First 3D Image of Ninja Historian vs. Octopus

What I did in class today on Google Sketchup. I would like to give a shout-out to Dave for all the help. THANKS!

MOUSE TRAP!

Pinky and the Brain may be my favourite two mice in history. Their show was one of my favourites as a kid. Pinky and Brain were two laboratory mice, who would break out of their cage at night and try to take over the world. Brain (the short one) was the mouse with the plan. He is like the Napoleon of the mice world. My favourite scheme of theirs, was when they tried to take over the world by having the last tea bag, they were convinced that Britain would crumble to their wants – I don’t think this was such a bad plan.

Using Google Stechup, I made the two a fun mouse trap. The first image in the picture is a full view of the mouse trap. In the next images (going left to right in the first row, then again in the second) I give close ups of the path they will take.

I enjoyed using a 3D model more than the Inkspace we did last week. I found that 3D images make better use of creating images on the computer. I really enjoyed the ability to move parts of an image inward or outward.

Plot Outline and Character Background Information

1.

(Done in Star Wars flying text)

In a land were history has turned into mythology.

Where people copy and steal from others.

Where the historian has been caste from the Ivy towers,

And thrown into the dingy pits of the mines,

Forced to perform manual labour for eternity.

Their books locked-up, and their primary documents destroyed.

There is no hope left for the scholarly world…..

2.

The Adventures of…..

Ninja Historian

(KA POW! N.H. does flying kick through screen)

3.

On the highest floor, of the largest library chaos has taken over.

The 10-foot tall, man eating, octopus – Ambrose, has just devoured the knowledge from half the monographs on the fifth floor of Weldon Library.

The Engineers, whose section Ambrose has just destroyed, are fleeing after a failed attempt to subdue the octopus.

Science has no tools to defeat Ambrose, and there are still students trapped in the library.

What can be done?

4.

Ninja Historian approaches as stealthily as a Grey Wolf, Ambrose does not hear a noise.

Ambrose lunges for a student, but he is too slow.

N.H. strikes Ambrose with a hard karate-chop

5.

Angered, Ambrose uses the ink that he has stolen from the books, to whip it at N.H.

With the ease and grace of a dancer, N.H. leaps away from the ink, never being hit.

6.

Next Ambrose uses his 10-foot long tentacles to swing at N.H.

After leaping away from one, N.H. is hit from behind by another tentacle.

(N.H. is knocked through the air.)

Worry creeps over N.H.

Can he really defeat such a large plagiarizing beast, the more knowledge he steels the more powerful Ambrose gets. 

7.

N.H. takes out his throwing stars (that are FN for Foot note) and whips them at Ambrose.

One, after another, and F.N. cuts off the eight arms of the octopus.

Ambrose is scared. The F.N.s will not come off.

8.

Close up of a F.N. leaching on to the severed tentacle, slowly expanding around the tentacle.

9.

Full views of Ambrose watching in amazement, as his severed tentacles begin to shrink.

10.

Ambrose continues to shrink into human size.

11.

A tiny first year appears where Ambrose the octopus once stood. Shacking with fear.

12.

N.H. pulls out his Rampola Style guide, and tosses it at the boy.

13.

The boy catches the Rampola Style guide.

The N.H.’s voice is heard saying: “Source it!”

Character Background:

10-foot tall octopus. Name: Ambrose

Why is Ambrose Evil? – He sucks out all the information from the books and does not reference where he got his knowledge. When he takes the information, the pages of the books are left blank, stealing knowledge from the world. Further, he uses the ink from the books as a weapon against Ninja Historian. The ink is hot, it can burn.

Named After: Ambrose is named after popular historian Stephen Ambrose. He wrote Band of Brothers, which became a popular mini-series on HBO. However, he is a known plagiarizer. In his book The Wild Blue, he copied full passages from Thomas Childers’ book Wings of Morning.

Ninja Historian- One bad-ass historian. (that’s all that needs to be said)

I think it’s essential that my characters have a deep history, and that future plots include illusions to famous books, to make the text richer. I personally love figuring out what authors are referencing and looking deeper into it. I think it’s a great way of learning lots of little things.

Brainstorming

So my original plan, which I am currently debating if I am going to attempt or not, was to make an animated short about what historians do. However, the historian would have been a NINJA! Obviously, historians are pretty balling in all, but a ninja historian is as cool as it gets.  

