Dobré ráno Marek

The Grape is gorn and we're back in the Republic of Yaris. There are about 60,000 different used cars for sale in Ireland today. There are too many variables (marque, model, year, drive-train, clock-Km, colour, price) of uncertain weighting to get The Best car. But, as an evolutionary biologist, I don't want Perfect, I rather want Good enough. One way of reducing the choice to manageable proportions is by brand: Audi Bentley Chevy . . . Renault Škoda Toyota. And the rest is fairly straight-forward, constrained by money and size and what is available at this location today. I am not one to piffle about: so long as it goes and won't leave me or mine stranded, a decision can be made today. 

The day after The Grape was given a terminal diagnosis, which was not wholly unexpected, we went to the nearest Toyota dealer and said "Sell me this pencil us a car; any car, so long as it's black Yaris". They had about 20 on the forecourt. Half of them older stick-shift petrol like my '06 little red Yaris and half newer [petrol+battery] hybrid models. We were conducted round the stock by a charming New Irish fella from the other end of the EU. After a bit of tire-kicking, I was ready to take the '21 Red Hybrid but was prevailed upon to sleep on the decision. Our contact was off on family business the next day.

But early on the day after that, I sent him a txt "Dobré ráno, Marek, we're coming in at 0900hrs to pay for the '21 Red Yaris Hybrid 212KK456". When we reconvened at 9am, that [rather low mileage] car had been sold, and the other '21 had been keyed over the w/e and was being de-scratched, so we could either go newer for more money or vice-versa. While we dithered, Marek went to his supervisor and secured us another €500 on the trade-in: he was really touched that my text had started with G'day in his mother-tongue. We have a multi-cultural society now, I prefer to lean in to it rather than set fire to vacant hotels. We can all play nicely and use DeepL translator to spice up the comms.

It took a tuthree days to get the paperwork sorted. When I returned to take delivery Marek was off-site again. I nevertheless left him a pot of '23 Marmalade with a tag "Děkuji vám, Marek. In Ireland after a large transaction (like a horse), it is traditional for the buyer to return a luck penny to the seller . . . but you  can't eat pennies. Bob & TB". And that's how we acquired a NightSkyBlack Yaris Hybrid with a once-round-the-world mileage. God bless her and all who sail in her. 20 minutes after taking delivery I parked under tree to go shopping. Bird shat of my windscreen! A baptism of sorts.

Hint - automatic: do NOT use left foot ever - ask me how I know.

Bitter lemmings

Lemmings + cliffs = fib. [Prev]

• Victorian cant
• Victorian coopering in Cork 
• Free speech heroes for Margaret Attwood
• Old Man sock test F3 generation is fastest (no surprises) 
• Joshua Idehen - Mum Does The Washing: every -ism explained . . . with red hands
• Parlez Nous à Boire 
  

The apparel oft proclaims the man

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man . . . Polonius advises

Half a life-time ago, in advance of a career-changing interview, we went into Next in Newcastle upon Tyne and came out 45 minutes later with a woolmark charcoal gray double-breasted suit. I didn't get the job, but the suit has done me ever since for weddings, funerals, christenings and interviews. Being exactly average in size has made life easier for me to find things that fit. And being frankly Scarlett about the apparel details certainly helps.

One of the useful things I was taught in graduate school in Boston was that wearing a jacket and tie [a charcoal gray suit might be a teensy bit OTT in academia] for an interview shows that you care enough about the job to step over that very low bar! For all other public/formal events, not wearing a suit is making a statement and so making it more about you than the situation probably deserves. Exceptions made if you are, like, The Corpse: then it's your last chance to be the subject of gossip.

People have said that I brush up well. But that's largely about being average size, so my pants legs come to the shoe but no further. And I inherited a wide variety of ties from my Da (HMS Dolphin, Royal Engineers, Old Eton etc. to none of which he was 'entitled') and have picked up more snazzy designs as gifts along the way.

By coincidence, in the run up to my last jacket&tie outing - to #1 Grafton St! - I found myself listening to Sean Carroll, public intellectual, in conversation with Derek Guy, internet personality, about the Theory and Practice of Dressing Well. Guy has been in some twitter-spats about suitings; and blogs about apparel on Die, Workwear. I R old; I R The patriarchy; I had a very expensive education including a very old fashioned uniform - so I don't need advice about neckties and buttons. Most of that is about signalling status to people who care; like wearing a gold ring in your left (gay) or right (pirate) ear. eeee but I do have a lot an hour and a bit of time for an enthusiast.

I liked very much the two-sidedness of Derek Guy's coin. One side knows and cares about the difference between a four-in-hand and a half-windsor. The other is very emphatic that he/we should never judge someone's worth by their clothing. Chances are, you've been wrapping your neck in a four-in-hand since you were in national school without knowing the name, like M. Jourdain and prose. Nevertheless, Derek Guy's advice seems sound: if you dress to fit [your bod and the social surroundings] then you'll possibly feel less awkward and it will be easier for everyone to have a fun and/or productive time.

Deputy State Pathologist

The Blob has been running for nearly 12 years; recently cranked down from daily to MoWeFr[Su]. Now that I R retire, it is no longer an everyday story of Institute folks and I must poke elsewhere for copy. Most days, before breakfast, instead of a cold bath [so Protestant, so Yesterday], I glance at the RTE front-page to check that I haven't missed something important. We've come a long way from the BBC dressing a chap in evening clothes for 9 o'clock to solemnly announce "There is no news tonight". RTE will fill their page with stuff regardless of whether there is any news. But it would take a momentous recent upheaval elsewhere to stop RTE giving headlines to an Irish murder or a multi-victim car-crash. 

