As I was flipping through Facebook posts the other day and drooling into my lap (I assume that’s what everyone does as they flip through Facebook posts, right? RIGHT?), I ran across a post from the Smithsonian Institution asking for help transcribing the cargo manifests that described every last item, from socks to sextants, food to fecal containment garments (that’s a real thing, look it up) (no, STOP! I just realized it’s better if you don’t) , that were packed away in the spacecraft that went to the moon. My space geek antenna went PING! and I clicked on the link to the web site without a moment’s hesitation.

Disappointingly, it was rather dull work that required searching for specific information in an image of a printed document and keying that information into a spread sheet, the kind of work I do every day at the DMV. I found one or two interesting things, like for instance the item (I forget what it was) that was to be stowed “ON LUNAR SURFACE,” or the page that described clothing items like underwear and wee-wee bags that were to be stowed “ON CREW MEMBER.” Here, put that on your person somewhere; there’s no room to stow it in the space ship.

But doing that introduced me to the other transcribing projects that the Smithsonian asks volunteers to do on the same web site, and while most of them look pretty dull, like transcribing collections of stamps or bees (really), there are several diaries to be transcribed. I picked one at random and it turned out to be one of the diaries kept by Leo Baekeland, a chemist who would be most well-known for inventing Bakelite, if you know what Bakelite is. They used to make lots of things out of it, and people who are into “retro” or “vintage” stuff are still into Bakelite because it’s durable as hell and has a comfortable feel when you hold it in your hand, although it’s kind of heavy for a plastic. The telephone we had, when we had a telephone here at Our Little Red House, was an old-fashioned model with a receiver made of Bakelite that had an impressive heft. You could have easily used it to knock a home intruder out cold with one whack over the top of his noggin.

The diary I picked to transcribe started out with pedestrian descriptions of Baekeland’s trip to Miami and a little sailing adventure to a place that I really hope was called Gun Key (Baekeland’s handwriting could get pretty sloppy sometimes) and I was not so sure I was going to continune until I got to the part where he begins to dish out the dirt on a certain Rich Brown, apparently a manager or partner in one of Baekeland’s business ventures who started throwing around accusations that Baekeland infringed on his patents, but only after Baekeland’s accountants noticed some, shall we say, irregularities in the way Brown tallied up his expenses. The inventory seemed to be off, too, and when Baekeland and his associates asked about it, Brown got defensive and threatened to sue. I was so hooked by the intrigue that I transcribed twenty pages before I realized how long I’d been at it. I didn’t get to bed until almost midnight!

I’ve got to keep at it now just to see how things turn out with Brown, although there are more diaries to transcribe and it’s a lot of fun, especially puzzling out words that don’t seem to make any sense at first. Did he really mean to write, “I’m going to conduct an excrement? ” cause it sure looks like that, even though “experiment” would make more sense. So then I go looking through the other entries for the word “experiment” to see if it always looked like”excrement.” (Just to be clear, Baekeland didn’t write “I’m going to conduct an excrement,” but there were lots of entries in his diary that look like one thing but turned out to be another. It’s just that I’m an eight-year-old boy at heart, so I like poopy jokes.)