DKFL

I just finished ear-booking a memoir Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley by Christopher Davis. In a first for me, it was read by a voice-bot; but it would have been hard to determine this from the aural evidence alone. It had about the same number of egregious mispronunciations as the, like, people they employ to create audio-books.

In our pantheon of the Saints of Kapital, Peter Kindersley ranks second only to Sir Clive "ZX81" Sinclair, [of whom multiprev].  We were distantly aware of Dorling Kindersley as a publisher of gorgeous glossy informative non-fiction for families. Dau.I and Dau.II were born in 1993 and 1995 and by 1996 we joined Sa Bhaile [At Home] a community of woo-folk [a lorra Birkenstocks and rice-cakes] who chose intentionally to keep their kids out of school.  In 1998, The Education Welfare Bill threatened to regularize Home Education in Ireland. Some of us in Sa Bhaile had a [interminable] series of meetings to create a new more structured disorganization; the better to fight or divert The Man from interfering in our version of educating kids at home. It was quite heady as we decided to organize the first conference sponsored by our nascent Home Education Network HEN.

Around this time, The Beloved went to London for a meeting [AGM??] of Education Otherwise EO, the well-established British equivalent  of HEN. The key-note speaker was Peter Kindersley, riding high on a direct selling pyramid scheme venture called Dorling Kindersley Family Learning. The business model for DKFL was for wannabee thousandaires to host DKFL jamborees at their homes - think Tupperware Parties for heavily discounted books, CDs and other merch. After his talk, TB barrelled up to him and said how inspiring DKFL was . . . and would DK like to sponsor the launch of HEN across the water in Ireland. Kindersley answered positively in a way that was not just "ho ho an untapped market". But businesslike, he asked for a business plan and proposal to be sent to his PA. 

Within a month a personal cheque for £2,000 had been lodged in the HEN bank account! In those far-off days, £2K was enough to cover all the upfront costs of running the 1st HEN Conference in Newtown School in 1999. That conference broke even - turning a modest profit from The Raffle. The Peter Kindersley Memorial Fund was rolled over to float the 2nd Conference in 2000AD. And so on! That subsidy enabled HEN to stagger on from year to year without requiring any Effective to raise funds for the major expense of the HEN financial year. Which was just as well because the HEN community was long on visionaries but short on grunts. So long and thanks for all the fi$h, Mr Kindersley.

The Beloved also signed up to be a "Presenter" for DKFL which didn't make us hundredaires let alone thousandaires but did allow us to acquire dozens and dozens of books at cost-price ad maiorem edu glossiem of our girls:  

The title of Christopher Davis' book Eyewitness is a reference to the long series of Eyewitness Guides whc fill the bottom right corner of the picture above: Sea Life; Mammals; Sports; Plants; Transport; Your Body; Space etc.. Those DK books formed the core resource for Dau.I and Dau.II to educate themselves from the comfort of their own sofa.

Davis was the 2nd Hire when Dorling and Kindersley launched DK at the Annual Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. He was therefore witness to [and co-cause of] the Rise and Rise of DK through the 80s and 90s as they launched a string of million copy best sellers including John Seymour's Self-sufficiency which got us where we are today. Davis was "let go" just before DK imploded spectacularly by investing in millions and millions of unsellable items of Star Wars merch in 1999. The book is wry, funny and a good lens on booze, deals, hubris and humility. The bare bones of DK's history and timeline is captured here.

Th5n1ksgiving 2025

Bird flu is endemic now. The H5N1 strain of the virus, which has been found in turkey Meleagris gallopavo flocks in counties CW MH MO this November, is notably concerning because it is particularly virulent if/when it jumps the species barrier and starts to scythe through, like, people. One problem is that bird flu circulates in wild birds, and the Department of Agriculture has NO resources to prevent sparrows or rooks vectoring the virus into free-range commercial flocks. What they have done is mandate that poultry farmers get their birds indoors to minimize the chance of passerine poop in the feeders or water troughs. We are a teensy bit concerned for our favorite free-range && organic egg farm halfway between here and The Déise. In supermarkets in Ireland you can but organic eggs or free-range eggs but not organic-free-range and I go all Buridan's Ass on making the choice.

