Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.

A Different Kind of Power

In the 1991, the fellows of Trinity College Dublin elected a new Provost, a well regarded Classical scholar who wrote the books on Cicero. So far, so conservative. But Mitchell was the first Catholic in the post for 300 years . . . and <frisson> the first who still had children young enough to be housed in #1 Grafton Street his official residence. The three boys had bedrooms carved out of the cellars and it was the first time a dart-board was installed in the Provost's House. Having close relatives who were actual students in his patrimony gave him an insight into the doings and needs of that often disregarded under-class. Catholic? children? it took another 30 years for Ye Fellowes to elect a Womanas Provost, but here they are now.

Three of the last four Presidents of Ireland have been women. On the far side of the World, they started electing women as Prime Minister in 1999 and since then only about half those heads of government have been men. Good thing too, women hold up half the sky, and we should put them in charge about half the time. They don't have to be better at the job than blokes, just different.  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result [NotTwain, NotEinstein]. 

I've just finished ear-booking Jacinda "PM, GNZM" Adhern's autobiography A Different Kind of Power [2025] in which she describes reinventing herself as a youngster, leaving her Church [LDS-Mormon] because of its repugnant attitudes of the status of The Gays and women, not to mention BIPOCs. I try to make time for people who have changed their mind on something embedded in family or culture. It may be mere contrariness, but more often [i.m.e.] it has required some deep thought about uncomfortable [cognitive] dissonance. Adhern joined the NZ Labour party before she was old enough to vote because she looked around her at The Dispossessed and a) decided that's not good enough and b) asked what can I do?

She was on a half-year semester abroad at U.Arizona when aeroplanes crashed into buildings on 11Sep01. Most classes were cancelled that day, but one Professor insisted that His class would schedule as normal . . . because, else, the Enemy would win. He invited the class to say how they were feeling, and accepted without comment sentiments which lurched from outrage, patriotism and defiance to frank expressions of Islamophobia. Adhern felt obliged to call out this superficial assessment and demonization of 2 billion people, including 4 million legit resident in the USA. Her "Not all Muslims" speech from the floor fell on deaf ears; but someone needed to speak the words.

It would be a tiresome book if it was chocka with tales of how Adhern was Right, or Compassionate, or AheadOfTheCurve. And indeed, the only times I felt a bit choked up as I listened were when Other people were unexpectedly kind and supportive.

Exec Summ Elec Proc. 30 years ago, NZ ditched the UK-adjacent FPP electoral system in favour of " mixed-member proportional (MMP)". There legislative branch is UniCameral - so no Senate, let alone a House of Lordlings. 60% of the 120 seats are elected in the British way: the winner of the most votes in 72 constituencies gets a seat in parliament for the next three years. In the run up to the election, each registered Pol Party goes into conclave and rank all their candidates in whatever order seems good to that caucus. Each ballot in the election offers two votes: one for a candidate in the locality and one for a party. These latter votes are all tallied up and the remaining 40% of seats in the national parliament are divvied up proportional to the popular vote. 

Putting others first 1) The 2008 election, Grant Robertson, big, gay, bespectacled, rugger-playing insider was nominated for the Labour List. He stood up and declined the honour unless and until Jacinda Adhern was listed for the party. As it happened Robertson held his constituency for the Labour party and Adhern sailed into parliament by being sufficiently high up The List. He didn't have to do that, it wasn't in his interests to do that, it was notably unusual to do that, but he did it. Believing that the country would be better off by gaming Adhern into a seat of power. Less than 10 years later Adhern was Prime Minister and her first cabinet appointment for Grant Robertson as Finance Minister. It was never seen by either of them as pay-back time, because for both of them politics was a vehicle for making the world a better place . . . for Others . . . for Everyone. <snif snif, me>

Putting others first 2)  On 15 Mar 2019 a 20-something gun-nut [conspi]racist from Australia carried out a mass-shooting in Christchurch, NZ: killing 51 people in and around two Sunni mosques.. Adhern, the leader of the country, binned her diary and turned up to bear witness and answer questions [R Christchurch City Council Newsline/Kirk Hargreaves] in Christchurch the next day. She calmed a crowd of distraught, grieving, confused people in a local Community Centre. She had a difficulty task, not least because The State would have to over-ride the Sharia imperative of getting the dead back to their families, washed, shrouded and into the ground asap. Her preferred soundbyte for media became They Are Us: because her New Zealand was, and was happy to be, a multicultural society; where diversity of people generated diversity of solutions to the ongoing enshittification of human existence. [See Caitlin Moran?]. Later she visited the mosque to show she cared, to listen to the pain, to answer questions. Towards the end of the session an 8.y.o. Kashmiri girl raised her hand. Her question was "And how are You?". Because some people, be they 8 or 18 or 80, can read the souls of those who are hurting and can by their tone and demeanour offer solace. A while later, this same girl waded through the departing crowd to the front of the room to hug the Prime Minister, her Prime Minister. <sobbin'>

