P.N.G. at Fifty

On 16 September 1975, late in the decolonisation game, Papua New Guinea 🇵🇬 moved on from being a United Nations trust territory under Australian governance; whc since 1949. Fifty years of independence are being celebrated. PM James Marape has presided over a flag-raising. I know bog-all about New Guinea, so I was tickled that yesterday Wikipedia devoted the entirety of its Front Page Did you Know? column to things Papua . . .

• ... that different sounds drummed on the garamut can indicate the intended recipient?
• ... that Papua New Guinea, despite having only 11.7 million people, speaks more than 800 languages?
• ... that the Papua New Guinean government almost ran out of foreign exchange reserves during a financial crisis in 1994?
• ... that the cavefish Oxyeleotris caeca is found in surface waters during the wet season?
• ... that changes in land use and forestry turned Papua New Guinea's contribution to climate change from being a net carbon sink to a net emitter?
• ... that communities around the Sirinumu Dam lack reliable access to electricity and drinking water?
• ... that Nancy Sullivan and ten other activists were sued by the Papua New Guinean government as retribution for opposing the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone?
• ... that the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates was intended to stop "yo-yo politics"?
• ... that inland fisheries in Papua New Guinea are used by more than half of people living in the mountainous Highlands Region?
• ... that a bay in Papua New Guinea is Goodenough?

PNG is about the size of California or Turkey but its people speak ~840 (very) different languages [20m YT]. So Tok Pisin is one of the official languages and first language of maybe 10% which makes it, for them, a creole and no longer a pidgin. On a visit in 2012, Charles Windsor used a translator [but not that translator] to introduce himself as namba wan pikinini bilong Misis Kwin.

They eat a lot of taro Colocasia esculenta. But beware, you need to process the raw material properly because the roots are loaded with calcium oxalate. This salt crystalizes out in the plant cells as needle sharp raphides [as R] designed to rip at the oesophagus of herbivores to give them a piss-off-and-eat-something-else message. That's all for domestic consumption. For export, there is Au Co Cu Ni and oil&gas.

Fifty years on, poor old PNG has a terrible record for diversity and inclusion, police corruption, infant mortality, disability rights, misogyny.  We could take a bit more interest and then international pressure might make it better for their dispossessed?

Maskalyk in Ethiop

Reading Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine (2017) by James Maskalyk. It flips, somewhat clunkily, between his work as a Toronto ER physician and volunteering at Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa. Working in dangerously uncomfortable adverse conditions in the Third World is not everyone's cuppa. See prev adrenajunkies David Nott or Stan Brock.

Maskalyk also pops in reflections while minding his recently widowed  grandfather at the old trapper's cabin in Alberta. On the last day of one care cycle there, Jim does triage on The Meds. As a doctor, he knows about NNT [number needed to treat, whc prev on statins - Ringer's - prostates] aspirin for heart-attack: 2/100 users benefit. BP meds 1/100 benefit. At least aspirin is cheap-as-chips. The old man is in his 90s, for the last 20 years, at least, each hospital consultant has added a drug (or two) which they believe will 'work'. Patient, GP and family stick with them in case there is a benefit they, unexpert, might miss. Or, esp if nobody is paying, the drugs accumulate in a drawer unconsumed . . . because they have adverse side-effects. The list spools bigger regardless - never gets shorter.

Pat the Salt, my aged FiL, has gone to his rest nearly a year now. He was rarely sick and never went to the doctor until he went, reluctantly [resistance is useless] for a check-up in his mid-80s. They found he had high blood-pressure. At peak he was on 10 different meds and supplements each day. Active intervention by his adult children prised him off two from the list. Jim's grandpa has a qualified advocate and they go into visit the GP together to simplify the drug list. Then the grandson sets off for the trauma of strangers in Addis . . . where there are, to the nearest whole number, 0 drugs available for each waiting patient. So much unfairness.

The book - I like this touch - is sliced into an alphabetical list of chapters: A is for Airways; B is for Breathing; C is for Circulation; D is for Drugs . . . Flow . . . Hurt . . . Kind . . . Love etc, etc. I suspect that this conceit contributes to the reader's feeling of clunk: O for blood group scrapes enough copy to warrant a chapter by wrenching material from elsewhere in the story. According to the catalogue, Maskalyk's other book about medicine at the edge Six Months in Sudan (2009) was sitting on a shelf in our local rural part-time library. Last Tuesday, being in town with a burst wheel-barrow tyre, I used My Open Library [we were inducted a couple of years ago] to self-serve it for me. 

