spitballing

Speaking of the Czechs, I remember when they taught us history in school with that big pull-down multi-colored map.  The Greeks had their empire, and of course the Romans theirs, even those no-account Persians had an empire.  Later on the Spanish covered a good part of the the globe, the French had Napoleon, and even the Germans had their ill-famed day in the sun.  But wait a minute, did I fall asleep or was I pretending my pencil was a spaceship when they were talking about the Bohemian empire?   Well once long ago there was something called Greater Moravia, but it wasn't that great and it didn't last very long.  Old Dog's people did pretty well for awhile but it doesn't seem like those dragon boats sailed in unison, it was every horned head (which Old Dog has pointed out they didn't really wear, which I have to say is a disappointment) for himself and it seems like they went native pretty quickly. 

I think we are all readers of Guns, Germs, and Steel.  How did those scrappy Europeans go from has-beens to conquerors of the globe?  Jared thought, as I recall, that it was because of the natural obstacles that divided Europe into all those different countries so that when the enlightenment hit and enlightenment guys pissed off their local king they could always flee to some other country which was happy to have them because the enemy of my enemy thing, so instead of being squashed they were able to spread their enlightened ideas around.  Well that's my memory, but having said that it sounds a bit implausible.  Maybe I should reread it, or at least the wiki entry on the subject.

You wonder why the process of civilization was so slow, well sure it took awhile to evolve,  The web is vague, but let's say Cro Magnon first turned his handsome head 40,000 years ago.  What was he doing all that time?  Why did it take so long to discover agriculture?  Well maybe it took awhile to catch on.  Watching the peas grow does not have the allure of getting together with your pals and spears and going off on the hunt.

Well I am just spitballing here, just throwing things out without much thought.  Maybe I should have been talking about math.  How about there is some guy, say one of those tribesmen on that island near /India where they killed the missionary, and he doesn't know nothing abut math, but he has say 25 fish, although he can't even count them, to him it is just a mess of fish.  And he is after clamshells which he knows he can get two each for a fish, so he goes to the clamshell guy and lays down a fish and gets two shells, lays down another and gets two more and in the end walks away with a mess of shells, though he can't count them, and gives his lady love one a day until he runs out.  How come me sitting here far from this guy can make a few marks on a piece of paper and know exactly how many days it will be until he runs out of shells,  Doesn't that sound like magic of some kind? 

The Bohemian National

The Bohemian National Cemetery is a fine cemetery.  I haven't been out there for awhile, but it has a lot of fine statuary, and I don't know if it was a Czech thing or just what people did at the time, but many of the tombstones have little cameo-style photos of the deceased affixed.  Perhaps that was the style with the slow developing cameras of the day, but I prefer to think that it was the thought, when the photo was taken, that it would be on their tombstone, that accounts for the very serious expressions on their faces. One whole section is devoted to victims of the Eastland disaster, with whole families buried together all expiring on that same date.  In the center is the tomb of our great hero, Anton, "Pushcart," Cermak.  Right across from it is one for James Janovsky which was the name of my mother's father, though he is not interred there, so I don't know who is in that mausoleum.  This Christmas I will be getting one of those Ancestry kits and I'd like to find out more about that part of the family since right now I know nothing.

There is a story that it was founded when the regular Catholic cemetery refused to accept the body of a woman who committed suicide and the free thinkers buried her in the vacant land where the cemetery would later arise, and according to the laws of the time once a body was buried it couldn't be disturbed so it became the Bohemian National Cemetery.  This story is probably not true since I don't remember where I read it and I have not been able to find it anywhere else.  But I think it did arise from some disagreement between the religious and the free thinkers.  Free thinkers were a thing around the turn of the century (Willa Cather writes about them), not quite atheists, more like agnostics or people who don't partake in organized religion.  I think Bohemians became associated with them because of their religious dissensions.

Meis's last work was the IBM building, not  sure what it is called now.  This whole idea of naming rights is stupid.  A building should keep its original name, add that to my credo.  The Quaker Building is a couple blocks west on Dearborn.  It used to contain the world's largest box of Quaker Oats, which was not an actual box just a replica twenty or thirty feet high.  As a youthful Chicago booster I used to point it out with pride, but as I got older I began to realize, the world's largest box of Quaker Oats, big deal.

