Leslie's New World Atlas, 1920

Mrs.5000 & I end up at a lot of depressing estate sales over the course of an average summer, but occasionally we find one that shows evidence of a life well lived. At a good estate sale, you see evidence of an individual personality with interesting and wide-ranging tastes -- and you get to paw through the material artifacts of their existence to grab incredible bargains! It's hard to think of a down side.


So it was that I recently picked up the 1920 Leslie's World Atlas for, like, a buck fifty or something.


They weren't kidding about the "New World" part! It was an interesting time to be buying an atlas, hastily marked with the "Latest Boundaries as Determined by the Peace Conference."


It's fascinating to look at this snapshot of new borders superimposed over old. With hindsight, we know that they were setting up a New World that would last less than 20 years, which would be followed by another New World that would last less than 50, and then we'd finally reach the way things are now and always will be in, oh, 1992 or thereabouts.


You can see an evolution towards the world of today, but also a progress towards big disasters that were to come.

Meanwhile, in Asia, if you ever wonder why the Koreans are a little touchy about the Japanese....

Old Atli, baby! What's not to love?

The Castle5000 Garden Sculpture

In last week's Geohashing Primer, I emphasized that since the hashpoint is randomly selected, you can't expect to find anything there.

Let's modify that, though: you can't expect to find anything there... except what's there. For instance, on our historical hashing of the Brookings, Oregon graticule last December -- the first time, I don't mind telling you, that anyone had hashed Brookings -- we happened on a field of scrap concrete and rebar!

Mrs.5000, for reasons that I was sure would become clear in the fullness of time, set about gathering the "best" of the twisted rebar.

...and behold, a few weeks ago, she constructed a garden sculpture.

It's a much needed focal feature in our backyard.

The lizard, a gift from Ma&Pa5000, seems pretty comfortable in his new rebar home.

So, there's another reason to take up geohashing. With geocacheing, you know what you'll find: the box. With geohashing, you never know what's going to happen. You'll probably end up with a garden feature or something.

Your Sunday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

HISTORIC LINCOLN SERIES NO. 43

For a time Abraham Lincoln boarded at the Rutledge Tavern and, in 1835, he became engaged to the innkeepers daughter, Ann Rutledge, who died the same summer.

Provenance: Unsure.

Want a boring postcard from Michael5000? Just ask -- he's got plenty!

The Bear Chronicles

Lowest Bear in North America

Death Valley, 2006.

Ulysses Chapter by Chapter: The Michael5000 Guide, part II

...the unsurprising sequel to Ulysses Chapter by Chapter: The Michael5000 Guide, part I

Chapter 11

Style: Highly swirly streams of words, cut through with dialog that’s kind of hard to follow. We are entering the turgid heart of Ulysses.

What Happens: “Bloom has dinner with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding at the Ormond Hotel, while Molly's lover, Blazes Boylan, proceeds to his rendezvous with her. While dining, Bloom watches the seductive barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy and listens to the singing of Simon Dedalus and others.”

Stuff I missed: Well, I could tell that Bloom was having dinner, and that the barmaids were hotties. That Bloom had dinner with someone, let alone someone connected to Stephen, I missed. That Blazes Boylan was proceeding to his rendezvous with Molly, I missed. And pretty much anything else, I probably missed that too. Indeed, I found this to be the second most opaque chapter in the book.

Chapter 12

Style: A gruff, fairly straightforward account of conversations in a bar, delivered in first person by an anonymous narrator. But this primary narrative is interrupted every couple of pages by a parodic riff in one or another recognizable kind of exaggeratedly pompous prose style, taking off on a tangent to the conversation at the bar. The tangents all run out of steam after a few paragraphs, and we find ourselves right back at the pub.

What Happens: Bloom goes to a bar where a noisy Irish nationalist is holding court. The nationalist doesn’t like Bloom, who makes weak gestures towards pointing out holes in his worldview, and who is anyway Jewish and the son of an immigrant. At the end of the chapter, Bloom leaves in a hurry after pointing out that Jesus was a Jew; the nationalist throws something at him as he leaves.