Today, it's Thanksgiving in the USA, the Canadian having given their thanks in October as always. In Ireland it's a just a normal working day but tomorrow Black Friday the shops will be rammed because discounts are to be had. And because Kapital can never have enough retail incentives Cyber Monday is in 4 days time. Whatevs, we have family&friends in the US and I try to remember to send them a greet in the much-to-be-thankful-for vein. My quip for 2025 has been This:

is as close as we're getting to turkey this year. Not that we'd be eating turkey in normal times - a most over-rated thing on which to waste oven-time. A little chicken can go a long way: roast as an excuse for roast potatoes, cold for late night sangers, curry for St Stephen's Day, and soup for the next couple of days after that. And the best of all these, for my pref, is soup. The justification for chicken and ham at Christmas is somewhat diminished because half the family are vegetarians. But our favorite farm does a line in free-range pork and ham and we had an excellent collar roast last year. I am tasked to order another for this December.

But to reiterate: we have much to be thankful for: plenty of firewood, the use of our legs, minds not tooo confuse, and a distinct want of Want.

Arrrrghinish

Bauxite is a locally [Les Baux-de-Provence, Jamaica, Guinea, Hungary] abundant reddish rock which is mostly Al(OH)₃ but run through with iron Fe silicon Si and titanium Ti congeners. Bauxite is the most abundant source of alumin[i]um for our take-out trays, soda cans and airplane wings. In broad terms, getting dirty bauxite to Shiny Al is a 4 step process 

1. Crush it to increase the surface area for chemical action
2. Slop in A Lot of hot caustic soda NaOH and boil it up under pressure to create pure sodium aluminate Na₂O·Al₂O₃
3. Discard the alkaline sludge aka red mud into tailing ponds until the end of time
4. Apply A Lot of electric current to reduce the alumina / aluminium(III) oxide / Al₂O₃ crystals to pure metal

Step 3 is a mill stone round the neck of share-holders and requires the company to divert significant dividend money to maintenance costs for the tailing ponds. In 2014, The Blob described the ruinous consequences of failing to front up these infra-structural costs in Ajka, Hungary. There on 4th October 2010, a berm failed after a rainy ould Summer. Seven people and 7 million fish died in the tsunami of toxic waste.

Long ago and far away??  On 4th September 1983 Aughinish Alumina Limited (AAL), a partnership of Alcan (40%), Billiton (35%) and Anaconda (25%) started operations in Co Limerick, using steps 1 - 3 of the ELI5 protocol above. You can see the consequences of 40 years of productivity from space:

on the South of the Shannon Estuary ~10km WSW of the Airport and about half that distance W of Askeaton, Co Limerick. AAL was the largest producer of alumina in Europe, making 35% of this key industrial resource at one time. Mergers, sales and acquisitions found AAL in the hands of Rusal in 2007.  Rusal is the creation of billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska Олег Владимирович Дерипаска.

So there was a Russian asset in the Republic when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but the once and future Taoiseach Micheál Martin claimed Irish exceptionalism w.r.t., like, sanctions and Kevin Sheahan, Askeaton publican and Fianna Fáil CoCo councillor echoed this unprincipled parochialism. Because 450 of his parishioners were directly employed by Rusal and he needed their votes next time around - he had secured 1,246 first prefs in 2019 . . . the Irish for shame is náire. The fact that Deripaska is a citizen of CypRus and deplores the invasion of Ukraine shouldn't make no differ.

A couple of weeks ago the YT algorithm dropped me The Aughinish Incident a very Irish Disaster [26 min] by Kev Collins. It addresses another facet of the Aughinish / Askeaton story . . . tl;dw? AAL started ops in 1983, over the next ten years there was an uptick in a range of human and animal health issues locally. Cattle dying from vet-baffling ailments, stillborn and deformed calves. And children too. It's not much use cherishing AAL as a major likely employer for the next generation of Askeatoneers if those youngsters are disabled or dead before they can be hired. Public and political pressure built up and up until in 1995 the EPA was tasked to determine a) if the uptick was within the normal range b) if not, what was the cause.