How to draw the flag of the PRC

We were across the water at a family event in mid-August and my team arrived first at the lunch location. While I was lollygagging on the shingle beach pretending to be a mermaid, Dau.I the Librarian upstakes to view the visitor centre . . . which had a binful of 2nd-hand books. I've resolved to stop buying any more books, but thought her acquisition of Handbook on People's China [The foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1957] was cool enough, and data-rich enough, to borrow. If you're quick, you can snag your own copy from Kennys - €4.99, a snip! A snap-shot of the state of that nation, coming to the end of its First Five Year Plan, when I was still in diapers, it serves as a benchmark for how much has changed. There are 2⅓ times more people living there for starters. In Ireland there is 'only' 1.8x difference in the population of the Republic over the same time frame.

The frontispiece is a colour inlay showing the red [#EE1C25] with yellow [#FFFF00] stars of the flag of the PRC 🇨🇳 and the next page gives a template in case a) you speak English b) you're a fan c) you're a teeny bit obsessive about getting the details correct. The basic shape is a 3:2 rectangle and the five stars can be positioned by gridding the canton into 150 [15:10] squares as [L].  No, no, not Canton, the city: that's 广州市aka Guangzhou, China's 4th largest metro and home to 3x as many folks are RoIreland. I've beat myself up for never knowingly heard of Tianjin which houses even more people.

What else don't we know about China in the late 1950s? The legislature is/was the National People's Congress but it only met once a year and Executive function was carried out by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress chaired by Liu Shao-chi. I bet you've never heard of him and not merely because he was purged in the Cultural Revolution - "renegade, traitor and scab" etc. No consolation that his memory was rehabilitated 12 years after his death.  Another member of The Standing Committee was . . . drum-roll . . . the Dalai Lama. That was 2 years before the Bodhisattva of Compassion fled Tibet and sought asylum in India. 

Lesser organs of government include the Ministries of Internal Affairs, External affairs, National Defense, Public Security, Justice, Supervision, Finance, Food, Commerce, Geology, Machine Building, Coal, Chemicals, Timber, Textiles, Railways, Labour, Education, Agriculture. Each of which had its own named Minister and some Vice-Ministers

Another revelation was that in 1957, the PRC was generating a proud but puny 16 TWh  = 1.6 x 10^10 kWh of electricity. In 2022, the Republic of Ireland used 3.4 TWh x 10^10 kWh [source] or 2x what China was consuming 70 years ago. That Irish data amounts to about 7,000 kWh of electricity per person.

  Which is consonant with Caislean Bob's annual domestic consumption of about 10,000 kWh a year split between 2 permanent residents. The excess [7kWh - 5kWh = 2kWh] must be all the server farms and data-centres to which the government whores us out. Me, I use my share of the electricity to get through 50,000 pots of tea - at about 5 pots an hour 24/7.  Obvs, since the Three Gorges Dam [whc prev] came on across stream in 2012 there is more electricity [95±20 TWh of electricity per year on average] to distribute across the PRC.

Right at the end of the book, my arithmetic heart beat a little faster at seeing a section III Conversion Tables on weights and measures. In 1957, in PRC

• a Chinese foot 尺 Chih is defined at 3 to the S.I. metre.
• for longer lengths, use 里 Li at 2 to the km 
• areas? use 亩 Mou at ⅔ of 1000 sq.m. or ~7 ares = 0.07 hectares
• liquid measure? the 升 Sheng is defined as = 1 litre
• weight? 斤 Chin = 500g  aka Catty [wch bloboprev - last 2 paras]
• for bigger lumps resort to 石 Picul or Tam = 50kg or 100 Catty

There, I'm glad we've sorted that out. And ahem <cof> <cof>: Other Chinas 🇹🇼 are available.

Mental Elf

Someone in Coolock branch library decided to condemn as "Worn Out" Joanna Cannon's 2019 book Breaking & Mending: A junior doctor’s stories of compassion & burnout. A local contact snagged it from the discard box and sent it down country to us. Its publication was subsidized by The Wellcome Collection in London, which also hosts an excerpt of the book if you can't find a copy in the library, like.

Cannon left school at 15 but went back to school and then medical school in her 30s because she wanted to work wit people, especially people troubled in their heads. 

