How much do personalized license plates cost?

I mean...maybe the joke is worth it?

Good day, to you, good citizen, party on!

Rancho Los Cerritos

Before we left for Texas, I wrote about Juan Temple. I mentioned that the headquarters for his cattle ranch was located at the Rancho Los Cerritos, a spot on the land he bought from his wife's family, the Corta, and it stretched from the adobe down to the beach.

I was surprised that this piece of California history was literally up the street from us:

I tried to include the beach in the picture so you can get a feeling for how much space the cattle had to roam.

We went and visited the museum today. After a summer spent in Europe looking at historical artifacts and learning about how the culture in the vicinity of those former fortresses and palaces developed, it was nice to drive up the street for a few minutes and do the same for my own neighborhood.

An approaching shot

I read a few sentences about how the land made it into the hands of the Spanish: Cortez signed a land grant of 300,000 acres (nearly 470 sq. mi) to one of his soldiers, Nieto. I'm sure this happened often, frankly, but this was from the land grant I live on, so...

Nieto, in turn, signed a land grant over to one of his men, Corta, and within a few hundred years, one of the Corta daughters married a white man from Massachusetts, and sold him a piece of their land grant, in the southern portion, down by the beach.

Anyway, off a quick left turn and nearly immediate right, you drive onto Virginia Ave. A few blocks later you're passing gthe country club, and then there's a parking lot for the Rancho Los Cerritos.

After checking in at the visitor's center, and making a donation (if you feel like it, since it's a free attraction when open), you're free to explore the grounds.

The green gate from the approaching shot in the beginning of this post opens onto the courtyard of a large, rectilinear U-shaped adobe building. The central courtyard has a cute pond and fountain in the very center of it:

The down-leg to the right of the central courtyard has many doors that open with rooms behind that are in varying levels of explorable.

The first room was the mayordomo's room. Since Juan Temple lived mostly in Los Angeles proper and spent only a few weeks a year down at the RLC, the boss of the ranch while he was not present was the mayordomo, and this was his quarters:

We all liked how the chandelier had candles and a rope and pulley system.

The next few rooms we visited I snapped pictures of, and included them here.

Blacksmith Room

Laundry Room

Library

The library was in the main house, the top/bottom of the big rectangular U-shape, as was the parlor and dining room areas. It had an upstairs, but it was closed today due to issues with the flooring.

Main House Portion; Parlor (Living Room)

Main House Portion; Dining Room

Out and around the back had a large grassy area as well as various fruit trees, and way out back was a brick wall and ornate green metal gate. 

On the other side of that wall and gate was tghe country club's parking lot. It was a little jarring.

The backyard also saw the large second level's veranda:

The large adobe structure, the U-shape, was originally built in 1846 after Temple bought the land and wanted a place to keep as a headquarters for the ranch. After he passed away, it was bought in the 1860s by a Mr. Bixby, a name that appears all over the city today. It was lived in as he ranched sheep until the early 1900s, when it fell into disrepair. 

As immigration to California from Mexico grew, the RLC was rented out room by room to families and singletons, many were workers on the nearby ranches.

Eventually it was brought into the modern era with the addition of electricity and running water. Later still it was designated a historical site and turned into a learning center and museum. Cass had already been on a field trip, and he was our docent for the trip.

Below, you can see Cass standing, for scale, in the roots of a massive magnolia tree:

I can't imagien how old it must have been. Hundreds of years at least, I'd wager.

In the way back area off to one of the sides in the backyard were some earthenware ovens and cookers:

An early cistern remained in the way back, a rainwater catch for the irrigation system in the back for the food they grew:

It was a neat little walk through a slice of history, one much closer to home than the old walls, castles, hotels and eateries we visited earlier in the summer.

Not quite predating photography:

Is that...is that a magnolia?

Anyway, again local history provides wonder and entertainment.

Farm, 2026

Here we go...

We got back from our trip to the panhandle of Texas a couple days ago. It was, like all the summer trips we make to the Harrison Farm, a hot and sweaty affair. They are full of bugs of many kinds, often in the house (this year I was calling it a "mothpocalyspe"), as well as full of love. All of Corrie's siblings made it, save for her older brother Rob, but it was a great time. Michael, Corrie's sister's husband, and I catered a few days of events as well.

