Michigan Rock Redux

Thanks to A. for the use of a scanner - I finally can post the image of the rock shaped like the lower peninsula. Here it is in all its plywood and masking tape glory. Since MLive took away my link from the earlier post, here's the text too.



Harris Diehl, of Broomfield Township, Mich., found this rock, in the shape of Michigan's Lower Penninsula, while in his field. Diehl was "just pickin' stone" in one of his family's fields in Isabella County when he stumbled across an unusual rock. Diehl brought it home and decided it could make a good educational display.
The Associated Press


---BROOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) -- Harris Diehl was "just pickin' stone" in one of his family's fields in Isabella County when he stumbled across an unusual rock.

"It looked enough like Michigan so you could recognize it right away," said Diehl, a property manager and sometime developer.

The flat rock is, indeed, shaped like the mitten of the Lower Peninsula. There's the Thumb over to the east, an indentation that looks like Grand Traverse Bay up to the northwest and the curve of the Lake Michigan shoreline south of Ludington is almost duplicated on the piece of glacial stone.

Diehl brought it home and decided it could make a good educational display.

"Rick kind of took over," Diehl said. "He's the artist."

Rick is Diehl's son-in-law Rick Huzzey, a process operator for Dow Corning Corp. in Midland and an amateur artist. With the mini-Michigan bolted and sealed to a sturdy piece of three-quarter-inch marine-grade plywood, Huzzey began the job.

"Here's Hartwick Pines," Huzzey said, pointing to a representation of the famous stand of virgin white pine near Grayling. Painted along the shoreline are "most of the lighthouses" that draw tourists and guide Great Lakes shipping.

Like a map in an atlas, he's painted in the products for which Michigan is famous.

Holland has its tulips. Around Traverse City and the Leelanau Peninsula, he painted grapes and cherries; a couple of sugar beets decorate the Thumb, the state's prime sugar-growing region.

Michigan's manufacturing and retail base isn't forgotten, either. In the Saginaw Valley, Huzzey painted the logos of Dow Chemical Co. and Dow Corning.

In southeastern Michigan, there are the logos of Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler AG and General Motors. The Grand Rapids region is designated with the logo of regional retail giant Meijer.

"All of the major roads in Michigan are there," Huzzey said.

And pointing to a gold star just a little west of the center of the peninsula, he smiled.

"That's our house," he said.

But the Lower Peninsula isn't the entire state, and Diehl began scouring the fields for a companion rock that could represent the Upper Peninsula.

That wasn't easy.

He was searching for a rock that not only had the right shape, but the right color. He finally settled on a chunk of stone that's shaped like the portion of the U.P. east of Marquette.

That's now bolted to the plywood and decorated as well. Diehl added a representation of the Mackinac Bridge, complete with tiny cars, to complete the project.

Around the edges are painted the state flag, fish, stone and other state symbols. Currently, the 250-pound-or-so representation in Michigan stone and plywood hangs in Huzzey's shed, but the family wants more people to see it and learn from it.

"We would like to display the rock in libraries in small communities," Diehl said. "Maybe senior citizen centers."

Even though it's heavy and hard to hang on a wall, the men point to the fact that it's solid on the wall of the shed. Eventually, they'd like to find a permanent home for it in a park, museum or library.

"It's a little bit of everything about Michigan," Huzzey said.

No Coloreds Allowed

My sister instant-messaged me the other day from “Burg,“ the small town in Pennsylvania where she lives with my parents. Seems the rules for the downtown business Christmas decorating contest have changed.

All lights must be white.

Christmas lights have always been a big deal in the small towns of western PA. Stringing them was an annual autumn ritual. Dad would bring the boxes up out of the basement and we’d dance around him as he untangled the lights on the floor in the kitchen. We supervised as he plugged them in to test them - huge, old-fashioned, three-inch-long tapered globes in opaque orange, white, green, red, and blue - and change any burned out bulbs before taking them out to drape them over the spruce in the front yard. We used the same type of lights inside on our live Christmas trees.

On December nights, we’d bundle up in swishy nylon snow pants and pile in the car to tour the neighborhoods. Nearly every house was lit in some way, ranging from a few electric candles in the windows to full-blown, electric-meter-spinning, Santa-threw-up-on-the-house complete encrustation of homes in tiny pink flashing lights (yes, there’s a specific house I have in mind).

As years passed, the big-bulbed lights burned out and were replaced by smaller, safer strands of what the British call “fairy lights.” In short order, these were available in a wide array of colors and styles, so that one house soon became all blue lights, another all red and white, and so forth. In one neighborhood, where the professionals lived (i.e. the high-school teachers and the orthodondist) mostly white lights prevailed. We maintained our tradition of multi-colored strands.

Then, one year, suddenly, all-white was all the rage. It seemed like 75% of the mostly blue-collar, former mining town wanted to emulate those educated people up on Highland Avenue. We were teen-agers by then, and growing more aware of the homogeneity of our hometown. Christmas was definitely the only real winter holiday - Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and solstice were just stories in books put out by uppity academics who think they’re better than us working class folk. There were no black people or Jewish people in town. There were no openly gay people or pagan nature worshippers, or if there were, they certainly didn’t let on. For a few years, there was a family of doctors from India, complete with Hindu gods, but they soon took their sacred cows to other pastures. Being bright and curious, my sister and I started to sense there was something lacking - if not outright wrong - about our little town.

