Las Sun Nov Bit Bob

Last year I was on (and on) about liquid measure. The next section 266 from Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic (1924) is shown above. A quartern loaf is 2¼ times the size of your standard 800g sliced pan: I guess, a hundred years ago, families were bigger. A little digging reveals that this loaf starts with a quarter peck [14 lb] of flour which is a quarter of a 56lb bushel of wheat flour. When we were bone-poor students in Dublin 50 years ago, we'd go to Moore Street market and buy ¼ stone of potatoes - same weight of carbs as the loaf! = 3½ lb = 1.6 kg. Boiled up with chopped cabbage, a bit of onion and butter it was rib-stickin' good.

What else?

• Abandonned home 空き家 reno in Japan. Quintessential BBC World Service: earnest, informed, a little gushy
• Using the footprint around NYC Grand Central Station
• Forrest W.A., minding a remote emergency airstrip between Perth and Melbourne / Adelaide
• where? here!
  
• Blow Bar Bafflegab. I have less of a clue after than before. Check out the single comment for alterantive meanings of blow. 
• Drive All Night - The Boss
  
• Exposing the 'Bots: a history of Captcha [bloboprev]
  
• Updating the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française
• Election special: we're off the the polls this coming Friday
  
• At the trough: 14 more seats on offer: TD base salary €113,679
  
• Posters: photogenic is votogenic?  [bloboprev on unappealing posters]
• Abbeyleix goes poster-free
  

 

Heels in the hunt

We have an election a week from today. In Ireland, certain categories of people are excluded from being candidates.

Otherwise there is low no bar. In Dau.I&II's constituency Gerry "The Monk" Hutch has returned from exile in Spain to run to represent His People. In 1995, we were living round the corner from Veronica Guerin when she was shot and wounded at her front door, the day after writing an article about the said same Mr Hutch. The following year Guerin was assassinated by a rival gang of hoods. You might imagine that it would be impossible for someone so outside the law to secure enough votes to get inside the tent and start to make the law. But you only have to look at the USA to appreciate that a bag of hammers the electorate will exercise their democratic rights while fully embracing irony.

And you don't have to travel across the Atlantic for examples. Michael Lowry, former Minister for Communications and former Chair of the Fine Gael parliamentary party has been consistently returned to the Dáil, as an independent, by the plain people of Tipperary North since he was drummed out of the FG party in 1996. In Thurles tax-evasion, fixing contracts, getting lavish gifts from the rich and owning race-horses is just fine and good on yer man. Many people in Ireland look to their TDs to fix their refused planning permission, their kid's place on a school bus, their place on the council housing list . . . and who better than one who successfully fixed the first roll out of mobile phone infrastructure in the country etc. etc.

Closer to home one of the 20 candidates on our ballot is "John O'Leary, of "Rossbrook", Kerry Pike, Co. Cork Businessman" which, fair enough, you don't have to be resident in the constituency to stand there. But O'Leary is on the ballot in Carlow-Kilkenny -- Cork E -- Cork NW -- Cork NC -- Cork SC -- Cork SW -- Kerry -- Wicklow. If you want to congratulate Mr O'Leary for putting one over on the man with his Count Binface jape going head to head with the current Taoiseach in Wicklow then send him a postcard T23 PK10? But I wish he hadn't cluttered my ballot with noise: it's enough to keep in my head a (quite long enough already) DO NOT VOTE list of misogynists, god-botherers, racists and haters, without adding numpties.

Farmer wellbeing

Despite Silicon Dock in Dublin and MegaPharm in Cork, it is politically necessary to maintain that Ireland is an Agricultural Nation. Pharma accounts for [55%] five times as much export earnings compared to Farmer [9%]. There are 15 million mammals on Irish farms but only 130,000 [9%] are, like, farmers. As farmers are outnumbered by their livestock [soon enough to be deadstock on your plate], so there are thousands of salaries coat-tailing on their hard graft and long hours. So many advisors, creamery managers, feed suppliers, agri-bureaucrats, hauliers, auctioneers, researchers, slaughterers meat-packers. My pal Mick, a reluctant farmer and enthusiastic historian and yomper, rocked up to a Teagasc sponsored demonstration a few years ago.  There were two farmers present, Mick and a bloke in a trench wrastling with hanks of yellow land-drainage pipe. Observing from a safe distance in spotless green wellies were two dozen suits, scoring a day out of the office and a generous mileage claim.

The wider agri sector does provide useful services to workers at the silage clamp face [L]. IF the poor bloody farmers can win a half day between mucking out and applying a top-dressing of lime to the 9-acre. I'm not the farrrmer here, I'm just The Outdoor Man, The Beloved is the one who fills in the forms and has an accountant. This year, she signed up for a knowledge transfer KT scheme which paid for her to go on monthly jaunts round the county: learning stuff and sharing information. It was under this rubric that we hosted a visit to our traditional hay meadow in June. The Outdoor Man was allowed in the kitchen to bake a great big brack and a slab of flapjacks. 

The penultimate jaunt of the year was a  Farmer Wellbeing Day, at Carlow Mart sponsored by Healthy Ireland [Hi] and Carlow CoCo. A couple of cars-full left the valley in good time to be sure of parking and a trip to the jacks before things got going. Only one of The Beloved's passengers availed of both the free hair-cut and the free health-check. When I worked at the institute, I used to take the annual free health check done by the Strength & Conditioning students: my BMI went down and my BP held steady. The "Enjoy a delicious complimentary lunch" was a disappoint: cardboard cup of soup and ham&cheese sandwiches but the Merch was mighty . . .

• Merch
  
• grey Hi watch cap
• grey Hi baseball cap
•  HiViz  waistcoat
• a brace of snoods, if you believe in such things
  
• First Aid kit with enough sticking plasters to outlive their sell-by date
• a new A5  hard-cover notebook  to take over from my nearly full [Nov 2022 start] one
• a  Positive Mental Health  wrist-band
• pens and post-its I guess farrrrmers don't have as much use for them as scientists
  

So a win for me: all that kit and no requirement to stand around in the cold being advised by <synecdoche alert> suits spotless green wellies.

