Hey, remember these? Zener cards, for testing ESP. Wow, these look cool. How come we don't see these designs more often? Maybe these would be a good needlepoint pattern; I could make coasters.

I PREDICT THAT WHEN I PICK UP MY BEER THE WAVY LINES WILL BE REVEALED.
Sorry! This isn't your lucky day! *BZZZT*

Tikaro Interactive work took me to Port Jersey yesterday. Port Jersey, where the corrugated steel containers are stacked in enormous rusty ziggurats halfway to the sky. Port Jersey, East Coast home of the beloved boxcar alligator. Port Jersey, where brand-new Mercedes cars with tinted windows and empty license-plate frames roll off the ship in an orderly line.

Just a lane away, separated by a ten foot wire fence, beat-up SUVs with no license plates are rolling the other direction, onto another ship. There's nothing orderly about THAT line: Kenyan guys in knee-length T-shirts shout angrily at Eastern European guys with tracksuits and buzz cuts, both gesticulating wildly while clutching cellphones. It's not really what you imagine when you think of a busy wharf -- for one thing, it's 99% asphalt and wire, and only 1% crumbling brick buildings (and 0% tarry barrels.) But it's exotic in its own way, that's for sure.

I'll attempt to break down the reality of Port Jersey and how it differs from my boyhood expectations, based mostly on Hornblower books and pirate fiction:

Imaginary Pirate Wharf	Port Jersey
Watch caps, muscular forearms, and tattoos	Knee-length T-shirts, enormous potbellies, and shaved heads
Tarry barrels, guarded by wizened men with crooked daggers	Blue igloo coolers, guarded by eleven-year-old kids in folding chairs and hoodie sweatshirts
Stacks of iron chests swaddled up in tarry netting	Sky-high pyramids of corrugated steel containers
Reek of salt water, mud and fish	Reek of salt water, mud and diesel exhaust
Grog bars on every corner	Aluminum lunch vans every 500 yards
Cobblestones and brick	Asphalt and wire fence
Stern-looking English marines with truncheons	Stern-looking entrance-booth guards with blue jackets, walkie-talkies, and clipboards
Dray horses	Twelve-foot forklifts
Cutlasses	Cellphones
Terrifying scowls	Terrifying scowls

I was delighted to find, though, that a lot of the language is still the same from that day to this, and so in the course of work I'm having to look up lots of nautical terms like "drayage" and "lading", and calculating how much pirate insurance costs. And to determine inspection percentage rates, which is the number of sacks of flour in a hundred we have to cut open with bayonets, to see if the caliph has tried to hide sand inside instead. OKAY THERE ARE NO BAYONETS, but all in all it's a pretty fun analogue.

UPDATE: Ooh, here's a really nice panorama taken from the spot I visited. Can you see the cruise ship in the background?

I'm very pleased to report that Tikaro Interactive Programmer Will Ronco competed at the Iron Man Lake Placid yesterday, and came in fifth. FIFTH! This was after Will and his coach had decided to try for a top-thirty finish in this race.

Will was so happy after crossing the finish line, that they put his face up on the 2008 race results page. He's also mentioned above the fold in the main coverage. Here he is having his Victory Thrash:



This means that Will is now qualified for the world championship in Hawaii this October. I'm thrilled and proud, but not surprised. Will is a hell of a hard worker, and has a tremendously cheerful, upbeat, and determined attitude. You can see some less ecstatically-happy finish pictures on Will's Blog.

Congratulations, Will!

On a purely selfish note, may I recommend hiring a triathelete as a programmer? Will works in three "chunks" during the day, breaking for a morning and an afternoon workout. It's actually amazingly productive, since he always seems to have fresh brain when he's sitting at the keyboard, and it gives me some "stripes" of time during the day when I'm at the keyboard and he's not. That's surprisingly useful when you're trying to write documentation for what should be done next, to know that the other person isn't forging ahead doing stuff RIGHT NOW that might be contravening the instructions you're writing. Plus, between my early-morning EDT start time, and his late-aftertoon MST finish time, we cover a fair amount of the clock between us. It works out great.

When Kenn Munk and I were working on the logo for Tikaro Interactive, we had to reluctantly put aside a bunch of concepts that were totally awesome, like a lightning bolt... ON FIRE! And a demon hand clutching a banner that said "TIKARO", and other stuff that would look GREAT carved in ballpoint pen on the cover of a denim-bound three-ring notebook.

