Behind the Iron Curtain part 12 – Police

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

Police did not exist. It was recognized to be a tool of oppression of common people by those in power and therefore something that an enlightened socialist regime does not need.

Did you believe that? I think not. But it is true. Police did not exist.

That is, the word “police” was not used in any official settings. During Habsburg rule in the Austrian Empire the police was mostly concerned with nabbing political dissidents and whilst during the First Republic it was actually really an organization for dealing with crime, that did not take long and during the WW2 it again morphed into an arm of oppression. The name “Geheime Staatspolizei” (secret state police) got stuck in people’s minds and the word police was irredeemably tainted in the minds of Czech people.

I do not know whether this was the actual reason for abandoning the word police by the regime, but I think it has played a role from what we were taught at school about history.

So the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic did not have any organization with the word “police” anywhere in it, but of course crime had to be investigated, traffic must have been regulated and miscreants had to be dealt with.

For this we had an organization “Veřejná Bezpečnost” short “VB”. Their yellow and white cars were very distinguishable and their uniforms made them easily recognized. Whilst they had the power to require “papers please”, they were members of community and at least where I live nobody minded them much. The derogatory term “policajt” applied to them, but without much rancor above what it usually has anywhere around the world.

And of course any totalitarian regime needs its secret police, even when not named as such, and ours was no exception.

The actual arm of oppression was the “Státní Bezpečnost“, short “StB”. These were plain clothes agents and everybody feared them. Nobody knew who belongs to this organization and who does not – a lot of the agents did have other primary jobs, infiltrating communities and spying on people, even their own family members. Everybody had to be extra careful about what they tell to whom and there was a huge culture of distrust. Critique of regime’s officials was one of the things that was frowned upon and one of the biggest challenges people raising kids had been to teach the kids tell truth at home, but to lie in public.

My father was a member of the Communist Party, he joined in his twenties and was an idealist. However he was also an honest man who spoke his mind, and one of his brothers was a political dissident living in USA – and they were in contact.

One evening my father came back from local gathering of the Communist Party and he informed my mother curtly “I might end up in jail, we’ll see”. These gatherings were officially places to discuss problems and solutions to them etc. but of course that was not particularly encouraged, what was expected was sycophancy. But in this one instance my father, when he had his turn to speak, did not reign in his honesty enough and said aloud words to the effect that a lot of the problems could be solved if only the grumpy fat old men in lead of the party actually cared about the people and not themselves. He got lucky.

Of course not everybody who opened their mouth and said something unfavorable about the Communist Party or the regime got nabbed and incarcerated. The way people function that would mean everybody would wound up in jail. But the possibility was always at the back of people’s’ minds. The way the regime worked, nobody knew if some innocent remark might be the point after which one gets into the regime’s focus, and once in focus, the StB could always find something. The maxim was that everybody is guilty and there is nothing you can do about it – only hope that you will not be the one who gets nabbed.

So people tried not to even think honest thoughts. This is how you control a populace – by building fences in their heads.

American’s Fear of Hearing Foreign Languages Is Nothing New

When I was reading today morning an article on RawStory This is why right-wingers are so threatened by hearing foreign languages in the Trump era, I honestly have thought to myself “Yes? And what else is new?”.

As some of you might recall from my comments in the past, I was in USA, twice, and I worked at Sun Valley resort in Idaho for the summer season as a laundry worker.

First time I and two of my friends have arrived at New York, with J-1 work and travel visa but without any specific plan as to where to go. We traveled by greyhound first to Atlantic City and after failing to find work and lodgings there one us stayed and two of us have split and traveled to Idaho. Again via greyhound.

In the greyhound we actually did not experience anything overtly unpleasant. Whenever we talked in Czech, the most that has happened was someone asking politely “Where are you guys from?” and after polite answer “From Czech Republic.” the matter was resolved and dropped. Nobody was pestering us (apart from two kids who kicked the back of my seat and their parents did not take them to task, aaargh!).

In retrospect, most of those polite people were Latinos and black. In retrospect the two of us stood out, with our pale skin and me with my blonde hair and blue-grey eyes.

It was only after we started to meet white “patriotic” Americans when we encountered some nastiness, some first hand, some second-hand.

There was a bunch of European workers at the resort for that season, a lot of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians, a few Croats (and a lot of people from France because the catering manager was French and it wa seen as posh to have actual french waiters). Almost all these people were people with university degrees, at least Bachelor or higher. But a lot of us had rather basic English and with heavy accents – after all learning English was for many of us one of the reason for the travel.

Some of the white people, guests as well as workers, took this rather badly and it was not uncommon to meet the attitude “they are so stupid, they cannot even talk English properly”, sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly expressed. AFAIK always by people of lower education and with zero knowledge of the world outside USA. The people saying this were not hostile, but they were nasty.