Higher than a breadbox

One rough locator which I've used to describe where we live is "the South Face of Mount Leinster" , as an ironic parity-of-esteem claim to the Eiger-Nordwand, ahem aka Mordwand. Let's face it, Ireland is really not mountainous on the global scale. My old biochemistry Prof Frank Winder is chiefly remembered as the first person to climb a particular route in a quarry in Dalkey, Co. Dublin which was thereafter known as Winder's Crack (1949). And you're welcome to wedge your fingers in there. Frank had to go to The Grand Tetons to climb, like, mou⛰️tains.

As Bill Bryson noted, for the notoriously monoglot USAians, Grand Tetons means Big Titties. Mountaineering involves two quite different goals: a) getting to the top, for the view b) stretching body and mind to make progress up rock-faces. Mt Leinster, for example is a walk in the park. There is a metalled road to the summit which services the TV station there; and Dau.I walked from ours to the summit in bare feet as an 10 y.o. Some mountaineers / yompers in WEA = these islands, are Munro-baggers. Munros were first defined [> 3,000 ft = 940m] and listed (1891) by Sir Hugh Munro, a tweed and hobnail mountaineer, like Irvine. The Munro list is long enough [N= 282] to pose a challenge that can be completed in adecade of determined weekends or a life-time for reg'lar folks.

Not all the Munros are craggy. The easy ones are only really challenging in midwinter, carrying a fridge or with kindergarteners at foot. I was delighted, in a Grand Teton way, to read about Marilyns named by Alan Dawson in 1992 after Ms Monroe and noted for their [> 150m] "prominence".  The Brits call it 'drop' and it is defined as the difference in height between the knopje / peak and the lowest contour that separates the peak from anything higher. It is orthogonal to 'isolation' which is the horizontal distance to the nearest higher mountaintop.  The Marilyn drop is only one of several definitions / lists to set your sights /boots on. Mt Leinster is a Marilyn. As is the much less accessible Stac an Armin [above L] in St Kilda.

• Arderins are Irish hills with a height of at least 500m and a drop of 30m
• Binnions height < 400m but a drop of  > 100m
  
• Carns 100 m < height < 400m with a drop of 30 m
• Deweys 500 m < height < 2,000 ft / 610m and a drop of 30 m in Eng / Wales / IoM
• Fives as Dewey for Scotland
  
• . . .
  
• Wainwrights are hills at least 1,000 ft = 305 m tall with a drop of 15 m in the English Lake District
• YOMPs - Mountain peaks for young and old
• ZOMBs - guaranteed safe during the Zombie Apocalypse

See also HuMPs (Hundred and upwards Metre Prominence); TuMPs (Thirty and upwards Metre Prominence); Corbetts; Furths (Munros not in Scotland); Grahams; Hughs (Hills Under Graham Height); SIMMs (Six-hundred Metre Mountains) . . . and so forth into nicety and pedantry.

Sun Nex

The Feast of St Hilda of Whitby [R hosted the 664 Synod of W]

• In 2005, The Boy headed off for NZ . . . via Petersburg 🚂 Vladivostok and Japan. Here's what it's like in Владивосток 20 years on.
• Canning Sardines
• Minister would be "far better off back in the classroom". Michael O'Leary wants more Effectives in The Dáil . . . teacher's unions react ASTI -- TUI "extremely offensive" . . . "ignorant"
  
• Pics of occupied Paris 1940-1942
• Seems I R a [PubQuiz] genius - 7/7
• Paul Mescal gets quizzed about "Irish"
  
• Rechurning a punt: Kursgesagt scrutinizes the claimed length of tubes in the human circulatory system. 
• All at sea
  
• Cromer UK coastal defenses rip-rap and sand capture
• Steve Marsh yomps across Hoy to unsee the Old Man and visits the Dwarfie Stane
  
• A whole channel of ships passing Passage
  
• Boscastle UK flash flood 2004
  
• Price comparator UK AldivLidl (tl;dr not a Mars bar in  it)
  

 

The Five Giants

The Buddha laid out the Nobel Eightfold Path as a set of principles by which to live a good life: Right Speech; Right Livelihood; Right Conduct etc. When the United Kingdom was back to the wall fighting the Nazis in WWII, several years before victory seemed probable, the coalition government started to plan for a Better Britain. However hard you imagine it is to be poor and/or homeless and/or troubled in mind and body now; life was much shittier in 1938. One of the shameful discoveries is that Joe Median was in general better fed and healthier under a war-footing with rationing [it's the brown bread] and wholesale destruction of the housing stock during the blitz. 

William Beveridge (1879-1963) was tasked to draft a report on "Social Insurance and Allied Services" which was published in 1942. That same month the fortunes of the Allies were decisively turning for the better in North Africa and at Stalingrad.  Looking for a snappy slogan to focus the attention of mandarins and policy wonks Beveridge came came up with Giant Disease, Giant Idleness, Giant Ignorance, Giant Squalor and Giant Want . . . The Five Giants which is the title of Nicholas Timmins' Biography of the Welfare State. I found the 700 page 2017 3rd edition on open shelves in the local village library about 200km West of the nearest bit of the UK. I can't imagine it flies off the shelves to be read in farm kitchens hereabouts. Reviewed at LSE - Timmins piece to camera [1 hour]

This is a brick of a book but readable and occasionally funny in a throw-away ironic sort of way. Timmins is also prone to run-on sentences for which my grad school mentor castigated me 40 years ago. Bafflexample on p.645 "There was a recognition here that if the Labour government had been right to insist since 1997 that poverty and disadvantage were no longer permitted as an excuse for poor results, it remained the case that disadvantaged children needed committed to them more effectively the many services which existed for them - many of which Labour had enhanced or indeed created" aka Blair's people talked large about children's entitlements but failed to deliver.

What I've learned from the book is that Government is Hard. I've had my sofa-bound say about homelessness and UBI and paying for drugs. We have a phrase in Ireland about hurlers on the ditch who know far better how to win than the actual players on the pitch. I suspect that too many people in politics in the UK [and in Ireland] find it easy to trot out a slogan [go back where you came from; welfare scroungers; privatise telecoms; nationalise railways] but couldn't actually run the coal-face of a government department. It's also apparent that politics was a) nicer b) arguably more effective when political parties were less monolithic and less polarized.

