The Infernal Machine

Posted on October 20, 2024 by twsobey

Title: The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

Author: Steven Johnson

Completed: Sept 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Years ago I read Ghost Map by the same author and enjoyed his storytelling. This book appealed to me because of my growing interest in anarchist theory and fascination with the rise of national policing around the time of prohibition. It told a more complete story of Emma Goldman than other stories I’ve read about her. It’s also interesting that many of the early anarchists dealt with debate about when (if ever) violent acts are justified that came up in Force and Freedom just before the Civil War. Both groups eventually turned towards violence. The anarchists seemed more easily convinced that violence could help them achieve their goals, but in retrospect, may have convinced more people to oppose their message.

Highlights:

  • The anarchists maintained that there was something fundamentally corrosive about organizing society around large, top-down organizations. Human beings, its advocates explained, oftentimes at gunpoint, had evolved in smaller, more egalitarian units, and some of the most exemplary communities of recent life—the guild-based free cities of Renaissance Europe, the farming communes of Asia, watchmaking collectives in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland—had followed a comparable template, at a slightly larger scale. These leaderless societies were the natural order of things, the default state for Homo sapiens. Taking humans out of those human-scale communities and thrusting them into vast militaries or industrial factories, building a society based on competitive struggle and authority from above, betrayed some of our deepest instincts.
  • Nobel gave his invention two names. One was a variation on his earlier product’s branding, with an emphasis on its newfound stability: Nobel’s Safety Powder. But it was the other name that stuck: Dynamite.
  • Kropotkin had embarked on the trip under the spell of Darwin’s recently published The Origin of Species, with its radical new account of natural selection operating through the competitive struggle for reproductive success, quickly paraphrased as the “survival of the fittest” by Darwin’s ally, the sociologist Herbert Spencer. But in the extreme conditions of Siberia, Kropotkin witnessed a different kind of struggle—not the struggle between different organisms but rather the shared struggle against the environmental conditions themselves. “Real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom under my notice,” he later wrote, “though I eagerly searched for them.” Instead, Kropotkin saw abundant evidence of a different kind of interaction: networks of cooperation among and between species, what Kropotkin would later call “mutual aid.”
  • The Haymarket Affair sparked an immediate crackdown against the radical groups; Parsons and Spies were both arrested, along with six others, and accused of being accessories to the murder of the officer killed by the bomb. During the trial, key evidence was supplied by the lead Pinkerton undercover agent, Andrew C. Johnson, who claimed firsthand knowledge of the anarchists’ murderous plot. In response, Albert Parsons denounced the Pinkertons as “a private army…at the command and control of those who grind the faces of the poor, who keep wages down to the starvation point.” In the end, the jury sided with Johnson, and all eight were condemned to death. Four of them—including both Spies and Parsons—were executed, despite the fact that no evidence ever directly connected them to the infernal machine that had exploded during the rally.
  • It is conventional wisdom—in the United States, at least—to say that we live in an unusually polarized political climate today. But measured against the landscape Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman encountered as young adults, even the much-lamented divisions of the Trump era look far less severe. The polar opposites might be louder now—thanks to the amplifiers of social media and cable news—but they sit on a much smaller globe of political possibility. Berkman and Goldman were living in a world where one side of the spectrum thought it was appropriate to execute people who objected to a seventy-two-hour week of life-threatening work—while the other side of the spectrum thought that we should abandon both governments and corporations and reinvent society along the lines of Swiss watchmaking collectives. Those were the distant poles of the debate. What we would now call the Overton window—the space of potentially valid political beliefs—was far wider than anything in American politics today.
  • colossal failure for the workers. “After five months out on strike, they were forced to accept the company’s harshest terms, including a twelve-hour day and a wage cut of almost one-half,” the historians Paul and Karen Avrich write. “Pinkerton spies were installed in the mill, grievance committees were done away with, and workers’ meetings were banned. Total victory, as Frick had foreseen, lay with the company. He had proved that a modern corporation, combined with the authority of the state, could destroy the strongest union in America. Not until 1936 would another union emerge in the steel industry.”
  • There was a noticeable absence among the twenty-one nations represented at the Rome conference in 1898: the United States of America. The lack of an American presence reflected more than just the geographical separation between the two continents. The notion of a trained detective versed in statistics and anthropometry serving as an agent of the law was simply a foreign idea to most Americans.
  • Kroptokin sensibly began his counterattack against the social Darwinians with a close look at the biological record: the insect colonies, the deer, and the seabirds of Siberia. But by the time Goldman showed up for tea in Bromley, Kropotkin had moved on to sociology. The closing essays in Mutual Aid offered an extended paean to the triumph of the “free cities” of the medieval era, which were to Kropotkin the pinnacle of human social organization.
  • The fundamental economic unit of the free cities was not the industrial corporation or the feudal estate; instead, the defining unit was the artisanal guild, the elective associations of craftsmen: carpenters, weavers, painters, jewelers, musicians, scholars. Grounded in useful labor and expertise, sustained through shared resources, the guilds and the free cities that contained them offered a golden ratio of individual liberty and communal belonging that echoed the ancestral hunter-gatherer communities, only now updated with technological wonders and achievements in art and architecture. That was the natural equilibrium that the hydra of state capitalism had demolished, with its vast hierarchies and deadening, robotic labor,
  • The fixation with the guilds and associations of the medieval town is a quality of the anarchist movement that is little remembered today. What lives on is the image of the bomb-throwing terrorist, willing to kill innocent civilians in the name of some imagined revolution to come. But there was also a strangely quaint, nostalgic quality to the movement—most apparent in Kropotkin himself—a longing for a simpler, more pleasant form of life.
  • Imagine a twentieth century where multinational capitalism is challenged not by a totalitarian, militaristic Soviet Union but instead by a sustained mass return to the guilds and small-scale industries of free cities. That may seem preposterous to us now, but it might well have been within reach, back in 1895.
  • The body count from the infernal machines was a footnote compared to the violence of the factory system, after all.
  • Goldman, dressed only in a kimono, found herself surrounded by a dozen police officers. At first she pretended to be a Swedish servant with limited English skills. The ruse initially succeeded. In an exchange that bordered on slapstick, one of the officers held up a picture of Goldman, demanding: “We want this woman. Where is she?” “This woman I not see here,” the diminutive Goldman protested. “This woman big.” After searching the apartment, the officers were on the brink of leaving when one of them stumbled across a fountain pen engraved with Goldman’s name. Even that clue was not sufficient for the cops to realize that the very suspect they were seeking was standing right in front of them. “By golly, that’s a find!” the lead detective declared. “She must have been here and she may come back.” Exasperated, Goldman finally turned to the detective and ended the charade. “I am Emma Goldman.” “Well, I’ll be damned,” he uttered in shock. “You’re the shrewdest crook I ever met.”
  • Throughout his two terms, Roosevelt would petition endlessly for the creation of a proper national detective force, an American Interpol. Each time, Congress would rebuff him, wary of consolidating too much power in the federal government. Lawmakers argued that “spying on men and prying into what would ordinarily be considered their private affairs” went against the “American ideas of government.” Others maintained that a “central police or spy system in the federal government” would be “a great blow to freedom and free institutions.”
  • In time, the young library clerk would make a name for himself in a different field. But the lessons he drew from the Putnam system—the unexpected power of systematized card catalogs and file cabinets—remained an animating principle in the mind of John Edgar Hoover for the rest of his career.
  • on the morning of April 20, two National Guard units commanded by a Rockefeller deputy began laying down machine gun fire across the tent cities outside Ludlow. Some of the strikers managed to escape into the hills, while others huddled in underground bunkers that had been dug for precisely this situation. That night, the Guard swept into the tent city and set it ablaze.
  • Berkman envisioned a procession that would follow Caron’s coffin through the streets of Manhattan, winding its way to the ultimate ceremony site in Union Square. But Arthur Woods worried that a funeral procession taking over a large swath of the city risked making martyrs of the would-be bombers. He and Mitchel were able to convince the board of aldermen to change the laws, making it a requirement that all parades receive police approval.
  • There were an astonishing number of bomb-throwing anarchists in the world at that moment in history, but even when you added them all up, they were an asterisk next to the victims of the Triangle fire, or the Ludlow Massacre, and countless other industrial accidents or labor conflicts that characterized the era. The invention of dynamite had meant that the government and the corporations no longer had a monopoly on devastating violence. But they were still its greatest practitioners.
  • Robert Moses had not yet streamlined the flow of automobile traffic between Manhattan and the suburbs of Long Island;
  • Every country in Europe has recognized the right of conscientious objectors—of men who refuse to engage in war on the ground that they are opposed to taking life. Yet this democratic country makes no such provision for those who will not commit murder at the behest of the war profiteers. Thus the “land of the free and the home of the brave” is ready to coerce free men into the military yoke. We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, anti-militarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments.
  • delivered by mail to the offices of Seattle mayor Ole Hanson on the morning of April 27, 1919. The war had ended six months earlier with the final armistice signed by Germany, but Hanson was in Colorado promoting the final Victory Loan campaign to raise money to support peacetime rebuilding in Europe. And so the Gimbel’s box was opened by an assistant who, in a stroke of enormous good fortune, happened to be holding the box upside down as he unwrapped it. The bomb inside the box had been wired with a detonation device similar to the one Erich Muenter had deployed in the Capitol bombing: rigged so that removing the top of the package would shatter a small vial of sulfuric acid, which would then drip down onto the dynamite caps and instigate the explosion. Opening the box the wrong way up inadvertently foiled the plan, causing the acid to spill out onto the floor and leaving the dynamite undetonated.
  • the infernal machine at Attorney General Palmer’s home had been only one of nine explosives that had detonated that night. The anarchists had targeted a church, several judges, immigration officials, industrialists, a city mayor, and a state congressman. All the bombs exploded within minutes of the D.C. blast—in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and at suburban residences in Massachusetts and New Jersey. In the history of terrorism on American soil, only the 9/11 attacks compare to the June 1919 bombing campaign in the scope and complexity of the operation.
  • the Editorial File System was a genuinely national database. In just two months, the Radical Division collected fifty thousand index cards documenting radical activity across the country. Hoover had weaponized library science in the service of subduing the revolutionary threat.
  • On Saturday, September 28, Goldman was released from prison. She was transported to New York and brought to the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, where she secured a $15,000 bond for her release on the deportation order. There was still the matter of the $10,000 fine for the original crimes under the Espionage Act. For that, she had to sign an affidavit testifying that she possessed insufficient financial assets to pay the fine. The agent gave her a suspicious look. “You’re dressed so swell,” he said, “funny you claim to be poor.” “I am a multimillionaire in friends,” she replied.
  • what you can never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep; born in a poisonous society which is falling apart, it is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations which are opening a breach in contemporary authority. It is everywhere, which makes anarchy elusive.
  • The ideological battle of the twentieth century ended up being fought between three worldviews that all relied on top-down authority: state capitalism, state communism, fascism. In part because markets themselves have elements of decentralized order that command economies do not, much of the planet ultimately embraced the least centralized of the bunch. But a large-scale society truly organized around the lateral entanglements of mutual aid? The world never got to run that experiment.
  • How would the twentieth century have played out if Kropotkin had been adopted instead of Marx as the founding father of revolutionary leftism? If the radical vision had not been central planning and the Gulag, but rather a return to the hill towns and watchmaking collectives of the free cities, only this time with clean drinking water and electricity?
  • Kropotkin’s friends petitioned Lenin to temporarily release the anarchists currently imprisoned in Moscow so that they could pay tribute to the man who had long been anarchism’s most persuasive advocate. The bureaucracy responded with a declaration that there were no anarchists in Moscow prisons, a statement straight out of Orwell’s 1984.
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Skid Road

