Spontaneous Publicity

Years ago — in 2003 to be exact — while I was first placing online my Brief History of East Lansing, I included among its pages a footnote I privately (and facetiously) refer to as the “Historian’s Lament”:

The difficulty in charting the lives of buildings such as barns and greenhouses lies in their purely utilitarian nature. A spiffy new structure, even a minor one, will often get a bit of fanfare from an historian, especially if it incorporated some important new technology (e.g., the school’s first underground grain silo, as mundane as that may seem today). However, these same historians are much less likely to mention the demise of these. The buildings become run down from heavy use; they are referred to by different names as their purposes change; they make way for much more spectacular edifices. (Or, as in the case of the greenhouses behind Old Horticulture in 1998, they are ignominiously removed to expand a parking lot.) In any case, it becomes a matter of connecting the dots: e.g., botany greenhouses were built in 1867, 1874, and 1892; but which of these, if any, was the greenhouse demolished in 1955 for the Main Library? In the absence of solid facts, one can only strive to avoid spurious assumptions.

Yes, it’s true that the mainline historians will fail to mention the demise of utilitarian buildings.  Kuhn hardly mentioned barns at all.  Lautner went for the larger scope of campus land use (as well as some political machinations) and glossed over the less permanent buildings.  And Beal — heck, Professor Beal seems not to have been able to admit to himself, let alone put into print, that his own Botany Lab had burned to the ground.  He deferred to others for most of what he included in his book about the farm.

However, I have come to discover that I have been looking in completely the wrong place.  Of course these historians are going to give the big picture overview.  Yet just because they find a building too mundane or utilitarian to mention its demise, that’s no reason to assume that no one found it interesting, or described its fate in excruciating detail.

While attempting to determine the date of a photo of the second boiler house, I got to wondering about the barn in the background — and took that as an excuse to attempt, once again, a catalogue of all campus buildings, including the barns and greenhouses.  As I tabulated the maps I had on hand, I noticed in the 1899 map a notation for B. O. Longyear’s house on College Delta, which intrigued me.

It was in a Google search for biographical data on Longyear that I stumbled across an online treasure trove — the Annual Reports of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture of the State of Michigan.  Between Google Books and Internet Archive, nearly a complete set of the reports from 1862 through 1920 are available in several formats. (Unfortunately, the first report, from 1861, still eludes me.)  Since the Board of Agriculture’s principal bailiwick was the Michigan Agricultural College, these reports tell of the school’s inner workings, often in painstaking detail  — all the way down to minutiae like the cost of chalk and erasers for the classrooms.

I had been trying to figure out what all the barns had been in the original compound (around where Ag Hall is now, and east and south of there).  I wanted to know when the newer compound (around where Hannah Administration and the Computer Center are now) was created, and which barns in it were new and which were moves and/or reconstructions. I knew I was getting close when I found the following comment in the Forty-Seventh Annual Report (1908) by Dean of Agriculture (and future President) Robert S. Shaw:

The farm building equipment work is now practically complete and a full description of the regrouping, remodeling, and refitting of the various buildings has been given in Station Bulletin No. 250, with the exception of a manure shed erected since this report was issued.

…a Bulletin that is included, in its entirety, on page 211 of the same Annual Report.

Jackpot!  If I wanted to reconstruct the farm compound exactly as it appeared in 1908, accurate down to the last timber, cupola, fence post, and horse stall, I need look no further than Experiment Station Bulletin No. 250.  Its level of detail is mind-boggling — in part because the College’s intent with its bulletins was to help the state’s farmers learn from the mistakes that the College farm had made.  A map of the old compound as it appeared in 1902 is included, and descriptions and diagrams of each barn’s modifications as it was moved or repurposed to the new compound carry on for some seventy pages in all.

Now, to write the article for my site…

A couple of weeks ago my Lego Star Wars X-Wing took a tumble off its display shelf.  (I suspect a mild earthquake that morning was the culprit.)  The X-Wing dove off the shelf, bounced hard off the printer, and landed, shattered into major constituent pieces, on the floor near the paper shredder.

The destruction was substantial, although luckily the individual pieces (in particular the rare-if-not-unique clear cockpit canopy) were not damaged.  All four wings tore off, and inexplicably the upper left and lower right wings split in two while their equally flimsy counterparts remained intact.  The wingtip laser cannons went flying, one landing on a windowsill behind the curtain where it went undiscovered for more than a week.  The nose section, which is an independent sub-assembly that snaps onto the main fuselage, split into three major parts; while the aft end of the fuselage evidently took a major shot because it was blasted apart, leaving only the rugged, central gearbox assembly that actuates the “S-foil” motion.