Stuff I missed: There is more business about the racehorses in this chapter, which continued to puzzle me. And of course it couldn’t hurt to know more Irish political history. On the whole, though, this is a pretty winning chapter. The tangents are over-the-top and often pretty funny. Plus, Joyce plays with juxtapositions of tone in a playful and startling sort of way. Here’s the last sentence, in which Bloom makes good his escape from the anti-Semite:

And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.

Chapter 13

Style: A parody of contemporary women’s lit for the first half; Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness for the second half.

What Happens: Some young women and their little brothers hang out at the beach in the evening. A mysterious man ogles one of the women. There’s a fireworks display. The point of view shifts to that of the man, which turns out to be Bloom. He wanders off thinking about the woman he’d been ogling, and women in general.

Stuff I missed: The parody of contemporary women’s lit. And something that is very obvious, now that I’ve been tipped off, looking back through the chapter: that Bloom is, well, um, masturbating while he ogles. I did think that Joyce laid it on a bit thick when describing the wonderful fireworks….

Chapter 14

Style: Well, hell. Let’s just quote wholesale from the wiki:

This chapter is remarkable for Joyce's wordplay, which seems to recapitulate the entire history of the English language to describe a scene in an obstetrics hospital, from the Carmen Arvale -- Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus -- to something resembling alliterative Anglo-Saxon poetry -- In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin -- and on through skillful parodies of, among others, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Sterne, Goldsmith, Junius, Gibbon, Lamb, De Quincey, Landor, Dickens, Newman, Ruskin and Carlyle, before concluding in a haze of nearly incomprehensible slang, bringing to mind American English employed in advertising. Indeed, Joyce organised this chapter as three sections divided into nine total subsections, representing the trimesters and months of gestation.

If you don’t know what’s going on – or at least, if ~I~ don’t know what’s going on – a lot of the chapter seems to be veering towards gibberish.

What Happens: Bloom visits a hospital where an acquaintance is giving birth. He hangs out with the local medical students, including stately, plump Buck Mulligan, who are drinking in what must be the hospital cafeteria; Stephen is part of the crowd too. The medical students are insufferably callous and smug as occasional reports on the woman’s long, difficult labor filter in. Then they head off for more drinking.

Stuff I missed: See “Style,” above. I totally missed the parodies of Junius, De Quincey, and Landor. And everyone else, of course.

Chapter 15

Style: Surrealist stageplay.

What Happens: A bunch of really crazy shit happens, that’s what. This is more than 100 pages of fever-dream hallucination, in which it is not clear who is doing the hallucinating. Bloom is present, sometimes as a heroic figure, sometimes being brutally degraded, sometimes as a woman. Bits of lowbrow humor tossed into the mix as well.

Stuff I missed: That the scene was in any way representational. From what happens afterwards, it’s a reasonable guess that part of the chapter represents, more or less, Stephen’s confused concepts of events taking place around him in a seedy brothel after he has been drugged by stately, plump Buck Mulligan, who is trying to part him from his wages. But it says here that this only comes after a series of several discrete hallucinations, or just alcohol-fuelled fantasies, of Bloom’s. Who can tell?

Chapter 16

Style: Longwinded and circuitous, but bracingly narrative after the thickets of Chapter 15.

What Happens: Bloom gets Stephen out of the brothel and takes him to an all-night coffeeshop to sober him up. They listen to a loudmouth sailor who claims to have had all sorts of unlikely adventures. Bloom invites Stephen home, though it is well after midnight.

Stuff I missed: Probably quite a bit. But at this point, Ulysses enters the home stretch. The going is relatively easy through the last three chapters.

Chapter 17

Style: The Catechism! Questions and answers! It is very readable, and fun, and not coincidentally my favorite chapter. I was happy to learn that it was also Joyce’s favorite chapter.

What Happens: Bloom arrives home with Stephen, but doesn’t have his key, so they have to more or less break in. They have some cocoa. Bloom offers to let Stephen sleep on the couch, but he turns down the offer. Bloom arranges for Stephen to give Molly, his wife, lessons in Italian. The two men share a pee in the back yard, and Stephen heads off.

