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| There's an upcoming U-M talk on �Ethics and the Display of Human Embryo Specimens� that examines the recent pressure museums have come under to remove their displays of preserved fetuses and embryos. Some argue that with things like the Visible Human, we don't need the so-called "wet tissue" displays, a dubious argument. Huh? October? Is it still a problem? Don't kids live there? Isn't he opening himself up to a huge lawsuit by residents? EXCERPT: "[Builder] Richard Kirk said after touring Depot Town, he decided to design the complex to preserve some of the area's railroad and manufacturing flavor. In addition to the smokestack, the building's architecture will include design elements such as structural steel pieces and entry features that are reminiscent of a train depot." Ducky. Except our old depot was wood. That's why it burned down. Oh well. Inside the two-story brick farmhouse, period-dressed docents ranging in age from 9 to old age detailed the Christmas preparations that would have been going on in each elaborately recreated room. Highlights: a chair chamber pot, consisting of a rocking chair with a removeable circular panel in the seat and a removeable box below for effluvia. Quite the charming item to have next to one's bed in the sweltering summer. Y. also saw a huge cookstove that made the drafty December kitchen hot. Here we sampled delicious bean soup cooking on the stove. We also learned why bedroom ceramic chamber pot lids bore crocheted doily lid covers: to muffle the lid-rattle when using one, so as not to wake one's numerous brothers and sisters in the same bedroom. Chamber pots were big on the tour. There was also a working loom creating rag rug fabric, and an ingenious cabinet in the kitchen antechamber where dishes were washed. The cabinet formed the wall between the antechamber and the dining room. Its many cutlery drawers and plate cabinets could be opened from both the antechamber side and the dining room side. So you could wash and put away the dishes in the antechamber and later, when setting the table in the dining room, simply access the cutlery and all from the dining room side. On site is also an earlier, 1830s log cabin. One 20' by 15' room. No privacy. A fire burned in the fireplace over which hung the cooking hook, with a Dutch oven nearby. Two dainty bonneted ladies offered us cider and detailed the workings of the cooking hook from which teakettles and stewpots were hung. Spoiled, Ypsidixit doesn't particularly want to sleep on a biting-mite-filled chicken-feather mattress over a noisy cornshuck mattress over an uncomfortable rope net platform strung on a bedframe, but other than that she rather longed to live in either the late-1800s farmhouse or even the rude 1830s pioneer cabin. 4 photos in "comments". --The old-timey white house with the pointy windows across the street and just to the west of the old high school is the site of a former murder. One former border reported seeing the shadowy figure of a man there, who closed her bedroom door one night. --A certain proprietor of a local coffee shop was touring the upstairs floor, a former boardinghouse, of T.C. Speakeasy's one day at the invitation of a lady connected with T. C.'s. He reported the place as very eerie and creepy and experienced the weird and unwelcome feeling of someone punching him in the gut. He made tracks. --T. C.'s Speakeasy was a real speakeasy, or blind pig, during Prohibition. Reportedly the cops turned a blind eye, perhaps having some incentive or other to do so. (via A.F.). It's official. If I may be excused for naming names, first Ypsidweller reveals, in the "paper mill" comment thread (below) that he used to have a copy of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" hanging up in his bathroom and enjoyed looking at it. I privately thought that this was a rather beautiful thing to learn about Ypsidweller. Then today Lynne reminisces about seeing one of her favorite paintings, Bosch's "Death of the Miser." Ypsidixit has long loved the engrossing and disturbing paintings of Breugel's protege, and has a book of Bosch's works. So it's a quorum. Bosch lives on in Ypsi. I know, gay marriage was already illegal due to the 1996 statuatory ban. But now the gay-marriage ban is protected from a possible overturn from them activist judges, thanks to this new protective shield of legalized hate. At any rate, thanks for playing, Charity; better luck next time. It's curious that the heyday of these smaller "Corners"-type communities seems to be the couple of decades after the Civil War. By the time you look at the 1915 map, they're all long gone. I wonder why. Early county settler John Geddes, who lived near Pebbles Corners, noted in a blog entry of February 12, 1859: "Rachel Savage died about Six O'Clock A.M. Disease, a hard cold. She was born Nov. 8th 1773. She was buried next day in Pebbles burial ground." There's