I've set out my stall on how the HSE/NHS treat Mental Health as a poor relation. It's easier to get €millions for Cerebral Palsy or €50,000 for a kidney transplant, than to get sorted for bipolar or OCD. Breaking & Mending is clean and compelling reading but it ain't a textbook and Cannon no longer practices medicine, so some assertions and suggestions are allowed. One is that good mental health depends upon being part of a listening, caring, community. Another is that we are all at different positions on multiple spectra. An effective [listening, caring] community makes allowances for outliers [in whatever direction they outlie]. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the bullying and slaggin' and compulsory gym of school is better for mental health than slopping about in the shallow warm dopamine soup of TikTok in your exclusive bedroom.

The last 20 years, we have been sold a bill of goods by the gods of FAANG [whc polyprevs] - everyone gets their own customized glove-fit echo-chamber. We no longer go out to the cinema and roar together in a waft of shared pheromones. Netflix distributes movies now. Lockdown kept kids from classrooms - but sucked into their customized devices. As social apes, we [most of us, that is, it being a spectrum] are not designed for being alone-with-a-phone. Maybe that's why youngsters go off the rails|: further from the average on the Axis of anxiety, self-harm, OCD, suicideation, depression, paranoia. Back in the day, the unhinged were recognised and accommodated in the community even as they were teased and bullied.

As if one person's story at the coalface of mental health were not enough, I Borrowboxed Will you Read this Please as an earbook. It is editted by Joanna Cannon and chapters a dozen tales told to a dozen British writers. There was a recruitment process, soliciting "mental health service users" to come forward to tell their stories. The "finalists" [there is a reality TV vibe here] were chosen to illuminate the variety of lives which generally go under our collective radar. Normal (2.3 kids, reasonably happy, car in the drive, holidays planned) families go about their normal lives oblivious of the handwashing or gender dysphoria next door. If you have gambling or bipolar or self-harm in your family that is quite enough without embracing the troubles of Others. But we really should a) care b) allocate resources to the Cinderella of the health services.

For the earbook, a dozen different reading voices have been recruited to the project. One nice conceit is that the income / royalties [if any!] are split 50:50 between each troubled person and the tale bearer.

2 tonnes an hour

The biggest asset Chez Blob is our 17m x 9m polytunnel. It has a lot more utility that our most expensive asset - the 9m x 4m array of solar panels which we had installed in April just S & downhill of the tunnel. The tunnel is where we dry the laundered wearables; where we grow spinach & beans & tomatoes & squash & tarragon; where I can touch up a chain-saw and store kindling. The only draw-back is that it never rains in the tunnel and even that is only a problem w.r.t. to the veggies.

But it for sure rains on the plastic of the tunnel and from the beginning there have been gutters along each of the long sides which capture rain-water and deliver it to containers varying in size from 20 lt to 1,000 lt. If you add them all up we have the capacity to store nearly 3 tonnes of water [obsessive details and itemisation] which may then be eked out each evening to where the thirsty plants require it. I've said before that, in an ideal world, our average annual rainfall [~1,000mm] was delivered in increments of 10mm every third night through the year. In rose-tinted memory, it was like that in Olde Ireland but now we can expect to go for weeks without any rain at all and did so in 2018, 2023 and now again in 2025.

It was terrible dry for long stretches of the Spring this year and in July, I was reduced to using well-water to irrigate the veggies. I hate doing this because, since we changed the submersible pump in April 2024, prolonged running of taps drags silt up from the bottom of the well, and I have to clean the filter. On the w/e of 19/20 July we were served a dump of rain which topped everything up again. Then nothing for 5½ weeks and I was slopping an algal soup out every evening as the barrels steadily ran dry.

We were promised the scut end of Hurricane Erin on Tuesday 26 August - without the wind but with the hope of some rain. I cleaned the gutters, checked the hoses, mustered the buckets in anticipation. Wednesday, I was woken in the dawning twilight by the drum of rain on the roof and went up to make sure The System was working. It was wonderful and not before time. For two pins I would have [frighten the horses alert!] stripped off and danced in the deluge.

It looks like we caught about 2 cu.m. = tonnes of rainwater between dawn and breakfast. Which is consonant with the fact that we had about 18mm of rain that morning and the gutters run full length and capture close to all the rain that hits the plastic - 17m x 9m x 0.018m =  ~2.75 cu.m. As mentioned we had another wet front slob through on the morning of 03Sep25, so we are now brimful at a time when we don't need it . . . but the soil microbiota in the polytunnel is having a fiesta.

