Month: February 2022

Richmond

Last weekend, both as I write this and per the inaccurate time of publication, my super amazing girlfriend and I went to Richmond. There were several reasons we went to Richmond. I think first and foremost because my super amazing girlfriend read an article about going there by train from DC. The second is that we are both a fan of train travel, so having read about the train thing we of course had to give it a try. The third is the fact that we are both now proud Virginians, so it made sense to see the seat of our government and contemplate yelling at the anti-mask brigade there.

It was a lovely train ride! The most harrowing part was getting to the train via DC’s other train system, the metro, which I love but is suffering from a lack of preventative maintenance right now, the poor thing. But we made it and I read while Krista read and then also knit. Unfortunately the train to Richmond doesn’t deposit you in Richmond but outside of Richmond, and it being lunchtime we hunted for nourishment in the cold and wind-swept plains of the Staples Mills strip malls. We found a Chinese place with quick and reasonably priced fare and, having prepared ourselves both body and soul, caught a ride into the beating heart of Richmond.

Small-W wontons.

During our time in Richmond we did several big things, which I shall detail in the coming weeks as part of my ongoing efforts to milk my life experiences for content. Truly I am the first person to ever do this so please be patient on this journey of discovery together. In this blog post I shall detail some of the smaller things we did in and amongst the big things.

Big-W Wonton

Perhaps the best of these small things was visiting Chop Suey books. Having really hit it out of the park in Charlottesville it is now Our Thing to go to book stores and yarn stores when we go travelling. Unfortunately Richmond has a dearth of yarn stores, which might honestly be the root cause of some of this state’s political troubles, and only a slightly more accessible selection of used book stores. Chop Suey was the only one we wound up at, but quality made up for numbers. The most significant discovery here was made when my super amazing girlfriend reported to me that there was a fake cat on the chair in the children’s section. I went to investigate and marveled at the realistic paws on the fake cat, and then was even more impressed with the realistic simulated breathing, and then utterly floored when the cat moved its head and turned out to be real. The cat was named Wonton and from all accounts completes his myriad duties as a bookstore cat, i.e. napping in various locations, with aplomb.

From the bookstore we proceeded to our hotel, which was fancy enough that the wifi was not free but had a fairly expansive view of the river. Inspired, we got a closer view of the river by proceeding to walk eastbound down the canal along the aptly named canal walk. Richmond has made the walk along the canal very nice, and although it was a bit chilly as we explored (not Richmond’s fault) that meant we had it largely to ourselves. We walked along it for several locks and we both enjoyed spotting various pieces of infrastructure along the way. If you’re a fan of infrastructure they have plenty to see, from flood control walls to train trestles to draw bridges, not including of course the canal itself. A lovely dinner capped off the night and we returned to our hotel to be energized for the following day.

Infrastructurrrrrrrrrrre

We used that energy the following day to once again explore the canal. This time we proceeded westbound, on our way to (not the ruin the surprise) the American Civil War Museum. As picturesque as the eastern portion of the canal is, the western portion tops it for sure. This is not least because there are a lot more pictures, painted on the walls of various former structures. It also deposits you at a bridge you can take across the river, which is a wonderful thing in and of itself but also provides impressive and informative views of the whole area. Once a historian friend of mine told himself off for saying that one location had any more history than another, but in this case you can see a lot of the history in this location via various old bits of (you guessed it) infrastructure. Plus it was sunny and just generally a nice place to be. There were also monuments.

After doing a few more big things, and also there were elaborate waffles at one point, and secret sandwiches at another, we head back out from town, caught our train in the nick of time, and deposited ourselves at the food of the mysterious temple to George Washington that is perhaps Alexandria’s most famous landmark, we walked home to our cat who we assured ourselves missed us very much. We had certainly missed her but it is sometimes nice to get away from the kids and see a new little corner of the world. I suspect we’ll be back to Richmond at some point; there were bookstores we didn’t get to see.

Tink! 2!

Reading this week:

  • The Mute’s Soliloquy by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This post is a special request from my only and most loyal reader, my super amazing girlfriend. You all will recall the wonderful day that I put up my first post about the world’s most wonderful cat, Tink! This is a follow-up post to let you all know how she is doing!

She is doing quite well! Back when I wrote the first post we had only had Tink for like a week or two, so although our love for this perfect cat was pure, it was young. Now, with the fullness of time, we have learned so much about Tink’s personality and habits. Some things haven’t changed. For example, in the last post I waxed on about how much she loves windows. She still loves windows! Her usual habit these days is right after breakfast she hops up onto the windowsill in our bedroom (pictured below, the one above is the office) to watch the birds out there. That is the prime bird-watching location because there is a tree underneath and so there are lots of birds to watch. Having been inspired by none other than the New York Times, we occasionally put cat TV on for her, which she seems to appreciate. The advantage of cat TV is she can watch it from the couch instead of the hard windowsill. She still prefers the windowsill, and gets grumpy if we fail to open the blinds for her, but it’s nice that there are options.

