2,000 Gallons of Oil Leak Into Lake Michigan
Plus microfibers, mercury, phosphorus, & more!
January 14, 2015

The Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant near Bridgman, Michigan reported an estimated 2,000 gallon oil leak into Lake Michigan on December 20, 2014. The Homer Simpsons of the nuclear power plant say the two month long cooling system oil leak is not radioactive. The oil leaking power plant is located just north of the 1,439 acre Warren Dunes State Park, Michigan's most-visited park.

Lake Michigan also has microfiber pollution. Microfibers are tiny synthetic fibers that wash and rub off of clothes and boat sails and end up floating in the lake. In 2013, 12% of the lake debris was microfibers, after researchers dragged fine nets through the waters of southern Lake Michigan. The fibers get caught up in the guts of fish and birds and are too small for many water filtration systems. Microfibers have been found in beer. (Homer Simpson panics.)

Lake Michigan also has mercury pollution from the BP refinery in Indiana. BP has been dumping 20 times the mercury they are allowed to dump in Lake Michigan.

Metformin, a type 2 diabetes drug, and other prescription drugs are being found in Lake Michigan.

Last September, the mayors of the Great Lakes cities met in Chicago to discuss the phosphorus problem on the Great Lakes, the world's largest source of "fresh" water (other than the ice caps). Lake Michigan is the source of Chicago's drinking water. It was a phosphorus algae bloom that caused Toledo to stop drinking Lake Erie water on August 2, 2014.

When my hand touches Lake Michigan water, bumps form around my pores -- keratosis pilaris. It goes away by washing my hand with clean water.

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Music Association: Doobie Brothers - Black Water







Happy New Year
January 1, 2015

Green glass bottles lay about, empty of bubbly -- all that's left are the bubbles. The corks and foil turtlenecks lay where they landed along with glasses half empty and half full. The Tv smugly blares:

“This appears to be the coldest Tournament of Roses Parade on record. What you are seeing was a chrysanthemum petal float and is now just a wilted mess, leaving an icy smear on the road. The rose petals on the next float are all brown and withered and ucky. They were beautiful when they were inside. Maybe we should have the next parade inside, don't you agree?”

“My script says, 'I agree.' The next float... isn't that a shame? They tried using hairspray... tons and tons of hairspray to keep the flowers (let's say) fresh, but apparently hairspray doesn't spray in the cold. If we wanted floats looking this way, we could've had the parade in Minnesota.”

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Music Association: Bob Seger - We've Got Tonight






TV review
Christmas Special
December 24, 2014

Have you ever bitten down on a candy cane and found that a piece of peppermint has disappeared because it plastered itself to the surface of your tooth?

I could write a Christmas special about that.

Fifty years ago this month, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer first aired on television. It was written by Romeo Muller (adapting Robert May's story and the Johnny Marks song) but if you think about the plot, you'd swear it was written by a committee.

First there's the reindeer with the nasal deformity, then there's the elf who wants to be a dentist who teams up with a guy with a big pick-axe looking for silver and gold. In a never-viewed scene he strikes peppermint.

The Christmas special is nearly a PSA for dental care in the face of cookies and candy canes.

Hermey, almost Hermes the PSA messenger god, wants to be a dentist. Yukon Cornelius, the Canadian with a pick that he licks, is prospecting for silver for fillings and gold for crowns. Or just silver and gold, the dental message was lost in earlier drafts.

What was the original story for the TV special of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

Rudolph became part of Santa's team, but what about Hermey? Did Hermey originally go sleigh-riding with Santa?

Burl Ives: And while Santa filled the stockings on Christmas Eve, Hermey filled the cavities, taking a big pick-axe to embedded peppermint candy cane.

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Music Association: Johnny Marks - There's Always Tomorrow
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer © 1164 (yes 1164, another decision by committee)






movie review
Hunger Games 3 - Mockingjay  part 1
November 25, 2014

I am a reasonable person.

In the first two Hunger Games movies, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) was the reasonable person. The final screen moment of the second movie (Catching Fire) was a closeup of her face transformed by emotional succession, a rapid evolution of feelings. That moment was one of the best in Catching Fire.

In the third movie, just released this past weekend, Katniss is no longer the voice of reason. Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) is the new voice of reason.

Katniss is suddenly lovesick for Peta. She now believes the lie she helped propagate in the previous two movies that she loves Peta. That's the basis of Hunger Games - Mockingjay part 1. Peta is being held by the capitol, and Katniss -- strong, tough Katniss -- can hardly survive or think straight without him.

This is the first Hunger Games movie without the hunger games, which is fine, but it's also the first one that has Katniss believing the love game was real.

