Gabby Hayes: Court Stenographer

 

CCR's Down on the Corner came up recently in one of my playlists.  I've always had trouble with the lyrics so I thought it would be fun to have my 13-year-old son transcribe the song for me earlier today.

Rules: He could listen to pieces and parts all he wanted but he could not ask for help or look up the lyrics.

Enjoy!

Earlier in the evenin’ just about supper time

Over by the courthouse they’re fighting to a crime.

Four kids on the corner, trying to break it up.

Will he with a pizza tune out with and he throws it with a hump.

Chorus:

Down on the corner

Out here in the street

And he in popo and plant

Bring the make-up, happy feet.

Drista hits the wacko, beaver just got his mouth

Look, he forms guppy hands, solo for a while

Popo twang gorilla pow on his column, too

And when he goes in to dance, doubles on kazoo.

(Chorus) x 2

You don’t need a pinhead just to hang around

But if you’ve got a nickel won’t you neigh your money down?

Over on the corner, there’s a happy ghoul

People come from all around to watch the magic boar.

(Chorus) x 5

McIdiot...

Yes, of course I have heard the term "pay it forward".  I once pushed a lady's stalled car out of heavy traffic and into a safe parking lot - she tried to pay me. "Pfft, nah," I said, "just do a favor for someone else someday".  I have helped out strangers with flat tires more times than I have fingers to count them on.  It's just what you do.

Yes, of course I have heard that people will sometimes pay for the person in back of them in line at a drive-thru or at some other takeout place if they are feeling especially giving that day.  My awesome sister does it all the time. 

But no one has ever paid for my meal. Ever.  Until today.

I  handed the employee at the window of the drive thru my card and she waved me off, saying its already paid for.  "ERROR... ERROR..." whispered my helpless brain, unwilling to parse the words the woman uttered into something I could understand.  I smiled and nodded like the buffoon that I am and I thrust my card at her again as if she was some sort of vending machine that was being super fussy about trading a Snickers bar for my wrinkly and torn one-dollar bill.

She pointed to the receipt and repeated that it had already been paid for.  I looked at my son and we both shrugged and pulled up to the next window.  We got our food and drove off.

About eighteen to twenty feet down the highway my son pipes up and says "Should we have paid for the person behind us, too?"

Time turned into honey and my brain finally oozed into working order [insert stadium-level slow clapping here].

I said "Yep. Yep we sure should have.  We will definitely need to make it right next time."  I sighed.

Well done, Good Example Man!  Thank you, citizen!  Now onto my next adventure where I push down little kids at Wal-Mart for their Pokémon cards! Quick, to the Inconsidero-mobile!  Awwaaaaayyy!

Sooo... as I type this I realize that simply going back and paying for the person behind me the next time I am there is not going to square everything with the universe.  What if I broke some sort of epically long chain because I just couldn't grasp basic Earth hu-mon behavior like a normal person?

How do I make this right?  How many rosaries must I say?  The balance needs to be restored.  I feel terrible.

Please help!

Down with Saucialism

 

So what you are telling me, Your Majesty, is that the less sauce I need, the more sauce per nugget I actually get?

It's decisions like this that are ripping your kingdom to pieces, mark my words!

If this policy holds true, what is to become of us that just want fair ratios of chicken to sauce with our meals?  Do you guys even sell a 46-pack? Cuz that's what I'm going to have to buy in order to get that 4th tiny container of nugget moistener:

Oh, yes, Your Highness,  I certainly see that I would have to shell out "only" an extra twenty-five cents per packet... No big flipping deal for those of us that work hard to cheerfully subsidize the sauce-drenched Jacuzzi parties of the 4-nuggeters, eh? It is out of sheer principle that I opt out of that tax and order several pillowcases crammed with nearly 200lbs of chicken in order to obtain 10 measly containers of Sweet and Spicy:

I am quickly going broke trying to keep up the charade that I am a good provider to my family, sauce-wise, but someone must take a stand.  Do not consider my words rash or ill-thought-out. I have spent many, many hours stuck in your drive-throughs carefully considering these words while enduring the ever-present distraction of blaring car horns behind me.  

For God and Country, please change your policy.  Thank you. 

Quick! Gimme the Biggest Poke-Ball You Got!

