Wikipedian Meet-Up

I actually got out of the house for a social occasion!

The Minnesota Wikipedians got together last Wednesday for a 'meetup' celebrating Wikipedia's 24th birthday. Lots of new faces (I only saw one person from the last meetup I attended-in 2019) and lots of young people. Most of them were tyros, but everybody has to start somewhere. I was the oldest there and probably had the longest experience of editing. The organizer was pleasantly surprised at the turnout (I'm the ghostly face behind the man in the blue shirt), he had originally booked a room for 8 people!

There was food, including tater tot hotdish and green Jello salad. I brought my famous sourcream molasses cookies that were quickly scarfed up. A young man approached me and asked if I was willing to be interviewed. I gave him my email address; time will tell if that social interaction comes to fruition.

Monster from the Radio Tube

20 Years Ago on FITK

Vacuum tubes (valves in the UK) are almost a thing of the past.

There are still four remaining uses for these elegant electronic devices:

1. Monitors & TVs. These seem to be on the way out, too heavy, full of lead, and being replaced by a variety of new technologies. Still in use by millions.
2. Microwave ovens have a tube that you never see (it is carefully shielded‚ these tubes put out a lot of energy.) Also used by millions.
3. Radio transmitters: lots of power handling, not for domestic use.
4. Audio amplifiers - mostly guitar amps and esoteric audiophile gear. While there is still a difference between tubes and modern solid-state equipment, I find it amusing to see musicians playing through 50 or 60 year old amplifiers.

When I was young, transistors were just coming into the marketplace, most radios had these glowing glass jars in the back, each like a little ship-in-the-bottle or a snow globe, except instead of a yare vessel or a bucolic scene, there was a strange metal sculpture inside, the mad construct of a demented engineer. Some tubes had a blue glow that would pulse in sync with the music, all of them were HOT. My friend Andy even wrote a short story about one of these artifacts coming to life—growing in size and terrorizing the neighborhood. This update on “War Of The Worlds” ended with the malevolent tube being banished to the moon, where you could see its ruddy glow in the dark areas of a partial moon. In later years, I actually went the trouble of learning how tubes work, ultimately building my own guitar amplifier.

Every so often, if I am playing my guitar with the lights out, I’ll take a little peek at those “monsters” in the back of my amp, and recall Andy’s story with a smile.

Nine Muses

Polyhymnia:

Calliope:

Melpomene:

Terpsichore:

Clio and Euterpe:

Erato:

Thalia:

Urania:

Fire

Third Street Theater

20 Years Ago on FITK

When I was quite young, my mother (who definitely had a hands-off approach to child rearing) often left me under the charge of my big sister. This was a pretty good deal for a 5-year-old. My sister was the queen of the neighborhood, all enemies and alliances, all of the sub-teen power brokering—all of it, went through her. She had a knack for organizing childhood play, whether it was a game of Starlight Moonlight or a trip to the swamp or a ‘parade’ with wagons and trikes and even a few ‘wild’ animals thrown in (our old tomcat did not approve of that!)

The topper was when she staged her ‘theatricals’. We had some boxes and construction debris left over from a remodeling project. An old blanket draped over a clothesline was the curtain. I was too little to be in the play, so I was pressed into service as the usher. It was toward the end of July, a cloudy, warm evening, where summer's embrace was still felt, even though the nights were lengthening fast. The show was set for 7 p.m. and the neighborhood children (and there were plenty) began to trickle into our back yard. I took their tickets (1 cent, please) and, when the show was ready to begin, I went over to the curtain and gave it a tug. I'm not quite sure but I think the show was some variation on The Brothers Grimm, perhaps Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel. The littlest kids were enchanted, the older ones distracted. It got a little darker, the clouds started to look like they meant business.

“Every body go home… its gonna rain… ” and my Dad’s warning voice closed the show.

The Eternal Dynamic

AI music generated to my lyrics…



The Eternal Dynamic
Adam and Eve to the present
Patterns of human interaction
Boys and girls together yet apart

Getting together with old schoolmates
The old back-and-forth begins anew
A bluff, a challenge, arguments
But made with twinkling eyes…

Oh!

