Julian Barnes, English littérateur with an affinity for La Belle France, was short-listed for the 1984 Booker Prize with Flaubert's Parrot. I might have read it at the time, because it's a bit off-kilter and "post-modern". But I can't really remember the story of one man's obsession with the stuffed parrot(s) which may have sat on Gustav Flaubert's desk. Something set me to thinking about other left-field object-person associations: like Captain Danjou's artificial hand.
We were passing through Waterford to put Dau.II on the train back to Dublin after a couple of days of driving lessons. She asked to stop in LIDL to see if they had more of their €4 hot-water bottles, they were sold out in Smithfield. And that's how I was persuaded to buy an olive drab hot-water bottle - not my first choice; my only choice. My McCauley hotties tend to shocking pink or polka dot.
You can maybe see where this is going? We all know that
I may be over-empathizing but I can imagine him sitting in the Pres Palace when the central heating is fritzed again. If only I had a Грілка he might muse. Although he has a sense of humour, hugging a pink polka dot hot-water bottle might be a bridge too far in the propaganda war. A LIDL olive drab number might supply some discrete core-body warmth.
You are at liberty to imagine Julian Barnes' grand-daughter writing a post-apocalypse memoir about her search for the authentic hot-water bottle with which Zelenskyy saw Ukraine to victory. Lionel Messi's world cup soccer shirts sell for $1 million each.
One of the potent metaphors in Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing [prev] is that the the family's holiday home place is on the Irish Sea facing coast of Wexford. They've been going down there every year since the foundation of the state and every year another section of cliff has been undercut by the waves and the sea is a few inches or a few feet closer to the back door. It's like Lal and Willie Pierce's place in Ballyhealy.
Hemsby in Norfolk has been in the news at the end of November because a 30m section of a concrete road, servicing a couple of dozen wooden homes, collapsed into the sea during a storm so unspectacular that it didn't even warrant a name. This came a couple of months after a palpably sad tale of compulsory eviction and preemptive demolition of a widow-woman's home. It was one of five homes grubbed up and taken away under the same order. No compo, no counselling, no option, little notice. I suppose, it's better thus that allowing all that timber & paint & nails & copper-wire to float out to sea like a fleet of Fukushima shipping hazards. On Saturday 9th Dec, the 5 houses isolated by the collapsed road were demolished.
There is a long history of lost villages all along the East coast from Ipswich to Scarborough. From the top: Clare, Shipden, Foulness, Whimpwell, Keswick, Eccles, Waxham Parva, Ness, Newton Cross. It's not all about global warming and sea-level rise; because geologists reckon that the East side of England is pitching down as the West side of the tectonic platelet rebounds from its load after the last ice age.
I was so taken with the story that I pitched it to Metafilter on the 7th Dec where the response was quotidian. Florida is a bigger story on disappearing beach-front property, especially if you value dollars over "heritage".
There is a utilitarian argument to be made. Nederland is throwing a lot more treasure, steel, groynes, pumps and dyke at the rising tides than Little Hans plugging a hole with his fist; although it has sometimes been een dubbeltje op zijn kant. The Brits can't or won't protect the whole of their exposed coast, so someone must decide who/what shall be saved. Even a few kilometers of rip-rap rock berm costs out at £15million - rising to £20m adjusted for grift inflation. That's about 2x the value of the 60 homes which have been lost to the waves over the last 30 years. It cost £80m to beef-up the sea wall in Dawlish [bloboprev] with, like, a proper engineered solution. But Dawlish is a town and its railway is a vital infrastructural bottleneck. It's easy for the mandarins in London to write off and Other the alternative types who live in wooden chalets among the eroding dunes of Hemsby.
Something can be done . . . if Shell Oil picks up the tab to keep its North Sea gas terminal.
In the run up to Dau.II's driving test, I was, several times, unceremoniously shoved out of The Grape in various bleak settings in SW Waterford City. My place being taken by Damian the driving instructor or Darren the driving tester. What to do? Driving School Centraal in Woodie's Car Park is a brisk 15 minute walk from, say, the City Library; but the RSA driving test centre is way off on the Ring Road. I had ~45 minutes to kill there, the drizzle was light, so I headed off towards a Stuff Shop called The Range which we'd passed on the way into the industrial estate. So much to tempt the unwary:
But I got caught in the craft section and bought one "Pack of 100 Art Studio Wooden Alphabet Beads" for what-could-possibly-go-wrong? €1.30. I thought they'd make a novelty stocking filler for Gdau.II [8] at Christmas. Returning home, I spilled the 1cm x 1cm cubes into a shallow bowl, resolved to thread the beads on a bit of string so that it spelled something nice. My nice is not Gdau.II's nice, though . . . I don't believe in unicorns for starters. The letter-bracelet -necklace was just an idea.