Yet, as I arranged the parts on the coffee table for post-crash analysis, I noticed that the R2 unit stayed nestled in its socket, and the cockpit section held together.  In fact, in spite of the considerable disintegration of the X-Wing, I got the impression that this could have been a survivable impact, much like a Formula One racer crumples when it hits the wall but leaves its monocoque safely surrounding the driver.

That led me to this strange notion…

Imagine a rebel pilot, during the attack on the Death Star, who for whatever reason — shot down, engine trouble, pilot error, etc. — crashes into the surface of the space station without dying.  (Obviously, we’re not talking about Porkins here.)  What could that pilot do?

He’s not wearing a pressure suit, so unless he’s carrying some kind of emergency suit he’s stuck in his ship.  Even if he can get out, then what?

There were no search-and-rescue ships sent out along with the rebel fleet, just the thirty X- and Y-Wing attack fighters — each a single-seater with no room for a passenger.

His R2 unit might have rocket packs (R2-D2 did in Episode III) but would that be sufficient to launch them far enough away from the impending blast?  I doubt it.

Otherwise, the pilot’s only option is to sit and wait for the ground beneath him to explode into oblivion.  If any pilots did survive a crash, this is exactly what would have happened, as no pilots survived the battle without flying out of it in their own ships.

What a weird, horrifying thought.

Google reports the following results for the term “search engine”:

1. AltaVista
2. Dogpile
3. Wikipedia’s article on “Web search engine”
4. Yahoo
5. An optimization company
6. A CBC Radio show called “Search Engine”
7—11. More optimization companies
12. Ask.com
13. Live Search
14. Mamma Metasearch
15. Google… UK!

What’s going on here? Are the optimization companies starting to figure out Google’s arcane secrets, or is it that Google’s expanding horizons are distancing it from its search engine roots?

Over the past couple of years, ever since I first heard about it in Walter Adams’ excellent memoir The Test, I have been fascinated with the Michigan State University Group, a technical assistance project that MSU provided to South Vietnam from 1955 to 1962. Part of the reason it intrigued me was the fact that up until two years ago, I had never heard of the project — and I’d even worked for one of the participating MSU departments for seven years (albeit thirty years after the project ended). I know I’m not alone in this; MSU seems perfectly happy to forget it ever happened.

The thing is, all I could find online on the subject was a reprint of the Ramparts article (“The University on the Make”) that had generated such controversy and campus uproar. In reading John Ernst’s even-handed 1998 history Forging A Fateful Alliance, and more recently Scigliano and Fox’s “official” 1965 overview Technical Assistance in Vietnam, I could see how one-sided the Ramparts article was. Yes, it raised some valid questions about the project, its motivations, and its CIA connection. But it did so by deliberately ignoring any positive benefit that MSUG might have had for the people of Vietnam.

This hardly seemed fair to me. After all, the people who had initiated and participated in MSUG had done so with (mostly) good intentions. That the results were less than stellar was pretty much par for the course in that era of overseas technical projects run by American universities, as Adams and Garraty so deftly illustrated in their book Is The World Our Campus? (1960).

Most people are unlikely to do as I did and take out interlibrary loans of dusty, seldom-used, sun-faded volumes from such far-flung locales as Southern Illinois University and the former Northeastern Illinois State College (as one book’s stamp reads).  For them, the sum total of MSUG history on the Internet was a possibly spurious, certainly unsubstantiated tale of cloak-and-dagger nefariousness. History is written by the victors, and in this case the victors were the conspiracy theorists.

I’m not trying to defend the project. Diem was a complete bastard, the U.S. was wrong for backing him at all (much less as long as we did), and MSU managed to piss away a lot of its intellectual capital and new-found respectability by playing along. But the University’s motives were not 100% craven, and MSUG was not merely a CIA front.

So, to provide a more even rendition of the history to a wider audience, I wrote an article for Wikipedia. (My other, more personal, motivation was that it allowed me to finally get the story out of my head, where it had been bouncing around without a proper audience for months.) Before posting it, I ran it past my wife, who called it “tough love” for my alma mater; and one of my closest friends, who suggested I run it past my dad, who remains active in the University community.

Dad was very supportive: not only did he purchase and send me another book on the subject, but he also contacted a fellow retired professor who had run the MSU international programs office for many years. (This professor begged off the question by reminding Dad that he had started in that role several years after the end of MSUG, belying the fact that he had of course worked closely with nearly everyone involved. This may be seen as an indication of how the subject remains a sore spot with the MSU administration.) The professor read the article and offered only minor copy edits and a few vague suggestions, and said he thought I should submit the article to a magazine or scholarly journal for publication. That was a pretty clear sign that I had nailed it.