Getting there is always part of our adventure, and this year proved no different. For an hour, maybe, driving through Arizona, the following storm was visible from the road:

Looks crazy!

Then I had to drive through it.

That was less fun. More white-knuckle, 30 mph putt-puttering through near zero visibility and trying to limit the hydroplaning. But still, we made it to Gallup, and our hotel of choice in that great rez metropolis, the El Rancho, hotel to the Hollywood stars of the great Westerns era:

An exterior shot of the premises; cute

We even hit 100k miles in Corrie's Subaru:

And...we took Picasso, our cat. He enjoyed being a farm cat, as he always does.

We let him roam during the day most days early in the trip, but leaving the door open late into the night with alight on proved a bad idea, what with the moths, mosquitoes, hornets, and wasps.

The sunsets to the west are usually incredible, but this. year we were limited because of clouds...but not every day:

Picasso loved that window, paying special attention in the pre-seven am hours and sleeping later once it got hot:

Another day, another window sill nap

The grainery in Clarendon is the biggest building in the town, and can be spotted early on the road to town, and easily from most spots, even the parking lot to the Lowes/Ace Hardware grocery store/hardware store in town:

The farm pickup truck, Old Blue, seems to have been driven to this spot a few, er, seasons ago and hasn't moved since. Gas or battery issues, I guess:

The Farm is a place where the work never ends. It's a vacation, yes, but not in the sense of "let's go to the beach and relax with mai-tais all day." It's more like a transportation back to the nineteenth century. You have a building to sleep in, sure, but you're kinda at the mercy of the elements. It's relentlessly hot, and occasionally inside the kitchen is the hottest place. With all the work that needs to happen, and the spotty wi-fi, you find yourself using your phone less and less, hence the above collection may exhaust my "nice" pictures from the trip. I wasn't snapping pictures away, but I'm not the best for that enterprise anyway.

This iteration of the Harrison/Dolman Reunion was held at a school in Hedley, Texas. The school was a high school basketball powerhouse in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '90s and early aughts. It's crazy. Corrie's brother Pete and I examined the extensive trophy cabinet one afternoon. 

This is the first year that there won't be any high school students, as the space will accommodate only K-6 and still have less than 200 students.

Cass, Uncle Joey and I shot hoops for a while in the darkened gym until we were yelled at. Michael and I made burgers in their awesome school kitchen, as professional a kitchen as either of have worked in in decades. Pete, Michael, Joey, and I made a brisket in Pete's fancy new digital smoker, and it was fantastic.

One day in particular I felt like I should write about. A day begins at 12 midnight. On this particular day, around 12:30 am, two large projects were started simultaneously: the brisket clean up and marination start; and the pottery glaze mixing.

Corrie's dad, Ron, kept a watchful eye on me and my carving of the raw briskets, taking just the right amount of fat off, and then preparing the correct marinade. That sentence, while easy to type, in real life took at least an hour. Once the meat was trimmed properly, washed, placed into the tough bag inside the cooler, the marinade was prepared. Once it gets put into the bag and onto the meat, the massage starts, the bag gets tied, and the ice goes in. Now every few hours until it goes into the smoker it needs to be massaged and flipped.

At the same time Ron and I were starting the meat, Corrie started sifting one of the two fifteen-pound bags of glaze into one of the five-gallon buckets mostly full of water. The sifting takes time, and I even spelled her with the second fifteen-pound bag and second five-gallon bucket of water.

In the past I've talked about scientific magic (photography, baby!), and I thonk I'd like to return to this topic later, but ceramic pottery should qualify as well. You take clay...sometimes it's just mud from clay-y soil (Dan and Citrus Heights maybe?), let the mud settle, pour off the water after long enough and you have clay. Great. Once you form the clay into a shape (a cup or bowl, or watever) you can bake it really hot (over 1000F). Then you call it a bisque, and once you dip it into a liquid concoction of powdered metals and bake it again even hotter, what you get is a thing that is durable and awesome, a glass-type surface on a heavy duty, warmth-trapping core.