As if you had only stepped out for a minute
Rather than thirty or forty years
Had it really been that long
since you last spoke to each other

And so the facade goes up:
Hiding what you don't want others to know,
But what they do know, what you know
They know … you know they know.

Oh!

All of the joys and disappointments
you had with your first young lover
They defined you and kindled
Your first sparks of passion

You greet each other and talk
But crucial words remain unsaid
Words you couldn't say then
Words you won't say now

Oh!

A moment you share in a dark corner
With your old crush… face to face
Your eyes meet and and then you kiss!
You are both seventeen again

Her kiss is the same…
The memory returns in an instant
When you open your eyes
You are once more both sixty-one

She is smiling, she says, “I love you”
And you say “I love you” too
The words which couldn't be spoken
Are finally said, at last…

Oh!


Click through to YouTube for more information…

Windmills of Your Mind

Mulder’s Farm, Deuel County, South Dakota

In this drafty shed on an abandoned farm lies this set of blades for a windmill.

Once used to supply groundwater to animals and gardens, the windmill had evidently become obsolete even before the farm’s demise. It was saved, perhaps it had been damaged in a storm, maybe the farmer thought he could rebuild it some day.

That day never came.



Once vibrant fields now overgrown with weeds,
Whispering of agricultural deeds.
The barn poses in a shabby dress,
Its laboring over, it takes a rest.

Rusty plowshares rest in the field,
No longer guided by hands that wield.
The windmill creaks in the restless air,
A sentinel of the past singing there.

A humble farmhouse, abandoned.
Standing in silence, unwanted.
The stone foundation is cool to the touch,
Reminds us of seasons past and such.
A victim of time's embrace,
A portrait of a once-loved place.
What once was real it now seems,
Is just a painting of broken dreams.

The B&B from Hell

20 Years Ago on FITK

In the fifties and most of the sixties, air travel was the province of the well-to-do, with airfares quite high (even compared to today’s inflation-adjusted prices) but toward the end of that era new de-regulations and the rise of low-cost charter flights changed the scene.

So, in the summer of ’73 I found myself waiting to board a round-trip flight to London for the grand total of $168. I had a traveling companion but neither of us had any experience abroad. We waited. And waited. The 7 P.M departure time passed. The new departure time of 11 P.M. passed. As well as the 1 A.M. mark. Finally, at 3 A.M., we boarded, flew into the rising sun, and arrived in Gatwick by late-afternoon. We took the train into London. It was getting late, we booked the only available B&B, “That’ll be the Rowan’s,” the clerk at the lodging placement centre said, with an arched eyebrow. We were so exhausted by then that we would have slept in St. James Park.

We trundled (with luggage) about a mile, finally ending up in a somewhat shabby part of London and found the address. We went to the door and a grim looking woman answered. We explained our needs, and she agreed to let us a room: “Two night minimum, pay in advance.” We agreed and followed her to our ‘room’. When she opened the door, a disheveled drunken man raised his head off the bed. It was a brother-in-law who had just ‘dropped in’. She had another room, and we went in. That one was really more of a prison cell: one high barred window, a bare hanging light bulb, no decorations, two small metal beds with a mattress(?) stuffed with wood shavings covered with a worn sheet and tattered blanket. Oh well, we thought, what are looks—we’ll be sleeping anyway—and after using the W.C. (which really was a closet - about two foot square) we tried to sleep. That was when the choir of watch dogs in the square behind the house began their nightly concert. Then, from the other side of the door, we heard a young girl screaming “Don’t let him touch me! Don’t let him get me!” The landlady's daughter was being molested by her ‘funny uncle’!

Amid this cacophony, we finally, after 36 hours awake, managed to drop off to sleep. We woke early, about 5 A.M. and quickly decided that ANYTHING was better that this. We quietly left without breakfast.

Later that afternoon we actually found a very nice hotel in South Kensington, and spent several days there in a place that was really quite civilized. Since that time, I have spent many nights in B&B's and guesthouses and have found most of them to be wonderful experiences (The Paradise House in Bath is aptly named), but my aspirations of becoming a World Traveler was almost nipped in the bud by THE B&B FROM HELL!