My ninja historian has many arch-foes, which would be the living embodiment of what historians face in real life. So far the one villain I have fully developed is (well I am still working on the name) a gigantic ten foot octopus that plagiarizes.  Currently, my vision is of the octopus causing mayhem in the library. The octopus is using all of its eight tentacles to spread throughout the library and take the knowledge out of the books. Imagine books and shelf’s crashing to the ground as the octopus absorbs all the knowledge in them and does not even reference. To battle the plagiarizing octopus, the ninja historian will use shuriken (throwing stars) that are shaped as a FN, for foot note. When the ninja historian throws his FN shaped stars at the octopus they will cut off his tentacles ending his plagiarism. Further, the FN will clamp onto the severed tentacle, and when all eight have been cutoff the octopus will begin to shrink into a first year student who was overwhelmed because he did not start his essay early enough. When the first year student is all sad and nervous that he got caught the ninja historian will throw him a Rampolla writing guide, and then magically disappear (because he is a ninja and they are all stealth and all) until the next history crisis. However, after examining the website my Proff emailed me I am a bit nervous.

My back-up idea that I just started to think about, so it’s not really developed enough is to make an interactive maze. I don’t know if you have been to Ontario Place. But my favorite thing there as a child was the Maze. I knew where everyone of the polls was to swipe your card at. And since I was always trying to improve my time, and since I am really short, I used to run under the boards instead of running among them. I was obsessed with going to the Maze from ages 5-12. I would continuously go through the maze, my parents must have loved this because they got to just sit there while I tired myself out.

My idea is to build a maze that has interactive stops where you have to complete an action to be able to get your card swiped. As a warning my maze might take-up the whole class room.

On a sad note, as I was trying to find a picture of Mega Maze I discovered they have replaced it :(.

Hopefully a change of feelings

Currently, it’s a few hours before our second class and I am sitting in Weldon waiting for the time to pass so I can put down my readings and build something. I honestly did not understand everything we had to read for today’s lab. I enjoyed reading the blog post “Transduction, Transmateriality, and Expanded Computing” by Mitchell Whitlaw. I am kind-of scared of my computer for a variety of reasons: will stop working and I will lose essay just before I press print, can’t figure out how to do very much on it, and I tend to drop my knapsack when I get home from school so I think my computer hates me. I liked Whitlaw’s comment “literally and figuratively cracking [the computer] open, hooking it up to new inputs and outputs, extending and expanding its connections with the environment.” I think a major reason why I am scared of my computer is because I feel disconnected from it. I know what I want it to do most of the time, but I just can’t get it to do it. And its usually the simplest things that frustrate me the most; such as just wanting to move a line over an inch on a graph your making but every time you click its never in the right spot. And then I get so frustrated and feel disconnected because I know this is a task that could be easily done in my real world, but is driving me Fing insane in the virtual world.

(Read this with the boxing ring announcer voice.)

 

On the right side of the ring we have Hilary the Historian with her primary documents and her Arduino set ready to take on the champion, the Silver Dell Computing Machine. The two have fought numerous battles, with the Silver Dell as the winner. But Hilary the Historian has been bulking up in the library typing vast computer script. Who shall win? Tune in at the end of the semester to find out.

Jumping into History

Dear my vast audience that has probably been waiting in anticipation for my first blog of 2012. Or maybe just Professor Turkel. I shall pad my ego with the pretend notion that people read this. Because that’s really what I am looking forward to as a public historian, that my work, which won’t only be essays, will be appreciated by an audience outside of academia. My little frozen Grinch heart swelled a bit when the little old ladies at the town hall meeting were excited by my research.

 

When I think about things lying around my apartment the first thing that comes to mind are books. If I bought a second book shelf this problem would be fixed. But I really do not want to schlep back that much furniture to Toronto. I am actually quite neat; these are very organized piles in the corner of my room. (That sentence has been added so that future Historians don’t write in my biography that I was  messy.) 

