Las Vegas - Out my window

Vegas is not exactly known for being a subtle, understated place.  They build things big and garish then knock them down to build something bigger and gaudier.

This is soon going to be the world's biggest Ferris Wheel.  It will make the London Eye look puny in comparion.  500 feet tall, when it opens sometime next year you will be able to take a slow 30 min turn on it, seeing glowing neon in all directions.

Here is the view from my hotel window.  For perspective I am on the 16th floor, and am not even near the halfway point of it.

Quite the view from my window.  And looking straight down I could see a couple of street people laying out on cardboard across the avenue from me. Most people pass them by without awareness.  I can't claim to be a "better" person than these marching fun-seekers....but when you are in town for a conference on ER medicine perhaps you can't help but see the side of society that others can look past.

Detritus of Las Vegas

Who knows maybe in some far distant future archaeologists - human or otherwise - will be trying to understand curious ruins from the early 21st century.  Written records will have long since vanished as all information after about 2020 will have been strictly digital and probably not sufficiently backed up. The enigmatic residue of documentation will be heavily skewed towards remarkable pictures of kittens, word fragments such as "LOL", and an encyclopedic body of data regarding the Kardashian family, evidently the ruling caste of this confusing era.

I suppose your average suburban neighborhood will be understandable, if only by repetition.  But what on earth will these hypothetical archaeologists make of Las Vegas?

Personally I think careers will be ruined and friendships severed over the controversy as to whether this in fact was actually the location of Paris.

I'd like to help out these scholars from the far future, so on a recent walk around Las Vegas I picked up various small bits of ephemera.  My only requirement was that the size and shape roughly conform to the famous Vindolanda Tablets that have opened such a personal window into antiquity.

I am pretty sure this does not advertise two for one drink specials

Ok, here we go, the cultural history of Las Vegas on small bits of cardboard:

Yes a product called Snus, that had a malodorous camel as its emblem.  It flat out told you that your teeth would probably fall out.  This could actually be sold.  But you had to knock the price down a bit and perhaps direct your marketing to folks who no longer had cause to worry about tooth loss...

This item will be a poser for them.  Were there actually non alcoholic beverages consumed in Las Paris?  But the dumps on the outskirts of town only contained millions of metric tons of Bud Lite bottles...

craft beer drinkers apparently being extinct by this point in history

Another extremely common artifact from the site are these colorful cards.  The exact commercial transaction being proposed here is not specified, nor is there any indication as to how a price of $47 was arrived at.  I am simply speculating here but one imagines that the slogan "What Happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" does not apply to micro organisms.  Individuals who want to go for some kind of stupidity trifecta, take note, you can charge whatever this is on any major credit card for your wife or boss to notice.

note wedding ring.  worn at all times

These cards are handed out by shifty looking individuals out on the brightly lit Strip.  There are about two teams per block, more on the weekends.  They are for some reason always a man and a woman.

Vegas does take pride in a sort of free wheeling, uninhibited air.  But underneath it all is simply much that is seedy.  Wander away from the neon for just a hundred yards or so and you find beggars, homeless people, and sterile parking lots beyond which lie the darker and far more modest quarters where the actual workers of Las Vegas live.  Many of them come here with high hopes, with dreams of finding glory and riches at the blackjack table or on the stage.  My final artifact probably was dropped by one such soul, someone whose name I will redact.

A plasma donor card from back home.  I hope they found fame and fortune under the bright
lights.  I hope they did not have to sell anything more precious than blood.

From the Mending Box

As mentioned the other day, I brought home some items from the family farm, now an abandoned ghost of a place.  One thing I carried back was a series of several small boxes that appeared to have my grandmother's collection of mending supplies.  Buttons, needles, and just odd stuff that found its way in there I guess.  Many of the buttons had swatches of cloth still stuck on them.  I guess when clothing wore out grandma would snip the buttons off in case some similar garment needed a new button.  I wonder how many "lives" these buttons had.  But that is certainly not the only thing I wonder about.

Overall buttons, probably 1930's vintage.  I wonder if they came from my dad's outfit or one of his brothers'.  Husky Lad seems to be out of business but Big Yank is still around!

Some of the smaller items were in this odd little jar circa 1960.  Who knew they made extra meat baby food.  The little tyke does look rather carnivorous.  Hmmm, I used to visit the farm sometimes.  This might be me.