But the key question addressed [on and on; again and again; in the evolving circumstances of history] is how do governments apportion money and services (and taxes) among its citizens in a way that is fair given the vastly different starting points from which neonates begin their journey. If you think you know, you're wrong so bad you don't even know you're wrong! [calling Dunning-Kruger]. And can we please have a bit more evidence-based, rather than ideology-driven, policy everywhere in politics?

As a kid who came to sentience in England during the late 60s and early 70s of the last century, it was odd to have then household names [Macmillan, Wilson, Heath], skitter across my eyeballs for the first time in decades. In 1966 I was at boarding school near Southampton. Time was allocated every Sunday for "writing letters". I brought away a stack of these letters home after my mother died in 2020 but haven't yet got the bottle to read them. One week, I discovered that outgoing mail was subject to censorship by The Man. Ringing the changes on writing home, 12 y.o. me addressed an envelope to George Brown MP esq. | Houses of Parliament | Westminster. This was opened up before posting to reveal, not a bomb threat from a disgruntled Young Tory, but a rather pathetic "Dear Mr Brown, how is it being Foreign Secretary? Can I have your signiture? Yours faithfully Bobby Scientist". The Censor informed me that the letter had been resealed and popped in the post . . . also "signiture is spelled wrong and it's better to use autograph". Which all, fair enough. A week later I got a 15cm x 20cm glossy photo of George Brown, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, with his name scrawled across the pale background near his left ear. 

Note: Brown was a famous boozer but the mainstream press of those days were too deferential to mention it. Private Eye coined the euphemism "tired and emotional" to describe Brown (and subsequently many other public figures) when he was blotto in public.

EV Drive mode

There was time, five years ago, when the EU almost got to boot daylight saving time into the black pit of hell where it deserves to live. But Covid put that initiative on hold and the opportunity seems to have passed: it's off the news anyway. One of the petty annoyances of twice yearly hour-shifting is resetting all the devices: the cooker, the car. This is only annoying because a) the change protocol requires an idiosyncratic combo of menu, buttons, pushes and push&holds b) I've forgotten [two week event horizon] the path in the intervening 180 days.  Frustration also applies with rental cars, because car makers are forever fripping about with extra features and the different brands won't talk to each other to find common ground. It doesn't help that car-rental people have neither time nor inclination to give clients a lesson in the peculiarities of This car that you want to drive off the lot, Now.

So we bought a new-to-us Yaris in September, which was a) hybrid b) automatic c) key-free ignition and that all took a bit of getting used to. The fan, for example, to stop the windscreen fogging up in winter the driver has to cycle through options to direct air at face; face&feet; feet; screen&feet. There is no option [R] to go screen only. BUT the designers claim you can set and maintain different temperatures for driver and front-seat passenger. The written manual is trying to service several different models of Yaris Hybrid with quite different controls: some with buttons & knobs; some with touch-screen some with both [a new dimension to Hybrid]. And the index is woeful: there is no entry for Clock except under M for Multi-Information Display.

Then the effn clocks changed on us and neither I nor my two 20-something effectives could discover how to make the Yaris clock go back an hour. That's not the end of the world. But it is still legitimate to take a swipe at the designers of a) the car b) the manual. Then for the first time in my life, I saw a key battery low alert on one of the several Multi-Information Displays on the dashboard. Nothing of help in the user manual but youtube offered several ingles-not-first-language explanations about a) what this meant b) how to prise open a keyfob c) the necessity to buy a CR2032 3v lithium coin cell.

I R old, I R the Patriarchy, so I felt no compunction about dropping into the Toyota dealer to change the key battery and the clock. The chap behind the service desk was ever so slightly patronizing. He didn't call me Gramps, let alone blithering ould fule, but you could sense him s l o w i n g down to s h o w me how to change a key-fob battery. I was therefore ever so slightly gratified, when he was unable to change the clock and had to fetch one of the mechanics from the shop-floor. Of Course and, like, well obvs the clock change is mediated by an unlabelled menu button on arm of the steering wheel [R]. That menu multi-button services: ABS brakes; Bulgarian dictionary, Cam-shaft optimizer, Dashcam, Eco-Fuel monitoring device, GPS integrator . . . far too much to fit on a label smaller than the steering wheel itself.

It is engagingly peculiar that in a User Guide so telegraphic that it omits mention of clock controls and key-fob batteries, the editors [and indeed the vehicle designers] found room for an oddly specific highly focused image of social engineering. Down on the floor nigh-invisible near the hand-brake is an [EV] button. I quote: EV Drive Mode in EV drive mode, electric power is supplied by the hybrid battery and only the electric motor is used to drive the vehicle. This mode enables you to drive in residential areas early in the morning or late at night, or in indoor parking lots etc. without concern for noise or emissions.

Real Men (don't) eat cake

Years and years ago, when we lived in England, one of our pals had a significant birthday and we schlepped 500km down the A1 to help him celebrate. After a sketchy start in college (booting his first year exams and having to do Autumn Repeats), he had his knees firmly under the table in one of the big corporate law firms in London - his niche expertise was buying and selling airports and power-stations! A large number of brightly coloured helium filled balloons were bobbing about in the flat the following morning. After a restorative fry-up (are we not Irish? after all), we piled into their car with the balloons and tooled around South East London. Every time a short human hove into view, the car screeched to a halt and the child was presented with a free balloon. Reaction was mixed: surprise, some delight, a lot of bemusement. But at least the balloons got a second life.

I've written about how [last para]the youth of a subsequent generation disdained free sandwiches. Giving the lie to the meme of starving graduate students. At that same hospital, we had a New Irish (Uganda via Botswana) IT guy. He was pretty forthright about not wanting Irish dogoodniks to ship clapped out, refurbed computers to Africa as if everyone sub the Sahara should be grateful to receive our cast-offs.

Did I mention that my aged FiL Pat the Salt left his safe harbour on this Earth to continue his v'yage in the Great Beyond? I did! We waked him at home on Friday and buried him on Saturday and there were soup and sangers at The Generic Majestic Hotel for afters. People came from all over to pay him respeck and many, as you do, brought food. We 2x over catered at the hotel as well and the staff packed up dozens and dozens of sandwiches and handed them to the nearest [bemused, bereaved] member of the family. By Saturday evening, the tide of people was ebbing but the fridge was Full of cake.