Another thing we’ve done for her is get her some cat grass. She quickly got into the habit of nibbling on every plant in the house, despite the fact that nearly every plant in the house was not good for her. We told her this, but we all know how 6-year-olds can be. So we grew some cat grass and she loves to munch down on that, especially when (in her opinion) dinner is late. She is fed at 7 and 7 every day and so at about 4 in the afternoon she starts making sure to remind us that dinner is in only three hours. To satiate her rapidly diminishing form, she’ll turn to the grass.

Of course we must remember that she is correct and she needs lots of nourishment. This is because she works hard every day. Her rent is only $50 a month but between you and me she has yet to earn it. This is despite all the time she spends on the laptop typing out emails or whatever else it is that working people do. She makes up for it instead by prowling around the apartment ensuring that all is well and that we don’t have to worry about everything, demonstrating her fierce capability to protect us by chasing down toys. She finds the ones with feathers to be particularly vicious and so takes extra delight in demonstrating to us how she would take them down if they ever posed a more substantial threat.

She’s not all work however. Tink knows the value of excellent work-life balance and pursuing hobbies. Here she is napping in her bag full of sewing and knitting projects. She hasn’t made much progress on them because being a cat she doesn’t fundamentally understand clothing, but she is getting there and we make sure to encourage her by petting her and giving her scratches on her perfect little head, the sweet baby angel she is.

One place Tink has made a lot of progress is in becoming a lap cat. Tink, who I will remind you is perfect, is not the world’s most cuddly cat. She enjoys the new perspective on the world getting picked up brings, but once she has verified that all the books in the bookshelf are still in place and there is still no likely way she is going to be able to get up there, she is ready to be put down. However, she has warmed up to the notion of cuddles. You will remember from the last blog post that she liked sitting on pillows. If you make yourself particularly pillow-like, she is, on occasion, willing to climb on top of you and knead you a bit and, if you are very very lucky, settle in. A good alternative to this process we have come up with is to lay down next to her and act like it was her idea the whole time to cuddle. If you catch her in the right mood, she’s delighted to play along:

And with that is my latest update on Tink for you all. We love her very much and miss her whenever we leave the apartment, which still isn’t much frankly, so that isn’t a huge problem for us yet. Though if work ever starts making us come in we might just have to quit our jobs and go live in a cabin in the woods or something just so we can make sure to keep Tink company. She’s worth it.

Ploob

Reading this week:

  • Strategies of Slaves & Women by Marcia Wright
  • Why Buildings Fall Down by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori

As I have referenced elsewhere on this blog, I went to the U.S. Naval Academy. The Academy is a strange and wonderful place, and during my time there I wound up in charge of The LOG magazine. The LOG is a weird little institution. It is at this point over a century old, and a very strange fit for a place like the Naval Academy. It’s a humor magazine, and humor is always at least a little subversive, and it is weird to have a subversive institution at the Naval Academy. When I was in charge, at least, people always wanted us to Fight for the Users, as it were, be underground, stick it to the man, etc., and then I had to explain that we were in fact funded by the Naval Academy and I had to run all the jokes by the Commandant before publication.

I wound up in charge of The LOG mostly by virtue of having shown up to all the meetings and also submitting my articles by the deadline. As I learned when I was in charge of the thing, these are rare and valuable traits in midshipmen (this is not really a dig; midshipmen were busy with academics and stuff all the time and my only real skill in this area was a strong ethic of avoiding work), and so I became the anointed successor. I did not do a good job! I have reflected long and hard on my failings and I learned a lot from the experience, which is actually the point of every Naval Academy experience, so maybe I was in some way very successful. But a positive trait I will grant myself here is a passion for the institution and history of The LOG.

One of my favorite things to do between classes when, again, I was avoiding work, was to go to Nimitz Library and peruse old copies of The LOG, every one of which (except for a banned one) they had on file. This is a remarkable little window into Naval Academy life because who are we truly, as a society, but our jokes? Reading old copies of The LOG was really the quickest way to get into the minds of all the midshipmen that had come before you and realize they also complained about the food.

