On a smaller scale, when I lived there a few years ago there was a man in Southampton (UK) who had a large catamaran in his garden. It took up the entire garden and was easily visible from the road as they had a corner plot.
According to local hearsay he had rebuilt and restored it (perhaps even designed and built it from scratch) in place, but having done so it could never be moved due to power lines and other obstructions. There was a dispute of some sort with the local authorities on the grounds it was an eyesore or some such, but as it actually couldn't be moved without being destroyed...
Sometimes when I drove past I would see him out polishing the handrails and other metal adornments.
(Doing some searching, it appears to have fallen into disrepair in the last few years of the owner's life, and may have finally been demolished after he passed last year. It's possible it had been there since he started building it in the mid 1960s! "Bitterne Park Catamaran" for the mildly interested... if you see the aerial shots, the boat has a bigger footprint than the house.)
My grandfather still has a farm in the region and had this to say
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Tom knew that building a boiler to power a steam engine was beyond his scope so he wanted Alex to fashion one for him.
My dad said he was definitely a different kind. Tom was determined, no doubt. However he made a set of false teeth - they didn’t fit very well and yet he would persist - showing up in town with his mouth bleeding.
Our local region, say, within a radius of 25 miles which would have been served by the villages of Lucky Lake, Birsay, Beechy, Dinsmore and Macrorie contained a relatively large number of Finnish settlers.
It's think it's very fitting. The dung beetle is the worldly embodiment of Sisyphus. Doomed to forever push a boulder uphill only for it to roll down again when he was near the top.
although probably unintentional, there's a bit of synchronism too, since the dung beetle (aka scarab) is the ancient Egyptian (Coptic) symbol of resurrection (among other things).
The way it's been described to me, the ancient Egyptians viewed dung beetles sort of like a phoenix (phoenices?) or an ouroborous, because they believed the beetles to have the power of self-creation (from the mistaken assumption that a dung beetle could survive entirely on dung it produced itself). So I wouldn't be so sure it's an unintentional reference.
A (disputed) story goes that a community wanted a church house and tasked a likely local to get it built. He protested that the only thing he knew how to build was sailing ships. So in 1868 they built an upside down ship and called it a church. The Pine Valley chapel is still in operation today in the mountains of southern Utah.
The same story was told about a chapel that was part of the Little Norway museum in Wisconsin. I think these stories might be completely made up in response to the ship-like style of the roof.
Blood and other binding agents are combined with fibrous material that gets pushed into the cracks between wood planks. Much more commonly done with types of tars and heavy oil.
When I saw "the Hudson" I thought of the Hudson River. It seemed plausible he might be able to row to Lake Winnipeg and then follow rivers and portages to Lake Superior, and from there paddle his way down to Lake Erie and the down the Erie Canal to the Hudson.
Not exactly an easy trip, but NYC seemed to me like a better place to find a steamship to Finland than Hudson Bay!
I’m just amazed by all the comments here about visiting the museum! I grew up near there and… it’s definitely pretty far off the beaten path for almost anyone!
Usually rivers don't count against 'landlocked'. It does seem a bit silly though, there's a ton of ship traffic on the Great Lakes and through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic.
Minnesota also borders on Lake Superior, but it does raise the question of how big the body of water needs to be to disqualify a geographical entity as landlocked.
Isn’t the concept of „landlocked“ usually referring to your ability to do trade at scale with the rest of the world without being dependent on the goodwill of some other actor? Seems Minnesota would still depend on the goodwill of whoever controls the waterways between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. So they are still landlocked.
By the same logic, all the Black Sea nations depend on the goodwill of Turkey to let them pass to the Aegean. Are they landlocked? No. Are Azerbaidjan and Turkmenistan landlocked, even tough they have access to the Caspian Sea? Maybe if it's a water body that somehow connects to an ocean, then it's not landlocked.
That would be the case without any international treaties. Turkey has the physical ability to block the Bosporus and the Dardanneles, but modern Turkey has never had the right to do so.
The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) demilitarized the straits and and opened them to any traffic under the supervision of the League of Nations. After the political situation in Europe changed, the Montreux Convention (1936) granted Turkey limited sovereignty over them.
Modern Turkey has the limited right to block passage of warships through the Bosphorus, a right which it is most notably exercising right now, during the war in Ukraine.
The Montreux Convention does not allow Turkey absolute discretion here [0], but international law is really about practicalities rather than theory.
They are landlocked by the definition of being a lake and not a sea. Landlocked doesn't mean "does not connect to the sea", because so many lakes and rivers connect to the sea. A lake is a lake by virtue of not being a sea. And a land mass is landlocked by virtue of not having a border that is a seafront.
As stated by others, you can get to the Atlantic from Lake Superior. But also, I think of Superior as a freshwater sea so I doubly think Minnesota isn't landlocked
Landlocked means "does not have a border that is a seafront". There's some opinions about it, but that's the definition.
And for the curious a sea is a part of the ocean, by some geologic definitions including seabed and salt water, even if it becomes closed off, and a lake never was part of the sea.
So, the same as the Caspian (actually better because they connect to the ocean through rivers), only freshwater. By the same logic the Caspian Sea is a saltwater lake.
The legal status of the Caspian Sea is a bit weird. It's something between a lake and a sea. It's not a sea, because Russia wants to maintain control over the system of rivers and canals that connect it to the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the White Sea. And it's not a lake, because it's not fully divided between the bordering countries.
Reading between the lines of the "aww shucks, how endearing", this guy destroyed many lives, including his own, by doing something totally unnecessary only for his own self-serving ends. Might be an allegory for the current shenanigans at Twitter.
According to local hearsay he had rebuilt and restored it (perhaps even designed and built it from scratch) in place, but having done so it could never be moved due to power lines and other obstructions. There was a dispute of some sort with the local authorities on the grounds it was an eyesore or some such, but as it actually couldn't be moved without being destroyed...
Sometimes when I drove past I would see him out polishing the handrails and other metal adornments.
(Doing some searching, it appears to have fallen into disrepair in the last few years of the owner's life, and may have finally been demolished after he passed last year. It's possible it had been there since he started building it in the mid 1960s! "Bitterne Park Catamaran" for the mildly interested... if you see the aerial shots, the boat has a bigger footprint than the house.)