Randy’s Blog

I've written about Native American mounds a few times, such as our trip to see some in Wisconsin, and a trip to West Virginia where our hotel was near the Criel Mound. There is one mound in the Midwest, though, that is the grand-daddy of them all: the Serpent Mound in Ohio. It's the largest effigy mound in North America, and I think in the world, too. Last month Wendy and I took a weekend trip to see it, as well as see some of the sights in nearby Cincinnati.

One of the first things we did to prepare for our trip is buy a cooler with wheels. When we went to Kansas and Nebraska for the solar eclipse a few years ago, Bill and Beth had one that we borrowed. It was so handy to have. So we bought one the night before our Serpent Mound trip, and filled it with water bottles and all kinds of snacks: bread, cheese, hummus, veggies, and fruit.

It took about six hours to get to Cincinnati, but a time change made it seven. It was dinner time when we got there, so as soon as we checked into our hotel, we went back out to eat. After dinner, we stopped at a place called Graeter's for ice cream. It was $5 for a single large scoop of ice cream, which seemed really expensive to me, but I have to admit it was very good. I had cookies and cream, which I really liked, but Wendy had salted caramel with chocolate chips, and it was even better.

First thing the next morning we drove 90 minutes east of Cincinnati to the Serpent Mound. The drive was mostly on a major highway (and wow, were there a lot of police out and about; I lost count how many times Google Maps said "There's a speed trap ahead") but the last 20 minutes or so were on narrow, curvy roads through lots of hills.

There's a gift shop and very small museum at the Serpent Mound, which we looked at first. One of the things that really surprised me is that the Serpent Mound was built on the site of a huge, ancient meteor crater! The construction of the serpent also has astronomical significance. The serpent's head points to where the sun sets on the summer solstice, and the curves in the serpent's body point to other astronomical events. I did not know these things, and they fascinated me!

We then walked all around the Serpent Mound (twice, actually, at my request) and climbed an observation tower to get a better view. The mound is 1,400 feet long, and even at the top of the tower, it's hard to see all of it clearly.

When we first arrived at the mound, there weren't many people there. But as the morning progressed, it got much busier. We think we might have seen some kind of Wiccan wedding, too! There was a picnic shelter reserved for a private event, and it seemed like a man and woman were at the center of the attention. Later we saw the group walking around the mound and the groom was wearing a skirt and long, blue robe. Unusual, if nothing else.

By this time, it was noon, and we were hungry, so we made a lunch from the many snacks in our cooler. Before leaving, we stopped at the gift shop again, and I scored some loot, which included this super cool wooden turtle bowl:

Then we drove back to Cincinnati (once again avoiding the speed traps) and had enough time left in the day to visit the American Sign Museum. It was fairly small and a little disappointing, to be honest, given the great reviews we'd read, but it did have many different kinds of colorful signs.

The next day was our last day in Cincinnati, and we made the most of it. We started the day by going to the Cincinnati zoo, which is the second oldest zoo in the country. There were lots of neat things to do. We started out with a "cheetah encounter" where we got to see a male and female cheetah sprinting. The female was faster, but the male was terrifyingly big and still very fast.

Later on we waited in a very long line to ride the train around the zoo. It was an okay train ride, certainly not great, but two notable things came out of it. One, as we rode by a small lake, everyone saw some turtles sunning themselves on a log. This caused great excitement among all the kids on the train, and one little boy yelled out "I want a turtle SO BAD!" Ha. I know the feeling, kid.

The other notable thing was that Wendy happened to see a sign saying "Galapagos Turtle Encounter, 2pm". This really piqued my interest, so we added it to our agenda. Around 1:45pm, we decided to head to the turtle area, and this is where we had a problem. Getting around the zoo was kind of confusing. We had a map, and I found where we were on the map and where we needed to go. Despite knowing that, I managed to lead us in a complete circle. This was not good. We were going to miss the turtle encounter. But, I put my logic skills to use, and now that I knew which way not to go, I managed to figure out which way to actually go. And we made it in time, and it was even cooler than I had hoped, because we got to see the Galapagos turtles up close, touch their shells, and take pictures with them. They were only 11 years old, but still quite big, and we learned it would be another 14 years before the zoo would be able to tell their gender! Getting to see them up close was the highlight of the zoo, for me.

It was now mid-afternoon, and despite being exhausted we still had one more stop on our itinerary: the Cincinnati Art Museum. Wendy wanted to see this, and I'm glad we went because 1) it was free parking 2) it was free admission, and 3) it was the last day for an exhibit of art from Burning Man. This exhibit was very weird and super cool. It's hard to describe many of the exhibits because they were so weird, but I enjoyed it immensely.