One evening when we were drinking beer with one of the actually really friendly (and not only pretending to be so) Americans, the discussion steered towards this and he summed it up in a joke.

“How do you call someone who knows three languages?”

“Trilingual.”

“How do you call someone who knows two languages?”

“Bilingual.”

“How do you call someone who knows only one language?”

“American.”

We all laughed, because it was true and therefore funny. He himself did not know second language, but he tried to learn Spanish and knew therefore that it is not an easy task. I only remember meeting one white American who actually really spoke second language (Spanish) with reasonable fluency.

When the season ended, I and my friend could either go straight home, or use the J-1 visa option and travel for one month to see a bit more of USA. We have decided to use that option and it was during this travel that we encountered actual overtly expressed hostility towards us.

The incident was very short, but it stuck in my mind. It was somewhere in California, and I do not remember whether it was in San Francisco or Santa Monica (probably the latter). We were just walking along the street, casually talking about something inconsequential when a smallish thin black-bearded man passing by shouted at us “You are in America, you should speak English!” with such force and venom in his voice, that we were startled and both paused. He gave us a scathing look and went on. We looked at each other and talked a bit about WTF just happened?

The stories that I am reading now about USA remind me of this incident and make me wonder whether it would turn out differently today. Whether today that man might feel bold enough not only to shout and give scathing looks, but to actually harm us.

Americans hate of foreigners is really nothing new. The “melting pot” was always a myth.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 12 – Rondel

For second attempt I have decided that the tools that are at my disposal are not sufficient to do what I want to do. So I have made a tool.

I took a piece of wood from my late cherry tree that had about the right diameter and I rounded one end with an axe and a rasp to desired shape – a cylinder with the outer diameter just slightly smaller than the actual dagger handle has. I have put it in a bucket of water so it does not burn too quickly and I proceeded with the forging.

First I made the same shallow bowl shape that I have done previously, but when making it deeper I did not use the ball peen hammer anymore, instead I have inserted the prepared cherry tree block and whacked it with 1 kg forging hammer (also courtesy of my late uncle).

It has worked rather well. Not as well as a metal die would of course, but reasonably well. After only a few whacks I got a shape with which I was content.

That was not the end of the usefulness of this highly sophimasticated tool. After drilling the hole for the tang and rounding the edges on belt sander I nailed the bowl on the cherry wood for polishing.

To avoid too excessive material removal I did not do it on belt sander this time, but I have used my angle grinder with lamellar soft abrasive wheels. It has worked very well and in mere minutes I had sufficiently polished surface. Some pitting remained, but I have decided against removing it completely to avoid one of the mistakes from previous day (making the steel too thin in places).

Now for the grooves. I could not forge them hot, because for that I would need a special die. I could make one of course, but that would be extremely time-consuming and my anvil cannot hold dies yet. I had to hammer them into cold steel and from previous day I knew that I need support and space for the bend at the same time.

So I took a rasp again and I filed grooves in the end of the very useful cherry log. They are intentionally asymmetrical, because that is the look I was aiming for.

On thus prepared support I have fixed the bowl, this time not with a nail, but with a fairly long and thick screw.

A lot of banging has followed, first with masonry chisel to mark the groove, then with the smith’s hammer and old file used as a flat surface, and with small cross peen hammer. The steel was a lot tougher than I thought it will be so the cherry wood collapsed a bit. The result is that some grooves are better looking than others and some are nearly symmetrical, but that is actually correct as far as the 3D model from the game goes – the grooves there are notably different and one even looks like botched. And whilst I am not aiming for exact replica, I am aiming for the general look of the thing.

The rondel has circa 50 mm in diameter and is circa 10 mm tall. Grinding that out of solid block of steel would take an inordinate amount of time, eat a lot of abrasives and definitively weigh way too much. So I think this is mission accomplished.

Next time I will be doing something like this I will most definitively do a better job at it, but I do not think this is all that bad and I will use it. Now it will be polished and buffed together with the bolster and the guard as long as it takes for all three components to have the same look to them. That will probably take a few evenings. However I will not remove all pitting from the rondel, because I fear that it might destroy it.

And then comes the assembly. I literally cannot wait…

Anatomy Atlas Part 15 – Back Muscles

Back muscles are actually much more difficult to learn (and to draw) than muscles at the front of the torso. This is because they are in two layers that interact with each other in a not overtly muscular person. So while musculus trapezius and musculus latissimus dorsi are the dominant ones, the underlying muscles are important too. And the muscles around the scapula are a nightmare.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I do not actually have any interesting story to accompany this picture. So I will only let you with the obligatory “lift with your legs, not with your back” warning. Back muscles around the spine are not optimised for load bearing and lifting heavy objects using your back muscles is a sure recipe for health problems later on.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 11 – Rondel Fail

This was my first attempt at making the rondel on Saturday. Also my first attempt at forging something. I failed completely to achieve my goal, but I learned a few things.