Armadillos were a big deal in Texas. People would point at a smear on the highway and say that was an armadillo but it looked like any other smear to me. I don't recall any mention of them in St Louis.  But here is a St Louis thing:  they call obstreperous hicks Hoosiers.  It has nothing to do with Indiana, just their name for that sort of people.  I expect the term was once in general use before it became confined to St Louis and that's how the citizens of Indiana got their nickname, as people often take their names from their distractors.  Though the land of Lincoln need not brag, it being called the Sucker State, but a little better than Missouri who some call the Puke State..

Spinning the Yarn

I first heard of the Cimrman story when my daughter sent me something she had found on the internet about the TV contest that he was so unjustly deprived of winning.  I found some more stuff myself, mostly disjointed anecdotes with little cohesive continuity.  Even by then, the story had evolved beyond the material provided by the original authors, so I figured that I could put my own creative spin on it without hurting anybody's feelings.  I first presented it at an annual storytelling event that was held in Petoskey for some 15 years, and it was big hit.

I am not conversant in the Czech language, but I became familiar with its rules of pronunciation when I learned a few Czech folk songs to sing for my family.  I used to be kind of an amateur singer-songwriter, but I haven't done anything with it for years.

The article about Czechs in Chicago was interesting.  We lived on the South Side, so the only Czech neighborhood with which I am familiar was the one the article calls "Czech California", although I never heard it called that back in the day.  We lived a few miles south of there on 51st Street, but my father was a partner in Lawndale Meat Products on 27th Street.  I looked it up on Google Earth one day, and the building still stands, but somebody has converted to a martial arts center.

Here's some recent news of the Caravan:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BBQOUUP?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Sorry guys

Marina City had its Christmas party last night and I fear I had to good a time and was just not up to making a post this morning.  I thought I could catch up this evening, but I just have no zest in the evening.  I'll be back tomorrow morning.

Czeching things out

Another fine piece of exposition from Mr. Beagles!   I suspect he has a familiarity with the Czech language; his essay doesn't read like something he pulled out of thin air.  To my shame I know very little about the Czech people and their history but the recent descent down the rabbit hole has filled in many gaps.  There weren't many Czechs on the north side when I was growing up except for those interred in the Bohemian National Cemetery.  As a native born Chicagoan I should have been more aware of the great influence the Czech community had on the city but my education was lacking.  The Germans and Irish are small potatoes but they get most of the press regarding the history of the city.  A nice review of the Czechs in Chicago is here.

I found a good companion piece to Mr. Beagles' essay on Jara Cimrman from the L.A. Times (2005) and it's a fun read.  Cimrman seems to be the type of hero we need for these troubled times.  He doesn't have to be real to be real, I think.  And as I read more about the Czechs I'm getting the impression that they are the "funny guys" of Europe, using humor and wit to fight oppression.  They seem more affable than the Poles or Germans, and then there's that whole "Bohemian" thing, meaning "a person who has informal and unconventional social habits, especially an artist or writer."

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As I ponder the differences between Louis Sullivan and Mies van der Rohe it becomes obvious to me that any comparison is futile; both were excellent architects of their respective times.  Also, they worked in different scales, with Sullivan's buildings being smaller and more intimate than those of Mies.  And it should be noted that the glass and steel edifices of Mies were notorious for their leaky windows; bring a mop!  I think the building that Uncle Ken mentioned was originally called the IBM Building, then the Quaker Oats Building, and I don't know what it's called now.

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Before I forget I want to mention that I found the earlier Beaglesonian entry where Mr. Beagles mentions Cimrman; it was his post from June 29, 2016 titled Welcome Old Dog.  But I have a trick I use to perform searches on the forum.  After I enter the search string (in this case Cimrman) I make sure to toggle the "search by date" option and then I hit CTRL-F and enter Cimrman again.  All instances of Cimrman are highlighted and easy to find.  This method hasn't failed me yet unless I don't spell something correctly.

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Since Uncle Ken visits St. Louis and other parts of Missouri frequently I wonder if he has seen any armadillos.  They have been steadily migrating northward from their usual southern environs and are becoming something of a pest.  Global warming?  Who knows for sure but I would avoid handling them.  Leprosy isn't pretty.

The Legend of Jara Cimrman

Uncle Ken was right, I must have posted this story back in our email days, but I did have it on a CD as I suspected.  Why is it you always find something in the last place you look?

I don't know what's been going on with the Caravan lately.  Last I heard they were still camping near the border, some of them waiting for their asylum requests to be processed, and others trying to cross the border illegally.