Here are two views of what appears to be a serving spoon made out of, of all things, lead.  It is so soft it would bend if you scooped up a good sized meatball.

The initials are of no known family members

Here's another small enigma.

Invite infection?  Why indeed?  I suppose the intent was to make folks relax about tetanus.

The mending box had all manner of odds and ends in it.  Small items of small value.  But my frugal forebears could not stand the idea of parting with any of it.  Oh, there was also this......

I wonder how many hours they spent hunting for this?  It probably still has pinch marks on it.

A Hewing Bee. Also Ghost Cows.

You find all sorts of interesting things cleaning out a very old house.  Out at the family farmstead I encountered a copy of the June 16th, 1922 Norwood Times.  It was a commemorative edition, marking the 50th Anniversary of Norwood Minnesota.

It had a lot of recollections of pioneer times, presumably by greybeards who remembered things first hand.  I found the accounts of how log buildings were constructed to be fascinating....because I could walk out to the Civil War era barn and see exactly what was being described!

"The barn was also built of logs, ten to fourteen high, either shingle or straw roof, with no windows for light, the cracks between the logs were plastered with mortar that I am unable to describe with polite words."

There you have it.  Only six tiers of logs visible in this view, they extend up a bit into the next story of the "modern" barn.

Just in case you wanted a closer view of that mortar that can't be described with polite words.  The long structure attached to the wall is a feeding trough for calves.  It is hand made and who knows how old.

In another slightly newer part of the barn, maybe late 1860s, you can see traces of exactly how the thing was built.  Here is an account from the Norwood Times called Building the Old Log House

"Later on when the country became more settled and anyone wanted to build a house, or barn, he would engage his neighbors and have a hewing bee.  A group of men would go into the woods and select and cut down trees and saw off the desired lengths.  The next group would follow and cut off large chips on two sides.  The hewers came next with their broad axes and made a straight mark with a chalk line, the whole length of the log and then hew it smooth on two sides until it was about six to eight inches in diameter.  Rafters were also hewn."

You can still see the lateral "chip marks" placed regularly before the guys with the broad axes, or perhaps in this instance saws, came along to flatten off the sides.  Note also the wooden peg holding this onto the slotted cross beam.  Were iron spikes in short supply or were they just building according to German traditions they brought with them from the old country?

Even the newer parts of the barn carry memories.  I recall this ladder up into the hay loft as being the entry point to a magical place where you could build forts, chase the barn cats.  Probably lose a shoe once in a while.  It is no longer a safe place to explore.

Barns have a nostalgic appeal in their own way.  Houses remember those who lived and died in them. Barns remember a daily cycle of hard work.  Times change for people.  But the needs of cows remain more or less the same.  Here after twenty years of abandonment we find a little patch of hay waiting to be tossed....and the pitchfork with which to do it.

Ghostly cows wait patiently for farmers long, long gone.

Farewell to the Family Farm

"Our" farm.  The term is apt.  My family arrived there in 1857.  Nobody had worked the land prior to that.  They bought it from a man who got it as a grant after service in the War with Mexico.  He never went near the place.  And before that....Lakota following the bison.  And as they found out to their eternal grief, the native sense of ownership differed a great deal from that of the encroaching white man.

It was an active farm until about 15 years ago.  A couple of aged bachelor farmers hung on until the last one died at age 90, still telling wild tales he heard from his grandmother who had been a young bride on the homestead during the Civil War.

It was an old fashioned German farm.  Crops, dairy cattle, pigs, chickens, a little of everything.  The soil was fertile and the family frugal, so they prospered over the years.

They never had to modernize too much, and were in fact a bit suspicious of change.  So the old stood alongside the, well alongside the slightly less old.

When the place finally became vacant the buildings just seemed to give up hope.  Ghosts held sway. Roughly a dozen people were born in the old farmhouse.  Roughly the same number died there.  A young son trampled by runaway horses in 1885.  All but one of my grandfather's siblings taken by diphtheria in the 1890s.

My father, now 91 and in a nursing home, is the last person living who was there when the place was fully alive.  He was offered a chance to go visit it recently.  He said he was just too tired.