Danny Boy

At 11 am 3rd September 1939, a Sunday, my mother and grandmother decamped briefly to shelter under the massive scullery table when they heard on the wireless that war had been declared. When nothing happened after 10 minutes, they somewhat sheepishly emerged and continued to prepare Sunday lunch for the men of the house. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Med, my father was making sure 'his' MTB, and its crew of 10, were ship-shape and Bristol fashion. He was a month short of his 22nd birthday. Just 10 weeks later, that Little Ship sank in a storm 20km W of the Northern tip of Sardinia [map]; as he was attempting to repatriate the Effectives to Blighty via French inland waterways. When I turned 22, I was studenting in Dublin and would no more have signed up to serve than I would have been training to be a ballet-dancer, surgeon or vicar - all of which had been stated career aspirations of younger-me. It was the 70s, long hair, loons and Bob Dylan for me; rather than drills, discipline and spit-and-polish.

A full [N=13] coven of my family gathered in Dorset in the middle of August, to scatter me mother's ashes in the sea near where she'd agreed to marry Sir the Old Man. As usual before travelling, I scoured Borrowbox for something, anything, to read on the road. I was ambivalent about an army memoir, but it was more up my street than James Acaster or Barbara Kingsolver. That's how I got to read Double Crossed: A Code of Honour, A Complete Betrayal by Brian Wood MC. 

Living in a parliamentary democracy, we get to vote every few years and hand over the command of the ship of state to a bunch of Effectives Operatives - people who can fund-raise and glad-hand and make deals without being necessarily competent to make difficult decisions. The data on which those decisions are made are gathered by professionals, paid for by the state. Whatever you think about the US-British invasion of Iraq, the uniformed employees of the state were obliged [and trained] to carry out the task on the ground. On 14 May 2004, Brian Wood was ordered out of his armored personnel carrier APC [as L] to engage the Iraqi militia who had just ambushed the Brits. Against 10:1 odds, 23 y.o. Wood and his squaddies won The Battle of Danny Boy and he was awarded the Military Cross. 7m YT exec summary.

But those events occurred 65 years after 1939 and the relationship between The Public and The Armed Services had changed significantly. Since Nuremberg, it was no longer possible to play that "only obeying orders" card: every soldier was expected to be squeaky clean ethically and morally when their mates had just been killed and maimed and incoming is still flying. Politicians, who had committed the British army to the sorry, shabby, ruinously expensive [£8,000,000,000 there or thereabouts] Iraq venture, chose to take the high moral ground by establishing a commission of inquiry into the ethical behaviour of the PBI (poor bloody infantry) hazarding their very lives on the ground at Danny Boy. Brian Wood was required to attend the Al-Sweady Public Inquiry and remember in detail who had done what to whom ten years earlier. The thing that most concerned him was that The Man would take away his medal. The Inquiry was also ruinously expensive [but only £25,000,000 not billions] almost all of it funnelled to lawyers, who had never handled an AK-47 let alone been shot at by one.

Fun facts; small world dept.  Jason Beer the principal lawyer for the Inquiry was the same as the Jason Beer [quips] who was i/c the legal team for the Horizon Post Office Inquiry 7 years later [whc bloboprev]. On the telly, beloved-by-Brits, actor Toby Jones played Phil Shiner - the venal lawyer for the innocent Iraqi farmers killed, captured and brutalized at Danny Boy . . . AND . . .  Mr Bates, the Sub-postmaster who wouldn't be bullied.

Today we have naming of Storms

Today 2 days ago . . . Met Éireann, UK Met Office and KNMI Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut have been in bed together as a storm naming co-op. Since 2017, France, Spain or Portugal are in another consortium, upon whc Belgium and Luxembourg are coat-tailing. This allows for warnings about floods and gales in Tarragona or Toulouse when things are comparatively benign in Tullamore. The last named storm which affected Ireland in the 2024-2025 season was Floris on 5th August and he was a lot less windy than tree-felling Darragh or Éowyn ( a record 184km/h at Mace Head Co Galway on 24Jan25). 

Hurricane Erin was a) nothing to do with the NL/IE/UK list b) a bit of a damp squib when she passed NW of Donegal later in August.

On 1st September, the tabula is raza and we get a new set of names to crank through: Amy, Bram, Chandra, Dave, Eddie, Fionnuala, Gerard, Hannah, Isla, Janna, Kasia, Lilith, Marty, Nico, Oscar, Patrick, Ruby, Stevie, Tadhg, Violet, Wubbo. Met Éireann is responsible for choosing those in green. Take it from me, there won't be any Storm Steve or Storm Wubbo this cycle! There just aren't enough name-worthy storms in any year.

More weather newses: after a long droughty Spring and Summer we have had two rainy fronts come in from The Atlantic - one passing through even at the moment of launch - which has refilled all our containers. Full report on 08Sep25.

Naming of parts (easing the spring)