I too an executive decision & nipped down the hill to the nearest [R] Direct Provision Centre (there are several in town). I've written before about the shame, bordering on horror, of what we do for asylum seekers and refugees. There were two burly chaps sitting in the garden and I went up, introduced myself and asked [because as a young man Pat had lived and loved among the Hausa in Nigeria] "Are there any Hausa Men here?". They, poor fellows, were naturally confused about the micro-ethno-geography of West Africa and it didn't really matter. Changing tack [are you clocking all the nautical metaphors in this piece?] I asked them where home was. 

• Forget Nigeria", I said, "Iran will do: would you like cake? My agéd father has died and we have buried him today and now we have A Lot of cake. I don't want to offend you but if you would like cake, then I will go home and fetch it.
• Yes we would like cake; will I come and help you carry it?
• There is not that much cake! I will return in 5 minutes.

And it was so! I was assured afterwards that they get enough [cheap] cake in DP Centres because those who cater can ring up some carb Kcals to satisfy the official nutritionist: Don't take them cake; rather bring nuts and fruit. Well, I'm sorry, but we didn't have nuts&fruit, we had cake; and my new Iranian pals were all smiles to get it.

sun bit bob nov

Very miscellaneous

• B1M wake-up call [R] for 17,000 'fracture critical' interstate highway bridges in USA 
• Crumbling US infrastructure - inland waterways division 
  
• YE-ZB Hayrake: getting carrier planes back home in WWII
• More info
• Clive Stafford Smith see also last sunday links
  
• Michael Lewis [whom prev] on TRIP
• Hawaii grid gripes
• Small Things Like These [prev] now A Filum 
• Hunicke: Your most reasonable effort is whatever it takes
• We go to the polls 29 Nov 24 - how Irish elections are financed
  

Darwin Glass

The Blob's Southern Correspondent TBSC aka the BiL in Kaapstad ZA sent me an enigmatic email:
>> Subject: Darwin . . . May be of mild interest to you.
but no attachment; to which I replied:
>> Subject: Re: Darwin . . . Missing link Darwin? or Oz City? or Uruguayan footballer? 1999 asteroid?lunar crater? All interesting.

But closer to home than the moon, there is Darwin Crater: a terrestrial geo-feature near Mt Darwin in Tasmania. This is a circular 1.2km ⌀ dimple in the landscape, about 15km South of the mining community Queenstown (pop ~1800). The peaks hereabouts: Mt Darwin [1030m] Mt Owen [1150m] Mt Lyell [920m] Mt Sedgwick [1150m], all named after 19thC Brit geologists, are 'mountains' in a cosy not very tall sense, such as we have outside our own back door in Mt Leinster [800m]. Although they look a bit more craggy than Mt Leinster.

There are strict criteria for deciding whether divots in the surface of the Earth are cause by extra-terrestrial impacts and none of these have been clocked for the Darwin Crater. But the smart money is on meteorite because a 20km x 20km area round about is rich in Darwin Glass [fragment R]. Geologists, like all good scientists, get narked by by the niggling unknown and so  “[Dr. Ramsay J] Ford accompanied a team that bulldozed a path from the Franklin River Road into the centre of Darwin Crater in 1974. The team drilled cores up to 230m deep in search of diagnostic shock features. “

That quote is from an account by Brad Dare, as part of his project to map and visit all the known, and aspirational, impact craters in Australia. It looked straightforward on the map. All he needed to do was park on the Franklin River Road, find the bulldozer track, yomp in, take some pictures and yomp out - it's only 2 miles = 3 km. Not so fast puny mortal. 

Mother Nature has had 50 years to return the rainforest to its pre-dozer state and soon Dare and his companion found themselves in Woozle status “After battling the swamp for some time, we noticed some footprints and, feeling elated that we must be closing in on the original track, followed them. Our hearts sank when we realised not too long after they were our own footprints, and we had inadvertently gone around in a circle. “ and later their 21stC equipment blinks out “The swamps’ humidity had allowed water to get inside the housing of our electronic equipment. With a flicker of the screen, both the GPS and compass went dead, and we were on our own. “ 

They did make it out, as do almost all folks who are lost in the woods, but it does put into perspective what a daunting task it is mount a search when folks get lost in wilderness national parks. See also when my neighbour lost his dog and his phone forever [last para] in a treeless (but fissured and scrub-covered) area a few dozen hectares in extent.

Turns out that Darwin Crystal is an asset, at least among the Woo: €31.16 Darwin Glass Healing Crystal ~28mm. Having physically transformed by the celestial slam-dunk “Close to 11,250 cubic metres of Darwin Glass was thrown into the air and scattered over a circular area totalling 400 square kilometres.”
Q: What would that be worth aliquotted as €30 = 30mm 🧊s?
A: There are ~30 x 30 x 30 = 30k such 🧊s in 1cu.m so about 300 million frags in total; valued retail at ~€9 billion. That's A Lot of sugar: enough to run all the schools in Ireland for a year.

Imagine! an asset that you just have to pick up from the ground on either side of the Franklin River Road! I've high-lighted the just because it's doing some heavy lifting. By happy coincidence the Darwin glass is spread over 400 million sq.m. or one chunk per sq.m. Since they were scattered far and wide 800,000 years ago, a good bit of a) jungle, b) swamp c) razor sharp grass d) leeches have moved in on top. There must be easier ways of earning $30.

Cherish your bowels

One of the gob-blowing experiences of my early life was to consume porridge made with pinhead oatmeal. I was 16 and had been taken on a self-catering holiday for a week in Tobermory, Mull with the family of my oldest pal, because my mother was sick in hospital. The first trip to the shops came back with a bag of pinhead oatmeal, aliquots of which were soaked over-night and boiled up for breakfast each day. Compared to 'normal' porridge it was as oude Gouda to Kraft slices.

