crogging

Years ago when The Blob was still in diapers, I wrote about a friend who indignantly refused to act as a community trash-collector on a beach North of Boston. Insofar as we choose to take some exercise away from home, we generally choose not to plod across a land-fill; or something that looks like one. If a beach is really heaving with plastic we're likely to be strolling on our own: normal people are on a beach where the trash isn't disgustingly obvious. In 2013, I was of the opinion that no one person could make inroads into the 38 billion plastic bottles which are discarded every year in the USA alone.

But my math was wrong because that's only a couple of bottles every week [for each and every man woman trans and child]. Steven Moody is an Irish runner who set himself the goal of picking up a few items of street trash every time he went out jogging. Not enough to require a bin bag - if he saw a bottle in the gutter he'd pause long enough to pick it up and carry it to the next trash bin he passed. He considered that he could, in this way, make a visible difference along his regular route and make himself happier. I think he also subscribed to the broken window theory: that a clean street was harder to first-trash than one which was already awash. He was also delighted to have had an original idea. Turned out that plogging [jogging with plastic] had been a thing [plocka upp = pick up] for several years in Sweden; so his idea was a First For Ireland <huzzah!>. I heard Steven on the wireless a while back pushing a plogathon on Sandymount strand last Wednesday 22 Aug 2018. Many of the beaches round Ireland have now been owned by Tidy-Towns type people who go out regularly with a bin bag. The great thing about plastrash is that it packs light: you can carry a huge volume away with you if you bring a bag.

Okay, that's plogging! What the heck and tarnation is crogging as in the post-title. That's where you train crows to pick crap up in exchange for peanuts or Purina Cat Chow pellets. via Neatorama. Last year they trained crows to clear cigarette-butts. Now they are suggesting corvids as electrical component sorters, search and rescue, car-key finders. Instructions for making the exchange box for crows.

Finding things? We met up with Young Bolivar [multiprev] when we were down in Cork last month and he has just lashed out to buy himself a drone. He showed us some distant selfies taken with his new toy. Just the thing for finding our sheep which have gone awol on the mountainside. Would such drone-hunting be drogging? Ooops no, drogging is something else entirely.