The Death of Fangorn

Back in early March I ran a post called  The Ents of Wisconsin.  I had while driving about encountered a mysterious, fog shrouded spot with what looked to me to be a Tolkienesque tree.

I was on my way elsewhere and did not have time to stop for a proper look see.  So on a mid April trip though the same area I thought I would stop in for another peek.

The great Ent had fallen!

In the Lord of the Rings Ents are generally described as being aloof but honest, always working for the preservation of their forests.  But a few are said to have become sinister, to have dark, rotten hearts.

Maybe this was one of those...

Farewell Fangorn, you stood for generations of men, and so long as you held your vigil that housing project remained stymied, at bay.  I fear now that they will just make a bonfire of your remains and that men and machines will march onward.

Probably next time I drive past Saruman Acres will have grown considerably.

Toll House. No, not the cookies.

Here is a curious little patent medicine trade card:

If you magnify things a bit more you start to see all sorts of hidden images in the artwork:

In the lower left hand corner I am seeing a Lady, two horses, a cow and a bird.

Seems like good clean, low tech fun.  So that's what people did before television and smart phones!  Flip the card over and you can find a list of all the things you should be looking for.  Lets see...

Sorry 'bout slopping over the margains, I must have been distracted by the glaring announcement of THE SEXUAL SYSTEM AND ITS DERANGEMENTS.  Wonder how they 'splained that to the kiddies engaged in the 19th century equivalent of "Where's Waldo"?

Middle Earth comes to the Middle School

The endless winter continues, with another blizzard anticipated to hit us on April 11th.  Ick.

After many attempts to schedule an outdoor test of the world's first robotic dragster I finally cancelled altogether.  Serves me right for trying a project that was so weather dependent.

But at least the current after school class is going well.

I was initially skeptical but have to concede that running a Dungeons and Dragons group for middle school aged kids is rather.....interesting.

It involves lots of dice.  And many cryptic, scribbled notes.  I also use genuine ancient coins for authenticity.  At least a few worn bronzes and a couple of badly bashed about Roman denarii.  No gold, that would be a little too much reality.  Especially since one "hobbit-thief" character is quite diligent about stealing things from fellow players.  And from me if he can get away with it.

All the kids actually get into and stay in character easily.  This makes for a fun game.

Of course, being middle schoolers they are astonishingly disorganized.  They all talk at once.  They argue with each other.  This makes them very prone to misadventure in the "world" I have created for them.  Shamefully they were recently routed and driven off in disarray by a handful of giant ticks.  Not especially heroic imho.

They are Nerds.  And Nerd Proud at that.  So I figured we should go for the full Gamer Nerd experience.  Instead of the usual nutritious granola snacks and milk I asked for something special for the group.

Surprisingly, I got it too!

Cheetos and Mountain Dew.  That's what I'm talkin' about.

More History in the Cards - a la Vuelta!

My mother in law, now departed, was a bit of a pack rat.  I think she was the one who gave me a stack of unusual patent medicine trade cards.  They are from the H.K. Wampole company of Philadelphia, and pitch a product called Wampole's Preparation.  Or, since most of these are in Spanish, Preparacion de Wampole.

These are odd ball cards.  They are of better than average quality, with some really nice images.

(The back of this card describes how much children like the taste of the stuff.  Probably it was not the basic ingredient, cod liver oil.  The cherry flavoring might have been popular.  After a while the significant alcohol content might have been appreciated.)

But I like these cards because they attempt to address topical issues of the day.  Consider this one:

A la Vuelta translates from the Spanish as "around", so I at first thought the entire series was devoted to notable happenings.  But it probably just means: "turn the card over and read about our product".

The back of this one also has the following information: (choppy Google Translation)

"Zeppelin airship. Count Zeppelin of Germany, made a remarkable journey in his airship in May, surpassing anything previously done with similar balloons. Personally directing his new giant zeppelin II. Toured 850 miles in 37 hours. The same Count remained at the helm, assisted by two engineers and a crew of seven men aboard. Declares that his balloon can travel two thousand miles and bear arms and ammunition."

I must admit, this is a bit of a puzzler.  Early zeppelin trials were indeed undertaken over Lake Constance on the German-Swiss border.  That fits the scene.  (In fact the first few zeppelin flights were launched from a floating hanger....that way they could direct the launch to accomodate favorable winds by moving the hanger!")

But this image and the record of early zeppelin flights do not seem to match up.

Here, is a nice history with photos covering early zeppelin flights.  If the "zeppelin II" refers to the LZ-2, well, it made a single short flight in 1906 and cracked up on landing.  And it was a January flight, not in May.

Other possible candidates by time frame could be LZ-3, LZ-4 and LZ-5.  LZ-4 did get a bit of international attention when it managed a 12 hour flight in July of 1908.  A planned and much ballyhooed attempt at a 24 hour venture in August of the same year ended again in a crash landing and destruction of the airship.

