The original "cheesehead"

The Green Bay Packers play the Chicago Bears for the NFC championship this afternoon, so it's time to explain the cheeseheads:

"His name is Ralph Bruno, and 25 years ago he was an apprentice pattern maker from Milwaukee who was reupholstering his mother's living room furniture when he found himself holding a leftover cushion.

On a whim, he burned holes into the cushion until his mother shooed him outside because of the awful smell. In his backyard, he painted the cushion yellow and fitted it on his head...

That night, in a direct rebuttal to the Chicago fans who have long ridiculed Wisconsinites with the infamous one-word mockery of their state's most beloved product, he wore the invention to a baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago White Sox.

Ralph Bruno thus became the Original Cheesehead.

"All my friends made fun of me; they thought I looked like an idiot," Bruno recalled this week. "But then a bunch of pretty girls came over and asked to wear it."

... the company [Foamation] has fewer than 10 employees who make the cheeseheads by hand in a nondescript warehouse near Milwaukee. Business gets so big before Bears games that they brought in several temporary workers this week...

In 1995, Frank Emmert of Superior, Wis., claimed that jamming a cheesehead over his face saved him from death during the crash landing of a light plane during his return from a Packers game."

More at the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Henry A. Kosholleck/The Capital Times archives

I have a question about grammar

What is the proper way to indicate an ellipsis when quotation marks are involved?  When I'm embedding text from a linked article, I don't like to copy/paste the entire text; I believe it's more ethical to take small excerpts and refer the reader to the primary source.  So I'll typically cite a couple paragraphs and even condense those paragraphs to retain only the most salient points.

I indicate citations in the blog by the common convention of using nested text, and I indicate where I've omitted text by replacing it with an ellipsis (...), but sometimes it gets awkward, as shown here:

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define persons as human beings.”...

There is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the Citizens United decision.

An entire paragraph has been omitted between those sentences, but the three dots that indicate that look totally awkward sitting there by themselves.  On the other hand, if I put them inside the quotation mark ("...as human beings...."), then it seems to indicate that the deletion was from the quotation, which is not the case.  Sometimes I move the (...) to the start of the next sentence, but if that also has quotation marks, I'm no better off.

This isn't a big deal, but I know there are some readers of this blog with true copyeditor skills, so I'd appreciate any advice you can offer.

Thanks in advance.

The Vermont legislature tackles "corporate personhood"

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.”...

In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons earlier today presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes "an amendment to the United States Constitution ... which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States." Sources in the state house say it has a good chance of passing...

The resolution goes on to note that "large corporations own most of America's mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities."

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define persons as human beings.”...

There is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the Citizens United decision.

Excerpted from an article at AlterNet.

Eight sisters

Whatever genes control facial morphology must have had strong penetrance in this set of children.  From Shorpy, where they are identified as "Les soeurs Gaudreau de Stanbridge East, QC, 1912. Unknown photographer."

State-sponsored sterilization

What these people had in mind was the raising of the genetic good through... forced "asexualization" of the lesser elements of society--forced sterilization of inmates in state-run mental and correctional institutions...

The Human Betterment Society put the issue quite simply in their slim little pamphlet, Human Sterilization--to save ourselves from "race degeneration" society had to act and restrict 'defective" men and women from bearing and rearing children... the country was burdened by as many as 18 Million people with mental disease, who "put a charge and a tax on the population" and who would "cost a billion dollars a year" to take care of...

Dr. William Hutton makes the case for the humanitarian treatment of the treatment espoused in the title of his A Brief for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded (1936). "It would be unjust and anti-social to withhold the privilege of sterilization from the victims of mental disorders (the insanities)..."(emphasis mine). He dives into the deep-end of the sterilization issue, making the cse for dealing with the "blind, deaf-mutes, haemophilicacs and brachydactyly (deformed fingers)" in the same manner...

Some states--like Kansas--reached across these lines into the lives of epileptics; Michigan did not hunt for epileptics but did so for "imbeciles". Oregon seemed to cast the widest net, including the "feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts" found in any institution maintained at the public's expense who condition was found to be "inadvisable for procreation".

Further details at Ptak Science Books

"Apple feeder" for birds

Constructed out of a coathanger and pieces of bamboo, as explained in the comments at Peregrine's Bird Blog.  I'll have to try this, especially since rotting fruit also attracts a variety of butterflies.

"Here, let me get that for you..."

Presumably the jackdaws at this location are picking ticks, fulfilling the role of oxpeckers.

Photo posted at Pixdaus by Hammerchewer.

Severed feet at the Battle of Visby

"The 2,000 bloody, mangled, and hacked bodies were immediately buried in a hastily-dug pit on a hot sumer day, July 27, 1361... During the last century these bodies were exhumed and examined.  Most had their left foot (the leading foot exposed under the shield) axed off..."