THE LEGEND OF JARA CIMRMAN
by Talks With Beagles

During the Autumn of 1966, in the Czech village of Liptakov, Dr. Evzen Hedvabny was installing a new fireplace in an old country house that he owned. In the process of tearing out the old fireplace Hedvabny discovered a large trunk hidden within the wall. This trunk was stuffed full of old papers, which Hedvabny was certain had some historical value. Lacking the expertise needed to properly evaluate his find, he turned the whole business over to his friend Karel Velebny who lived in the capitol city of Prague.

Now Velebny was an aspiring playwrite who, upon opening the trunk for the first time, just knew that there must be a story in there somewhere. He assembled a group of his friends and, with their assistance, sorted out the papers and eventually pieced together the story of Jara Cimrman, who had lived in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Velebny and his associates were so inspired by the trove of information that had fallen into their hands that they formed a theatrical company and produced a series of plays based on Cimrman's life story. The first play was performed in 1967, and the company has been performing them regularly ever since to capacity crowds.

Now "Cimrman" is the Czech version of the German name "Zimmerman", which means a carpenter or a handyman. Jara Cimrman was certainly both of those things, but he was much more than that. He was a scientist, inventor, world traveler, explorer, philosopher, poet, educator, businessman, amateur dentist, amateur gynecologist, and many more things too numerous to mention here. A person like that is often called a "Renaisance man", and the ultimate Renaisance man was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). It was natural, therefore, for rumors to circulate that Cimrman was somehow related to Leonardo. Serious Cimrmanologists never took these rumors seriously, however, until just recently, when a team of geneticists using DNA sequencing was able to determine that Jara Cimrman was indeed descended from Pietro Luciano da Vinci, who was the illegitimate son of Leonardo and his girlfriend Mona Lisa. Pietro left Italy at a young age and eventually ended up in England, where a mix-up at the immigration office changed his surname to "da Vincimrman". Pietro thought that this sounded a bit pretentious, so he shortened the family name to "Cimrman", which is what it has been ever since.

One of the most illustrious branches on the Cimrman family tree was Kevin Cimrman, whose most notable accomplishment was the invention of the fog engine. Living in 18th Century London at the time, Kevin noticed that there was a lot of fog going to waste, so he designed an engine that used fog as fuel. He managed to build a working prototype, but it had some bugs in it that needed to be worked out and Kevin was out of money, so he approached the London City Council in an an attempt to secure the necessary funding to perfect his invention. Kevin made the seemingly audacious claim that his engine could pull a streetcar faster than any horse, and in the trial run it certainly did, but only when traveling down hill. The City Council, lacking Kevin's creative vision, rejected the proposal out of hand. Kevin was so discouraged by this turn of events that he went home, set his invention on fire, and walked away from it. A moment later James Watt, who was a personal friend of Kevin's, came by to visit and was amazed to see the flaming engine moving under it's own power for the first time. Watt concluded that the heat of the flames had caused the fog in the chamber to expand and, by making a few minor alterations to Kevin's machine, subsequently came up with the steam engine. Kevin, having left the country destined for the North Pole, never received credit for his contribution to Watt's invention.

Little is known about Jara Cimrman's early years. He was born in Vienna, Austria to a Czech father and an Austrian mother, so according to the rules in force at the time, was a Czech citizen. The date of his birth is uncertain because the handwriting on his birth certificate is illegible, but it is generally believed that he was born sometime between 1850 and 1870. This would have made him somewhere between 10 and 30 years old when he served his brief apprenticeship with Thomas Edison. It was Cimrman who gave Edison the idea for the electric light bulb, but Edison quickly patented it under his own name, denying Cimrman the credit he rightly deserved. Disillusioned, Cimrman returned to his native Bohemia, a country to which he had never been before, and spent the next decade or so in contemplative introspection and vindictive brooding.

During this "lost period" Cimrman made a number of expeditions to the North Pole in search of his long lost ancestor Kevin. At the time, Kevin had journeyed to the Arctic to see if he could do something about global climate change. In those days there had been a series of unnaturally cold years which are referred to by historians as "The Little Ice Age." Kevin had concluded that this climate change was being caused by an excess quantity of ice in the polar regions. He figured that if he could somehow melt some of this ice the world would become warmer. Unfortunately, Kevin was never heard from again, so we don't know how far he got with his experiments. It is possible that Jara stumbled on the remnants of these experiments and re-initiated them, which would explain why we have global warming today. We may never know this for sure because Cimrman, being humble by nature, never claimed credit for any such thing.