For 20 years 1998-2018, the reports on Irish mayhem would mention the presence of Dr Marie Cassidy, the [Deputy] State Pathologist. Before she was appointed DSP in 1998, one man carried the can, now there are seven pathologists on pay-roll (currently all women for what that's worth). Jack Harbison, Cassidy's mentor and predecessor, wasn't camera-shy and State Pathologists have become celebs in Ireland. This is not the norm in other jurisdictions.

When Cassidy retired in 2018, as well as the Dancing with the Stars gig and a part on Cold Case Collins [nodding sagely R], she also sat down to write her memoir Beyond the Tape which was published in 2020. It required big font and 1.5pt line-spacing to get it to fill 300 pages and justify the £16 sticker price. Not knocking it for being short; it does the job. The gruesome is presented but not lingered over and the books spares us the smell and the flies, so we can get a sense of how grim-but-necessary tasks are carried out professionally. One thing that helps front-line workers get through is gallows humour and a good bit of that leaks into the pages of the book. 

One aspect of the professional demeanour of Marie Cassidy is that she tries very hard to be non-judgmental and dispassionate. It's not helping grieving relatives if the forensic pathologist goes all weepy on them but neither is pretending to be a robot. Also (by her own account) while Cassidy works hard and meticulously to bring decades of experience to bear on resolving the cause of death, she is not prone to over-egging the pudding. She will stand up in court to say that the evidence is equivocal or insufficient. And I also detect a degree of compassion for the perps. It's not helpful to anyone if state professionals are judge and jury and St-Peter-At-The-Gate for The Accused. Humility and a l o n g list of wrongful convictions require uncertainty about The Facts.

This is the 4th forensic biography I've reviewed after Mark Spenser's Murder Most Florid, Patricia Wiltshire's Trace, and Unnatural Causes by Richard Shepherd. The last has the greatest overlap with the Cassidy book. Shepherd eventually unravelled. It's probably true that gallow's humor isn't enough to secure the mental health of all workers at the forensic coal-face. I only read Beyond the Tape because The Beloved browsed it off the library shelves especially for me. I won't be reading Marie Cassidy's first essay into fiction with The Body of Truth (2024) but I daresay the whodunnit members of my family - who are legion - will give it a go.

Turn Turn Turn

It's a while since I did a compost-heap work-out. Can it really be three years since I did this? It certainly didn't feel familiar when I set to the task mid-morning on 10th Sep 2024 [heck'n'jiminy, that's two weeks ago]. It also seemed a bit redundant, because I still had two bags of 'friable loam' = sieved compost from when(ever) I last did it. Nevertheless the primary input bin was getting kinda full and something had to be done. It was higher than it might have been because I had been mucking out under the trees where the sheep are wont to rest up; and I'd added a bagful of dung to the compost bin. I sort of wrote off Bin3 of the three-bin process because the second bin (having been festering for an unknown age) felt and looked pretty good after I'd sieved it through a Tesco-crate. Here's what's left [zip zero zonders] in the second bin after an hour of shovel, sieve and bagging:

Note the white floor: two corrugated election posters effectively stop tree roots from robbing the nutritive value of the compost from below. I went back to the task at tea-time and forked the intake-bin into the vacated middle bin:

I left a few scoops of starter in the intake bin, added a basket of grass clippings and another bag of sheep-shit then gave it all a good stir. It's now ready for kitchen waste and rhubarb leaves.

Did I say I sieved the stuff before bagging? I did! This has a number of benefits 

① It breaks up the clods and allows obvious nettle-roots to be discarded
② It develops upper-body strength
③ It turns up a lot of things before they go back to the veg-beds. Things that do not compost include wine corks, avocado stones and teabag bags. 

The white bucket [R above] is mainly full of grey rags which once held 2g of tea and now remind me of nothing so much as the wretched public laundromat in Tramore eeuw!. I've implemented a 2024 regime of ripping open and emptying tea-bags into the compost to scotch this problem at source. I am also being encouraged to use more loose tea in a pot.
w.t.f. are teabags made of?; and do we really want to be consuming a hot-water infusion of the stuff??

Judy and Pete do Turn turn turn

Equinoctal

I caught The Ringstone at pretty much peak oblique sunlight on 11/Sep with a flaming mountain ash caorthann Sorbus aucuparia - crowning the earth-mother as it were.  It's a fairy'nuff image for the start of Fall, no? Pre.view from Jun last year.

Else:

• Ireland’s most beautiful train route [40m DW Docu] Rosslare to Howth. How others see us.
• Working on friendship Trevor Noah ♥ Simon Sinek
  
• Life on Thames River - oral hist edition
• Down with the yoof in Leeds Armoury Museum
• Cup Song / chanson à tasses: Drummondville PQ
• Booting the Irish, bilingual signage edition.
• History of money laundring EIC VOC edition

More Autumn landscape? Perp or perps unknown have been setting the heather blazing again [also April 2020 and April 2022] and I bet you a sacrificial pig that it's not a bunch of neoDruids going all wiccan about the Feast of Mabon. Our hill was downwind of the conflag [below 19:49hrs 20Sep24], and The Man will be happy to dock the damage from our our maintain-the-dry-heath money. Burning is not an effect method for killing Rhododendron ya eejits.

The next morning, Sat21Sep24 bright and early (caught the sunrise), I was up and yomping. It was dewy sog under foot and when I got to the back end of the hill, I could see the fire was out; with only an ugly splot of soot-waste across the valley. The fire defo crossed the county borrrder, but one could believe that all /most of the damage was on the neighbouring commonage. Without a theodolite and chains OR a phone with google sat map, it's hard to be sure to be sure:

Kindred

It's 40 years since we published our definitive catalog and [trivial] statistical analysis of neogene tooth metrics. At that depth of time, I cannot remember if we included any Homo neanderthalensis in the dataset . . . they may have been 'too recent'. Didn't care either way, because Neanderthals have never really floated my boat. Although The Blob has been 'interested' in the idea of palaeolithic denisovan / neanderthal / sapiens pals making nookie . . .