I scrabbled about looking for an S - the 8th most common letter in English and the normal way of making the plural. There was only one S! - and that a mis-shape. If you count this hirpled S, there was at least one bead representing each of our 26 letters, rarities like Q Z and J included. So the composition of the bag-of-100 cannot be random. The beads are made in - surprise! - the PRC = People's Republic of China. Perhaps the foreman or marketing manager chose them so that patriotic messages could be easily written with this tool. "LOLS" is difficult but Xian, Qi and Zhu are much easier. Bloboprev on letter freq.
Here's the scatterplot of the 26 letter freqs in the OxEngDict compared to PplRepChina as represented in the archives of Art Studio and The Range. The letters appear chosen to be completely unrelated to their frequency in English. So The Range, a British firm headquartered in Plymouth, are not serving anglophone literacy with this particular toy.
And here's Santa Nollaig:
Since 1st Aug 2014, drivers are required to display N for novice plates on the car for two years after passing the test. There are other restrictions. RSA's "research tells us that novice drivers are most likely to be killed on our roads in the first two years after passing their test due to their inexperience". But I doubt if they have separated out young [male] drivers from drivers immediately after their test; because the overlap between these constituencies is very high.
I know that Dau.II is a more careful driver than me . . . and for sure (for the next couple of months!) she knows the highway code and the meaning of the dozens of signs, some quite peculiar, that grace our roads.
Quiz. Please describe and define the difference between each pair of similar-looking signs! If you can't get 100% on this, I advise that you make and display on your car an S to indicate sign-ignorance.
And what about the dithery Olds?? [prev] Several years ago, my mother shared some news about one of her 80-something neighbours. This old dear had just deposited a car load of garden clippings at the recycling and compost centre. On leaving, she reversed at speed across the car-park and whannnnged into two other cars. The police were called. With commendable compassion and pragmatism, it was agreed that IF the neighbour turned in her driving licence THEN she would be spared an appearance in court. I felt a rush of empathy because the first time I, aged ?16?, was put behind the wheel of a car by my father, I contrived to reverse at speed across the car-park and whannnnged into a pile of roof-tiles breaking a few and the brake-light cover.
My current 10 year licence expires [5 months early] next June when I turn 70. Other road users need to know that someone with slow reactions, defective hearing and / or compromised sight is behind the wheel . . . to give us old buffers a bit more time, space and courtesy. I suggest E for Elder. Actually, maybe we can make it like pre-emptively declaring your pronouns on e-mail footers. If everyone displays a red letter on white sign according to their driving deficiencies, then the poor N for novices won't feel so stigmatized.
Last weekend we were resident in the Tramore Multi-species Care and Rest Home. The lines were quite blurry as to who was an inmate and who running this asylum. The Owner / Matron / CnC was away on a week's respite - absolutely deserved and not half long enough. The resident rescue dog has been in the wars these last couple of years: so many buffets of outrageous fortune. The poor cr'ature deserves a bit of coddling. But not coddle! "2 large onions, cut into slices" makes that streng verboden because dogs are lack the enzymes to process N-propyl disulphide, so that hangs around in the circulation to blat glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase in red blood cells resulting in anaemia. Propyl disulphides are what give onions, garlic, shallots their honkin' quality and make yor eyes water when you slice them.
The science is all at NCBI: Some food toxic for pets Interdiscip Toxicol. 2009 Sep; 2(3): 169–176.
Big red face! I volunteered to trot up the hill to [the nearer emporium] Supervalu to buy Knorr Beef Stock Pot 4's 112g [at front L] which is by contrast "slowly simmered with parsley and carrot". ONION!!
I cannot forebore to drill down into the ToC . . .
Following the tradition of Gautama Buddha [aka The Great Man], at the age of 36, Prince Yongey did a midnight flit from his privileged position as Abbot of a well-appointed monastery and went on retreat among the Great Unwashed of India. The book is
Mingyur had intended to go on his [self-]discovery pilgrimage for 3 years and come back to his patrimony with more compassion and a few IRL stories to use as parables and liven up his teaching. Escaping from his minders at midnight having ordered a taxi for the train-station was in the nature of a schoolboy jape. Sitting in a jam-packed train bound for Varanasi being bumped by lousy neighbours; assaulted by the reek of the privy and startled awake by the train's whistle . . . not so much. He couldn't even honour his intentions to sleep in the station concourse the next night, paying a pittance for a dorm room instead. Baby steps, pilgrim! Reality is harder than the well-planned fantasy.