Some other ones that I really liked were coming across as too steampunk (and therefore too dated) for an interactive shop. But I missed those designs. When were were all done with the company logo, I asked Kenn to go ahead and make one that was totally and unapologetically "Unhinged Victorian inventor" that I could use on my blog. This is the result.

I really like how Kenn cut the gear so that it looks like a laurel wreath and also like wings.

This logo makes me want to get INCREDIBLY muscular, then get the top-hat-and-gear tattooed all the way across my chest. And fight shirtless in the streets, then dance, of course.

Dear West Chester friends and neighbors:

Do you remember the period of your life, starting at about age nine and lasting until about age now, when you were cynically skeptical of all the magic in the world, but secretly really wanted to believe in it? Watch any group of cub scouts walking through a haunted house, their words dripping with scorn: "THAT'S not a real spider web." "THAT'S not a real mummy!"

I think the heat in this scorn comes from disappointment. These kids' critical faculties have developed to the point where they can start to see behind the scenes, and they realize that most of the wonderful things they thought were real are, in fact, fabrications. And that's a painful, painful process. Every one of those cub scouts is secretly wishing that they'll turn out to be wrong, and that the haunted house will turn out to be real. In other words, they're mourning the loss of magic in the world.

Imagine, for instance, that a sealed letter arrives at your house on a dark and stormy night, detailing a legal battle that has been tied up in the courts for almost THREE HUNDRED YEARS, concerning William Penn's land grant, his embezzling steward Philip Ford, and William's lackwit, gadabout son William Junior, who after getting expelled from the new Commonwealth for drunken brawling, moved to England and started a scheme with Lord Fairfax to recover treasure sent to the bottom of the caribbean by his grandfather, Admiral Sir William Penn. Imagine that the Quakers in Barbados have found this treasure. Imagine learning that YOUR VERY OWN great-great grandparents secretly smuggled some of this Quaker treasure up here to Chester County, and that it's interred somewhere around the county seat.

Okay, are you imagining that? Well, how would you feel if, after an amazing adventure involving piecing fragments of documentation out of the back of family portraits, you found the spot mentioned in the treasure map you've carefully pieced together, only to find that the ground had BEEN RECENTLY DISTURBED, and something had OBVIOUSLY BEEN PLANTED THERE? I'll tell you how you'd feel. You'd feel like Santa Claus had kicked you right in the solar plexus. You'd feel like the Easter Bunny had pulled off his fuzzy head, revealing a sweaty dude chomping on a cigar. And the guy with the cigar IS LAUGHING AT YOU.

That is why I wish to embark on the West Chester Buried Pirate Treasure Project. Here's Phase I:

• Assemble a sizable amount of plausible pirate treasure, to include items like: silver-plated candlesticks, pearl necklaces, tiaras, costume jewelry, doubloons, and handfuls of glittering rubies and emeralds. All treasure will be plausible to a suspicious kid (no plastic, all "made in china" marks carefully filed off.")
• Find or construct a suitable round-top treasure chest, divide the treasure into packets, sew the treasure into oilcloth sacks and seal the seams with tar, and lock them in the chest using multiple locks (necessitating multiple keys).
• Locate a suitable location (I have a great one in mind), and
• BURY THE TREASURE six feet deep. We're talking four adults, four shovels, four hours. The real deal.

The final step in the plan? WAIT AT LEAST A YEAR. It is of the absolute, utter, most crucial importance that when our various children manage to unravel the Mystery of Penn's Treasure, and when they at last arrive at the spot referenced in the map, that the spot where we all begin to dig is pristine earth covered in vegetation.

Kids cannot imagine waiting a year to do anything. If it's covered with grass, man, it's been there since the Pleistocene.

So what do you think? Who would like to volunteer their ancestors to become a retroactive part of the Secret Guild of Penn's Treasure-Keepers? It doesn't matter if your family hasn't been living in Chester County for 300 years, there are plenty of plausible-enough ways to get your ancestors involved: "As it turns out, great-great-great grandma was an investor in the first East India expedition that Sir Admiral William Penn founded, and so she naturally gained a share of the prize money, which was then stolen..." "Well, as you know, great-great-great-great uncle Ezra was a cabin boy in Lord Fairfax's flagship..." "Hey, did you know that every generation of our family up to Grandpa were savage Caribbean pirates?"