Here the LZ-4 leaves its floating hanger getting ready for the 24 hour flight.  The rudder configuration is similar to the card image...but not spot on.

There were quite a few zeppelins  built in the period of 1900-1914. Only the LZ-5 and LZ-10 really looked anything like the "zepp" on the card.  LZ-5 had a short ignomious career, with the usual "downfall".  LZ-10 was a fairly successful passenger craft, but I find no mention of any historic flights in May of any of those years. And by the time they were doing regularly scheduled passenger runs the great novelty of zeppelins was much reduced.

So, who knows?  The copy writers probably just made stuff up.  Or perhaps anticipated the success of the LZ-4 flight and could not be bothered to change the text when it flopped.

The dating of this series of cards is problematic...a few have calenders in the 1905 to 1909 time frame.  An interesting time for the H.K. Wampole company.....their founder, H.K. himself, seems to have went crazy and drowned himself on the way to an asylum.  Afterwards some $200,000 of company funds were discovered to be missing.  

Never to be seen again.

Tech Review II - Travel Computer

My previous efforts to buy an inexpensive, reliable, light weight travel computer eventually established the fact that no such beast actually existed.  The folks who I talked with all just kept saying "why not get a tablet?".

Eventually I decided they were right.  But I had my criteria and I was not budging from them.

-light weight and compact.  Heck, otherwise I could just lug my laptop.
-real keyboard please, my fingers are designed for emphatic keystrokes.
-able to process photos and do at least rudimentary blogposts from, well, anywhere.
-cheap would be nice too.

And here is what I ended up with:

This is kind of a hybrid.  It is a tablet, an ASUS TF300T, but with a docking pad with useful features that sold me on the deal.

First of all, I got a good price at Best Buy.  (Note, current price is $399.)  As it happens there was some sort of promotion going on they threw in the docking station for free.  Free = good.

This gives a really nice battery life, as the pad and the docking station each have separate batteries.  The pad battery runs down first, then it draws off of the docking station.  Run time depends on what you are doing, but they claim you can get 15 hours off of this system.

The docking pad has a real USB port.  The lack of this feature soured me on iPads a bit.  I use the port for a wireless mouse which I find pretty helpful.  It is also nice to be able to physically link with an external hard drive for back up, and maybe to a printer once in a while.

The keyboard is not full sized, but if you disable the touch pad - and you really should - it is serviceable.  The docking station also comes with a slot for a full sized photo card.

I had never used an Android based system before, so there was a learning curve.  But I cannot emphasize just how much I prefer this to the Windows 8 laptop I tried earlier. Various travel handy apps just slide right on.  Skype, a currency converter, Google maps.

All this is positive, and on the negative side I have found very little.  It is a little glitchy in regard to photo storage.  It really, really wants you to either upload to "Cloud" or keep it on the photo card even though there are plenty of virgin Gigabytes available.  Finally I just tucked a 2 Gig microSD card into the slot on the tablet.  For five bucks I have enough storage for something like 700 images.  I plan on copying the better images from camera to microcard on a daily basis.  That way if I lose the camera I will have most of my work in another format.  Oh, if I do manage to lose the camera I can also use the pad as one....it has an 8 megapixel camera similar to my Canon Powershot.

Photo manipulation, basic cropping and such,  is a little clunky, but I will get used to it.

The screen of this, as with all tablets, is its Achilles heel.  I am told that the glass stuff they use to make swiping possible is inherently fragile.  Smudges pretty easily too.

When I was playing around with it I tapped a function key....and the darned tablet started playing Vivaldi.  Rather good sound quality too I must say.  I now have a play list, via the Pandora app, so I can relax while doing other work.  I carry a headset when I travel so I won't bother others.  These are handy for in flight movies too, I hate those cheap earbuds they give you.

Well the real test will be ahead, hopefully it does not let me down overseas.

Bottom line is that this might be a good option for you.  Mostly if you are in that "in between" status.  I am too old adapt to just wandering around with a teeny little SmartyPhone.  But I can still recognize useful tech when I see it, and barring surprises far afield, the TF330T looks to be the real deal.

Roman Silver - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

When you first start excavating on an ancient site you can be forgiven a bit of "treasure hunting" mentality.  It is undeniably cool to find something as recognizable as a coin, and we are by long habit accustomed to thinking of such an object as having inherent worth. Of course most of the coins you pull out of the ground are worn out, corroded specimens that somebody dropped long ago, looked down at and thought "Do I really want to pick that up out of the muck?".

After you have been at it for a while you get more interested in how and why walls, pits, roads and so forth all fit together structurally.

But because I still get asked about coins pretty often I thought a brief word on the topic would be in order.

