America's Best on Parade

Although I will still be posting things from my UK trip for a while I am obviously back in the States.  Being gone a month is long enough that you see your home with new eyes again.  Certainly there is much that is difficult to explain to my overseas friends....or even to my fellow citizens who apparently no longer recognize their homeland.  Problems?  Sure.  No shortage of them.  But the Promise is also there.  It always has been.  I think it always will be.

On Friday a new tradition was on display.  When Covid bit hard in 2020 there was no gathering for high school graduation.  A big gym packed with people did not seem prudent, and if we are being honest few of us ever enjoyed the ceremony that much anyway.  Instead there was a parade through our community.  Graduates in cap and gown riding in the beds of pickup trucks and such.  Proudly being driven by their parents or friends.  Decorations elaborate or simple.  Signs and flags showing what was important to them or where they were heading for college or other destinations.  It was charming, and has continued even as Covid slowly, grudgingly releases its grip on the land.  A few pictures and thoughts from the 3rd annual Grad Parade.

Despite being very well organized - police escorts at the start and finish - moving 375 graduates through town can take a while.  I'm told at the end their diplomas are handed to them through the vehicle's window!

So many pick up trucks.  This young lady is joining the Air Force.

A vintage entry.  Lawn chair, cooler and boom box in the back.

Of course somebody will always turn up in a Limo.  Probably will do so for the 20th Class Reunion too.

How do you even get something like this?  American flags were much on display.

Not sure why but here is a Turkish flag and another I could not identify.  Another vehicle had flags from El Salvador and Mexico.  Everyone got cheers and thumbs up.

Presumed family business entry number one.

Almost for sure family business entry number two.  The sign on the door has the somewhat confusing message "The Future is Bright".  Still kinda cool.

Personal Favorite Entry: Runner Up.  A Shriner Car!  For those who know not of such things the Shriners are a fraternal organization that often "does" parades with little squadrons of these things doing formation driving.  Well played, Sir, well played.

Personal Favorite: Second Place.  This is a large cardboard cutout of the grad.  The signboard says he is already in Marine Corps Boot Camp.  Note also the flag on the front of the car.  Looks like grandpa sitting proud in the back seat.  I am 99.9% sure he also served and will have a Corps tattoo on his arm.

And my absolute favorite?  I'm not going to show that picture.  It was clearly a Special Needs student.  But he was every bit as proud to be going down the parade route in the back of a pickup truck wearing his cap and gown.  He had three younger kids - siblings? - and a dog riding with him.  All of them, even the dog I think, were smiling.

So there you go.  A bright sunny evening when a parade happened to go past our weekly neighborhood cocktail hour.  For the better part of an hour the problems of the world were of no consequence.  Its often said that small towns lose their best and brightest when they graduate and move away.  But not all of them do, and some of course come back the better for their wider experience.  But for those who leave, well, we consider it part of our duty as Americans to once a year marshal our best and send them off to help fix a broken world.  It looked to me as if they are ready to make a good start on it.

Cacaphony

Yesterday's post on the various iterations of the word CACO of course got me thinking.  I mean, any word that has that as an element would have to be related, no?

First the background.  As a Latin word for excrement caco goes back to the Greek kaka.  The Romans borrowed much from the older civilization.

Cacophony in its current usage just means loud and discordant.  Annoying maybe.  Many years ago we had a teenage garage band on our block and that pretty much defines the word.

Phony of course means sound in this context.  And the caca part?  Well somewhere between the earthier Greek and Roman versions it meandered through French and just came to mean "bad or evil".  A fair description of most garage bands although when Kenny the drummer with bright red hair down to his waist really got going the execrable version of the root word would not be out of place.

Oddly the term phony in the sense of something fake has an entirely different etymology.

Note, the photo below is not Kenny and his mates.  You google up Worst Garage Band ever and horizons open up for you....

An Insult for the Ages

It was my second to the last day of excavating at Vindolanda.  The area I was working on was not very interesting so when a bit of excitement was evident over on the other side of a ruined wall I strolled over for a look.  And this is what had been found.

