Wandering unsupervised in various real and imaginary places. Detritus reflects my interests in robotics, travel, history and the odder aspects of the world around me.
Like most inhabitants of flat lands far from the sea I have a fascination with all things nautical. It's just human nature to stand on the edge of large bodies of water and stare at them. In Sheboygan Wisconsin recently I got to indulge my rather silly inner Sea Dog by walking around the wreck of the Lottie Cooper. This was a three masted sailing ship, built locally in 1876. It hauled cargoes of timber up and down Lake Michigan. One stormy night in 1894 the ship was battered to bits by a gale as she lay anchored off shore. Five of her six crewmen were saved. Later much of her cargo of 230,00 board feet of timber was salvaged but the wreck was left in Sheboygan bay until harbor improvements a century later required it to be removed. It is now up on shore and you can walk around in it. The "deck" is just a pedestrian path and is solidly planted on the ground but I can imagine just a bit of swaying back and forth....
This box like structure supported a large centerboard. If I am calling it by the wrong term please don't correct me, remember I am having my little Sea Dog fantasy here.
So very many nails. I wonder if they needed this much iron to hold it together or if it required frequent repairs over its 18 year career.
Farewell Lottie Cooper, you can sail on in my imagination...
Supposedly the village of Merrillan got its start when local land owner Leander Merrill sent a representative to the offices of the West Wisconsin Railroad asking them to change the proposed route of their line to the town site. A few winks and a $75,000 consideration did the trick. It is a modest little hamlet now but has some rather nice tree shaped tombstones in the cemetery just east of town.
Your basic model. Nice anchor though.
This one is rather more ornate. The stylized branch on the upper right disturbs me. Doesn't it look exactly like a clutching, skeletal hand?
Another nice anchor. The local rock chipper had a certain flair with these.
The yellow lichen that adheres to these monuments adds quite a bit to their visual appeal. But once in a while you find one that has so much of the darned stuff that it covers most of the carving. Too much of a good thing I guess.
The most interesting "Tree Shaped Tombstone" on the place was of course a far newer one. This caught my eye.....and I immediately came up with a theory. Can you guess?
Calvin Frelk was born in the Chicago area and spent his younger days as a utility lineman. In 1955 he and his brother George invested in their first Wisconsin property dedicated to raising Christmas trees. Through a long and successful career Calvin grew an awful lot of trees and served at various times as the President of both the Wisconsin and the National Christmas Tree Associations. He met his wife Arlene at a roller skating rink in the 1940s. They had been married for 60 years at the time of his death. The image of two trees side by side but with branches growing together is just perfect. Nicer, don't you think, than the stark, barren dead tree stumps of the earlier tradition?
High school team names pose a few challenges. For one thing we seem to be living in a "Participation Ribbon" age and the very concept of cheering on your Falcons (or Panthers, Cardinals, etc) to victory over some other bunch seems just a little mean. And lets be honest there are some team names that are unfortunate. Of late there has been quite a push to get rid of team names like Indians. Also probably Warriors. Redskins may seem a lot worse but hey, that's different 'cause D.C.. Not that there is anything inherently offensive in the name itself. Most of us enlightened 21st century types recognize a great deal of merit and nobility in Native culture. But tempers and spirits in young people being what they are you can see why pep rally references to scalping and so forth are inevitable, so maybe Indians should be gradually phased out as a High School team name. But, if you want to pick a name that is even more cringe inducing, how about this:
I mean it is really hard to see the nobility in bombing people even in time of war. Welcome to Kohler Wisconsin, home of the Blue Bombers. Actually my first clue was not the equipment trailer shown above. No, it was this:
When we saw this we were really, really hoping this was not something that the mascot drove around the field at football games. It wasn't. But what then is it? Something with tail guns....
Here is the big clue:
No kiddin', this is a huge barbecue grill fashioned to look like a B17 bomber. There are grills in each wing with the fuselage holding space for coolers full of brats.