This time last year The Rest Is Politics Leading interviewed Jacinda Ardern. If you haven't time to listen to an entire book.

math book thud

I've been on a math-for-norms book binge. Singh then Eastaway and now Jordan Ellenberg's How not to be Wrong (2014). Which is the same title as a book by James "LBC" O'Brien. The subtitles distinguish: JE . . . The Power Of Mathematical Thinking [US] OR The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life [UK IE] vs JO'B . . . the Art of Changing Your Mind. Want an insight into the tawdry prejudice that can inhabit the head of a radio presenter [or your own]? Choose O'Brien. Deal with your own math-anxiety and get a better crap-detector? That would be Ellenberg. He doesn't claim that math is easy, but maintains that you will be better off [and less often bamboozled by sharks] if you knuckle down to the work of squeezing sense from numbers. Compared to Singh and Eastaway, Ellenberg's book has more pages and a teeny-tiny font and many even smaller footnotes and an index: it is meant to be taken seriously, hence "thud" in the title. But it is also meant to make math fun and some of Ellenberg's waggish asides 

It's also okay to make your own fun where math meets literature. As when you hunt for ELS [equidistant letter sequences] in The Torah, [or like Meeee in genomes, or GenBank or Magna Carta]. The Torah = the Pentateuch = The first five books of the Old Testament: Gen Exo Lev Num Deu = The Word of God! About 30 years ago, three math-comp-phys whizzes loaded up the Torah and wrote a program to look for hidden messages in a text written 2,500 years ago in Hebrew. In fine, they looked by ELS for, and found, the names and b.days of 32 'modern' rabbis. They also jumbled the order of the holy letters to see whether you could find that good of signal in random Hebrew letters . . . and [compufolk can do that sort of thing in perl or python] then re-jumbled the text a million times to get a measure of just how unlikely were their prophet-finding results! It caused a stir at the time and not just among people who'd done the bar-mitzvah. Push-back came quickly and Ellenberg uses the tale to be skeptical about other crazy 'truths' which seize the public imagination every few years [Dan Brown, we see you].

One of the themes which runs through the book is Utility: how evaluate competing desiderata so as to come up to some optimum solution. He quotes one pundit as saying that "If you never miss a plane, you're not doing it right spending too much time at airports". To get to the airport in Good Time, you've skipped breakfast and left home before airport-shuttle: so you're down the cost of a taxi AND a €9 croissant from Costa Packet. If you fly twice a month those deficits (we'll ignore the sleep deficit and the hazard of using the airport t'ilet) will far exceed the cost of rescheduling the missed flight. And not only travel: Surgeons who never kill patients aren't pushing the envelope of their cutty craft.

Also The Variance! There is a whole chapter on winning the Lotto. For about a decade, Massachusetts ran a lottery where on some occasions, the expected utility of a $2 ticket was ~$5. Something, something roll-down excess jackpot something something match 5 winners. On such draw-days, at least three different consortia bought A Lot of tickets. One group wrote a script to generate 000s of different 6 number combos. Another group just rocked up to convenience stores with $10,000 in cash and did quick-pick; which saved the confederates some RSI from making pen-marks on Lotto forms. The winnings were about the same for each strategy. Across the state, ordinary folk were winning also but with only $2 up-front their odds of winning were slim enough. The consortia, by covering more bases, smoothed out the variance and more or less ensured that they would cash out close to the expected utility.

Because we love each other ver' much, Ellenberg has some overlap with The Blob: Poincaré's bus-step; Cantor's infinities; Abraham's armour; Nate Silver's uncertainty; Shannon's bits; Hamming's bit-errors; Pearson & Son.  I recommend this book: you don't have to read all 120,000 words. And it will help your crap-detector for interpreting Gallup polls, press headlines, and political pundits.

Amen to this: "I think we have to teach math that values precise answers but also intelligent approximation, that demands the ability to deploy existing algorithms fluently but also the horse sense to work things out on the fly, that mixes rigidity with a sense of play". But later he says ""Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss"."" Maybe we should hope that at least one reader may grow up to be that Nobody.

Pots Landing

Sometime in the 1970s Coillte, the semi-state forestry firm, acquired one of the old steadings in the hills above us and planted it all with Sitka spruce Picea sitchensisis. By the time we arrived ~20 years later the forest formed a forbidding dark green cliff to the East of the rough track which served as the main access to Mt Leinster and other local peaks. For reasons, Coillte had excluded the ruined farmhouse and yard from the deer-fence enclosure of the forest. Notwithstanding the cliff, that farmstead was, if not a destination, at least a way-station on a longer trek; perhaps especially for small people. Storyrock was another (off-piste) picnicplatz for Dau.I and her sister..