Then I was more or less ordered to get Kindred out of the library. That would be Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art [review] by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. It's pretty good. A Lot of progress has been made in tech and archaeological practice over the last 20-30 years. 

① It is now much easier to record electronically the  x y z co-ordinates of every bone and artifact so that the whole structure can be reconstructed in fully zoomable rotatable 3D back on the lab computer screen.

② Archaeologists have found the patience to reattach stone chips which were sundered by neanderthal blows 50,000 years ago. This can inform about the percussive techniques used in the first place. Scanning microscopes can find differences in the wear grooves on neanderthal teeth and tools. A modern database has been built up to record the what wear results from scraping hides and how that differs from severing tendons or dis-articulating bone. Comparative flint-knapping is almost a profession in  modern archaeological circles.

③ DNA! I was in the lab next door when Dan Bradley was extracting ancient DNA from ancient bones, and parchment pages to make sense of the history of domestication and incest in Ireland and Europe. Neanderthal DNA is perhaps 10x older but, with luck and care and PCR, enough DNA of sufficient quality can be obtained from neanderthal bones to recognise it as distinctive and distinctively different from "us" Homo sapiens. As 23andMe will tell you, there has been detectable inflow of neandergenes into our ancestors . . . but apparently not in the other direction.

There's a lot we don't know, but it is wonderful how much information has been wrung from a few tonnes of bones representing another way of being a bipedal hominid ape. It's like an alternative running of the experiment over 600,000 years.

A peculiar footnote on p113: " . . . Aboriginal knappers paid as much attention to the overall appearance of their scrapers as Westerners do to their pencil-sharpeners" i.o.w. not at all? What colour is your pencil-sharpener? I have no idea!

When oh when will Usians get with the program and learn about centimeters? Obvs, the USA is the largest English-language book-buying market in the World, so no author wishes to gratuitously alienate readers by giving all distances in versts. But really, everybody [who can read a 400 page academic-adjacent  book about Neanderthals] understands metric even if we in Ireland still weigh babies in lbs and know our height in ft&ins. The editors at Bloomsbury have used cm, m, km, m², kg as primary measurement while appending equivalents as in, ft, mi, yd², and lb in (brackets). Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds but I will point out that 0.5m is variously made equivalent to 1½ft, 20in & 2ft. Number-crunchers gotta data, and I went through the first half of the book to clock the range of values given for m/ft ratios (converting mi to ft by * 1760 * 3 and in to ft by /12): count N=50; mean 0.309; st.dev 0.023; min 0.25; max 0.4. That std.dev is pretty tight: the mean is 1-2% above the everybody knows value of 30.5cm. There are officially 3.281 feet to the metre or 0.3047 m to the ft.

I really like the editorial decision to use micro drawings of palaeolithic artifacts at colophons through the text - raptor-claw [L], pierced shell, flake, feather. Feathers? Many neander-sites reveal a disproportionate number of avian wings, often corvids. I propose that black wings made great eyebrow enhancers 70,000 years ago in France.

There's an effective index but no list of references: proper order for a "popular" science book. It's coming up for Christmas: might make a nice gift for a reading teen. We defo need more archaeologists.

and More women in science!

Moral Hazard, Invasive edition

A few years ago, one of 'our' reg’lar hill-walkers paused at the gate for a chat. In among a lot of other information, he mentioned that he’d seen a clump of Rhododendron ponticum up the hill, far from any walkers’ motorway, but close to the fence that separates the commonage from the various single proprietor holdings. I was interested, because I’d shared a house with two long-haired botanists in the 00s and one of them had contract work in Killarney National Park . . . where Rhododendron is an invasive scourge – relentlessly driving native oak Quercus & Scot’s Pinus climax woodland to the brink of extinction. It can be 'treated' [R is for Roundup] but it's hard, hand, work.

I was interested, but I was also still working and it was term-time and I didn't immediately make it up the lane to yomp across the pathless mountain to take pics and write it all up for The Blob. Indeed, with my two-week event horizon, the whole incident slipped from my ‘mind’ temporarily and then Coronarama closed down at lot of practice and patterns and habits . . . including plant identification.

Then, a few days ago, we heard that one of the other Blackstairs commons had scored 0% /100 in their evaluation under Acres: the latest = current agri-environmental scheme. The explanation given telegraphically as “invasive alien species, contact Head Office for remediation”.
I thought “feckit, that Rhodo has come home to roost on our neighbours and I'm sorry they’re getting 0% help from The Man”
then I thought “feckit, if I / we / they had done something about it when it was one scraggly bush five years ago, then it would have been a lot easier to extirpate”
and then I thought “feckit, how long do we have before the offspring of that lone bush sends tentrils up the stairs and strangles us all in our beds?”

By contrast [Smug alert] Our commonage score was 65%, which rounds up to 70% which secures all 20 of us commoners a modest stipend from Bruxelles. It’s more money than a score of 60% (let alone brrrpt 0%) and close enough to 75% (rounds to 80%) giving us something extra to which can aspire. I won’t bore you with the details but we also have problem with invasive plants degrading the quality of our iconic, fragile, endangered Dry Heath [it's a biome / habitat]. IF we can fell out all visible Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis before the next visit of the inspectors in Summer 2025 THEN we can get paid at a higher rate in the future. 