Roman soldiers generally were paid in silver coinage.  Bronze was for making change and gold was for investment level finance.  (Sometimes the troops would get a special bonus in gold to keep them happy, or get a payout in same at the end of their enlistment).

Roman silver coinage is a very complex topic, and I am about to display my knowledge and ignorance in equal portions.  But here goes:

First an example of "official" coinage:

(note please, these are all from an assortment of coins I have purchased here and there....everything we find at Vindolanda gets turned over to our supervisors!).

The above example is a denarius from Septimus Severus.  A rather "severe" emperor he did put out some nice coins.  The term denarius by the way lives on....the dinar is the official currency of 9 Arabic countries and the slang term "dinero" for money recalls this ancient currency.

This is a nice solid coin.  Good clean silver, well struck.  To visit the other end of the quality spectrum, check this out:

This is a "silver" coin from the rather dodgy emperor Claudius Gothicus.  His reign from 268 to 270 was just about low tide for the Empire.  The coinage was lousy looking copper with a faint trace of low grade silver on top.  This was an era of hyper inflation and economic collapse.  Bad coinage can be either a cause or effect of a bad economy.  It certainly did not do much to inspire confidence in Rome!

In between the extremes of sound coinage and poor excuses for money we have some interesting intermediates.  Here is a coin from the empress Juila Mamea.

This coin has some ok parts, but something is going wrong on the edges.  What we have here is what is called by collectors a "fouree" coin.  It has a base metal core.  The silver was applied by wrapping a fine silver foil over it, heating it up and striking it in the die. They presumably looked great on issue but over time wear on the high points shows the falsity within.  Nobody is quite sure if these were the work of criminal counterfeiters, corrupt local mint officials, or official policy by greedy emperors.  A detail on the wear points:

Julia Mamea was the mother of Emperor Severus Alexander, and the real power behind the throne during his reign.

Another odd category of Roman coinage are the so-called "limes" coins.  This is a reference not to the citrus fruit but the Roman term for limits, or boundaries.  It is theorized that way out on the periphery of the Empire it was difficult or perhaps unnecessary to supply high quality coinage.  Simple base metal versions of conventional coinage were just given a quick splash of silver.  When you see something like this:

You get the impression that nobody was even trying very hard.  It makes particular sense when you see it, as in this case, from an Emperor who generally had pretty decent coin quality.  (This is Severus Alexander 222-235).  Limes coins are common enough in some areas that it is assumed that they had a level of official sanction.

Pity the poor merchants of the Roman Empire.  They had little choice but to accept Imperial coinage generally, but no doubt were quite skeptical of individual coins that looked wrong or felt light.  The  practice of biting a coin to assess its quality comes down to us from ancient times.  Here is "Under Dog", a cartoon of my younger days keeping the tradition going!

You would imagine that we would find coins with various tooth marks and other "proof" marks on them.  And sometimes you do.  Here is an extreme close up of Julia Mamea's nose from the above coin:

Is the X a natural bit of damage?  Perhaps, but it sure looks to be in a rather sheltered area!

As to coins found on the site of a fort like Vindolanda, the quality is generally much better than what is found in the surrounding communities.  You could afford to cheat the merchants.  But start paying the troops in monkey money and your reign may be brought to an abrupt and unhappy end!

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Stillwater, Minnesota

Stillwater is an interesting place.  Other than the military presence at Fort Snelling it was just about the earliest settlement in Minnesota.  And being right on the St. Croix river it had some nice bluffs for early brewery caves....

Alongside Main Street as it heads north out of town we find this stone wall with a bronze plaque at a wayside rest.  Looking closer we see...

This is near the site of "Tamarack House" the first settlement in the St. Croix Valley.  Joseph P. Brown built the log structure with the hope - never realized despite what the sign says - that it would be the first courthouse in the new Minnesota Territory.

The wall behind it is from the Knipps brewery which was established here in the 1860s.  It was a three, some sources say four, story building which of course had a cave.  You can see the cave a bit to the left of the historical plaque:

Nicely sealed up at some later date, the caves were said in 1870 to extend 60 feet back into the cliff, with plans to dig even deeper.

The Knipp brewery did not prosper, and the place was a private residence by the 1880s.

Oddly enough, as I drove back into Stillwater I noted another sealed up cave.  This one was right on the edge of downtown near Elm and North Main Street.

I could be wrong, but this looks to be too far from the Knipp brewery to be convenient to their use. There were two other major Stillwater breweries but they had their own caves which should make future appearances here.  So what was this?  One could always consider other uses for caves...wine, mushroom cultivation, cheese.  But it has the look of a brewery cave.  One theory I put forward would be that it might be a storage cave for an obscure brewery called Haase and Hermann that was known to exist circa 1875.  More research will be necessary here as these stones tell no tales.