 

My son and I were waiting in the warm sun yesterday for our take-out pizza order to be completed, just happily chatting the minutes away.  Suddenly, a buck-toothed Sevenelevenasaurus came crashing out of the forest across the street devouring everything in its path!  It was complete mayhem and near total carnage! 

I had warned the city earlier this month about overdevelopment in our area bringing terrible consequences and horrors beyond human comprehension, but did they listen?  No!  They shouted me down and had me dragged from the premises.  

Who's a time-wasting lunatic now, Councilman Ernie?!  Who's a time-wasting lunatic now?

A Small Robotics Project

Many Halloweens ago my then-five-year-old-son asked if we could make some animatronic zombies for the front yard that would leap out of their shallow graves and chase people.  After an extensive feasibility study that lasted at least fourteen milliseconds, I had to tell him “Umm… no”.

Now he’s eleven and, while he is still interested in robotics, he has tempered his expectations on what can be done with technology from 2020, a limited budget, and little to no access to magic.  I wish more people I have dealt with in the past were that reasonable.  I really do…

So it was no big surprise when he said “Dad, I want to make an animatronic dragon head that blinks and looks around and stuff.  If that works, then maybe we can make a bigger one that has a body and stuff.” I told him “Boy… did YOU come to the right place!  Let’s do it.”

Now, I know the very, very best way to absolutely and irrevocably crush someone’s interest in something is to “start from the beginning”.  Like a kid is going to totally dig a 45-minute lecture on Ohm’s Law or giggle with joy while sorting a bag of random resistors by color code…  Don’t even get me started.

But you gotta put the first stake in the ground somewhere, and I wasn’t going to just build it myself.
I believe the “Hello, World” for robotics is getting a light to turn on and off on command, so we started there.  I kept the “lessons” to 10 minutes or so, with each one building on the last.  Using an Arduino Uno as the base, here’s what we did, day by day:

1) Blinked a light on the Arduino at various rates using changes to software
2) Introduced breadboards, and blinked a light on a breadboard instead.
3) Blinked two LEDs on a breadboard at different rates using changes to code
4) Changed the blink rates using variable resistors on the breadboard instead of software changes
5) Replaced the potentiometers with photoresistors instead.  Now the lights blinked according to how much light fell on these devices.
6) Replaced the lights with an H-bridge and motor combination.  The motor now turned clockwise if the left photocell saw more light, and counterclockwise if the right one saw more light.  Nothing happened if the difference between the two wasn’t big enough (dead zone was programmed into software).
7) Embedded the photocells in a couple of ping-pong balls and glued them to a stalk that was coupled to the motor.

[I tried to embed a short video of it in action in this blog post but there seems to some sort of error with the upload.  Bummer.]

The next step is to Paper Mache a dragon head and embed the disembodied eye-balls into that.  At that point, he wants to stop work on that one (no blinking, he decided) and make a new head that tilts up and down or turns side-to-side in response to touch.  Easy-peasy, buddy.

Stand by for pics of our progress!

H1N1 News vs. Coronavirus News

TL;DR: If you are interested, please check out these links to the posts I wrote eleven years ago regarding the Swine Flu pandemic.  There may (or may not)be parallels in how the current Coronavirus news is being meted out.

September 02 2009: Post 1
September 27 2009: Post 2
November 12 2009: Post 3
February 2010:Post 4

A little while ago I was thinking about posting something about the Coronavirus scare going around.  Before I start:

First, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am just some guy on the Internet.  Make of that what you should.

Second, I have nothing but sympathy for those who have suffered due to the current crisis. 

So please keep these in mind as I repost four of the articles I wrote eleven years ago regarding the Swine Flu Pandemic.  Thanks.  [Note: I have not re-verified the links from the original articles below, so many of them are probably obsolete.]

September 02, 2009

On April 23rd of this year, the first death attributed to the H1N1 virus was confirmed after flu-like symptoms began showing up in the population of Veracruz, Mexico, who happen to live near the Smithfield Foods pig farm there. Testing later showed that the herd was clean, but the so-called swine-flu virus continued to spread through the local human population. Containment was not an option once the virus went international.

For several months the media went absolutely bonkers about this pandemic and you could not turn on the TV without seeing reports of sickness and death throughout the world from this "new" killer disease.

High profile cases reported on the quarantining foreign travellers in China and group of tourists from India after they were sickened while on a field trip to a NASA in the US.