In any case, this Rinpoche had a near-death experience [of the puka-puka, shit and go blind, dehydration, delirium and coma variety] just 3 weeks into his 3 year excursion. At some time during this ordeal, he realised that with one bound he could be free because he'd memorized the phone number of the nearest monastery of his sect. At the same time, he knew that bumming a call off the next tourist with a cell-phone would hardly be the correct behaviour for an enlightened no mind no matter tulku reborn into a his Buddha-nature. In any case, he passed out before really having choice in the matter . . .
. . . and woke up in a hospital bed, on a saline drip and having antibiotics coursing through his veins. This was courtesy of a foreign wannabe meditator to whom he'd earlier given some free advice / instruction. The bloke came round to say goodbye and found his Thai all in a heap. Mingyur recovered and set off on his retreat in earnest: staying away from his monastery for 4½ years (50% extra for good behaviour). But that journey is only sketched in at the very end of this book. It's a bit elliptical in the description but it might be that at his encounter with the very face of death he became enlightened = Bodhisattva.
Good for him.
Up till now Matthieu Ricard has been my GoTo for GauTama. I have another line now. I got the book out of the library and ordered up an ear-book version through Borrowbox at the same time. The audio is read in standard American English by Feodor Chin, famous for doing voice-overs in video games. It grates a little: Mingyur's home is in Nubri, Nepal and Chin makes it sound like Newbury, the horse-racing town in Berkshire, England. One of my horse-riding protestant cousins lives there, so I experienced some cognitive dissonance. But that's just me. The Buddhist theory can get a bit heavy, which is okay IF you're chopping wood and carrying water about the farm with earphones - but a sleeper if reading it all on the page. Verdict: worth reading but not worth buying to read.
I was wailing on about the final stages of gestation for Dau.II's to become a competent driver. On Monday last . . . just in time for tea, the key L → N fledging happened after a leisurely cruise around the mean streets of SW Waterford City. She had clocked up the mandatory 12 hours of lessons from a licensed instructor while still living in Cork in 2021. That should be enough to cover a) indicator + mirrors + clutch + handbrake b) getting going on a hill without stalling c) L-hand reverse round suburban corner d) 3-point turn e) general line maintenance e) not dawdling f) not lurching, gear-grinding. Thereafter, as much practice as you can get with parents should be able to smooth the experience out; internalize some of the muscle memory; and learn by not doing what other drivers do.
In different times and an adjacent country, I had 6 lessons in the Summer after I turned 17, + a final lesson from the same instructor immediately before I took the test in December. In that sense mandating 12 lessons is a bit overkill. I got my Massachusetts licence by showing my UK ditto and sitting a 10 question MCQ with a pass-mark of 7/10; it was easy to clock 100% and I was let out on the roads of North America.
Dau.II was insured to drive The Grape in February 2023 and immediately registered to take her test in Waterford asap. It took 40 weeks to get to the head of the line - hence the gestation metaphor. Having been assigned a date 4 weeks out, she contacted a highly recommended Tramore instructor and booked two hours with him to ascertain how far apart were her skill-set and the test's requirements. Not far, it turned out but only in The Grape! It was back to nappies in his car. But several times we managed the logistics of getting herself from Dublin; The Grape from the Home Place; and Damian in from Tramore . . . all to assemble in Woodie's car-park on the Cork Rd in Waterford. This is clearly The Place to change students in Waterford; there are always a handful of driving school vehicles.
We were all relieved (although not really surprised) that she passed. You cd take a fail on the chin if that didn't put you at the end of a 9 month wait-list. [WTF!]. When she came out smiling and waving her pass cert, I was very happy that taking the protocol seriously and not stinting the car-miles had paid off. We agreed that I'd drive home, while she txtd her news to a longish list of frends'n'relashuns. As we left town, she got her face out of the phone to say "You should be in 5th gear, no?" which she followed up with "I'm a peer now, innit?, I can tell you these things."
Gotta say, that when she was starting to drive, I was known to flinch as she skimmed the bushes coming round a country corner; and to wince when the gears crunched. But gotta say gotta say that I never worried about her going too fast: from the beginning she always notes and obeys the posted speed limits. It's restful and saves money. Other drivers please note.
Some old Compostella feet hands have been known to say When the road finishes, the Camino continues. Dau.II, smug in her pass, said something like
"Once you've passed the test, the life-long learning begins".