Mockingjay is two hours of lovesick unreasonableness.

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Music Association: Headeast - Since You've Been Gone









No Honor in Racism
November 2, 2014

The protest against the NFL's Washington Redskins had a great turnout and a great day at the University of Minnesota.
The name will change. It's just a matter of time. 






Happy Halloween
October 31, 2014





Native History
October 30, 2014

For years Hopes and Dreams has freely provided a set of timelines of United States history that I made.

I should update them and expand on them, possibly by creating a timeline of world history. But has studying history become... history?

Older scientists and doctors have complained to me of the rising expectations of keeping current with research and changes in their fields. Access to information has become easier, yet experts are expected to read everything that comes along, while it's still hot. The studying not only never ends; it increases. So why study something as accessible as history?

I'm not certain we should. Civics? Absolutely. History? (Shrug.)

Part of the problem I've had in expanding my historical timelines is a matter of values.

Is history about kings? Is it about who left the biggest scar on Earth? Is it about conquerors? Are those our values?

Or is it about cultural understandings, understanding how most people of a time and place lived, sometimes with nature, and leaving without much of a trace.

Think about how environmentally friendly the Native American cultures were, despite being as diverse as their landscape. Native Americans certainly qualify, especially the tribes north of Mexico. My second prior post “The Oldest Of The New World” shows the lack of traces of thousands of years of life prior to the United States.

The Old Copper culture (4000-1500 bce) was the earliest known Native Americans in what is today Michigan. Their area surrounded Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Huron and included lower present day Ontario. In addition to hunting, gathering, and fishing, they were miners, metalworkers, and traders of copper items, mined from Isle Royale and the southern coast of Lake Superior. The copper mining started with gathering float nuggets in soil and streams then turned to the mining of copper sheets from rock fissures. The earliest copper work was chipping like what was done to stone. Learning to take advantage of copper's flexibility, they turned to annealing techniques (alternating heating and hammering) to craft beautiful tools and ornaments.

The Hopewell (200bce-700ce) were one of the four main mound building groups of North America. The Goodall Focus was a Hopewell subgroup covering southwestern Michigan and northwestern Indiana, including the Goodall mounds in Indiana and the Norton (or Converse) mounds in Michigan. You may wonder, why not call it the Norton focus? Most of the forty Norton mounds were destroyed. They were either leveled in 1874 as part of a development by James Converse, trenched through with a water line in 1885, or destroyed by Interstate 196 (later the Gerald R. Ford freeway) in Grand Rapids in 1963. Some of the gutted burial mounds contained earthenware pots and pottery fragments, copper needles, deer bone needles, graystone pipes, pipestone pipes (using catlinite from Pipestone Creek, MI), beetle totems made from antler, and bear canines (illustrations).

Sacred. Burial sites. Would the same people pillage cemeteries and churches? It boggles the mind.

Native American burial mounds have been found in: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas,  Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Ontario. In Minnesota, Native American mounds are in Indian Mounds Park in St. Paul. In and around Lake Minnetonka there were 524 mounds at 48 sites. Today 40 mounds remain at 12 sites. Native American mounds are also found in Bloomington, Eden Prairie, Ottertail, Red Wing, and probably other spots. The largest Native American mound is at Cahokia in Illinois.

The Late Woodland Period (500-1000ce) found hunting with bows and arrows, taking over for spears.

Forest signposts were trees -- big trees with a branch unnaturally outstretched, pointing the way. Forest dwelling Native Americans would pick a spot along a trail, where the trail wasn't easy to follow, and plant a sapling of a large tree with a main branch pointed toward the nearest destination. They would loosely wrap the tree branch to cause it to grow parallel to the ground. The wrap would be only a few feet wide, maybe a piece of deerskin, that would last a few years. After a few years, a scar-free tree would act as a trail marker for generations.

The Mascouten lived in southwestern Michigan (lower peninsula) and were part of the Algonquian languages, which are northeastern tribes but not part of the Iroquoian language family. The Mascouten were attacked with French-traded metal blades and matchlock guns by the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) in the 1630s and the Iroquois in the 1640s. The survivors of the Mascouten were either captured by tribes with European weapons or fled to the Myaamia in Indiana and the Kickapoo in Wisconsin.

The Council of Three Fires was either formed at Michilimackinac in 796ce or they migrated from the northeast sometime after 1400, when the North American continent became colder. By oral tradition, the council had been a tribe traveling the Atlantic coast, around the gulf of the St. Lawrence River, before settling on the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. The Council of Three Fires were the Ojibwe (Chippewa) the older brother - keeper of faith, the Ottawa (Odawa) the middle brother - keeper of trade, and the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) the younger brother - keeper of the fire. All three tribes are language off-shoots of the Algonquian family of languages.

The Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) lived in wickiups, domed houses of arched sapling poles and interwoven mat coverings. Their hunters and warriors used bows and arrows and wooden clubs. They fished using spears, bone fishhooks, and nets of swamp ash and milkweed with stone sinkers. They tapped maple trees with spouts and buckets. Sassafras was an insect repellent. They traveled with birch bark canoes, dugout canoes, toboggans, snowshoes, and beginning in 1755, on horses. Their trails crisscrossed Michigan with multiple trails converging on Michilimackinac and Detroit. The Potawatomi weave is named after them. They were famous for their embroidery and beadwork. They crafted wampum out of white and purple shell beads, possibly adding Lake Michigan crinoids as ready-made wampum beads. They were the keeper of the fire, the hearth, and the Michilimackinac meeting place.

The Bodéwadmi grew beans, peas, squash, melons, corn, wild rice, and tobacco. They boiled fish on the eastern coast of Wisconsin before it was a Friday night event in Door County, Wisconsin. They followed deer mouse prints in the snow to storage stashes of nuts. They made soup from cattail roots, soup from blueberries and wild rice, and soup from milkweed flowers, wild garlic, and lichen. They made pudding from corn and from squash. Maple syrup was a sweetener. Everything in its season, like the Bodéwadmi medicine wheel.

Iroquois war parties chased the Bodéwadmi and other Algonquian language tribes out of Michigan and into Wisconsin during the Beaver Wars of the mid-1600s. The Bodéwadmi spread out in Wisconsin and into Illinois, and were back in the St. Joseph area of southwest Michigan in 1695. During the War of 1812, the Bodéwadmi, siding with the British, attacked a column of soldiers and civilians escaping Fort Dearborn. A Bodéwadmi-French woman, Archange Ouilmette, intervened on behalf of the Americans. As a result, Archange and Antoine Ouilmette were given a reservation in 1829 where Lake Street meets Lake Michigan in what is today, Wilmette, Illinois.

The Treaty of Chicago in 1821 caused the St. Joseph band of Bodéwadmi to surrender a large tract of land in southwest Michigan (nearly all land south of the Grand River) and northwest Indiana. In 1823, the US Supreme Court ruled Native Americans could not own land, except as part of reservations. In 1838, the Bodéwadmi of the Wabash River Valley, Indiana were forcibly removed to Kansas, which killed 41 (mostly children) of the 859. During the following ten years, 600 more died.

Some Bodéwadmi escaped to Canada or Wisconsin. Most intermarried. Many returned to Michigan or moved further west. Chief Leopold of the Pokagon band of Bodéwadmi negotiated to keep his 280 people in southwestern Michigan.

The oral history of the Myaamia (Miami), the Downstream People, says they emerged at Saakiiweeyonki (South Bend, Indiana) where the St. Joseph River empties into Lake Michigan. From Saakiiweeyonki, they spread out along the Waapaahšiki Siipiiwi (Wabash River) from Kiihkayonki (Ft. Wayne, Indiana) to Aciipihkahkionki (Vincennes, Indiana). The Wea tribe's largest village was Ouiatenon on the Waapaahšiki Siipiiwi.

The Myaamia spread to the Maumee River in Indiana and Illinois. They settled north into Wisconsin and Michigan, living along trade routes of rivers of the Lake Michigan basin. They.were on the western shore of Lake Michigan's Green Bay in 1658, Fort St. Joseph (Niles, Michigan) in 1673, and Fort Miami (St. Joseph, Michigan) in 1679-1680. Their language was also a off-shoot of the Algonquian family of languages of the northeast. They lived in wickiups surrounded by fields of corn in summer months and migrated to the prairie in winter. They were like the Bodéwadmi in many ways, except the Miamiak ate their prisoners. Chief Little Turtle ended cannibalism in the late 1700s. On November 9, 1846, the United States divided the Myaamia into the Indiana Miami (148 Myaamia were allowed to stay) and the Western Miami.(taken to Oklahoma).

Sounds and drinks I wrote this while listening to a CD by Carlos Quinche titled “Meditation - Contemporary Native American Music” from 2008. It's wonderful instrumental music. It's great music for contemplation, writing, and peace. Simultaneously, I was drinking tea from the Native American Tea Company. They have six tea blends: Good Medicine (spearmint), Indian Love Tea (ginger), Warrior's Brew (cinnamon), Teepee Dreams (peppermint), Chief's Delight (berry), and Victory Tea (punch). Plus they have a black tea and a green tea. (Box 1266, Aberdeen SD 57402-1266; phone 1-888-291-8517). For a better balance in life, I highly recommend the ones I have tried: green tea, Good Medicine, Indian Love Tea, Chief's Delight, and Teepee Dreams.