And now, a digression into Wikipedia minutiae…

With no red flags waving, I posted the article just after noon UTC on March 26. I added a few redirect pages and also incorporated links to it in several articles that mentioned (or should have mentioned) the project: Ngo Dinh Diem, John A. Hannah, and Operation Passage to Freedom among them.

It soon was noticed by a user with a vast Wikipedia résumé on South Vietnam, Blnguyen, aka YellowMonkey, who praised it and kindly offered assistance in polishing it up for Featured Article status. He (I assume it’s a he) made some minor improvements but otherwise left it well enough alone. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any sources for related photos either, so I’m still trying to figure out if the image of Fishel and Diem I scanned from Ernst’s book can be used.

The other thing I did that day was to self-nominate the article for Wikipedia’s “Did You Know?” feature. DYK has only a five-day window for eligibility, meaning that nominally the hook could go up on the main page any time through the 31st of March, or maybe the 1st of April (or, not at all). For the next several days, I watched it closely.

The DYK template has a minimum refresh interval of six hours, but as I watched it over the past week, it generally had a refresh interval of closer to 7½ or 8 hours, or about three new lists per day. It was pretty easy to follow, even though checking on some updates meant stopping by the computer after a 4 a.m. trip to the head. Thing was, the DYK nomination list is usually backlogged, so the stuff that appears is almost always the five-day-old hooks. This meant I should have expected to see my DYK, if it was chosen, around the 1st.

Except of course the 1st was April Fools’ Day, and all the DYK hooks were jokey twists on reality. So everything got delayed by a day. The first DYK update went up promptly at 00:01 UTC, 2 April, signifying the official end of April Fools’ Day (not that that abated the attempts to edit the Oldsmobile page, but that’s a different story).

The next DYK went up at 06:02, exactly 1 minute after the refresh window opened. And lo and behold, there was my hook.

Or, a facsimile of my hook. Although it exceeded the 200-word recommended limit by a handful, I had offered up:

…that the Michigan State University Group, which gave technical assistance in public and police administration to the government of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1962, provided cover for the CIA?

What appeared was:

…that Michigan State University, which gave technical assistance to South Vietnam from 1955 to 1962, provided cover for the CIA?

In other words,

…that the Michigan State University Group, which gave technical assistance in public and police administration to the government of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1962, provided cover for the CIA?

By the way, the edits and inclusion of my hook in DYK were done by my new acquaintance, Blnguyen. I suppose “in public and police administration” was simultaneously too detailed and not explicative enough. Pulling “the government of” was a good bit of clean-up, since the contract was with the government but the assistance was, at least in intent, given to the country — i.e., not just the government, but the people of Vietnam.

Piping the article title into “Michigan State University,” however, shocked me a bit. At first I thought my trouble with the piping is that it implies, at first glance, that “Michigan State University” is a new article, which of course it is not. But the truth is, it was shocking to me because it pulls no punches, and gets to the heart of the matter: MSU itself provided the assistance — and the cover. MSUG was just the instrument of providing. This edit made me face the fact that I’m still a bit uncomfortable about my school’s integrity having been risked on this enterprise, and perhaps subconsciously I was trying to distance MSU from MSUG.

What chagrins me most, though, is the fact that the next DYK update occurred at 12:14, or 6 hours and 12 minutes after the previous. On average, the DYK refresh intervals today (including a relatively laggard one at 18:34) have been merely 11 minutes longer than the required 6-hour minimum. That’s a considerable change from last week: from 3/25 to 3/28 the average interval was an even 8 hours. Clearly they’re working to eliminate some of the backlog by updating as often as possible. (And yet, by 03:00 UTC on 3 April, they were back to an 8 hour interval.)

In short, if we go by Michigan State time (that is, EDT), the DYK hook appeared from 2:02 AM to 8:14 AM on a Wednesday morning. So much for getting it noticed. I’ll have to check stats.grok.se tomorrow to see if the article received any bump in traffic at all.

Follow-up: Well, that was at least a bit impressive. 1 April: 11 reads. 2 April: 1172! (Also bumped up views of my user page on that day to 25, from a pre-posting YTD average of 2.34.) Nevertheless, I still feel that the article didn’t get the audience it deserved from DYK.

Jeopardy! held its annual Teen Tournament a couple of weeks ago. As usual, the contestants were frightfully brainy kids who know way too much for their ages, and as usual I was impressed by their knowledge.