I've had to be quiet about this until now.  There is a policy that when something really interesting comes up the Trust that runs the site gets the first chance to announce it.  Their press release can be found HERE.

It was a friend of mine who found the darned thing.  He is always commendably good about covering up to avoid sunburn but I insisted he take off his hat and stand proud for a photo.  I consider it the best picture I've ever taken on the site. 

He looks understandably quite happy.  The red and white marker pole is used to sight in the exact location of the find.  It could be my imagination but it appears to be standing a bit taller and prouder than usual.

So, who was SECUNDUS and why did someone write/carve such insulting things about him?  CACOR is not one of those words you learn in Latin class.  It means "excrement".  The word survives to this day in various forms.  "Caca" in Spanish is obvious, and "kack" is a seldom used English variant.  The specific ending here suggests SECUNDUS was "a shitter" if one assumes the person carving it was fully literate.  Phalli are pretty common in Roman art and can have various meanings including Good Luck.  Here it sure seems derogatory.

Alas there are things we will never know.  For instance, who was SECUNDUS?  There have been writing tablets found at the site mentioning individuals with this name but these were decades if not centuries earlier.  And it is a pretty common name in Roman times.  Technically it just means "the second" but it is felt to not indicate a second born child or a "Jr.".  No, it may just indicate someone born in the second month of the year.  This by the way also helps explain the frequency of Tertius, Octavius and variations on months of the Julian calendar, Marcus, Julius, Junius.

The time spent on this carving suggests depth of feeling as well as a lack of concern about being detected.  You probably would not dare to openly insult your Centurion this way.  The most logical explanation would be a grievance between two soldiers of equal rank, perhaps messmates.

UK Geocaches, some faves and observations

One of my minor Covid lockdown activities has been geocaching.  Fun, a bit of hide and seek, and an excuse to do more walking.  As I knew I'd have a little down time during a month in the UK I decided to hunt a few caches there.  The comparison between the hobby in US versus UK is interesting.

First of all the UK has way more cool places for geocache hides.  Castles, ruins, natural landmarks, etc.  And it meshes well with the extensive public walking paths that crisscross the landscape.  

With all that going for them there seems to be little motivation to create tricky hides, clever camo etc.  You get to a spot, look where the cache should be and there it is, usually in a regulation Official Geocache container.  For those who like to swap little trinkets this is much more common in the UK.

Here's a couple of my favorites in the limited series of caches I had in walking range.

A cache at Thirlwall castle.  This is a short stroll from one of my accommodations.  The actual cache was pretty easy, and as you can see its a standard geocache container.  You'd think a site where a magic dwarf is said to be guarding a hidden table made of gold would be a bit more exciting.   https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC6RPPK

Another place I could walk to was called Allen Banks.  It is a nature preserve along the very picturesque Allen river.

There were numerous geocaches in this preserve but the one I really wanted to find was near the remains of a summer cottage that had a floor made of sheep knuckle bones!  As it happens it was  pretty cool - how could it not be? - but did not quite live up to high expectations.

 

https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC3AC7

As in the US there seem to be long chains of geocaches that follow the better known walking and biking routes.  Given the reality of needing to do ten miles plus daily on some of them the time for diversions could be limited.  Especially as some of the same issues I encounter in the US are present there as well.  Caches that are no longer there (a big storm at Allen Banks wiped out several) or have been replaced in creative but misleading spots.  But as an add on activity it is fairly resource efficient.  I found that my phone app was sufficient to locate most of these although the gps unit is always a bit better.

Vindolanda 2022.....Jet Lag Musings

Back from a month of excavation at the Roman site of Vindolanda.  I can't say I'm over jet lag....at my age it comes in waves but roughly 24 hours after my departure from Newcastle I'm at least momentarily feeling great.  When I'm tired I lie down and am unconscious for a while.  When I wake up I don't look at the clock to decide whether it makes sense.  Coffee and pepperoni pizza are consumed in significant quantities when the whim suggests.

