Tracing the Depew lineage: how far back can we go?

For years, my Depew ancestry was stuck at 1850, with Joseph Depew in Montrose, Iowa. Joseph and his wife, Wealthy Elmer, had migrated with the Mormons to Nauvoo, Illinois, and had settled in Montrose, just across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo. Family legend was that, when the family was packing up to leave Montrose and head west with the Saints, Joseph was nowhere to be found. Wealthy and her sons were in her parents’ wagon, ready to move out, when Joseph showed up drunk. He yelled that no wife of his was going west with the Mormons, and pulled her off the wagon. Her father got the horses moving, the wagon started rolling, and Joseph couldn’t stop it. So Joseph and Wealthy stayed behind while their boys went to Payson, where they were raised by their grandparents.

The oldest record of Joseph Depew was an 1850 census record, saying that he was born “about 1800” in “Pennsylvania.”

My brother, Craig Depew, has done a lot of digging over the years, and we think that Joseph’s reputation has been rehabilitated. He may or may not have been the town drunk, but he did move west with his family. He never made it to Utah. Both Joseph and Wealthy died of illness in Winter Quarters, Nebraska. Their sons did go to Payson, where they were raised by their grandparents.

Uncle Craig also found that Joseph was descended from Nicolas DuPuy, a Dutch immigrant who arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) in the 1663. Nicolas was born in Holland in 1627.

Further digging gets us tangled up with questionable sources, including a French historian named Louis Moréri, who never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

If Moréri is to be believed, Nicolas’ lineage can be traced from Holland to France, where the DuPuy family were knights and noblemen, originally from the Dauphiné region of southeastern France. They converted to the Huguenot religion, which put them at odds with the Catholic church and the French king, and eventually made them outcasts. That’s why they fled to Holland, and from there to the New World.

In the Dauphiné, Hugues DuPuy was born in 1055, in Peyrins, France. He and his three sons went to the Holy Land with the First Crusade, and acquitted themselves well. One of his three sons, Raymond DuPuy, was the “second Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.” He was a Big Cheese. No, I’m not named after him. And no, I’m not descended from him.

If you go back further, and if Moréri can be believed, Hugues was the son of Raphael de Podio, who was born in 1011 in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. (Italy!) He was a military commander and the Grand Chamberlain of Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Conrad gave Raphael a governorship in the Dauphiné, so he moved to Peyrins and Frenchified his last name to DuPuy.

Both “DuPuy” and “de Podio” translate literally to “of (or from) the podium,” but can also be translated to “of (or from) the heights.” Many French geographical names include “Puy” in reference to a hill, a ridge, or another high place.

Raphael himself was a descendant of Norman Anglie de Podio, born in A.D. 905. Norm was the first to bear the “de Podio” surname, his father being named Adminius Amélius Simplicius. It would be really great if we could say that the Depew family line goes all the way back to Norm, in A.D. 905.

Norman’s name is dangerously anachronistic, and I have a couple of problems with it.

First, the term “Norman” meant “Northman” or “Norseman.” Originally, it referred to the Vikings, the Scandinavian raiders that terrorized Europe and Britain for a century or more. The term wasn’t generally used until after Norm was born. The earliest it could have been used is A.D. 911. That’s when king Charles III of France and the Viking leader Rollo signed a treaty, giving Rollo and his people the land that is now called Normandy, in exchange for no longer raiding the rest of France. Over time, Rollo’s people became known as “Normans.” But that began in 911, and our man Norm was born in 905.

Second, the middle name “Anglie,” or “Anglo saxony” as one source renders it, refers to two Germanic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons, who invaded the island of Britain in the 5th Century, and by A.D. 899 were united in one kingdom under Alfred the Great. The year 899 is when Alfred the great died.

Our man Norm was born in 905. The term “Norman” didn’t exist until after 911. And the term “Anglo Saxon” referred to a people on an island all the way on the other side of the continent, a people that didn’t exist as a unified people until 899. I will state plainly that I think someone in a later century made up the name “Norman Anglie”, and they may have even made up the person.

To complicate things even further, it looks like the Amelii line is from southwestern France, near the Pyrenees and Spain. While Moréri has been quick to connect the Ameliis in the southwest with the de Podios in the southeast (and in Italy!), other reputable historians have not been able to confirm that connection, and there is considerable arguing between the two factions.

So, depending on how much you believe, we can trace our Depew lineage back to Joseph in 1850, Nicholas in 1627, Hugues in 1055, or Norman in 905. 

"Other" and "Othering"

"Other" is a powerful weapon. It's a cruel weapon.

"Other" allows us to divide the world into two groups: people who are like us, and people who aren't like us.

We can then marginalize the "other" group. We can ignore them. We can resent them. We can fear them, and hate them, whoever they are. When you "other" someone, you can feel justified in mistreating them, excluding them, denying them respect, denying them basic humanity. You can feel justified in bullying them, hurting them or casting them out.