Posted on August 18, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle

Author: Murray Morgan

Completed: Aug 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Since moving back to Seattle in 2017, I’ve been reading different books about the history of this place, including about the people here or biking here and even walking in Seattle. This book was a wonderful addition to my collection and covers a much broader scope than most of the other books. It tells the tales of many of the pivotal characters from Seattle’s history, both those with streets named after them, but also those whose names we’ve mostly forgotten. Like with any good book about a place, reading this introduced me to two more Seattle books that are now on my list to read at some point. This is such an amazing town

Highlights:

  • (Preface, about the author) Murray and Rosa had bought a kayak at Lilywhites in London and put in at the Danube’s headwaters at Ulm, traveling south by southwest through Europe, more or less disconnected from the news. Floating down 1,200 miles of the Danube in a kayak seemed like a lark, even if neither of them had ever paddled a kayak before, and Murray couldn’t swim. “We just decided to go until we ran out of money,”
  • Seattle’s attraction for the misfit has shaped the city, for good and sometimes for ill. We are loath to judge, sometimes to a fault. We welcome new ideas, even if they are goofy. Our tolerance for the offbeat and the adventurous has shaped our politics, our booming (when it’s not busting) economy, our distaste for organized anything, notably religion.
  • The bridge over Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway, where Murray worked as a tender as he wrote Skid Road, had been renamed the Murray Morgan Bridge.
  • The half-million people in Seattle tend to look on Alaska as their very own. “We’re the only city in the world that owns a territory,” a booster once remarked, and the 128,643 Alaskans agree, though they are not happy about it. Seattle stores display sub-arctic clothing, though Puget Sound winters are usually mild; Seattle curio shops feature totem poles, though no Puget Sound Indian ever carved one; Seattle radio stations carry programs especially for Alaska, though Seattle is as far from the territory as New York is from Hudson Bay.
  • A canal connects Lake Washington and Lake Union with the Sound; the second largest locks in the world raise ships from salt to fresh water.
  • Here stood the mill that, in the (18-) fifties, meant Seattle was really a town, not just a hope; and here in the doldrum era of the seventies Val Wildman sold Seattle’s first stein of nickel beer. This is Yesler Way. Once it was called Mill Street, and before that it was simply the skid road, the route along which the ox-teams skidded logs to Yesler’s Mill in the Sag.
  • Today Yesler Way is still a dividing line of sorts: to your left as you climb the steep street are the big new buildings, symbols of Seattle’s dominance over a state and a territory and its dreams of controlling the trade of a distant continent; to your right, in the redbrick buildings untopped by neon, along the unswept sidewalks where the rejected men stand and stare, are the symbols of the past, the monuments to men who dreamed the wrong dreams or, like Doc Maynard, the right dreams too soon.
  • they all seem to have had the same notion about the role of a chief: a chief had little authority. He was merely a rich man with some eloquence, a man whose opinions carried more weight than those of his fellow tribesmen. Since wealth was hereditary, the chieftaincy often stayed in one family, but it did not necessarily go to the eldest son; the tribe might agree on a younger son, on an uncle, on anyone who was rich, or at least generous and wise, or at least persuasive. A tribe might agree to have more than one chief; nearly all had one leader for peace and another who took over during war.
  • Denny was a Whig and a teetotaler; Maynard was a Democrat and a bit of a drunk. The doctor had been hitting the bottle when he conferred with Denny and insisted that since his streets not only paralleled the bay but ran due north and south, they should be continued across the Denny-Boren holdings. Denny, while admitting that it would be neat to have the town four-square with the compass, felt that it would be more convenient to have the streets in his section parallel the water too. “Maynard had taken enough to make him feel that he was not only monarch of all he surveyed but what Boren and I had surveyed as well,” Denny remarked dryly. No agreement was reached. The next morning, the day of filing, Denny turned in his plat first; some hours later Maynard, nursing a hangover, appeared at the cookhouse and gave his version of the plat to Yesler. Neither man would back down, so instead of the streets curving together across Mill Street (now Yesler Way), they hit it uncompromisingly, as far apart as the proprietors. They remain far apart to this day.
  • Among those Indians who understood the terms there was not complete satisfaction. Unhappiest of the tyees was Chief Nelson of the Muckleshoots; his tribe considered their neighbors, the Duwamish, to be something less than human, but both tribes were assigned to the same reservation.
  • Finally Leshi was betrayed by his nephew, who received a reward of thirty blankets for turning him over to authorities at Fort Steilacoom. He was tried for the murder of an officer who had been ambushed during the war. (One of the two attorneys for the defense was H. R. Crosby, Bing Crosby’s grandfather.) The first trial ended in a hung jury, 10–2, for conviction. A second trial before a new judge in another district resulted in Leshi’s conviction. He was sentenced to death. A strong minority of pioneers, including Maynard, felt that Leshi was being made a scapegoat, that Governor Stevens was blaming the Indian for harm that had really been caused by unfair treaties. When the day came for Leshi’s execution some of his partisans arranged to have the sheriff and marshal who were to hang him arrested on a trumped-up charge. The execution was delayed, new appeals were made to the Territorial Supreme Court and the Territorial Legislature, but in vain; after another half-year Leshi was led to the gallows. The man appointed to hang him said later, “He was as cool as could be—just like he was going to dinner…. He did not seem to be the least bit excited at all, and no trembling on him at all—nothing of the kind, and that is more than I could say for myself…. I felt I was hanging an innocent man.”
  • When a man tired of purely social intercourse, he could always buy a couple more drinks and lead his partner down the hall to one of the little rooms. There was no attempt to conceal what was going on at the water’s edge. One historian has argued that it was the establishment of Pennell’s place that led straight to Seattle’s present-day dominance of the Northwest, the scholar’s thesis being that word swiftly spread throughout the timberland about the type of entertainment offered at the foot of the skid road in Seattle. The town had, in that historian’s words, “the best mouse trap in the woods; hobnails and calks were deepening all the paths to its door.” While this economic argument gives more importance to sex than even Freud would be likely to admit, there can be little doubt that Pennell drew his clientele from all over the Sound country,
  • It was not surprising that after Cooke had undertaken to finance the Northern Pacific, Congress enlarged the land grant until it covered sixty miles on each side of the right of way—more than seventy thousand square miles in all, a grant half again as large as all of New York State.
  • It became apparent they were going to bypass the capital; the best Olympia could hope for was a spur, and the railroad said the town would have to build that itself. Seattle was still in a happy glow over its rival’s discomfort when the wire came locating the terminus on Commencement Bay. No news could have been worse. This meant not only that Seattle would be deprived of the terminus, but that the hamlet of Tacoma, with two hundred residents, a settlement barely two years old, would swiftly grow to challenge Seattle’s industrial leadership. The new town, only twenty miles away by water, would undoubtedly dedicate itself to the economic destruction of its nearest rival. The two thousand residents of Seattle, with no effective allies, were pitted against a community sponsored by a transcontinental railroad which was backed by the nation’s leading banker, who had the personal support of the President of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
  • Eventually a Scottish engineer named James Colman took over the aborted project and reshaped it into a line to the coal fields behind the town of Renton. As such it served Seattle well and made Colman a millionaire, but it did not solve the problem of direct connections with the East.
  • The Chinese had been popular once. They had been imported in large numbers by the railroad builders when cheap labor was needed. When the Chinese arrived the Western people had looked on them as genii who would bring from the East on their narrow backs the much desired tracks. The Chinese, one and all, were called “John,” and the stories of John’s prowess as a construction worker almost reached the status of folk legend. John could work twelve hours on a handful of rice; impassive John could handle blasting jobs that other men were too nervous to carry out; brave John would work all day at the end of a hundred-foot rope, chiseling notches for trestle supports; inscrutable John had the best poker-face in a poker-loving nation. Good old John. And then the final sections of track were laid, the golden spikes were driven, and the construction workers poured into the western cities, into Tacoma and Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. The streets teemed with restless men, men with money to burn; restless men, soon broke, the Chinese among them. The fact that the Chinese were accustomed to receiving less than the white men no longer seemed laughable to the white workers;
  • there was competition for every job—and fear of economic competition always increases prejudice.
  • The November 1 deadline passed quietly, but on November 3, in Tacoma, the Committee of Nine took action. Before dawn Cronin’s men circulated through the community, giving word to the underground to be ready to strike. When the steam whistle at Lister’s Foundry sounded at 9:30 a.m., hundreds of Tacomans poured into the streets. They marched through a steady rain to the Chinese shanties that dotted the business district and stretched along the waterfront, told the occupants to pack up, escorted them under armed guard to the railroad tracks, flagged a train, and while the conductor shouted joyously, “Put ’em aboard! I’ll haul ’em,” herded the Chinese into boxcars. After waiting a day in the rain at a siding the displaced Chinese were taken to Portland. The whole affair was carried off without violence, indeed with a horrible friendliness that enabled the vigilantes to chat with their victims as they forced them into boxcars. Among the whites were men who could say that some of their best friends were Chinese.