As usual, however, their wagering strategy left much to be desired. I dearly wish that someone would provide the crème-de-la-crème of our high schoolers with some rudimentary tutoring in this subject so that they wouldn’t look like complete fools when placing their bets — even as they answer esoterica that would befuddle most adults.

Here’s an analysis of the 2008 tournament. Although I name names, this is not meant as criticism of the individuals; although they provide the specific examples, they are merely illustrations of the general norm.

To begin, Zia was a complete juggernaut during the quarterfinals. He had 15,600 after the first round, and a neat (and impressive) 50,000 going into the final round. With the second-place guy (Nick) holding 15,600, Zia was a runaway — he needed to wager nothing in order to move on. But I guess he figured “what the heck, might as well see how much I could pile on,” so he tried to bet as much as he safely could.

Except that he goofed on the math. He bet 19,399 instead of 18,399, and when he got it wrong he had 30,601 rather than 31,601. If Nick had bet it all and gotten it right, he would have had 31,600 and won. In that case, Zia would have pulled a Clavin, all for a basic error in subtraction. There’s no reason to make a simple mistake like this, given that contestants have essentially unlimited time to ponder their wagers.

Nick, too, wagered poorly. Qualification for the semifinals includes four wild card spots, and in past years 15,000 has been about the bare minimum needed to have any hope for a wild card (this year, the fourth-place wild card had 13,000, although the median for the four wild cards was 19,600). It turns out that Nick’s 15,800 would have given him the fourth wild card, although he would not have known that at the time. Regardless, betting 5,800 was probably ill-advised, since by getting it wrong he took himself completely out of the wild card race. Unless he was very confident of the final category, he would have been better off leaving it alone.

In the semis, Zia was not so much a juggernaut, but was still a… dreadnought at least. Toward the end of the second round, he had 28,600 when Katie hit the last Daily Double with 10,000 in the bank and 7,200 remaining on the board. She instantly made a fatal error — she never even looked at the scoreboard before declaring her wager. There was no consideration at all in her meager 2,000 bet. Here’s how I would analyze the math involved:

Zia had 28,600. Katie had 10,000. The board had 7,200 left after she hit the Double.

Assume that, all else being equal, the 3 contestants will evenly split the remaining money; therefore, each will take 2,400. This ultimately would give Zia 31,000 and Katie 12,400 (ignoring the 10,000 available to her for the Double). Going into the final, Katie could then muster 24,800 by doubling, leaving her 6,200 short. Half this amount, or 3,100, is the bare minimum she could wager to stay in the game, with the caveat that getting it wrong will take her completely out of the game.

Of course, the above math is a bit too involved to utilize mid-game. So the quick math comes from asking what it would take to get to half the leader’s amount right now, in order to stay in the game. In Katie’s case, this was 28,600 /2 - 10,000 = 4,300.

Basically, she was so far behind, she was really in the position of needing to bet big, and get it right. Fail to do either, and she’s out of the game. She failed to bet big, so even though she got it right, it was game over for her.

Then, in the finals, the soon-to-be champion Rachel nearly pulled a Clavin of her own. She had 26,801 from the first game, and 9,800 going into the second game’s final round, for a stand-pat total of 36,601. Her only competition was “Steve,” who at most would be able to muster 18,400 + 8,400 x 2 = 35,200. Rachel had already won! She could wager up to 1,400 for fun, without risking the victory.

Instead, she bet 5,000. Why, I’ll never know. But if “Steve” had bet the farm — which would have seemed pointless and might have risked losing the second-place prize to Zia (if he hadn’t been crashing and burning) — she might have snatched the championship away from Rachel. Lucky for Rachel, who managed to be the only one with the correct final answer, this would be moot.

Zia, with his balls-to-the-wall wagering style, had the most success when it came to capitalizing on Daily Doubles — even though it ultimately bit him in the behind in the last game, when a True Daily Double smacked of desperation. Still, overall I’d say he had the best attitude: what the heck, take a chance. What do you have to lose?

Garmin wants to become the name everyone thinks of when they think of the Global Positioning System. It’s not the oldest GPS company around — Magellan is 3 years older — and TomTom is bigger in Europe, but Garmin is striving to be the “kleenex” of GPS, while constantly looking for the next great innovation. And though I appreciate the quality of their hardware, I think Garmin needs to spend more time focussing on the limitations of its products, not their innovations.

