Day 33 - Conspiracy Anyone?

Charger for HP Photosmart R727 camera

It's spooky how well Amazon knows me. Recently, I found my digital camera. It had been packed away since long before we moved to California, and I was sure there are some photos on it that I haven't downloaded yet. So yesterday evening which was "clear the surface of the desk" night, I pulled it out of its case and opened the battery compartment to see what I needed to do to get the camera working.

The camera is powered by a rechargeable battery, not a couple of AA's, so I went looking for the charger. After checking the most likely places, I failed to find it, so I got online and checked out where I could find a charger. I tried Best Buy first because that's where I got the camera. But their search engine sucks - the more precise I made the search criteria, the more irrelevant results I got. After scaling back the search criteria to the bare minimum, camera chargers, I concluded that Best Buy no longer carried anything having to do with my several year old camera.

I used Google's search instead and found lots of sources for appropriate chargers. Since the prices were all around the same amount, I chose Amazon since I have lots of experience with them. After adding the charger to my shopping cart, Amazon suggested that I might want a spare battery, too. And I agreed that was a good suggestion, so I added the battery to the shopping cart. And then, Amazon suggested a few videos I might want to consider.

Paper Clips, the
video, image from
Amazon.com

The first video in that list was "Paper Clips," the 2-disc special edition. And this is why I think Amazon is just spooky. I already own that video, but how my decision to purchase a Lithium Ion rechargeable battery and a charger could connect with videos (yes, plural; there was another one about the making of the film "Paper Clips" in the list of recommended items) about a Middle School project in Whitwell, TN, is beyond my comprehension. I didn't get my copy from Amazon. I didn't even go out in search of it as I had never heard of it. Several years ago I was in f.y.e. in Ballston Mall in Arlington, Virginia, just looking around when I saw the video in a rack of discounted items. The cover of the video announces, "It began as a lesson about prejudice. . .What happened next was a MIRACLE" which was enough to grab my attention. I flipped it over and read the back and made the decision to buy the video.

But that's not the really spooky part. The really spooky part is that on Monday this week, I gave a speech at my Toastmasters club, the title of which was "Paper Clips." I chose my speech topic because the day before, Sunday, January 27, was Holocaust Remembrance Day which is what inspired me to give that speech on Monday.

Sandvika Norway paper clip via

Wikipedia

For those who don't know (and who obviously haven't read Day 14), the movie is about a Middle School class project to collect six million objects as part of their unit on the Holocaust in order to understand how big that number is. They chose paper clips because of a story one of the students had read about the Norwegians during World War II wearing paper clips on their lapels as a sign of opposition to the Nazis after the Nazis banned the wearing of any flag or lapel pins.  The Norwegians had erected a sculpture of a giant paper clip at the end of World War II as a commemoration.

I admit that I buy a pretty wide range of things through Amazon, sometimes they are for my dad, sometimes for a niece or nephew, sometimes for a friend, and even occasionally for myself. So I can't figure out what kind of algorithm Amazon uses that would take all those very different book and video titles and mash them up to present the top suggested items yesterday. If the Paper Clips video had been at the bottom of the list of suggestions, I wouldn't have been surprised. But it was the first one in the list.

Does anyone out there believe in conspiracies? Is Amazon stalking my Project 365 blog?

Day 14 - Paperclips

Image by David Masters via Flickr                

One thing I have learned from Toastmasters is that even the most commonplace items can provide topics for interesting speeches. One of the earliest Table Topics questions I observed involved volunteers being handed a variety of common office items with instructions to describe how and why they came to invent the items.  The responses were inventive and creative, but they provided just a taste of the surprising, even fascinating facts, and some myths, that make up the story of the common paperclip.

The paperclip's history begins with the first patent being awarded to Samuel B. Fay in the United States in 1867.  That design was intended to attach labels to garments and fabric.  Just 10 years later, in 1877, Erlman J. Wright patented the first version explicitly intended to clip sheets of paper together.  But neither of these patents were for the design we know of as the Gem paperclip.  That design was never patented, which contributes to a long-standing myth that the first paperclip was invented and produced in Norway.  Norwegian Johan Vaaler patented his design in both Germany and the United States in 1901.  

Vaaler paperclip design from Wikipedia

The myth of the Norwegian origin of the paperclip really gained ground after World War II.   When the Germans prohibited wearing pins including the Norwegian flag or insignias or portraits of the king, the Norwegians began to wear paperclips on their lapels as a symbol of their solidarity against the Nazis.

Sandvika Norway paper clip via
Wikipedia

Never mind that Johan Vaaler’s design wasn’t very practical – it consisted of only one loop, not the double loop that we know.  The coincidence of the myth of the Norwegian origin and the fact of the Norwegians wearing paperclips during the war led to the Norwegians erecting a large model of the Gem clip in Sandvika, Norway several years after the end of World War II.

In 1998, the myth of the Norwegian origin of the paperclip was still prevalent, along with the embellishment which transformed the tale of the lapel paperclip from a symbol of resistance against the Nazis to a symbol of solidarity with the Jews.  When students at Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, TN, asked their teacher if they could collect something as part of their unit on the Holocaust to get a concrete idea of just how big the number six million is, they discovered the paperclip’s myths and set the goal of collecting six million.