One time I had just sent to the printers an issue which included a cartoon of a laundry machine. At the Academy you sent your laundry out to be done by the Academy’s central laundry service (in my day they also had washing machines you could use, or people brought it all home on Christmas vacation to ask their mothers to do it). The cartoon was the imagined machine that did the laundry, replete with stations that added weird stains to your shirts, poked holes in your socks, lost your underwear, and returned to you someone else’s laundry entirely. After hitting send that day I walked over to the library and, I swear, picked a random issue of The LOG off the shelf, opened up to a random page, and discovered, right there in an issue dating from the 1950s or so a cartoon of the machines in the laundry service that added weird stains to your shirts, poked holes in your socks, lost your underwear, and then returned to you someone else’s laundry entirely. Clearly, nothing ever really changed.

Which brings us to Ploob! While my super amazing girlfriend and I were in Charlottesville one of our many activities was visiting used bookstores, which is where I found this particular gem. Despite my recently professed expertise in all things The LOG, I was unfamiliar with the character of Ploob. I will quote from the book:

The character of Ploob was originated by Midshipman Thomas A. Hamil of the Class of 1952. While still a Plebe himself, Hamil found time to laugh at some of the problems with which he was confronted. Taking out his pen, he rapidly sketched a ‘typical’ Fourth Classman in the meshes of ‘the System’ which baffles many and yet has so successfully indoctrinated young men from all walks of life into the intricacies of Navy procedure. Hamil sent his sketches to the undergraduate bi-weekly [Ed note: in my day it was monthly at best] publication of the Academy, ‘The LOG.’

The character continued after Hamil graduated and the book I picked up is a collection of those cartoons up through approximately 1957, when it was published. When I spotted this book I immediately knew I had to have it for the fun artifact it was, a window into the Naval Academy of the 1950s and also the Naval Academy of forever and always. And so I wanted to present to you, dear readers, some of my favorite cartoons from the book, first ones that struck me particularly and then a bunch more presented as a gallery:

This cartoon I liked because it is a prescient prediction of my mom giving me this same advice and me taking it just as seriously as Ploob.
This one I like because the goat is cute.
This one I like because I was a chemistry major.
And this one I like because it shows how things HAVE changed. Or so I hear. My plebe company gave an upper classman the brick while I was there. The ritual is like this: a Midshipman is spotted going home with a woman who has been deemed ‘ugly,’ i.e. a ‘brick.’ The plebes then, in our case bedecked in our hoodies and sweatpants and with a lot of chanting and suspense, throw said upperclassman into their shower along with the brick and turn it on, much to their embarrassment and frankly to the embarrassment of society as a whole who should have moved on from this sexist bullshit by now (at the time I thought it was quite a lot of fun). When I went to the Naval Academy it was about 15% women, but now it is a whopping 30% women, and I am told the sexism has died down a LOT. I’ll be happy when we get it to about 85% women. Honestly, crewing a ship doesn’t typically require a lot of upper body strength, and most of the women I went to the Academy with could kick my ass anyways.

And now the rest (I could go on about each and every one of them but suffice it to say that each one captures the Naval Academy experience perfectly and timelessly):

Annie B. Hore

On the left is Annie from the frontispiece of her book (published 1886), while on the right is a picture c. 1881 from Meyer Family memorabilia, published in an article by Dr. G. Rex Meyer.

Reading this week:

  • Tanganyika: Eleven Years in Central Africa by Edward Coode Hore
  • The Road to Tanganyika edited by James McCarthy
  • Brazza, A Life for Africa by Maria Petringa

One of the interesting parts lately of transcribing the Chronicle is going through the book reviews. It was here I discovered the existence of the book To Lake Tanganyika in a Bath Chair, written by one Annie B. Hore.

I had not given a whole lot of thought to Annie until this point, and that is really an unforgiveable and glaring oversight on my part. She was born on April 8th, 1853 as Annie Boyle Gribbon, the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Annie enters our narrative when she married Edward Coode Hore on March 29th, 1881, while he was on his first home leave after becoming a missionary on the London Missionary Society’s Central African Mission.

I have been trying to dig up information on Annie and besides what I get from the Chronicle, a lot of what I will present here is from a thorough biography of Captain Hore written by Dr. G. Rex Meyer and published in Church Heritage. Dr. Meyer is first cousin twice removed of Annie. It was of course very foolish of me to overlook Annie because she does of course pop up all the time in the Chronicle, albeit it only ever as “Mrs. Hore.”

She was a remarkable woman. This was of course 1881 in Victorian-era England, and if you were a vibrant, outgoing woman and dedicated Christian and wanted to see the world and spread the message of Jesus you were pretty much out of luck, unless you got yourself married to a missionary (I am ignoring the moral quandary of missionary work here). As she says in her writing, she married Edward not in spite of his missionary work but as an enthusiastic partner of it. And so, eleven months after they were married she gave birth to their son Jack (February 1882), and five months after that (July 1882) she found boarded along with her husband and infant son the steamer Quetta bound for Zanzibar.