I got my first Garmin, a GPS II, as a gift from my dad for Christmas 1996. It was terrific. Its display was monochrome and it didn’t contain any maps, so it really amounted to an electronic “bread crumb trail.” But it could track 8 satellites and store 250 waypoints, and after I’d spent some time driving around the suburbs I’d marked dozens of select locations to keep me oriented at all times. It even got me safely home when a lake-effect blizzard shut down the expressway and coated every road sign with opaque sleet, as it kept me on course while I navigated unfamiliar white-out terrain. It was probably pretty expensive at the time — perhaps 2 or 3 times the cost of a similar model today — but it was rugged, easy to use, and convenient to carry.

It’s eleven years old now, but the GPS II still works as well as it ever did… mostly. For some reason it only runs when powered from an external source, and not from batteries. Maybe it finally broke a contact.

In 2002 I bought a brand-new Garmin StreetPilot III, which was awfully pricey at $800. I was wowed by the colour screen, the built-in maps, and the voice directions, but nevertheless it has always been a source of buyers’ remorse for me. There are so many reasons, among them:

• The voice speaker is not internal, it is part of the cigarette lighter power adapter. Even with the built-in hinge, this means a large, ungainly speaker hanging off my dashboard.
• A basic carrying case cost extra — some $25 from a “discount” store. It’s too small to comfortably hold the unit, the speaker/power adapter, and the suction-cup antenna all together, and can’t hold the beanbag dash-top friction mount at all.
• The memory cards were expensive, and Garmin-exclusive. Even the biggest available memory card (128MB) only holds a fraction of the entire U.S. map.

The unit has its quirks, too. One is that it always presumes that you’re driving. It’s a “StreetPilot,” after all. I tried using it on a train one time, and it kept trying to position me along the minor access roads that run parallel to the tracks. I’d appear to zoom along some side road, and it would peter out, and suddenly I’d be on another road, on the other side of the tracks, and so on. There is no way to tell it, “show me exactly where I am, rather than what road you think I’m on.”

The routing calculation can be flawed, too, like most available GPS units. This is mostly the result of faulty map data, but sometimes it just seems like a hole in the logic. More than once it has led me off the highway, up the exit ramp, across the intervening street, and down the entrance ramp to merge onto the highway again. Its choice of routes has more than once led to bitter front seat arguments when it picked the “best” route, but not necessarily the right one.

Worst of all, though, and the reason I have been seriously considering replacement of this unit for the past few years, is this: when the StreetPilot III is busy calculating a route, it suspends updates of the on-screen map. The image freezes, and a little graphic in the corner depicts an on-going route calculation, and until the algorithm is complete or the job is cancelled, that is all that appears on the screen.

Why is this so annoying? Take this example: I’m driving in unfamiliar terrain, trying to get home, and I know the best way to do so is to get on the highway… and I’m guessing the highway is “over there” somewhere. While the GPS unit is busy figuring out how to get me there, I could easily miss a turn that would easily take me onto the highway — one that might be obvious to me if I had the local map available. If I miss the turn, which may well have been the first step along the as-yet-unrevealed route, then the unit will start recalculating — further delaying the map redraw.

The route calculation seems to take forever, too. My friend has a factory-installed navigation system in his Lexus, and it comes up with an answer within just a few seconds. If he misses a turn, it recalculates almost instantly. Why must I wait 30 seconds or more to receive route instruction from my StreetPilot? It’s a specialized tool and that’s its primary purpose!

As an aside, a couple of years ago I went shopping for a new handheld unit, one with pretty much the current basics: at least 12 channels, WAAS-enabled, built-in maps, rugged and waterproof. I wound up buying a Magellan eXplorist 200, rather than one of the Garmin eTrex models, because it was better priced for similar features. The maps are rudimentary (especially beyond U.S. borders), the available satellites schematic is much less intuitive and informative than Garmin’s, and the computer interface port is hidden behind a super-secret panel and requires a specialized connector only available via mail order from Hong Kong. The eXplorist is really just a very slight upgrade to the electronic bread crumb trail of my old, semi-defunct GPS II. But it has served well its basic function, which is to raise my confidence level that no matter where I go, I’ll always be able to find my hotel and the airport. It was indispensable during our 2006 trip to China and Thailand.

Now Garmin has come out with their next generation: nüvi. They have addressed many of the issues I found with the StreetPilot. The unit is much smaller, to the point that it’s truly portable (though not waterproof). Entire U.S. maps are pre-loaded, so I would never find myself in San Francisco trying to get to Napa and finding that I’d deleted the California map to give space to someplace else. The speaker is internal. It accepts SD cards for further memory space. And it has two tracking modes in addition to automotive — cyclist and pedestrian — so it presumably could handle a ride on the train.

