Category: History

Earthquakes and Railroads and Magic Fingers, Oh My!

The hotel we’re staying in while our house is being built is very close to railroad tracks. We hear the whistle and then, we feel the train going by. No kidding, we can feel the rumble. It shakes the chairs, the sofa, the bed. The whole room shakes for as long as the train passes through the area.

It’s kind of an eerie sensation. It reminds me of the Illinois earthquake in 2010, which was felt by many in Eastern Iowa. It rattled our bed. That went on for a few minutes.

And some of you X-Files fans will get it when I say this free association would naturally lead to memories of the Bad Blood episode (season 5). This hilarious show features Mulder and Scully telling their own versions of what happened in a little town full of vampires. Both agents got all shook up using the Magic Fingers on a hotel bed.

Scrub to about 2 minutes into the YouTube to see the first Magic Fingers earthquake. There’s more, but you’ll get the idea.

Top of the Line Appliances for Your Pipe Dream Home!

It’s that time of the year again; everybody’s moving whether relocating across the country or just moving across town.

One thing is key: you need quality, top of the line appliances. Say you’re having family and friends over for dinner and you need freezer space for roadkill squirrel. Why, a General Electric fridge with the perfect size little freezer designed to accommodate flattened rodents is just what you need.

But wait; you’ll need a stove to cook them! Look no further than your own Magic Chef. Emeril Lagasse would be proud to own this little gem, which might even have smell-o-vision as he would call it! That is, if you like the smell of smoked salmon (see what I did there?). Just whack your food against the grill to knock off any residual char. Or spray them down with the complimentary Copper Bullet Hose and watch that smoke just disappear!

Better hurry to order. These items are selling so fast there is a strict order of only two to a customer!

Pay no attention to that thing which resembles an antique hash pipe in the oven.

Note on Photos: Courtesy of Slager Appliances in Iowa City, I took these photos of vintage appliances on display in their showroom.

Thoughts On Laptop Computers

We bought a laptop computer. It has been years since I’ve used one. I forgot how exasperating a touchpad is. Luckily, we have a spare wireless mouse and a USB port. The laptop is slim and very light, like most laptops these days.

I remember the first “laptop” I had early in my career as a consulting psychiatrist. I think it weighed about 2-3 times what the modern ones weigh nowadays. I think I could have stopped a thief from taking it from me by whacking him over the head with it.

If I remember correctly, it had a slot for floppy discs and another for disc media. It developed a hardware problem which forced me to box it up and send it back to the manufacturer for repairs. I don’t remember how long I kept it after that.

The new laptops don’t have any internal optical drives built into them.

I read a tech article in which the author’s opinion about the gradual disappearance of internal optical drives and other physical media for laptops was probably the result of large companies finding out they could make more money by charging subscription fees for digital media.

Microsoft comes to mind.

The Mumbo Jumbo on Some Big Antique Cribbage Boards

Today, I’m going on a tangent about big, mostly antique cribbage boards which were specially made for making the scoring more complex. The main perpetrator (I mean manufacturer), was Drueke (variously pronounced as Drooky, Drew, Drooka).

The Drueke name turns up on most of the big two, three and four track vintage cribbage boards you find for sale on eBay. There are a few other makers, but Drueke is the one you commonly see. I don’t know anything about Drueke except it was a well-known maker of board games including chess and cribbage sets. The company was based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

If you know how to play the basic version of cribbage, you probably think it’s complicated enough as is. But Drueke made boards that allowed you to score many aspects of the game right on the playing surface.

There are other 4 track cribbage boards that aren’t designed to allow players to go crazy with scoring everything you do in a cribbage game. But typically, you’ll see a lot of what Drueke called the “Once-A-Round Scoremaster” boards. I got curious about the rules and found a couple of web pages on which I found out more about them. The rules are a little hard to find and a little vague when you do find them.

I couldn’t find out anything about them even on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website—and it’s the main authority about cribbage rules.

Reddit has a page titled Cribbage-Four Track Board (Example Rules). Click the “read more” below the image. It also shows a nice photo of a typical board. It’s tough to follow.

Then I found a Board Game Geek (BGG) page on which a guy named Jeff Bridghman outlined a clearer explanation of how to play on such a board. It’s actually better than the rules included with the Drueke game. By the way, if you have trouble with the web page, just reload it by typing “4 track boards and all the extra mumbo jumbo?” and hit the search button again.

