I’ve just spent most of an afternoon scanning the negatives from our Minnesota trip.
I’ve also remembered something cool I forgot to mention in the writeups earlier: Soudan mine isn’t just a tourist exhibit, it’s also a high energy physics lab. They’re building neutrino detectors which they’ll use to try and measure the mass of neutrinos fired from Fermilab in Chicago.
I’ve been invited to test-drive an SUV. As the front of the envelope puts it:
It’s the right of every
American to drive the latest
descendent of the original 4×4.
They’re referring to the Jeep Liberty (sic), a gas-guzzling four ton behemoth that gets 16 miles per gallon. To try to sell it as an “off road” vehicle, they’ve set up a special little course that you can drive it around. Careful perusal of the brochure reveals that the course has a maximum elevation of fifteen feet, which will surely give a nosebleed to the kind of terrified soccer mom who actually drives this kind of vehicle.
When I move my jaw as if yawning, there are strange wet squelching noises in my head. They sound like they are coming from somewhere near my ear. My nose isn’t congested at all, so I’m wondering what’s going on. Maybe it’s some kind of brain parasite, like in “Wrath of Khan”?
Scientists have developed a white mouse that changes to brown when fed a harmless dietary supplement, then changes back to white again.
Could this be the next trend after LCDs and e-ink? The Mouse Display! Granted, at one rodent per pixel that’s an awful lot of mice, and the refresh rate is going to be pretty poor, but wouldn’t it be worth it to have a computer screen with fur you could pet?
Since the age of about 11, I’ve been a fan of Interactive Fiction—also known as “Adventure Games”. If you were using computers in the 80s, you’ll probably remember them: text on a screen, words describing where you were and what you could see. You typed commands, and if you were lucky the computer understood you and said something appropriate.
Then graphics came along, and the text adventure disappeared from the computer games market.
The best text adventures were those written by Infocom. Almost as good were those written by Level 9. I spent many hours writing parsers and text compression code—first for Z80, then 6502, then 68000. I usually got as far as implementing full sentence input and 40% text compression before selling the computer and upgrading to something completely different. So I only ever finished writing one actual game; that was on the TRS-80, and is long lost.
These days the tools for writing professional quality adventures are available for free download. You can play the games on almost anything; even a Palm handheld has more CPU power and RAM than the computers Infocom’s games ran on in the 80s. (Screen size is a bit of a bitch, but so it goes.) There’s been something of a renaissance in the genre as a result; enthusiastic amateurs have written dozens of excellent games.
So, nothing now stands in the way of my completing my second epic adventure game. Well, nothing except… puzzles.
Puzzles are the glue which holds an adventure together. They’re what makes it a game, rather than an extended essay. And while I’ve come up with at least half a dozen viable ideas for an adventure, I can’t seem to flesh out enough puzzles to make it all hang together.
Once again I’m discovering music for the first time, that I missed when it was originally released. This time it’s the Human League’s first album, “Reproduction”, from 1979. If I’d heard it then, it would have blown me away. It’s still pretty amazing today. The version of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” is wonderful—who’d think you could build the song out of so little?
Ely apparently attracts a lot of Birkenstock-wearing nature lovers, and we’d found it comparatively civilized. Vegetarian food had been easy to find, espresso was everywhere, and the local store had even stocked Red Bull. This changed rapidly as we headed west southwest towards the Iron Range and the Minnesotan accents became thicker.
We stopped off at the Soudan mine. Once an active location for deep mining of high grade iron ore, it’s now a museum and scientific laboratory. The museum part consists of a tour of the mine.
I’ve been down a deep mine before—a coal mine in England. (We used to have them before Thatcher.) Soudan was different, though. Because of the stability of the rock, they had simply hollowed out vast caverns which needed no support structure whatsoever. It was almost like being in a big adventure game.
Naturally, the tour included that compulsory part of every mine tour—turning off all the lights and allowing people to experience total darkness, probably for the first time in their lives. We also got to ride a converted ore wagon.
Being so deep underground, the mine stays a consistent (cold) temperature, and is very moist—so it attracts bats. So I also had a couple of close bat experiences. I flinched the first time I saw something flying towards me, but once I worked out it was just a bat, I was fine. As we emerged blinking into the sunlight, we saw where they nest just inside the lip of the pit.
Our next major stop was at Itasca State Park. Lake Itasca (pronounced eye-tass-cuh) is the origin of the Mississippi river. Legend has it that if you cross the river there, you get good luck. It’s harder than it looks; there’s a path of partially-submerged rocks, but the water flows quite quickly, and the rocks are often slippery with algae.
The trees were very tall; it reminded me almost of the Pacific Northwest, although it was sunnier and less damp…
We stayed in Bemidji (rhymes with “squidgy”), home of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. Unfortunately, the good luck we’d had on the rest of the journey meant that there was a lot of accumulated bad luck that needed to be discharged. The process started with heavy rain in Bemidji. I’d been hoping to pet a raccoon at the Paul Bunyan animal world (no, really), but we decided to head back to Minneapolis instead and relax a bit before having dinner with Sara’s family.
The bad luck continued with the flight home, which was delayed two hours. And finally, the taxi back home from the airport broke down in the middle of the highway. Electrical systems died, and the engine wouldn’t start. Another passing taxi stopped, and we moved our stuff to that one for the rest of the journey. I took pity on the driver of the first taxi, and paid him what I remembered the meter having read the last time I’d looked at it. He seemed to be having a hard time believing I wanted to give him money, but I felt he had enough problems to be dealing with without getting stiffed on the fare too.