"Othering" someone lets you assign a label to them, to make them easier to identify because of their "otherness." Often, the label acquires a pejorative connotation, if it didn't have one to start with. "Others" become "extremists," "terrorists," "criminals," "undesirables."

It's easy to generalize about an entire population of "others" based on the public actions of one or more bad actors. But it's just as easy to justify or rationalize the bad actors in our own group, the population of people like us, and to say "the rest of us aren't like that." That's called the Fundamental Attribution Error. More about that in another post.

If we succeed in getting rid of all the "others," if we end up with a population that is just like us, then we end up in a bland, boring world. We end up with a plate of plain, white rice. Every day. For every meal. BORING.

I used to attend a regular weekly meeting (high priests group; if you know you know) where everyone thought the same thoughts and said the same things, all the time, week after week. Saying something different was, um, not well received. I finally started finding excuses to skip the meetings. I would rather pull the veins out of my forearm with a fork than sit through that again.

The fact that we are not all the same should make us stronger and more united, not weaker and less united. Granite is made of four different minerals, none of them as strong in their pure form as when they are combined in granite.

Our differences are what make life interesting. A smarter man than me once sang:

    Rejoicing in the differences, there's no one just like me
    Yet as different as we are, we're still the same.

We need to recognize that we are all children of the same God. He loves us equally, and therefore we should love each other equally. When we truly understand this, the "other" designations melt away. Rather than building walls, or fences, or detention/isolation centers, we should be building bridges. Remember, we are stronger together. 

Oh Please, Not an AI Music Composer

A Hamilton player piano:
 an old-fashioned music machine.

Facebook just fed me an advertisement for an AI music composer -- an AI engine that will write music for you. Does nobody remember George Orwell's 1984? In that dystopian novel, all of the pop music was written by computers. It was glurge that appealed to the masses, and pacified them, but it was emphatically not high art.

So far, I'm not all that impressed with AI. I know it's "the future," and I know "the future is now," but frankly, the way most humans wield AI is clumsy and talentless. We are excited about the sloppy software, and B-grade graphics that people have generated using AI. And we've read story after story about people using AI to make resumes, term papers, book reports, newspaper articles, speeches, and even legal briefs -- all of them marred by sloppy logic, inaccurate "facts" and analyses, made-up references, and so on.

If AI music promises to be of the same quality as the rest of this garbage, then I will only listen to musc created before 2025, thankyouverymuch.

To be clear, ultimately it's not the AI engine or Large Language Model (LLM) that's the problem. The AI is just a tool. The problem lies with the human using the tool.

Most of you are too young to remember the original Apple Macintosh computer. It was released in 1984 -- gasp okay, that's ironic. Anyway, the Mac came with a suite of software including a desktop publishing program called Aldus PageMaker. This was really putting power in the hands of the people. Suddenly, any idiot could be a desktop publisher.

And do you know what? Every idiot became a desktop publisher. The world was papered with ugly, lousy, amateur posters and newsletters and banners. You could spot a PageMaker document a mile away, not because of any defects in the software, but because of the human who had used PageMaker with all the skill of a lefthanded troll to create such an ugly document.

Now we're seeing the same misuse of AI. We're already seeing the PageMaker-quality output in words, in images, and in video. Are you ready to hear it in music? With AI, any idiot can become a composer.

I read today that composer John Williams has just finished writing a piano concerto. The man is 93 years old. He has a lifetime of talent and experience behind him. AI music may be able to imitate his compositions, but it will never match his genius or the quality of his work. There is no shortcut to that kind of quality.

About Energy Drinks

UPDATE, AUGUST 18, 2026: There's a new kid on the block. Read about it here. 

Potholes! A new video game idea.

We're visiting our daughter and her family in Kansas City this week. We have been visiting, on and off, since last August. While we've been driving around this week, it has been obvious that the roads around here had a hard winter: potholes, potholes everywhere.

Potholes, potholes, everywhere!

Map of potholes in Kansas city

While attempting to dodge the potholes, I got an idea for a great new video game. I'm going to call it "Potholes!". With the exclamation point.

Here's the basic idea

The premise is simple. It's a first-person point-of-view driving game. You are in the driver's seat, looking through the windshield as the road scrolls towards you. This should be easy to do in a 2D game engine, like Defold or Godot.

As you drive along, potholes appear in the road. Each time you hit a pothole, you register some degree of damage. The larger the pothole, the greater the damage. When your damage reaches a critical point, your car falls apart, right there in the middle of the road. (Use a cut scene for this.)

Scoring

Your car has an odometer. Your score is how far you can get before your car falls apart.

Details of operation

The point is to dodge the potholes. You can drive around them, or you can straddle them. Damage occurs when your tires hit the potholes.

You get an animated "bump-bump" when you hit a pothole. The larger the pothole, the larger the bump.

