Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Grindstone

Having a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see.
These hands have helped it go, and even race;
Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,
Not all the miles it may have thought it went,
Have got it one step from the starting place.

~from Robert Frost's The Grindstone (1923)

__________________________
A grindstone belonged to my grandma's yard when I was little. It stood outside withstanding Wisconsin weather year after year. I saw it once a month or so on Sundays when we visited. I guess it had been my grandpa's and maybe his father's before that but they were already dead by then and I forgot to ask my dad about it too. My dad never farmed for a living and so the grindstone never passed down. He showed me other useful things.

A grindstone must have been handy on a farm in the days of steel plows and scythes. I never saw it make sparks fly but it must have done that in its day. Come to think of it, that's probably why it was outside (and why Frost's grindstone was outside too). It's not the kind of tool to keep and use in a barn around sawdust or straw. But farming changed and that grindstone became a relica sort of lawn ornament and a plaything for me, my brother, and my cousins while the grown-ups chatted inside.

No doubt that grindstone had abetted the killing of countless blades by whetting blades, but those of the surrounding weeds by then outnumbered the kind that this device had sharpened. I thought of none of that then. It was enough to just play with it and turn its heavy wheel. A fixed handle cranked the stone disk around and around. Getting it going really fast and then letting go of the handle made it hard to grab it again without getting hurtsuch was its angular momentum. But that's not what I called that force then. I didn't know what to call that force thenI just knew that the grindstone had it and I never forgot it. And though that grindstone is long gone, it was a starting place for lessons learned many years on.

21 comments:

rhhardin said...

American scythes are hard steel and need the grindstone to produce a new edge.

Eurpean scythes are soft steel and get a whetstone treatment every few minutes, with peening the edge every day or so. Peening moves new metal down from where it's fat to make a new thin edge. The whetstone makes that thin edge razor sharp until it's worn back too far into the thick part.

Peening hardens the steel to a sort of compromise hardness. If it's too soft, you'll peen more and that will harden it a little more.

edutcher said...

If Martin Luther King's dream had come true and people were not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, Barry Soetero would still be in the Choom Gang at Punahou High.

PS We are aware the Limeys and the Frawgs (surprise!) are getting cold feet about Syria while the Russkies have decided to send a couple more ships there.

Heckuva job, ValJar.

The Dude said...

I use a grindstone every day. Currently I lean towards powder metal cryogenically treated gouges - they hold an edge nicely.

rhhardin said...

No Syria attack, and Obama is over, sez Belmont Club.

There's apparently a limit to how much you can fuck up, even without the Constitution.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

If Obama attacks Syria without congressional approval, as he is constitutionally bound to do, we should start a petition on the White House website for him to submit his resignation.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I goggled the petition and apparently it has been tried before.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Getting it going really fast and then letting go of the handle made it hard to grab it again without getting hurt...

Impeaching Obama is the only way to rightsize the presidency.

edutcher said...

Lem said...

If Obama attacks Syria without congressional approval, as he is constitutionally bound to do, we should start a petition on the White House website for him to submit his resignation.

Technically, he can do it with good enough reason (which, of course, doesn't exist), but protocol and tradition (not to mention a lot of Congressional egos and Demos eager to CYA (ANSWER is protesting outside the White House)) demand at the very least a consultation with House and Senate leaders.

Given he does things according to Uncle Saul and Uncle Saul says, when cornered, double down, so backing away is going to be interesting.

This is almost certainly the first time in his life he's been slapped in the face and told, "No, you won't! Don't you dare!".

And it's probably not going to be the last.

I have a nasty feeling we're going to be eyewitnesses as Barack Hussein Obama's carefully crafted little world comes apart before his very eyes.

PS An interesting hypothetical (I read it elsewhere) - what if we'd gone in and secured the WMDs and found they were originally Saddam's?

Titus said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
chickelit said...

Thanks for the lesson, rhhardin.

AllenS said...

Here's an idiom, or is it idiotm, that you never want to take seriously:

keep your nose to the grindstone

It would be very painful.

deborah said...

The words about the grindstone remind me of a spinning wheel.

I've read that one thing that contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire was the lack of capitalization on the wheel. Wait, I'll get the book.

"Despite their engineering skills and talent for borrowing,the Romans were technologically handicapped by two momentous failures in the exploitation of power. The first was the shortcoming of the horse harness [they failed to use a breast harness so the animal could breathe freely]...The second failure was in the exploitation in the invention of capital importance, the waterwheel. The Romans did not overlook the waterwheel entirely, but failed to realize its potential...The first description of a waterwheel that can be definitely identified as vertical [as opposed to the horizontal type] is that of Vitruvius, an engineer of the Augustan Age (31 B.C.-A.D. 14), who composed a treatise on all aspects of Roman engineering...Vitruvius expressed enthusiasm for the device but remarked that it was among "machines which are rarely employed."
-Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Francis and Joseph Gies

chickelit said...

Deborah: I have nothing to offer but Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat.

deborah said...

Gee, mister, you must be really old.

chickelit said...

I was 9. I had an aunt who babysat us in a car once while my parents and uncle were night diving at Devils Lake. She was really into BS&T on the 8 track.

deborah said...

8-tracks. The nadir of human civilization. How old are you, please?

chickelit said...

Here's a song that always sounded better on 8-track: link

deborah said...

Good song. Reminiscent of Chicago. Thanks.

The Dude said...

Chicago sucks, the band and the city.

BS&T were the real deal - they could improvise. Chicago plays the same charts they have been playing since LBJ was in office.

chickelit said...

I'm A Man. Seriously, what's not to like?

deborah said...

Gee, I said reminiscent, not the best band ever. Anyway, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sgenkjmXZ4