International incident, with ducks

Amsterdam, Australia, France... Netherlander ducks, Just Add Light and Stir, England and New Mexico, 85 years.

So... Julie Daniel sent me some photos to us in Just Add Light and Stir. This one would've have been legible at the small size I use for that blog, but I liked it, so I thought I should share it. Then I wondered what it's about. An act of kindness? Lack of dedication to one's nation? Sports! Conservation. Connections? Different readers will connect it to different things in their thoughts and lives.

I don't know where the sign exists (where Julie took the photo), and I don't know who loved the story enough to make sure money was spent on a sign that would be there a long time. Wikipedia says this, about that (and some other things):

Pearce won all of his races with relative ease. He defeated his first opponent Walter Flinsch of Germany by 12 lengths and his second opponent Danish rower Schwartz by 8 lengths. In the quarter final he was easily beating French opponent Saurin when a family of ducks strayed into his lane. Pearce momentarily stopped rowing to let the ducks pass; he still won by 20 lengths and broke the course record. In the semifinals, Pearce was pressed by David Collett of Great Britain, winning by three-quarters of a length (roughly 1.5 sec). In the finals he became the first Australian to win gold in the single sculls by defeating Kenneth Myers of the United States by 9.8 seconds. In winning he established a new Olympic record, some 25 seconds faster than the previous mark. This also earned him the Philadelphia Gold Cup, which represented the amateur champion of the world. He was awarded an Honorary Life Membership of the Sydney Rowing Club.

That was sweet, about the ducks. Had he lost the story would have a different tone. But he didn't have teammates to be angry about it; he was there alone. And he could've been even better prepared, but there were rules then that aren't now:

In preparation for the 1928 Olympics, Pearce attempted to enter the Diamond Sculls at the Henley Royal Regatta, but was barred as he was a carpenter by trade: the rule relating to amateur status then in force barred anyone "Who is or has been by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer." This socially discriminatory wording was deleted in 1937.

One thing leads to another!

Rum Tum Tugger hooks up

One of my favorite correpondents, Colleen Prieto, sent me this note:

Hi Sandra –

So I played Rum Tum Tugger in the lyrics game, and then I was sitting on the couch singing it along to myself.

Robbie right away asked “what is that song?? I LOVE it!!!!”

I pulled it up online so he could hear it sung better than he’d hear it from me :-) and I told him it’s from the musical Cats which I had gone to see when I was little. He wanted to know right away if we could go see the show. He went to see his first theater show (A Christmas Carol at a small local theater) just last weekend and now he’s ready for another and knows just what he wants the next one to be!

Hopefully we’ll be able to find it playing, maybe in Boston, in the near future. And until then, I’ve added a filmed DVD version to our Netflix queue which should be fun to watch.

A happy consequence of a fun game – we have something new and interesting to go and do together!

Colleen :-)

---

Here's documentation of when Holly got to see Cats: http://sandradodd.com/eastyorkshire

Somewhere there's a photo of her posing with the make-up kit she bought at the theatre, with her face "catted up." I'm putting this note here in hopes that when I find the photo I'll bring it here.

A week ago, Holly and I saw Emma Fuller star as Annie in a Landmark production of that musical, in Albuquerque. Her mom, Beth, was in the company and played four parts. Emma is unschooled. Though Holly had seen her a couple of times this year, the last time I had been with Emma was in London in the summer of 2011. She was wearing a pink raincoat she had bought in Paris. In the musical, the Warbucks house provides Annie with a new coat, which she loves, and it was also pink, but fancier, and longer. But seeing her with that coat saying "I LOVE IT!" reminded me of her other pink coat, in London, not so far from where Holly and I saw Cats.

I could go on, connecting one thing to another. If you could, too, that will help you with lateral thinking—with your own learning, and that of people around you.

Keep your ideas bouncing in unpredictable directions! Let them spring and fly.

---

NOTE: For years I ran a lyrics game on a blog, but eventually it was repetitive and we started getting World of Warcraft gold farmers' spam, and too much other spam, so I closed it. But the tricks and procedures I had honed keeping that blog up led directly to my ability create and maintain Just Add Light and Stir, which is my favorite project and is over two years old now.

I've started a page for song lyrics play on facebook, here: Lyrics Game, Goofin' with Songs

For any reader who doesn't have Rum Tum Tugger in mind already, here it is:

Æ and its last gasps

Æ or æ isn't a very good typewriter or computer letter, but in handwriting it was very pretty.

It's called "an ash," and has fallen out of English usage. When I was a kid I used to see it in archæology and æsthetics, but no more. And even in this font, it's coming through too small, and not taking it's proper width.