Stuff I missed: Probably not a lot. This is certainly the least turgid chapter of the whole beast.

Chapter 18

Style: Molly Bloom’s famous long monologue!

What Happens: Molly drifts off to sleep, thinking. But don’t start doing the victory dance just because you’re on the last chapter – it takes her a hell of a long time to nod off. She’s irritated with Bloom, and can tell he’s had some sort of sexual adventure (see Chapter 13) although she assumes incorrectly that he has hooked up with his chippie. She’s also probably a little irritated with herself, although she won’t admit it, for hooking up with her own boy-toy earlier in the evening. Her period starts. She reminisces about her girlhood in Gibraltar. Having been told by Bloom when he came in that he’d hired Stephen to teach her Italian, she fantasizes about getting the young man into the sack. And eventually, she gets to the very lyrical and lovely final two pages or so of the book – but if you are like I was, and know those and only those two pages pretty well, don’t expect the preceding 35 pages to match them for style.

Stuff I missed: I think I got the basics of this one.

And there you have it! Michael5000’s road map to Ulysses!

Whither the Reading List?

I find, to my surprise and delight, that with the completion of Ulysses I have burned through many of the most intimidating titles on The Reading List. That makes me feel like I no longer have any need to pace things, so I randomized the remaining thirty-eight titles and will just read them in that unstructured order.

Next up: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which I am well into and can assure you is, if nothing else, rather more accessible than the great modernist masterpiece.

On deck: DeWitt, The Last Samurai.

In the hole: Ball, Bright Earth.

I have no idea what these latter two are about, or who recommended them or why, so it will be black box reading. Which is pretty much what I wanted from a reading list, so it’s all good.

Then, I'll also be reading Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa at the behest of L&TM5K Vice-Dork Jenners. Jenners is -- with all due respect, of course -- one of those froufrou book-clubby bloggers and would have me write nine posts about Musashi on a preordained schedule. This is unlikely to happen -- I run a tight ship, and am not likely to let anything come between my audience and their twice-weekly boring postcards -- but I might tack it on as a Reading List supplemental if it turns out to be interesting.

What We Did Last Tuesday: A Geohashing Primer

So last week I was attempting to boast of a great feat of geohashing daring-do, although the message might have been lost in my amateurish attempt to channel James Joyce and in all of the parochial geographic references. Basically, I drove around the region all weekend, occasionally leaping out of the truck to tromp around in the underbrush. So doing, I successfully hit 6 out of 6 "hashpoints" (see below), a rare achievement indeed.

But to top things off, I went and did another impossible thing (albeit not before breakfast) two days later. Before I direct you to the gory details, though, perhaps I ought to explain to the puzzled among you how this "geohashing" thing works.

Some Definitions

To start with: as you know, there is an abstract grid of lines draped o'er the globe for purposes of navigation and for locating stuff. Degrees of latitude indicate relative position north and south, and degrees of longitude indicate position east and west. As you may well have forgotten, these degrees are subdivided, like hours of time, into sixty minutes('), and those minutes into sixty seconds("). So a landmark -- Ayers Rock, let's say -- can be located at 25° 20' 44" S 131° 2' 1" E. (Actually, that's just one little spot on the immensity of Ayers Rock, but you get the idea.)

Finally, as you probably never knew in the first place, the square rectangular roughly rectangular (usually) portions of the Earth's spherical surface (phew!) that are bounded by latitude and longitude lines are called graticules. Here's an example from my customized geohashin' map of Oregon, showing in black lines the graticules bounded by the local lines of latitude (44 N, 45N, 46N) and longitude (121W, 122W, 123W, 124W).


Hashpoints

Every day, a random set of coordinates is generated for geohashers. How is not important, except in that (a) it is truly random and (b) the random number generator is seeded by the date and the opening value of the Dow Jones Industrial index. This latter is also not important, except in that -- because the American stock market is closed on weekends and on American holidays -- you get the coordinates for Saturdays, Sundays, and American holidays a day or two in advance, instead of at 9:30 Eastern Time on the day of.