an interesting little extra tidbit I put in "comments"--a little note scribbled on the map in the Textile Road area. The tiny writing says "not xxx for swamp and thicket." If anyone can read it, that would be fabulous. GHOST TOWNS OF WASHTENAW COUNTY: While poring over her new plat maps (whee!), Ypsidixit, astonished, noted the appearance and disappearance of a new ghost town, the hamlet of Carpenter's Corners, at Carpenter Rd. (!) and Packard in the northeast tip of Pittsfield Township. Carpenter's Corners appears as a named community only on the 1864 plat map [pictured]. It promptly disappears from subsequent plats, although Carpenter descendants hold the land till 1915, when the land's sold. The rise and fall of Carpenter's Corners, and the story of early 19th-century Washtenaw County pioneer Ezra Carpenter, may be viewed in a time-lapse plat-map slide show in "comments." Luckily the kids see right through this politically correct nonsense. Pioneer honor society committee leader Chris Jennings said "I'm African-American, so I feel it's racist." The lower GPA, Jennings says, shows "we're not a strong enough community and district to include minorities the right way." Pioneer honor society VP Eric Liao said of administrators' desire to "increase the diversity" of the club, "You're not helping that problem, you're just covering it up." Not to mention the rather racist and outdated assumption that just because someone has a different skin color or ethnic-sounding name they are some exotic "diverse" being and not just another born-and-bred suburban kid like everyone else. This beautiful, graceful 1886 church could be yours--yes, yours--for a mere $425,000. Start your own church starring Reverend You, chop it up into condos for the thriving community of, um, Willis [sound of crickets] or open a restaurant to siphon off jaded Pickle Barrel diners. Lots of possibilities here. History of the Willis Church, and more local churches for sale. (via A.F.). Two examples are the amendments giving the vote to African-Americans and, later, to women. Amendment 15, giving the vote to African-Americans, was ratified by a majority of the 37 extant states in 1870, quite a while, actually, after the War. Holdout states that ratified later: Texas later in 1870; New Jersey 1871; Delaware 1901; Oregon 1959; California 1962; Kentucky 1976; Tennessee 1997. Another interesting example is Amendment 19, giving women the right to vote. Ratified in 1920 by a majority of the 48 extant states [Arizona was the last Continental state to join the Union in 1912; Alaska and Hawaii followed in 1959]. Holdout states (lots of them--a wonder it passed): Connecticut later in 1920; Vermont 1921; Delaware 1923; Maryland 1941; Virginia 1952; Alabama 1953; Florida 1969; South Carolina 1969; Georgia 1970; Louisiana 1970; North Carolina 1971; and Mississippi 1984. What conclusions can we draw from this interesting mini-pile of data? Leiterman has a preliminary hearing in Washtenaw County Thursday, Dec. 2, and will eventually be tried here. "Investigators have refused to reveal their evidence against him. Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie also refused to discuss any specifics of the case. "It will all become clear in time," Mackie said. This news made the world's best paper, across the pond. This story's a couple days old; apologies if you've heard it already. Ypsidixit is a tad confused. She'd thought the main construction would be taking place on the northwest side. That's why they saved the chimney and all. Right now there's just piles of earth there and a bunch of white sticks stuck in the ground. Perhaps that's Phase 2? This story reveals that EMU entered this deal without fully hashing out all the legal details, which suggests that the developers will be in a good position to make a deal to their advantage once the apartments are built. Last objection: the apartments will be pricier than the norm around town. Not a selling point for EMU students, who aren't as well-heeled as their U-M counterparts. All in all, this project doesn't seem terribly well thought-out. [photo copyright Eastern Echo] "Accident" introduces a high-level DC human rights advocate who learns that her ex has been detained for alleged crimes against humanity in the Liberian civil war. Neff says, "This book is, in a way, a reflection of so many conversations I've had with students from Africa who come to Eastern...