After 3 years, and £5million, that investigative study concluded that there was a) nothing to see here b) no cause could be assigned with statistical confidence to the nothing. The skeptical minority report of environmental statistician Dr Sarah Walters from U.Birmingham was suppressed. So only 5 volumes and a summary [PDFs downloadable] totalling 1,280 pages were published . . . in 2013.  Unless a) you live in NW Co. Limerick && b) you're doing a degree in stats && c) your crap-detector is particularly well polished I doubt you're going to read the report with a jotter on the table for taking notes. Kev Collins runs a channel on which he can make articulate assertions w/o itemising all the supporting evidence. A bit like some of The Blob, do I hear you say? His Aughinish piece-to-camera is a useful teaser or call-to-arms, but you'll have to Work to determine if a) the EPA was suborned and bought off by oligarch-roubles or b) the adverse health storm in West Limerick was hard to endure but not attributable to anything but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or c) little gr👁👁n men.

One of Kev's points is that the fissured limestone nature of the bedrock upon which the AAL red mud mountain is piled up is not uniform in texture. The subterranean fissures have capacity to funnel toxins underground quite a distance from the Aughinish source . . . to blurf up in some unfortunate Askeaton farmer's borehole - but not the neighbour's. The geology around the plant is quite diverse

with a thesaurus of limestones, siltstones, mudstones, shales and sandstones; variously cherty, muddy, laminated . . . and differentially porous. Which is an unfortunate reality because, it seems, the EPA adopted a model of uniform geology which was all about the Mean values while smooshing the variability around those means. Must hunt down Dr Walters' minority report.

Maybe refer back to the cluster of Down syndrome kids born to a cohort of mothers who had earlier attended the same secondary school in Dundalk. At the time my boss and his boss crunched the numbers and concluded that so many cases in such a small cohort was vanishingly unlikely BUT it was a) wrong and b) counter-productive to point the indignant finger of blame at The Brits and their Sellafield nuclear facilities just 100km E across the Irish sea.

The day after YT delivered The Aughinish Incident, Wikipedia headlined "The High Court of Justice in London rules BHP liable for the 2015 Mariana dam disaster in Minas Gerais, Brazil". That is Ten Years ago! BHP was originally an Australian mining corp but went multinational megacorp by merging with Billiton Maatschappij. Yes, yes the same Billiton which [see above] had a 35% stake in AAL when that enterprise floated . . . kleine wereld!  The High Court judge handing down that condemnation was/is Finola O'Farrell. Justice O'Farrell has acquired a lapel-full of gongs and honours from The Brits but I bet she's eligible for an Irish passport. As with Aughinish, the wheels of justice / fact-finding ground slow for downstream Minas Gerais. But a sorry tale of corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, failures of technical oversight launched 45 million tonnes of toxic crud into the Doce River killing 19 people and uncountable millions of fish. That was +40x as much as at Ajka in Hungary 5 years previous. 

I trust that the EPA, Micheál Martin TD and Kevin Sheahan CC will own their responsibility when/if [whc heaven forfend] corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, & failures of technical oversight cause a similar breach of berm into the mighty Shannon.

But for me, the bottom line is that the State should cherish all those who are crushed by misfortune [in maternity hospitals, sketchy work-places, on the roads, at the seaside]. Then we'd be less quick to lawyer up and/ or Go Tribunal and assign blame at ruinous cost to everyone involved except the lawyers. 

Just a little closer to the Lord

I've been a fan [have two of his glossy coffee-table books fan] of Andy Goldsworthy since Stone [1994] Time [2000]. His schtick is to assemble or modify natural materials so they better stand out in the landscape. A good part of the oeuvre reflects on impermanence - even gurt big lumps of sandstone are being imperceptibly changed by wind and tide. It can be a salutary lesson in humility: we're on the planet for a few years and when we're gone Nothing beside remains . . . yes, even The Blob will be poofed away by The Algorithm and forgotten.