These coordinates locate a "hashpoint" for that day within your graticule. The coordinates are in the same relative position within each of the world's bazillion graticules (with a few asterisks tacked on here for the equator and so on, for those of you who groove on spherical geometry). So, a given day's hashpoints might be distributed like so here in northwest Oregon:

...except that hashpoints are literal points, not big areas like those orange circles would imply.

OK, Random Locations. So What?

Well, the goal of course is to try to GET to the random locations. "Why?" you might well ask, and it's a fair question, and all I can say is that if you are asking it than geohashing is probably not for you. I can only assure you that there is a very limited number of people living among you who do not ask "Why?" but rather say "Oh my god, where do I sign up?" (One "signs up," as it were, here.)

You will quickly discover, though, that more often than not you will not actually be able to get to your local hashpoint. This is not because Obama is taking away your freedom(?), but rather because most places are simply not accessible. This will vary depending on where you live -- indeed, one of the cool things about being a geohasher is that the daily checking of the hashpoints teaches you a lot about the composition of the landscape you live in -- but in the Portland, Oregon graticule, for instance, we get a lot of hashpoints that fall in practicably impenetrable forests, in cropland, and in people's houses or backyards. We also get a fair number that fall in lakes and rivers, which doesn't rule out a successful expedition but which brings up the need for a boat or strong swimming skills.

If you've determined that a hashpoint is potentially accessible, then off you go! If you are a social type, you might try to get to the hashpoint at the same time as other people (although with only a few hundred active geohashers worldwide, your odds aren't good). As this is a game played by confirmed dorks, however, there are plenty of merit badges available for various ways of reaching the point (by bike! without crossing your own path! at the legal speed limit! in fancy dress! etc.!).

For a while, I was content to use online aerial imagery and my surveying skillz to find hashpoints. We have so much forest cover in the Beaver State, though, that eventually I felt the need for a GPS gadget. This was not a trivial expense, but it has quickly become one of my favorite toys ever.

There are unfortunately some real barriers to entry to the hobby. The main one is that, to really be participating, you need to write up your adventures on the geohashing wiki. That's kind of time consuming, and forces you to learn wiki coding. But it's kind of fun, too.

Frequently Asked Question That Reveals That the Person Asking the Question is Wrestling with the Concept

Q: So what do you find at the hashpoint?

A: Nothing, of course. It's a random point, so unless someone else got to the hashpoint earlier in the day and left something for you to find, you will just find the location, wherever it is, as it is. Here's the hashpoint I'm about to tell you about:

Nothing to find. If you want to find something on your adventures, then you need to talk to the geocacheing people. There's a lot more of them, but their hobby is kind of... I don't know... cut and dried for my taste.

What We Did Last Tuesday

So when I woke up and checked the hashpoint in the morning, as one does, I saw that it was waaaay in the very southeast of the graticules (in the northern and western hemispheres, anyway). Which made me immediately look at the North Lincoln City graticule. Here's the North Lincoln City graticule on my geohashin' map:

It is well over 99.9% ocean. But last Tuesday -- 2010-08-31, as we call in on Planet Geohashing -- the hashpoint fell on the tiny, tiny sliver of land at its extreme southeast. So obviously Mrs.5000 and I took the afternoon off work and went out adventuring.

Here's the writeup: http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/2010-08-31_45_-124

It's a story with a happy ending:

OK, I'm sure you're convinced. See you at the hashpoints!

Now This From the Wells Fargo Department of Superfluous Tautology

I noticed an especially weak bit of text gracing the Castle5000 mortgage bill this month!


(The orange oval is my own little enhancement).


How inspiring! My guess -- but this is only a guess -- is that this little koan was meant to be part of a bid to encourage me, the mortgagee, to enroll in an electronic payment plan. This would "make a difference" by saving the Wells Fargo Mortgage Company the expense of sending me bills and by eroding my day-to-day control over my household finances. Oh, by and making an unmeasurably trivial reduction in my personal share of the planet's paper use.

But whatever its original intention, somehow it has been divorced from its referant and now just sits there on the envelope, mildly encouraging us to shake our fists -- or at least wag our fingers -- at fate.

Gentle Reader! I encourage you to do one thing different and make a difference! And report back in the comments.