Big Maryland fighter had no bone to pick with us

Visiting fireman John Means Jr.

came to Appleton WI Jan. 30, 2012

to see the new Pierce Fire Engine tiller truck

being built at the Appleton factory

for his Howard Co. Maryland fire company.

John has driven fire engines for several years

and is licensed now to drive tiller on this

2 million dollar truck.  A tricky job.

He humbly describes it:

"You gotta turn left when it feels like

you should turn right...."

Highly maneuverable for getting a big rig

into tight places,

fireman John, Dee's 'little' brother,

will handle the machine deftly,

we know.

See a sample video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGPeDYOAiBM&feature=related

Below, there is a current Facebook photo 

by photographer

Emily Means:

 'firefighter's togs at the ready to jump into.'

Volunteer firefighters have these rigs set up 

to go at a moment's notice 

by their front or back doors.

Emily is John Means Jr.s' daughter,

a senior at Westminster High School, MD.

There are a total of I think seven firefighters in the immediate

Means family.  Emily's mother, Doreen, a paramedic,

has been one one of them.

While John was here to view the new firetruck

we rendezvoused with him after hours yesterday

when he was off duty from the Pierce engine plant.

As it happened, Pierce put the fireman contingent up

at a night-time rest site, The Raddison Paper Valley Hotel,

which was only a few blocks from Lawrence University,

Erin's work-site where she is the Archivist.

We picked John up at his hotel and had a joyous evening

together.  Part of the time we were at Erin's apartment

where we got some pictures:

Left to right, Erin, John, Dee, and Erin's friend Ben

gathered around the Phil Kari moose femur leg bone.

See previous SRN post about that.  We took Phhil's bone with us

to show John.

It rests on an old chair from the Wildgrube family farm

circa 1880.  The Wildgrubes were our great-grandparents.

Erin refurbished and reupholstered the chair, with Ben's help.

This was John's first visit to our state.

  He brought a CD of a brilliant grand-parents interview

done as a school project by daughter Emily with her Gramaw Jeannie and Grandpa Poppy.

(See previous SRN postings: 'Poppy's Barn'.)

Gramaw and Poppy share their happy memories of many years together in Pleasant Valley MD

with Emily and a video camera which quickly did not inhibit them.

It was a golden family time together.  A partial reunion, an earth-salt family I am lucky to be

part of.  Same for Leland and Erin, too.

All things are connected, especially if you live long enough

Bob Sellars

communicated by Email yesterday

a piece of technical information

he wanted to share

because he was truly amazed by it.

It has to do with the modern VW plant

in Dresden, Germany.

Bob, no longer able to facilely operate

his typing fingers

due to his degenerative muscular problem,

has a willing caretaker

who types what Bob asks him to.

A scientist by profession

Bob has for his lifetime shared 

info on what amazes him.

(He once told us how raccoons

if pursued by dogs in water

will, when it comes right down to survival,

turn and bitingly attach a dog over his snout

and hold the attacker under the water

until it drowns.

And many other intriguing

and useful facts have been imparted

by Bob.)

We welcome Bob's return to

his keyboard, with the help of 

a hired aide.  His faithful wife Libby

is heartened too by the

continuation of Bob's word-smithery.

Yesterday's video was

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd5WGLWNllA

Bob's Email read as follows:

This is one amazing emails we’ve seen in sometime. We thought you will enjoy watching this.

I have watched a number of advertisements about the new developments of VW. If you are ever in Dresden area, be sure to include this factory in your tour.

          Love, Libby and Bob.

         

          Received this from Bob. Marshall, whom some of you know.

Subject: FW: A Factory Like You've Never Seen Before

Only the Germans can do this.  INCREDIBLE

Want to see why the Germans have a positive trade balance, in

spite of paying workers some of the highest wages in the world? Watch this: It is truly incredible.

............

Lt. Les Dix on maneuvers preparatory to landing on D Day in WW II

The below poem arrived 1-30-12 from THE WRITERS ALMANAC:

Letter Home

by Ellen Steinbaum

I love you forever
my father's letter tells her
for forty-nine pages,
from the troopship crossing the Atlantic
before they'd ever heard of Anzio.

He misses her, the letter says,
counting out days of boredom, seasickness,
and changing weather,
poker games played for matches
when cash and cigarettes ran out,
a Red Cross package—soap,
cards, a mystery book he traded away
for The Rubaiyyat a bunkmate didn't want.
He stood night watch and thought
of her. Don't forget the payment
for insurance, he says.

My mother waits at home with me,
waits for the letter he writes day by day
moving farther across the ravenous ocean.
She will get it in three months and
her fingers will smooth the Army stationery
to suede.

He will come home, stand
beside her in the photograph, leaning
on crutches, holding
me against the rough wool
of his jacket. He will sit
alone and listen to Aïda

and they will pick up their
interrupted lives. Years later,
she will show her grandchildren
a yellow envelope with
forty-nine wilted pages telling her

of shimmering sequins on the water,
the moonlight catching sudden phosphorescence,
the churned wake that stretched a silver trail.