By 1898 Cimrman had regained his optimism and secured a teaching position at a small school in rural Bavaria. While at this school he did some important research about the characteristics of light and darkness. Since the light bulb had already been invented, Cimrman resolved to invent the dark bulb, for people who needed to sleep in the daytime. While Cimrman never perfected the dark bulb, he did manage to come up with a dim bulb, and the name of Jara Cimrman has been associated with this device ever since.

One reason that Cimrman was unable to perfect the dark bulb was that, working with inadequate funding and volunteer student help, he was never able to precisely measure the speed of darkness. He was able to determine, however, that the speed of darklness is variable, unlike the speed of light which is absolute and constant. In the morning you see, darkness travels slower than light, allowing the light to over take the darkness, while in the evening, darkness travels faster than the speed of light, enabling the darkness to over take the light. You know many scientific discoveries had no practical use when they were first discovered, but years later somebody found a useful application for them. Who knows? Maybe it will happen to this one some day.

Always the innovator, Cimrman was the first person to successfully demonstrate the Big Bang Theory in the classroom. Ironically, this accomplishment resulted in the termination of his employment with the school. Apparently the superintendent, who had always been jealous of Cimrman's genius, was just looking for an excuse to get rid of him. No other explanation makes sense, since that school needed a new roof anyway.

By 1905 Cimrman had landed on his feet again and was operating a soda pop factory in the Ukraine. In this capacity he did a lot of work with what would later become computer technology. His greatest accomplishment in this field was the invention of the electric abacus, one of the earliest fore runners of the modern computer. Unfortunately, Cimrman was persuaded to abandon this project by his angry employees after the accidental electrocution of the popular abacus operator, due to an unexpected power surge during a lightning storm. Years later somebody got a hold of the abacus plans and incorporated them into the design of an electric chair, which was used to execute convicted criminals. As usual, Cimrman got none of the credit he deserved.

In 1910 Cimrman made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein, who was in Europe on a lecture tour, and they soon became drinking buddies. It was Cimrman who first suggested the Theory of Relativity to Einstein when he asserted that the reason they both kept falling off their bar stools was that there was a curve in the space-time continuum. In honor of Cimrman's contribution, Einstein began using the letter "c" to represent the speed of light in all his calculations. By some accounts, Einstein and Cimrman were reunited decades later in the States and collaborated on the development of the atomic bomb.

Cimrman was somewhat of a political activist, which was a dangerous activity to pursue in Hapsburg Europe. His most notable achievement in this field was the formulation of the Theory of the Fragmentation of Europe. Cimrman believed that the trouble with Europe was that many of its countries were too big, and were constantly trying to get bigger at their neighbor's expense. He proposed that these larger countries be broken up into smaller states the size of his native Bohemia. Then they would be too weak to pick on each other, so there would be peace in the land. Of course nobody listened to him, and look what happened! Two world wars, a cold war, and many other conflicts too numerous to mention. Cimrman's controversial opinions eventually got him into trouble with the authorities, and he was forced to hide out in the obscure village of Liptakov. One day in 1914 Cimrman took a stroll outside the village and mysteriously disappeared. There were occasional Cimrman sightings reported in various places around the world after that, but none of these reports could be reliably confirmed, and many people presumed him to be dead.

One of the more interesting of these unverified accounts describes how Cimrman, while sailing his squirrel-powered submarine in the Bermuda Triangle, was sucked into a time-space wormhole and transported to the moon, with the tragic loss of one of his crew members. While there, Cimrman was able to go for a brief walkabout on the Moon with the aid of a portable breathing device which he fashioned out of some empty beer bottles that he had on board. Moments after he returned to his submarine, the wormhole opened up again, delivering Cimrman, his craft, and his surviving crew members safely back to Earth. Cimrman probably dismissed this experience as a dream or hallucination because he never spoke of it to anybody. Of course Cimrman could not have known that, when the first astronauts reached the Moon decades later, they would find some mysterious footprints, a dead squirrel, and several empty beer bottles on the Lunar surface. This information was never released to the news media because the government hushed it up to prevent the Russians from finding out about it.