Anyway, That night I trimmed and then marinated the brisket, Corrie and I mixed up glaze, and then we fired up a whole set of greenware. "Greenware" is what the dried clay bowls are called before they're fired into bisques. You have to 'bisque' the greenware before you can even use the glaze. The firings in the kiln take between eight and ten hours to bisque a thing, and at least another six to eight to cool enough to handle. That night, we fired greenware into bisques that we'd need to glaze and fire into finished pottery, and have cool enough by the Saturday auction. The pieces were auctioned off to raise money for the Farm.

Above is the kiln, red hot inside, about 1400 degrees F, on the start of the cool down mode. This was later on the day I was talking about. Between the brisket, the glaze sifting, and the greenware firing, we didn't get to bed until after 3am. After I woke up and made some breakfast, I headed to check the kiln and got that picture. That was a Wednesday, when everyone would be arriving. Peter and his son Colton made it around 7pm, which was after Carol's return near dinnertime, while Stephanie, Michael, and their son Miles arrived from Austin closer to 9pm.

It was a long day, prefaced by things that had to get done. The brisket had to marinate for at least as long as we did before starting the smoker Friday afternoon (to be ready the next afternoon). The bisques had to be done so they could be glazed by grandkids before getting their firings even later.

Stuff always has to get done.

And Corrie's designing and trying to manage the construction of Ron and Carol's new digs onsite, which adds a nifty wrinkle to the whole endeavor. (It's looking freaking awesome, by the by.)

The times were good, the days long, the devices mostly stowed, and the feeling of accomplishment you get because you're doing something was ever present. That's what I generally fail to imaprt on people I talk to about the Farm trips. It takes twenty hours and we usually bring our cat. It's hot and there are too many bugs and goddamn-bastard-fucking stickers that are terrible, but you get shit done. Every day. Stuff gets done, and it's peaceful. And that's one reason we love it out there.

And when that house gets done...? It's going to be AWESOME!

How many were there?

Say you are on vacation with your six-year-old. Also say that it's been hot---like 100  and up---and you like to do nice walking things on vacation, like museums, galleries, and other public sights. Let's add to this mixture a new museum! It won't have air-conditioning, but because enormous former palaces have cavernous rooms, it won't be so bad.

How shall we keep the six-year-old engaged with such a long walk around the Royal Museum of Art in Brussels? When she'd rather be sitting anywhere else? Well...we chose a scavenger hunt of sorts. And I imagine this would work with six-year-old everywhere.

Corrie got Camille to count the butt-cracks they could see in any sculpture or painting. It went from, Maybe this will work, to Oh man! Look how pissed those other people are! This is awesome! And Camille was fully on board.

I think the number settled on 27.

More Research in Needed...

There is a street parallel to our street, Elm, about two miles east:

Temple Ave. This picture is a Google map street-view pic along 4th, with the Irish bar O'Reilly's on the left and possibly my favorite little commie book shop, Page Against the Machine, on the right in between the palm trunk and the building.

Anyway, I thought it was maybe named for a temple of some kind, but in all the years we lived there, I never really found anything worthy of the name.

Then I found out it was named for early land-owner, pioneer, and rancher Juan Temple.

And I thought...Juan...Temple. Cool. Then I saw a photo of Mr. Juan Temple:

Well...this didn't strike me as what I would have expected as "Juan Temple." I know many of these early dudes were from Spain, and they're lookin' white more than many American's would guess, but still.

But then I saw some details of this dude, Juan Temple, and I figured a good story about him should be done. Maybe a prestige show, like the Parker Saga, would be interesting. Check it out:

• Born in Reading, Massachusetts in 1796 as Jonathan Temple
• Worked as a merchant in Hawai'i before 30 years old (possibly arrived as a missionary, but it is murky); captained his own vessel (1823)
• Ran afoul of local Hawai'ian leadership (possibly for smuggling or running booze to natives), had his property seized.
• Things died down, but he knew he should probably leave; 1827 lands in the coastal Mexican city of San Diego. Converts to Catholicism, learns Spanish, changes name to Juan, moves to the puebla of LA by 1828, opens first general store in what would become DTLA
• Marries into the powerful local family, the Corta.
• Bought a large piece of land from his wife's family, Rancho Los Cerritos; puts tons of cattle on it. His ranchero adobe was a few miles from us in Long Beach, and he had cattle from his hacienda all the way to the ocean, at least 20,000 acres.
• During the Mexican-American War, the American troops used his adobe in LB as a headquarters, After pushing out the Mexican military, they were less cool to the relatively loyal locals, and Temple's wife, Rafaela Corta, led the insurgency with bullets from her husband's shop.
• What the American's knew is still murky, because after insurgency, they made Juan Temple essentially the mayor of Los Angeles.
• Enlarged fortune with beef sales to NorCal during the Gold Rush.
• 1850s-era economic downturn caused trouble; then floods one year and a drought the next, and eventually they had to sell the Rancho Los Cerritos land.
• Moved to San Francisco and died later, in 1866. Rafaela Corta moved back to her daughter's place in Paris, France,when she eventually passed as well. (Juan and Rafa had a daughter, Francesca, who married a Spanish merchant, who eventually moved back to Spain, and then onto Paris, a city in which everyone in their family found lovely and enticing.)