With half-spaces in a typewriter, it worked well to type Ælflæd (my SCA name) or Træskæg (our friend Sigmund Træskæeg / Marty Tuft's SCA name). You ended up back on track and the end, for having used two half-spaces.

At the grocery store near us is a sign on the door, so I see it often.

I pronounce it in my mind "eee-yay-it" but they intended for it to say "exit." Someone at a sign company discovered that character and assumed it was a fancy "X".

There are names still around that were once spelled with that letter. I think "Ælflæd" went out of style for a girls' name 700 years ago or so. :-) But Elsie is still around (Ælsie). Schuyler Waynforth has a daughter named Linnaea, and it should be, in a way of thinking, a six-letter word (Linnæa) rather than seven. That's more important for calligraphers than for anyone else.

For men's names one medieval and still rare name is Elvis (once Ælvis). Others still around are Albert and Edward (Ælbert and Ædward, back in the day).

A living language changes, and English is one of the liveliest and changingest languages of them all.

Here are some ways my SCA name has been written down: OH WAIT!! I posted this too early. I'm sorry. If you care, check back. Or look through scrolls here. I intend to cut and paste just the names from some of them, but it's going to take some photo manipulation time. http://sandradodd.com/duckford/award/scorpion
http://sandradodd.com/duckford/award/wow
http://sandradodd.com/duckford/award/augmentation
http://sandradodd.com/duckford/award/heartofthescorpion

Big, float, camera, Ecclesfield, hospital, national health...

A 1933 horse-drawn float that seems to be made of flowers. I thought "Rose Bowl"?

But I could see (even in the smaller image that was in the e-mail from Retronaut) "Ecclesfield." For all I know, there's an Ecclesfield, California. So I googled it. Found "Ecclesfield parade," and all in just seconds.

Ecclesfield is in South Yorkshire, near Sheffield. I read about hospital parades, which were held there from the 1890's to 1936, and looked back at the photo. I could see "Ecclesfield Parade," but there was another word on the left. I got a magnifying glass, and it says "Hospital."

Now I know how hospitals were funded before the National Health program, and I have more pictures in my head of England. Nice.

Hospital Parades

The link says they were paper and flour paste on a wire frame. I wonder what they did with them afterwards. Maybe left them at someone's farmyard until the weather dissolved them?

When I was a kid I worked on a float once. We were wiring paper flowers (paper napkins made flowerish with a fluffy fold and a piece of wire) to chicken wire. I suppose (never thought about it until today) that at the end of it all, they cut the wire off the truck, rolled it all up and took it to the dump.

One thought leads to another, if you let your thoughts gallump along. :-) Retronaut has sparked a LOT Of thought! Here's their entry (introduced in the e-mail): http://www.retronaut.co/2011/12/vintage-big Vintage Big. All they cared about was that it was a big camera, in an old photo. That's enough.

Ganesha and the Methodists

All this happened in a twelve-hour span...

I read a hymn in a new Methodist hymnal (and took notes so I could look it up). I knew the tune, so I could hear it in my head. The notable thing was that the text was pretty much a prayer asking God to help people reconcile faith and science, mystery and proof.

The tune I know it to is here (let the intro stuff go by before the real melody starts):



Here's another organist playing it, also informally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbgbS42n_U8

Here's the arrangement and words I grew up with, from The Baptist Hymnal of 1956:



I can play that on the piano. I'm likely to make a few mistakes but it still feels good.

I read the new text while waiting for a Christmas concert Holly was in. It's called "Praise the source of faith and learning," by Thomas Troeger. The hymnal was The Faith we Sing, 2004.

Here are lyrics: http://faculty.samford.edu/~twwoolle/Praise%20the%20Source%20of%20Faith%20and%20Learning.htm "...lest we justify some terror with the antiquated creed" was the end of one verse. It's to the tune above.

That's Holly with the short hair in the front row, black dress with sleeves, above the first poinsettia.

This morning I checked the overnight/international e-mail. Hema Bharadwaj and I have been having an exchange about Ganesha, because Marty did his final project in an Eastern Religions class on how to set up an altar to Ganesha. Hema sent a link she liked about the origin of Ganesha and some regional variations and symbolism. The final paragraph is this:

Thus various symbols with potent metaphysical themes telescope into the form and narrative that is Ganesha. They speak a profound truth in a language that bypasses the rational mind and connects intuitively with the soul. It is this silent language that we – a generation bombarded with unsubtle ‘Breaking News’ – are longing perhaps to hear. That is why we are so drawn to him, going to the extent of turning him into celluloid cartoons and plastic China-made dashboard displays. And Ganesha does not mind, so long as we appreciate the realm of his mother, and aspire for the realm of his father. (http://devdutt.com/decoding-ganesha/)

His mother(Shakti/Pavarti) wants to accept life and death in the real world; his father (Shiva) would prefer a spiritual life of renunciation. Ganesha melds those, and understands both.