So what I have always wanted is a hologram book that you can jump into. I have always wanted to be able to emerge myself into an image by jumping into it since I saw Marry Poppins. It’s the scene where Marry and the children are on their way to the park when they bump into Burt who has drawn a row of beautiful chalk photos of different scenes. They then jump into the picture of the English countryside. During their adventures in the drawing Marry wins a hoarse race on a carrousel hoarse. After which she sings Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Hopefully this has rejuvenated your memory. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b-Z0SSyUcw&noredirect=1

I love reading historical fiction. I am currently reading The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli. The book is about a female photographer for Life magazine during the Vietnam War. Well, I would not want to be able to jump into the war scenes; however, I would love to be able to walk around the streets of Saigon. (I just started the book, so it’s only 1963 so far, so its not a completely unrealistic notion.)  

My hologram book would work by opening any ordinary book of one’s choosing and then the individual would place “The Button” on the page they would like to enter the story at, smack in the middle of the spine. Once one pressed “The Button” a rainbow hologram image would appear covering the page. Then you would place the book on the floor, and step into it. Though the weird feeling often associated with Disapparating might be a side affect; I have not worked out all the kinks yet. Once you have arrived in the image you would have the ability to explore the historical backdrop of the book your reading. However, the experience only lasts for twenty-five minutes. One should not escape reality for too long.  

My first historical discovery:

As a disclaimer, when you get through this blog post you will probably be thinking that this is the smallest historical discovery in history, and that it has no real importance to the historical world. You know what, that may be true. But it’s one tiny step for history, and all I really got as a historian in training.

So I have been working pretty dam hard on this LACH project. There have been many poorly slept nights over the fact that my house is “lame”. But I did not give up; I really wanted to find something. As a historian who hopes to unleash historical scandals that have been hidden to the world, I may have been approaching my subject with a view already in my mind. I know, very bad historian of me. Ideally, if I could have fabricated a history for it, I would have made it a house where illegal booze was brewed during the prohibition, and the Winder family would have sold the alcohol  from the back of their store in cans marked paint. Yes, I have a little bit of an over active mine, and have been loving “Board Walk Empire”. I did not come across anything of this sort by the way.

So I did the assignment through the steps that were laid down to us. I first went to the ARCC and looked through the Fire Insurance Plans, nothing there changed. Then I went through the bounded copies of the City Directories from 1961-2010. Nothing special there. It was a tad sad though, whenever the husband died (which always came before the wife) the wife would have to move out, probably because she could not afford the rent on her own. Then I faced my fear of microfilm and got the Archivists to teach me, and then re-teach me how to load it. I had some issues with it; I swear my finger almost got sucked in at one point. By the end I did not mind the City Directories on the microfilm, but on that first day when I was looking at them for three hours, I felt so sea sick. What I came across was that in almost every year there were new tenants in my house, and that they were all working class people. I only had George L. Winder live in my house from 1906 to 1911, and while he was living there he did not even own it, it was his father’s, Edward Jr. So even though I had a Winder property, I barely had them living there.

Next I looked at some of the Assessments Roles available at ARCC, and then I went down to Service Ontario. They gave me the wrong number, the number was for Lucan. I will not even get into how much that angered me. So I had to go back to Service Ontario a few more times. Once I got the right number, I had the hard task of determining which Winder is my Winder, no easy feet since they all give each other the same names. I also had to distinguish which property on the lot was mine, I figured that out quite easily though, it’s the one 78 feet from the end.

So once I had all the information collected I was pretty depressed. Nothing cool came up in my research. And since I really want to do well in my masters courses this was not sitting well with me. So I went to the London Room, and used their computers to access Ancestry.com. From there I started entering names from my vast list of tenets, hoping something would poop up.  Trying to research about a city you don’t know much about has its difficulties.

The tenant for the year 1890 is listed as Alfred Wheable, A brakeman on the Grand Trunk Railway. An enlistment paper came up for him on the website. I was all excited maybe I found some great Canadian war hero. Coincidence, I was there on November 11. So I asked the librarian how I can find out more about certain regiments, and people’s military careers. She asked me for whom I wanted this information for, and when I told her she asked me if that was Geoffrey Alfred Wheable’s father. I replied, um who? She repeated the name, like I should know. Then I told her I was not from London. She said there is a school named after him, and that he was a big-shot in the school board.

Alfred Wheable's enlistment form.