And that was it! We drove home the next day (gaining an hour this time, instead of losing one). It was a fun trip.

Early last week I was thinking about the start of fall, the coming of winter, and how I would have to put away my rain gauge once the weather turned cold. I realized that throughout the spring and summer, there was only one day we had gotten more than an inch of rain, and that was in the spring, just a few days after I installed the rain gauge.

Perhaps I was sensing the future, because by the end of last week we'd had three days with more than an inch of rain! The grand total for my rain gauge last week was 6 inches. Other CoCoRaHS observers in the county reported even more, so it's no surprise there was a lot of flooding in some areas.

There are 2 other rain-gauge-related notes I've been meaning to share:

Death in Paradise

A few years ago, while visiting Wendy's family, Bill watched an episode of a TV show called Death in Paradise. It's about a British detective solving murders on an island in the Caribbean. Wendy and I had never seen it before, but it looked good, so we started watching the show whenever it aired. Recently, Wendy was watching an episode in which a meteorologist was murdered while taking measurements at a weather station. She got excited and called me in to show me this scene:

On the left you can see a rain gauge exactly like the one I have! It's got a funnel at the top, a narrow inner tube and a large outer tube. I would guess there's about a half-inch of rain in it. It's a bummer for the meteorologist that he had to be murdered, but at least his killer was brought to justice in the end.

Powered Paragliding

A month or so ago I went outside in the morning to check my rain gauge. I heard a strange-sounding plane, but I didn't pay much attention to it at first. It got louder, though, so I looked up in the sky to see what it was. Eventually, I saw it, and it wasn't a plane. It was a guy sitting in a chair, attached to a parachute, with a big fan on the back of the chair, propelling him forward.

Huh, I thought. That's weird.

And indeed it was. I didn't think to take a picture, but I'm not sure it would have turned out well anyway. I searched the web for a description of what I saw, and I found it: powered paragliding. Here's a picture of what it looks like:

That's not an everyday sight, at least not in our neighborhood!

In my last post, I mentioned buying a trilobite fossil at the Dunn Museum. That reminded me as a kid I collected a number of rocks around our house that contained fossils, and I've kept them even after all these years. Adding the trilobite to that collection gave me the idea of posting pictures of all the fossils.

Here's the trilobite that I got last week:

The remaining pictures are all ones I collected as a kid.

This is the most impressive one:

This one is much smaller, but I really like the amount of detail on it:

This is another of my favorites. It looks like a little leaf!

There are several little shells on this one:

A lot is going on in this rock:

More shells here:

A series of lines in this rock, but not much else:

Another series of lines here. I'm not sure what it's a fossil of.

Finally, a really good looking shell:

That's my fossil collection.

To take these pictures I first had to learn how to use the macro (close-up) setting on my phone's camera. Then I had to discover that the pictures turned out blurry, regardless of what setting was used. I was bummed. I couldn't write this post without better quality images.

Fortunately, I found a neat product on Amazon that clips onto your phone and puts a lens over your phone's camera to improve the picture quality. It was only $15, so I gave it a try. It came with 3 lenses, one of which was for macro photos, and it worked really well! I am pleased. All of the photos in this post were taken with it.

A while back we got an advertisement in the mail for the Bess Bower Dunn Museum of Lake County, which featured a special exhibit on Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross. I had never heard of Alex Ross, or Marvelocity, or the Dunn Museum. But I enjoy all things Marvel, and the ad had very cool artwork of Captain America, so I was intrigued.

Friday we both took the day off, went out to lunch, and then visited the museum. It's in Libertyville, which is within a 30 minute drive of our house. The museum traces the history of Lake County, starting with a small dinosaur exhibit (which includes an enormous rock with fossils embedded in it) followed by short exhibits on Native Americans, European settlers, the Civil War, and the railroad boom, among others. At the end we came to the Alex Ross exhibit.

Apparently Ross is a famous comic book artist who lives in the Chicago area. The exhibit featured his life-like artwork, and some busts and statues he's made. The most adorable display showed artwork and dolls he made as a child:

The superhero art he's created as an adult is amazing. Here's the artwork of Captain America that was printed on the advertisement we got in the mail:

But, for me, the crown jewel of the collection was a Galactus helmet he made in the early '90s:

I cannot get over how awesome this is. It is sheer brilliance, born of cardboard and duct tape. For those who don't know, this is Galactus: (not drawn by Alex Ross, just an image from the interwebs)

He is a cosmic force in the Marvel universe. A giant being known as the "Devourer of Worlds", who must destroy planets and consume their energy in order to survive. Woe upon you if he chooses your planet! Woe, misery, and doom!