Articles describing predicted vaccine shortfalls, rationing, and National Guard “distribution assistance” began to appear in the mainstream media. WHO declared the H1N1 outbreak a Level 6 pandemic, and then stopped counting infections and instructed hospitals it was no longer necessary to test for H1N1 because of the cost and time involved in doing so. The ECDC stopped publishing infections and began reporting only on deaths starting August 11th.

The Obama administration recently published a report that 30,000 to 90,000 people could die from this illness in the US alone by the time it ran its course. As of today, 2,992 people have died worldwide, and there is a bill in the Massachusetts legislature that could allow swine-flu related warrantless detainments of private citizens.

There. I’ve cherry-picked the last several months of swine flu news to make it sound like we are all doomed. Are we?

Based on curve-fitting (I started compiling data about two weeks into the crisis) of periodically published data from the WHO and ECDC, the one millionth serious infection should have taken place sometime during the middle of this month. Hey, I know this uses a lot of assumptions that make my effort only slightly better than a wild guess. For example, if you plot morbidity rate, you see that it starts high and gradually drops to below 0.5% (the fatality rate of “run-of-the-mill” flu and pneumonia), levels out somewhere around 0.4%, and climbs back up to near 1% (at this point the ECDC stopped publishing infection counts). Does this mean that the virus a) is less lethal than regular flu and only looks worse because of underreporting or b) the virus has mutated into a deadlier form (like the 1918 influenza pandemic) .

I choose to think it is just cases being underreported. I mean, I have had the flu a few times and I have never bothered a doctor about it. I can only think of a couple of people that have, as a matter of fact. In addition, when you think about all the people that will catch this and not report it because of lack of insurance, can’t afford to take time off from work, or the fact they live someplace where there simply are no hospitals, it seems like the morbidity rate I calculate is at least an order of magnitude too high.

But if you do take the 0.4% number and assume that 3.5 billion people - half the globe - eventually become infected over the next few years (spreading at a rate akin to the 1918 outbreak) then that means that, over the next couple of years, 14 million worldwide will die from this disease - 61,000 in the USA. It is a remarkable coincidence that my “back of the envelope” 61,000 number falls smack in the middle of the Obama administration’s range as put out in their badly worded press release.

But comparing the number of people killed during the 1918 pandemic to the population of the world at that time, and doing the same thing with the current global population for even my probably-way-too-high-estimate, it seems that the current outbreak is at least an order of magnitude less worrisome than the one from nearly a century ago.

So why the panic? Why the incessant “1918” comparisons on the news? If this is so much less serious than regular flu, why the rush for inoculations? Why is Elmo helping children in the Fight Against H1N1? If the situation is so out of control, why don’t the infection and death graphs follow a severe and worrying exponential curve, rather than the tamer path actually seen? Why does WolframAlpha show a mortality rate of near 1% when a recent article stated that "800,000 have been infected in NYC alone", but with only 54 deaths, this makes the real rate a hundred times lower, doesn't it? Why do many reliable sources (look them up) say that this will be no worse than any other flu season? If that is the case, why is this so darn newsworthy?

With all of the data out there pointing in different directions I really don’t know. I have a couple of theories, though neither fit the observed facts. One is an equal mix of “unlikely” and “crazy”. The other is just “full-on tinfoil-hat crazy”. I am not going to post them, though, because I am interested in what you think and I don’t want to tilt the discussion in any direction.

So tell me what you think, because I am at a loss. Should we worry? Is everything OK? What data am I missing? What’s the real deal here?

September 27, 2009

For those of you following the H1N1 pandemic news, here is some more information for you regarding the "crisis" (also see previous H1N1 post if you are interested).

My (admittedly very basic) analysis shows that the number of daily worldwide deaths due to swine flu has plateaued at 50 or so. As a matter of fact, the 7-day moving average may actually be trending downward, but that is not real clear yet. A huge majority (90%) of the world's population lives north of the equator and this might just be the calm before the flu-season storm. Who knows?

The US has 4.6% of the world population, but accounts for 14.7% of the reported H1N1 deaths. This is most likely due to better identification and reporting than due to population densities. Assuming things stay steady, this seems to imply about 2,700 Americans can expect to die from this each year for the next 3 years (the expected duration of the pandemic). This is about 20 times less than administration’s mid-range estimate, and will bump up the overall death rate in the US by 0.1%. The overall death rate from flu alone will increase by 4.8%.

Run-of-the-mill flu and pneumonia kills about 60,000 Americans every year.