[[That was the first time m'mother had been in hospital in her life. She had a bowel obstruction that required surgery to remove a length of her transverse colon and install a temporary colostomy. It didn't require the surgeon to nick her spleen down there in the bloody dark. In recovery, she was allowed home for a weekend, and while pottering about after several weeks in bed, the exercise required some extra red blood cells. Her spleen obligingly puckered up to deliver them and burst asunder. Home was 15 miles from the hospital and she'd lost A Lot of blood by the time she returned to theatre for a total splenectomy. That's when she had her near death experience (tunnel, lights and all). If you've ever had a 'stitch' in your side while running for a bus then you've experienced a splenic pucker-up to release more rbc's as required by the exercise.

Almost exactly 20 years later. My folks were on another Mediterranean cruise. Between Naples and Malta she had a gripe in the guts and was stretchered off the ship in Valetta, operated on by a Polish surgeon and repatriated by plane 5 days later as soon as she could walk to a taxi. Meanwhile back at Caisleán Bob, then in Dublin, The Beloved decided that I should go to Malta immediately to succour my aged parents. In those before-Ryanair days, I had to go to a travel agent to book a charter flight and spend a week there.

And 30 years after that, my mother had a final (asserted to be independent of the other two) blockage at the age of 99. And that is what carried her off. ]]

That's a big long tripartite aside to emphasise the importance of intestinal health . . . and the virtues of pinhead oatmeal in achieving that goal. My correspondent M believes in porridge and bought a 1kg packet of pinhead oatmeal for the full authentico roughage experience. When she got home she twigged that she'd have to boil the oats for "30 minutes" in a 3x volume of water. The 30 min was aspirational, and the porridge wasn't cooked for at least an hour. By which time her teeny tiny bedsit was completely fogged up and even the bed felt wet. The cooking had cost more in gas than the oats. So that's how I acquired 980g of pinhead oats.

I have developed a protocol for beating Flahavan's finest into submission. 

1. soak the oats in 2x water for at least 8 hours
2. bring to the boil on the top of the wood-burning stove [fuel cost = zero]
3. allow it to seeth ["blut blut"] for 10 -20 minutes
4. take off the heat and leave overnight
5. add the final 1x of liquid [make that milk for me, ymmv]
6. bring to the boil stirring assiduously to prevent sticking and to break up the glutinous lumps
7. serve forth to eat with more milk [cream if you have it], {a drizzle of golden syrup | soft brown sugar | maple syrup if Canadien} and a spoon.

Most excellent! Start with a cup of oats and you'll have M-F worth of breakfasts bringing cheer to your microbiome.

The Irish Way of Death

All their life in England, my folks took The Times and The Daily Telegraph. A good part of the reason was to scan the hatches, matches and dispatches small ads to see who among their pals, or their offspring, were experiencing change in status. In 2001 my father fell down the stairs and shortly afterwards died in hospital. His nuclear family sat around the dining table with the undertaker to disburse A Lot of money from the estate to get the Ou'fella up the chimney. We agreed that about ~2% of the spend = €200+VAT should be allocated to The Irish Times, to alert his remaining Irish friends and relations of his death.

In 1997, we bought the farm and moved to the deepest rural midlands of Ireland with two small children. We established a toe-hold in the local community as BlowIns from Dublin - mostly harmless. But we didn't inhabit the pub, nor did we go to mass; so we missed a bunch of funerals which we would def'n'y have attended out of respect to the departed and their relict family. After a few years, our abutting neighbour recognised this deficit in our social connexion and started to tell us when someone in or near the valley had gone. So at least we had a local work-around. 

Then in 2006 rip.ie was launched by Jay and Dympna Coleman, sibs from Co Louth. Dympna lived abroad, and because she was out of the loop, <dang!> missed the funeral of a school-friend's father. They reckoned there had to be a better way for the diaspora to keep tabs on what/who was going down back home. It rapidly became the national GoTo for finding out 

• who had died; 
• times & places of wake, removal, mass, interment;
• where/when of tea and hang-sangwiches continued to be announced, as ever was, at the end of the mass
  
• what were the names of all their collateral relatives, descendants and in-laws;
• flowers/no-flowers; donations; 

Timely transmission of these logistical details is important in a culture that embraces an almost Islamic briskness in progressing the process: if the corpse isn't underground on the Third Day, something has gone awry. In England it's completely different: cold-storage is a Thing and it might be more than a week before the departed, like, departs. It was Ten awkward and fraught days hanging around for this and that in England, before my widowed mother could get shot of everyone and start to process her grief. There is no doubt in my mind that the Irish do it better.

In May this year rip.ie was acquired by The Irish Times, the [protestant] paper of record and a commercial venture. Fair do's to the Colemans to have an exit strategy and be able to cash out on their brilliant and useful service. Their company Gradam Communications,  reported an operating profit of €40,373 for 2023. This is on turn-over of  €1.7 million with four employees. rip.ie is free to use and seems, like FANG, to generate its income from Ads - mostly from funeral directors, florists and monumental masons - who are banking no 60 million page views a month making a return on investment RoI.

 A piece on the RTE Brainstorm channel, digs into the not-for-profit value of rip.ie. This commercial venture has been orders of magnitude quicker at recording deaths than the government bureaucracy. Its archives also offer a unique insight into the Irish Way of Death: through the logistical details as listed above; but also through the capture of condolence messages of which there are an enormous number. And it's an on-line bonanza for where are your people buried? ancestry hunters at home and abroad. Here's a nice LiveLine story [1m15s to 10m25s] about how a 1930s communion photo was returned to its family through rip.ie condolence over-sharing.

The other tom-tom of death is the Local Radio. Death notices are read out immediately after the news several times a day! The delivery is always peculiarly dead - drained of affect without being robotic. Funeral Directors will, on behalf of the family, pay the radio ~€150 for 3x readings of the notice. So the still-living really need to check in every day . . . or miss a funeral that they really should have been at. On foot of the Brainstorm report cited above, the story was covered on DriveTime - the tea-time RTE Radio One magazine programme. They put the question out there:
Q: "What is rip.ie to you and how often do you check it?".
A: "I check the site every day before breakfast. If I'm not listed, I get on with my day!" as one wag put it.

Sun son Nov Luv

Whaaa's happenin'?

• Mosse pottery [as R](Co KK) goes green. Who doesn't love spongeware?
  