What puzzled me were his comments about the High Hand score. He said his board had something I’ve not seen on pictures of the boards on eBay. The High Hand score goes from 1-10 on every one of those I saw. On the other hand, his board shows actual scores (14 through 29). I think it must have been a custom build. The thread has longevity; it started in 2011 and the latest comment I saw was in 2023.

If you buy the Drueke board, you’ll need the rules. But even if you have the Drueke rules, you’ll probably need something more specific. Maybe Drueke figured people would be more creative than they are. It’s a lot like life. I think sometimes you have to make up some rules.

Thoughts on Down Time Activities for Land Survey Technicians

I was just thinking about the old-time land survey crews. When I was getting on the job training as a survey technician, the typical land survey crews were at least 2-3 persons. One rodman, one instrument man, and a crew chief who organized the job, which could be property or construction jobs.

Nowadays, you get by sometimes with one man doing the jobs using a theodolite that measures angles and distances. You don’t always need a physical measuring tape; you can use something they call “total stations.”

It’s cheaper for engineering companies to use one man survey outfits. On the other hand, one disadvantage is the lack of mentoring for learners who want to become land surveyors or civil engineers.

Mentoring from surveyors on the survey back in the day not only taught me such skills as how to throw and wrap a surveyor’s steel tape—it also taught me how to work well with others as a team. Of course, this was transferrable to working on the psychiatry consultation-liaison service in a big hospital as well.

It’s well known that playing cards in the truck while waiting for the rain to stop was an essential skill. I don’t know how they manage downtime nowadays. We didn’t play cards on the consultation service during downtime, partly because we didn’t have much downtime.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a recent post, we played Hearts in the truck on rain days. I always sat in the middle. At the time, I was a terrible card player in general. It was a cutthroat game and I had trouble remembering which cards had been played.

When you consider that the strong suit of engineers and surveyors is math ability, you’d think that survey crews would have figured out a way to play Cribbage during downtime. You can have a Cribbage game with 3 or 4 people although I’ve never played it that way. If there are 3 players, it can still be cutthroat.

The one problem I can see is that, the guy sitting in the middle would have to set the board on his lap. You’d almost need a special, custom-made board which would have a space for placing the cards to keep track of what’s been played. I think that might have made things easier for me.

The other drawback to one man survey crews is that pretty much the only card game you can play is solitaire.

Memorial Day Events 2024 in Iowa City, Iowa

The Memorial Day ceremonies in Iowa City, Iowa this year will be on May 27, 2024. At 8:30 a.m. there will be a ceremony at Park Road Bridge. Then at 9:30 a.m., the second part will be at Oakland Cemetery. At 11:00 a.m. the third part will be at Memory Gardens.

Reminiscence of My Younger Days

The other day we had some stormy weather roll across central Iowa, although it was not as bad as the tornado that swept through Greenfield. We hope the best for them. We didn’t actually get a tornado, but I remember wondering why the siren went off about 6:00 a.m. It woke me up and I wondered what was the matter. Turns out it was a tornado warning and we had to sit in the basement for a little while. It was a little scary, but the storm moved east pretty quickly northeast out of our area.

For whatever reason, this eventually led to my reminiscing about my younger days. Maybe it was because of a temporary scare and increased awareness of our mortality.

I used to work for a consulting engineers company called WHKS & Co. in Mason City, Iowa. This was back in the days of the dinosaurs when it was challenging to set stakes for rerouting highways around grazing diplodocus herds.

I was young and stupid (compared to being old and stupid now by way of comparison). I lived at the YMCA and took the city bus to the Willowbrook Plaza where the WHKS & Co. office was located on the west side of town.

I usually got there too early and stopped for breakfast at the Country Kitchen. The waitress would make many trips to my table to top off my coffee while I sat there waiting for the office to open. That was fine because I had a strong bladder in those days. I left tips (“Don’t cross the street when the light is red”).

My duties at WHKS & Co. included being rear chain man and rod man, at least when I first started. A “chain” was the word still being used for a steel tape for measuring distances. It was well past the days when land surveyors used actual chains for that purpose. You had to use a plumb bob with the chain to make sure you were straight above the point (usually marked by a nail or an iron property corner pin) you measuring to and from.