From News of the Weird:
In April, the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., surgically removed a dead worm from the brain of a woman because, having entered the woman’s body via pork she ate in Mexico and then having died, its carcass was causing her periodic seizures. The operation took six hours and required that the patient be only mildly sedated, in that she needed to keep talking to surgeons to help guide them from point to point in her brain.
[The Times (London), 4-11-01]
Mmm-mmm. Pork chops.
We went on vacation to Minnesota, and returned on Saturday, hence the lack of recent journal updates. Time to rectify the situation…
I’d visited the Gopher State before, but this was the first time I’d been north of Minneapolis. The plan was to head into the northern part of the state, where the woods are thick and the wildlife is plentiful. We weren’t planning to rough it in a tent—there are some limits—but hopefully we’d get to walk in the woods and along the lakeshores.
After a few days in Minneapolis, we headed for Duluth, on the southwest shore of Lake Superior (aka Gitche Gumee). Through lucky timing, Prairie Home Companion was on MPR as we were driving. We don’t listen to it at home much, but somehow it seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the journey.
Duluth is fairly small, and since peak vacation season hadn’t started yet, it was pretty empty too. The local economy has hit the skids now that there’s not as much call to ship iron ore across the lake, and it’s obviously dependent on tourism. We toured the S.S. William A. Irvin, once the flagship ore-carrying boat of the US Steel fleet. We also had to visit the Great Lakes Aquarium, of course, because it has an excellent river otter exhibit…
At the risk of stating the obvious, Lake Superior is big. You could just about fit England into it. It was the first time I’d seen a lake that stretched out beyond the horizon, had tides and waves, and was big enough to lose a 400m long cargo ship in. It was weird—the lake looked like the ocean, except it wasn’t salty and didn’t have seaweed. (Conversely, Sara’s first experience of the ocean was that it was weird, because it looked like a lake, but it was salty and full of seaweed.)
Sitting on the rocks by the lake late one afternoon, we watched the cold mists rolling in onto the land. To my delight, there was a pair of loons fishing just off shore. In spite of numerous visits to Minnesota, I’d not actually managed to see the official state bird before.
Since Minnesota has 10,000 lakes and plenty of swampy ground, the other state bird is the mosquito. I’d done some research before travelling, and discovered that the best safe mosquito repellant is a solution of around 10-35% DEET in a slow-release polymer of some kind. We’d visited REI Minneapolis and picked some up, along with a can of Permethrin for clothing. So, while we saw a lot of really huge mosquitos, we managed to come away without a single bite…
After Duluth, we drove up the north shore of Lake Superior to Split Rock Lighthouse. What can I say? It’s a lighthouse. It has a big rotating fresnel lens, state of the art for its day. It has a foghorn building with two big horns sticking out the front.
Then came the journey I’d been waiting for. We drove up to Ely. If you look at a map, you’ll see that it’s about as far northeast as you can go by road. It’s really rather like “Northern Exposure”—log cabins, lakes, tall trees, and the occasional passing moose. We passed a female moose on the way into town; she just stared at us and carried on munching.
Why did I want to go there? Because Ely is home to the International Wolf Center. Minnesota’s the only state in the USA where wolves aren’t actually endangered, and at the Wolf Center you can get a close look at three great plains wolves and two arctic wolves. The great plains wolves are the kind native to Minnesota; surprisingly, timberwolves aren’t found there. (Someone screwed up when naming the sports team.)
The wolves were really beautiful, and very fluffy—although they were beginning to shed their winter fur. I didn’t get to pet them, but I did get to feel some winter wolf fur (from one that had died of natural causes). It was amazingly soft and silky: guard hairs 4-5cm long, with black bands two thirds of the way up to give the coat its color, and warm white underfur. If you had to sleep outdoors in Minnesota in January, you’d need it.
We ate at a restaurant called the Chocolate Moose. You can see it on the right as you look west on Central and Sheridan. The food was excellent—all made from scratch. I felt I had to try something authentically Minnesotan, so I ate walleye coated with wild rice and pan-fried, on a wild rice pilaf.
Next: The Iron Range…
This is a picture of Filene’s department store, at Downtown Crossing in Boston. I took it because I liked the way the flags were lit up. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but in early afternoon the sun peeks around the corner of the building just enough that to shoppers walking towards the T station, the flags are illuminated from behind with sunlight, while the front of the store remains in shadow. This gives the flags a beautiful translucent glow.
Flags are one of the things that make America different from other countries I’ve visited. Nowhere else do you see so many flags. Well, maybe Red Square on May Day in the old Soviet Union; but in the USA it’s parade day all year round. Walk down any street and you’ll see houses with flags outside.
Of course, in England practically nobody flies a flag outside their house. Partly that’s because the symbol of the Union Flag has become co-opted by football hooligans and other nationalist yahoos—about the most positive image of British flag-waving you’re likely to encounter in everyday life is tanked-up Public Schoolboys from Oxbridge waving it at “Last Night of the Proms”.
Beyond that, however, there’s something about flag waving which is—to an English mind at least—so frightfully vulgar. Flags don’t seem to have quite the same connotation in the USA, which I find interesting. Yes, right-wingers and nationalists and neo-nazis wave the flag—but so do card-carrying liberals.
I think part of the explanation is that America is still undecided about so many things. That includes the question of whether waving the flag represents the first amendment, or possibly the second. Is it celebrating freedom of persecuted minorities, or oppression of other persecuted minorities?
The flag is ubiquitous. It means almost anything—and so it means almost nothing. For me, it quickly became one more piece of visual noise for my brain to filter out as I walked down the street. Still, once in a while some particular accident of location or lighting will push the image into my consciousness, and remind me where I am. And I’ll take a picture.