I was articulating my indignation on behalf of our near neighbours who had been hung out to dry because Rhodo appeared on their patch through no fault of their own. Then I found myself asking why? we had a problem with Sitka spruce degrading one of Europe’s precious rare extensive habitats. It’s because, 45 years ago, Coillte (the semi-state forestry quango) acquired 20 hectares of upland cheap and planted it with a mono-culture of Sitka. That forest was clear felled in 2021 but not before it had spread Picea seedlings far and wide across our commonage, which abuts the Coillte forest. We’ve spent chunks of the last 5 years cutting these buggers down. But it’s only under the Acres scheme that we are actively getting penalized for the presence of Sitka.

Coillte made money on acquiring then planting their enormous land-bank – A Lot of money – and locally they’ve doubled down on planting spruce to set another 40 year cycle in train. When big corporations (banks, bloodbank, beef, broadcaster and that's just be Bs) take risks  and make a lot of money for directors and shareholders then they keep the profits. When they take risks and it doesn’t work out, they are too big to fail and the government bails them out. It’s called moral hazard when no adverse consequences attach to poor decisions.  

Coillte, by washing hands and walking away from the eco-mess they have visited upon us, their neighbours, are basking in the privileges of moral hazard. It’s the poor bloody infantry farmers who are left to stamp out the contagion.

Pat the, Pete the, Paul the Post

We have a new Postman! When he retired in 2015, I wrote about the community centred service meted out by Paddy our first postie at Caisleán an Blob. He'd been with us, and for us, for 19 years. Peter replaced him and was with us for 9 years. Postal delivery workers have complete autonomy about how they run their round - from clockwise or anti-clock to the details about whether to do the long dead-end bohereens on the way out, or on the way home. It always includes a break for 'bait', because if they got back to base early, then the An Post time-and-motion manager would soon be consolidating 9 rounds into 8 and letting someone go from the payroll. I think Paddy got a cup of tea in someone's kitchen on the reg'lar but he always stopped on the same verge mid-morning for his union-time break.  It do be captured by the first (and so far only) pass of the Google-car in 2009:

He certainly didn't get buffeted by passing traffic there.  Pete was different (b/c we're all different): we were later on his round, and his union-break was one drop after us. If I really needed to know that he'd nothing for us, I could peer through the trees in the SE corner of our haggard and see him parked up on his spot in the valley below. A couple of times, I trotted down the lane and 500m along the county road to hand Peter an outgoing postcard. I did once, foolishly in retrospect, accept a parcel from one of the courier services at Peter's Stop - lugging a 20kg case of plonk uphill was more than I was expecting, even for my birthday.

Now, because P for Postmen always come in threes, we have a new postie who goes by Paul. He's fine, his van is even bigger than Peter's but I showed him how to turn in our lay-by to save him having to open our gate. Years and years ago, I moved our post-box to the outer wall of one of our sheds, so that regular mail could deliver through the van window rather than getting wet getting out. Rural posties serve a vital role as social cement: must to what we can to make their round easier.

In 2015, I also wrote about the politics of post, my mother's postie, corporate bullying and the power of the articulate middle-class.

Mater Dolorosa

More not less

• Flattening Seattle: a century of road-making
• Development? Build houses in Dublin back gardens [two egos shouting over each other]
• More informative text
  
• Los Invernaderos de Almería: polytunnel province
• StandUp Probability, random edition
  
• Retired farmer busted by ash-dieback
• Just last week, I mentioned the Flahavan's Bronze Axes [R]. The finder has grassed himself up
• Dau.II and me, we checked out The Broighter Boat in Dublin last Monday
  
• Heritage? Ringstone with rowan Sorbus aucuparia
• Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan - I'm not the right demographic but it's pretty life-affirming.
• Brenda Fricker on Tommy Tiernan reads Helas by Oscar Wilde . . . and talks about depression, the other oscar, acting  
• Four Irish late-lamented musicians on N stamps. Guess who before click? 
• Irish tracks ditto (2019). Also guess?
  
• Sand art Kilmurrin Co Déise [background]
  

Ther is a wode called wilde

[title reference] My entrepreneurial pal D has been cybersquatting on wildatlanticwhiskey.ie for a few years now. He is not alone in cashing in on Bord Failte’s conjuring of The Wild Atlantic Way to drive dollar tourists to the bleak and depopulated West coast of Ireland. See what ventures will autocomplete when you google “Wild Atlantic . . .”. 

Every Friday morning, Teagasc hosts Signposts: a live webinar on a range of topics of interest to farmers. Introducing each session is a nice job if you can get it; and at least two govt-payroll employees claim a couple of contact hours to service the scheme each week. Somehow there is zero-redundancy in adolescent mental health or RSA driving testers or nursing home beds or [insert useful / essential public service niche here]. 

On 6th September Signposts gave a platform to Ray Ó Foghlú and Jeremy Turkington [no prizes for guess which chap is a protestant from Tyrone], from HomeTree.ie, a nature restoration and biodiversity boosting charity from Ennistymon, Co Clare. Turkington was recently recruited from down the road at Irish Seed Savers in Scarriff, where he was tree manager for 5 years. HomeTree have acquired some hectares; but their business model is to work with land-holders rather than displace them. One of WildWood’s projects is Wild Atlantic Rainforest but they are building a diverse portfolio of Things To Do to future-proof the Irish landscape and salvage what is left of its woody heritage.
I like the cut of their jib! 

They are impatient with the months it takes for regulatory approval to notify the land registry of a switch from farrrming to agri-forestry. By statute, prospective home-builders must get an answer from the CoCo Planning Office by 8 weeks maximum. Consider Old Peadar, whose hip is now futzed and he can mount up his MF35 no more. Wildwood would like to present an option of planting the Peadar Memorial Oak Forest as his legacy. But by the time Wildwood negotiate the regulatory and logistic inertia of (Coillte, DeptAg, NPWS, NoneSoHardy) to get their whips in a row for planting, Peadar has set his acres to his neighbour to secure some sort of income from his asset. This despite setting for grazing at con-acre having a smaller return on investment than the effectively unavailable government grant for trees. 

