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Philip Spiess
Bruce, Paul, and Jeff:
A good number of years ago now, I heard a learned computer scientist discourse on what computers could and could not do -- particularly in the realm of human intelligence. He said that, whereas the human brain can often follow a fly in its wild zigzag course across a room, following it closely and quickly enough to kill it with a fly-swatter or a rolled-up magazine (this is, of course, not infallible, as those of us who have swatted at numerous flies know), no computer -- or the human ability to program said computer to do so -- has come anywhere close to being able to duplicate the human brain's ability to follow that fly, or predict where it will go or land next. (Now this, as I said, was a number of years ago, so perhaps the situation has changed, but I rather doubt it.)
Bruce: I can return your many compliments to me: I am bedazzled by your grasp of scientific subjects, which, although I am more or less aware that they exist, are well beyond even the inklings of my understanding of how they work, much less of what they mean.
Judy: Unfortunately, the vandalism of cemeteries is an all-too-common occurence throughout America (and I'm not even talking, say, "anti-Semitism" here; I'm talking about rank and random unthinking vandalism). Shortly after I moved to Washington, D. C. in 1973, I went to visit the historic Congressional Cemetery on the eastern end of Capitol Hill. A number of famous people are buried there, such as John Phillip Sousa; less, perhaps, than most visitors think, as in the cemetery's early days Congress ereccted several rows of centotaphs, designed by the famous American architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, to such early famous Americans as then had died (a centotaph is a memorial marker; the person designated on it is buried elsewhere). There are quite a number of interesting statues and monuments there, from just after the Civil War to the turn of the last century, including some dogs and the statue of a little girl who had been the first victim of an automobile accident in Washington's history, and I had gone to photograph some of them. It's a good thing I did, because several years later, when I went back to do some more photographing, vandals had ruined a large number of monuments and sculptures, including smashing the little girl's statue to smithereens.
The truth is that security in most cemeteries, whether big or little, whether well-financed (very few are) or poor, is largely non-existant, even in the daytime (or perhaps I should say "especially in the daytime"). If there is even a caretaker, what can one person do, even with a dog or two and a shotgun? When Mr. Dahmann, our classmate Donald's father, was superintendent of Vine Street Hill Cemetery, he regularly locked all the gates at night and occasionally patrolled with a loaded shotgun, but after he died, he was not really replaced. By the time I found the vandalism of my grandmother's monument, the cemetery was in financial straits, and the office was closed most of the time. As an out-of-town visitor to Cincinnati on a very short visit, there was little I could do. (Had it been Spring Grove Cemetery, it would have been a different story entirely.) It is of some (if short-lived) satisfaction to me that I had taken photographs of the four sides of the monument several years before it was vandalized, and I have this fond vision of one day perhaps of having it re-created in, say, epoxy and replaced. (I don't even know if the pieces of it are still there, lying on the ground -- I doubt it.) But the discovery of my grandmother's desecrated monument was nothing "awful" compared to the "awful" discovery my grandfather Philip Spiess (he had died before I was born) made in 1925, when he found my grandmother (the one of the monument) dying of convulsive hemorrhaging while strapped into the dentist's chair, having been put under ether while the dentist went out to lunch, locking the door behind him!
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