Sometime in the 00s, a hillwalking family suffered a tragic loss and their friends-and-relations planted a tree to commemorate one whose tiny legs would never again give out and demand rest at the ruin on the edge of the forest. Mountain ash = caorthann = rowan = Sorbus aucuparia was a pretty good choice, not least because in berry-season, it really brightened that corner of the dark forest. The tree grew straight and tall, fighting for light up against the spruce. But when Coillte clear-felled their forest during Covid, the memorial rowan was exposed to the blast of any easterlies and was badly shook. I restaked it [have rope, have hammer, have stakes, have time] at least once and I know the friends-and-relations looked out for it. But this last Winter, the weather laid low the tree well before its time [insert sad emoji].

One section of the hillwalkers used to yomp about the mountain by the light of head-torches: after dark, in Winter often on Thursdays. Last Thursday they called in to "borrow a shovel" as they walked up the lane with a baby rowan, stakes, spike, hammer, sheep-fencing and energy. They were going to have a Go at memorial_tree.02. I left them to their neighbourly task and went to bed. Woke up at 0300 hrs screaming "the water, the water". You're at nothing planting young trees without a solid plan to keep the roots damp - ask me how I know. At first light I dealt with my anxiety and reported:

. . . mountain ash looks well! It takes a village to raise a tree.
I lugged a 4lt flagon of K'roe Spring up there just now and left it for the next waterer because it's not needed now.  You know this, but the nearest running water is 100m SE just across the county line where the runnel gets closest to the ditch:

I could see myself making a wee dam there but not until I'm wearing wellies.
Ar aghaidh!

Although the OS map above is more than 130 years old, it does capture how the land East of the county line is bog marsh wetland. By Sunday morning I had wellies, shovel and bucket because I have form for building recreational dams. It was slight excuse to pretend that I was creating a lake, with added dry-shod landing for the convenience of otters others: utility topping my amusement. It only took about 20 minutes, with Jacinda Adhern chatting in the background describing her orderly departure from a six year term as NZ-PM.

I didn't need wellies as my micro-dam project happened after a long dry May. You can see Lake Blob reflecting the sky behind a minimal intervention obstruction to the water flow. I dug up some mud-and-sphagnum from the bottom of a pool in the rill and dumped it in a downstream heap. It was then just barely deep enough to easily obtain a bucketful of tea-coloured water. For added utility (for waterers in dancing pumps, like) I robbed three extra flat stones to make a landing / standing. 

It's been lashing down these last tuthree days, so the baby rowan is getting well puddled in, and nobody will need to bucket water about for a good while yet. Indeed, there was a Summer down-pour after dinner last night and it's entirely possible that my pathetic two-scoops dam has been carried away. I am also assiduously collecting water for the polytunnel and we are talking about acquiring another 1 tonne IBC against El Niño Madness later in the Summer.

STOP PRESS: Before 07:00 this morning, as the clouds lifted off the hills and blue sky appeared in the East, I walked up the hill. Up beyond the Mountain Gate, the hills are alive to the sound of water, the drains are full and somebobby should really go up and fix the spill-over sites. But the dam at Pots Landing is holding. I'll go up again later this week with a shovel and drop a tuthree cut sods on top.

Wilf Rock

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 
Thus unlamented let me die; 
Steal from the world, and not a stone 
Tell where I lie.

When I was in Grad School in the early 1980s, I was trying to get a novel handle on the [Euro]peopling of New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I did A Lot of reading about pre-colonial demographics. I also put in a lot of field-work foot-miles from Cape Breton to Cape Cod in the East to New York and up the Hudson River valley to Montreal and the St Lawrence. Starting in to Year Three of this project my boss advised me to enroll in an evening course at the Harvard Extension School. It was something like "Grave markers and iconography in colonial New England cemeteries". As reg'lar readers may suspect, I have a low threshold for "gosh how interesting, do tell me more". I can't remember any details but if you plot "flying skulls" across time and space it looks like this fashion for memorializing the beloved dead in this way swept like a wave across  New England . . . only to be replaced by "sad angels", Our teacher projected A Lot of 50x50mm slides from a very large collection.

My abiding memory is of gravestones remembering several children from one family dying within days of each other. Also considerable discrepancy in age between husband and wife. And so many dead young mothers. Death omnipresent, a belief in a happy hereafter, but people still wanted [their names and dates] to be recorded forever in this vale of tears.

My Grandfather Wilfred [L, R] was born in in 1879 at The Big House in King's County as the youngest son. There was no future there, let alone a fortune, so he upstakes and joined the Army seeing service in the Second [Colenso, Spion Kop, Mafeking, Ladysmith, that one] Boer War and on the NW Frontier.  One story is that he got rather too deeply in a romantic entanglement in India, so resigned his commission and fled to America in the 00s of the 20thC: maybe winning a section of the Hollywood Hills in a card game; maybe being in San Francisco during or just after the 1906 earthquake; maybe losing all his money to become a panhandling hobo for a while. With more certainty, he volunteered for the RNVR in WWI and lost a lung while serving a balloon-observer in the North Sea. Later he was stationed in Egypt with the RNAS (Air Service) which, in 1918, was merged with the RFC to form the RAF Royal Air Force. I'm sure there were other people who served in all three divisions of the armed forces, but he's the only one who is related to Me. When peace broke out, he became Harbourmaster at Dunmore East, which is where his only son, my father grew up. The photo was apparently snapped in 1952, when Wilfred was about the age I am now. He's got a better hat, but I've got a better sofa!