• Clutterporn on MeFi: dozens of anecdata about parents who won't downsize their Stuff. 
• The bottle-return scheme [Prev] is finally getting some traction
• Bunch of Danes smelt magnetite sand to iron.
• Our Town cover Tennessee Kamanski
• "We are all better than our worst 15 minutes" Clive Stafford Smith defends people on DeathRow and Guantanamo
• Backstory on Larry Lonchar, his friend
  
• Bring back Waterford Airport
  

Domestique

I've written about Team Work in science: after my old boss was awarded a Mentor of the Year Gong. With 10 year hindsight that reads partly like a tale of master and proles; where the Gong-winner may or may not acknowledge that their success is founded on the work of others - not to mention O Fortuna [♩ ♬ ♫ ♪] dealing good cards. But it also gives tribs to those who share, and give and share again. As aside: read the comment which adds another side to an earlier Othering. 

My recent earbook has been Winners by Alastair Campbell which has a niche pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, post-9/11, post-Crash standpoint although Campbell tries hard to tease out eternal verities from the stories of famous politicians, entrepreneurs and sportistas. Campbell was famously ambitious as a journalist, then editor and then Blair's Director of Comms. For his younger self it was all about the winning: putting one over on Losers so he has empathy and understanding for people hewn from the same well 'ard hard stuff. As it happens, and rarely among Britse politicians, he is fluent in German and French and so understands Le Tour de France and its jargon [glossary]. A domestique is one of the riders who puts in the miles solely to ensure that the star of the team gets over the line firstest with the mostest. Don't presume to call such a one "domestique" to their face though: équipier or gregario is more respectful.

In 10 Downing Street in the Blair years there were a number of Effectives, who had risen to the top of their profession about halfway up the Team Blair hierarchy. Offered a promotion, these folks were astute and self-aware enough to refuse: "nope, I know my limits and my comfort zone and I'll leave the stress to you thanks". I know a number of cases of excellent scientists who took the only available path for promotion and finished up as Head of Dept, or even Head of School and perforce left a large part of their scientific chops behind as they took up cudgels in Admin. Science is top-heavy on spectral types: hyperfocus and obsession with detail makes for success. But those attributes often go together with "shy and retiring" and "lack of eye-contact" which makes them kinda useless dealing with boardroom bluster, let alone family crisis or interpersonal tiff from team-members. Promotion? what a waste of talent!

25 years ago I was hired to work in one of the first SFI Science Foundation Ireland multi-million showcase labs to make sense of The Human Genome. I was surprised because I was for sure not the smartest man in the room (nor woman neither!). When SFI hands you money-no-object millions, you can hire the best in the field (who are prepared to migrate to a provincial backwater off the coast of Europe). It transpired that, a few months earlier, I had been talking to my then office-next-door colleague and now boss. I'd given him a candid self-assessment that I was an infrastructural guy whose ambition genes were shot off in the war. At least part of that was true nature but part of it was being brought up as a navy-brat with a strong sense of service. Anyway, my new boss took me at my word and gave me a desk and a laptop and a task to see if human genes were clustered into 'operons': units of related function. I started off robbing code from the Young Turks who were much better programmers than me but then developed a local expertise in displaying data using a particular graphics package. I was happy to have this code robbed by my colleagues when the need arose.

In Campbell's book, there's a neat anecdote about John F "Winner" Kennedy going on a Presidential tour of Cape Canaveral to see how his Giant Step for Mankind project was going. The consummate pol noticed an old black man pushing a broom across an enormous hangar. Although it was kinda obvs, Kennedy asked the elder what he was doing there. "I'm helping to put a man on the moon" was the reply.  Because, dammit, John Glenn and Alan Shepherd and the rest of the NASA team couldn't do their work unless somebody emptied the bins and swept the floor. Quite so!

The pipes are calling

Pat the Salt, BJB, has departed this Earth for further adventures elsewhere. Born in 1925, he grew up in Cardiff around the middle of thirteen sibs in the Hungry Thirties. He ran away to sea as soon as he left school at 14; and clocked up thousands of sea miles between Liverpool Halifax Fremantle Buenos Aires Oran. His ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in August 1942, but he wasn't for drowning. He lost all his kit, though. A few months later, through a rambling series of unexpected encounters, he was given a set of new-to-him bagpipes in Australia. And these became his signature dish ashore and afloat. By the time he returned to Blighty in 1945, his last Cardiff home had been blitzed, both his parents were dead and one of his sisters was full of shrapnel. But he made sure his younger brothers and sisters were fed and presentable if The Social came to the front door looking for orphans.

Evidence from the Irish Press [R] shows that he came to Ireland in 1948 and went on the tramp from Dublin busking at least as far South as Laragh Co Wicklow. He was probably heading for Passage East where he knew his people were buried. No work in Ireland, so he started with Kellogg's in Manchester where the family had washed up. In another life, in other times, that would have been an unexpectedly comfortable billet but he'd seen things you people wouldn't believe. Soon enough he was working for Elder Dempster in colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He survived, thrived and shipped up country to Kano in the Sahel near the French border with Niger.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the city a young woman of startling elegance and exotic beauty was nightly praying to St Patrick to beam her up out of this khaki dusty backwater to somewhere greener. Seeing a personable young chap with pipes she thought "I'll have him" and she did. Pat was then doing well in the groundnut trade, his wife Souad was working for BOAC out at the airport and the two of them scrimped and saved and did without to buy a farm back home in Ireland. And it was so. But trying to wrest a living, in the 1950s, from sixty stony acres near Dunmore East was even harder graft than shipping before the mast in wartime in the 1940s. Opening the first chic Parisian boutique in Waterford City wasn't enough to ensure solvency.  But while the farm spiraled down into murrain, blight and debt, the children were growing up honest, literate and determined. 

It's not about me, except to say that I bumbled on stage in this up and down drama about a year after The Farm was sold and Pat was wearing a white coat behind the counter of his store in Freshford Co Kilkenny.The joke was that, while my lab coat indicated I was a mere student of biology, Pat's showed he was a nuclear physicist master of a cyclotron in the ball-alley behind the shop. {Despite | because of}my very expensive education, I had a lot to learn. Insofar as I have any manners (and I don't mean fish-forks) now, is largely due to my being accepted into the family in 1973. Blimey, that's 50+ years ago. It's been a journey: all of us have put in restless miles a long way from where we were born.