My favorite superhero has forever been the Silver Surfer, who is deeply connected to Galactus. To prevent his planet from being devoured, a man named Norrin Radd offered to become Galactus' herald, and search the universe for planets ideally suited to the giant's appetite. Galactus agreed. Norrin was transformed into the Silver Surfer and saved his planet and his people, but he himself was now slave to Galactus. Until, that is, Galactus tried to devour the Earth, but was foiled when the Fantastic Four managed to convince the Surfer to rebel against his master and help them save the planet.

So yeah, I thought the Galactus helmet was cool.

After we finished the Ross exhibit, I scored some loot in the gift shop. I bought a small trilobite fossil, estimated to be around 400-500 million years old:

And a magnet, featuring Thor and Galactus himself:

The magnet now lives on our refrigerator, right next to a Silver Surfer magnet I bought many years ago:

I enjoyed our trip to the Dunn Museum, and I enjoyed the Alex Ross exhibit a lot.

Last year I wrote about discovering the works of J.M. DeMatteis, a comic book writer, and how it was really a re-discovery of sorts, because he wrote Moonshadow, a graphic novel I read years (nay, decades) ago. Shortly after that post I was able to purchase a cheap, used copy of Moonshadow from eBay, which was a major feat, considering that most used copies of it sold for around $100.

This week a new edition of Moonshadow was published by Dark Horse Comics, and I purchased a copy. It is a beautiful deluxe hardcover:

So what is Moonshadow about, you may ask? That's a difficult question to answer. Here are a few attempts:

• I like the phrase "a cosmic coming of age story".
• DeMatteis himself describes it as "Dickens' David Copperfield meets Siddhartha in space". I've never read those books, though, so I have no idea what that means.
• A commenter on DeMatteis' blog described it as being "like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, except way more poetic", a description which DeMatteis liked.

Here's how the publisher's website describes it:

A romantic, unreliable narrator leads us through his interplanetary coming-of-age story, as an older Moonshadow recounts his strange mixed-species birth in outer space, his escape from a deep-space zoo, and his struggles to survive in a war-torn universe.

It goes on to describe it as poetic, philosophical, and groundbreaking. I would also say it's the most literary graphic novel I've read. It inspired me to read Dostoyevsky, after all!

I was a little disappointed at first that the cover art on the new edition is different from the previous one. But as soon as I opened the book, I discovered a welcome surprise. The previous cover art is beautifully reproduced on the inside cover:

And that reminds me: one of the minor characters in the book is a black cat named Frodo!

I love Moonshadow. I can't wait to re-read it in this new deluxe edition. If you're interested in it, just be aware that the subject matter is inappropriate for kids -- mature readers only!

CoCoRaHS

I decided to join CoCoRaHS after all. It's the community of amateur rain gauge readers that I wrote about recently. Since I have their rain gauge, and I'm taking daily measurements, I might as well submit my data to them. They have training material online that I read through. I was discouraged at first, because according to their guidelines I don't have a good place to put a rain gauge, but at the end they said in urban areas there often aren't any good spots, so just do your best. My rain gauge is attached to a post on our deck, which is about the only spot in our yard that isn't covered by trees.

They also recommend taking measurements every day at 7am. I'm not quite that dedicated, but fortunately they accept measurements any time between 4:30am and 9:30am. That I can handle. It's neat to see my data plotted on the county map each day, and see how much rain other observers in the county recorded. I've also been amazed at all the other observations you can submit besides rainfall. Things like:

• Hail (they have instructions on making a hail pad out of styrofoam to measure hail size)
• Snow depth and water content of snow (there are entire training sections devoted to these topics)
• Significant weather events, like extremely heavy rain or snow (these reports are sent immediately to the National Weather Service and have proved vital in helping the NWS decide when to issue flood warnings)
• Thunder frequency (there are instructions on how to count thunder claps)
• Even the shape of snowflakes! (They have pics of the predominant snowflake shapes, like stellar dendrites, sectored plates, and rimed crystals, among others.)

All of these are optional, of course. They point out that we are volunteers, and we should only do what we can handle.