You can dodge into the oncoming lane, but if you collide with oncoming traffic, you crash, obviously. (Use a different cut scene for this.)

There is a rare, giant, car-eating pothole. When you drive into it, your car disappears, as you can imagine. This one gets a Warner Brothers Cartoons style cut scene, where you see the car drive out into thin air and then drop straight down, leaving a puff of dust at ground level.

Enhancements

Day and night. At night, you have wimpy headlights that may or may not catch all the potholes. 

The headlights occasionally flicker, often at just the wrong time. If this is too annoying and spoils the game, I will drop it.

Fog! Potholes are invisible, until you're almost on top of them. Maybe I should add heavy fog, where the potholes are completely invisible.

Degrees of difficulty

• Easy: slow speed, few potholes (This will be the original game)
• Medium: higher speed, more potholes
• Hard: highest speed, lots of potholes, but density will vary at random

Steal this idea! It is NOT copyrighted.

Feel free to steal my idea and make it your own. Feel free to sell your game and get rich from it! Maybe just acknowledge me in the credits.

Cory Booker shines again

Cory Booker just finished giving a 25 hour, 5 minute, speech on the floor of the U. S. Senate, speaking in opposition to Donald Trump's policies and executive actions. The black man broke the previous record of 24 hours, 18 minutes, set by white segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1957, speaking in opposition to the Civil Rights Act.

 In 2019, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) threw his hat into the 2020 presidential ring. He was impressive at the time, although he didn't get very far in the competition. He sat out the 2024 election, in deference to Joe Biden and then to Kamala Harris when Biden dropped out of the race.

It's a much different world today. Biden won in 2020, Harris lost in 2024, and we're all watching as Trump and his minions run roughshod over American institutions, in a clumsy yet brutal attempt to remake the USA into the Germany of the late 1930s.

The Democrats were so thoroughly defeated in 2024 that they still haven't recovered. They do not have a champion, a leader, someone with the charisma of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama to show them the way out of their wilderness. The Republicans in Congress, in the courts, and in most of the states, will not oppose Trump, and the Democrats are in every way too weak to oppose them.

I was mildly optimistic about Booker in 2019. He was certainly a better alternative than Hillary Clinton. But maybe now is his time to stand up, take on the mantle of leadership, unite the Democrats, and do something effective to oppose Trump. It's been five months since the election, three and a half months since the inauguration, and we have around three years to go until the next presidential election -- that is, if we get to have one.

Democrats need to unite behind somebody. Booker just showed that he may be the man for the job this time.

The Tariff Wars: Canada Strikes Back

 I know that, to many Americans, there is no weather north of the US-Canada border. USAnian weather maps often show clouds, storms, winds, and temperature readings right up to the border -- and no further.

Likewise, to many Americans, there is no civilization and nothing newsworthy north of the US-Canada border. All the news happens in the USA, and the only civilization that matters is in the USA.

Well, if Americans aren't watching Canada today, then they are missing something important.

Canada has long been the USA's closest and most faithful ally. You may not know it, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Canada was the FIRST Western country to declare war on Japan. Canada declared war on the evening of December 7, the same day as the attack. The USA declared war on Japan the next day, on December 8.

Since 9-11, Canadian troops have fought alongside American troops in every theatre of the Global War on Terror. They never came late to the fight, and they never came afraid or unarmed.

All of this is to say:

If you weren't watching the news carefully today, you missed something important. In the dark predawn hours of Tuesday morning, Donald Trump slapped his 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. After the sun came up, Canada slapped back. Hard.

If you want to see what was said, and what is being done, head over to CBC.ca, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website, and have a look. (That link will go stale in a few days. The world keeps turning, you know.)

In a nutshell, Canada's Prime Minister said that a trade war now exists between the US and Canada. He slapped a 25% retaliatory tariff on $155 billion of American goods. He removed American goods from store shelves. And he warned that the provincial premiers (like state governors) were going to take additional action themselves.

PM Justin Trudeau pointed out that Canada's quarrel wasn't with the American people, and in true Canadian fashion, he apologized for the pain it was going to cause them. He made it clear that Canada's beef was with "you, Donald."

The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, announced that American wines, beers, etc. had been removed from the provincial liquor stores, representing a gigantic loss of revenue for American producers. He announced that governments in the province would no longer be doing business with American contractors or commercial entities. He announced that the province had torn up its contract with Starlink. He warned that Ontario would be switching off the flow of electricity from the province to Minnesota, Michigan, and New York state if Trump didn't cancel the tariffs.

The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, announced that the province was ready to close the taps on oil and gas flowing south. The premier said, in effect, "This doesn't worry us too much. We can always find someone else to buy it from us."

That's just the start of it. Canada has taken the gloves off. They basically said, "You want a fight, you got it. Both sides are gonna get bloody, but we're not gonna lose."

#TrueNorth