And yet. I tried out a nüvi 780 (a nearly-top-of-the-line model) last week. I gave it a bit of a challenge, asking it to find Taylor’s Refresher in St. Helena, CA, even though the unit knew it was sitting in the Garmin store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It found my destination fine — but then it did the exact same thing as the StreetPilot. It suspended map updates as it calculated the route, and it took nearly as long to complete as the old model would have. That one issue is sufficient for me to decide that I will never purchase a current-generation nüvi. Maybe when the next generation comes out.

Even then, it might be doubtful. As much as I’ve benefited from its products in the past, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Garmin might be doomed. And that’s not just because their stock price has gone into the crapper since Christmas.

It’s because with all the convergence in handheld devices, Garmin’s position of being a specialty device manufacturer may have limited scope.

Sure, they’re working hard to find new and novel ways that GPS can enhance everyday life. Their Forerunner wristwatch devices are fantastic for joggers and cyclists. And if I had a hunting dog — heck, if I had a dog period — the Astro collar-mounted dog tracker would be a must-have.

They’re also working hard to cram as many new functions as possible into their automotive systems: Bluetooth, traffic radio receiver, MP3 player, FM transmitter, etc. etc. And this is where we begin to ask the question: when is it no longer a GPS unit?

There’s a rumour afoot that the next-generation Apple iPhone, due out (perhaps) some time later this year, will contain a GPS chip. The rumoured chipset is said to be the SiRFstar III, the very same chip used in many Garmin devices. It can handle 20 channels at once — enough to track every GPS satellite that can possibly be overhead at one time — and its “time to first fix” is said to be exceptional.

Big deal? Perhaps. Consider the iPhone’s data transfer capabilities. Rather than tie up its memory with pre-loaded maps, the iPhone could determine its location using the GPS chip, then download just the detailed map for where it happens to be at that moment. The map would not be last year’s pre-loads, or even the manual download pulled off the Internet last month. It would be the very latest, up-to-the-minute map, with brand-new points of interest, and maybe even current traffic data.

And if it finds itself somewhere new — for example, after a long flight — it would be able to dump the old maps at the user’s will, saving space for a detailed map of the new location.

Apple is planning to make it possible for third-party developers to start building accessories for the iPhone. If Apple doesn’t put a GPS chip in an iPhone soon, Garmin needs to market a plug-in adapter as soon as possible. (TomTom is said to be working on the same.) Otherwise, I don’t think they stand a chance.

I know nothing about Angelo Testa.

I am a railfan and historian, and as such I’m fascinated by the forgotten and defunct rail lines of Chicago. One of these is the Lakewood Branch, a fragment of an old line that runs north from Goose Island. At right is a shot of the Lakewood’s current terminus as it fades out into a pair of cracks in the asphalt of Diversey Avenue. Until recently, the sole remaining customer along this branch was the Peerless Confection Company, manufacturer of a wide assortment of hard candies.

Via this rail line, once or twice a week, Peerless took deliveries of sugar and corn syrup to feed its large, shiny copper kettles. Here is an excellent photo essay describing a delivery in 1999. The travail of running trains through rapidly-gentrifying neighbourhoods is illustrative of how far rail-supplied industry has declined in Chicago.

Chicago was once one of the nation’s biggest candymakers, but decades of ill-advised tariffs designed to protect the American sugar farmer have made it utterly untenable to be a large-scale American confectioner. Peerless was one of Chicago’s last surviving confectioners, but it finally gave up the fight earlier this year.

A few days ago I took a camera to the Peerless factory to see what was left and maybe catch a few interesting shots. I was unprepared for its sheer size. The factory is an entire city block long, running along the east side of Lakewood Avenue south of Diversey Boulevard. The buildings at the south end, along Schubert Avenue, are the oldest part of the factory, a seemingly random assortment of common-brick boxes, painted white, with simple corbeling at the cornices. To the north are a pair of much newer precast-concrete behemoths, utterly nondescript and indistinguishable from each other at ground level.

The land where it stands, at the boundary between Lincoln Park and Lakeview, is prime territory for Chicago’s continuing, go-go, mindlessly unstoppable condo-building boom, so what I found that day was no surprise. The entire factory was surrounded by Jersey barriers, and the walls were spray-painted with fluorescent orange No Parking warnings. A similarly-coloured sticker on the main entrance showed that the city Department of Water Management stopped by on Christmas Eve to remove the building’s fire meter “before demolition,” but found no one home. Across Lakewood to the west, the site of a former baking company building was already a moonscape of brick and concrete rubble. The Peerless factory is doomed. It may already be gone.