Somewhere along the way, Pat's Australian pipes went missing. So I never heard him play The Minstrel Boy. About ten years ago, Pat and Souad, well into their free travel years, washed up in the centre of Tramore. They picked up with old friends and made new ones. One of the latter was, inter much alia, a piper. Pipers are a community in the same way as Cosa Nostra is a community.  Shortly thereafter, in a way maybe not so very different from the return of The Boy's bicycle, Pat's pipes mysteriously re-appeared. That piper had a daughter, TL, who was to the manner born a piper in her own right. As well as being an accomplished musician, that child had the biggest heart and the most generous hand you could ever hope to meet. They're grown up now, soldiering though college in another part of the country.

But in May this year, just before Pat turned 99, just after his care went full palliative, TL returned home to Tramore to play the pipes for Pat. Everyone agreed that to play the pipes in his bedroom would smither Pat's dentures and have his hearing-aids blow a gasket. So TL stepped out into the garden and gave her old pal The Minstrel Boy at full blast through his open window. Ah bless! is it dusty in here, or is it dusty?

AFOL LEGO BURP

How much information about the Tokio Express do you have capacity for? Tracey Williams doesn't think that a book's worth is TMI! On 13 Feb 1997, the container-ship Tokio Express was caught in a brutal storm between Land's End and the Scilly Isles and a freak wave carried away a number of TEUs which were washed overboard. Within a few weeks specific designs of Lego 'bricks' started to appear on Cornish beaches. Lego head-office supplied an inventory of the lost pieces and they are still being found nearly 28 years later. And not only in Cornwall.

pic.credit Caroline South

Ironically, a good proportion of the lost pieces were nautical themed: octopus, life-raft, flippers, sea-grass, life-jacket. The available inventory tells how many pieces of each type were hoiked off on their journey in 1997, so finders can assess how rare their pieces are. Green Dragons are the Holy Grail in the field.

I'm a beachcomber, buoys and rope division. Dau.I is a librarian, Northside Dublin division. She correctly surmised that I would like to read Adrift: the curious tale of Lego lost at sea (2022) by Tracey Williams. When I became one of the earliest unDanish adopters of Lego, aged 7 in 1961, there were only red bricks. The spaceships, dragons, flowers and helmets all came later. I really wouldn't count as an AFOL [adult fan of Lego] although several of my family wear that badge. With my failing eyesight, I don't imagine I'll become an ABOL [adult beachcomber of Lego] because the search image is too small. a BURP is a big ugly rock piece, see also LURP. 

What else did I discover? The standard Lego plastic is made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ABS, which come together in varying proportions depending on the polymerization conditions. ABS is hard, shiny, chemically resistant, stable, ductile (= un-brittle). All these properties contribute to making Lego the brick of choice for the last three generations. But also ensure that pieces can withstand the buffets of waves, sand, salt for decades before landing on a beach and getting a second life as a rather shabby collectible. 

My son the engineer put himself through Open University to get his first degree and is now designing signalling networks for British Rail. Make an error here and people will die. I like the idea that there are life-and-death averse B.Eng.s who are working for Lego tonking a concept brick 100x with a precisely weighted hammer and looking for cracks.

Hallowe'enish 2024

Clocks fall back an hour today! The EU have really dropped the ball on doing away with this nonsense.

• Surfing the Skookumchook Narrows, BC 
• Gazing at N Korea from PRC.
  
• Should absolutely ban school home-work [PDF chapter from (Caitlin) Moranthology]
• Don't whack trees . . . the NPWS will whack ye back
• Bruce "Mutagen" Ames [whom prev] dead: link to MeFi obit post
• Breadporn: more . . .
  
• Valencia:
• France:
• Pies in Murcia:
• Cleaning drains in Oz. "Where would you rather be? Fishing??"
  
• or less

Heyhey, a milestone of sorts. The Blob passed 2 million pageviews yesterday:

This ship has been sailing for nearly 12 years and has cluttered 2.5 million words into the internet servers. It's great therapy for me [whoa: oversharing TMI etc.] but I do check to see if it has utility for others. It took 3 years to pass 100,000 pageviews; and another 3 to pass the half million. So The Blob is doing the state some service?? But there is a strong suspicion that PVs are driven as much by B◎ts as human 👁👁. Case in point:

It is frankly incredible that as many, like, people checked in to The Blob last Thursday as in the whole month of September. I've seen these blips before, and then activity, as recorded by Blogspot, settles down to bumbling along at a few hundred PVs a day - much of that scrapers, spiders and bots but some real people [like you-hoo, dear reader] as well. Have a great day wherever you are.

Kokoro 心

A tuthree weeks ago, I was blathering on about ancient Greek customs and norms: with a xenia here, a pompḗ there and aretê in the middle. One of the delights of other languages is that words are diced differently there, so it's hard to get an exact synonym (with all appropriate baggage and nuance) for any word in foreign. A lot of mileage is wrung out of how hiraeth and saudades are untranslatable. But pick a word, any word, and you'll be missing some aspect of meaning when translating it to another tongue.

So there I was, two days on the trot, hangin' out at the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Garden in Tramore. The first day, we were in Tramore with a surprising couple of care-free hours. We polished up our Annual pass [a snip at €70 /yr IF you plan to treat the place as your oasis of calm and live close enough to go a tuthree times with a friend] and headed out into into a brisk sunshiny autumn morning.  The garden hangs on the side of hill, so it is a challenge for those with a wheelchair or COPD. But for the rest of us, it is lovely: curling paths, well-placed benches, dappled shade.

The next day we were back to witness the Japanese ambassador to Ireland Marayama Norio 丸山範雄 laying the foundation stone for the new visitor centre at the Garden. ahem That didn't happen, probably because the new building scheduled had slumped like the ever-building National Children's Hospital. But Ambassador Maruyama [seen L with his bodyguard] did share some waggishly optimistic words about the future utility of the Kokoro Centre. This was complemented by some, mercifully short, speeches by The Minister, The Mayor and The Chair of the Board for the Garden. Two previous Irish Ambassadors to Japan, one rather frail, were also in evidence. The average age of the invited guests was about 65; which is a pity because it is subsequent generations who will be using and supporting the gardens for lifetime of the Kokoro Centre . . . if it ever gets off its foundations.