I should explain to the non Wisconsinites that bratwurst is very important in our state, and that Sheboygan is the unofficial Brat Capitol. This portable grill would presumably be used by the booster club to cook up tasty sausages at games and other functions. A bit of research showed that it was student built, part of Project Grill. This is a design and engineering program in which all manner of interesting barbecue grills get built. The link contains photos of some really fabulous ones. As I said, brats are very important in Wisconsin. So to get back to my original point, how did a high school team get named The Blue Bombers? Kohler actually started out as a company town, built adjacent to the factories of The Kohler Company. Employees of same still make up much of the population. Kohler is one of the world's premier manufacturers of plumbing fixtures. Sinks, toilets that sort of thing. During both world wars the fact that Kohler had existing foundries for brass and iron naturally led to government contracts making, well, a small out of the way exhibit in the company museum gives you a clue.
I can't confirm that they made parts for the B17 but they did some work on the B29. And they made lots and lots of things that were dropped out of aircraft or fired out of cannons. Kohler is a very nice town. The Kohler Company is a great place to work and makes fine products. The "Bomber" grill is a swell student project and was done in collaboration with local veterans. But in a new era when bombs are going off all too often around the world maybe I will be so bold as to suggest that the school consider a name change. The Foundrymen sounds nice. Or given the modern tendency to pick names like Avalanche or Crimson Tide perhaps Kohler could ponder the products of their name sake company and dub themselves The Swirling Vortex!
As I sat down to the keyboard to chronicle the tale of The World's Largest Badger I realized that you could make a case for this being either a Golden or a Dark age for ridiculous roadside advertising statues. On the one hand there are certainly more of them than ever before. The advent of fiber glass construction techniques and the mass marketing culture we live in has resulted in boom times for assorted mascots, shills and critters. But so many of them are uninspired. A mouse in front of a cheese shop is cool. But when you have seen a dozen identical mice in front of such places you are less impressed. I am not so far gone yet that I can quote the catalog numbers but no doubt such cultists are out there. But the Classics, the Originals, the True Greats....they were often idiosyncratic projects that were the handiwork of some imaginative small businessman or perhaps a local civic group. These mostly older and certainly not from a catalog artifacts are becoming rare in our times. Many have suffered indignities of age and of, well, read on. The World's Largest Badger can be found about five miles north of a little Wisconsin town named Birnamwood. The village website thanks the Girl Scouts for keeping the down town planters watered and reminds all that local ordinance does require you to keep you lawn nicely mowed. There seem to have been no famous humans from this fine little hamlet, their one famous citizen being...The Badger.
Well, that's the Big Guy in July of 2016. But to do him justice please take a look at this YouTube clip of him in better, so much better, times.
Yes from his creation in the (?) late 1960s or early 70's Badger watched benevolently over a kingdom of wonders. Gifts, Cheese, Taxidermy. A fishin' pond. A petting zoo. A giant hollow log contained the gas pumps. The Great Squirrel on the roof was a nice whimsical touch. Alas, how the mighty have fallen. No doubt you saw some glimpses of the hard times that have come.. The Badger is no longer 40 feet tall. His body was cut off when the Badger Country Store went out of business in the late 1990s. What is left of him is buried in a mound and peers out over a wooden fence. He now welcomes, or perhaps warns off, potential customers for a strip club.
The current, er, establishment does not seem to be doing well. It has changed names and ownership several times. I am by no means an expert in such matters but an isolated spot five miles north of a hamlet of 800 mostly rather conservative souls does not seem like a great business plan. I suppose they are busy during deer hunting season but most cars going by are vacation bound families on their way north to the lakes. The Squirrel, who seems to have something wrong with his right front paw, is of course censorious as their kind tends to be. Angry chirps and chatters for a usurper threatening to scale his log home.
But The Badger had nothing to say. He stands his lonely vigil with as much dignity as he can muster. His paint is peeling. One of his fangs has become dislodged. But still he endures, an Ozymandius of a lost Kitsch Empire. "Look upon my works, Oh ye Mighty, and Despair!"