In the 00s, a Donegal forester called Liam Emery was tasked to cover another Irish hillside [The S face of the Hill of Bogay] with a monoculture of Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis because Coillte the state forestry service likes to cast things in its own image: dull, monolithic, short-termist, tone-deaf. [maps loca] 

But Liam elected to stick one to The Man and interplant 3,000 Japanese larch Larix kaempferi among the spruce. Not randomly but intentionally so that as the trees grew to maturity the golden-turning larch needles would (at certain times of the year [FALL], under certain [rare-in-Donegal, sunny] weather conditions) light up the hillside with the image of a Celtic cross. I am not sure if the project was driven by particularly religious ad maiorem dei gratiam etc.  sentiments. But it surely tuned into a particularly peculiarly Irish heritage [R image clipped YT by Stephen Reid ultimately from Will Reilly].  So park your wonder-fatigue and check out the YT story. 

tl;dw: in ~2002, Liam and his pal Bernard went off piste; they surveyed then planted 3,000 alien-to-the-project larch whips in a 200m x 100m pattern. In 2010 Liam suffered a fatal kayaking accident and it wasn't until a tourist overflight in 2016 brought the arbor-image to the internet. Slightly longer version.

Obvs, being so photogenic and with Liam's tragic death and all, there is a movement to stay Coillte's hand w.r.t. to felling out the forest when its commercial time is done . . . in ca. 2045. But forests must be thinned every ~15 years lest the trees suffocate each other from being too close-packed. Dogoodnik tree-huggers can't just Stop The Chainsaws and think that will solve the problem. Kiwi Sean came and thinned our forest in 2022, bringing in selective light and air and converting crinkle-crankle trees into firewood to warm a couple of Olds in the twilight of their years. So I guess we can expect the picture of the cross get increasingly pixellated with each thinning cycle.

Also earlier Triquetra (Celtic knot) in P. sitchensis and L. kaempferi above the Lake of Glencar Co Sligo 

Hat-tip off also to thelife.of_reilly on Insta for a) the Bogay drone footage and b) flagging that another artificial heritage construct, the Grianán of Aileach lies about 3km NNE from the Emery Celtic Cross. The GoA is a 19thC re-construction of an iron-age hill-fort atop the peak in the distant background of the picture [R]. 

¿Post Title? Bloboprev. 

Bone Dry Ungood

Cripes is Ireland damp for about 5 months every year. When we came home to Ireland after spending the 1980s+ in foreign, we canvassed opinion about what was essential to know / do / acquire to live our best lives At Home. MaryC was strong in her advocacy: "get a tumble drier; vented to outside". Later we acquired a polytunnel which (regardless of tomatoes, wood-storage and my second-best sofa) served primarily as a laundry aid. Even if we give clothes an additional blast with the tumbler before folding them away in the press. So we are not, like Dau.I and Dau.II, in their teeny Dublin flat, forced to dry laundry on a rack in our living room. 

The drier sort of deals with our laundry-damp [other damps are available] but not the fact that we live, breathe, bathe, and braise in a house built in 1941with 500mm thick rubble-in-courses masonry with no [rising] damp-proof course. The kitchen windows weep visible condensation. The walls are also sopping: it's just harder to see the dribbles . . .and the black mould against the grey granite. A month ago, Dau.II cried enough with the musty cotton goods and bought a MeacoDry Arete® One 12L Dehumidifier for their tiny 2-bed TigerBuilt flat in D7. And last week we followed CanDo Yoof and bought another. Come in, roll up, it's R2D2's kid-sister [R] sucking water from the air and saying Farewell to Fungus. We left the machine [its refrigerant actually] to settle for 2 days and then switched t'bugger on. It registered 95% RH [relative humidity] which was unsurprising: 24hrs after a yellow rain warning that had gone on and on for 18 hours.

How much water vapour can a room support aka is the R6X6 reservoir large enough to bring our kitchen down from 95% RH to 55? Turns out it depends on the temperature [see table under]. But the bottom line / rule-of-thumb is that our 4m x 5m x 3m = 60 m³ kitchen "only" holds about 1 litre of water. We set La Demoiselle Dehum going at 16:00hrs and 95 RH. When I went to bed 7 hours later, she had cranked the kitchen down to 65 but by 06:00 the following morning we had reservoir is full and RH had crept up to 76. Clearly this a work in progress.