Everyone, even the monoglots, essayed to translate Kokoro into English. Nobody thought to cut to the chase and quote Lafcadio Hearn The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan, for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro. Written with the 心 character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment, affection; and inner meaning — just as we say in English, “the heart of things.”

After speeches, canapés! Calling Logistics Manager! Someone decided to lay out the sushi and petit fours on a dazzling white cloth on a table on a balcony overlooking the garden. Which is fine in theory. Not so much if access to the balcony is along a narrow dead-end walkway past the jacks. But if that's what it is, then somebody needs to hoosh people (and their frames, sticks, entitlement and deafness) along, past the table, and out again to enjoy the garden. Not clogging up the access to provender . . . and the jacks [toot toot incontinence alert].

My first encounter with my doughty and dependable pal Rissoles [multiprev] was at a Home Ed gathering in Glendalough. It was agreed that a group photo would be A Good Thing but everyone continued to mill ineffectually about, gnawing rice cakes, and not controlling their kids. Rissoles (I believe it was the first time his family had been to such an event) stood up on a chair, called for silence and directed the milling herd to go East, the photographer to go West and let's just get this done!  And it was so. Y'gotta love him.

Kati

I wrote with nostalgic gusto about Old Measure, which was still in daily use in rural England in the late 1960s. So many etymologically unrelated names related by inconsistent multipliers: 8 furlongs to the mile; 14 pounds to the stone; 20 [UK] or 16 [US] fluid ounces to the pint. But that's very insular and introspective and frankly baffling for pretty much everyone under the age of, say, 50. 

I was processing the last? of the beans at the beginning of the month. There is only so many beanz and man can eat, despite being good for the heart, so I was blanching and freezing for Christmas, when we expect the family to be sharing þe sucking pigge. I needed to convert 7.5oz to grams and, although I knew it was about 210g, I asked my browser. As well as kg, lb, oz and several different tons, I was offered an answer in Tola or Catty. These measures of weight a) were outside my insular education b) had a whiff of spices.

Catty, kati, jin, 斤, is for measuring lumps and is about 600g or 1⅓lb avoirdupois. It was originally a word in Malay, and we derive tea caddy from the same source. About 600g because several cultures retain an old style incommensurate 604[.78]g = 1 catty. In the PRC, they've made international trade simple by redefining 1 jin = 500g or a 'metric pound'. That's how we used to buy cheese in Rotterdam in the late 70s "een pond van belegen kaas a.u.b." or "een half-pond" as the case might be. Dus! I've been misheard many times in Ireland with my Britse accent asking for "half a pound/kilo of sausages" and getting twice that because 👂"[I'll] have a pound of sausages".

Tola contrariwise is for smaller things, having been standardised by the East India Company in the 19thC as 180 grains = 3⁄8 troy ounce or 11.7g. Conveniently, the EIC rupee (which was a widely circulated and trusted coin) [see R] weighed 1 Tola. I know nothing about such matters, but the base unit of hashish is apparently 1 tola or more likely [short measure alert!] 10g. And 10 tola is a convenient and widely used weight for gold bullion. In these uncertain times that will cost you €9,000! although it's a good bit smaller than my pinkie finger. 

And while we're East is East, there's a Picul or tam 擔 which = 120 Catty. In Hong Kong this amount is called a stone. What with HK being British and all for 100+ years, this is a little wild because elsewhere in the Empire 1 Stone = 14lb in standard human body measurement [for those over 50] in these WEA islands. A picul at 72kg was what an 11st = 70kg man could be expected to sustainably carry on a shoulder pole. I like that reference back to the size and capacity of the human body to generate relatable weights and measures. In Nederland carpenters and others still measure in duim 👍 = inch from the width of a man's thumb. For longer measurements there's a furlong [prev] - the length of furrow that could be ploughed before the oxen went all lactic and had to be rested. It is 220 yds = 10 chains =~ 200m and there are 8 of them to the [statute] mile.

Ashley breezes past

The Met Bureaus of Ireland, UK and Nederland have had their corporate arm-wrestle and come up with their shared Storm Names list for the 2024-2025 season. Here they be: Ashley, Bert, Conall, Darragh, Éowyn, Floris, Gerben, Hugo, Izzy, James, Kayleigh, Lewis, Mavis, Naoise, Otje, Poppy, Rafi, Sayuri, Tilly, Vivienne, Wren. The names owned by Met Éireann wearing their green jersey. Vivienne of course named for Vivienne the Pirate Queen of the Nine Cattle Rustlers. We've been here before 2015 - 2018 - 2019 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023; so maybe we're running out of Trad Irish Names that only have a few silent consonants and fadas.  Storm season starts on 1st September each year but some years are slower off the mark than others. Storm Atiyah, for example didn't whistle through until the second Sunday in December 2019 fully 50 days later than Ashley.

Storms worth naming held off until this last weekend when Ashley was taken out of Pandora's Box and started whipping up waves in the Atlantic. Saturday lunchtime, I pinned the location of Ashley's Eye and asked for the Nullschool Wind App to predict its position 16 hrs ahead. 

Ashley's eye was predicted to be travelling at ~75 km/hr (the circulating wind going faster) in a NE direction and brushing her skirts against the West coast of Ireland. Ashley was accorded an orange wind-warning for 4 (later upped to 7) Wild Atlantic Weather counties from Noon Sunday and yellow for the rest of the island. We therefore made our storm preparations: filling some 5lt water containers and putting candles in candle-sticks. We needed to do this anyway because the ESB is giving us our second scheduled outage in a month tomorrow 09:30 - 14:30, Tuesday 22 Oct 24.

Saturday night and Sunday morning the forecast yellow rain came through but by the time I got up to count the sheep [N = 15, all present and correct!] before breakfast, it was barely spitting and the wind hadn't really got up.

By tea-time Sunday we had endured a few gusts but nothing really sustained and the wind-speed didn't seem to be in resonance with any local trees enough to whip off branches. So that was it. The tabloids tried to talk it up with emotive language (wreaks chaos, airport mayhem, horror map) and Rosslare ferries were cancelled, but Ashley herself had less bluster.