Captain Aggravated

I took two years of French in high school, I can say ai as a avons avez ont. Because that’s most of the french I actually spoke aloud in that class. Two years I “studied” this language, I’m not sure I’d be able to safely spend a week in France, I’d be hit by a train because I didn’t understand the warning sign.

That’s not how they taught me English. In second language classes, they’ll try to teach you rules like adjective order; like how we always say a wonderful big red balloon. If you said a red wonderful big balloon you sound broken. ESL students will be taught that their first semester, a native English speaker will follow that rule perfectly without consciously knowing it exists for 30 years until it is pointed out by that linguist tiktok guy.

This is one place where I think modern schools categorically fail, is teaching languages. They teach languages in ways that are easy to create multiple choice tests for because those are easy to grade. In reality, you don’t teach an Anglophone French by speaking English to him, you teach French in French. It can be practical to have a common language to fall back on but you learn a language by speaking it.

Now, “Ancient Egypt” refers to a knee bucklingly long span of time; There were pharaohs who employed archaeologists to study the Giza pyramids, because by the time anyone named Ramses was around, the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre were already thousands of years old. If you were to end up as a Connecticut Yankee in King Djoser’s Court, some 5500 years ago, none of the languages English evolved from have emerged yet. You’re going to be operating at the level of holding up a basket with a quizzical look on your face until your host says “nb.” Then you’ll try to say it back, and so forth. Your vocabulary will build and eventually you’ll be talking just like one of them.

Land in Ptolemaic times and you can do the same exact thing but in Greek or Latin.

Who else is talking to them?

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.

When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking…hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.

When it comes to rich people, pretty much yes it is.

Wait a minute! What tools? You’re supposed to be doing theory! You’re a field psycho-ornithologist, aren’t you?

Yeah, see: when you’re looking at these highly ornate antiques, it’s not the wealth of the craftsman on display; it’s the wealth of his customer.

Are you yourself a craftsman?

I have been rendered incapable of seeing beauty in ostentatious displays of wealth.

Don’t mistake me for a scholar, now. I’m a guy with a thickness planer in his backyard shed that’s read a couple books and watched a lot of videos about building furniture. I’m confident I could defend the rank of “enthusiast.”

That said, it is something I liked about Reddit. You could post “Left-handed theoretical psycho-ornithologists of Reddit…” and you’d get at least a few credible answers.

Okay so there are layers to this question:

Why does antique furniture usually have carved feet?

First, antique furniture tends to be the fancy stuff for rich people. Modest furniture made out of a few boards for the unwashed masses usually isn’t considered for preservation, but the fancy shit rich people bought got kept.

Rich people tend to like to show off how rich they are. And one way to do that up until fairly recently was through furniture. Maybe you use exotic wood, but even if you don’t do that you pay a woodworker to waste his life carving useless intricate details like pineapple newel posts or ornate table legs.

The claw-clutching-a-ball design apparently comes from China, it’s supposed to be a dragon’s foot clutching a jewel. The British adopted it in the Queen Anne period because it’s ornate, fancy and foreign exotic. Rich people get to brag that they got their table, or a taste for the style, “during their travels.” Ball-and-claw feet specificall would fall out of fashion with the Chippendale era though fancy schmancyness would hit an all time maximum, and then the industrial revolution happened.

It used to take a skilled artisan to make carvings like that with a chisel. Now, we have duplicating machines that can batch them out dozens at a time. This episode of the New Yankee Workshop shows this off. When building his Lowboy, Norm doesn’t even try to carve cabriole legs, he buys them from a company that makes them, and we get a little footage of the factory. This is why you don’t see the Zuckerbergs of the world showing off ostentatious carved furniture: ornate carvings are commodity items now. You can buy furniture with cabriole legs and arch cornices at any of those big warehouses out by the highway with a “Going out of business forever” sign out front.

Is it only ornamental?

95% yes. Speaking as a woodworker I can tell you, people overwhelmingly like looking at tapered legs. Our own legs taper, so we tend to copy that. From fancy cabriole legs to simple shaker furniture. A flared foot of any kind is mostly ornamental because again our own feet flare out, but there is a bit of a practical purpose: A larger surface area with a rounded edge is easier to slide across the floor than a small, sharply edged end of a board. It doesn’t tend to dig in as much, particularly on carpet. Also, the rounded features are more difficult to chip and splinter.

Why are they usually webbed feet?

It’s meant to be a dragon’s foot, so somewhere between reptilian and birdlike. It is also furniture, not a statue, so it’s rather stylized and not very anatomical. Edit to add, sharp, deep crevices like you get between, say, the fingers of a balled fist, are difficult to carve; The deeper and thinner the crevice, the longer, thinner and more delicate a tool is required to carve it. A craftsman may design around the limitation of the tools he has by, say, making webbed feet rather than trying and failing to do distinct toes.

Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.

I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.

The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.

Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.

I just finished my third and fourth cutting board this week.

I went to high school shortly after Columbine. We didn’t have active shooter drills.

I’m looking forward to our first proper mystery like The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet or Celebrity Number Six. We’ll know the Fediverse has 5 years to live max when this becomes the place to post that kind of thing.

It doesn’t sound like a medication’s marketing name, it sounds like the name of an open source project: a complete garbage fire.