One other neat thing is that once you've submitted 100 rainfall observations, your data is included in the Global Historical Climate Network, which is used by researchers around the world.

Bird's Nest

I noticed a while ago that a robin built a nest on top of the electric meter on the side of our house.

This does not seem like a good location! It looks precariously balanced, and is only about waist high, seemingly well within the reach of an animal like a raccoon. But apparently I know nothing about bird nests, because its been working out for them. Over the past few weeks eggs appeared in the nest, followed by four very ugly little baby birds which then quickly grew into more bird-like fledglings. Yesterday we took a peek in the nest, and there was 1 little bird left. Apparently we startled it, because it hopped/flapped onto the ground, and one of the parents flew over to protect it. I assume/hope that the other little birds had already done the same.

Turtle's Nest

Last week we went on a hike at a nearby park, and came across a turtle that seemed to be digging a nest to lay eggs. Once again, I thought it didn't seem like a good place, because it was right by the hiking trail. But what do I know about turtle nests?

Geocaching

Earlier this spring, Wendy and I started geocaching. The conservation district has a geocaching program that highlights the best hikes at parks around the county. You get a trivia question about the park, and GPS coordinates to a container along the hike that has the answer. Answer all the questions and you get a badge. It's a neat way to explore new areas.

So it's been surprising to me at how un-fun some of our geocaching hikes have been! We started in late March and were wholly unprepared for how soggy the trails were from melting snow. Our shoes would be soaked all the way through to our socks by the end. You would think we'd learn our lesson, but we kept thinking conditions would dry out by our next hike, only to discover that was not the case. Our most recent hike was a few weeks ago, and not only were the trails still wet, but the mosquitoes were out in force and we didn't think to bring bug spray!

I've also been annoyed with the geocaching app I've been using to navigate to the right coordinates. It tries really hard to make you upgrade to the premium version. On the most recent hike, we couldn't even find the container because the app refused to navigate us unless we paid up. Very frustrating.

Perhaps all of these troubles were foreshadowed on our very first geocache hike, when we came across a dead body!

Yes, it was the dead body of a fish. But a dead body nonetheless!

A new book by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke has just been published! It's been listed as "Coming Soon" on her publisher's website, anomalistbooks.com, for an ENTIRE YEAR! I know this because I kept checking periodically (obsessively?) to see if there was any news about a release date. Finally, this week, it was published! I ordered it immediately and UPS delivered it to me yesterday.

This is her fourth book of interviews she's done with Native Americans about their encounters with star people. It's called Space Age Indians:

It focuses on people who lived to see 2 indigenous astronauts launched into space: John Herrington in 2002 (a Chickasaw member), and José Hernández in 2009 (from the Purépecha tribe in Mexico).

The title is inspired by the song "Space Age Indian" from the band Tiger Tiger:

I like my computer,

I'm an Indian of the future,

Space Age Indian, I won't be left behind,

Space Age Indian, I'm changing with the times

Even the book cover seems to be slightly inspired by the song's album cover, which also has a rocket taking off in the background:

I looked around to see if I could find the song. It's posted on YouTube and is pretty good:

Getting back to the book, I've just started reading it. As is usual with Ardy's books, this is not one I can read straight through. Some of the interviews are so thought provoking I have to put the book down and let the ideas settle before continuing.

The book is off to a good start, though. The first several interviews are with Indians who are Vietnam veterans that live in Hawaii. They reported encountering, and in some cases, having their lives saved by tall, shimmering "Blue Men" during the war. One of the men later earned a degree in astronomy after the Blue Men took him aboard their ship and showed him Earth from space. He says he now searches the universe for life, in hopes of seeing them again.

I'm sure I'll have more to tell later. Right now I have to get back to reading.

Late last summer I wrote about getting a rain gauge and learning about CoCoRaHS, a network of amateur rain gauge readers, whose data is used by the NOAA. This spring, I kept noticing that whenever it rained there wasn't any water in my rain gauge. This was odd, I thought, but I didn't dwell on it any further. Until one day, when it dawned on me that the only explanation is that it must have a leak! So I went outside to investigate and found that yes, there was a big crack at the bottom. And that's when it dawned on me that I probably shouldn't have left the rain gauge outside all winter!

So I needed a new gauge. Wendy suggested I get the official CoCoRaHS rain gauge, which you need if you want to join the network. It's super fancy, allows you to measure to the hundredths of an inch, and can be used to measure the water content of snow. I got it and here it is:

There's a narrow inner tube that sits inside a large outer tube. A funnel at the top directs water to the inner tube, which holds up to an inch of water. When it fills up, it overflows into the outer tube.