  • Still the fire roared on. It jumped Columbia Street and swept south. It crossed Second Street and closed in on Trinity Church on Third. No one tried very hard to save the church. “It was a wooden structure and had on its front end a tall belltower,” one volunteer fireman said later. “It was so ugly the fire would have been a failure if that tower had been left standing.”
  • William Grose, Seattle’s first black businessman. He was said to weigh 400 pounds.
  • The box-house was a saloon with a theater attached. The entertainment was rowdy, and the box-houses were restricted to an area where they competed with establishments offering even rougher entertainment. The box-houses were usually located in basements; they frequently had to close during the rainy season, when the floors were covered with water from an inch to a yard deep.
  • They called it The Independent Order of Good Things, and they selected a motto, “Skin ’Em.” The next time the Order assembled things were a bit more formal. The members got together front center on the stage of the Bella Union. A Seattle lawyer who did frequent business with theater people was initiated; he drew up some bylaws, which were adopted unanimously. The month-old name seemed somewhat unspecific for a group with bylaws. Cort, looking at a picture decorating the stage curtain, suggested they call themselves the Eagles. Agreed. Next they drew up a short, earthy declaration of principles: “Not God, heaven, hereafter, but man, earth, now.” Under this mundane motto the Order prospered.
  • a guide was expected to build a boat to take his charges down the Yukon to Dawson City. Alexander bluffed it out. He wandered about a riverside camp, watching the experts whipsaw lumber from the trees, arguing with the experienced boatbuilders, telling them what they were doing wrong, soaking up information when they explained why their methods were right. He learned enough to build a boat that looked like a boat, but when he put it in the river it listed dangerously. Quickly he hauled it ashore, explained, “Well, the job’s half done,” and made another. He lashed the two boats together and ushered his uneasy companions aboard. They made it to Dawson.
  • Seattle and Alaska, Alaska and Seattle. Amid the Brainerd-created clamor the other claimant cities barely made themselves heard. They kept trying, but soon almost everyone except residents of the rival coastal cities considered Seattle the gateway to gold.
  • It was along the Skid Road that the most famous of Alaska’s bad men, Soapy Smith, rounded up the gang that eventually operated the town of Skagway as its private enterprise. Soapy Smith—like Erastus Brainerd—was a part-time genius. He took a weird bunch of individualists, men who went by the names of Fatty Green and Kid Jimmy Fresh, Yank Fewclothes and Jay Bird Slim, and organized them into a syndicate that not only ran all the gambling and robbery at the southern end of the gold trail, but even took over the United States Army Recruiting Station at Skagway during the Spanish-American War and assigned men to pick the pockets of the recruits who were taking their physicals.
  • Denny Hill went first; five million cubic yards of earth were sluiced down onto the tideflats and the maximum grade on the north-south streets was reduced to five per cent. Another three million cubic yards came off the Jackson Hill, and two million from Dearborn Hill. In all, sixteen million cubic yards were washed away, and when Thomson was through, traffic could move easily north and south. Ballard and West Seattle were brought within the city limits.
  • Portland was perhaps the most notorious ship on the Pacific Coast. She had been built in 1885 and took to sea under the name Haytian Republic; she was seized four years later for carrying ammunition to rebels in Haiti during a civil war, and an attempt was made to sink her as she left Port au Prince. She began operating on the Pacific Coast in 1889 as a cannery boat, but government agents found a load of Chinese aliens and some packets of opium aboard her on one voyage; she was seized, condemned, and sold. Her new owners renamed her Portland and put her in the coastal trade as a passenger ship.
  • Gill believed in letting people alone. If a man wanted to go to hell, Hi was unwilling to set up roadblocks. He didn’t believe morality could be enforced by legislation and he didn’t believe it was healthy to try to keep a town closed, especially a seaport town on the frontier. Strict law enforcement, he argued, merely drove prostitution and gambling underground.
  • The central feature in the planned community was to be a five-hundred-room brothel, the biggest in the world. When construction was about to begin, the contractors found their work would be simpler if they were to build eighty feet west of the original site. There was one trouble: most of that eighty feet was occupied by a Seattle street, so the city council thoughtfully granted the Hillside Improvement Company a fifteen-year lease on the thoroughfare. A contemporary observer remarked, “American cities have voted away their streets to gas companies, electric-light lines, and street railways, but Seattle is the first one that ever granted a franchise to a public thoroughfare for the erection of a brothel.” The huge building was completed by the autumn of 1911, but it was never occupied by the tenants for whom it was designed. Gill’s boys had gone too far. The great barn on Beacon Hill became a symbol of the administration.
  • The first issue of Seattle’s first paper, the Gazette, had creaked off a battered Ramage screw press3 on the second floor of Henry Yesler’s office building at Front and Mill Streets (now South First and Yesler Way) on December 10, 1863. The Gazette was written and edited and put in type by James R. Watson, a frontier newspaperman who had found the competition too strenuous in the big town of Olympia;
  • He bought a huge American flag and made a ceremony of raising it on top of the Times Building; he put the flag at the masthead of his paper too, and on the front page; when his opponents objected that no man should use the flag as a personal trademark he chided them for “resenting the display of Old Glory.” This trick of replying to an attack with an attack was typical of his operations. He never apologized, never sidestepped, and never defended himself; he just ripped into anyone who opposed him. To suggest that Blethen might be wrong was to prove yourself an unpatriotic crackpot in the pay of red-flag anarchists.
  • A general strike, by dictionary definition, is a strike in all industries of a locality or nation, generally in sympathy for a smaller group of workers. Theoretically it brings about complete cessation of business. The first strike in the United States to meet that definition took place in Seattle. It began at ten a.m. on Thursday, February 6, 1919, and lasted until February 11. Sixty thousand workers went off their jobs, and they did bring about an almost complete cessation of business.
  • The carpenters, perhaps the most conservative of all unions, voted to strike. So did the typographers. So did the musicians and the longshoremen, the stagehands and the millworkers, the hotel maids and the teamsters. One after another, a hundred and ten unions voted to strike. The Wobblies were not represented on the Central Labor Council, but they sent delegates to applaud the strike votes; the Japanese unions, kept off the council by racial restrictions, sent delegates to say they’d strike too. A general strike was approved overwhelmingly, but no one knew how to run one. It was one thing to walk off the job at some plant and try to keep strike-breakers from walking in. It was altogether different to stop the industrial life of a city of 300,000. It had never been done in America. No one was sure how to go about it.
  • the Commercial Club, a lively group of small businessmen who had organized in opposition to the Chamber of Commerce,
  • on Sunday, November 5, 1916, 280 demonstrators sailed for Everett. Pinkerton agents in Seattle wired that they were coming. When the Verona tied up at the Everett dock, the sheriff and 200 deputies were waiting. The sheriff asked the Wobs to point out their leaders. They refused. Somebody started shooting. Before the Verona cast off and moved away, five of the demonstrators and two of the vigilantes were dead, thirty-one demonstrators and nineteen vigilantes wounded. When the two ships got back to Seattle, everyone on board was arrested.2 Seventy-four were charged with murder. On March 5, 1917, the first of the defendants, Thomas Tracy, was put on trial for his life. Anna Louise Strong covered the trial for the New York Post, and the testimony she heard changed her life. Years later she summarized her dispatches by saying, “The news was that at every stage the Everett police and private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking in the streets. The lumber guards on the dock had begun the shooting and continued firing as the Verona pulled away; yet none of them was arrested.
  • Her father was a religious pacifist; she shared his moral scruples about killing and to them added her economic conviction that war was merely a way of making the rich richer and the poor dead.
  • The closing down of Seattle’s industries, as a mere shutdown, will not affect the great Eastern combinations of capitalists much. They could let the whole Northwest go to pieces as far as money alone is concerned. But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order—this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.
  • Stevenson built up a large radio audience; he liked being an oracle and soon was hawking political nostrums along with dental floss. He had the technique down pat: he criticized specific wrongs and proposed vague remedies.
  • Glynn Ross, a former prizefighter with a flair for aggressive promotion, astonished everyone but himself by proving Seattle ready for an annual season of grand opera. Bringing in singers of world rank, stressing the popular rather than the elitist aspect of opera, offering some seats at prices below those for a first-run movie, and presenting works alternately in their original language and in English, Ross made going to the opera something anybody might do,
Posted in Lit Review | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

WA-ACTE Summer Conference Presentations on Robotics and Lock Picking

Posted on August 6, 2024 by twsobey

(Updated: Additional links requested in the session at bottom)

I’m presenting to middle and high school CTE teachers at this year’s WA-ACTE Summer Conference on two topics: Robotics and Lock Picking. The “Lockpicking and other mischievous way to learn engineering” looks at using lock picking as a way to get students excited about learning how locks work and how to use tools to make lock picks. My other talk is “DIY Robotics – Affordable Robotics for Every Classroom and Beyond“. In this one, I cover common issues with robotics in the classroom (cost of the robotics kits being the biggest one) and how we can use open source robotics systems like Arduinos to overcome many of these problems. Below are resources for anyone interested in getting started with robotics in the classroom. If you want to try using Arduinos in your classroom, feel free to contact me with questions. Unlike the prepackaged kits, there isn’t a company to reach out to with questions so the community has to help each other.