Wilfred [was] retired in 1947 and lived out his remaining days across the water in Co Wexford. He died in 1957 and was buried [R] in St Mary's, the Church of Ireland First Fruits church where his cousin (and landlady) played the organ. I always found it peculiar that there should be a (Carlow white granite) cross at the grave-head because in practice he was agnostic edging atheist. But then again, your still living rellies have the final say w.r.t. grave-goods.

The Board of First Fruits was a cunning plan which, between 1778 and 1833 funnelled a lot of money into building "established" churches (and glebes to house the rectors) across the island of Ireland. 700 new and refurbished churches over 50 years had a significant impact on the landscape of vernacular architecture. At some level of consciousness we'll have twigged "Oh, another Protestant church on that hill, down than lane" there is no need to read the sign-board, if any, to recognise the Gestalt. St Mary's has the same look-and-feel as the church in Bunmahon which is now the Copper Coast Visitor's Centre. 

Wilfred lay there among the Protestants, quietly weathering topside and composting below. Thirty-something years later, we came back to Ireland in 1990 and I would drop in to say hello if I was passing. I reported to my father that the lettering at the foot of the cross was weathered almost to illegibility. In 1998, we asked the local monumental mason to "make it better". This stone-guy emptied a £15 bag of chippings onto the concrete slab and sent an invoice for £120. Which was a bit disheartening. Shortly after that my father died in his turn and grave-keeping slipped way way down on the list of priorities. That chippings episode turned out to be useful because my letter to the mason recorded the full text of the inscription while it was still, barely, legible.

Forward another ~25 years and there were more deaths in the family. Three of them were buried in Kill, Co Waterford and a rather spectacular, somewhat foreign looking, ✞ was commissioned to mark the spot. This was all the work of Thomas Glendon, a quite-famous mason and letterer, and last year I drove a shovel to facilitate some up date-ing. We all liked the cut of Tom's lettering: very elegant, the ligatures. Tom is even older than me, and with a sense of clock ticking, we asked Tom to re-cut Wilfred's 1957 inscription.  I lied about the inscription in 2o2o. It's not Stephenson's Home is the sailor, home from the sea And the hunter, home from the hill but rather Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas [as L and below] from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene which has the virtue of being a) shorter than RLS b) penned, possibly in Ireland, by a planter from the Other Island. Our planter family came over about 50 years later . . . and stayed.

As they do, and like Topsy, the project growed. From two lines scrunched at the base of a granite cross to 200kg of recumbent Kilkenny black limestone slightly battered to shed the rain, and filling about 20% of the space between the curbs of the grave. That took forever several months of to-fro, but on a bitter wet and wind-driven day at the end of January, Wilf's Rock was delivered to site [R] as we watched white horses scudding across Bannow Bay.

Book 1. CANTO IV, verse XL
He there does now enjoy eternall reft
And happy eafe, which thou doeft want and craue,
And further from it daily wandereft:
What if fome little payne the paffage haue
That makes fraile flefh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not fhort paine well borne, that bringes long eafe,
And layes the foule to fleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after ftormie feas,
Eafe after warre, death after life does greatly pleafe.

Title a rather weak reference to Wolf Rock which caused HMS NormalAccident in 2002. The more familiar, because nearer, Wolf Rock has a lighthouse. Waterwolf is another, floodier, thing altogether. 

More Math Book

I had a troika of math-for-normals books on the go in parallel at the end of May.  One The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh was admittedly more for noodles than for normals. Maths On The Back of an Envelope (2019) by Rob Eastaway is in the tradition of John Allen Paulos [whom bloboprevs] and his A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995). Numeracy is important to prevent yourself or your granny being gulled by nonsense which appears in modern media. Eastaway could, with Simon Singh, Simon Clark, Hannah Fry, Tim Harford, James Grime, Adam Rutherford, Matt Parker, Marcus du Sautoy, Alex Bellos [yes all of blobochecked] make up a cricket team of Explainers of Maths resident in the UK: who therefore know the difference among googol, google and googly.