As a comparison to the 2,700 estimate, 4,000 die per year in the USA in house fires and 600 die per year in lightning strikes. So my day-to-day concern is somewhere between those two things. Mind you, I am not a statistician or a medical doctor. I only can look at the information presented by official, unbiased sources and try and figure out how to interpret the numbers in a way that is meaningful to me.

Of course, if millions of people call in sick to work all at the same time our already wounded economy might be temporarily affected a tiny bit. But this might be offset by the huge amount of money being pumped into the works for vaccines, cold and flu remedies, face masks, advertising, etc, etc.

Maybe there is something to worry about, but maybe not. Any thoughts?

November 12, 2009

At left is a graph I have been updating since a few weeks into the Swine Flu Pandemic. I was going to post it a few days ago but didn't get around to it (laziness, mainly). Recent headlines from MSNBC and other places have galvanized me into posting quick article.

Most of the information I have been getting has been through the European Center for Disease Control. I stopped getting my information from the CDC in the U.S. because I like the daily, more globally-concerned format of the data from the ECDC better.

The headline that caught my attention was “Swine Flu has sickened 22 million in the U.S.”. My numbers show that serious illnesses from this outbreak should be closer to 2 million, and that's world-wide. I thought, okay, this is a typical wild exaggeration by the media designed to capture my attention. After all, to avoid overworking emergency rooms, they stopped general testing for H1N1 months ago (at the recommendation of the CDC) when a patient showed up with flu-like symptoms, so how could they claim these numbers?

The sub-headline read “CDC: 4,000 in U.S. died, including 540 kids, between April and mid-October”.

4,000?! I “knew” that number was way off because my curve fitting shows roughly 1,000 in the U.S. should have died over the past six months, pretty close to today's ECDC published number of 1,004. But sicknesses can be misinterpreted – deaths cannot. So what is the deal?

Apparently the CDC has been under-reporting the numbers for a while. They knew they were wrong, but, in the absence of the correct numbers, they have been publishing gross underestimates for a while. I am looking forward to tomorrow's ECDC update and how they explain the discrepancy.

FWIW: I am not a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes people just make mistakes or do the best they can with the data they have – this is most likely what is going on here. It would have been nice to know that the error bars were so huge. Even knowing that the data were “plus or minus 100%” would have been a vast improvement.

As I wrote in my previous H1N1 posts, it looks like there are a lot of different data out there that can be used to “prove” anything regarding this outbreak. I am genuinely puzzled and concerned here. I plead genuine ignorance on my part – no passive-aggressive shenanigans or accusations of malfeasance are implied.

Any help to make sense of the situation would be appreciated.

February 10, 2010

I think this will be my last H1N1 Epidemic Update.

The ECDC seems to have stopped publishing daily updates in favor of weekly ones (unless I am missing it), and the news seems to have stopped reporting on it, I can only assume that the epidemic is over.

BTW, I have no idea why the spikes in the graph are there, but I suspect it is a reporting issue.

Nothing really too much more to say other than my condolences go out to those that have been effected.

Pancake and Waffle (Conclusion)

The next day I went to PetSmart (not the one run by the dead-eyed animatronic… the other one) to see what they had in the way of terrariums.  After talking with a super helpful guy there I decided that a 40-gallon jobber would do nicely.  Thanks, José! You were awesome!

But where to put it?  It’s not like I could cram it onto the boy’s already crowded desk.  Really the only place it would fit would be in the middle of the room where his foosball table was.

What?  Oh, yeah.  I never mentioned that, did I?  I built a 75% scale foosball table a while back.  

Here are some pics of that.

It was a fun build but, since he never really used it, into the attic it went, leaving just the base. That surface happened to be the perfect dimensions for the new hamster home.  Yay!

But Pancake was still MIA, so, you know… Not so much “yay” for that bit.

Around 1AM the next morning my wife woke me up to say she was hearing noises coming from our son’s room.  The boy and I had crashed on the sofa in the media room after binge-watching The Simpsons and the cat was still curled in his bed downstairs, so it was time to investigate.

I glanced into the boy’s room to discover that, yes, Pancake had returned and was busying himself trundling along the noisy-noisy wheel of noise at top speed!  No way! I snuck over to the cage door and deftly closed it.  He was trapped!  Well, trapped-ish...  I then lifted the cage into the waiting terrarium and left it there.  Now… NOW, he was trapped.  We woke up the boy, told him the news, and he darted to his room.