The act of getting from England to Lake Tanganyika is the story that comprises her book, To Lake Tanganyika in a Bath Chair (a “bath chair” here is like a wheelchair). It was not easy! They started one overland caravan but had to turn back when Annie got sick. She returned to England and then the next time she tried to go to the Lake it was via Lake Malawi (then Nyasa). They had to turn back from that due to fighting along the route, and so they began once again on the overland route. The wheels of the bath chair were not very effective, so it was essentially converted to a palanquin, and it was on the shoulders of 16 porters (though only two at once) that she travelled to Lake Tanganyika, becoming the first European woman to do so. She also thus became the first woman to join the Central African mission and started their first school, a school for girls.

I very much recommend a read of Annie’s book. Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to find. Unlike her husband’s book it only received a single edition. However, thanks once again to the Yale Library, I was able to obtain a copy and spent two who days transcribing it for the benefit of the internet and the world. Please find it below. I think the book is very witty, and Edward claiming that they should just get a move on down the road is channeling the exact same energy my dad has whenever he is on a roadtrip. It is also a unique look into fairly early European travel into Africa from the perspective of someone who is not a militaristic white dude. (When the Chronicle reviewed her book in January 1887, they overall recommended it, but noted that the introduction and conclusion by “E.W.” “does not add much to the value of the book, and is disfigured by some glaring inaccuracies,” which is true, but also that “the portraits of Mrs. Hore and ‘Jack’ are not pleasing likenesses, which is whack and shows the value of certain kinds of people’s opinions.)

Annie’s route, included in her book.

Once in place on Kavala Island, Annie threw herself into missionary work and excelled at it. It was a little slow going as first, as she and Jack were recovering from illness, but she soon started a school for girls, which in turn inspired Edward to finally start a school for boys. From Edward himself: “I may say I have worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., for months past, and it is certainly as master of works that I have gained [Chief] Kavala’s admiration; but the center and strength of our powerful influence doubtless lay in the arrival and presence of my wife and child, and its resulting details in Mrs. Hore’s girls’ school.”

The Hores returned to England from Central Africa for the last time in October 1888. When I read the Chronicle I am astonished that the missionaries would take their children into Central Africa, given the high mortality rate of missionaries there. But for the Hores, although their son Jack survived the rigors of caravan travel and spent his childhood on Kavala Island, it was upon their return to England that he fell ill and died in London in April of 1889. According to deceasedonline.com, he is buried in Camden (search “Hore” and “1889”).

In August of 1890, however, Annie gave birth to a daughter, Joan, and in 1894 the Hores moved to Australia where Edward continued to work for the London Missionary Society for a time. Annie had relatives in Australia, and in his article Dr. Meyer notes that “[Edward] was dour, grey and humorless; a personality in sharp contrast to that of his wife Annie who, while a devout Christian, had a great sense of humor and an ebullient personality and who was loved and admired by all who knew her. When Edward and Annie Hore visited the Meyer [Annie’s cousins] family in Sydney, which they did frequently after 1890, Edward, with his difficult personality, was ‘tolerated’ for the sake of his wife, who was popular and always welcomed.” Dr. Meyer also notes that, in helping fundraise for the Society, Annie’s “contributions were extensive and greatly appreciated… Annie Hore conducted many meetings and gave informal talks, mainly to women’s groups.”

When Edward finally left the Society for good, they settled in Tasmania where they ran a small farm. This farm, again according to Dr. Meyer, was not successful for a long time, but eventually matured into a productive if modest estate and when they sold it provided sufficient funds for a final retirement. Annie and Edward were respected members of the community. After suffering a stroke, however, Edward died in 1912. Annie outlived him by four days short of ten years, with both buried in the Cornelian Bay Cemetery in Hobart, Tasmania. Her epitaph reads “Missionary.”

To Lake Tanganyika in a Bath ChairDownload

Click to access to-lake-tanganyika-in-a-bath-chair.pdf

Notes on this transcription: I have made some effort to proofread this transcription. However, I have maintained several of the book’s typos while contributing some of my own, and which is which is an exercise for the reader. I have included the best scans I could of Annie’s portrait, Jack’s portrait, and the map of her route. The book includes a map of Lake Tanganyika which is the same map prepared by Captain Hore that can be found in a variety of places, including here. I have also tried to put the pdf together in a fairly pleasing way but there was only so far I was able to go.