[t]hey never truly feel assimilated, yet they are usually the most highly motivated and goal-oriented students." She'll be discussing it and signing copies at the Whittaker Road library this Thursday at 7. A big crowd turned up last time she spoke there, so interested parties should go early. Reviews and chapter excerpt. This elegant, lucid 120-page essay examines the development of mechanical timekeeping devices in Europe. At first so inaccurate they had to be constantly corrected with the help of sundials, large mechanical public clocks became village status symbols in the mid-1300s, hugely expensive to build and maintain, and widely derided for their inaccuracy. Cipolla details such fascinating tidbits as the ancient clepsydra (water clock), and the eventual horological application of the then-novel gears and wheels of post-10th-century European milling technology. Readers also learn about the former Japanese system of six hours of day and six of night, which hours expand and contract as daytime lengthens and shrinks with the seasons, and about the pivotal role of the much-vaunted "verge escapement with foliot" [scroll down 1/4] invention, which converts a linear motion to a back-and-forth motion that may be used to measure time. Worth buying for its bibliography alone, this work stimulates all sorts of reflections about time and its role in past and modern culture. DESCRIPTOR: "This site is the mouthpiece for a group of soldiers who are fighting in a war they oppose for a president they didn't elect while the petrochemical complex turns the blood of their fallen comrades into oil." EXCERPT: "During the course of this war, I have occasionally asked a random lieutenant or a captain if he at any time has even browsed through Che Guevara�s Guerrilla Warfare. Almost half of them admit that they have not. This I find to be amazing! Here we have many years of guerrilla warfare ahead of us and our military�s leadership seems dangerously unaware of what it all means!� Called the Russian Diary of Anne Frank, this horrific memoir details one 12-year-old Russian boy's memories of barely surviving WW II in Kiev. Babi Yar is a ravine in Kiev that the invading Germans sealed off and used as an execution camp for around 200,000 Russian Jews, Ukranian civilians, Poles, Roma, and other prisoners whose bodies gradually filled the chasm. Leave it at that. The brutality and suffering and sometimes almost unreadable horror of that place were unknown to Russia and to the West until the 1966 serial publication of Babi Yar in a Moscow magazine and the following book version. It caused a sensation. "We dare not forget those cries [of war victims], both because such things are unforgettable and because the problems of the Babi Yars hang over mankind like a black cloud. Nobody knows what technical forms they will assume in the future, or what names will be given to the new Buchenwalds, Hiroshimas, and other horrors, still hidden from us but awaiting their hour. "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today. "Looking at our yesterday, we think of tomorrow. Life is the dearest thing we have. We ought to protect it. "Fascism, violence and war must end and be recalled only in books about the past. "Finishing one such book, I wish you peace!" --Anatoly Kuznetsov. This was the momentous first time Y.'s A.F. met the family, and with his friendly and funny manner he predictably charmed everyone, (just as he's charmed the wary, fiercely independent Ypsidixit, though she'd never admit it.) There isn't anything I'd be more thankful for than to spend such a warm time with family and have the gratifying opportunity to feed beloved people a wealth of good homemade food. I hope your holiday was as good. When four English soldiers became trapped behind enemy lines as WW I swept across France, residents of tiny Villeret village decided to hide them "in the open" by disguising them as villagers...for two years. Private Robert Digby fell in love with town belle Claire Dessenne, and fathered a child with her. Macintyre embeds this forgotten historical footnote in a rich description of the family rivalries, personalities, and everyday life in insular Villaret. The village portrait is in turn embedded in a wider-canvas description of the ravaged countryside and the at times complicated relationships among the occupying Germans and occupied French. Thus framed, the tenderness between Digby and Dessenne, and Digby's eventual betrayal by a villager, transcends a wartime love story to become a stark and timeless drama of crucial moral choices, both valorous and craven, in the face of harsh extremity. The book came about after MacIntyre's visit to the village to report for the Paris Times on a dedication ceremony for a plaque honoring four English soldiers executed by German firing squad. The assignment underwhelmed him till an old lady in a wheelchair buttonholed him to reveal that she was the daughter of one of the Englishmen. Result: this gripping story salvaged from what MacIntyre calls "the very tip of living memory." "The journals and letters written by men like Hudson and Juet, along with the accounts preserved by the English East India Company, form an invaluable record of the first European contact with native tribes. Much rarer are the records of what the natives thought of the unshaven English mariners who pitched up on their shores. Hudson's arrival at Manhattan [in 1609] is the exception, a result of the work undertaken by a diligent American missionary called Reverend John Heckewelder. In January 1801, [just as Rawsonville was being settled] almost two centuries after the Half Moon dropped anchor on Manhattan's western shoreline...