I was over the moon, a famous Londoner living in my house. I was so pumped; I headed off to the catalogue boxes to see what I could find out about him. In the London Room there are two “Coronation Souvenir” books one for the year 1937 and the other for 1953. They contain photos and mini-bios of London’s elites, pretty much just men, and some photos of the Royals. Kind of weird in my opinion, are they claiming a similar elite status in London Ontario, to that of the status of the Royals in London England?  In the books they had Geoffrey Wheable’s birthday as February 21, 1891.  I then tried to find his birth certificate on Ancestry.com. I found it, but it was very different. His middle name is written as “Praceadman”. Though I will later discover that his grandmother’s maiden name was Proudman, it could have just been a wrong spelling. However, his birth certificate had the same birth date as the coronation books.

At this point in my research I did not have every year from the directories as I pretty much do now (some are missing from the microfilm). One of the years I did not have was 1891. Surged with hope that I found a person to claim for my house's associated value I packed up my papers in a flash and scurried home to get my car so I could drive to the ARCC.

Geoffrey Pracafman Wheable written. Bottom, second from the right.

This was a high point in my researching; I skipped down Dundas then up Richmond to get to my appartment. I went down to my parking spot and grabbed my car and drove to school. I busted in to the ARCC, and on like most Fridays, was the only researcher in there. The archivist asked me what I was going to use today, and I told her the City Directories. Since I was so excited about the fact that Wheable may have lived in my house I shared this information with her. She made me a little sad, she said it did not matter if he only lived there a few years; it was a harsh comment in my mind. I brushed off the remark as the pages of the City Directory zipped by, and I waited to find the beginning of the year 1891. Sadly, Alfred Wheable is not listed as the residents for that year; however, I decided to find him in the directory for that year and was surprised to find that he was not at the house that was listed on Geoffrey’s birth certificate either. My historian senses went off at this point, there has been some poorly documented sources, what should I and should I not trust?

I went home, defeated, to eat and be cheered up by fiction. After what I thought was the big breakthrough for this project, I had bubkiss, I was one sad little historian. I was going to go for a whole fetes angle, which was “he was a fetes in my house, and since he is born in February, he might have lived there for a few days since you don’t know when the data was collected”, but that angle was not very popular.

So I went back to the London Room to see if I could find something else. The very nice librarian who told me who Geoffrey Wheable was, had done some researching to see what the library had on him. Since she knew from last time that I found his birth certificate hard to read and confusing because it had a different middle name, she got me the microfilm reel “Index of Births and Stillbirths 1869-1910”. As I went through it I was socked to discover that his birthday was February, 21, 1890. THIS MEANT HE WAS BORN IN MY HOUSE!!! What! What! Party in the library!

Now you may be asking yourself, how do I know that this document is accurate? Well, unlike his birth certificate that was written in 1929, this index was written in 1890.  Now you may be wondering to yourself, how did this confusion come about? My guess is that since his birth was not documented right away, and his sister, Glady, was born on December 20, 1891, people got the years confused. Also, once I looked at the birth certificate again I noticed that all the other children on the page were born in 1890.

So this is my first historical discovery, the correct birth year for Geoffrey Wheable.

Now you may be wondering, who in the world he is. Here is the point form summary of his life. Began his career as a teacher at Chesley Ave. He later goes on to be the Superintendent of the London School Board for over 25 years. During which time he helped London deal with the demand from the baby-boom population.  Additionally, he helped pioneer many new pedagogy methods in the London Public School system. Wheable stated his influence on teaching to be “from a system of simply imparting information, to that of training the child to think and to use his own judgement.”[1] During World War I he enlisted and served in France and Belgium with 1^st Canadian Infantry Battalion C.E.F.  Wheable was wounded during Passchendaele in November 1917, for which he was awarded the Military Cross.

My angle: The significance of having Wheable born in the house is that it helps strengthen the claim that Wheable was from London. Though Wheable is known for being born in London, he spends his formative years in Port Colborne. Preserving the house where Wheable was born is vital in sustaining the London-Wheable connection.

So after making my first historical discovery I think I have earned my patches. I plan on rocking a cardigan with some elbow patches during my LACH presentation on Wednesday; since I am now one bad ass historian.

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[1] “Wheable Now 25 Years in Ontario Education,” The London Free Press, May 6, 1951, Historical Series Scrapbook volume 7, page 80, call number: r971.326.