And HomeTree took a currently deserved swipe at The Man for botching the roll-out of Acres, the latest DeptAg scheme for supporting and manipulating the behaviour of farmers. One of the line-items in Acres is a subsidy / premium for planting new quick-thorn hedges. No such scheme would be approved without a scoping exercise to ascertain the potential demand across the nation. The plain farmers of Ireland have signed up for 7 million Crataegus monogyna whips . . . but there were only 1 million such available in Ireland. Sooo, 6 million whips are going to be imported from abroad: wreaking who-knows-what effect on Irish thorn biodiversity. Acres is still at least a year behind on approving us for a) gates b) clearing stone ditches for insolation. An effective organisation would have launched the roll-out of product in lock-step with rolling out the paperwork. DeptAg is a disorganisation: slow to change; blinkered in their views, superficial in assessing the changes it adopts; changing the changes. 

A tuthree other HomeTree anecdotes have my appro. 

① Pearl-clutching eco-warriors are embedded in their certainties about “native” this and that. There are 6 species of “native” willow Salix . . . although they are all more or less inter-fertile and Salix-x crosses are part of natural variation. But Salix viminalis is definitely not native despite being The Preferred for weavers and basketeers. HomeTree say “why ever not plant Salix viminalis as part of a foulwater remediation swale?? it a) works for the swale and b) can supply product to local artisans. It’s like Kiwi Sean the Forester carrying a bit of a torch for sycamore Acer pseudoplatanus: an invasive-of-long-standing as a candidate for replacing ash Fraxinus excelsior in Irish hedgerows as ash die-back crumbs the latter. 

② James Lovelock [blobobit] used to beat up on his 90-something self for planting a native mixed hardwood forest in his home-place in Devon. He shd have just walked away and allowed natural regeneration to bleed in from the field edges and bird-shit and make a genuine native locale-specific, ecotype- and niche-specific woodland. Up to a point, Lord Lovelock, if you really just walk away then a) it may work out [R] but there is a non-trivial chance that your woodland will be dominated by total-bitch invasives like Himalayan balsam Impatiens glandulifera, Rhododendron ponticum and (heaven forfend!) Japanese knotweed Reynoutria japonica. It’s legit to tilt the process in favour of your desired outcomes as well as waving the “native “flag. We planted oak Quercus robur, ash, Scot’s Pinus sylvestris and larch Larix europaeus (and a dozen ‘minority’ species for variety) and still finished up with two early in-blown sycamore. If you really want knot-free plankable oak in 2160, then be sure to prune off the side-branches for the first 20 years. You can’t manage a forest from your kitchen table applying for the next tranche of grant money. 

③ Oak Quercus robur is in the top drawer for re-afforesting Ireland with broad-leaf hardwoods. Oak supports a fantastic array of commensal species but folk in the business of planting trees, even those that won’t live to see a return (unless we start living for 200 years instead of 100), would prefer a product that will be useful to people: shipbuilders, turners, carpenters, wheel-wrights. That means a trunk as long and straight as possible from the bole. There is native oak growing in the windswept, salt-soiled, soggy Wild Atlantic Rainforest [W.A.R.]. But acorn gatherers who are providing the wherewithal for the re-forest roll-out turn their backs on the stunted bent-in-two hardy oaks on coastal Co Mayo. Brfffp! Wrong: given ‘better’ soil and adequate starting shelter, W.A.R. oaks will grow in a much more soldierly fashion. And, they will supply untapped genetic diversity for support growth in adverse conditions which the effete elite trees of the sheltered midlands can only dream of. Whoa? Nature && nurture; genetics && environment . . . who’d ha' thunk? HomeTree are not proscriptive but rather pragmatic and holistic. I wish them every success.

perverse incentives

Call me Doctor: I spent 4 years of my younger life on the Pequod in Boston slogging through a PhD. But it was quite left-field because the field-work involved coursing across The Canadian Maritimes and New England looking at cats . . . I dunno? maybe rather than squinting at test-tubes while wearing a white lab-coat?? My supervisor wasn't even a 'proper professor' with tenure. Thru the ministrations and advocacy of Lynn Margulis, my boss was an unsalaried adjunct professor working from home decades before that became the new normal. Apart from me (and 10,000 documented cats), Neil was inching forward research projects in genealogy and numismatics. This required hammering out letters in his office and once a day crossing town to the post-office to send them and collect incommmming for his attention.

About halfway though my time there, Massachusetts implemented a 5c levy on beverage containers which could be redeemed on their return. The scheme was designed to  reduce littering - recycling hadn't yet been invented?! On his way to Post Office, Neil would rootle through the trash bins and fetch out redeemable tins left there by school children who disdained to pick up a nickel from the sidewalk, let alone go out of their way to turn in a can of Sprite. On his way back from the PO, Neil would redeem his loot at the Star Market before going home for lunch. With his scruffy beard and thrift-store top-coat, he was possibly pitied as a homeless bum rather than the owner-occupier of a million dollar mid-Victorian home in one of the wealthiest 'burbs of Boston.

It's an image which surged over my attention-horizon recently because of an RTE piece about trash in Dublin city centre: "He also said that since the introduction of the RETURN scheme, members of the public opening bags looking for plastic bottles had become a significant issue for those trying to keep the city clean". Dau.II has been living & working in Dublin city centre through calendar 2024. Shocked! she be Shocked! at the drifts of rubbish strewing down the streets of her walking commute across town each morning. Rate-paying businesses seem to leave plastic bags of trash out on the street at close of business in the evening but refuse collectors pick it up the following morning. That is beyond belief in a working First World economy but seagulls do relish a chip.
But lookit: by privileging one sort of rubbish with a cash-value the result is to spread other (more noxious?) filth down the street from ripped trash-bags.

