Geese and trains

One of my favorite comic strips is Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis. In one of them, gentle but ignorant Pig says, "I saw a bunch of gooses today."

Cynical Rat says, "They're called geese."

"I didn't know that," Pig replies. "I saw a lot of geeses today."

Yesterday I saw a lot of geese flying overhead. It is migration time, and I imagine the skies will be filled with flocks going by for a while.

We went into Madison for a number of errands, one so that Tom could visit a hobby shop and pick up some books on model trains. He has recently decided to build a model train set-up in the basement and recreate the Dells area circa 1804 or 1850. He claims he is not that interested in seeing the train go around in a circle, but it is an excuse to build a model of the Dells.

"Then why didn't you just build a model of the Dells before the train came through?" I asked.

Seems the train, according to Tom, is what made the Dells -- certainly what made the city of Wisconsin Dells. The real town in the area at that time was Newport, built with the expectation that the train would go through there; but Byron Kilbourn -- a railroad tycoon (doesn't he look happy?) -- bought up a lot of land up here and then influenced (bribed) the various powers-that-were into routing the trains through what he named Kilbourn City. Newport became a near-ghost town and people moved to the new Kilbourn City or to Baraboo. Eventually the name of Kilbourn City was changed to Wisconsin Dells.

I guess that justifies the train set...