I twigged that Eastaway was more than {one book picked of a library shelf in rural Ireland} when he wrote about being called up for a crap-detecting soundbyte by local radio. And also about canvassing an audience of teenagers for the weight in stones (rather than kilos which have been curriculum official in UK for the last 50 years). No surprises that he has worked with the UK Math Trust where Gdau.I is currently wrestling kangaroos. Ten years ago he won-a-gong from the IMA [Institute of Mathematics and its Applications] and he's written a dozen books

One of the themes in Envelope is getting numbers correct but not too correct. When RTE reports that 48.34% of people support the bacon-and-cabbage for dinner movement, the number is a blur while "half" or "50%" can be taken in. If  the number is absorbed it may trigger a question like "I wonder what the proportion was in 1996?". It was a time of transition, in 1997 my farming neighbour confessed that his family had frozen pizza for dinner the day before: induced to do so by his teenage daughter. Eastaway suggests using Zequals (a new coinage of his) when trying to get into the right ballpark. Zqualling strips all but the first significant digit. So 7 stays as 7, but 83 ⇒ 80;  83.78 ⇒ 80; 8,452 ⇒ 8000. Pre-process your sums to Zequals and you won't need a calculator but still get a good enough answer: 98 ÷ 5.3 ≈ 100 ÷ 5 = 20.

 Since we got our solar panels, my life is ruined by the kW app on my device. I put off baking until the sun is giving enough to get the oven to 200°C "for free". I put on the immersion when the sun is making 5.25kW [the max] resolving to wash A Lot of dishes or one elderly body before the water gets cold. Towards the end of Envelope, Eastaway offers a poser: which of the following uses the most electricity:

• fridge
• TV on standby
• shower 
• kettle 

Depending on how much tea you drink and how many oxters you possess, shower or kettle (~ 2000W) will win. Leaving fridge ~50W and TV-standby ~2W in the ha'penny place. Apparently, back in the day, TVs would get warm even when nothing was showing, and there was a desultory campaign to make folk unplug them when they went to bed. Not so since we did away with cathode ray tubes and went LED pixels. I knew all that, but Eastaway then riffs on to point out that the family Yaris runs at 20kW or 10x the kettle! "A 30 minute car journey uses more energy than all your domestic appliances put together: that's something to think about when doing the school run". Yes indeed. It reminds me of my dear old dad who would periodically get cost conscious and go though the house flipping off switches while muttering "every light blazing" and "harumph". And then he'd drive into town and buy another lawn-gizmo to clutter his shed.

Nothing in excess [as Delphi sed μηδὲν ἄγαν] is all very well but some excesses are way more excessive than others. Cows burping methane is waaaay more than human pooting the stuff after Beanz Meanz Heinz even accounting for there being 6x more people than cattle on the planet. We shd all give up the ould burgers [two too many poo R]: mutton, chicken, pork are all easier on the planet and lentils least of all.  But cars are an even bigger burden. 

Go Republic!

Today in Italy it is Festa della Repubblica because 80 years ago, just after WWII, they held a plebiscite [ballot-paper] to determine whether to continue with a monarchy (but without Mussolini, he dead) or go full-metal Republic. It wasn't a slam-dunk, but a 54% majority voted for Republic. This iconic picture by photo-journalist Federico Patellani came to symbolise the optimism that people felt for a new system of governance. The woman in the picture wasn't named as Anna Iberti, from Milano, until decades later. Patellani blasted off an entire roll of film on that shoot and other images are available on the internet. But everyone likes the ragged hole torn in the newspaper of record: it's a metaphor of the shaky start to the Republic: so many parties, so many elections.

The referendum was not held in some provinces of Italy which were a) still occupied by the allies in 1946 and b) diplomatically incertae sedis: 

• The Julian March = Venezia Giulia consisting of Trieste and Fiume which was eventually split between Italy and Yugoslavia.
• Bolzano =  Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol up in the Alps, fell to Italy, although it took a generation for Austria to finally quieten its aspirations for sovereignty there.
• Zara a Italian enclave city deep in Dalmatia, which administratively included two archipelagos out in the Adriatic: Lagosta and Pelegosa. All these are now part of Croatia

Pelagosa was the site of a battle between two submarines during WWI. On 5th Aug 1915, the Italian sub Nereide was sunk by SM-5 of the Austro-Hungarian navy, with the loss of all hands. The Captain of SM-5? Linienschiffsleutnant Georg Ritter von Trapp . . . as in Sound of Music, Anschluß, Christopher Plummer.  Phew! that's today's rabbit-hole: coming up for air and breakfast.

Moral HazMat

There were elements of moral hazard in The Blob's recent voyages round the world of shipping. Shipping companies are profitable because they employ desperate non-union sailors, register the ships in-foreign and power them with bunker fuel [mmm sulphur, love the smell of phenolics in the morning]. We the people and we the planet tolerate these shenanigans because we like cheap Stuff. Ships are complex machines. Hard as it is to assemble these engineering marvels, deconstruction is also difficult. If MegaCorp had to build safe and clean ship-breaking & disposal into their business plan, shipping goods would be more expensive.