"Letter Home" by Ellen Steinbaum, from Container Gardening. © Custom Words, 2008.

ON THE SAME GENERAL TOPIC, THIS:

Backwards In the Sun

A man loathe to give up the manual typewriter

To bow to the age of computers

Who liked push reel lawn mowers

Wringer washers

And treadle sewing machines:

 I announce that

Something good happened here to mitigate

My reluctant accessions adopting the new over the old

While sitting as a machinist

 Marveling at what my word processor

And color printer can do;

 I like to correspond with fountain pen

And then hang the letter backwards in a sunny window

For a while before sending

To study the line without the ability to read text

As though the right or wrong  will show

And save me from mistake or unmeant innuendo

Hand script, even supposedly horrible hand script

Sometimes dangerous from the front side

Takes on a loveliness when viewed backwards

And this is interesting when one thinks

Of evaluations involving all angles and facets

Rather than merely the most obvious surface

(How often have I sent letters not so carefully inspected)

The thinner the paper for this sunlit viewing

The better:

I remembered a box of old onion skin typing paper

I had from when thinner meant more copies

Yielded by typewriters and carbon paper

Before clicks and double clicks and infinite production

I got this dusty box down and opened the lid

To find nearly a full box of crispy thin sheets

Audibly-crinkling onion skin paper

Talking paper very loud to the touch

After all that time being cooped up

Like a presumed useless ugly duckling

Or love-starved oldster getting dryer

It leaps to respond to the slightest tactility

And you cannot buy it anymore

Who needs it?

On the word processor so novel to me

I can practically put cardboard through

And obtain glorious-looking pages

But they don't talk when I handle them

They are dead except for the images on them

Not so with onion skin

It says something

You must be of an age to appreciate V Mail

From World War II when loved ones communicated

Across seas on government-mandated crackling tissue paper

To keep the weight of transport down

And to reduce bulk

 It was a practical and beautiful medium

I inspected my father's letters then on the flip side to the light

After I had digested all from the most obvious facade

I knew there must be more from him than that

Which showed on just one surface;

 I was only six years old

I searched side-ways both sides and between the lines

 I became familiar with the look, feel and sound of onion skin

My one contact with Dad and so much  preferred

To the dreaded telegram on dead yellow paper;

That bad paper never wanted never came here

And to find a whole box of  lively paper fifty years after

Those haunting hungry scrutinies was a blessing

I had it among my high basement cobwebs

Must have known it had value

It had escaped years of throwing out

In silent peace like a covered bird

 Intact a perfectly good box of now off-white paper

Backwards fountain-penned sheets in sunny windows

Will vibrate while this irreplaceable and

Obsolete box lasts

It will last long this new lost art

Because there are so many dry leaves fitted in the old box

Like memories they are so very thin

But strong

Tearing such gossamer  is  not as easy as you'd suppose

In my cyberspacial kingdom there are many color images

In my computer's memory favorite old snapshots

And vivid drawings I've committed to that realm

And my fountain pen will not quit till I do

A way is pointed to a blending

Validating procedures and leanings  in the doing,

Printing computer-generated transparencies

On talking paper - with penned script -

 And  backlighting these marriages not on an electric monitor

But in the window backwards in the sun

(DD CIRCA 2000]

(When Dee helped June Bjorklund move last year, June gave her a partial box of rare onion skin paper for me)

Lee closing the gap

See this:

http://vimeo.com/24342426

Rerun this:

http://vimeo.com/14756565

Leland Dix updated his cover photo.

January 11

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• • 

    Mark as Spam

    Leland Dix Close the gap one page at a time

    January 12 at 3:38pm ·  ·  2
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For those in travail, and you know who you are....

Illustrated, so to speak, by the raccoon news

Love IS all there is

Painted on a gourd leat as it died

517 Arcadian Ave, Waukesha

Granny holds on

Margaret Helt

with son John, daughter MaryAnn, and the late Clifford Helt,

Burlington IA farmer

who himself took 10 days without food and water

before he passed

A pickup with its battery on ground

seen at the Dousman WI Firkus farm sold by me as a realtor, once

John's mother Margaret takes a motorcycle ride in 2008 with a friend

Margaret does a stint at a local food pantry

http://raccoonnews.blogspot.com/2009/11/granny.html

...................

Margaret Helt today lies dieing hard

in a Burlington health facility

with her family at her side,

if she goes......