What do you need to get started?

  • Arduino – You certainly need one of these but Arduino isn’t just one thing, there are many types of Arduinos that have different characteristics so which one to pick. In Renton Schools, we opted for Arduino Nanos originally and are now switching to the Leonardo. Both are great, especially for mobile robots. If you’re just getting started with Arduino, get the Uno. Note that Arduino is open source so anyone can manufacture Arduino-compatible boards that usually cost less than official Arduinos. This is intentional. Also, you can find Arduino (both official and third-party) on many other websites that will give different levels of support/price. For lots of support look at places like AdaFruit (their Uno equivalent is called “METRO”) and for no support but lower prices, check AliExpress.
  • USB Cable – Often your Arduino will come with one, but not always. Just note which type it requires (mini, micro, USB-C, etc) and if it didn’t come with one, you likely have an old cable in a drawer that will work.
  • Programming Environment – This is where you write the code before loading it onto your Arduino. I’ll outline several options for this below. For now just know that you need a computer with some software installed to program your robot.

That’s all you need to get started. After the basics, you’ll want to start getting sensor, motors, lights, speakers, and all the other items to make your robot do everything you want. For now, we’ll just look at programming the built-in LED to keep things as simple as possible

Programming Environments

There are different ways to program your Arduino. Most online tutorials will assume you’re writing code but there are block-based coding languages as well. These are helpful for younger students and people just getting started with coding.

  • Arduino IDE – This is the default programming environment. You can download it for free and install it on Windows, Mac, or Linux machines. There isn’t a version for Chromebooks. They do offer an online editor that can work with ChromeOS, but I haven’t had good luck running it on Chromebooks at our schools.
  • Makeblock or mBlock – This is an online editor that works with Chromebooks. It also defaults to block-based coding and will translate your blocks into Arduino code that you can see on the right side. You have to install a plug-in to allow it access to your USB port for uploading code. You also need to tell it you’re using at Arduino when starting. Do this by clicking “Add” on the Devices tab on the right edge of the screen and selecting the Arduino you’re using.
  • CodeBender – This is another online editor, but only allows for text based coding. I’m not a huge fan but I know many teachers have experience using CodeBender for other projects so if you’re already comfortable with it, give it a try

Blinking LED

The first project to try when starting is blinking the built-in LED. Below is the code in both the Arduino IDE and mBlocks. In both examples, we blink the built-in LED on pin 13 on for one second and off for one second.

Using Arduino IDE, you always need to have two sections of code “void setup()” and “void loop()”. The setup runs once when the Arduino turns on, then goes to the loop code with continues to run over and over until you unplug it. In the setup part of this code, we only tell the Arduino that we’re using pin 13 as output. In the loop section, we turn on pin 13 (set it to high), wait a second, turn pin 13 off, and wait another second before repeating it.

After the code is written, click Tools >> Board and select the type of Arduino you’re using (Nano, Leonardo, Uno, etc). Then click Tools >> Port and select which port on your computer it’s connected to. Now click the arrow at the top (next to the check mark) to load your code onto your Arduino and watch the LED blink. Now try changing the code to make it blink in a different pattern like on for two seconds and off for 1/4 second.

With mBlock, once you’ve added your Arduino on the Device tab, you can start coding with the “when Arduino starts up” block in the Events section. Next add the other blocks shown above to turn pin 13 on (set output to high), wait 1 second, turn pin 13 off, wait another second, and repeat forever.

Make sure your Arduino is plugged in and click Connect. It will ask what port you want to use and usually only gives you one option. Once connected, you can click Upload Code to see it work. You can also click the “Arduinoc” tab to see the text-based code. Now change the code (either the blocks or the text) and see if you can get the Arduino to blink in a different pattern.

Project Ideas

Now it’s time to start building more advance projects but what to build? You could build a mobile temperature sensor or temperature logger, create a digital egg for an egg drop challenge using an accelerometer, or start building a $20 mobile robot. If none of those are exciting enough, there are plenty of project ideas online:

  • Arduino Project Hub – The Arduino website hosts a repository of different projects from simple to very advanced. There will certainly be a project there for anyone.
  • Instructables – There are over 200 Arduino project on there. Some are very well written and other leave a lot for you to figure out along the way. If you’re just looking for ideas, this is another great place
  • Student imagination – Your students will be able to come up with too many project ideas. Many will be much more complex than they are able to create, but if they break the large project ideas down into smaller and smaller pieces, they will find the intersection of their dreams and the edge of their skills. Have them start there then learn, build, and expand the project until it can do much more.

You now have the basic. Create some cool projects, reach out if you have questions, and please send me photos of what you create.

Update with additional resources requested during the session

  • Renton Custom Leonardo Projects – Several of you asked for resources related to the custom Renton CTE Arduino Leonardo. This site shows a few basic projects and how individual components can be combined into larger projects
  • Class projects and guide – We discussed the list of projects I have the students go through during their first Tri to understand the basic of Arduinos. This page list those projects and walks you through many of them. The formatting was corrupted a bit when Google switched from Classic Sites to the new version but hopefully the content is still good. This is based on the Arduino Nano which is easy to get on any of the sites listed above
  • Robotics Parts List – The most common question was where to buy supplies. This page was badly corrupted so the formatting is terrible (working on it). The most common links people wanted were for:
    • Chassis – The chassis are from Feetek (the spelling changes sometimes so don’t worry if it’s a bit off). I found it here before and ordered the FT-MC-005 which doesn’t seem to be available currently. I’ve emailed with them before and they’ve been super helpful getting the FT-MC-005 even when it wasn’t shown. If not, the other option to get the same thing is to “Start Order Request” on this page and explain that you want the 2WD Chassis with servos (the other option is for geared motors. Servos have 3 wires and are what all my examples use. Geared motors only have two wires and require an additional piece of hardware.)
    • Storage Boxes – These are small, inexpensive storage boxes that will hold the robots and are easily stackable
    • Arduinos – You can get these on  Amazon or AliExpress for a little less
Posted in Education, Maker | Tagged | 1 Comment

When Driving Is Not an Option

Posted on July 7, 2024 by twsobey

Title: When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency

Author: Anna Zivarts

Completed: July 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I met Anna a couple of years ago when our kids did gymnastics together. Out of the 100+ families at the gym in a very walkable part of Seattle, Anna was the only other parent I saw who arrived without a car. After parking our bikes next to each other several weeks in a row, we started talking (first about the lack of a bike rack).

Although our kids have both stopped doing gymnastics, our families have remained friends and I was very excited to read this book when it came out. Some parts seemed obvious to me as a bike commuter while others points were news to me. My biggest surprise was the percentage of people in the US who can’t or don’t drive. I’m now thinking of all the families in Renton Schools where I work who don’t drive and how invisible they are at school drop-off. Perhaps we should get the District Admin to take the Week Without Driving challenge.

Highlights:

  • In Seattle, the route 7 bus that I took to and from work was always packed. I’d have to negotiate room for my toddler and his stroller to squeeze in with the other moms, many of them immigrants from East Africa, with seniors pushing grocery carts returning from shopping trips in the International District, with young men getting off at Lowe’s to look for work as day laborers, with blind and deafblind workers on the way home from their shifts at the Lighthouse, with groups of high school students in the afternoons. Sitting on the 7, I started to think about what it would take to build a coalition with everyone on that bus, where we could fight for more reliable transit, for smoother sidewalks and nicer bus stops, for affordable housing close to where we needed to go.
  • ONE-THIRD OF PEOPLE LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES don’t have a driver’s license.1 This includes people like me who cannot drive because of a disability. It also includes young people, immigrants, people with suspended licenses, and people who have aged out of driving. Additionally, there are many people with licenses who can’t afford to own a car or pay for insurance, parking, or gas. But because of who the majority of nondrivers are—disabled and poor people, unhoused or recently incarcerated individuals, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, seniors aging out of driving—we are largely invisible,
  • Seven percent of American households do not own a car, and an additional 17 percent of households have a “vehicle deficit,” meaning they have more adults than vehicles.
  • If you ask someone from the United States what image comes to mind when they think about disability, it’s probably a disabled parking spot sign. These signs with a stick figure in a wheelchair are probably the most, if not the only, visible manifestation of disability in many public spaces. But the reality is that many disabled people can’t drive or can’t afford cars. People with disabilities are four times less likely to drive than nondisabled people, and two to three times more likely to live in a zero-vehicle household.
  • Many people who are disabled must remain in poverty in order to qualify for needed health care or home care support, support services that wouldn’t be covered even with “good” health care coverage from an employer. Tamara Jackson, a policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities and co-chair of the Wisconsin Non-Driver Advisory Committee, explains: “The reality is that you have a system where pre-poverty is a prerequisite.” A 2020 report on employment and disability from the National Council on Disability describes this “poverty trap,” explaining that many disabled people “agonize over the choice between maintaining the health care that they need to live and work, or a job that they are qualified for and desire, given the asset limitations imposed by means-tested programs that are attached to health care.”
  • When our communities are designed to work best for, and only for, car-based mobility, the cost of not driving is unemployment and foregoing basic needs. So, people will choose to buy and maintain a vehicle, despite it being a significant financial burden and stressor.
  • I also depend more on my block community than perhaps many of my neighbors who can drive. I don’t have the ability to jump in a car and go visit a friend across town in an easy fifteen minutes or head out of town to the woods or the mountains on the weekend. My block is really the heart of my social and recreational world and where I spend most of my time, and I believe that’s something to aspire to.
  • WHAT NONDRIVERS NEED—what we all need—is a transformation of the way we organize mobility, housing, and public space so that we have options for getting around that do not rely on driving a car. We need safe, connected places to walk, roll, and ride; transit that is as reliable as driving; and land use and remote access opportunities that reduce how much we have to travel.
  • For many years, transit riders who lack the resources or ability to drive were referred to as “captive” riders (now we use the slightly better, though still condescending, term “transit dependent.”) As outlined in Nicholas Bloom’s 2023 book, The Great American Transit Disaster,22 decades of racialized underinvestment and neglect have resulted in a second-class system that is, in most American cities, viewed as a social service for those unfortunate enough to lack access to a car. The view that transit is for those who don’t have other choices, and therefore those of us who ride transit will take whatever we can get, still lurks deep within many conversations around transit funding and service. It’s time to call out the racist, ableist, and classist undertones of this assumption and invest in transit so that it becomes the reliable, comfortable choice to get us where we need to go.
  • As employers began to rehire after the initial pandemic layoffs, in many cases making telework an option for the first time, disabled workers had new job opportunities. In research published in late 2022, Ari Ne’eman, a doctoral student in public health at Harvard, found that from the last quarter of 2021 through the second half of 2022, employment gains by disabled people outpaced employment gains for nondisabled people by 14 percent.
  • From his experience in Bellingham, Comeau believes much of the most difficult work is in convincing the public that reducing congestion shouldn’t be the overarching priority of local government. He insists we need leaders who are willing to be straightforward with how our communities must change:   We’re gonna densify. There’s going to be more people living here in the future, and we need you all to get ready. That includes more traffic in certain places, and you’re going to have to get used to it. We’re not going to widen our streets just because it’s not as easy to drive anymore. We want it to be easy to walk. We want it to be easy to bike or get on a bus or cross the street to a bus stop. Nobody enjoys traffic congestion, myself included. But that’s literally the trade-off for focusing on density and people-oriented infrastructure. You cannot continue to make it easy to drive or park a car if you’re trying to plan for people.
  • Imagine a highway department staffed entirely of people who do not drive. Maybe they ride as passengers in cars sometimes, or drive when out of town on vacation, in other countries where more people drive, where driving is easier, more comfortable, and more convenient. Our perspective of what a transportation system should look like would be heavily influenced by what people walking, rolling, and taking transit need. Would we be able to know what would work best for drivers at a highway interchange? Probably not, and yet the inverse of this is the reality for most of the people in charge of our transportation system, to the point where it’s still revolutionary to suggest that engineers or planners get out of their cars and try walking or biking a road project to experience how it works for people outside of cars.
  • An easy step for employers is to stop requiring driver’s licenses for jobs where driving isn’t an essential function. This one seems pretty simple, but I find driver’s license requirements all the time on new transportation planning, admin, and engineering postings. Someone explained once that a driver’s license requirement was a default setting on their internal HR system for job posts, and so until those HR settings are turned off, it will be the default on every new posting.
  • Remember the school drop-off paradox. When you choose to drive, you make it more dangerous and less comfortable for other kids to access school or activities without a car. Consider how parents and caregivers who can’t drive get to the activities you take your child to. Is there a nearby transit stop? Is there a well-lit sidewalk? Is there bike parking?
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LilyTiny

Posted on June 26, 2024 by twsobey

It’s time for ToorCamp again and this year I’m helping people learn to program LilyTiny microcontrollers. You can use these at the Fairie Yurt to control the EL wire (prototyping this currently) or over at the Maker Stage to create wearables with LEDs or sensors. I plan to update this with photos as projects are completed but want to offer the basics for programming here so anyone at Toor can start modifying them.

Also, if you’re at Toor and want to play with one of these, I am giving away plenty. Stop by OlyMEGA and ask.

To program these the first thing you need is to install the Arduino IDE. Next you’ll need the ATTiny85 driver. The Windows Driver is here. Linux didn’t need this but required another step later (see below). I’ll add that and the Mac directions on an update.

Then we need to add this in the Arduino IDE to File >> Preferences >> “Additional Board Managers URLs”: https://home.drownedchipmunk.com/lilypad//package_digistump_index.json Now close the preference window and open Tools >> Board >> Board Manager, search for Digispark, and install the first one. You’re now ready to program. This seems like a lot but if you’re at Toor, I can walk you through it quickly and you can get to the fun part.

Finally, here’s some basic code for the LilyTiny to control LEDs or EL to blink/fade depending on which pin you connect to. Good luck and please share your projects

/* Default program for wearables and sew-ables using the LilyTiny (Lilypad with ATTiny85
 *  Slow and Fast set how long the cycles are
 *  Pin 0: Fast Fade
 *  Pin 1: Slow Fade
 *  Pin 2: Fast Blink
 *  Pin 3: Slow Blink
 *  Pin 4: Random (Not yet implemented)
 */
const int Slow = 2000;
const int Fast = 250;
int Bright;
// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN as an output.
  pinMode(0, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(1, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(2, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(3, OUTPUT);
 // pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
 // pinMode(5, OUTPUT);
}
// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
 //Fast Fade on Pin 0 
  if((millis()%(Fast*2))>Fast) Bright = map((millis()%Fast), 0, (Fast-1), 0, 255);
  else Bright = map((millis()%Fast), 0, (Fast-1), 255, 0);
  analogWrite(0, Bright);
 //Slow Fade on Pin 1 
  if((millis()%(Slow*2))>Slow) Bright = map((millis()%Slow), 0, (Slow-1), 0, 255);
  else Bright = map((millis()%Slow), 0, (Slow-1), 255, 0);
  analogWrite(1, Bright);
 //Fast Blink on Pin 2
  if((millis()%(Fast*2))==0)digitalWrite(2, HIGH);  
  if((millis()%(Fast*2))==(Fast))digitalWrite(2, LOW);    
 //Slow Blink on Pin 3
  if((millis()%(Slow*2))==0)digitalWrite(3, HIGH);  
  if((millis()%(Slow*2))==(Slow))digitalWrite(3, LOW);   
}

Linux Installation

In addition to installing the Arduino IDE, adding the json file, and installing the ATTiny85 boards in the Board Manager, you need to do two other thing pointed out on this page. You need to add your username to the dialout group with the following command. (If you already program Arduinos, this step is already done).

sudo adduser $USER dialout

You also need to create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/49-micronucleus.rules and adding the following code to it.

# UDEV Rules for Micronucleus boards including the Digispark.
# This file must be placed at:
#
# /etc/udev/rules.d/49-micronucleus.rules    (preferred location)
#   or
# /lib/udev/rules.d/49-micronucleus.rules    (req'd on some broken systems)
#
# After this file is copied, physically unplug and reconnect the board.
#
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="16d0", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0753", MODE:="0666"
KERNEL=="ttyACM*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="16d0", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0753", MODE:="0666", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
#
# If you share your linux system with other users, or just don't like the
# idea of write permission for everybody, you can replace MODE:="0666" with
# OWNER:="yourusername" to create the device owned by you, or with
# GROUP:="somegroupname" and mange access using standard unix groups.

If you need additional details, the linked page above provides more insight.

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Rebar Ladybug

Posted on June 21, 2024 by twsobey

A few years back, I made a rebar dragonfly. Shortly after I started work on a ladybug to join the dragonfly on the fence, but ran out of welding gas before finishing. For over a year it sat there, slowly losing pieces. I still haven’t refilled my gas canister but I took it into work and used the welder there. It’s now hanging on the fence with the other welded art I’ve done. Next up… maybe a bee or an ant? Comment any suggestions below.

Posted in Maker | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Get the Picture

Posted on June 20, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

Author: Bianca Bosker

Completed: June 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: About a year ago, I was asked to support high school art teachers at work. A few months ago, middle school art teachers were added as well. The trouble is my background in art is very limited. I enjoy welding pieces, but my art history knowledge and skill with a paintbrush are both severely lacking. While this book did not improve my painting or provide me with all the history of “The Art World,” it did show me there are many “art worlds” and that I’m not as far removed from some of them as it feels. Bianca also offers insight into how to better connect with art, find art that speaks to you, and incorporate art into our lives. After reading this, I feel better prepared to help all the art teachers in our district… until next year when I’m expected to support the Ag Science teachers, but that will require a different book.