The Rancho Los Cerritos house is free to visit, and literally down the street, Long Beach Blvd, er, maybe up the street, just over five miles away.

We'll go check it out after we get back from Texas, which we leave for, like, day after tomorrow.

So many treatments to write up, right?

Cass, IMAX, and Opening Day with the Stories We Still Tell

Around the year 2300 MHs, the kingdom of Ilias, or Troy, fell.

Or not. 

But for many reasons, stories about the fall of Troy, and defeat of said Trojan kingdom at the hands of the Achaeans (we call them Greeks) over a bride theft, has been one of the Western world's founding stories.

Why, out of all the poems or songs or pieces of storytelling is this historical piece the one kept alive by countless generations? Kept alive before most people could read or write, kept alive through the churn of history, and even today in the Iliad and the Odyssey, characters form this story are alive with us.

In the waning days of of the year 5507 MHs (yesterday), Cass and I attended an opening day, 3pm 70 mm IMAX showing of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey."

"Take a picture of the IATSE sign," Cass told me

That screen seemed the same dimensions as out television, but it was so freaking big. SO big. BIG.

The movie itself is also BIG. But I'll get to that.

Cass and I rode the train from our downtown stop in Long Beach to the Pico stop outside of LA Live and Staples Center Crypto.com Arena. We walked up to a poke´ place so Cass could try it, and then headed over to the Regal IMAX theater by LA Live. (LA Live is an entertainment plaza and studio-zone, kinda like Downtown Disney without that branding. ESPN Studios in LA is housed there, as is the Peacock Theater, and yesterday there was a special showing of LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring.)

We got their early enough so that my mother would be proud, and we chatted. We talked. We talked about movies and books and history and sports. On the train into town I tried to explain why I liked Tenet more than The Prestige, whereas so many film nerds (like me?) prefer The Prestige to nearly any other Nolan film.

Cass asked me what my favorite Nolan film was. That's a hard question to answer, I told him. Inception and Tenet are such big swings, so original and bombastic. I loved the grandness of Interstellar, and the tight compact nature and structure of his three-hour biopic Oppenheimer.

Cass reminded me, "You may even like this one most," meaning the film we were waiting for. I nodded, That's right bud, finished my beer, got some popcorn, candy, and a slushee for the Boy, and we went and found our seat. We were dead-center, or just a seat over from dead-center, and in the very back-back row, the last row in the IMAX house

When I bought the tickets, it was either these seats or a much later show that I wasn't going to subject either of us to. I figured that in this spot, we'd be able to see everything.

And we were. Not being closer and more immersed, but what we could see was outlandish. Chest rattling bass, real boats in real sea water getting pounded, real people dealing with real wind on real beaches. This movie is strikingly beautiful, and especially with every frame nearly a spectacle, especially projected onto such a huge surface.

The set pieces are grand, and the use of CGI, while not non-existent, are reserved for the special moments. The cyclops, for one, was different than I expected, but I couldn't tell you what I did expect. But it was realistic and low-key terrifying way that should prep you for the Circe scene later. That scene boasts some awesome body-horror graphicness that had Cass wide-eyed in shock as it progressed, while I was like, Er, didn't expect to see this today. Needless to say, the weirdness of the cyclops did, in fact, not prepare me for the Circe scene.

Like Oppenheimer before it, Nolan here plays with the timeline and structure, so we get the story of Odysseus leaving for Troy, and like most accounts, almost nothing of the ten years spent on their siege of Troy. We get to see the Trojan Horse, the sacking of Troy, and the return home, but obviously not in that order. 