A beverage deposit return scheme was launched In Ireland on 1st Feb 2024 but only half the members of my nuclear family have actually loaded bottles or cans into a  scruncher machine and received a docket in return. My first time, I naively tried it without my glasses and couldn't read any of the messages (press for receipt, for e.g.) a more experienced ould buffer at the next machine kindly helped me out.

Also: it's perverse to charge people to have their trash taken away. Especially by competing capitalist companies exploiting low-hanging fruit and gouging their employees on wages. It just encourages the poor to dump elsewhere. Bring back domestic rates and unionized bin-collectors.

Costa potty

 We bought a new sofa!! It is a 4-seater [L] IF some of the 'seats' are very trim. On the last day of August, we went into town to pick up the missing part of our 1½ piece suite. When we put in the order a month previous, the (1) sofa was in the country at the EZLiving warehouse; the (½) matching footstool was still on the ocean wave between China and Dublin port. The Customer Comms. department of EZLiving the furniture emporium really managed to ruffle my feathers. 

1. It was a week between paying for the sofa, towards the end of July, and the window which EZLiving allocates to servicing the scut-end of Co Carlow. To facilitate communications with the delivery team we shared 3 telephone numbers and 2 email addrs.  So EZL and their robots can call us anytime, but we can only contact them 0818 222 272 Mon - Fri 9.30am - 5pm. Two days before delivery, I get a txt, to me, a €1,000 customer, including " . . . if you owe us money, you must pay before delivery . . .".  I felt obliged to call 0818 222 272 to confirm that we didn't owe them money and that delivery was scheduled for 10am-14pm on Monday. That miscomm caused me anxiety and cost me time (5 minutes) and money (34c/min).
   
2.  A month later, with 2 days notice, the footstool arrived, as evidenced by txt: " confirming your order is booked for collection on Friday 30 August. Our collection facility in the store is only open Friday from 10am - 4pm. Items will be held for 1 week only. Please call us on for any amendments queries."  That is a) a bit shouty b) contradictory (if it's only open Friday then if we miss one Friday, a week later, our stool will be on its way back to China).

We missed Friday (we have a life beyond the imperatives of EZL's logistics, shucks) but the ambiguity of the message had us calling 0818 222 272 to confirm that we could collect it Saturday. But that phone line (the only web-discoverable line) is closed at weekends. It's 40mins = 40kms to Town but we went . . . in hope. It was fine, we spoke to an EZL person, they took our name and order number in back and a smart young chap in a warehouseperson's coat came out with our multi-wrapped unbirthday present.

The reasonable fellow who had taken our money a month previous was behind the desk and I shared my gripes with him, saying it did not bode well for repeat business from us. He was quite candid about the peremptory [he used the word aggressive] messaging devised by EZL head office. The finance and logistics manager had gotten fed up with clients who ordered stuff for collection and . . . then didn't collect it . . . for weeks. The company has limited local warehousing and even the best furniture (designed for centrally heated Western homes) will deteriorate if left indefinitely in a corner of the warehouse and then the client will complain and it's all an unsatisfactory time-expensive, space-costly mess even though the furniture has been paid for.

The relief was so palpable (as was agéd bladder pressure) that we took ourselves across the car-park to Costa Coffee to celebrate. I've never knowingly been in Costa (or Starbucks) before and I was glad to be near enough the end of my life to be able to frippp away €7.20 on coffee and a modest lemon tart. €7.20!! At the other end of my life, that's the amount I got in my first pay-packet for working a [hard, cold, dirty] 40hr week riddling potatoes on a farm. The Beloved had similar and fortunately left using the facilities till afterwards: she came out of the Ladies blenched white: the floor awash, the toilet-seat "wet" - you may imagine the rest. On advice, I held on till we returned home and used the compost heap.

On the way home I did mention that Ladies jacks are always in worse shape than The Gents and that it was nothing to do with ignorance. When I worked in The Smurfit Institute of Genetics, the Head of Department decided it would boost esprit de corps if everyone gathered for coffee/tea at 11am. Petty cash to supply biscuits. It was fine, if you like talking about Big Brother or The Match. But at more-or-less 11am each day, all the women from the Ophthalmic Genetics lab on the top floor trooped past the free coffee and through the back gate of TCD to a convenient café in Lincoln Place. 

The problem was that, by 10:30 pretty much every day, the Ladies jacks were reportedly too foul to use. As everyone with access had at least 12 years of schooling and at least one degree, it was obvious that "basic shared-facilities manners" and "education" didn't overlap too good in a Venn diagram sense. They never did work out who took the opportunity, while sitting down in the stall, to ream out her nose and stick boogers on the wall . . . at nose eye level. 

Mais revenons nous a nos pouffes! It took several minutes of pass-the-parcel to unwrap the foot-stool we had just picked up. The silly little legs were secreted in a zipped compartment of the base. It required twelve bolts, 12 washers and an(other!) allen key. It's fine:

I think it's a pretty good compromise for having a 'corner-unit'; which the whole family has been hankering for since they became A Thing ~20 years ago.