By 2001, the eighth graders had collected not six, but 30 million paper clips.  They had received and cataloged 30,000 letters about their project.  And they had received a donation of a box car that had been used to transport Jews, gypsies, and others considered undesirable by the Nazis, to concentration camps.  Transporting the box car included crossing the Atlantic on the chartered Norwegian freighter “MS Blue Sky,” continuing the myth of the Norwegian connection.  The box car now forms the centerpiece of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial.  The documentary “Paper Clips” retells the whole story.

A footnote, related to World War II but not included in the Whitwell Middle School Paper Clip Project, is that another post-World War II effort, code-named “Project Paperclip,” resulted in the immigration of more than 700 German scientists into the United States, including Werner von Braun and 125 rocket scientists who contributed significantly to the development of the NASA space program in the 1950s and 1960s.

Image by kylemac via Flickr

The final example of the fascination that can come with paperclips began in 2005 when Canadian Kyle MacDonald posted an offer on Craig’s list to trade a red paper clip for anything of greater value that he could continue to trade, with the goal of bartering his way to home ownership.  One year and one day later, after 14 trades, he had his house – in a small town in Saskatchewan.

The trade that propelled the bartering to a higher level for Kyle was the opportunity to spend half a day with Alice Cooper.  And the trivia highlight for me in all of this is that before moving to his next trade, Kyle was asked to join Cooper on tour in – of all places – Fargo, ND.

As I think back to that Table Topics exercise, I can’t recall a more imaginative response than the actual story I discovered through research about the humble paperclip.  I hope that I have provided you with some entertainment, along with the lesson that there is no subject is too humble to be considered as a topic of a Toastmasters speech.

Warming Up - Exercise 4

Dare to Dream

You may already know that I grew up in Minnesota.  And for all 21 years that I first spent there, I dreamed of getting out.  Why, you may ask?  Because frankly, I considered life in Minnesota to be, well, boring.

I finally did leave Minnesota.  In December 1969, within days of graduating from one of the three colleges in my hometown, I made it to California because my dreams were . . . out there.  I just couldn’t imagine my dreams coming true in Minnesota.  But then one day in 1976, I met up with a surprise.

That year, on a trip to visit my parents, the three of us went to see my grandmother who still lived in the same town where she had raised my mother, two uncles and two aunts, my mother's siblings.  On the way out of town, my father asked if I wanted to stop by the shipyard.  Now my grandmother lived 21 miles from the Red River of the North, and Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, but there is no body of water anywhere near Hawley, Minnesota, big enough to accommodate a vessel large enough to be called a ship.  So my response was a surprised, “Shipyard!  What shipyard?”

My dad drove down Hawley’s main street and pulled up in front of a building that I recognized, except for the sign above the door.  I knew this building – it was the potato warehouse where my grandfather worked when I was a kid.  But the sign above the door, in the shape of a Viking ship, announced, “Hawley Shipyard.”  And that’s what was being built inside the building.  My eighth grade science teacher, Robert Asp, and my dad’s 12^th grade basketball coach, Willard Pierce, were inside that building adding planks that formed the frame of a replica of a Viking ship.

Building that ship was Robert Asp’s dream, a dream that began in 1971, just months after I left Minnesota for my dream.  That summer, Robert fell from a ladder and had to spend most of the summer recuperating.  During that time, his brother Bjarne took Norwegian language classes at a local college.  And together with Robert’s reading about Norwegian Viking ships, the dream began.

By 1974, Robert had located a source for timber.  He thought he would need 15 oak trees – eventually he needed more than 100.  By 1974, he had found a place to build the ship, the abandoned potato warehouse that the city of Hawley agreed to rent to him for $10 a year, with the proviso that he would demolish the building when he was finished.

By 1980, the Viking ship replica, christened Hjemkomst, Norwegian for Homecoming, was completed, the front wall of the warehouse had been removed so the ship could be extracted, and the ship reached Lake Superior, just outside Duluth, Minnesota.  Robert was able to sail on his ship that summer.  But he had been diagnosed with leukemia back in 1974, just as the construction began in earnest, and in December of 1980, he died.  His brother Bjarne also died before Robert completed the Hjemkomst.  The task was left to his children to complete the dream – to sail the Hjemkomst from Minnesota to Norway.

In 1982, four of his children, plus friends and a Norwegian sailor and square-rigged long boat captain, sailed the more than 6000 miles from Duluth, through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence Seaway, and across the Atlantic Ocean, to Bergen, Norway.  After a year of storage in Oslo, the Hjemkomst returned to Minnesota where it now resides as the centerpiece of the Hjemkomst Heritage Center in Moorhead, Minnesota, my home town.

I left Minnesota in the last days of 1969 in search of my dream.  Just a few months later, Robert Asp began work on his dream.  Within a dozen years, his dream transformed not just one, but two towns in Minnesota – my mother’s home town of Hawley, Minnesota, which had adopted the Hawley Shipyard, and my hometown, Moorhead, Minnesota.  Robert Asp’s dream made me realize that being a descendant of Norwegian immigrants isn’t necessarily something to run away from – it might just be a reason for celebration.