From page 101 of  The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence, by Richard Nielsen and Scott Wolter, 2006.  While fact-checking the statement above, I found an interesting account of the battle, including the photo above, described as follows:

War hammers were also in evidence where a square section of the hammer head showing in the shape of the section of the skull which had been stove in. See the picture... which points to three bodkin arrow points which had penetrated the skull and two holes where a hammer had been used and the skull split between them...

Which came first is unknown. A number of guesses can be made such as two quick hammer blows to fell the man and the arrows landing after, or a hail of arrows which he had turned his back on and then later two hammer blows to put him out of his misery...

The grouping of the arrow heads is particularly spectacular and it makes one wonder if they used the tactic of a hail of arrows as in the later battle of Crecy where it is said the English Longbow men kept 100,000 arrows in the air at one time.

Tweety's church

Photo found at Pixdaus; source unknown.

Fake fruit in your cereal?

The nonprofit Consumer Wellness Center reported that its investigation found "blueberries" that were nothing more than a concoction of sugar, corn syrup, starch, hydrogenated oil, artificial flavors and artificial food dye blue No. 2 and red No. 40.

The offenders are well-known manufacturers such as Kellogg's, Betty Crocker and General Mills, and the fakes were found in bagels, cereals, breads and muffins. Some products contain real blueberries mixed with fakes. For example, the blueberry bagels sold at Target contain some real berries but the "blueberry bits" listed in the ingredients aren't real blueberries...

Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats Blueberry Muffin variety has no blueberries but does have "blueberry flavored crunchies" made from the sugar-and-dye concoction mentioned above. Total Blueberry Pomegranate cereal, from General Mills, contains no blueberries and no pomegranates...

This is all quite legal, of course, as long as the label specifies "fruit-flavored clusters," or something equivalent. But it's still intentionally deceptive, and a scummy corporate behavior, IMHO.

Prize-winning photomicrography

Living Licmophora juergensii on red alga, together with the diatom Cocconeis and filamentous cyanobacterial colonies. Licmophora cells can move to locate a place with suitable light exposure. They then produce a mucilaginous stalk for fixation on the substratum. Multi-layer image captured using differential interference contrast. Sample collected from Bodden, the brackish waters lying between the isles of Hiddensee and Rugia (German Baltic Sea).

This image comes from the Olympus BioScapes 2010 Winners Gallery.  Dozens of other fantastic photographs at the link.

Photographer: Wolfgang Bettighofer, Kiel, Germany.  Via MSN.

Things we can't explain

An event in the life of philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, as presented at Futility Closet:

On July 21, 1759, Emanuel Swedenborg attended a dinner party after returning to Gothenburg from England. He went out for a short interval and returned pale and agitated. He told the party that a fire had broken out in Stockholm, 250 miles away, and that it was spreading quickly. He said it had already destroyed the house of one of his friends, whom he named, and that his own house was in danger. Two hours later he exclaimed, “Thank God! The fire is extinguished the third door from my house.”

The following morning the governor questioned Swedenborg, who provided a description of the fire, including how it had begun and ended, and word spread throughout the city. Two days later a messenger arrived from Stockholm bearing letters that confirmed Swedenborg’s account, and a royal courier brought news reporting the extent of the fire, the houses it had damaged and destroyed, and the time it was put out. All confirmed Swedenborg’s description.

“What can be brought forward against the authenticity of this occurrence?” wrote Immanuel Kant, who elsewhere criticized Swedenborg’s mysticism. “My friend who wrote this to me, has not only examined the circumstances of this extraordinary case at Stockholm, but also, about two months ago, at Gottenburg, where he is acquainted with the most respectable houses, and where he could obtain the most authentic and complete information, as the greatest part of the inhabitants, who are still alive, were witnesses to the memorable occurrence.”

Posted because a similar, possibly "paranormal" event occurred in my family.  In the 1960s my grandfather was admitted to a hospital after a severe automobile accident.  His children (my mother, aunts, and uncles) gathered at the bedside.  Several days later my uncle Paul arrived.  He had been driving from Minnesota to Seattle and was in the middle of nowhere when he heard his father's voice saying "Paul, come home.  I need you."  He knew it wasn't "real," but it was so compelling an experience that he turned his car around and drove back to Minnesota.   I suppose one can come up with a number of more prosaic explanations involving long-distance phone calls, but there was no apparent reason for him to dissemble about something like this.  I prefer to believe that such things are possible, and beyond the limits of our current understanding.  What kind of rational explanation can one offer for the Swedenborg incident?

Worm fence (snake fence)

This is the iconic fence of American Civil War movies.  The OED tracks the use of snake fence to the beginning of the nineteenth century -

(1805) R. Parkinson Tour Amer. I. i. 48   Snake-fences; which are rails laid with the ends of one upon the other, from eight to sixteen in number in one length.

