Ferris Wheel

I came upon this picture on the internet yesterday, and for the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been trying to define what I think/how I feel about it.

My source for the picture said it was taken in Cañon City, Colorado in the 1920s.  The owner of the amusement park was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and invited his fellow Klansmen for a day at the park. 

I have a friend who disputes that.  He claims the story is a fake, and the picture is actually a still from a scene cut from the Mel Brooks’ movie, History of the World- Part One.

Either way, I guess the main lesson I take from this photo is how insidious hatred and bigotry can be.  We think of the KKK in terms of cross burnings and hangings, when the majority of their time had to have been  spent in ordinary, everyday pursuits. 

Still, how odd to think of them having a harmless good time.

A Sign That I Could Do Without

Never mind the early-blooming Azaleas, Oak trees leafing out and the Redbuds blooming in the woods, an absolutely sure sign of spring I saw this week- and one I would happily do without – is the appearance of Polistes carolina.

These are large red wasps with a vicious sting and a bad attitude.  They are extremely territorial and aggressive and they love to nest in attics and under the eaves of houses. 

They are also damn near impossible to kill.  A direct hit with any name-brand wasp and hornet spray may knock them to the ground, but more often than not, a few seconds later they are back in the air and looking for a fight. 

We have nests inside the eaves on both our house and garage, and all attempts to eradicate them have been fruitless.  Short of burning the house down, I don’t think anything will get rid of them, and I’m not even sure that would do the job.

You do not have to be physically attacking them to stir their ire.  Often your first indication a red wasp is around is a searing pain on the back of your neck or shoulder.  Unlike honey bees, this isn’t a suicide mission for the wasp – she (only the females have stingers) can and will sting you more than once if you let her.  The venom is so powerful that the tissue at the center of the sting will often necrose in a day or two.

First aid for stings is ice and/or a poultice made with baking soda and water.  Benedryl – oral, topical, or both – is also a good idea. 

Nothing helps very much; it’s still going to hurt like Hell.

Not Kinky

No, that’s not another picture of Kinky Friedman – More about who it is later.

Perhaps because of the Lincoln series on PBS, and Daniel Day Lewis winning at Sunday night’s Oscars, I got to wondering what the American Indians did about the War Between the States.  I have learned that they fought on both sides; some tribes, like some Anglo families, splitting down the middle.

On the Southern side tribes like the Choctaw and the Cherokee formed their own units, while in the Union Army, Native Americans were more likely to be  added to established “Colored” regiments.  A member of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, for example, was just about as likely to be of Iroquois ancestry as African.

Back to the picture - 

The man in the photograph is Ely Parker, a Seneca lawyer and a Union General.  He is the man who wrote the terms of surrender signed by Robert E. Lee.  At Appomattox, Lee is said to have remarked to Parker, “I am glad to see one real American here”, to which Parker replied, “We are all Americans.”

Asa-Luke Twocrow, an Oglala Sioux, was working behind the scenes as a rigger on Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln film when he was cast as Parker.  He called playing Parker a great honor, saying "As a Native American, he did a lot of things -- working as a lawyer, an engineer -- and achieved what many Native Americans were striving for, to be recognized as an intelligent human being."

Parker was one of two Native Americans who reached the rank of Brigadier General during the Civil War. 

The other was on the Confederate side.

Stand Watie, a Cherokee chief, was considered to be the an expert at guerilla warfare, and the most successful Confederate commander West of the Mississippi. 

He achieved one of his greatest successes at Pleasant Bluff, Arkansas on June 10, 1864, capturing the Union steamboat J.R. Williams. which was loaded with supplies valued at $120,000. At the Second Battle of Cabin Creek, (Indian Territory), Watie’s cavalry brigade captured 129 supply wagons and 740 mules, took 120 prisoners, and left 200 casualties

Kinky Again?

Kinky Friedman appeared at the Lakewood Medallion Discount Liquors in Dallas this past weekend to sign bottles of his Man In Black Tequila.

While there, he confirmed to reporters that he is considering a possible run for Governor.

More than six years after losing the race for governor, the singer, songwriter and novelist said he's considering another run.  Friedman ran as an independent in the 2006 general election, and he received more than 12 percent of the vote.  He also ran in 2009, but dropped out early in favor of former Houston mayor, Bill White.