Yet what’s this object mounted on the northwest corner of the building? A jumble of red and black square aluminum tubing, perhaps meant to symbolize the crystallization of sugar, with a name in jaunty lowercase cursive displayed below: angelotesta. Surely it’s artwork. Abstract, modern, minimalist, and totally not my style. But artwork none the less.

Who was Angelo Testa? I’d never heard of him. The web has plenty of listings of his works for sale, so I guess he was fairly prolific, but it’s kind of thin in the biographical department. According to the one decent article I found online — notably, available only via Google cache — this sculpture was Testa’s last. In response to a commission from Peerless, Testa designed five different maquettes in the late 1970s before succumbing to cancer in 1984; another artist completed this work and it was installed in 1986. One of the other maquettes, for a design that was not chosen, is up for auction and expected to garner $4000-5000. This implies that, despite my ignorance of him, Angelo Testa was apparently not an unimportant artist. In addition, it seems that most of Testa’s work was in textiles — so a giant metal sculpture is fairly unique in his portfolio.

The wall on which it is mounted is going away — so what’s to happen to Angelo Testa’s final work?

Larry Bell has big, big hops.

Last year, as described in this excellent Chicago Reader article, the Illinois distribution rights to the Bell’s Brewery brands were sold from one distributor to another. This was a perfectly legal transaction made possible by an outmoded but fully active law that protects distributors’ rights over those of the breweries, a law that made sense when all breweries were gigantic megalopolies, but which is utterly skewed when it comes to microbreweries and small craft brewers such as Bell’s.

In meeting with his new distributor, Larry Bell became concerned that his wide variety of brands would not be adequately marketed in Illinois, and that they would get lost among the Very-Big-Name Brands the distributor also carried. Rather than (as he saw it) suffer under this new regime, Bell chose to exit the Illinois market entirely, effectively killing around 10% of his total business (most of it in Chicago) for the sake of principle.

As a Michigander I’m a fan of Bell’s beers. Now an expat living in Chicago, I was saddened by the loss of the opportunity to purchase Bell’s here — a choice I had long taken for granted — but respected Bell for his stand against the distributors, who in my opinion have grown to be as all-powerful as the breweries were back when the Beer Industry Fair Dealing Act was written. In solidarity, I tried to remember to pick up some Bell’s whenever I returned to the Great Lakes State.

Now, a year later, Bell’s has returned to Chicago — sort of. Larry Bell (and his legal team) found a loophole in the law, one that implies new brands — not merely extensions of existing brands, as Heineken found when it tried to bring Heineken Premium Light here under a different distributor — are not subject to prior distribution deals. With that in mind, Bell’s Brewery has created three new brands under a “Kalamazoo” name: Kalamazoo Royal Amber Ale, Kalamazoo Porter, and Kalamazoo IPA. By leaving the Bell’s logo as well as the Bell’s name off the label (except for the “Brewed and bottled by Bell’s Brewery, Inc.” at the bottom), and by using new brewing recipes, they have followed the letter (and perhaps the spirit) of the law and have managed, so far, to bring the Amber Ale into the city via a new distributor.

Of course, the former Bell’s distributor has threatened not only to sue, but to make the legal battle as protracted and expensive for Bell as they can.

This evening we stopped at one of the dozen or so purveyors of Kalamazoo Royal Amber Ale and sampled a couple of pints. It’s very tasty. Heavy on the hops, like most Bell’s creations, making for a somewhat bitter finish that’s close to an IPA. But leading into that is a rich, creamy smoothness that I think is superior to Bell’s standard-issue Amber Ale. It is well worth seeking out. I’m looking forward to Kalamazoo Porter — and especially Kalamazoo IPA — coming to town.

What impresses me most about Larry Bell is not his fearless stance against the distribution syndicates, nor his audacity in creating new brews specifically for the Illinois market.

It’s the fact that the new label for Kalamazoo Royal Amber Ale depicts a close-up shot of the classic 1887 Michigan Central Railroad depot in downtown Kalamazoo. Clearly visible in the shot is the sign over the depot’s main platform which reads, in part, “Kalamazoo — Chicago, 138 miles.”

Big hops.

Okay, tin-foil hat time. I try not to get political, but this just bugs me.

Yesterday the President George W. Bush announced the phone number of a hotline that offers counseling to people who are at risk of losing their homes because they’re caught in the subprime lending crunch. He said the phone number to call was 1-800-xxx-HOPE.

Except the actual number is 1-888-xxx-HOPE.