Smiles and sighs all around!

So, yeah.  It would be like you or I breaking out of jail, enjoying a few days of freedom and then deciding to return to the prison to hit the treadmill for a bit.  Hooray for taking definitive action without the burden of forethought!

The next day we went back to the PetSmart and asked a different guy about getting a replacement Robo and told him what happened.  We (the wife and I) explained that we all knew that there were risks inherent in putting two unrelated hamsters in the same enclosed space but surely a 40-gallon terrarium would…

“Oh, no no no no!” he admonished us, overly cheerfully and certainly overly loudly.  “Robos that aren’t related will fight each other all the time!”  The boy had turned away from the shelves upon shelves of “cool looking stuff to put in an aquarium” (the terrarium stuff was lame) to listen in on the conversation. He was aware of the risks, too, but he also knew that, if they had a big enough space and didn’t have to fight for perceived resources, they wouldn’t necessarily go all psycho on each other and they would eventually get used to having a roommate with slightly different DNA than themselves.

“As a matter of fact,” he continued gleefully, “they are very cannibalistic, and they will…”

“DUDE!” I said, stopping the narrative dead and nodding meaningfully toward the boy.

The salesclerk looked at me, perplexed.  It then dawned on him that, while his message was on point, understood, and appreciated by all, his delighted tone needed to be adjusted a notch or two downwards. We thanked him for the warning and promised to look out for any signs of the little guys hurting themselves (from stress) or each other (out of the dark Cthulhu-like malice that apparently defines the dwarf hamster soul).

So… yeah.  We bought a new hamster and a bunch of terrarium stuff and everything went into their new de-luxe apartment near the foot of the bed.

After a few days of watching them behave themselves (for the most part) and absolutely launching themselves in random directions off the new and gloriously silent treadmill we saw that all was well. 

The boy drew this to commemorate the occasion:

This has not happened.

Yet…

In the meantime, Long Live Pancake and Waffle!

STORM MODE 2020!

AHHHHHH!  STORM MODE!  STORM MODE!

What the heck is that stuff??

Honey!  Come quick!  I knew that when Betelgeuse exploded it would rain down shredded Corona Locusts down on us from on high!

It's in the Bible!

What do you mean "Where?"  near the back where it talks about God's judgement being meted out in three to seven inches of white fluffy dollops of vengeance! Don't you read?! DOESN'T ANYONE EVER READ?!

And look! our son left us a message on the back porch with his last gasping, freezing bits of strength!

We'll be seeing you soon, my boy!

In the aaaarrrrmmmmsss ooofff annn angel...

Pancake and Waffle (Part VII)

Yes, Waffle had passed. 

At this point the boy had attended as many funerals as he had attended weddings, so he is well-adjusted to the impermanence of all things. 

For example, here is part of an e-mail exchange we had before we got the hamsters:

Thank you!  Ivam learning that hamsters can't be put in different groups so let's get 2 of the same type that look different. also if possible i would like to request a phodopus roborovskii hamster, as they live up to 3 and a half years, not like others that live to one and a half thanks. also are these two hamsters it, i mean when they pass away is that all the time i get with hamsters

Here, he is considering getting longer-lived hamsters because he is worried that, when they do die, he would never be allowed to get replacements.  Here was my response:

I’m not sure what to say.

You are going to be a completely different person at 12 or 13 or 14 than you are now. You might find other things fascinating then.

It will probably be up to you how long you want hamsters. Usually, people don’t choose pets by lifespan, otherwise everyone would own tortoises or parrots. Fish die all the time, for example, but people still love aquariums. 

It’s just the way God made the world so we can learn to appreciate how awesome and precious and special life really is. Things need to end so other things can begin.

If you take good care of your hamsters and you love them and treat them right (like I know you will), then, when they die, we can get new ones if that is what 12- or 13- or 14-year-old Ethan wants.

So, don’t pick by lifespan. Don’t treat them like the world’s saddest countdown clock. Choose them based on how much love you can give them and how much happiness they will bring you.

Love you,

Dad

So it was agreed that, when the hamsters eventually scurried off to squeeze themselves through the bars of the Pearly Gates, their replacements would keep the name Waffle or Pancake. No Roman numerals. The names would be like the titles “King” or “President”.  After passing, they would get an appropriate descriptive adjective tacked on to their name like an old-school British or French monarch.