I'm not sure how to create any sort of depth, any sort of real values, in a timeline. Maybe it would be best as a blog post about native history.

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Music Association: Carlos Quinche - Ancient Dreams
Drinking Association: Native American Tea Company - Teepee Dreams
Twin Cities Calendar Association: November 2, 2014 - No Honor In Racism Rally (Washington NFL name)










History Schmystery
Sand Dunes & Fossilized Cheerios
October 25, 2014

Take a straw and use it to blow a little pile of sand.

If you blow straight down, the sand scatters. If you blow with water in your mouth, the sand will get wet and won't move much. If you blow from the side, you can cause an escalator effect -- the sand grains bounce up the little sand pile and over the top. Now do that for thousands of years.

Congratulations, you've created a sand dune.

Maybe...You'd need more sand. Your wind was fine.

What you learned was that the wind has to be consistent, from one direction and one angle, no cross purposes, for the thousands of years. And dry. It has to be a dry wind. A wet wind isn't going to do any good. Water shuts down the escalator. Cold shuts down the escalator. Cold temperatures take the slightest bit of moisture on the surface of the sand and freezes the sand together so the dune is frozen in time. Walking on a frozen dune makes the same sound as crunching on tortilla chips, except not as close to your ears.

Wind likes to sort stuff. You can see it at Warren Dunes State Park, Michigan's most visited state park, on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. Look at the sand on Tower Hill, the big, obvious dune by the beach. The grains of sand are fine.

R.A. Bagnold identified sand as any particle between .02 - 1.0 mm in diameter in The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, from 1941. The grains of sand must be light enough in relation to the strength of the wind to be bounced or carried but heavy enough to be dropped off or stopped. Soil particles would keep moving. The squeak of the sand comes from the high quartz content.

Run down to the beach and the sand grains are larger, darker, and heavier. At the water line you'll find sand that is borderline pebbles, actual pebbles, and fossilized Cheerios.

Cheerios were first created in 1941 by General Mills. Cheerios haven't been around long enough to get fossilized, and these aren't really fossilized Cheerios. They are crinoids, little white ringlets of plantlike marine animals that were the dominant life forms of the Silurian period (380-350 million years ago). They are still around today, but these crinoid fossils are most likely from the Silurian. Crinoids are too heavy to be carried by the wind (usually).

For hundreds of millions of years, much of the North American continent was an inland sea, a mega Gulf of Mexico (630-306 million years ago). Seacoasts and ocean coasts make sand. The Great Lakes don't have the tidal forces to make sand to the degree an inland sea would.

How Sand Dunes Are Formed
The recipe for forming sand dunes is:
•  medium-fine sand
•  a strong single direction (One Direction) wind
•  obstacles that stop the sand, like beach grass or a hill of sand. Most of the sand bounces up the sand hill. Some sand gets carried by the wind.

Dry and warm helps.

Cooking time varies by location and conditions. Some dunes like Tower Hill at Warren Dunes are in a funnel-shaped area that may have caused two or more dunes to converge as one.

Historians say that Lake Michigan used to be larger on nearly all sides (except around Warren Dunes), and they call it Lake Chicago. Historians are funny. If they were in Minnesota, they would have a blast continuously renaming all the lakes as the water levels rise and fall.

Some say the dunes were formed when glaciers dumped an accumulation of sand in one spot. Funny people.

There was a time, 9,500 years ago, when Lake Michigan or glacial Lake Chicago or whatever was half drained. At that time there would have been a sand bowl sitting just to the west of where Warren Dunes is today. The sand was formed by the same seas where the crinoids lived. Lake Whatever washed it together and then dried up. That's when the winds took over. They've been working at it ever since.

Remember the description of sand dunes being like escalators? The back edges of dunes are often like cliffs where the sand drops off. In the 1980s, the Warren Dunes staff built a picnic area behind the Tower Hill dune. At the same time, the escalator speed escalated when park rangers began driving over Tower Hill on ATVs.

Steep slopes became less steep, and beach grasses became uprooted. And only a few years later, the dune swallowed up the picnic ground.

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Music Association: Dido - Sand In My Shoes











History Schmystery
The Oldest of the New World
October 24, 2014

It's quantification time: time to put numbers to the statement, North America is “a young continent and an old continent.”