat enclosure which includes Goat Island and a couple of food dispensing machines. As a smaller, newbie goat he is relegated to the back corners of the pen while the alpha goats aggressively work the crowd.  How the Cute have come down in the world...

And while we are on the subject of transformations into older forms (not that I'm thinking of gangly teenaged grandchildren, nope...) here was an educational sighting. A dragonfly who moments before had crawled out of the husk of its nymph form.

Spreading wings and ready to fly off.  (Not that it brings back memories of kids leaving home, nope....)

Well there are still some constants.  Best Pal at the zoo is a camel named Humphrey. Or sometimes, Bumphfrey.  They've known each other for years and I think the big galoot actually recognizes the little guy.  Who is here holding up a bunch of nice tasty grass for his constant friend.