This is a movie about societal collapse, and about what happens when the social compact dissolves and is disrespected often and flamboyantly. In this Bronze Age tale, that social compact is known as Zeus's Law, which states that because you never know if a stranger is a god or not, you must be kind to visitors to your house and offer to share some bounty with them. This is usually scene as food and drink. Now, mix that social understanding with a staunch patriarchy and dozens of men (who avoided the Trojan War) who now view Queen Penelope as a prize, and you get a nonstop party of jerkass "suitors," unwanted and who understand that they will not be asked to leave. For years Penelope has to deal with this. The flaunting of the social compact.

The Trojan Horse plays a part in Odysseus's understanding of his role in the breakdown of society as well. it's also a late-movie set piece that Nolan has his fun with.

At a time this morning when I should gave been sleeping, I dove into scholarship on the Homeric Question, on the Epic Cycle, and even the Theban Cycle. [[Sidenote: My best memory or basic connection to Thebes is, honestly, from Disney's animated Hercules movie. But Thebes was an important Boeotian city, and Boeotia was an important part of Ancient Greece, and despite incorrect historical narrative that they were Philistines, you may have heard of some of the Boeotian myths and characters that have survived: Eros, Narcissus, Hercules, and Orion. Anyway...]]

The fact that the voice of the main narrative parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey seem to be in different dialects is one of the main pieces of evidence that most scholars use to say that attributing both pieces to the same person is incorrect. And yet Homer persists. Was he blind? Was the idea that he was blind stem from the fact that his name translates into "follower," but, in the other dialect is taken much more literally, as "blind?"

Some people see the history of the oral tradition in the Homeric Epics as well. Bronze Age details with an early Iron Age view. As the story is told, over and over, keeping the histories alive and meaningful for the living, as Matt Damon's Odysseus says, "It's so those that can't read can know," the stories invariably change. And this is to be expected.

Was there a Troy, an Ilias? Was it weakly sieged for a decade and then lost in a torrent of fire and murder because of a false gift? That's the story that seems to still be with us, three-thousand years on. And I return to the question I posed near the beginning: why this story? Is the question really "why the Trojan Cycle the most?" Is it because it's about love, scorn, honor, hubris, denying the gods and then acquiescing to the realities of world you can't control? 

The movie we watched yesterday is an interesting reflection on what it may have felt like to live through the general Systems Collapse of the Late Bronze Age, and that's the fun part of the big picture, I think, anyway.

That, and where else can you see Matt Damon out on a raft made of ten pieces of picket fence nailed together out on the open ocean? Like, literally out on the frickin' ocean, waves washing over his face, projected as big as an airplane on the side of an indoor building?

As we rode the train back to Long Beach, our seats with our backs on the sun and and our faces shielded, Cass nearly fell asleep on my shoulder. The one thing keeping him awake was the train's voice. The stop-announcer on our A-train, our local light-rail, was off by four stops, and Cass stayed up and mentally grappled with it, even nailing his own prophesy, when someone almost missed their stop because they were relying on the voice and video offered by the train.

Our long journey home was fraught with misinformation, and I smirked at the thought. Our systems in this day and age are fraying, our social compact buckling under the weight of a leadership class that flaunts it for profit. The failing of the machines is just a symptom, one that plenty people ignore happily. 

That's was also probably what it felt like in the beginning of the Systems Collapse event. 

But there are some kids playing attention at least, kids like Cass who are SO eager to learn the stories of the past, the stories we still tell ourselves. He's starting early. He knows the road is long, but his appetite is sufficient.

Detritus of the Brain from Our Visit to Europe

1

The Smurfs! Oh my goodness, I forgot the Smurfs.

In the 1958 the Atomium was finished and opened in Brussels. But something else debted that year as well, and they were also a Belgian creation, "Der Shtrumpfs," which was later Anglicized as "The Smurfs."

I had no idea before going that the Smurfs were a Belgian thing, like mayo on fries, huge-dimpled waffles, and angry French/Dutch.