You and the lead chain man had to pull hard on each end of the chain to make sure it was straight. It was challenging, especially on hot days when my hands were sweaty and the chain was dirty. Callouses helped.

The rod was for measuring vertical distances and an instrument called a level was used with that. One guy held up the rod which was marked with numbers and the guy using the level read the elevation. Another way to measure both horizontal and vertical angles used a rod and a different instrument that we called a theodolite (older instrument name was “transit”).

We worked in all kinds of weather, although not during thunderstorms. In fact, when it was looking like rain out in the field, a standard joke for us sitting in the truck waiting for rain was to draw a circle on the windshield (imaginary, you just used your finger although if your finger was dirty which it always was, you left a mark) and if a certain number of drops fell in the circle, you could sit in the truck and play cards.

When we played cards, it was always the game Hearts, which I could not play skillfully at all. I always lost. But it kept us out of the rain. If a big thunderstorm blew in, we just headed back home.

We never got caught in a tornado.

Big Mo Pod Show Theme: Subverting Expectations

I want to give a shout out to the Big Mo Pod Show Subverting Expectations that aired on May 11, 2024 following the Friday Big Mo Blues Show on May 10, 2024.

What impressed me most and puzzled me a lot was the tune that Big Mo didn’t talk about on the podcast. The tune was a dazzling guitar performance called “Hot Fingers” by a duo called Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie Dunn. Big Mo said it was recorded in the 1920s.

I looked for a video of it and could find several with the picture of what looked like a Caucasian guitarist and nobody else. I also saw one picture with the Caucasian guitarist and what looked like a cut-and-pasted photo of a black guitarist.

Because I couldn’t tell who was who, I googled their names. It turns out that Lonnie Johnson was a well-known blues guitarist. He was black. Lonnie Johnson recorded “Hot Fingers” with another famous jazz guitarist named Eddie Lang, who was white. Eddie Lang used the alias of Blind Willie Dunn in order to hide his race while performing with Lonnie Johnson. I’m not sure how Eddie Lang could pass for black, an interesting twist in the late 1920s. I’m not saying either was racist. Why would they have performed together if they were? And why would Eddie Lang have adopted the black-sounding pseudonym?

So that brings me back to the title of the Big Mo Pod Show which was Subverting Expectations. The expectation that gets subverted had to do with a tune I don’t remember hearing on Friday night. It was “That Lovin’ Thang,” by the group Tas Cru, with which I’m unfamiliar. Big Mo remarked that you could listen to the blues as played by Tas Cru with an expectation that they were going to make mistakes in their performance—which never happened, attesting to their talent.

On the other hand, it strikes me that the story behind Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie Dunn (Eddie Lang) does create its own sort of subverted expectation, in a different sense. I know Blues music experts already knew that, but it was news to me.

Jim Has a 27-Year-Old Shirt!

I have a 27-year-old shirt. It’s denim with a plaid pattern on the front. I wore it when we went on vacation to Hawaii in 1997. In the featured image, I’m wearing it as Sena and I pose for a photo after we got off the plane. We and a lot of other vacationers were festooned with leis as we entered the airport.

That makes this shirt 27 years old—at least. I’m sure I had it for a while before we went to Hawaii. I don’t remember where I got it. Sena says she probably bought it for me at Target.

I looked it up and found an identical shirt for sale on eBay—but it was advertised as being for ladies. The description is “VTG 90s Ladies Greatland Denim Flannel Shirt Size M Pocket Streetwear Grunge.

My first thought was: I’m wearing a lady’s shirt that sells for about twenty bucks on eBay? I couldn’t find one labeled for men. I asked Sena about it and found out for the first time that the buttons on a man’s shirt are on the right side and on a women’s shirt the buttons are on the left.

Then I looked at the eBay picture of the shirt again. The buttons are on the right. I guess the woman selling them doesn’t know the rule of right and left side buttons as it pertains to shirts for men and women.

Well, I guess I can stop being insecure about it. I don’t think anyone really knows why that gender-based rule about right and left side shirt buttons exists. I looked at a couple of web pages and they tend to repeat the same reasons and then end up saying nobody knows and it doesn’t matter.

The other thing to consider is whether my shirt could be considered vintage. According to some experts, anything between 20 and 99 years old can be vintage. I guess that makes me and my shirt vintage.