In 2005 a Czech television station conducted a poll to determine who was the greatest Czech of all time. Cimrman won by a large majority, but was disqualified because they said he was a fictional character. Cimrman's fans were outraged by this travesty and made a big uproar about it. They refused to believe that Cimrman was fictional and, even if he was, he was undoubtedly the smartest fictional character who never lived. Cimrman, you see, founded a school of philosophy known as "Externalism". An Externalist believes that he has no material existence and only exists in the perception of other people. Other philosophers of Cimrman's day scoffed at his hypothesis, but if it turns out that he really is fictional, then it just proves that Cimrman was right about Externalism. Now how many other fictional characters do you know of who are smart enough to recognize their own fictionality?

The big uproar about the television poll indirectly led to something called "The Cimrman Revival". It seems that some Russians scientists had recently discovered a human body frozen in the ice of Siberia. It was first believed to be a primitive proto-human species but, due to all the publicity generated by the TV contest, the Russians eventually recognized that it was, in fact, Jara Cimrman himself. Once they realized who they had, the Russians employed some secret experimental technology to bring Cimrman back to life. As soon as they had obtained all the information they could from him, the Russians spirited Cimrman away to Kathmandu, Nepal, and to this day the Russian government denies that the whole thing ever happened. (Those sneaky Russians!)

Cimrman was known to correspond with several people by e-mail while he was in Katmandu. They report that he was really excited about the internet because he had finally found something capable of holding all of his accumulated knowledge. In his former lifetime, Cimrman had devised something like the internet, using a network of pneumatic pipes to transmit written messages and small packages to distant locations. He once tried to relieve a famine in Slovakia by sending sausages, which were plentiful in Bohemia, to the stricken area. Unfortunately the sausages did not travel well and arrived at their destination in a somewhat altered condition. The ungrateful Slovaks called this stuff "spam", which meant "worthless crap" in the local vernacular of the time. Cimrman insisted that the spam tasted better than it looked and eventually sold the idea to an American meat packing company. The internet spam of today was in fact named in honor of Cimrman's contribution to international harmony. (The report blaming the spam incident for the subsequent withdrawal of Slovakia from the Czechoslovakian union is of dubious authenticity and will not be repeated here.)

After spending a year or so in Kathmandu, Cimrman mysteriously vanished again and has not been seen since. Soon after that, some of the Cimrman texts, which had been published on the internet only in the Czech language, began to spontaneously translate themselves into English. At first this was believed to be the work of a mutant virus gone wild, but it soon became evident that Cimrman had somehow managed to transfer his consciousness to the internet, where he could theoretically live forever. (Of course there was more evidence than that, but I am not at liberty to divulge its nature, or even to tell you why I can't tell you.) Suffice it to say that we can take comfort in the knowledge that Jara Cimrman is alive and well on the internet, and that he will continue indefinitely his eternal quest for truth and excellence.TWB
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externalists and solipsists

Jane, Dick, and Sally, has a nice ring, an echo of Tom, Dick, and Harry those ubiquitous everymen. While Sally does not appear to have a formal version like Salntha, it has a nice short version in Sal, as in my gal Sal.  I've known a couple Sadies who upon closer inspection turned out to be Sarahs so um, I dunno, just saying.

I don't remember white gloves as an usher at the State Lake, but I do remember something called a dickie which was a cardboard thing with a collar that went across your chest to give the impression that you were wearing a smooth white shirt, and there was a bow tie which may or may not have been attached to the dickie.  I think it was remnant of former times, like celluloid collars which I have heard of but never experienced. 

What can you say about a guy who can't even get his credo correct?  There are those folks who can see, and maybe smell and taste, music, and likewise can hear color.  I can do that a little in that high notes appear to me as red or yellowish whereas the dark colors are green and blue.  It kind of makes sense to me in that high notes and the lower side of the spectrum are pure and simple whereas low notes and blues and greens are more complex.  Kind of odd too that the high notes have higher frequency while on the light scale the higher frequencies are on the blue green side of the spectrum.  That blue flame, though hotter than the red one, seems calmer, more composed, than that red and yellow flame waving wildly. 

I seem to have heard of this Cisolopsmrman from Beagles before, perhaps that was in the olden tymes when this conversation was carried on by emails.  The externalist school of philosophy sounds like the opposite of solipsism.  If I am speaking as an externalist why should you listen to me since if I am right, I don't exist?  But if I am speaking as a solipsist why should I be speaking to you since you don't exist? 

Speaking of things that don't exist, don't exist in the sense that they are not a threat to the integrity of our country and certainly don't exist in the sense that they justify having five or ten thousand of our highly trained troups sitting on the border tossing cards into hats, whatever happened to that caravan?