The rondel is supposed to be circular with ten asymmetrical grooves. The simplest way to achieve that would be to take a piece of 4-6 mm steel and cut the grooves with angle grinder. It would also lead undoubtedly to the prettiest looking result I might add, with the crispest lines and smoothest surface.

However I do not want to do that for multiple reasons. One is that it is not historically correct – AFAIK that thick steel was rarely used. The other reason is that it would make the dagger very heavy towards the butt of the handle, and that would make it very uncomfortable to use and it might tend to overbalance in the scabbard and fall out off it.

So I wanted to go the more historically accurate way of making bowl-shaped rondel. With the equipment that I have (not to mention total lack of skill and experience) that unfortunately means I will not be able to make crisp and deep groves, but you can’t always get what you want. Maybe some other time.

I have decided that this old broken shovel is about the right thickness (about 2 mm). It is also good and strong steel that should withstand hammering and bending etc. Unfortunately it is also strongly pitted, but I have decided to use it anyway.

My anvil is a simple piece of rail screwed to a log, and I have not modified it yet for any kind of attachments. Therefore in order to be able to forge bowl-shaped object I could not use it at all and I had to improvise. I fixed a cut piece of thick-walled steel tube to my wood chopping block.

I also lack tongs, so I had to use adjustable pliers.  But at least I have proper ball peen hammer, one of the few usable things that I got from my uncles’ derelict and trash filled house (you would not believe how difficult it is to buy ball peen hammers around here, nobody is using them and therefore nobody sells them).

For fire I have not used charcoal but half rotten dried wood. Not for any practical reason, but because I have a pile that I need to get rid off and I do not want to burn it in the stove so I co not carry the rot into the house. It is possible to heat steel with wood fire quite easily, temperature is not a problem. Problem is smoke and long flames. If you ever try to do it, be aware that it is dangerous and I advise strongly against doing such a foolhardy thing.

I thought these tools will be sufficient to achieve my objective, but to be honest I was not overly optimistic. I assumed skill will be a bigger problem.

It started promisingly and I had a bowl-shaped object in a jiffy. It was after this that it all got wahoonie-shaped.

The problem was the diameter of the ball peen hammer, which was slightly too small for the task that I wanted to do. When trying to correct this, the bowl only got deeper, but its bottom did not get any wider. I ended up with a shape that was too deep, too thin-walled with too small bottom and completely wrong shape – I was aiming for a shape like a bottle cap and I ended up with a miniature dog bowl.

Nevertheless I have decided to try and finish it to see how it looks on the dagger. I cut off all the excess with angle grinder, drilled a hole in the middle and shaped the whole thing on belt sander, removing all rust and pitting in the process and preliminarily polishing the surface to 320 grit.

It did not look all that bad on the dagger, but I did not like it very much anyway. It was not the design I was aiming for at all, not even close, and despite looking kinda good it has completely changed the character of the dagger. I knew I will have to compromise on this part, but I was not willing to compromise that much.

Nevertheless I have tried to make the grooves, just as an exercise to see whether my intended way of making them will work. It worked, sort off. It also completely destroyed the part, because I have made it too thin-walled and the walls were so thin in one place that the steel crumpled like paper instead of bending nicely.

That was it. Time to rethink my process. With these lessons learned I went to sleep on Saturday, completely tired, but determined to give it another shot right next day morning.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Interlude 2 – Measuring the Hardness

I am not done with the “Behind the Iron Curtain” series, but right now my mind is way too focused on other things.

One such thing was the conundrum of measuring hardness of steel. There is no way I can spend thousands of € on measuring equipment. And the cheapest “sort of” evaluation of hardness is a set of five needle files that costs over 200,-€. I would rather spend that money on materials, but I do not mind spending a few hours of work.

So yesterday I had my first shot at this issue.

First thing I have done was to find in my scrap pile old and damaged hack saw blade. I have heated it piecemeal with handheld propane torch to orange heat and quenched it in a bucket of water. Since it is uniform thickness, the water does cause no cracking this way and quenches the steel very nicely and without flames or stink.

After quenching each segment I broke it off (it breaks really easy) and proceeded further, untill there was no unhardened steel left. After that I broke all the pieces into much smaller pieces until I had a nice little pile of extra hard steel shards.

These I have dunked straightaway in a pot with about 1 cm of sunflower seed oil and proceeded to my kitchen. There I was heating the oil very slowly to temper the steel whilst measuring the temperature with my IR thermometer. The higher the temperature, the lower the steel hardness, so I had  temperature steps predefined at which I took a few pieces of steel out of the oil bath.