I R retire! It's been 3 years and a couple of months, since I last drew a pay-check. That was in the middle of Year I Coronarama. The usual niceties were deferred sine die. My colleague who retired in October 2019, was invited back in December as one of that year's a handful of honoured guests at the Staff Christmas Lunch. Eulogies were given; each buffer replied, at more or less too much length, with more or less sentiment and nostalgia; The Pres gave each one an ungainly glass vase; and everyone went home. My now ex-colleague was scheduled to be wined and dined by his deptl work-mates in March 2o2o: but that was cancelled by lock-down.'
In June this year all 6 Science pandemic retirees were invited to dinner by our department. Speeches were made; The HoD gave each one a robust glass tear-drop; and everyone went home. I had a mild attack of imposter syndrome because I'd only been working there a wet week eight years while the other 5 sixty-somethings had composite service of 150 years. But it was good to have a natter with my actual pals and cut dead the departmental misogynist bully and, it being June, there was still light in the sky when I went home. It all gave me a strong attack of closure.
New Ross is half way between Chateau Bob and Costa na Déise and we go through town in the regular. Less so since they completed the Fitzgerald Bridge on the N25 New Ross ByPass. I've billed Ross as being Ireland's most depressing town but own that they are making efforts to brighten the place up. otoh Claire Keegan's book Small Things Like These hasn't giving the town a tourist boost. I still stop often in Ross because there are a couple of Polskie Sklepy, the recycling centre and a choice of supermarkets. Last week I left the car in Lidl's carpark and walked [I know, hard to credit] to the excellent Polski Sklep for yeast and rye-flour.
Craft Central is a commercial venture, it's been in Ross for more than a decade and it's more in the line of The Big Blue Barn - a primary colour softplay [ball-pit, slides, climbing frames] shed with a rudimentary café for Mums. Craft Central is a quieter option for, like, birthday parties. Although one available package is slime play and they also to host e.g. hen parties getting together for a bit of relaxed plate-painting or crochet.
The usual gig is to book the place (for 60-90 minutes) and rock up with up your pals. There looks to be about 20 seats. Once you've hung your coats and settled down, you can work your creative magic on mugs, plates, canvas bags, masks, T-shirts . . . clocks! All the matériel is supplied and hands can be held if your creative magic was b'aten out of you in National School. When you've finished, you get to take your piece home. Not sure on what the regime is for clean up. Me, I wouldn't allow the entitlement of paying for service exempt punters from leaving the place as they found it.
In my family growing up my, often absent, naval father was The Artist. On at least one day of the family hols, he'd absent himself again and take his satchel of water-colours to a lonely headland and paint how the sky met the sea. They were nice enough and there were eventually a lot of them. About halfway through their 50 year marriage, my mother was persuaded by a pal to take part in a 3-week Oil Painting class at the local Women's Institute. The first week, with a palette-knife, her thumb and most of a tube of gamboge she produced a respectable still life with orange. The next week, she brought from home and painted a life-sized crimson steel soda-siphon. It looked like the real thing. It was clear that, notwithstanding the labels she'd shouldered at school, she had a good eye and a sense of proportion. Sadly after the next and last session she got back in her box and left "Art" to the Old Man. Except for patch-work cushion-covers: at about the same time she started getting fat-quarters from Laura Ashley and sewing them together.
I was very much impressed by Dawn Morley and her team at Craft Central. That sort of service /business is good for community, good for creativity, good for self-esteem. The website on their brochure https://craftcentral.ie/ must have lapsed because is now all about the beer. You can find them on FaceBook, but I will not link the Zuckerverse here. Christmas?: C.C. stocks a range of hand-crafted stuff for purchase.
Context. Years ago, we were concerned about changes in the law about home-education and we were soliciting support for amending the Education Welfare Bill before it became the Education Welfare Act 2000. Our manifesto and politicking made neither dint nor jot of a difference to the final wording. But in the course of our campaign, I was tasked to make contact with the Shadow Minister of Education, Richard Bruton. I found the number in the telephone book [remember them], dialled and got "Hello, Richard Bruton". Ireland is a tiny country, everyone is two degrees of separation from Bono or The President.
We had a riot in Dublin a couple of weeks ago. There was a grievous random assault in the afternoon and a few hours later a mill of yahoos started whoopin' and hollerin' up and down O'Connell Street. One bus, one tram and one police-car went up in flames and the city-centre Foot-Locker was looted. What is it with trainers and the dispossessed? There were calls for the Minister of Justice Helen McEntee to resign! resign! but she wouldn't oblige. Underfunding the Gardai is a political cabinet-collective decision and the day to day management and deployment of the police is, I hope, a police, rather than a political, matter. We've seen what happened on Armistice Day in London when their Home Secretary tried to orchestrate the police response to competing gatherings and that precipitated a fascist scuffle at the Cenotaph.