Traveling at the tail end of the Covid era was peculiar.  There were fewer direct changes than I expected.  Although I must say Heathrow airport choosing to close about 80% of their bathroom capacity was uncalled for.  But there were plenty of things that had changed in three years.  No more kiosks to print boarding passes, it is pretty much all "wave the phone" now.  Even the tedious scrutiny of customs officials entering the UK is gone.  You hold up your passport to a camera, smile and go through.  I don't want to think about what sort of algorithms go into the machine deciding to give you the green light or the red one with a locked gate.

This was a bigger trip than my usual.  Four straight weeks of excavating instead of two.  My packing and prep was near perfect.  With periodic washing up and thrift store buys I always had enough garments that were in acceptable state.  Not easy to do with carry on luggage only and for an activity that involves mud.  My lapses were minimal.  Three pairs of reading glasses was barely enough.  Sat on one pair, lost another.  A couple more pairs of socks would have been handy.  I again carried along shorts and never wore 'em.  As is my usual custom I tossed various worn out items in the bin at the end of my stay.

I figured out buses, trains, a botched airline reservation, several weird variants on how showers work and managed to trek across the landscape via public footpaths that existed only on Ordnance Survey maps.  I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Four weeks versus two.  I wondered if I would get tired in all the various ways one can.  Physically, just plain homesick, etc.  Nope.  I'd compare it to the difference between having a half pint at your favorite pub - just enough to take the edge off your thirst - versus a full pint savored at leisure.

Ahhh.  Tasty.  And again in 2023?  One hopes, and it is hope that sustains us.

Vindolanda 2022 Day Twenty and Last - Moses

Yesterday we had to retreat from the deeper anaerobically preserved end of the site.  It was just too wet.  Of course when there are tantalizing bits of post and floor fragments emerging it is hard to step away just when things start to look good.  But this is an inevitable part of excavating at Vindolanda.  Your time runs out.  Quickly when you do two weeks, at a more leisurely but still inexorable rate when you do four.  At the end you are always Moses looking out over a Promised Land you will not be allowed to enter.

I've used that expression a few times but only yesterday bothered to look up the origins of it.  Without getting too theological it really sounds like a difference of opinion on excavating technique.  Moses was supposed to speak The Word to a rock and water would flow forth.  Instead he whacked it a few times with his staff and got the same result.  We followed our supervisor's instructions precisely, spoke many words, got lots of water flowing forth, only smacked things we were supposed to smack.  And yet the Promised Land is beyond our reach even if it is mere inches below our feet instead of seen afar from a mountain top.  Sigh.

And so it was an uneventful last session.  Scrape, scrape, scrape.  A few bits of pottery, part of a quern stone.  Then pack it up for another season.

Quern stone bit was actually kinda cool.  Super light weight, hard to believe they used it to grind grain.  If you look closely you'll see it is really porous.  Basically it is a rock imported from far away volcanic areas where this "tufa" is common stuff.

I'll have a fair bit more to say in a few days when jet lag wears off.  No promise on an early report of our surprising find from yesterday, I understand a press release is being puzzled over.  Sometimes Life imitates Monty Python....

Vindolanda 2022 Day Nineteen

We started the day soldiering on in our anaerobic trench.  Various posts and other wood emerged, but overnight rain had "recharged" the soil and continuous streams of water coming in forced us to higher ground after lunch.  Before that happened a few mildly interesting bits came up.

Since evidence of a 2nd century AD murder was discovered inside the fort some years ago I always get a bit nervous when I find ambiguous bits of bone.  Could this be human?

Nah, evidently goat, so we are OK.

The other interesting thing that emerged from the tenacious mud was this:

Concrete.  So what?  Well it is 1800 year old Roman concrete.  This was an uncommon building material and mostly reserved for high status buildings with private bath facilities.  It "might" be a clue to the location of the commander's house from an earlier version of the fort.  I dug a bunch of this stuff back in 2017.

The afternoon was spent on higher ground, but so far neither finds nor features are worthy of comment.

I realize this is a thin report, and acknowledge that I'm holding back.  Because today on site one of my friends found something really, really good.  It is under social media quarantine for the time being but I'll share it as soon as I can.  Really outstanding....