At some point, all fathers find themselves doing something that is many, many sigma into the tails of any “My Life’s Accomplishments Probability Curve” they could imagine, pre-kid.  When the nurse hands you your infant for the first time, things like “teaching a kid how to ride a bike” and “treating a skinned knee” and various other Norman Rockwell things plunk suddenly near the dead center of that curve.  Other stuff like “Being roped into playing Joseph in several area church Christmas plays” and “Writing a series of stuffed-animal-centric comic books”, while extremely unlikely and definitely unthought of at the time, falls well outside the peak but is still somewhat plausible.

It was with that in mind that I began converting one of my son’s magic wand boxes into a miniature casket fit for a hamster.

There were still several wand boxes left over from the 2017 project.  It was short work to cut one in half and modify it like you see in the pic on the left.

We each placed something of personal value into the coffin.  The boy chose a small hunk of geode, the wife chose a small polished stone from one of the family’s vacations, and I chose a silver dime.  A hole was dug in the forest out back and Waffle the Brave was laid to rest.

(To be continued…)

Pancake and Waffle (Part VI)

The traps I bought are basically finely off-balance seesaws.  Food goes in one side of a tube, and the rodent enters from the other.  When the mouse or hamster or whatever reached the food, the idea is that the weight of the critter combined with the effort to get the food causes the food end to drop, the entryway end to lift, and a one-way door gently closes, entrapping the critter.

Instead of the recommended peanut butter I just placed some hamster food in the food end and distributed the four traps around the boy’s room. 

In the morning we discovered that the food in two of the traps had been turned to crumbs and that some of the food in the food dish in the cage had been eaten… or at least pushed around a bit.  But no hamsters.  It seems that the hamsters did not weigh enough to unbalance the trap enough for the door to shut.  Super.

Before we went to school and to work we moved the traps around a bit but this time I hot-glued the food to the food end of the trap.  Maybe the extra time spent struggling there would cause the doors to close properly…  Hey, it might have worked, except that evening there was no evidence of any of the food being eaten and the food dish seemed undisturbed.

This was starting to look less and less like a “search and rescue” mission and more and more like a “recovery” mission.  Out of desperation, I resorted to the one tool I had hoped not to involve in this whole deal.

The cat.

Rocket (the cat’s name is Rocket, you see) had been sequestered from the second floor of the house since we got the hamsters.  No sense in giving the Robos tiny little cardiac arrests while we were at work.  Or downstairs.  Or just by leaving the bedroom door ajar for ten seconds. 

I opened the door to the upstairs hallway and slowly followed the cat around.  I could tell he smelled…  something… he just wasn’t sure what.  He walked into the boy’s room and sniffed around the bed a bit.  I followed him ready to grab him at a moment’s notice in case he did discover where one or both of the little guys were hiding.  After a few minutes he left the room and he sauntered down the hallway toward the master bedroom in his usual cat way.  No longer hunting.  Just out for a stroll.  I picked him up, shut the door, and brought him downstairs again.

It was a longshot, but, hey, it might have worked.

My usual routine when the wife brings the boy to karate after school is to make myself dinner, head to the media room, and fire up Netflix (dude, you gotta watch Norsemen… it’s awesome). As long as I shut the doors to the media room it’s pretty relaxing.  The cat just stares at me through the glass and pouts quietly. 

This time, though, my peripheral vision caught a brownish-white fuzzball arcing majestically through the air on the other side of the French doors.  Sometime during the show Rocket had found his new buddy (maybe in the laundry room?) and was teaching how him to play “Grievous Bodily Harm: The Home Game”.  I dashed out of the room just in time to catch the hamster in mid-tumble down the stairs.

He wasn’t moving as I held him in my hand and gently lowered him down into his cage.  After a few moments he started stirring around a bit… slowly at first then with more and more confidence.  I could tell he was injured but he ate a bit, climbed up the tube to the second deck and got on the treadmill.  After a few desultory rotations he climbed off and went back downstairs to the food dish.  I placed the cage inside an open cardboard box and I passed the news on to the wife and boy that one of the hamsters had been found. 

When they came home, I filled them in on what had happened.  They were happy to see him back in the cage but we could all tell that he was moving far more cautiously than normal. 

Sadly, Waffle did not make it through the night.  Pancake was still MIA.