°C	g/m3
-20	1
-15	1½
-10	2
-5	3
0	5
5	7
10	9
15	13
20	17
30	30
40	51
50	83
60	130

Being too dry indoors is also a problem: we are designed with wet mucous membranes which allow lungs to get oxygen and these membranes are also the first line of defense against microbes. Too dry and the macrophages cannot patrol and you'll get sick. 

Also wooden furniture. In 1967, my Dad retired from the Navy at 50 and bought a cottage + acre at the edge of the commuter belt for his new workplace East of London. It was before the end of cheap oil and, in winter, the family cranked up the central heating. Until he noticed cracks in some of his inherited dining chairs. Thereafter all the rads acquired a humidifier: a plastic reservoir with a 20x20cm square of porous sponge to wick up the water and disperse it to the circulating air. One of my teen-tasks was to fill these reservoirs with a dinky water-can. It was a neat cheap-as-chips appropriate technology solution.

For most domestic purposes the aim is for 40-60 RH. R6X6 trips off at 55. 

• Storing apples for the winter is best at ~1°C and 95% RH
• Storing flour 50 - 65
• Mixing dough 40 -50
• Proofing dough 70 - 75
• High RH was one of the reasons why N England became the centre for cotton spinning rather than doing this nearer the point of production 

Herding vets

I was at an interesting conference last week, which was grand but not quite grand altogether. The following day the organisers dropped me an e-mail requesting feed-back. But all the links there were to the dreaded Tripadvisor. I'm more comfortable giving back a narrative than a bunch of ★★★★☆s.

Logistics. I've run a few day-long meetings in my time and have some ideas about how to make such things run efficiently. And, like, name-badges! Even with a very small team of Effectives managing time, motion and people can be done with efficiency and dispatch. 

For example, at our village hall last Friday, from a standing start, all-willing D, The Beloved andI slopped out 30 cups of tea and 5 instant coffees in about 4 minutes. As well as stripping the clingfilm off the [Chocolate!] biscuits and getting the milk out of the fridge and into jugs. The Waterford Museum Team made three rookie errors in crowd management.

1. At the morning coffee break a backup of parched conferees trailed across the room, out the door and down the stairs. Because all the catering supplies were crammed on two 2m long trestle-tables arranged in series.
• The key thing is to put the milk and sugar and teaspoons on a different table from the hot-water bowsers. Preferably so that  conferees can get at the goods from all sides. Then put the petit-fours, micro-viennoiserie, sandwiches and biscuits at an even further remove. Folks dither. Nobody wants the *@!!& ditherers causing . That's what happened in Waterford .
2. The programme was as chock full of passion, interest and information as an egg is full of meat.  The very first speaker, an academic who should know better, made a big show of keeping to his allotted 45 minutes . . . and then ran over. It is about correct to say that if he hadn't peppered his talk with references to clocks and alarms, he would have kept to time. But his over-run set the tone and we were 15% over time by the coffee-break. And a full hour adrift by the end of proceedings! It matters because people have trains to catch and parking-meters running as well as their abiding interest in The Emergency.
• there was, because of over-stuffing the programme, no time for questions, comments or elaboration from the floor. That's a shame because the average age in the auditorium was 60+ and some of them would have info or stuff germane relevant to the discussion
3. The programme included 1.00pm Lunch in exactly the same font as 11.30am Coffee Break. But at no time were were told that lunch was forage for yourself. My Dunmore pal David must be from the inner circle (he was after all alive during The Emergency) because he had brought sandwiches. Obvs we're all adults; we can [and did] go across the square to have bowls of hot soup and soda-bread. And as the conference was 'free', adults can understand that the budget might not run to 1.00pm Lunch at any time. But slack time-keeping meant that there were no tables inside and we dined al fresco in November . . . because we're well 'ard. Better comms is easy: 1.00pm Lunch-break: find your own and be back at 2pm sharp.