2

I meant to find and share the following slide. I took the picture with Corrie's phone and sent it to mine, lovingly referring to it as "Nerd stuff:"

It was from the conclusion of our Japanese speaker's talk, where he discussed how feldspar, a mineral that makes the occasional crystal, can split light beams and cause a doubling effect, which was a thematic element of Pynchon's Against the Day. In this diagram is the conclusion of his thesis, about how Pynchon arrived at the name of "Umeki Tsurigane" for a character in AtD, how it came from Madame Butterfly and the combo of the 1954 novel and subsequent 1957 film of Michener's Sayonara.

The whole thing captures well the depth of the Pynchon party every two years.

3

I knew I had this picture somewhere:

This is from Aachen, and is the collection of attached buildings that survived the allied bombing during WWII and originally date back to before 1000 CE.

Here a postwar pic:

4

I tried to take this crazy reflective picture off an orange glassed sculpture in Brussels. It didn't work out so well, but here we are:

I reserve the right to keep adding anecdotes, because I feel like I still had at least one more story left. I just can't remember.

Table of Contents for Germany and the Low Countries 2026

 International Pynchon Week 2026, Dortmund, Germany, baby!

1. Just got home
   
2. Introduction
3. Numbers Fun
   
4. Day Zero
   
5. Dortmund
   
6. International Pynchon Week 2026
   
7. Aachen
   
8. Brussels
   
9. WTF Watches
   
10. Antwerp
    
11. Amsterdam
    
12. Journey Home
    
13. Staying in Epic Places
    
14. Graphic Novels, and the Missed One
    
15. BEER!
    
16. Laundry
    
17. Field Trip to Coal Mine
    
18. Movies on a Plane
    
19. Conclusions
    
20. Detritus of the Brain
    

We made it! There and back!

(Updated)

All in All...

Holy hell, a fantastic trip!

Originally part of the plan was to visit Bruges and possibly Ghent, but as the heat dome settled down on us in Dortmund, we called an audible and decided to skip both. Too much time in a bus on multiple days.

The kids did well, but obviously not every second was sunshine and happy times. We rode bikes, we painetd pictures, we ate some exotic grub, and we sweated the sweat of weary Yanks. We watched soccer and some of the Dwayne Johnson Hercules movie.

Cass found numerous young ladies with which he could start conversations. Camille painted pictures and made jokes, and both kids kept up quite well with our shenanigans. They may have been complaining and bitchy for plenty of it, but they made it all the same, all seven to twelve miles of walking a day.

Hopefully the memories will be there for our youngest. I think they'll be foundational for Cass. Time will tell.

Good times, for us, for sure. We've been at it for a few years now, but...I guess this is what we do.

Movies on Planes

As I round out the collection of pieces from our European adventure, I thought I'd mention some movies that I saw on the airplanes. 

Back in 2019, I saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time on the airplane to Rome (and watched it on the way back, too).

The big movie for me this time was this year's Oscar nominee "The Secret Agent:"

I watched the first forty minutes without sound, for lack of headphones, but since it's subtitled, it didn't really matter.

Have you seen it? It't hard to describe. It sticks with you, which is something. The opening scene has our star, Oscar nominated Wagner Moura, driving a VW Beetle into a gas station outside of Recife, in northern Brazil, during Carnival in 1977. The corpulent worker wearing a shortsleeved button-up shit with no buttons buttoned, fills his tank and explains why there's a corpse in the parking lot covered with a sheet of cardboard. Cops do show up, but not for the corpse ("They'll be here soon for him," they say), but really just to extort Wagner Moura's character. He gives them his remaining cigarettes. 

It's engaging, but hard to explain why, and the whole thing is like that.

I also watched, fully silently, a little Quebecois movie with the translated name "Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person:"

It was fun and silly.

Lastly, after I did get some earphones, and after I finished The Secret Agent, I watched one of the Kenneth Branagh's Poirot movies, "A Haunting in Venice:"

When I saw it had both Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh in it, I thought, hell yes. It's both a haunted house story and a murder mystery, and it's filmed sumptuously in Venice. 

I've tried to find all three since we've been back. Tough crowd right now, anyway.

Forgot one!

I thought we had another graphic novel purchased on this trip:

We purchased this at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. It's done in a comic style very reminiscent of Herge's Tin-Tin.