[Heckewelder] was surprised to learn that Hudson's arrival had long ago entered tribal lore. Learning that the story had been handed down from father to son, but was nowhere written down, Heckewelder reached for his notebook... "'[Hudson distributed alcohol upon landing as a gesture of friendship]...and the whole assembly [of native people] soon become intoxicated'...tales of the drunkeness that greeted Hudson's arrival persisted among the native Indians until the last century. Indeed, Heckewelder claims that the name Manhattan is derived from the drunkenness that took place there, since the Indian word manahactanienk means 'the island of general intoxication'." --Nathaniel's Nutmeg, by Giles Milton. A LITTLE BACKGROUND: Onyx used to be king cat till the Busacks adopted cute kitten Kai. TODAY'S COLUMN: Onyx sourly writes about secret attempts to get Kai into trouble by telling him to attack the "dead bird" on the table or clamber lumberjack-style up the living room tree and jangle off all the "colored balls" [Onyx, despite a limited vocabulary that lacks such common words as "ornaments," nevertheless is a compelling writer]. Although the complexity of these schemes seems to indicate intelligence, Onyx apparently forgot that Ms. Busack would see today's column, and learn of his secret plots. So I have to wonder about Onyx's grip on reality (how hard can you grip anything with a paw, anyways?) ONE CITIZEN'S APPEAL TO THE COURIER: Ambline [Ambline?] Rawson arrived here in 1825, and a village was platted as Michigan City in 1836, by Mathew Woods, Amasha [Amasha?] Rawson and Abraham Voorhies. The P.O. was named Rawsonville in 1838, but it closed in 1902. Why? Well, although Rawsonville had enough clout in the early 19th century to actually make a bid to be the home of the University of Michigan, the bid fell through. Had it succeeded, the railroad would doubtless have built a depot there, instead of Belleville. It didn't. By 1930, there were no businesses at all in Rawsonville. Now it's a name on a road and on several businesses sprinkled around the area, but no P.O. A community? Or just a memory? Photo of the old Rawsonville schoolhouse in "comments." Did the school board immediately comply with this reasonable request? No. Shame on them! THE QUESTIONS: How would you describe your blog? *I do think everyone should blog, and I especially think more older people should blog. I am interested to know what people who've been around a while think, based on their lifetimes of experiences and thoughts and memories. At any rate, off I go to try and answer these questions without making a fool of myself. Thanks, you sanctimonious idiots. Way to make Ypsi look like a ignorant little provincial hick town with zero understanding of how them newfangled innernets work. Photo gallery in "comments." Detroit-born aviator Charles Lindbergh used the Ypsi airport when he visited the then-U-M president (probably Little) sometime after his famous 1927 flight.
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WATERLOO FARM MUSEUM'S "CHRISTMAS ON THE FARM": Y. and her A.F. spent part of the weekend checking out the evocative recreation of a 19th-century pioneer Christmas. It was beautifully done.
YPSILANTI'S FAVORITE PAINTER IS: 15th & 16th-century Dutch (yay) crackpot genius 
GHOST TOWN OF WASHTENAW COUNTY: PEBBLES CORNERS. Yet another tiny community has come to light while raptly reading maps: Salem Township's cluster of homes called Pebbles Corners, as seen on this 1874 map. Several Pebbles and Peebles owned land nearby.
SO LONG AS WE'RE ON A MAP KICK, here is a snippet from the very oldest Ypsi township plat map ever, drawn on September 15, 1819. The only feature on it aside from the river are the famous 4 French claims by LaChambre, Godfrey, Godfrey's children, and Pepin (spelled "Peppin" here).
WILLIS BAPTIST CHURCH IS FOR SALE.
PAPER MILL DIARIES: The cheap new apartments are going up on the northeast side of Huron River and LeForge. Tacked-together wood-frame construction is gradually taking shape as structures without character or--Ypsidixit's bugbear--the slightest relation to place. They're just ticky-tacky shoeboxes plunked down within spitting distance of a rather dangerous curve in the railroad. Ugh.
BOOKS READ: "Clocks and Culture, 1300-1700" by Carlo Cipolla.
BOOKS READ: "The Englishman's Daughter," nonfiction by Ben MacIntyer.
THE BYGONE YPSI CITY AIRPORT: Two kind readers inquired about the erstwhile Ypsi City Airport. Ypsidixit's adventurous friend, a veritable living encyclopedia, informs her that indeed, there was an airport at the location the kind readers mentioned--at Carpenter and Morgan. Started up in 1922, the airport served Ypsi till, apparently, sometime in the 60s.