We can hammer out the details of the backstory later (by the way, William Penn's ties to privateers and, sunken treasure? Quakers' ties to the Caribbean? Embezzlement of dizzying sums? ALL TRUE.) For right now, we just have to get that treasure into the ground and start the grass growing over it. I'm thinking that each family involved could commission a Pirate Portrait of their ancestor, and we'll seal a key into the frame of each portrait. Will the kids get suspicious that the Pirate Portrait may be done in a style not exactly common in the early 1700s? Maybe. But when I bring down a GENUINE* Buried Pirate Treasure expert from the Museum of Natural History in NYC to be present at the digging up of the treasure? NOSKEPTICISM WILL BE ABLE TO WITHSTAND US. It's okay if the kids aren't 100% convinced, but we are going to blow their little MINDS, man.

So: Who's with me? Who's in? Leave your message in the comments! I'm thinking we can fit ten families' worth of treasure into a fair-sized chest. That's ten oilskin packets, each sewn shut and sealed with tar. We'll have to do this under conditions of UTMOST SECRECY. Don't discuss this at the dinner table in front of little ears! In fact, I will delete this post after we've gotten everyone signed up. For kids savvy enough to find this post in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I'm sorry you had to find out finally and unequivocally that the treasure was planted. Bear in mind that we're doing it because it's important to always be unsure if maybe there really IS a cave with a pirate ship in it right under your feet.

UPDATE: McGlinch sent this picture of a stack of Pirate Golf Trophies in his mom's basement. Excellent, this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Imagine these holding up a pile of rubies and emeralds and what-have you:

Kate, Lydia, and I drove up to Maine this weekend for my uncle Bob's memorial service. Uncle Bob Baldwin was the oldest of my banjo-playing uncles. He died of a brain tumor this past year, and I miss him very much. His shape note group was there, and let me tell you, if you're in an old Maine church with plaster walls among the trees, and this group of gray-haired, grim-faced*, suspender-wearing Mainers stands up, and they open their books and there's just enough time to think "boy, this is probably going to be emotional" and WHAM they open their mouths and this haunting, ethereal, beautiful harmony just fills the space and I'm crying like a baby.

I'm writing in the flip tone of a blogger, here, but that shape-note singing is just SO UNBELIEVABLY METAPHORICAL and powerful. That crack on the O.C. about "This American Life" -- "Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are?" is funny because it's true, of course, but the reality is that there is no such thing as ordinary people, not really, and when you have a group of completely normal-looking grandparent-type people stand up and weave that kind of ethereal, powerful music that at the same time is grounded in community... well, damn, I can't believe I didn't bring a handkerchief.

I was very glad indeed to see my cousins, and Lydia got to visit her grandma, and Kate got to ride the Icthyopter in Belfast:

IPhone iPhone iPhone, iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone. iPhone iPhone iPhone? iPhone! iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone -- iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone.

iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPHOOOOOOONNNNNNE!

iPhone? iPhone!

TWO. POINT. OH.

UPDATE, from the Short Hills Mall on my way to meet my client: ouch. And I didn't realize it got worse: double ouch. I need some kind of picture of Veblen giving me a wedgie or something. Here, lemme just make one:

A Flickr user called the MOL Container Lines mascot the "Boxcar Alligator", which I think is a great name -- even though (or especially because) that gator is really a sailor. A sailor on the rails has a Coxey's Army vibe. Which is only enhanced because it seem like the gator is being replaced by the blue "MOL in a box" logo.

Anyhow, the boxcar alligator is coming right along! Here's a closeup of his green head (and white teeth, if you squint):

The story so far (all links go to Flickr):

UPDATE: Aha! Here's where the stickers on the side of shipping containers come from; Ocean Shine Decal Industries Ltd. I'd love to have a boxcar alligator container decal set, but what would I put it on? I don't think the sidecar is big enough. Maybe I'll have to wait until I can buy a 20' used steel container to use as a Wendy house. Oh, and it looks like they do computer-cut vinyl painting stencil masks, which is exactly the same as temporary airbrush tattoo-ing, only different.

I liked the X-fin control planes on the USS Albacore in Portsmouth, NH, so much that I asked my friend Kenn Munk to make an Albacore X-Fin Growmone, with a Tikaro Interactive logo on it:



I think it looks awesome, and makes it just that crucial bit easier to imagine that I actually own a badass submarine. However, Guerilla Drive-In projectionist and submarine veteran Subewl pointed this out:

"Gentlemen, gentlemen... bubbles? What we have here is a failure to understand tactics. Bubbles is cavitation... is noise... equals a torpedo up the rear."