It is the nature, perhaps the duty, of opposition politicians to disagree with the government and try to make political hay when things go awry. So, on Sinterklaas = Tuesday 5th Dec, Sinn Féin put a motion of no confidence in The Minister before the Dáil which it was dismissed 83 to 63 votes. In Ireland we have proportional representation in Elections which results in the opposite of a 2 party system like Democrats vs Republicans or Conservative vs Labour. The current Government is a coalition of Fianna Fáil (36), Fine Gael (33) and Greens (12) - Ceann Comhairle (1) giving a knife-edge majority of 80/160 which is 'whippable'. Who knows how the 'opposition', which has long tail of axe-grinders, micro-parties and crazies, will vote? The Government decided that Green Leader, Eamon Ryan would have to fly home from COP28 in order to vote for this absurd performative motion. Great green gobs of irony for the Irish Minister of the Environment to be contrailing a mighty carbon footprint to deal with the political expediency back home.
Finally, many weeks after leaving the sunny south east for Dublin, the RSA found her a test date in Waterford in mid-December. She has been peppering the intervening time with a number of paid lessons with a Waterford-based instructor and as much practice time with her old man as her knees can stand. You can drive for hours [although twee uur rijden, kwart uur rust is better] under normal circumstances but repeated left-hand reverse turns, hill-starts and 3-point turns require significantly more delicate muscle control and repetitive strain so 'er legs start to go all trembly after an hour. And because we live remote, we have to drive for at least 15km to find a quiet residential development to practice, practice, practice.
Last Tuesday she stepped off the train in B'town in the afternoon and we drove about town until we found an older-model housing estate which has, like, roads at right-angles and off-road parking to clear the public roadway. We only mounted the sidewalk s l o w l y twice, so that's a win and a learning experience.
The next day we headed off in the opposite direction to E'town having done some Google Streetview research to locate suitable quiet roadways with suitably configured intersections. We turned off into a 00s-era estate called Shingán [drone-view above L] and didn't mount the sidewalk at all at all. So that's progress. The trouble with learning a new task - like a left-hand reverse turn - is that A Lot is going on. Once you've mastered the skill, it is impossible to imagine why it was so berluddy complicated at the beginning - see prev Curse of Knowledge. Let fall any one of the numerous steps in this simple task and you fail the test and have to wait for yonks again.
My sister and brother both failed the test first time round. Sis quietly mounted the pavement on the left-hand reverse and the tester kept telling her to "continue round the corner, please" until she snapped back that she'd have to go forward or she'd take out a lamp-post. They never recovered the relationship. The Brother's examiner came out of the Test-Centre in a neck-brace having been whip-lashed by a learner-boy-racer the previous week and was understandably quite the cross-patch.
A recent The Rest is Politics (Question Time) included a question from Sarah Jane Blakemore about limiting the number of passengers in cars driven by recently qualified drivers. It was in reaction to the case where 4 teenagers spun off a Welsh road and drowned. Ooof! We had a 4xdeath in Clonmel earlier this year. In Ireland, novices are required to swap L plates for N plates until they get their road-legs. Rory Stewart learned to drive and passed his test first time in Crieff - population 7000, no roundabouts or traffic lights. In celebration he drove his mother into Edinburgh and nearly lost her in several white-knuckle adventures in, like, traffic. Dr Blakemore is an expert on the adolescent (that's 14 to 24) brain.
Protocol. Stop by curb [30-60cm out?] - gears in neutral - hand-brake on - adjust mirror to see on-side rear wheel - take deep breath - check all round for moving objects - engage reverse gear - release handbrake while multitasking the clutch - when curb starts to veer away from rear-wheel start turning steering wheel (not too much) - quick check all round while moving backwards - ensure that rear-wheel maintains distance from curb - ignore what's happening to front-end of car: that will take care of itself - once round the corner continue in a straight line parallel to give the impression that the wild fish-tailing was all part of the protocol - re-adjust wing-mirror for normal driving - follow tester's instructions for next task. As I say, that's A Lot of processing.
Shingaun maybe from Siongán, a place abounding in ants or pismires. At least they named the estate after the Townland rather than giving it a bucolic English nonsense-name like Meadow Features or Valley View.
Or, as I think she, and The Garter King of Arms, prefers it Omnia feminae aequissimae. That is the heraldic motto chosen by Brenda Hale, when she reached the top of the legal profession and was inducted as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary as Baroness Hale of Richmond [Yorks, near where she was born-and-raised]. On the Kermit theme: “It’s an inside joke between us. My husband was my frog prince. Now people give us frogs.”. She clearly has a sense of humour, as well as facility in Latin. The Blob has acknowledged her coded messaging before as part of The Arachnidati.