Highlights:

  • modernists were pushing white as the new neutral. But it was the Nazis who helped perfect what we now think of as the white cube. The Nazis’ first foray into architecture-as-propaganda was building none other than an art museum, which opened in 1937 with tall ceilings, spotless white walls, gleaming floors, sparsely hung art, and bright overhead lighting—a design ethos that failed artist Adolf Hitler praised as a brick-and-mortar manifestation of his quest for “cultural purification.” From then on, the look became so popular that, historian Charlotte Klonk observes, “one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention.”
  • Jack had mentioned that he used to love the meticulous black-and-white photographs made by the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Now, however, Jack considered them—kiss of death—“decorative.” His key criticism of the work: “It’s just very technically skilled.”
  • In 1917, Duchamp blew minds when he took a porcelain urinal, turned it on its side, and declared it a sculpture. (He dubbed art made from existing things “readymades.”) Besides Fountain (the sculpture of the urinal), Duchamp made pieces such as Bottlerack (literally, a bottle rack) and In Advance of the Broken Arm (just a snow shovel, albeit one with a sense of humor). Duchamp believed art needed to evolve beyond the so-called “retinal art” he saw his peers making—paintings of reclining nudes and impressionistic water lilies that, Duchamp sniffed dismissively, were “pleasing” and “attractive” objects that tickled the eye without stimulating the mind. “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products,” Duchamp wrote.
  • You can stick a stroller in a garage and get a few mechanics to claim it’s a car, but that does not mean the stroller can do sixty miles an hour on the freeway. But put a urinal in a gallery and get critics to extol its artistic essence, and the urinal becomes a sculpture. There are many schools of thought on looking at art, including isolationists who will wave away context and tell you that anything beyond the artifact itself is irrelevant. But I didn’t know any isolationists. The mood in the room was that fine art was what influential insiders said it was, hence the importance of attaching the right names (the right context) to whatever you were doing.
  • Barbara Guggenheim—whose last name is chiseled on museums around the world—in her book Art World. “Gallerists and collectors are quick to snap up quality artists, leaving few good ones, if any, languishing in obscurity.” So it’s pure coincidence, then, that the artists languishing in obscurity tend to be overwhelmingly women and people of color, while the “quality artists” in major American museums are 85 percent white and 87 percent male.
  • Fumbling for words early on, I had occasionally—and very regrettably, I now saw—praised artists’ work as “beautiful.” Since then, I’d had it drilled into me that beautiful meant “decorative” and decorative meant “dumb,” and the only graver insult was “accessible,” which beautiful art was assumed to be.
  • “Just walk up to a piece and try to think of five things that it brings up,” she suggested. Not five things that the art is about. The observations don’t need to be grandiose, like this probes masculinity in the postinternet age. Just, what are five things you notice, either in the work or in how it makes you feel. “Like, that red is very cool or very warm . . . That shape really dominates the canvas . . . I love how that paint is gushy and then it thins out,” Gina said, ticking through formal features. “All those things are important, and they’re intentional.” I thought of Julie wrestling with her blue sky. Painting is constant decision-making.
  • beauty appears to be hardwired in our brains. “Beauty is one of the ways life perpetuates itself, and love of beauty is deeply rooted in our biology,” writes psychologist Nancy Etcoff in her book Survival of the Prettiest. Like the innate preference for sweetness that makes newborns smile when they drink sugar water, scientists like Etcoff hypothesize that humans have evolved to find certain forms more attractive than others (a theory that undermines the idea, espoused by some, that what we find beautiful has been imposed on us by a corrupt cabal of Don Draper types). Exactly which visual features constitute the “aesthetic primitives” that humans innately consider beautiful is still being researched, but there are a few promising candidates. People across diverse cultures and age groups prefer curved shapes to angular ones—a preference that holds constant across things, rooms, patterns, and abstract shapes, as well as one we share with rats, chimps, and gorillas. Humans—like squirrels, crows, and capuchin monkeys—also prefer symmetrical designs to asymmetrical ones, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, we prefer colors (like blue) that we strongly associate with pleasant things (like clean water), while we dislike colors (like brown) that we strongly associate with things we avoid (like feces).
  • Today we hail Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as art and dismiss a needlepoint pillow that says “NAP QUEEN” as lowly “craft”—certainly not the sort of thing we should stare at in museums, waiting to feel transformed. Yet the notion that fine art exists in a special category unto itself and moves us more deeply than mere stuff is actually a recent invention, one that’s newer and more European than the cuckoo clock.
  • ancient Greece and Rome. “Art” meant any activity requiring human ingenuity and skill. Training horses, painting vases, passing laws, writing poems, singing songs, sewing clothes, blowing glass: art, art, and more art. While in ancient Egypt the “chief sculptors” who worked on royal tombs enjoyed a privileged status, among the ancient Greeks and Romans, painters and sculptors got lumped in with farmers, cobblers, and other manual workers who did physical labor for a fee—“suppliers of a commodity on par with shoemakers,” writes one archaeologist, describing Greek artists circa the fifth century BCE.
  • One survival-of-the-most-artistic hypothesis contends that art is our version of peacock feathers: An extravagant, frivolous display by which paleolithic humans showed potential mates that they were fit enough to hunt and gather and have time leftover to paint warty pigs. Another theory is that our art-inclined ancestors survived, thrived, and reproduced because making art offered a dress rehearsal for grappling with hostile conditions.
  • The scholar Ellen Dissanayake, who’s dabbled in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and art history, argues that art is a social glue that bonds communities together and thus increases its members’ odds of survival. Also, she thinks the concept of “fine art” is a travesty that’s made us forget that “engaging with the arts is as universal, normal, and obvious in human behavior as sex or parenting.”
  • [Ellen Dissanayake] is for banning the word art altogether on the grounds it’s uselessly vague, and argues we shouldn’t treat art as a thing but as a behavior. Art, she claims, occurs anytime we take ordinary things and transform them into extraordinary experiences through a process she calls “making special.” Making special happens when words turn into poetry, flesh gets painted for a shaman’s ceremony, a B-flat meets a middle G to form the tune in a Peking opera.
  • what if taste was simply an idea to be interrogated? I liked the idea that “good” taste could just mean having tastes that were unpredictable and flexible
  • And here’s the thing: According to the latest theories, our brains are not faithful translators of those impoverished light signals hitting our retinas. The incoming visual data passes through what Rebecca calls a “filter of expectation” in which our brains preemptively dismiss, ignore, sort, classify, and prioritize the raw data even before we get the full picture.
  • Our perception of the world is only a prediction—a hallucination, you might say, shaped by our filters of expectation. And art, Wagemans contends, deliberately messes with those predictions. Artists create images that introduce incongruities, such as a plate of sushi made with eyes instead of fish. Artists defy our expectations, such as by sticking a pearl-clad woman in wrestling helmet inside a padded room. Artists introduce “unfamiliar experiences in an otherwise completely familiar setting,”
  • The glitch that art introduces our brains to is a gift, one that may nudge us to adjust our filters of expectation
  • Our brains evolved into engines for compressing reality and turning it into a trickle. We had to conserve our mental energy so we could spot the predator jumping out of the bushes to eat us. But what happens when we evolve beyond being prey? I’d come to think our brains needed help transforming from trash compactors into microscopes, and that’s where art comes in: a way to fight our instincts to truncate and elide, and, in so doing, to notice more, appreciate more, empathize more. Which is all to say, to experience more. If our lives are the set of experiences that we collect, then art can enable us to literally live more in the same amount of time by uncompressing those experiences. Art is practice for appreciating life,
  • Studies by Braverman and others found that after going through this art-based visual literacy course, medical students who then examined a patient observed more, offered more sophisticated descriptions of what they saw, were better at reading human facial expressions, and tended to make fewer mistakes than did control groups who, say, went to an anatomy lecture or sat through a tutorial on physically examining a patient. NYPD detectives, FBI agents, and Navy SEALs have all since made their own treks to museums to relearn looking by spending time with paintings.
  • Putting art on your walls wasn’t the same as decorating. Buying art also meant helping artists thrive and enlivening your hours on this planet by surrounding yourself with objects that could tweak your humanity.
  • The big galleries supported a winner-take-all model and the fantasy that talent was in short supply. But you could buy a print for $150 at Denny Dimin or spend $10 and get a small sculpture of candy from Spring/Break, where the work jarred loose my filter of expectation more than did anything I saw at the week’s more prestigious fairs. You could take chances for prices like that. You could back a different way of seeing the world—and potentially change your own while you’re at it. Or you could spend nothing: My conversations with artists and gallerists left me with the sense that you could support art just by seeing it and letting it work its magic on you.
  • Beauty, I’d come to think, doesn’t have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn’t have to be something we agree on. Beauty is that moment your mind jumps the curb. Beauty is the instant you sit up and start paying attention. Whatever makes that happen for you can be beautiful. Math equations. Gymnastics. Planes landing. But you have to be open to seeing it. Beauty doesn’t find you. You create beauty by looking for it, and the moment you do find it, stop and pay attention. Beauty is infinite, if you decide it can be, but you may never see it the same way twice.
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Shielded

Posted on May 11, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

Author: Joanna Schwartz

Completed: May 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: This was a somewhat depressing read. I think most people understand that police violate people’s civil rights often and the reasons for that can be debated. Having read news articles about civil rights cases being won, I assumed it was common for some kind of amends to be made (not always, but certainly often). This book shows how untrue that narrative is and all the steps one must go through before the police department ever has consequences, even when everyone agrees rights were violated. It clarifies many aspects of our legal system that have always been murky to me and is worth reading by anyone interested in better understanding how we got to the point where police in this country are untouchable.

Many of these topics also came up in a recent 5-4 Podcast.