End of life issues are also central to Wasteland The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters (2024) by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. which I just raced through on Borrowbox. At the turn of the century, Fruit of the Loom [remember them?] stopped making apparel in Donegal when government a) imposed a structure of minimum wages and maximum working week b) stopped supporting foreign direct investors by building them sheds c) [mainly] corporate HQ stretched their debt to breaking point. I can now buy cheap shirts in Penneys or expensive shirts in M&S but they are still made by sweated labour in Asia. I haven't actually bought a new shirt this century. My father died in 2001 and I snagged all his blue corporate shirts. When they had worn to rags, my FiL Pat the Salt kindly died to restock my wardrobe. I have the fashion sense of a brick, so dontgiveadamn how many buttons are on my cuffs.

For others, it matters, and/or their Penney's blouse was in rags after three washes; so new kit must be bought. Guess it keeps the economy rolling. But shame prevents sending last year's shirt to landfill, so some people feel better by donating their cast-offs to Oxfam. Oxfam cherry-picks the designer brands, prices and hangs them. They get bought by bougie students. They rest is sent to Oxfam Centraal where it is scooped into heaps with a fromt-loader and compressed into bales. These are shipped to, say, Accra, Ghana where they are auctioned off to fabric re-cyclers. But here's the thing: if the waste stream is top-sliced by Oxfam and its dogoodnik customers, there is only trash left and Ghanaian rag-pickers can't make a living so the whole shipment goes direct to Kantamanto dump. The unintended consequence of your conscientious re-cycling makes life worse for the dispossessed in West Africa. Oliver F-W's book is full of these counter-intuitive factlets. And so many acronyms PET PFAS POP PCB PAH - and that's just Ps.

I thought I was on top of waste and pollution - I used to teach water chemistry after all. But, blimey, I didn't know the half of it. Wasteland will open your eyes . . . and not in a good way. 

In a strange way, in my 'mind', ruminations on Moral Hazard reminded me of a recent interview of Alvin Roth by philosopher-physicist Sean Carroll. Roth has made a career out of looking a 'questionable' markets; and has written a book Moral Economics. One useful definition of 'questionable' in this context is cases where such-a-thing is illegal in some jurisdictions but accepted in others. You can't sell your blood plasma in Ireland or in much of Western Europe; you may only donate it. There would be a shortage of blood and blood-products in European Clinics and Hospitals except for the fact that billions of units are sold into our health systems from the USA . . . where folk can sell their own blood. Maybe we shd think about incentivizing donors here rather than begging them. The Mindscape podcasts all come with added [searchable] transcript so you don't need to listen to the whole thing. Roth was a driver in establishing Kidney transplant rings [whc bloboprev] to maximize the match among donors and dialysees.

Moral Hazard [bloboprev] occurs when The System is structured so that players can make money by taking risks but know that they can walk away if their cunning plan has unintended consequences. Olde Timey miners in the American West made holes in the landscape; abstracted gold, copper, zinc, silver, lead and then loaded up their burros and trotted off to the next prospect. Mammy Someone else would deal with the toxic desert which had been brought to the surface. In this century, executives at Irish Banks made A Lot of money geeing up the Celtic Tiger with doubtful loans . . . but, considered too big too fail, were bailed out by Mammy the Irish Govt with help from we the tax-payers.

Simpson's Gogglebox

I had an Epiphany on 6th of Jan 2026 and stopped watching YT.  60 days later, I acknowledged that by saying No to the algorithm, I'd freed up a lot more time to sit on the sofa page-turning books. Lack of YouTube doesn't affect my diet of earbooks half so much: my borrowbox coups are mostly consumed when I am out and about. I was in Tramore Library on a recent Monday morning returning a book and thought I'd browse the shelves. On my way to non-fiction (300 Social Sciences 400 Language 500 Science 600 Tech) I was surprised to see a Whole Block of shelves labelled Crime Fiction. There was more shelf-metres in that category that All of 300-699. I find that Quite Peculiar but I recognise I'm in the minority on that one.

During a brief gap in my jury-service days, I nipped down to the County Library and borrowed a couple of books. One of which was The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh [rendered R]. I have name-checked Singh for kicking homeopathy; unaware of the unintended consequences [no placebo] of such righteous punching down. But generally Singh is a force for good: edutaining STEM more widely to diversify the lives of math-anxious folks and maybe making them [feel] smarter.

You're wrong if you know that Matt Groening made 800+ episodes of the Simpsons. The show's success required-allowed the hiring of a rotating roomful [nearly a gross!] of comedy writers. A Lot of them were [Harvard] college educated and their demographic leaned nerd science-guy [sex-ratio ~1F:4M. Singh ploughed through the footage and alt.tv.simpsons and interviewed the writers to winkle out the math references. A lot of them Easter Eggs which lit up the day of those who 'got' them. Getting them might require using VHS to step through a sequence frame by frame to find a subliminal nerdnik gag. The Simpsons writers were cracking jokes about Googol and Googolplex when Sergey Brin was still in High School

I was born too early for The Simpsons, by the time it launched in late 1989, we'd given up the ould telly several years earlier. But, during my YT years, I clocked enough hours to know that the cast live in Springfield, US; that Lisa is a genius and has an older brother called Bart. But I rate puzzles and Easter Eggs, [one of Singh's other works is The Code Book] and my lack of Simpsonology doesn't impinge much on my appreciation of Singh's book.