Year-End Gallery 2024

Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Not the best year.

Still, FITK perseveres or, perhaps more accurately, abides. The ill-logic of running an endeavor such as this has always been apparent, but in the doing of it there are just enough rewards to keep me continuing. The biggest question mark in online publishing these days is AI, in all of its various guises. AI-generated content is overwhelming search engines, making finding this blog a needle in a hay field, not a haystack. When my stats indicate over 10k views a month (over 1 million total!), I have a sneaking suspicion that most of these ‘visits’ are bots or other scrapers. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all stop by fairly often and there are also regular visits from various LLCs. Not many commenters anymore, though—it seems that it just isn’t done as much as it used to be.

My Icelandic obsession coverage here is ending but I’ll keep the index in the sidebar for the book and music reviews and for anyone interested in perusing these old posts. Many thanks to all those who have stoked my Iceland fires over the last 20 years—the embers of which will always remain warm. This past month’s ‘Little Miss Loopy’ posts were a fond farewell to Auður who had shown me the way in nearly everything on the internet (her early 2004 Icelandic blog was very similar to Twitter!) All the other Icelandic bloggers from 20 years ago have moved on as well, mostly to bigger and better things.

While still using FITK as a base, my photography has been expanding to other outlets in the past couple of years: regular posts to the Steve Hoffman site and my involvement with the Homewood Photo Collective have broadened my horizons. Conversely, my travel plans have been scaled back, with grandchildren and a general ‘malaise of the flying experience’ rising, the quantity of my trips has been curtailed. Places I’ve traveled post-covid have all had difficulties (but not Iceland which, from my travel perspective, is about as seamless trip in logistics as could be imagined.) Alas, my desire is spent. The U.S. Southwest still has some appeal (I’ll be there in February) but flights there are always more difficult than they need to be. Seattle is always an option (and a great destination if you don’t have to drive.)

So, what will the upcoming year bring to FITK?

Having 20+ years of posts to revisit once a week is a nice way to establish an over-all perspective of the blog. Getting in touch with some of my old blog-pals (Maria, Kristín, Reshma, DJ Cousin Mary, Darien, and Karen/Sharon) over the last 12 months was especially nice. The rise of AI Suno program allowed me to set some of the more poetic FITK posts to music (which may not be a completely good thing.) The idea of a FITK podcast keeps bubbling up from my subconscious. Is there a DJ Batty in the offing? More long fiction is not on the roadmap, but there will be some shorter pieces showing up from time to time in addition to the usual mess olio of thought-pieces and images.

I will offer you this, my closing comment, in Icelandic:

Þetta reddast.

Jólabókaflóðið

Death at the Sanatorium

A Mystery by Ragnar Jónasson
Translated by Victoria Cribb
Minotaur Books 2024

When last I visited the work of this prolific author he was joined in his writing endeavors by the President of Iceland! No such stunts this time however; this book was actually written in 2018 and only translated into English in 2024.

The main character, Helgi Reykdal, a young policeman who had taken a sabbatical to study forensics in London, has returned to Reykjavík to finish his dissertation and ultimately re-join the police in the CID unit. It is 2012 and Helgi is studying a murder case that took place in Akureyri in 1983  that had never been properly closed. He is getting nowhere in interviewing the surviving people of interest in the old case (for his dissertation) when a startling development forces him to become an investigator for both cases..

There are flashbacks and changing of focus on different characters but is handled well and never becomes confusing. Ragnar is an avowed disciple of Agatha Christie and it shows. The plot-twist at the end is clever. Victoria Cribb is the best translator of Ragnar, the language is direct and never fussy. Recommended as a light read, it would be a perfect Jólabókaflóðið gift.

The one thing that I found most interesting was actually in the acknowledgements: the book  had mostly been written in Kaffihús Vesturbæjar, located near my favorite swimming pool in Reykjavík. The Weaver and I might have actually been in there when he was writing it in 2018!