The 1-800 number is really for the Freedom Christian Academy, which “offers religious-based curriculum for home schooling and is located in Ponder, Texas, northwest of Dallas.” Oops.

A simple mistake? Maybe.

But I think not.

Bush is heavily into grassroots-style, Bible-thumping Christianity. He purports to be from Texas. His “No Child Left Behind” initiative has so screwed up the education system in public schools that expensive private schools and home schooling are the only real options remaining for parents who don’t want their children to grow up to be idiots or terrorists.

One is chance. Two is coincidence. Three means, you should have ducked the first two times.

On Friday morning, 30 November 2007, Amtrak’s Pere Marquette arriving at Chicago from Grand Rapids crashed while passing through Norfolk Southern’s 47th Street freight yard on the south side of town. Preliminary reports suggest that the engineer was speeding in a reduced-speed block and was unable to stop in time when the tail end of an double-stack wellcar train appeared in his path.

This story has so many aspects I want to address, it’s hard to know where to begin.

I’m sure heads will roll for this incident. Probably the engineer, who had only three months of certification. Possibly even some of the other people in the locomotive cab, if they provided distraction or are found to have sat idly by without commenting on the excessive speed of the train.

Yet I think it illustrates more the trouble today with the American passenger rail system. There are dozens of different signal aspects an engineer has to learn, many of them completely different from one railroad to another. The Federal Railroad Administration should have long ago mandated a nationwide unified signaling system — and allocated some federal funds to put it into effect. Meanwhile, our passenger trains are sharing the rails with freight trains. Traffic conflicts will easily delay a passenger train, while the wear and tear of heavy freight trains makes it impossible to run passenger trains at a decent speed along those same tracks.

We should have had a high-speed passenger rail system in this country long ago, and not just the half-assed experiment of the Acela trains on the east coast. I could go on and on about everything that is wrong with the American rail system, but I would rather go into the other thing that bugs me about this story: the bad press coverage.

I wish I could find the article I read a couple of weeks ago, I think in the Chicago Reader, about reporters parroting the version of the story told by officials in press conferences, never bothering to think for themselves or take the time to make a few phone calls and ask a few questions and determine whether maybe, just maybe, the officials are telling the story in a way that puts themselves in the best possible light.

For one thing, many sources reported that there were five people in the locomotive cab at the time of the crash, including a fresh relief crew that had just come on board at Hammond, Indiana. If so, the press failed to mention, this apparently would have been a violation of FRA rules. However, railfans on the Yahoo IlliniRail discussion group noted, among plenty of other complaints about poor press coverage, that there were only three in the cab (a rail foreman, the engineer, and a student engineer) and the relief crew was seated elsewhere in the train.

More significant to me, the local papers were told by the NTSB about a police security camera at the yard that had recorded the crash, but said that the video had not been released to the press. As late as Monday their online sites were echoing this official line, but by mid-afternoon there was breaking news: the video had been posted on the Internet. This was suddenly the hottest topic for the evening news, and every local TV station (and now, both the Sun-Times and Tribune web sites) carried clips of the wreck.

Even today, the latest article on the Tribune web site (dated December 4, by transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch) says, “A Chicago police surveillance video of the crash… made its way onto the Internet on Monday.”

I found the video online, by going to YouTube and typing “Amtrak crash.” Guess what, folks — according to the posting itself, the video was posted on December 1st! Saturday! A day after the crash itself!

“Sorry,” the news outlets must be saying to us. “Weekend. Sleeping.”

One thing no one has yet seen fit to mention is that the time stamp on the video, assuming it’s accurate, shows the crash happened at 11:25 AM CT. According to Amtrak’s schedule, the Pere Marquette was due at Chicago Union Station at 10:30 — so the train was running more than an hour late. (Yes, the numbers show only 55 minutes, but 47th Street is nearly six miles south of CUS. With the intervening yards and slow zones, there’s no way a train could make that run in five minutes.) By the way, the Pere Marquette is a less than four hour trip. By my accounting that means it was more than 25% overdue at CUS.

I’m hoping this will be addressed by the NTSB’s investigation; after all, their vice chairman was quoted as saying, “We will be looking at what the engineer was doing and what he was thinking and … [we’ll] try to get an idea of his mental state at the time he went through the signal.”

Maybe the engineer was thinking, “Last run of the week, time to go home, but I’m late late late… gotta go, gotta go.”

Still, why anyone would cruise into that “box canyon” of moving freight cars, with sight distance severely reduced by the walls of steel on either side, at forty miles per hour, is beyond me. Let the heads roll.

But don’t expect to hear the whole story in the news.