The book has several intercalated 'exams' where you can test yourself on the larfometer 

• What did 0 say to 8?
• Nice belt!
• What are the 10 kings of people in the world
• Those who understand binary and those who don't.
• Prove that a horse has an infinite number of legs
• Horses have an even number of legs: two hind legs at the back and forelegs at the front. That's a total of six legs, which an odd number of legs for a mammal. The only number which is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore horses have an infinite number of legs.
• Why do computer scientists confuse Hallowe'en and Christmas?
• Because Oct.31 = Dec.25 . . . and bin.11111 = Dec.31 

This seems the best chance I'll ever have to do Simpson's Paradox on The Blob. It forms half of the current book's Chapter 12 in which Congressional votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act are tallied with unexpected results.

Because the Civil War is was still fresh in everyone's memory, having finished only 99 years previously, it is interesting to see how votes compared where Jim Crow hadn't run [North] and where it had [South].

Party	Northern	%	Southern	%	National	%
Democrats	145/154	94%	7/94	7%	152/248	61%
Republican	138/162	85%	0/10	0%	138/172	80%

These data show that, in percentage terms, as expected, Democrats were more in favor of civil rights than Republicans in both North (94% v 85%) and South (7% v 0%) regions BUT when the country as a whole is considered Republicans seem to be more Civil Righty. That's paradoxical, no? It hinges on several numerical diffs which are smoothed out if you consider only % of votes. 

• There are 3x more people and their representatives in the North than in the former Confederate States
• Democrats were the party of power in the South (Lincoln was a Republican)
• There is cross party lack of support for Civil Rights across the South; even the Dems there are luke warm  

One final thing to mention (which is the subject of Singh's Appendix 2) is Euler's Identity

e^πi + 1 = 0

A pair of Kings

 Did I mention that I was doing time as a juror? I did. 

At lunch on the second day, I mentioned to our Jury Foreman that I was going to the theatre that evening, and there was a Dublin train at 16:08. IF the judge finished on the dot of 4 ANDIF everyone stood out of the way ANDIF I could exit through the court rather than through the Jury Room and the warren of first-person-shooter corridors and stairwells THEN I was confident I could trot the 600m to the station and make that train AND have dinner with my extended family before the show. It is the nature of things that at least half our fellow jurors earwigged on the conversation. So when the lawyer was still on his feet at 16:05 two of the jury turned round in their seats and raised their eyebrows in sympathy with my flight plight. It was okay, I had a back-up bus with JJKavanagh at 17:10 and was able to dine on grazed left-overs before we all left for the venue at Club na Múinteoirí on Parnell Square.

The play we were all going to see was II a clever riffle-shuffling of two Elizabethan plays: Edward II by Christopher Marlowe and Richard II [as R] by Wm Shaxsper. It is a matter of historical record that the former was the Gt-grandfather of the latter and that both kings were from their crowns untimely ripped. Plays about monarchs of The Colonial Oppressor might seem a peculiar choice to show in The Republic, hmmm? But made a bit of sense in that it was brought here as part of Wilde Stages; the current incarnation of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. One snitty insider comment was that DGTF, in its 22 year, will find the money and a stage for any ould nonsense so long as it's Gay. 

It was kind of amusing that a) our family party almost doubled the mid-week audience b) was 90% female c) occupied the whole 3rd row. The rest of the audience was middle-aged to elderly blokes. Family members with better gaydar than me (I just wear BLT-Allied merch) said I was probably the only SWM in the dark  The elder king projected Presence as only an Ac-Tor can do. The other, The Beloved's 30-something neffy from ZA, was introduced to us near nekkid and sort-of-fetal broiling under the spotlights as Richard II. Although later he gets up and owns his patrimony. His Presence was why we were all attending alternative theatre way past my bedtime.

Who knows or cares now whether a fellow who died 700 years ago was gay? Not millennials, that's for sure: sex and gender don't seem to make no differ for my students or my childer and their pals. But at least some contemporaries believed that Richard II and esp Edward II preferred company and congress with men. 200 years after the facts, Holinshed's Chronicles maintain that Edward was disemboweled per anum with a red-hot poker "so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardlie might be once perceived" at Berkeley Castle in September 1327. 

I was not tooo distracted by the superficial campyness of the perf: corsets, codpieces, chiffon, tinsel crowns and petals. Underneath, the play is an eloquent discussion about the desirability, and even possibility, of renouncing great power and great responsibility [aka shirking one's duty] and walking into a less-stress sunset. That's important: in my family there is a generational thread of service and subservience of self. Is that a Good Thing? Would the world be richer if our ambition genes hadn't been shot off in the war?