I've just read an emphatic denial that sporting a spider-brooch while putting a stop to Boris Johnson's proroguing gallop in September 2019 was entirely coincidental. That is from the Horse's Mouth, but the source is her 2021 autobiography . . . called Spider Woman: a life! I guess she comes from a class and background that you can put one over on whomever you're talking to in such a elliptical way that you can deny intending any sort of offense. She was at one time a barrister whose profession allows them to make outrageous suggestions about the integrity of opposing barristers and go off to lunch together as soon as the judge gets hungry.
Lady Hale is about ten years older than me and reached the Very Top of her profession by being appointed Chair of the UK Supreme Court in 2017. When she graduated 50 years earlier (literally top of the class) from Cambridge in 1966, The Law was almost exclusively the domain of comfortable white patriarchs and vacancies were filled by "a tap on the shoulder", it having been established that the appointee was the right sort of chap [right pedigree, right school, right club, right sports-and-pastimes, right wife]. This complacent, incestuous background led to groupthink and pretty shabby endemic treatment of poor people, black people, women, children, foreign-johnnies including the Irish.
As in so many parallel ♀AFAB♀ lives, Hale had to be twice as good to progress half as far as most of the young men who graduated below her in 1966. She had an interesting career, being an academic lecturer, writing definitive books on the law w.r.t. family, women and mental health, barrister, judge. She is convinced that the breadth of her experience secured her several promotions to, eventually, the Supreme Court. She had also managed to, if not exactly schmooze the patriarchy, assure the Effective Lawyers that she wouldn't frighten the horses with her feminism and care for the dispossessed.
Having someone with empathy and compassion, as well as lawlerly rigid attention to the text at the foundation of the Supreme Court ensured that this new independent institution started with a bright future. Slapping down the grifty pretensions of the actual Prime Minister, when the Court was still in diapers bodes well for the future.
I gotta say, though, that not all the legal cases included in Lady Hale's book are set out with absolute clarity for the audience of the book. I suspect some curse of knowledge here: Hale has lived and breathed these cases for so long and so intensely that it is impossible for her to imagine that we-the-reader weren't at her side along for the journey. It's like me learning about additive genetic variance in population genetic class as an undergraduate through agricultural examples like back-fat thickness in pigs. It was never explained whether thick or thin was the desirable quality!
I recommend this book. I think it is an inspiring tale of a smart girl who did well by hard work, collegiality, ambition, stubbornness and luck - and yes, like my mother, she made her own luck. But I don't expect y'all to, like, read all 250pp of it. So here are some links
Friends at the other end of the valley, both trained in science, are now quite cosy in The Arts Block. 25 years ago they came into a few acres of unmanaged woodland and had to decide a) where to build their home b) how to gain access from the county road. Case b) was decided by the meandering exploratory path their dog Holly took. They call their gaff Hollywood. 25 years ago we came into a few acres of under-managed pasture and ragged hedgerow. In one corner of our property a little grove of holly Ilex aquifolium had survived the assaults of live-stock long enough to start up, grow thick-as-me-leg, die standing up and be replaced by a dense stand of younger growth. Call me superstitious but I'm really reluctant to cut holly down - although I don't mind making Christmas wreaths.
"witnessing the propagation" because I keep discovering micro holly, presumably deposited in birb-poop, whenever we start clearing back the undergrowth. I've taken to driving in a bamboo next-door [as L], so that galumphing me or trampling oblivious visitors don't crush the life out of these childer of the woods so that they e v e n t u a l l y grow into gods of the forest.
Last Winter Dau.II cleared out the first part of the mass-path aka The Glen Lane which defines the Northern boundary of Chateau Blob. There among the tangle of ground ivy, bramble and fern were a handful of fighty holly whips straggling through the top hamper like a drowning creature gasping for air. They are, of course, gasping for light rather than air and none of them - all hirpled and twisted - were ornaments to their species. I dug them all up - a feat in itself given the stoney root-matted nature of the surrounding soil - and popped them into plastic pots filled up with nourishing compost. Rough and ready that was, but they all survived.