This is not to cast a crate of asparagus at Team Waterford Museum. They had a limited budget, so they blew it on petit-fours; thinking "slopping out tea for 80+? how hard can that be?" and did that themselves. But catering is Hard Work - physical and logistical.

Maggot-pie

I was impressed / entranced by Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare: the winner of the 2025 Wainwright Prize for writing about nature, environment and conservation. I don't keep tabs on literary prizes [except wrt to Michael Crummey??] but maybe I should trawl through the Wainwright back-catalog because a dozen past winners / short-listees have been favourably viewed by The Blob. One of the gob-smacking episodes of Raising Hare, is when one of Dalton's adoptees elects to deliver a litter of kits behind a curtain inside the house.  It is a testament to the non-threatening empathy of their host. It is less crazy than you'd think because hares are fastidiously clean about their person and leave no trace - because to do so is to invite the attention of carnivorous predators.

Dau.I the Librarian filleted out a book for me from the book-stream she was processing. Featherhood (2020) by Charlie Gilmour is a memoir and reflection on the [abusive] relationship between fathers and sons over 2 generations more or less spanning the 20thC.  Charlie, the last son in the dynasty, was abandonned at birth by his famous and famously eccentric father Heathcote Williams. He spent the first 28 years of his life working to forge a relationship with this serial evader of parental responsibility.

A key theme of commonality is that both father and son chose to rear tame corvids - treating their homes as free-range aviaries. Heathcote adopted, and wrote poems about, a jackdaw Coloeus monedula called Jack Daw. While Charlie found a magpie Pica pica in a London gutter, named it Benzene and looked after it for nearly three years. Hence the book-title [har har] Featherhood. The difference between hares and crows [and birds in general] is that the latter are not house-trained in the way that small childer, cats, dogs, and hares can be. The most aggravating aspect of keeping a flock of free-range hens in the 00s was that they drifted in to hang about on our warm salubrious South-facing stoop and shat all over it. Don't get me started on the pair of skittery-shittery ducks we had for a while. At least the ducks were adept at hoovering up slugs in the kale. And it's sweet to have robins Erithacus rubecula in the polytunnel - but don't leave the laundry hanging there longer than necessary.

Corvids, like most birds, are just cloacally incontinent. If you choose to keep them indoors expect shit on the table-cloth - and every other surface. But corvids are carnivorous and are programmed to stash surplus food against a rainy day. If you feed the wee darlin's maggots, mince and scrambled [shells-and-all please] eggs, then expect to find giblets poked up your sleeve, meal-worms in your hair, and old meat book-marks. And the smell - whooph! These matters didn't effect Heathcote much because he lived feral, unwashed and surrounded by brimming chamber-pots. Charlie and his avant-garde artist partner Yana adapted to the maelstrom because they were on A Mission.

Benzene isn't a difficult individual to please. Her medieval tastes are simple enough. She likes music. She likes men. She likes to consume small animals when they're still alive. They assumed their magpie was male until, as a yearling, she started building a nest atop the fridge: a most unsuitably slippy surface to start weaving twigs and detritus into a nursery.

Before I lived in their basement, my New England foster-parents had hosted a sooty mangabey Cercocebus atys in the same space. This beast had been rescued from a Boston brothel where he'd endured a miserable existence wanking away in a cage in the lobby. Some of the whores used to torment him, but the clients were in general more kind and supportive. In the cellar, the mangabey would roar blue-murder at the sight of any woman but pause in his frantic business to hold out a hand to men, in the hope of a treat.

Charlie was eventually adopted, and loved and supported by David "Pink Floyd" Gilmour when his mother dated and then married the guitarist. It didn't keep the chap from going off the rails with drink and drugs and mental breakdown as a teenager. But his new Dad was infinitely kind, tolerant and open-handed. Not all men, indeed. For one of his offensive off-'is-'ead escapades Charlie was banged up in chokey for 16 months, but new Dad embraced him at the prison gates when he was released.

So Feathered is less bucolic and meadow-sweet frothy than your average contender for a Wainwright Prize.