Highlights:

  • we must foreground the realities of civil rights litigation when we do. Myths about the dangers of making it too easy to sue police have made a mess of our system. A shared understanding of how officers are shielded from the consequences of their actions, and how those shields leave many victims without a meaningful remedy, must fuel a reimagining of what it means to hold government accountable and what it means to protect and serve.
  • In the summer of 1919, after a seventeen-year-old Black boy’s raft veered into the “whites only” part of Lake Michigan, a white beachgoer pelted him with rocks until he fell off his raft and drowned. Chicago erupted into violence, with Black people suffering the lion’s share of injuries and death. When the Chicago Commission on Race Relations investigated the Chicago riot, they found Black people’s distrust of the police was widespread and well earned; as Maclay Hoyne, Cook County state’s attorney, testified before the commission, police had “shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get.”
  • the Wickersham Commission, to examine the impact of Prohibition on police tactics. Two years later, the commission issued a report called Lawlessness in Law Enforcement that concluded, based on evidence from more than a dozen cities across the country, that “the third degree—that is, the use of physical brutality, or other forms of cruelty, to obtain involuntary confessions or admissions—is widespread.”
  • The Court has justified limitations on Mapp and Miranda in the same way it has justified limitations on Monroe—with concerns that police cannot effectively do their jobs and keep people safe if they must meticulously respect people’s rights.
  • Congress imagined that through the fee-shifting provision in Section 1988, attorneys would be encouraged to bring Section 1983 cases on behalf of plaintiffs acting as “private attorneys general” to vindicate constitutional rights. But, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting Section 1988, attorneys who represent successful plaintiffs are often paid for only a fraction of their time. And if they lose—which happens more often in civil rights cases than in other types of cases—they will be paid nothing at all.
  • As Justice Kennedy explained, “Litigation, though necessary to ensure that officials comply with the law, exacts heavy costs in terms of efficiency and expenditure of valuable time and resources that might otherwise be directed to the proper execution of the work of the Government.” In other words, it was more important to protect Ashcroft and Mueller’s time than it was to investigate Iqbal’s allegations that they had violated the Constitution.
  • There are other civil rights cases that challenge local governments’ conduct—claims, for example, that a police department does not properly train or supervise its officers. A plaintiff will not likely have any evidence about officials’ intentions or local governments’ inner workings until they get to discovery. The heightened pleading requirement puts these civil rights plaintiffs in a bind: they are only allowed discovery if their complaints include evidence supporting their claims, but they need the tools of discovery to access that evidence.
  • Deputy Sylvester pounded on the door so loudly that the neighbor in apartment 115 came out to ask what the commotion was all about. When another deputy explained that they were looking for the owner of the motorcycle, the neighbor said the owner lived in a different building in the apartment complex. A few seconds later, Deputy Sylvester saw the door of apartment 114 opening, glimpsed a gun, and started shooting.
  • After the Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Garner, departments adopted its rule prohibiting deadly force against a person fleeing arrest who was not a threat, and studies found a 16 percent reduction nationwide in fatal police shootings. More recently, Seattle and San Francisco have adopted standards less flexible than Graham and have reported a significant reduction in the number of force incidents without a decrease in officer or community safety.
  • “You shoot me, paralyze me, put me in a nursing home, ruin everything, and I can’t get no type of compensation?” Leaning back in bed, David Collie said, “This ain’t justice.”
  • Pierson v. Ray, got to the Supreme Court in 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court, held that the officers had good-faith immunity under Mississippi law because they thought the arrests were proper, and that that immunity should apply to the Section 1983 claim as well. Chief Justice Warren explained that this qualified immunity from suit was necessary because, otherwise, officers could be held liable when they mistakenly believed the law authorized an arrest.
  • In Baxter v. Bracey, an appeals court granted qualified immunity to officers who released their police dog on a burglary suspect who had surrendered and was sitting down with his hands up. Although a prior court decision had held that it was unconstitutional to release a police dog on a suspect who had surrendered and was lying down, the court in Alexander Baxter’s case granted qualified immunity to the officers because, it held, the prior decision did not clearly establish the unconstitutionality of the officers’ decision to release a police dog on a person who was seated with his hands in the air.
  • Defenders of qualified immunity have not been able to summon a reason why officers who violate the Constitution should be protected from liability simply because a court has not previously ruled nearly identical conduct to be unconstitutional. Instead, the strongest defenses of qualified immunity have been various predictions that the world would be worse off without it. But claims about the need for qualified immunity are unsupported by the facts on the ground.
  • I studied police misconduct settlements and judgments in eighty-one jurisdictions across the country, over a six-year period, and found that officers paid just 0.02 percent of the more than $735 million that plaintiffs received. Officers in only two of the jurisdictions were required to contribute anything to settlements and judgments entered against them; their average payment was $4,194, their median payment was $2,250, and no officer paid more than $25,000. Officers do not need qualified immunity to protect them from bankruptcy when they are sued; local governments almost always pick up the tab.
  • Some believe that those structural forces are part and parcel of having a law enforcement system that grew out of slave patrols, and that it is impossible to have a police apparatus that is disentangled from that racist and violent history. Others view police misconduct less through a historical lens than through an institutional one, bred in the bureaucratic crevices of individual agencies. Either way, it is common wisdom that individual acts of police misconduct can’t be wholly separated from the culture of a department or from leaders who encourage that misconduct or look the other way when it occurs. There may be bad apples, but they often come from rotten trees.
  • Analysis of thousands of qualified immunity decisions revealed that judges appointed by Republican presidents are more likely to grant qualified immunity than judges appointed by Democratic presidents, and judges located in more Republican-leaning regions of the country are more likely to grant qualified immunity. Studies have also found that judges’ personal characteristics may influence their decisions: white judges grant summary judgment to defendants in employment discrimination cases more often than judges of color, and court of appeals judges with daughters are more sympathetic to female plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases than are those without.
  • not all people trust the police, and the demographics of differences of opinion on this point are noteworthy. Gallup’s 2020 poll found that 82 percent of Republicans had confidence in the police, as compared with 28 percent of Democrats. Fifty-six percent of white adults expressed confidence in the police, but only 19 percent of Black adults did.
  • As Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in 1972, When any large and identifiable segment of the community is excluded from jury service, the effect is to remove from the jury room qualities of human nature and varieties of human experience, the range of which is unknown and perhaps unknowable. It is not necessary to assume that the excluded group will consistently vote as a class in order to conclude . . . that its exclusion deprives the jury of a perspective on human events that may have unsuspected importance in any case that may be presented.
  • In the forty-four large jurisdictions, over a six-year period, plaintiffs had received more than $735 million to resolve the police misconduct cases they’d brought. Officers were made to contribute just 0.02 percent of that $735 million. The remaining 99.98 percent of the awards came from the pockets of taxpayers, not police officers. And in the thirty-seven smaller agencies in my study, no officer contributed to any settlement or judgment in a police misconduct case—not one dime. In just two of the forty-four large agencies in my study—Cleveland and New York—could I confirm that officers had personally contributed to a settlement or judgment during the six-year study period: 34 cases (out of 6,887) in New York, and 2 (out of 35) in Cleveland. But, even in these two cities, the likelihood that an officer would be required to make a financial contribution to a settlement or judgment entered against them was remote.
  • officers were more likely to be struck by lightning than pay anything from their pockets in a police misconduct case.
  • In fact, the effect of ballooning police budgets on local governments’ financial stability is a far more pressing budgetary concern than are payouts in Section 1983 cases. In many cities—including Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles—annual police spending amounts to between one-quarter and one-third of general fund expenditures. In these same cities, settlements and judgments in police misconduct suits account for between 0.06 percent and 0.64 percent of general fund expenditures.
  • During the three years of my study, the Chicago Police Department was allocated, on average, about $16.5 million per year for lawsuit payouts. During those three years, plaintiffs in police misconduct suits received more than $52 million per year. When the police department’s litigation fund ran dry—as it did in the first quarter of one of those fiscal years—the police department was not called upon to reduce spending in other areas. Instead, the city council took money from other parts of the city’s budget to make up for the shortfall, often from parts of the budget that were earmarked for the most vulnerable members of the city.
  • Alan Hevesi, wrote to the police commissioner echoing Holtzman’s recommendations. Even when cases are settled, Hevesi wrote, “there is enough evidence collected to convince the City that the plaintiff has a serious case. The police department should analyze these settled claims, and take steps to review the officers’ performance and propensity to commit acts of excessive force.” NYPD officials did not take Holtzman and Hevesi up on their suggestions.
  • The Supreme Court could revisit its decisions in Rizzo and Lyons, and make it easier for individuals to seek injunctive relief that would change police department policies and practices. But, given the near impossibility of that happening anytime soon, local governments should take advantage of the leverage they have to make police departments more attentive to the lawsuits brought against them. A local government can, for example, tie the money to pay settlements and judgments—as well as the defense of these cases—to their law enforcement agency’s budget.
  • research showing that police misconduct lawsuits account for less than 1 percent of local governments’ budgets, while police departments eat up one-quarter to one-third of those budgets.
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Running Around the World (Now with Arduino)

Posted on May 4, 2024 by twsobey

About a decade ago, while running with the Boise Area Runners, I challenged the club to (collectively) run around the world in a year. I set up a Google form where people could input their mileage then gave monthly updates about how far we’d gone. We made it back to Boise in November.

Last summer the idea of running around the world came up again when talking about the Southeast Seattle Schools Fundraising Alliance (SESSFA) Move-a-Thon. This time, another parent was voluntold to create the tracking website which gave me time to plan another event. For the final day of the Move-a-Thon we decided to hosted a jog-a-thon at Dunlap Elementary.

The event was held immediately after school so all students could attend. To connect it to the SESSFA Run Around the World Challenge, we wanted to keep track of how far we collectively ran but obviously couldn’t do that with a website. Luckily, a co-worker had a large red button on his desk that used to make funny noises when you pressed it and I had an Arduino.