- and defines it as an American idiom.   Worm fence has been noted as early as 1833; other terms include "zigzag fence" and "battlefield fence."   The best description I've found is at a page by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County (Illinois):

Very few new rails are made any more because they can only be split successfully from large, straight, solid logs without knots, such as the oaks and walnuts that grew in virgin timber.

The log was cut four "ax handles" long -- about eleven feet. The bark was peeled off and wooden mauls and wooden wedges, made of ironwood or other very hard wood, were used to split it into halves, then quarters, then eighths, like pieces of pie. These in turn were split into  roughly triangular or rectangular rails measuring about 4 by 4 or 3 by 5 inches. The rails were laid on the ground in a very exact zigzag pattern with the ends extending a little over a foot from where they crossed. After the fence was seven or eight rails high, each corner was strengthened and braced by two other rails, or stakes, one on each side, sunk a foot or more in the ground and slanted upward to cross and hold the fence in place. These stake rails, in turn, were locked in place by an additional horizontal rail or "rider". Between seven and eight thousand rails were needed to build a mile of "worm" fence -- enough to enclose a forty-acre field...

None remain except red oak, white oak and black walnut, weathered and gray but as sound as the day they were split. All those made from less durable woods are gone.

"Worm" fences seemed a prodigal waste of land in later years because they occupied from three to four times as much ground as the modern barbed wire and woven wire fences. They quickly grew up in wild roses, wild raspberries, wild blackberries, weeds and vines, furnishing food and cover for a host of wildlife. With the clearing of the timber and more and more intense cultivation of the land, these fences offered refuges where the quail, the cottontail rabbit and dozens of other birds and animals learned to live with civilization.

There is also a final notation that "Many an undesirable citizen left town riding on a rail" - a reminder that the "rail" in question is not a railroad, as some modern listeners assume.

Modern "stack rail" fence components are available from lumber/fence companies, recommended for rocky soils where posthole digging is to be avoided.

Photo credit: Flickr user jesca1ia.

Were pygmy mammoths present in ancient Egypt?

Excerpts from an interesting piece at Tetrapod Zoology -

...here's the image, as it appears on the beautifully decorated tomb wall of Rekhmire, 'Governor of the Town' of Thebes, and vizier of Egypt during the reigns of Tuthmose III and Amenhotep II (c. 1479 to 1401 BCE) during the XVIII dynasty...

... drew attention to the small, tusked, hairy elephant in the painting, shown as being waist-high to the accompanying people... Its apparent hairiness, convex back and domed head make it look like a juvenile Asian elephant, but then why it is shown with huge tusks?

Inspired by the then-new discovery that a dwarfed population of Woolly mammoths Mammuthus primigenius were still living as recently as 3700 years ago (albeit on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic: Vartanyan et al. (1993), Guthrie (2004)), Rosen (1994) made the tentative suggestion that the elephant shown in Rekhmire's tomb might actually be a dwarf Woolly mammoth. If true, this would have radical implications. It would mean that the ancient Egyptians had a trading link of sorts with far eastern Siberia, and also that mammoths were captured and then transported alive to Africa!..

... there is then a third possibility: this being that Rekhmire's elephant is neither a Siberian mammoth nor a wrongly-scaled 'symbolic' elephant, but perhaps a depiction of one of the pygmy Mediterranean island-dwelling species. Most of the dwarf Mediterranean elephants were Pleistocene animals that were long gone by the time of the Pharoahs, but Masseti (2001) noted that a population of dwarfed elephants seem to have lingered on in isolation on the Greek island of Tilos (located between Rhodes and Kos)...

More at the link, via BoingBoing.

Winter's Bone

I watched this movie last night; it's a powerful portrayal of life in the methamphetamine world of the rural Ozarks.  I spent a number of years in St. Louis, and before that a decade in Kentucky, working with many backwoods people, and can testify to the validity of the presentation of the landscape and the lifestyle (and one that is not geographically limited - you can find people like these in the Rockies, the desert Southwest, the rural Midwest and elsewhere).

It's not an action movie, or a thriller, as the trailer might suggest.  It's a picture of a way of life, and one that in this story is almost unremittingly bleak, until a small glimmer of hope for a better future appears in the closing scene.  The acting and editing is superb.


Note: YouTube has made available a new embedding technology, which I've used for this video and the "Antogo" one further down the page -

If you use the new embed code style, your viewers will be able to view your embedded video in one of our Flash or HTML5 players, depending on their viewing environment and preferences. Environments that support the HTML5 video player are listed here on our HTML5 settings page. In instances where HTML5 isn't supported (e.g. our HTML5 player can't play videos with ads), we use Flash.

An additional benefit of the new embed style is that it will eventually allow embeds to work on mobile devices, which typically use a built-in player instead of Flash or HTML5.

The list of supported browsers is here.  Let me know if you have problems viewing these videos (other than the "wandering" placement problem that plagues the Safari users), because I can opt to embed videos using the old-style embed code.