As we slowly drove through the neighborhoods that December, my parents simply didn’t like the look of the all-white decorations, finding them cold and perhaps a little cheerless. But to my sister and me, the white lights took on the symbolic meaning of no diversity, lack of tolerance, failure of imagination, and resistance to changing times.

“No coloreds allowed,” my sister said, and we laughed, but it was, sadly, kind of true.

You have to understand, this is the land time forgot, and when an African-American man did turn up in town last year, the only thing people could comment on was that he looked like football star Jerome Bettis. Sports and gangs are still their main references for men of color.

Now the edict has come down from the office of the community development director that the downtown businesses shall be all white this holiday season. Of course, if a business doesn’t want to participate in the contest, they don’t have to, and can put up a giant blue menorah if they wanted, but I doubt anybody will. Prizes will be awarded, and the dying businesses of this shrinking town need every cent and every scrap of recognition and promotion they can get. My sister reports that plenty of downtown stores are going out of business or are already shuttered, yet the development director continues to spin that things are great and continues to attempt to up-scale and gentrify the town. “It’s like she thinks Burg is the new Palm Springs or something,” my sister said. Only there’s no work, no money, and people are leaving in droves instead of coming to visit.

The area has simply failed to keep up with the pace of modern life, reminiscing about the days when coal when king and perhaps relying too much on a dream of attracting tourists - a solution from the outside rather than from within. The place is stuck in a tar pit of old habits, out-moded social mores, and brain drain.

I wonder if anyone is really fooled by the covering of twinkly, sparkly, misleadlingly-pure white lights.

OMG

I just logged onto Yahoo! and at first glance I thought the picture of Harriet Miers was Barry Manilow.

Huzzah for the Modern Luddite-esque Lifestyle

As someone whose Macintosh studio display is larger than her single, rabbit-eared television set, I was amused by this blog entry and subsequent comments.

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war! - When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
Drive the nations together, who can stand?
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand? O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!

-- William Blake, prologue to King Edward the Fourth

Also performed as "Lullaby" by Loreena McKennitt.

Speaking of Religion...

I finally found something I can believe in.

By Popular Request

The 23rd Qualm

Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war,
I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

There is No Teacher Who Can Teach Anything New

Buy the book instead.

Quote of the Day

Where there is an art, there is a science.
Where there is a science, there is an art.

Art is feeling.
Science is fact.
Feelings must be combined with fact before anything new of value can be created.

Science and art are inseparable in creative development.

-- Alden B. Dow

From the latest newsletter from Flying Sheep Yarns.

She is as in a field a silken tent

Friday cat blogging.
P. in town.
Swarmed by ladybugs on U-M campus.
Train whistle blowing.

Found

That Found guy has gotten some local press lately. Found even came up in conversation with my writers’ group last week, as a source of inspiration for poems, characters, and such. So I decided to pay closer attention to the random bits of flotsam that drift into my path. Here is what I found this week:

• a corroded penny


• a dollar bill


• a handwritten list of places to buy home-brew supplies


• a dead nuthatch with ants crawling out of its eye sockets

The dead bird is the only one I didn’t pick up, though I was tempted, and it would be in my freezer right now if decomposition hadn’t already started. I restricted myself to turning it over with my foot.

I have always had a strange attraction to dead things, even as a child. Perhaps especially as a child. Every shoebox that came into the house wound up buried in the backyard, filled with leaves, grass, and flowers, topped with a deceased chipmunk or defunct sparrow. As I got to be a teenager, I held fewer funerals, but the impulse remained.

After I learned that Percy Bysshe Shelley was cremated on an Italian beach, I wanted to set the little pyres on fire, but never actually did. Perhaps I should have become a chef, arranging quail flambe on beds of exotic greens.

Part of my interest stems from the philosophical pondering that a dead animal induces. Where did that spark of life go? What was it to begin with? If I’m not careful, I can easily lose half a day gazing into the middle distance mulling unanswerable questions.

But mostly I like dead things because they satisfy my earthly curiosity. What does that nuthatch’s bill feel like? Or a squirrel’s tail, or a deer’s tongue? Unless you’re doing scientific research or wildlife rehabilitation, you probably don’t have many chances to find out unless the poor creature’s dead.

Thankfully, I am not alone in this tactile inquisitiveness. At the Field Museum last week, looking up at the bones of Tyrannosaurus rex, my friend leaned towards me with a twinkle in the eye and a whisper, “How fast do you think the guards would be here if we broke the light beam?”

Battin' 1000

Two people today have uttered exactly the same sentence to me: "Don't look for logic." Which is kinda trippy, 'cuz they're the only two people I've actually spoken with today, and talking about totally unrelated topics.

Oh, and don't look for logic from iTunes. It just followed 50 Cent with Patsy Cline.

Come for the Violent Sci-Fi, Stay for the Tranquil Theology

There's a free showing of Blade Runner tonight -- at the Jewel Heart Tibetian Buddhist Center.

Where else but Ann Arbor?