Now that frosty nights are upon us, plants in pots are a royal pita because, if under shelter they need watering, and if not they risk root-freezing. Accordingly, last week, I planted them all out along the top of the ditch where our orchard abuts the access road - a feat in itself given the stoney root-matted nature of the surrounding soil! Believe it or not there are 8 holly plants between laurel Prunus laurocerasus on the left and the ash on the right:
I'm quite chuffed about this. This Winter, I'll make a few active passes to locate self seeded small holly and pot them out if they are in a really adverse position w.r.t. light and soil. In 12 months time, I'll give them a rough prune and plant them where a) they have a better chance and b) some utility for us. The | treelets | edging the orchard will serve us as a sight-screen from the many walkers who pass through our property on the way to recreate themselves in the uplands North of us.
When I was, say, 9 y.o., I was able to pee twice as high as my head [prev]. I was reflecting on this because it was the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy last Wednesday 22 Nov 2023. My contribution to the MeFi debate about Conspiracy was "On 22 Nov 1963, 4700mi ENE of Dallas, 9½ y.o. me had just gone to bed but was re-woken with the news that President Kennedy had been shot. I started to internalize 3 letter acronyms TLA the next day JFK LBJ CIA FBI . . . RFK MLK." The reason we got the hot press news within an hour of the event at a country boarding school on a different continent is because one of the chaps went for a leak after lights-out and must have encountered a news-appraised teacher in the hallway.
. . . and it worked! Not only to stem the current gush but also to stop the previous drip-drip leak. Seems that the crappy plastic pin which had held the system together for +25 years had fractured so that the ball-cock pressed on the shut-off button at an oblique angle and therefore could . not . get . it . completely . SHUT. Things had to get worse to get better in this case. I can afford to buy a new toilet if I need to but I'd rather keep the existing one out of land-fill if possible.
I guess it's why they let lecturers retire in their 60s. It's all very well for Leopold Bloom "Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine" to have a whiff of pee about him. But no fair on 20-somethings having to get up close and personal with a leaky lecturer during a physics lab? In a 9 y.o. that detrusor muscle is a powerful thing hence the pee to a great height Olympics in school bathrooms . . . in an old chap, no so much.
Did I mention that we were all up in Dublin recently? I did! I surely did! As well as being requested and required to make enough K'roti to feed a family of refugees for a month, we were also asked to come by car in order to repatriate some surplus bulk goods from the melded households of Dau.I and Dau.II: an ironing board w/o a cover, another cheese-grater etc.
One thing that came back was a small box full of miscellaneous stationery / houseware. The pritt-stick turned out to be a desiccated fossil but the box of misc nails, hooks and screws will get used eventually about the home-place. The dozen [Ikea] Allen keys not so much? Except as Art [R]! Because, like every household in the Western world, I already have an extensive collection of Allen keys.
Remember that famous story about the new airline executive who saved the company his salary by removing one olive from each First Class in-flight salad. Some Ikea exec is going to have a similar epiphany on including an Allen key with each and every flat-pack. They do not, for example, include any spare screws for the klutzy customer who opens the packet and has one screw skitter across the floor and disappear down the heating register. The Allen argument will be that a) everyone will be able to find a suitable Allen key in the MiscStuff drawer in their kitchen b) the company is saving $40,000 adjusted for inflation since 1987.
Remember the 1990s, when every big-assed desktop home computer came with a package of floppy-disks CDs holding the operating system including a spell-checker for Bulgarian. And a chunky manual to explain how to get work out of your new toy after you switched it on. I learned and internalized a lot of keyboard shortcuts from carefully reading the Manual which came with early installs of MS-Word. CDs and manuals cost a single olive money to ship, so suppliers long ago started to lay-off the cost on the internet. Allen keys are still breeding and propagating though! Hat Tip to William G Allen of Hartford CT who invented the hex-key of which we all have too many.
NoNoNotDublin:
I'm not stupid, but I've definitely worked in places where I was not the smartest person in the room. In the early 90s, I was contributing to the birth of bioinformatics in Trinity College Dublin. Our lab acquired a final year project student who, on the side, used to devise crossword puzzles for the magazine his aunt edited and played contract bridge for Ireland. In contrast to me, in the same department 15 years earlier, he secured a First. He went to America for his PhD and was peer-reviewed top-listed for one of the five first multi-million Big Biotech grants after the 2000AD foundation of Science Foundation Ireland SFI. That quango cravenly refused to cough up and start his proposal because he was too young. The country is lucky he's not now making waves at Stanford or Yale but is indeed back in TCD cutting edges at the interface of neuro and genetics.
Who dat? It's Kevin Mitchell, assoc prof of [neuro]genetics at TCD. We've met him before. In addition to teaching and research and raising a family, Kevin has also made time [like Luther he can do no other] to write books for Princeton UP. Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are (2018) and this year Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (2023). I was at the launch of the most recent book [what's not to like when free canapés meet with free travel?] and shelled out a pony to bring a copy home. Pony? That's Buridan's Ass [L] unable to choose between two equally delectable choices.