Look Ma, the stool can go at either end! If we didn't have so many *$@!% books we could really have a corner-unit. The only thing is that we don't live in a ranch-style execuhome and the the footstool alone takes up 3% of the floor space (add the woodstove = 4%; desk = 7%; chest = 4%; coffee-table = 3%; matching sofa = 10% and two more chairs = 9%). Sum of furniture = 40%, so getting anywhere in the room takes on elements of assault course. Ah, the first world problems.

head foot hand knee

Bits'n'bobs

• Dr Pavee - travellers done good at college
• One homeless micro-family sorted
  
• Reduced instruction set rare plant Monotropa hypopitys rediscovered in Killarney
• Sledding winter fuuuuel down the mountain
• Polewood - the joy of coppice
  
• Only The Granite Best for the Leinster House bike shed [€336K R] 
• Touring Scotland in a Ford Anglia 1961 (Loch Katrine [prev] 1m50s)
• Bog butter and other bits'n'bobs found in Ireland last 12 months
• Including anonymous bronze axe-heads
  

Easy Living

One of the stars in The Blob's dramatis personae is The Sofa. Obvs part of the supporting cast! In 1996, we bought The Farm including quite a modest, for Ireland, farmhouse with 500mm thick solid rubble-in-courses walls with a footprint of 450 sq.ft ~= 40 sq.m and an upstairs of the same size. There is but one "reception" room downstairs. It took us a year of builders [fix: no chutes, no taps, no t'ilet, hole in roof, bees in soffit] to move in. We had two rooms downstairs: a living room 3m x 4.3m and a slightly larger kitchen. Eschewing sofabeds (neither a good bed nor a good sofa) we went off to Habitat (Conran the Baptist to Ikea as the source of worldly salvation) and bought a sofa that would sleep a <6ft = 185cm guest. It was white ("to brighten the room"); it had legs so a half-finished jigsaw could be slid under; and it was our loyal support for 27 years. But it was also a trampoline for tweens, a magnet for spilled coffee, and the original loose cover frayed to fritters after years of washing. The springs had sproooiinnnngged under 'my' end of the sofa.

The Boy and his team were coming to visit for August, and shame wouldn't allow us to present our old sofa hammock . . . not least because the Gdaus are now of trampoline age. Accordingly we went on a circular tour of furniture emporia in and between the cities of Waterford and Kilkenny and . . . eventually . . . bought a sofa and a matching square foot-stool as a compromise between "corner-unit" and "limited space". Eircode revealed when the van from EZLiving Centraal circulated in our area and we had a date for delivery - of the sofa. The matching foot-stool was still in a container somewhere in the Indian Ocean; but that could wait. 

It was on us to make space for New Sofa. The sofa-fairies came and took our Habitat heirloom . . . and temporarily replaced it with a  pair of lawn-chairs - like we're the indigent transient students of our youth not the bougie Upstanding Pillars we are now. Rather than leave it out in the rain they transported it uphill to a second life in the poly tunnel:

Note the prosthesis under the left-hand seat cushion. That's where the upholstery springs had fractured and the void has been packed with a couple of pillows . . . it being impossible to use a lap-top if your knees are higher than your ears. Bystander asks: "But, if you leave it in the polytunnel, won't your once-was-white sofa get covered in dust and bird-shit?"

Yup, sound advice. Turns out that the fly-sheet of one of our several "partial tents" is just the right size to catch bird-splat and (we devoutly hope) the territorial marks of the neighbour's tom cat. How ever did these "fairies" move the sofa? You may well ask. Let's just say that, ~50 years ago, one of them served time in NCL National Carriers, the ancestor of Lynx Express, now a wholly owned subsidiary of UPS. What couldn't be door-delivered with a 7 tonne van, had to be schlepped to destination on a sack-truck. EZLiving deliverers have a "driver's mate"; in my day it was just me and a sack truck, which is an amazing power lever. See I've included it in the pics - pride of place, at the Right Hand of Sofa, too.

A few days later, my pal René called to visit. He was delighted at the outcome "See?! I told you 20 years ago: that polytunnel will change your life, you'll live up there". I'd only moved the sofa to keep it out of the rain until the CoCo has a free Furniture Dump Event. But y'know, I like having somewhere to sack out in the fresh air and the WiFi signal penetrates the plastic pretty well.

Nice work if you can get it

I've spent a lot of time in Teagasc but I don't have a lot of time for Teagasc. They are conservative, complacent and dull. The only light thing about the organization is the scones which are produced and consumed in prodigious quantities twice a day at Teagasc canteens across the land. 30 years ago, when I was working in TCD, we had a visiting speaker from California. At dinner that night he lamented the fact that his shamrock, given him one Patrick's Day several years previous, had died. I assured him that I could sort his problem. Accordingly, I left home late the following morning and called into Teagasc Kinsealy which was about 1 km along my 12 km commute. I had made an appointment with the Clover Liaison Officer C.L.O. who was available from 10 am. 

We had a very informative chat. He had spent the previous 20 years researching the question of wot am dis shamrock anyway? St Patrick used it as a prop for teaching about the three-fold nature of God 1,600 years ago. StP was 1,300 years before Linnaeus, who put predictable order on the naming of flowers. "Research" included driving round the country [on a mileage allowance that covered both petrol and depreciation of the ve-hicle, and a per diem to cover meals and accommodation] talking to the plain people of Ireland, and mountainty types at the end of grass-median bohereens. At each stop he invited informants to show me your shamrock. As a trained botanist, Dr Shamrock was able to tally up custom and usage for each county; and construct an overall bar chart for the island. Pretty much any fairly common three-leaved forb was identified somewhere: the also rans were black medic Medicago lupulina, white clover Trifolium pratense, wood sorrel Oxalis acetosella and red clover Trifolium repens.

But the front runner was Trifolium dubium (lesser/yellow clover, Irish: seamair bhuí) [as L]. And that became the government Shamrock if you wanted, for example, an export licence. The late lamented Mary Mulvihill has the definitive story of the promotion of Trifolium dubium. Glad to have sorted this out at the end of my visit, Dr Shamrock took a seed pack from his desk, labelled it, filled it with official T. dubium seed and handed it to me. It was close enough to 11:00 am, so we went up to the canteen for tea and a liberally buttered scone.