Between signing bottles and schmoozing customers, Kinky also shared his plan to solve the state's budget problems:

"I would campaign very hard to legalize casino gambling," Friedman said. "And to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana. If we can accomplish those two things, we won't be talking about any kind of taxes for 30 years."

I suspect that like many of his songs, many of his political statements are made for shock appeal, but he is fun and refreshing.  I don’t know if he could govern – or would even want to – but he does add zest to Texas politics.

No Keyboard – Press F1

OK, the picture is fuzzy and blurry, but it’s the best I can do. 

I pulled it from an on-line video on how to fix the problem just to prove that

• I actually got this screen yesterday, and
• It’s not all that uncommon

The message I got was only slightly different.  It said

KEYBOARD FAILURE

NO KEYBOARD CONNECTED

PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE

Uh, excuse me? 

Isn’t F1 on the keyboard? 

And pushing F1 on an unconnected keyboard is going to help how?????

I saw this screen when I first turned the computer on after the crash I mentioned in yesterday’s post had been corrected.  As near as I can tell, it occurred because the computer was looking for an old-style PS2 style keyboard, and our keyboard connects via a USB port.

I turned the pc off, double checked all the connections and turned it on again.  The message showed up again, but timed out after a while.  Then the computer continued its boot up sequence and after finding “new hardware” (the mouse and the keyboard) everything works fine.

Apparently, it is not always that easy.  That screen shot was from a video featuring a teenaged computer geek explaining what to do when it isn’t.

 

Life After Blue Death

We had a momentary power failure yesterday afternoon – just long enough to have to reset the digital clocks, and for DirecTV to have to go through an extended boot-up sequence.  I was using my laptop on line at the time, and didn’t even lose my network connection.

The Dell pc in our office wasn’t so lucky.  Even though it was “protected” by a line conditioner, it looks like that failure (or the power surge that caused it) fried our computer’s brain.

When we first turned the computer back on, we got the dreaded blue screen saying Windows was shutting down to prevent further damage and to check the BiOs.  Turning the pc off and back on resulted in a black screen with scrolling garbage.  I could not get into a DOS screen or Safe mode no matter which f-key I pounded, or how often.

In desperation, I took it back home to the guy that built it, and we got lucky.  He noticed the word MEMORY was recurring on the junk scrolling down the screen.  He opened the case and removed one DDR memory stick – picked the bad one on the first try – and the computer booted up normally.

Replaced the bad memory and added some more while we were in there anyway. Now the computer is better than ever.

Say It Wrong Long Enough, And

Fooling around on the internet can occasionally lead to some interesting information.  One of my favorite sources is Mentalfloss.com which was the source of this list of words that came to be because people got them wrong:

1. Pea

Originally the word was "pease," and it was singular. ("The Scottish or tufted Pease..is a good white Pease fit to be eaten.") The sound on the end was reanalyzed as a plural 's' marker, and at the end of the 17th Century people started talking about one "pea." The older form lives on in the nursery rhyme "Pease-porridge hot, pease-porridge cold…"

2. Cherry

The same thing happened to "cherise" or "cheris," which came from Old French "cherise" and was reanalyzed as a plural. So the singular "cherry" was born.

3. Apron

"Apron" also came into English from Old French and was originally "napron" ("With hir napron feir..She wypid sofft hir eyen.") But "a napron" was misheard often enough as "an apron" that by the 1600s the "n" was dropped.

4. Umpire

Umpire lost its 'n' from the same sort of confusion. It came to English from the Middle French "nonper," meaning "without peer; peerless" ("Maked I not a louedaye bytwene god and mankynde, and chese a mayde to be nompere, to put the quarel at ende?") A nompere or an ompere? The n-less form won out.

5. Newt

The confusion about which word the 'n' belonged to could end up swinging the other way too. A newt was originally an "ewt" ("The carcases of snakes, ewts, and other serpents."), but "an ewt" could easily be misheard as "a newt," and in this case, the 'n' left the "an" and stuck to the the "newt."

6. Nickname

The 'n' also traveled over from the "an" to stick to "nickname," which was originally "ekename," meaning "added name."

7. Alligator

Alligator came to English from the Spanish explorers who first encountered "el lagarto" (lizard) in the New World. While the big lizards were for a time referred to as "lagartos," the "el" accompanied often enough that it became an inseparable part of the English word.

All example quotes come from the Oxford English Dictionary.