This report from John this morning:

Dear Friends   I wish I could report that Mom crossed over in the night, but.... Yesterday morning she rallied a bit: puckering her lips for a kiss, opening one eye a bit, and moving her jaw as we sang hymns and prayed. I thought that might be the final push to get to the other side of that apparently deep and wide river. But it wasn't.   Cindy's father lasted 10 days after food and drink, so we know this could potentially go another two days. Every day is another notch lower, but she has not yet hit bottom.   Everything is set and we are just waiting. We have said and sung and prayed everything we know.   If her death does not occur by 3 this afternoon, we call Anni in Boston and tell her not to get on the plane, and her brothers not to rush here tomorrow, and we move our plans into the future.   The one good thing is that Mom is not suffering.   As I reassured son Aaron last night, it is OK to pray for death at this point.   John (John will eventually do his mother's funeral.) ...................... From The Writers Almanac, Garrison Keillor  Jan. 27, 2012 Don't Look Back by Kay Ryan This is not a problem for the neckless. Fish cannot recklessly swivel their heads to check on their fry; no one expects this. They are torpedoes of disinterest, compact capsules that rely on the odds for survival, unfollowed by the exact and modest number or goslings the S-necked goose is— who if she looks back acknowledges losses and if she does not also loses. "Don't Look Back" by Kay Ryan, from Say Uncle. © Grove Press, 2000.

Playing? Or, a life and death struggle between hummingbird and honeybee? / WHS 2014 reunion

WE

had some inquiries* about yesterday's SRN-featured
tiny-tongued bat

 so we revisited the video clip 

(furnished by St. Paul, MN RR museum docent, Bob Heeschen, 
play it -

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xHkq1edcbk4?rel=0).

Indeed, the bat was stopped by our digital
aimed at the monitor 

as he lapped cactus nectar

with a minature (but not so for him) tongue.

And that was not all the delightful  video

disclosed.

Hummingbirds' whirring wings were slowed

by the slow-motion filming videomaker 
to allow us to witness what

in real time would be barely visible:

a hummingbird did roll-over flips through the air 
with a competing nectar gatherer, 
a honeybee.

Over and over the hummingbird rolled
as it chased the bee away

- I tried roll-overs in 1966 in a Cessna 150 single-wing; it was chancy -

 the bee/bird encounter happened

so fast that it nearly escaped the eye
were it not  for slow-motion photography.

Just before that, a hummingbird flew

into a spider's web and was nearly caught

by an also hungry spider.

No matter how tiny the tongues of

some animals are

the urge of nourishment attainment

is universally potent.


The tongue shape
is an oft-repeated theme
in nature.

Bill Vollmer, using his tongue, cleans wall-eyes he caught in the Menominee River
near Marinette WI




Yesterday I bought a can of Pringles
and thought of a tongue
as I placed a Pringle on my 
own similar tongue.


A battle of tongues
so to speak.
The frail potato chip wafer
was no match for my 
75 year old crushing proboscis.


And it was not easy to eat just one.

........................


And speaking in of tongues,

Fellow classmates at Waukesha High School, class of 1954, are planning
another, yet another reunion, for the year 2014.  That will be their sixtieth
(60th).


As fresh meat, I have been gently pressured - tongue-talked - into participating in a planning committee
for this elderly event.  Although I have not gone to a single reunion, ever,
when the tongue screws were turned by Bill Nelson (above center top)
and Sally (Martin) von Briesen (below, leading a cheer)
and augmented by another '54 classmate, Jack Hill
(see the end of this link to a post
http://raccoonnews.blogspot.com/2012/01/mike-dixs-extreme-fall-bucket-lists.html)
all three, coaxing, coaxing, coaxing.....


I said today - OK, count me in.
It could be fun.
I might have been missing something.......

...............................................
*Comments?

People wishing to register comments 

to the SRN are invited to do so via Email c/o

ddix1@wi.rr.com

Let's stay together/a campaign slogan is born/SRN says Amen

THE VIDEO:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pScGXz7LWEU

Al Green gushes after Obama sings song

January 23 2012 at 08:00pm 

Reuters

Obama’s rendition was dubbed “terrific” by the musical great, who thought the head of state totally “nailed it”, reports TMZ.com.

Green, of course, is referring to Obama singing part of the first verse of the song on Sunday night at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.

The clip was swiftly posted on Youtube by amused viewers, garnering millions of hits.

“I was thrilled that the President even mentioned my name, and if the President can get the economy going again and get everything going that he wants to, then we'll all be together,” Green told TMZ.

Licking: a lexiconography

A bat pollinates a desert cactus flower;

Postage is applied in England;

 Maryland niece-in-law has a seriously-studded tongue;

But if you're REALLY serious;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=QRveJCEAQMk

BEEF TONGUE
2 1/2 lb. beef tongue 1 onion, sliced 2 tbsp. pickling spices Place tongue in pot. Add onions and spices. Cover with water. Simmer uncovered for 3 hours. Drain and cool. Remove skin and serve.

Having gone in this from the tiny tongue of a bat to the large tongue of a steer, the raccoon news does not represent to have run a detailed gamut of miraculous tongue uses and effects.

Still Fickle Bat

A bat I thought was you

Fluttered around my head

Last night after the lights

were turned off

I opened the door

To let you find your way out

But you stayed

Would not go

Winging around my sought repose

Nibbling my ear lobes

The way you used to do

 I went out myself

And you followed me

Joining another bat

Zig-zagging in the darkness

Both of you exchanged squeaks

And left

I lay awake a long time

Wondering if you’d be back

 The only way to keep you

Is to set you free

[DD 2007]

....................