We measured the course the kids would run, figured out how many laps it would take to get to different cities in and around Washington, then programmed that into the Arduino to track their progress each time someone pressed the button. Not sure how many students would attend or how far they would be willing to run, there were cities included from 12 laps (2.4 miles) to 2000 laps (400 miles).

After each lap, they would slap the big red button, pause to catch their breath, and start the next lap. We had about 35 runners participate. Some ran only one or two laps while others continued running (with only brief snack breaks) for the entire hour and managed to cover four miles. Collectively, we ran 346 laps for a total of 69.2 miles putting us well past Mt. Rainier and only 5.5 miles shy of the Canadian border and by the end of Move-a-Thon, SESSFA kids had run a total of 32,000 miles, 29% over the goal of getting around the world!

As we started cleaning up after the event, several of the longer distance runners came up to me and asked, “Can we do this again next year?” As someone who likes to run and encourage others to do the same, that may have been the highlight of my week. We can most definitely do it again next year!

Congratulations to all the Dunlap and Rainier View Elementary students who came out and ran. You did amazing!

For anyone interested in doing something similar, but unsure about Arduinos, hopefully this next section will help. If you’re never going to build one, the rest of this will probably be pretty boring.

For this project, I used an Arduino Nano. I wired the LCD screen to it just like we show here. The button was connected between digital pin 8 and a GND pin. You can modify the two arrays at the top of the code with the correct number of laps for the cities you pick. Once you upload it, every button click gets you closer to the next city. Good luck with the project and feel free to comment below, if you have questions.

/*
  Dunlap Running Lap Counter 
  Button connected to Pin 8 and GND.
  Output to 16x2 LCD
*/

#include <LiquidCrystal_I2C.h>      // LCD Library
LiquidCrystal_I2C lcd(0x27, 16, 2);     // LCD Declaration, tell the arduino we're using an LCD at I2C address 0x27, 16 column and 2 rows

const int buttonPin = 8;         // input pin for pushbutton
int previousButtonState = LOW;  // for checking the state of a pushButton
int counter = 0;                 // button push counter

// Next three variables are used for debouncing the push button
unsigned long lastDebounceTime = 0;
unsigned long delayTime = 50;
int counted = 0;

int lapsRequired[] = {12, 23, 36, 58, 102, 168, 229, 250, 375, 440, 504, 525, 620, 667, 759, 912, 1050, 1130, 1215, 1525, 1905, 2000};
char *cities[] = {"Columbia City", "Renton", "Bellevue", "Issaquah", "Tacoma", "JBLM", "Olympia", "Mt Rainier", "Canada", "Ellensburg", "Oregon", "Yakima", "Vancouver", "Portland", "Mt Hood", "Salem", "Corv/Pendleton", "Spokane", "Eugen/Pulman", "Roseburg", "California", "Boise"};

void setup() {
  // make the pushButton pin an input:
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT_PULLUP);

  lcd.init();               // initialize the lcd
  lcd.backlight();
  lcd.setCursor(0, 0);      // move cursor to   (0, 0)
  lcd.print("Laps: ");
  lcd.setCursor(0, 1);
  lcd.print("City: ");
}

void loop() {
  // read the pushbutton:
  int buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
  // if the button state has changed,
  if (buttonState != previousButtonState) {
    lastDebounceTime = millis();
  }

  if (((millis() - lastDebounceTime) > delayTime)
      // and it's currently pressed:
      && (buttonState == LOW) && (counted == 0)) {
    // increment the button counter
    counter++;
    counted = 1;     //Flag used to only count a button push once
    for (int i = 0; i <= 21; i++) {
      if (counter == lapsRequired[i]) {
        lcd.clear();
        lcd.setCursor(0, 1);
        lcd.print("City: ");
        lcd.print(cities[i]);
      }
    }
    lcd.setCursor(0, 0);      // move cursor to   (0, 0)
    lcd.print("Laps: ");        
    lcd.print(counter);
  }

  if (((millis() - lastDebounceTime) > delayTime)
      // and it's currently pressed:
      && (buttonState == HIGH) && (counted == 1)) {
        counted = 0;
      }
  // save the current button state for comparison next time:
  previousButtonState = buttonState;
}
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Mayan Center Village and Dangriga

Posted on April 12, 2024 by twsobey

Just before Avery was born, we had been traveling more with recent trips to the Bahamas and Africa. She went on her first international trip (to Canada) the day after the 2016 Presidential election, when she was about 2 months old. She visited three more countries before all travel stopped in 2020. This year we decided it was time to restart the tradition with a trip to Belize.

Cacao pod split open so the fruit is exposed. Several seeds have been removed
Cacao fruit still in the husk

Our first non-travel day was at the Mayan Center Village on the edge of Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. The two big attractions for us were the wild cats and chocolate so we started the day touring a farm that grows cacao and, it turns out, so many other fruits. The cacao fruit was so good, I was a little surprised it isn’t imported in that form for people to eat. Next we tried cinnamon, star fruit, sugar cane, and a handful of other fruits and spices. The plants were each grown in their own area but not exclusively and not in neat rows. If we were hiking through without a guide, I doubt I would have realized it was a farm and the birds certainly didn’t realize this bounty wasn’t meant for them. We saw hummingbirds and hawks, lots of songbirds, evidence of many woodpeckers, but the highlight was the toucan that decided to natter at us for a few minutes.

Now that we’d seen how cacao was grown, it was time to visit the Mayan chocolate factory to see how it’s processed. Here, the tour starts with… a trip to another local cacao farm to see how it’s grown. I guess we could have researched that a little better but by the end of our second farm tour, we were very familiar with how cacao is grown. Back at the processing center, we heard about fermenting the seeds to improve flavor and got to taste one seed at this stage. I liked it but it was bitter and didn’t really taste of chocolate yet. Next, the seeds were roasted to creates cocoa nibs. These definitely taste like chocolate but felt nothing like it. Then they pulled out the grinding stone and Avery got to work. I thought I’d read somewhere that it takes hours of grinding to get it smooth enough for chocolate bars. We had it ready in about 5 minutes. Then we added a little sugar that was locally grown and some more cocoa butter before scooping it into molds and setting it in the fridge. Five minutes later, we had some amazing mini chocolate bars. It was such an easy process, we’re going to try it again at home. Maybe we’ll start Drowned Chipmunk Chocolates.

Child using a grinding stone to make chocolate
Avery grinding cocoa nibs

For lunch, we found a roadside cafe that catered to locals. Our beers arrived just in for kickoff of the Man City vs Real Madrid game. The owner found out we had lived in England and informed us that we were clearly cheering for Man City… while he was cheering for Madrid. About a dozen of us watched. Four cheered when Man City scored an early goal. The other eight or so cheered more when Madrid scored two in the next 15 minutes. Avery got bored so we decided to leave at half time. We found out later the game ended in a 3-3 draw.

Across from the Mayan chocolate center is a butterfly garden. For a few dollars, you can go inside a large net enclosure with hundreds of butterflies. The owner has been raising butterflies for over 20 years and appears to have 10+ species. Occasionally, when we stopped moving for long enough, one would land on us. Avery loved the idea of a butterfly landing on her… until one was about to, then it instantly turned into a scary bug and she jumped back. No matter how much we reassured her, she kept jumping.

Hand coming in from the left side with a yellow and black butterfly resting in the fingertips
Obviously a scary insect

It had been a busy morning so we went back to our room to rest for a bit before the night walk in Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary to look for the wild cats. As dusk fell, we rode into the park, seeing fireflies along the way. These were different from the East Coast fireflies we saw last summer that blinked. These just stayed on for several seconds or more. We also saw a Fer de Lance, one of the most dangerous snakes in Belize. Luckily, we were still in the truck. As we started the walk the darkness of night enveloped the jungle. Avery had gone back and forward many times on whether she thought a night jungle walk would be amazing or terrifying. Leaving the parking lot, we were tentatively on the amazing side of the divide. Within the first 200m, we crossed over into terrifying. We paused for a minute to see if anything could persuade her back across the invisible line to no avail. I headed back to the parking lot with her on my shoulders watching the fireflies and occasional bat along the way. While we waited at the ranger station with courage builders in hand (this time in the form of Sprite and Oreos), Dom continued on with the guide. They saw kinkajou climbing through the trees before spotting a puma in the bushes beside the trail. Only the head was sticking out with eyes focused on the creatures with the bright lights in the middle of the dark jungle. They watch each other with varying degrees of curiosity on each side.

The next morning it was time to leave the jungle for the islands so we got a ride to Dangriga where a boat would meet us. We arrived early, dropped our bags, and went to explore the town. Avery was in charge of where we went and her first stop was a beach bar with fruit smoothies. She could have stayed there for days.

Young child sucking hard to drink a thick smoothie through a straw
Rediscovering the joy of a cool drink on a hot day

Nearly 90 minutes later, she finally finished her drink and we were off again. We stopped in grocery stores and clothing shops. We even found an art gallery/winery. It wasn’t entirely clear what the wine was made from. Grapes were unlikely. We had heard some wine is made from the juice runoff during the cacao fermentation process so maybe it was that. Either way, he want ~$20 per person to sample it so we kept walking. Avery eventually pointed us towards a bandstand by the shore. We watched the birds and the waves for several minutes before she asked if she could go stand by the water… then put just her toes in… then up to her ankles… then…

Avery, a young child, squatting down in the surf with her hands and skirt getting wet
“Please, just my toes…”

She was soaked and giggling by the time we had to go catch our boat. I think she’s going to love being on the island.

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