Can't afford €25? Free Agents is in many Libraries. Can't make the time? Nigel Warburton hosts another debate about free will. 'Is Free Will An Illusion?', joined by psychologist Susan Blackmore and Kevin Mitchell -only 40 mins. Blackmore has acquired interesting baggage on the nature of reality by practicing Zen for 40 years as well as being a skeptic and free-thinker.
Free Agents reads easy, although the middle chapters have a lot of '$10 words' [like salient, instantiate, reify] not always with an appropriate gloss for those who missed out on a very expensive education. Each chapter is split into bite-sized chunks with a helpful contents label. Chapter 4 Life Gets Complicated, for example: The Energy Barrier - E pluribus unum - Big Hungry Beasts - La Familia - Coordinating Movement with Electricity - Neurons - Hail Hydra! - As the Worm Turns - Summary. As you see, a mix of informative with whimsical and assuming that everyone clocks the cultural references . . . and knows the rudiments of Latin. Thus p.75: "Like the Borg in Star Trek, these individuals get assimilated into a collective. It's not just that resistance is futile: it's pointless". I've only a sketchy idea of what/who/where/when are the Borg [Χ]; resistance is futile is lifted from h2g2 [✓] but I doubt if pointless is referencing Richard Osman's gameshow [Χ]. Comms Fail w.r.t. to me = 2/3, so!
I hope it's a conscious, freely-chosen hat-tip to Robert Heinlein when Mitchell outlines the huge range of things a primate could do after breakfast. It could climb a tree, search for grubs, scratch itself, groom another monkey, look for a mate, go to sleep, bang some rocks together, jump up and down, poke itself in the eye, urinate, start a fight, wave its arms around, stick a pebbles up its nose, eat some dirt, screech . . . and not a lot different from a Man from the West as imagined by O'Grady and Pyke.
I have a lot of respeck for Kevin Mitchell. His book is an attempt to defuse the hot button topic of Free Will by dissing the black and white thinking and entrenchments which are normal in the field. Robert Sapolsky [bloboprev] is the latest big hitter to book-bat for No Free Will. Harris Hegel Hobbes and Hume have all had a go, and that's just the Hs! It takes confidence to go public in such august company.
Of course we all have baggage:
Whatever life throws up [bloooargh!] we still get out of bed most mornings and make decisions. Some of those decisions are on autopilot: involving only a tad of conscious thought; but others are life changing for us or those around us. For Mitchell [and for me as I fire my fan-boy knickers on stage] choice, agency, decisions, Will are on a continuum of constraint: some lock-and-loaded by our autonomic nervous system; some almost a dice-throw; some the product of deep thought and rationalization. That this accords with our humble not-an-intellectual lived experience doesn't make it less true . . . whatever nifty neuro-psychological experiments may tell us.
It doesn't help that there has been A Lot of recent side-eye towards iconic experiments which purported to expose how the human mind thinks. Too many:
Mitchell and Sapolsky have their stalls compared on the pages of Nautil.us: "Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not". Here they biff it out toe-to-toe split-screen on Philosophical Trials. I've bought Sapolsky's book - it seemed to demand parity of esteem with Mitchell's - which comes to the opposite conclusion about Free Will. I really don't think I have the energy to read it anytime soon. Although I got a lot out of his last book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Here's the thing, we all feel that we have free-will, we behave as if we do, our legal system and society itself are predicated on it. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and doesn't sink in water . . . then it's a duck we have free will. Clever Free Will is Bunk people are retreating from this common sense, common knowledge; redefining free-will, separating it from agency, and dickering about several incommensurate versions of determinism as they circle their waggons of certainty. Me, I'm 300 pages down on Free Will and right now frankly Scarlett about the whole debate. I'm outside that intellectual waggon corral, dancing with bison and freeeeeee.
For all you biological determinists out there, remember there is, even
at this moment, a butterfly in Haiti stamping its foot saying "I refute
it thus"!
postscriptsgripes:
Q? why oh why do we need to know that John "Inequalities" Bell [no relation!] was born in Belfast and not be given parity of birth insight to John Nash, John von Neumann, Jean "Ass" Buridan or Hans Jonas?
A! because none of the other Johns wear the green jersey. By flag-wagging the sole Irish contributor to the book's bibliography, Ireland's collective deep thinking capacity is rather diminished than bigged up.
Lynn "Endosymbiosis" Sagan shd not be "née Margulis", she was née Alexander. Carl Sagan was her first husband, Thomas Margulis her second. Ask me how I know.