You can sort of see why Ireland might need a C.L.O. But it's hard to justify keeping one on the books for 20 years after the active part of their career was over. Ireland Inc is really reluctant to re-deploy, let alone sack, employees, so they drift on, eating scones when required and not shouting at anyone until they get to retire on a comfortable pension. Like 'Declan' who was sufficiently under-employed at Dept Social Welfare as to change my nationality before tea-time. Like the HSE employee who redundantly conducts patients from one room to the room next door. The knowledge of this cosy reluctance to downsize the work-force makes The Man super-reluctant to employ extra people to clear invidious backlogs in government services. That's why Dau.II had to wait 10 months for a shot at taking her driving test.

Stats laid bare

In April 2015, I was invited to An Event in Trinity College Dublin and had an interesting chat with one of the last-man-standing Professors of Anatomy. We compared notes on the several deficits in university education - driven off the curriculum by The New Sexy. The New Sexy is often fabulously expensive to develop and pricy to roll-out, so pennies need to be pinched elsewhere in the budget. Trad knowledge, like Anatomy, are undervalued and when the AnatProf retires he (almost always He) ain't replaced. So that class of chap is becoming an endangered species.

Same thing happened at the July 2024 Wexford Science Café which was a conversazione with Dr Sheila Willis, late Director of Forensic Science Ireland. When she started in Forensics in the 1980s the people there could do old style: 

• microscopic paint chips could be found in a child's jumper and matched to the car of a boy racer
• it was definitely Monaghan mud on the boot-heel and the pollen is oak
  
• the blood spatter on the ceiling was [not] arterial
• the hair was from the cat, definitely not the neighbour's aardvark
  

But the great god DNA has nudged a lot of this accumulated expertise into the dustbin of history and thrun the deer-stalker hat in after it. New hires tend to be from genetics and biochemistry rather than geology and ag. It's probably a sound judgment economically: paint-chip breakthroughs are rare but every perp is full of DNA; but having the framing always DNA is not good for expansive hypotheses. Dr Willis was innerviewed on The Life Scientific recently and the revelation that she'd been to school in Wexford Town secured her invite to the WxScCafé. The Blob has quite a lot to say of forensics.

We were invited to lunch recently (they only allow me out with my bib every ten years) and I rubbed shoulders with a different (and still in post) Prof of Anatomy. We agreed that a) scientific training was far too specialised and this was probably affecting a) creativity b) critical evaluation of data through lack of context. We also agreed that everyone, but especially scientists, cd/shd be much better trained in probability and statistics.

Was I a bit shiny-eyed & ranty about that? If so, it might have been my then current earbook: Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan. Wheelan has a faculty position, currently at Dartmouth and before that at U.Chicago. But he has been active in explaining math, data and money, not only to his students, but also on the radio, and in several newspapers of record. And there's more of that in Naked Statistics which uses jaunty, not to say facetious, examples to illustrate such arcana as the central limit theorem and the standard error of the mean. I thought these were pretty good explanations, and some of them were funny. ymmv, I guess. Everyone in the room I am in as I write (N = 3) knew that LeBron James is a tall American basketball player. But similar assumptions are made about the length of an inch, the weight of a pound, the significance of a "hole-in-one" and the function of a "pitcher". Maybe the author and publisher don't give-a-damn about bamboozling non USians. Maybe I am being patronizing about what my neighbours know and ignoring the ubiquitous penetration of American language and culture.

As with all vaguely technological non-fiction earbooks, aural processing is at a significant deficit if the words are either full of numbers or supported by pictures. Don't bother me none in this case: I've seen enough right-skewed distributions in 40 years of data processing to visualise what one looks like; I don't need to see the actual numbers to be believe that two confidence intervals do not overlap. But it is a bit tiresome, yet again, that publishers will take money by selling audio-books without providing these aids to understanding. For one thing it is effectively exclusionary of, say, dyslexics for whom audio is a much more efficient medium for knowledge acquisition.

But here's the thing: Wheelan gathers all the basics covered in the earlier chapters into a big puff for the value of multiple regression with dummy variables. He makes a convincing case that using this technique (readily available in your favorite stats package - yea even Excel) can yield interesting and unexpected insights into your data. One of the first, most challenging, and most rewarding courses I took in graduate school in Boston was Multivariate Statistics: sitting at the feet of Ralph D'Agostino. D'Agostino was also mad for multiple regression with dummy variables and explained that it was mathematically equivalent but much more obvious in its assumptions than ANOVA which is very widely used as a blackbox by people who know no better. D'Agostino died, in the fullness of his years, in September 2023. The obit reveals that he was, for 30 years, one of the Principal Quants in the famous Framingham Heart Study - a longitudinal [1948 - now] investigation into the effects of lifestyle, income, exercise, diet on the likelihood of cardiovascular events. The stats used there to effectively crunch through the data have changed our understanding of cause and effect; and implemented all sorts of policy changes, product labelling and drug development.

One Sep Sun Bit Wol

Bubo bubo [R]

• What wouldn't you do for your [Angelman] son?
• Aphantasia explained by Ian "TCD" Robertson [bloboprev]
  
• Gott Betrunken im Himmel - Ryanair deplores drunken passengers
• What is a unit of alcohol? ♀♂ edition
  
• Parting glass - Onóir 
• Matthew & The Atlas ~ I Will Remain
•  ≋≋≋≋
• Fenit tombolo 
  
• The Death of Lough Neagh
• Mackerel? Only Irish & Asians need apply their forks
• Long lining Halibut Greenland
• Martin's Boat - Colorado R dory [been here before]
• Boats? curving the strakes in the forest
  
• Skara brae . . . neighboring Brogdar prev
• Hot-lime pointing a tumble-down Irish cottage
• Peter McVerry [multibloboprev] Trust goes $henanigan$ tsk!