A nice young couple have purchased the home acreage (the cropland was sold off a while ago).  They will of necessity raze some of the old buildings, but they will also bring the place back to life.  They have a new baby.  They are planning a couple more.  The man intends to brew beer in the old milk house.

They are even talking about raising a few bison, bringing history around full circle.

Some images from a farewell trip.

The house is circa 1875.  Parts of the barn are circa 1860, with newer sections just piled up on top.

One item I was tasked with retrieving was an antique bed and headboard.  When we dismantled the bed frame we found the bold claim VERMIN PROOF marked on it.  My wife will be pleased.

My kids are old enough not to fall for it, but I wonder how many youngsters today would look at this turn of the (last) century school writing slate and think:  "Hmmm...pretty early model iPad there."

Also up in the attic, an "Indianapolis Kraut Cutter".  This is only one part.  The whole thing stands about four feet tall and looks like it would make short work indeed of a head of cabbage.

As I said, ghosts hold sway here, but friendly ghosts.  I found a huge stash of my grandmothers's mending things.  Hundreds and hundreds of buttons.  She died forty years ago and I am sure my fingers were the first ones since then to touch the collection of buttons from coats, overalls, long underwear.  She saved every one of them and no doubt spent many a winter evening fixing and mending so as to get just a little more wear out of things.  No need to buy new...

I do not think the garden was kept up after her death.  But outside the house I found her watering can. It looks as if it was set down yesterday.

The Robot Dragster Project - Final Chapter

Last spring my robotics students undertook an ambitious project, building a remote control dragster. Our goal was to, at a minimum, make something that would exceed the legal speed limit.

It was a project fraught with technical difficulties including a crash in early testing that broke it in half!   OUCH!!!!!

But the really hard thing to accept was that we never had a chance to do an actual road test.  Last spring winter just went on and on.  The streets were covered in ice and crud.  In the end we just ran out of class time.

So the Dragster sat in my basement for six months.

But it did get its moment of glory.  After the Machines Behaving Badly event we still had a class session left.  (It does not make sense in Wisconsin to schedule an event on the Saturday when deer season begins.  No, not at all.)

For the "extra" session I brought out a number of robot toys including the mothballed dragster.  And by gosh we actually got a road test in.  I think the batteries were a bit weak but the two kids who drove it managed to steer it straight and true...

Notice that at the end our novice driver even managed to make the turn rather than plow into the curb. I had used my remote switch to power off the motor by that point.

Top speed?  Well, a disappointing 16 miles per hour.  Much more could be attained I am sure.  But, there is this consolation.....we were testing on school property, and the speed limit is....?

Goodbye Drew

I found myself standing by a road in a miniscule community in northern Wisconsin.  I was taking a few pictures of a just demolished tavern when a vehicle pulled up next to me.  The driver looked at me as if I were doing something peculiar, which I suppose I was.

He was my age and had a grizzled beard similar to mine so I just decided to go with the flow.

"Shame they wrecked the old place."

He allowed as how that was true and said:  "My mom told me they were knocking down my dad's old office", adding perhaps needlessly "He was an alcoholic."

We are losing a lot of taverns in Wisconsin.  It is part of a larger trend here and elsewhere.  Local pubs in England are fading fast too.

It is due to a combination of things, some good, some bad.  People live in spread out suburban areas now, and society does not tolerate drunk driving.  People drink at home with alcohol they can purchase cheaply at Big Box stores.  We are collectively less social, turning inward to television, video games and the internet.

I have passed more than a few pleasant evenings in taverns, and I sorrow for their slow, sad march to extinction.  Here are a few pictures of one on the day of its destruction.

I think it is interesting that somebody removed the generic part of the sign, it probably advertised Budweiser or some such, and left the personal part.

They must have tried to be some kind of sports bar at one point.  A place where folks might go to watch the Packers game.  So many televisions...

Parts of this place were fairly old.  There was a stone foundation under one section.  Note also this pile of marked bricks circa 1910.

A good tavern is much more than a building.  It is also the people who pass through its doors.  Who brought this teddy bear in?

You have to squint to make it out but at some point the words "Brad is fat, ha, ha, ha." were painted on this surface.

Farewell, Drew's Tavern.  You have been standing padlocked for as long as I have been driving down this road.  No doubt there were good times had by Brad and the other patrons back in the day.