I haven't finished this yet, but it has a young man looking around his grandmother's attic for items that he could use to celebrate her on Queen's Day (a Dutch celebratory holiday, on the sovereign's birthday). While looking around he finds some pictures and some evidence that, eh, there are some secrets in the pasts of his ancestors. Like trying to keep a small family of Jews hidden from the occupying Nazis.

It's harrowing and sobering at the same time, like much of the Dutch approach to their checkered past in the tropics.

This was in a bag that wasn't looked through until today. Whoopsie!

Field Trip to Zeche Zollern

This was the field trip to the coal mine in Dortmund. The Zeche Zollern coal plant was the first that ended up powered by electricity. The weather was beginning to warm up, and the tour guide spoke only German (our original English-language tour guide fell ill), but it was a fun time.

We rode the bus through Dortmund for an hour, which helped inform my view of regular life in that western German city.

"Zeche" is a German term that means 'colliery' or 'mine,' and "Zollern" refers to a German royal family, a noble family, the Hohenzellern, that dates back to the 1200s-ish.

Anyway, the whole area was modeled after a noble courtyard:

But, of course, the central building housed the mine officer's offices, which had a panopticon effect.

Inside some of the buildings, which were modeled after cathedrals, the stained glass windows were adorned with images of labor:

The workers were all assigned a chain basket within which they would store their clothes for the day. They would, using the chain, pull down their basket, change clothes, and pull it back up to the rafters:

This is one of the main coal working centers. The diagonal lines were for pulling elevator chords, elevators for both people and for coal. 

It was said that if you were not at roll call in the mine at 6 am, you wouldn't get paid for the day. The best way to make sure you were at roll call, was to take the Men's Elevator. If you slept in, or otherwise missed the Men's Elevator, you'd have to take the last coal elevator before roll call. The Men's Elevator went at a respectable 40 kph (about 11 mph), but the coal elevator rocketed down at 70 kph (nearly 20 mph).

There was a large transformer room, with cool gears and capacitors and all kinds of cool electro-mechanical stuff.

I tried imagining the sound and the action of the place in full working order. 

But then it's hard to ignore the Allied-forces pummeling Dortmund took as a center for coal industry and munition factories. It's almost surprising any of the old infrastructure still exists.

Dortmund was picked as the location for the IPW in parts because of a quote from Gravity's Rainbow: "Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet," that, and a university's faculty that loves and teaches multiple classes in Pynchon's works.

Besides a snafu on the way home, this was a great little trip, and to see the inner workings of an energy industry that's now a museum. It was said that it had to lay dormant from the postwar period until the 1990s before they figured they could turn it into a place for learning, or before they learned how to do that, and once the realized that people would come to learn.

On the day of this field trip I had Corrie's phone. She had mine to take back to the SIM card people to make it sure it would work. Hers worked, and for that day we switched. She got mine working, and we switched back, but not before I took a handful of pictures that took a while to get access to. 

Germany! Trying to come to terms with their own monstrous shadow in real time.

Laundry, In Three Parts

 The First

Friday. It was hot. Super hot. Sweaty. The last things for the IPW were done early, and later we were going to go to Domicil and see a violin show. I walked down to the laundromat and tried to figure the system out. You had to choose the machine on a screen. Then pay on the screen, then walk over to the machine and press start. It was 9€ per wash (yikes!), but he dryers were only, like, one euro for 12 minutes, but one dryer didn't get hot at all.

Ahh, domestic duties.

The Second

We were leaving the next day from Brussels, and the need was there again to get the piles of sweaty clothes through the washer. I put eyes on while we were walking around town the day before, or earlier in the day, and it was similar to Dortmund in that it was on a screen where you have to choose, and pay, and get change. I took the kids with me, but then Corrie finished up her museum visit and came and got them, as I sat, sweaty, wearing my swim trunks, their mesh undergarment making the time unpleasant.

The Third

We were heading home a few days later, but the kids weren't going to make it with their underwear, and so I headed out again one bright evening in Amsterdam, with the heatwave having mostly broken. This was the closest spot, and there were very few washers or dryers, and I'm not sure if anyone using it while I was there lived in the neighborhood. Again, it was expensive, and again it didn't work very well, but...that's the job.

No place took cards---all were cash only. That could be challenging, but we made it work.

Nothing like laundry while abroad, baby!