Here's what it looked like last week, when we got 1.76 inches of rain in one night:

To measure that, I had to pour out the water in the inner tube, and then pour in the outer tube's water, using the funnel. It's more work than a normal rain gauge, but it's a lot more accurate.

I haven't joined CoCoRaHS yet. You have to go through training first and they highly recommend you measure the gauge at 7am each day. I'm not sure I have that level of dedication!

The heavy snow from the winter and the heavy rains this spring have left the pond near us at the highest levels I've ever seen it. This bench has been rendered fairly useless:

But the geese don't seem to mind. When I took that picture there were 2 geese and their 11 babies hanging out nearby:

Today we got 0.36 inches of rain, with more to come in the next few days. I look forward to measuring it!

A couple of years ago, I blogged about our day trip to view the Indian mounds in southern Wisconsin. I had completely forgotten, when I wrote that post, that we'd briefly seen an Indian mound in West Virginia earlier that year, when we visited Wendy's grandparents to celebrate her grandma's birthday. We didn't have a chance to investigate it at the time; we just happened to walk by it after dinner one evening. In hindsight, it was that mound that planted the idea of visiting the mounds near us.

This year we visited Wendy's grandparents again, this time to celebrate her grandpa's birthday. It rained for most of our trip, but on our last day there, the rain finally stopped, allowing us to fully investigate the mound.

So, here it is, the Criel Mound. Or, as I like to call it, "the mound that started it all":

The view from the top:

And here's the one picture I took of it two years ago:

The mound was created as a burial tomb. It contained an upper tomb, with 2 skeletons, and a lower, master tomb, with a central body and 10 other bodies arranged around it in a semi-circle. Before the archaeological significance of the mound was fully appreciated, the top was leveled off to build a judge's stand for horse racing!

The mound was just a short walk from our hotel. I'm glad the rain stopped so we could see it.

Bonus cruise post!

One evening, towards the end of our cruise, we arrived a bit too early for dinner. We had about 10 minutes to wait, so we sat down in the library, which was near the dining room. Glancing at the books on the shelves, an idea popped into my head: I told Wendy I would pick a book at random, open it to a random page, and read to her The Most Interesting Excerpt in the World!

I walked over to the shelves. The first book I noticed was a thick book called Birds of the World. I grabbed it, sat down, opened it up, and read what was apparently the most forgettable excerpt in the world. I don't remember what it was at all. Something about habitats, maybe. But the pictures of birds were neat! So we entertained ourselves for a while by flipping through and looking at pictures of birds from around the world. Not a bad way to spend 10 minutes.

When I put the book back on the shelf, the book right next to it caught my eye. It had a weird title: Cranioklepty. The subtitle was Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. On the back cover, the book was described as "An Untold History of Crime & Error" as well as "A Comedy of the Grotesque". That sounded really cool, I thought! So I borrowed the book and started reading it after dinner. It didn't take long before I realized that I loved the book.

It's written by Colin Dickey, and chronicles the rise of the now-debunked sciences of phrenology and craniometry, which proposed that you could discern things like character, personality, and intelligence either from bumps on the skull or from the size of the skull. These ideas became very popular and led to a big demand for skulls. The skulls of criminals were easy to obtain, but the skulls of great artists and philosophers were much more difficult to acquire, which led to a huge increase in grave-robbing.

The history of skulls belonging to composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are told in detail. I lost count of how many times their skeletons were buried, dug up, studied, and re-buried. And it was not uncommon for their skulls to disappear or get secretly replaced with someone else's skull each time!

The descriptions of grave-robbing and dealing with corpses were especially macabre. And funny! I couldn't stop laughing at the description of a budding phrenologist who robbed a grave and had his first encounter with the stench of a week-old corpse!

And then there was the story of Beethoven's autopsy, which discovered the composer's brain had deeper, more numerous folds than normal. Dickey writes that this was fitting for Beethoven, because one year Beethoven's brother sent Beethoven a holiday card and signed it "The Landowner". Beethoven sent a reply and signed it "The Brainowner". Ha!

This book was a wonderful discovery. Next up on my reading list is Dickey's latest book, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. From what I've gathered, there's nothing creepy or scary about the book, because it's not really about ghosts. It's about the stories behind the ghost stories in famous haunted houses, and what they reveal about the living. Sounds interesting! And he's currently writing a book about conspiracy theories, which is quite relevant to my interests!