I was excited to read this on that page, too: " Ganesha’s rat may be depicted in films as a cute mouse but it is a bandicoot..." I was in India a month and didn't see a single monkey, but the last night, on the way to the airport, I saw something running in the raised, wide median between lanes on the highway in Mumbai. I saw more than one. In Albuquerque it might've been prairie dogs, living in the dirt next to a freeway, but it was nighttime and this wasn't Albuquerque. I'm glad I saw them, and I'm glad that Hema and Pardnya believed I had seen them, and said "bandicoots." So I didn't see monkeys, but I did see bandicoots (fleetingly), and now I understand why sometimes (in English) I read that Ganesha has a rat, and sometimes I read it's a mouse, because as far as I (and probably others in the western-English-speaking-world) knew, Crash Bandicoot was nothing more than a video game character.

I've seen Ganesha's rodential friend portrayed sleeping, pulling Ganesha in a chariot, giving him a ride on his back, playing chess with him... On a wikipedia discussion of symbolism, there was this statement: "Martin-Dubost notes a view that the rat is a symbol suggesting that Ganesha, like the rat, penetrates even the most secret places." That's kind of cool. In Christian parallel, that's like The Holy Spirit. Kind of.

"Tractor" (the word, the thing)

This morning my mind wandered through the events of the day, a coming road trip, and the literal meaning of the word "tractor." I had never thought of it. Traction. Retract. A tractor is a thing that pulls!

The thing it most basically pulls is a plow, that tool said to have so profoundly advanced human culture.

I wondered then whether anyone (maybe Icelanders) called them "iron oxen" or "power plows" or anything more Germanic. So I started poking around.

number:	3114
English:	cart, carriage, wagon (wheeled vehicle; not self-propelled)
Deutsch:	Karren
Nederlands:	wagon
Italiano:	vettura, vagone (of train), carro (with animal traction)
Nihongo:	?
Esperanto:	vagono, ĉaro
Novial:	chare
Tsolyani:	hóggukh

That came up, when I tried to see what "tractor" was called in other languages. It's not tractor, but I was excited to see that in Italian, "carro" is something pulled by animal traction (which fit right in, and also gave me a good clue why we called our automobiles "cars." In English a "cart" is pulled by animals, but people didn't so often ride in them as they do "wagons" or "carriages."

Britannica Concise Encycopedia had some cool tractor details:

High-power, low-speed traction vehicle. The two main types are wheeled and continuous-track. Most modern tractors are powered by internal-combustion engines running on gasoline or diesel fuel. Tractors are used in agriculture, construction, and road building, for pulling equipment such as plows and cultivators, for pushing implements such as bulldozers and diggers, and for operating stationary devices such as saws and winches. The first tractors grew out of the steam engines used on farms in the late 19th century; in 1892 an Iowa blacksmith, John Froehlich, built the first farm vehicle powered by a gasoline engine. The tractor revolutionized farming, displacing draft animals and many farm workers. By World War I the tractor inspired the tanks built by the British and French.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/tractor#ixzz1dya3raeO

I saw some steam tractors at an outdoor museum called Hollycombe Steam in the Country last summer.

It was pulling visitors in a wagon like... like... an omnibus !

Car trunks and glove boxes

October 1940. "Grand Forks, North Dakota." 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration.

Four of five have real trunk-looking trunks, and this is about the end of that era.

From the Shorpy blog: http://www.shorpy.com/node/11699?size=_original

I wondered whether maybe in carriages, pre-automobile, there was a box for the driver to keep things in. I don't know, but if anyone does know, please leave a note!

Wikipedia has an article on glove compartments. There's more, but I liked this part best:

A glove compartment is occasionally referred to as a "jockey box," especially in the U.S. Upper Rocky Mountain states such as Idaho and Montana, but is found as far south as Texas. In South Africa, it is called a "cubby-hole". In Turkey, it is called "Torpedo Compartment".

According to the BBC Four programme "Penelope Keith and the Fast Lady" it was Dorothy Levitt who first coined the phrase 'glove compartment' as she advised motorists to carry a number of pairs of gloves to deal with many eventualities.