This marks something of a mile stone for Detritus of Empire. Post number 1,000. That seems like a lot but spread out over roughly five and a half years it is a manageable bit of lifting. Three days a week. A few extra posts for travels or when the mood strikes me. It is a bit difficult to tell who - or in the case of automated spambots, what - is reading. The stats generated by the blog creating software claim that roughly 320,000 entities of some sort have opened a page. A lot has changed since early 2011. Blogging has for instance died. Or so I am told. It has for certain become passe, almost something to be apologetic about. The means of communication over the internet have moved on. Facebook, Twitter, whatever is current today. Until a handier means of "long form" communication turns up I expect I will keep writing although perhaps with some changes along the way. I have for instance tinkered with font and picture size, recognizing that much of the world has pitched their computers into a landfill and are peering at tiny little phone screens. It is interesting to track what have been the most popular posts over the years, and to speculate why... Three Guys Versus the Asian Carp is number one by a big margin. It tells the tale of our attempt to stem the tide of invasive fish in the Illinois River. We did knock their numbers back by a single digit figure. The mighty Instapundit site picked it up. Thousands of hits in the course of an hour or two... History of England Part Seven was part of my first series of posts back in 2011. I had written a bootleg history of the UK for some travelers of my acquaintance. This one seems to have attained enduring popularity because it features royal Corgis. Travels in the Shire another post picked up by "Insty". I just thought northern England looked like the Shire. Oh, and there was the thing about Mordor Slugs. Dressed up Dogs one of the few posts I feel bad about. Its just some silly dog pictures I found on the internet. I consider myself more of a "content producer" not just a collector of nonsense. The Curious Legacy of General Claude Martin this one started with a book I got at a local garage sale. I read about the remarkable General Martin and had to research more. This post gets a fair amount of traffic due, I suspect, to alumni from the schools General Martin started in India and France. Greetings "Old Martinians"! The Squirrels of Mirkwood I do worry that my increasing interest in squirrels is a sign of impending dotage. The Creeping Terror In the summer months I spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to patients that the tick they think maybe crawled across their shirt sleeve is less dangerous to them than the pack of cigs in the pocket of said shirt. Sigh. The Grandchildren of the Okies go Home My parody of the classic Woody Guthrie song. Folks leaving the taxes and regulations of Cal-i-forn-I-A and heading back to the Dust Bowl. A bit more interest than the usual political posting. But in general politics are a glut on the internet market. Forgotten Brewery Caves Alma Wisconsin my most recent Top Ten post, this one is from 2014. I am always careful with the Brewery Cave series to not put temptation to trespass or take risks into the path of the unwise. In the fashion of recent years this one was picked up via Facebook and made the rounds of local history buffs. Harvey I have not actually seen a six foot tall talking rabbit. But I would like to imagine that I would see one if it ever wandered past. So, what direction for the next thousand posts? I am surprised to find myself something of an internet authority on a few odd topics such as 19th century brewery caves and tombstones shaped like trees. I'll probably stumble onto a few more. I expect to retire the intermittent "Tacitus MD" category shortly. I have always had to hedge a bit on those stories for privacy reasons anyway. The student robotics project posts have never been of wide interest. Too bad, I'm going to keep doing them. There is a lot of cool stuff ahead in that world. I hope the "Generations" category continues to expand... And beyond that we shall just have to see.
When I visit somewhere I consider it just common courtesy to do a little homework first. So naturally when getting ready to visit Sheboygan Wisconsin on the Fourth of July weekend I noticed quickly that they had what was described as "The World's Tallest Flagpole". That of course made a visit mandatory on a magnificent sunny day. It is certainly one very, very tall flagpole. That little white dot at the base of the flagpole is a strapping 6 foot plus lad who frankly looks like an ant.
Here I am leaning on the base of the pole.
So, what's the deal? The flagpole is 400 feet tall. It is a project undertaken by the Acuity Insurance Company and stands outside their headquarters. The numbers are mind boggling. The flagpole is 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. It weighs 420,000 pounds. It takes 500 gallons of paint to coat it. The flag proper is 70 feet by 140 feet. Each star is three feet tall. The whole thing weighs 340 pounds and is 9,800 square feet of Red, White and Blue. It draws the eye. It is hard to stare at it very long - you get a bit dizzy - but hard also to look away.