Whoops! That's on the short list of places I don't want a torpedo. Thanks for the advice, Eric!

Anyhow, you can get a glimpse of the new Tikaro Interactive company logo (also by Kenn Munk), there on the fin. It's intended to evoke a gear and a pixel. There's also some bristle-block, some virus, and some harbor mine mixed in there. Plus the letter "Y". I like how the gear teeth break the perspective a little, and I especially like the square "chop" that Kenn put it in. I've already ordered the rubber stamp and made some tattoo stencils.

I love this logo. As a bonuse the "gearxel" works as a stencil, and I could easily imagine it roughly spray-painted on the side of a Syd Mead flying dumpster — it has a "futuristic dystopian heavy industry zaibatsu" look, and if I'm a sucker for anything it's futuristic dystoptian heavy industry zaibatsu.

What do you think? You can see the logo on Flickr here.

In 1950 (or thereabouts), Kate's cousin Bob McIlvaine and his wife Jane bought the Downingtown Archive, a small newspaper with a decidedly local beat. A Downingtown resident remembers "...the only world news they ever printed was VE and VJ day! Graduations, marriages, births, deaths and town happenings were eagerly awaited every Thursday. I don't believe there was a person living in the area who didn't get printed up in the Archive!"

Jane and Bob were diligent and creative marketers -- each subscription represented a chance to win a new car. They hid a subscriber's name in an ad somewhere in the paper each week, giving that subscriber a dollar off that merchant (result: all subscribers scanned all the ads carefully.) They ran on old photo on the front page every week, seeing which reader could be first to correctly identify the baby, or building, pictured in it.

Bob sold a story about the Archive to the Saturday Evening Post, earning enough for a shiny new Studebaker with elegant stagecoach-style yellow wheels. This so impressed my dad as a boy (one story, one shiny new Studebaker!!) that my dad immediately decided on a career in journalism.

Jane wrote a book about the Archive called "It Happens Every Thursday." You can't get it at Amazon, but you can sometimes find a copy at Baldwin's Book Barn, and every McIlvaine cousin has a copy stashed away somewhere. The movie rights were bought by Universal as a vehicle for Loretta Young, and the movie based on the book was released in 1953.

For five years, I've been trying to find a print of the movie. It's not out on DVD, or VHS. I tried sending letters to Universal and to the Museum of Television and Radio, but no luck. But then Nicole Valentine gets interested, calls up her old friends at Turner, and he opines that Swank might have it, and there it is, hiding right under my nose all along.

I ordered the (one and only) print from Lois, the nice woman who sends all the movies out for the Guerilla Drive-In. At a McIlvaine family barbecue over the weekend, we threaded it up on the 16MM projector and watched it. I grabbed just a few moments of the movie. Here's the scene where the "identify this old picture" bit backfires -- Bob and Jane accidentally publish a picture of the town's slate-gabled House of Ill Repute, and the brash madam comes in to take them to task:



That's followed by a brief bit of Frank Capra at the end of the film, where Jane makes a rousing speech about the role of smalltown papers in God's Great America, and shames the crusty town council. Incidentally, the movie replaces Downingtown, PA with the fictional town of Eden, California, and "McIlvaine" has been replaced with "MacAvoy." There's a great collection of crusty printers with a heart of gold, crusty farmers with a heart of gold, etc, plus a happy ending.

I'm not sure how much of the movie is true, and how much is kinda-sorta true (did Bob really try to seed the clouds with dry ice to bring rain?) It wouldn't surprise me, much: Bob went on to a distinguished career as a diplomat, and Kate has fond memories of him still delivering (not receiving, mind you, delivering) Meals on Wheels in his eighties. On a bicycle.

I wonder if there'd be much interest in town in having a screening at the Chester County Historical Society Cultural Center. Is anyone outside the McIlvaine family interested in seeing the movie?

UPDATE: I just skimmed the book again, and yes: it's all true. Cloud seeding, dry ice, torential rain just as the plane is about to take off? Check, check, check. I'd forgotten what a great book it is: "plucky, hard-working country editor" is the next genre over from "plucky, hard-working country vet", and I especially like the closing paragraph:

Now, whenever I get discouraged, I wonder why imperfect country editors should expect more than we get from those around us. And I remember what Fisher Ames wrote. "Monarchy is like a splendid ship with all sails set. It moves majestically on, then it hits a rock and sinks forever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water."

And, on a country weekly, damn it, your feet are always in the water. Often as not, it's hot. But we haven't sunk yet.