For that I have found this site on the Interwebs that was kind enough to post a table of  hardness versus tempering temperature with not only the silly units the USA uses but also the sensible units the civilised world uses¹, so I could actually understand what temperature ranges we are talking about. I wrote the temperatures from the table on pieces of paper and put them into small receptacles in which I have placed the tempered shards. I did try to hold the temperatures for about 15 minutes, but for a steel this thin that is not completely necessary.

At 260°C I stopped, because after that the oil could ignite, and I made the remaining temperatures on a fireclay brick with handheld torch. For these soft rangers I do not need much precision anyways.

With all the shards tempered and hardened I have cut ten pieces of hardwood from old spokes from my crib.  They are a bit too thick, but I had no wooden dowels of the right thickness in my pile and I did not want to use wood set aside for arrows. I cut a groove in each piece and marked the pieces 1 to 10 with roman numerals (because those are easy to carve with a knife).

After that I glued one shard in each groove with fast healing epoxy. The softest one in the I and the hardest one in X. Once the epoxy has healed, all that was left was to sharpen the shards on my belt grinder and I was done.

I have tried whether the hardness progresses from I to X and it does. 10 is able to scratch everything, I scratches nothing, and each higher number seems to scratch the one below but not the one above. Here they are (one is missing in the picture, I do not know why, how typical of me to miss-lay things in a matter of seconds).

I measured the dagger on the tang where it is hardened but will not be visible later on. VIII scratched, VII almost scratched, VI did not scratch at all. The hardness should be therefore somewhere around 58 HRC. That is hard enough to keep an edge, but not so hard as to shatter or break easily or eat sharpening stones.

As a proof of concept I would call it a definitive success. I have a set of tools that allows me to estimate the hardness of steel from about 40 to 65 HRC. Not with great precision, but well enough to be useful. After I get my hands on some suitable high carbon steel (about 1% is needed) of thickness about 2-3 mm, I will make better ones, chisel-like, with not only a tip to scratch, but also an area to be scratched.

A little backyard scientist project.

1 – I hate that USA insists on using the silly units and infests half the internet with that nonsense. Finding well written articles on the internet that are not in English is difficult and when something is written in English, it is often US-centric. As if USA did not spread enough misery as it is, it has to keep poisoning sciences and engineering with this utter garbage.

Forest Path Statues – Part 1 – Beginning

The location where I spent this spring’s vacation has a very interesting path through the forest – many tree stumps along it are carved into beautiful statues, some somewhat realistic, some completely abstract. I saw an empty truck parked there with link to this website  of  Czech artist Jan Kužel. The style of the statues there corresponds to statues in the forest, so it is reasonable to deduce those statues are at least in part his work. These are done mostly with the use of a chainsaw, which is very impressive.

I checked and double checked and AFAIK Czech Law does not prohibit photographing and sharing of photographs of any art that is permanently displayed on public land with unrestricted access. Which is this case. So the photographs are mine, but the art they are depicting belongs to someone else. I will post only a couple of pictures at a time, because there is a lot of them.

It has begun on a clearing with a simple table and a couple of benches, and a road sign reading “To the Mountains” on the left and “Home” to the right.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Anatomy Atlas Part 14 – Hand Muscles

Several of my pictures are about hands, one way or the other. I liked drawing hands. Not so dissecting them.

What I said about watching human heads sans skin in formaldehyde being creepy goes doubly so for hands. Mucking around in someones guts left me cold, but dead hands I have found disconcerting. In many aspects a human hand is much more intimate than, not to put a too fine a point on it, genitals. Genitals in a jar are just another organ. A hand is a part of someone’s life in a much more profound way.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Human hands are a marvel. Their flexibility is nearly unsurpassed in the animal kingdom and they are extremely good in their ability to grasp things ranging from feathers and eggs to sticks and stones. But what people generally do not know is that the strength of the hand does not lie in the muscles in the palm. Palm muscles  only position the fingers and shape the palm, but what curls and straightens the fingers – and thus gives them strength – ale muscles of the forearm, whose tendons go under a series of ligaments to the base of the last digit segment like ropes through pulleys.

I have also found that many people do not realize that the smallest of fingers – the pinky – is essential for strong grip. Without pinky it would be difficult to get a firm grip on a tool or a weapon, be it a hammer or a chisel, an axe or a sword.

The one interesting thing that Professor Kos has mentioned and I remember is the muscle Musculus palmaris longus. This muscle is not present in all people, and in some people it is present only in one hand. Its absence has no ill effect whatsoever, so from evolutionary point of view it seems to be a neutral trait.