Rube Goldberg redux

". . . (It) doesn't matter what the work is, if he's doing it, by definition it's more important than anything you could possibly do." - Joanna Ashmun

As I mentioned before, my father in law once told me he was a genius. He really believed it, even though he would sometimes refer to his "Rube Goldberg contraptions" in a fit of false modesty. He had the expectation that if he wanted you to share in his work and triumph, you would be happy and willing to spend hours every day making sure his contraptions somehow made it out of vision into reality under his divine guidance.

When my husband realized how much of his time was being used up this way, he stopped letting it happen. My nephew, too, realized that all that talk never led anywhere, and stopped listening.

So FIL went elsewhere to get feedback--to engineers who told him it wouldn't work (which made him more determined), and engineers who told him it was an "interesting idea" in order to end the conversation, which gave him great hope; to machine shops in town, where he spent thousands of dollars having ancient engines "customized;" to friends he invited to participate in his great triumph, who now don't come around anymore; to college faculty members who must not have rewarded him with sufficient encouragement, since he didn't go back after the first visit.

I've mentioned already the manure communitor and the two embryo transplant Herefords, but that's just a partial list of his grandiosity coming to fruition.

After MIL died and FIL realized he had money, he asked me (captive audience at the time) to "advise" him on how he should spend it. He had three things in mind: (1) a "lightning machine" to trap nitrous oxides from engine exhaust as a fertilizer for his garden and pastures; (2) a perfect milking cow in one generation of embryo transplants, since artificial insemination really hadn't done anything to improve the Holstein breed, and (3) an alternate type of milking machine modeled on the human hand.

(Continued in next post)