But is it really the tallest? No. I was not aware of it but there has been a recent - sorry for the pun - wave of Giant Flagpole building. Assorted Middle East and Central Asian countries just have to one up the competition and raise their flags just that much higher. Freudians, have a field day with this one. Make what you will of it but all those Big Sticks in repressive lands are the handiwork of an American firm, Trident Support Corporation. Marc Summers and David Chambers are a couple of resourceful engineers who got into this line of work kind of by accident. Every few years they build one a little bit taller. And then their phone rings. Tajikistan, Jordan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan. The current "champ" is in Jeddah Saudi Arabia. At 560 feet it has held the record for two years now. Now, I want to be fair. The info that claimed the Sheboygan flagpole as the world's tallest was either old or poorly written. The actual information that Acuity puts out calls it "The World's Tallest Symbol of Freedom". I am ok with that. None of those other flags, though they may be a little higher off the ground, fly over as good a place. Here you can salute the flag, or if you prefer, not. You can agree with the policies of the current Administration or call them scoundrels. I can and do have pointed discussions with friends and relatives who vote in different ways and still consider them - as I hope they consider me - to be decent patriot folk and great neighbors. Tajikistan and its ilk may be waving something around but it is certainly not a symbol of that kind of freedom. Happy 4th of July, 2016
Political Incorrectness Warning. If you have a low tolerance for same just look briefly at this adorable monkey picture and move on.
Oh, for cute as my old Scandinavian grandmother was wont to say. It's no secret that our politics have gotten strange lately but last week a headline caught my eye that I thought just had to be a typo: "White House Threatens Veto of Zika Funding Bill". What? It is hard to imagine why a veto would be threatened when Congress wants to designate $1.1 billion dollars to fight a disease. But, you see, the Administration wanted $1.9 billion. Now, it matters not one bit that there is little to no chance of another $800,000,000 being just found lying around somewhere. This is an Election Year Disease and things are not what they seem. First of all the Administration wanted "all new money". Or to be more precise, since we are in deficit spending mode, all new debt. How irresponsible to use money "left over" from a fairly successful fight against the last Election Year Disease - Ebola - and from funding designated to set up Obama Care exchanges in U.S. Territories which will actually happen several geological ages after pigs learn to fly. Also, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans had the nerve to put this to a vote when most Democratic Representatives were staging a "sit in" thus depriving them of a chance to gripe about how stingy and inadequate over a billion dollars really was to fight this new, SCARY disease. Zika has been around forever and was first discovered in 1947 in a rhesus macaque monkey in Uganda. Yep, that's one at the top of the article. It is a moderately unpleasant illness to have although almost everyone survives it and seems to have life long immunity. The mosquitoes that help it get around have been spreading around the world, with the global economy, the warming planet and the banning of DDT all contributing. Of late it has been associated with sexual transmission and with birth defects in children. Naturally there is great interest in doing something about it and many companies and institutions around the world are working - independent of US funding - on a vaccine. It is estimated that finding one will take two years and getting it past regulators will take....another six. Zika is not the first disease to become an Election Year Disease. But it has pretty much all the required criteria for a good one. Interesting Name, check. Foreign Origins, check. Connection with sex, check. Association with Man Damaged Rain Forest, check. Although Election Year Diseases are a fairly new phenomena I think they are here to stay, courtesy of CSI type shows where all scientific problems can be solved in under an hour by wise cracking genius nerds typing on computers. Let's review, shall we: 1976 Swine Flu. Republican's fault because Gerald Ford did too much. 2014 Ebola Republican's fault for questioning CDC policy on quarantine. 2016 Zika Republican's fault for only finding a measly billion dollars. Of course all these diseases are also Republican's fault because everyone knows they don't much like foreigners, sex or Mother Nature. It is all so tedious and silly. The CDC should take the billion dollars, say "Thanks, we'll get back to you if we need more". It would buy a whole bunch of public service announcements telling people to get rid of old tires that mosquitoes breed in. It would not of course allow for any Republican notions like draining swamp lands or liberally applying swell insecticides. Nor would it have any influence on the slow process of regulatory approval of a vaccine. Any children born in the interim with birth defects are the fault of Republicans for not giving more money to Planned Parenthood. You will note that on the list of Election Year Diseases I have not included AIDS, even though it was an actively discussed issue in several election cycles. That's because to be a really silly political issue you can have Ominous Threat but not significant numbers of Americans actually dying of an illness. Across the political spectrum Americans are much, much better than the chumps who lead us. We know how to recognize real tragedy and step up in response.