Formally: The troublefome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer . . . THE Tragedie of King Richard the fecond,
 

 

Tonn Nua Lá Nua Burj Nua

Two years ago we were part of a  l o o n n g tailback approaching the Luffany roundabout at the N end of the Waterford ring-road. We had seen the future and its works to mangle Lincoln Steffin's 1919 assessment of the neonatal Soviet Union. Because we have become dependent on energy: for the toaster, the uber, the video-calls, the wireless, that X-ray, those youtubes, the zone underfloor heating. Generating electricity is only part of it; creating the infra-structure to distribute, deliver, store. maintain and service the MWs is also required.

cw: I know buggerall 40min worth of advocacy about Offshore Wind 

. . . but should put in the work to know more. Last Tuesday, we invited Dave "Salesforce" Dempsey to talk at the Wexford Science Cafe about Offshore Wind Energy and we got a 40 minute tsunami of data and a hurricane of acronyms [OWE, DMAP, ORESS, GWh, CfD, CBF] and there was time for many questions and informed comments from the floor. One reason why the talk was lucid is that, while Dempsey wrote the book about "Industry Trends in Cloud Computing" [a snip at €130], he's recently had to teach himself the language, politics and numbers of a National Energy Plan. Fewer Curse of Knowledge assumptions! [wch bloboprev]

I think Politics is key here. Offshore was last mentioned at WxScCa when we had the Management of SETU, the ambitious SunnySouthEast multi-campus University, saying they were going to launch MW-engineering and energy-tourism courses at their Wexford Campus. But they don't have a [proper, like, with labs] Wexford Campus! That project is still bogged down in unresolved CPOs, site-changes, finance over-runs, NIMBY, judicial reviews ten years after it was approved in principle. It's like the National Children's NOTpital in small. I don't know if we [the people, politicians, players] are capable of delivering Big. Thinking Big we can do - just listen to blowhards and hurlers-on-the-ditch two pints down in any Irish pub. This is where EirGrid are at:

Tonn Nua [en: New Wave; fr:  François Truffaut nouvelle vague] is currently the most favoured and most advanced Designated Maritime Area Plan (DMAP) to launch the energy future of Ireland. If Tonn Nua works, then they intend to roll out ~50% larger capacity wind-farms further out to sea called Li Ban, Manannan and Danu. Tonn Nua is planned to have 60 x 15MW, bottom-fixed turbines spread over 300 km² more or less shadowing the Costa na Déise from Helvick Head to Hook Head. 60 x 15 = 900MW capacity - enough to power 800,000 homes. I use "shadowing" deliberately, because there will be complaints about The View from people who have bought sea-view retirement homes [with added toasters etc.] all along the coast. Few of them will be complaining on behalf of the crabs and conger which will have their homes turned over in the maelstrom of civil engineering.

Dave Dempsey  is not in the pocket of The Man or FAANG; he's made enough money to be independent. Like successful entrepreneurs, he looks at the horizon, thinks big and is prepared to take risks. Independent, sure; but also a Booster for Offshore Wind Energy. He expresses a resistance is useless vibe about Future Ireland. “I'd say it's better for your children to look at that than look at the Burj Khalifa or the Sydney Opera House when they wake up in the morning". Adding that there are 3,500 jobs to be had at peak rollout.

Any 15MW wind-turbine is massive and this is one reason for off-shore windfarms. The changes at Luffany roundabout were to accommodate the first bottle-neck in the delivery of 80m turbine blades from Belview Port to King's County. The blades for 15MW are 120m long. Road improvements to get those big boys where the wind requires them would consume the entire budget of Transport for Ireland. Offshore has no hedges. Nevertheless, 15MW turbines, their towers and blades, need some (flat and extensive) on shore ground  for assembly and maintenance. And they need it next week. Rosslare Europort plans to tender to provide this service but they are probably too-little too-late too-entitled. Pembroke Dock / Milford Haven across the channel in Wales, with it's deep-water harbour and existing oil refinery is well ahead in that race. In addition the brownfield site at the old [Tata] steel and heavy industry complex at Port Talbot is 100km East but within the logistic catchment and will get mighty devt grants from the UK government. See: it's not just for Tonn Nua: the winner will get the contracts for servicing all the future Irish, Welsh and Cornish Offshore projects.

The other issue is that the Irish Grid does not have the capacity to land anything like 900MW at Great Island at the head of Waterford Harbour. The Greenlink Interconnector from Wales, which comes ashore at Baginbun Co WX and tootles across county to Gt Island, has been live for a year now. But apparently, when Tonn Nua switches on, that route will all have to be dug up again to install fatter cables from there to Great Island. Some questions:

• Who is in charge of future planning at EirGrid?
• Who is cheese-paring at the cabinet table at Govt Centraal?
• Who among them has a Vision for Ireland longer than the next election ?

But there is "with one leap we were free" solution to the imbalance between supply [too much and uneven] and distribution [inadequate] & demand [insatiable]. Tonn Nua is owned by Helvick Head Offshore Wind DAC: a joint venture between ESB and Ørsted A/S, their Danish oppos. Helvick is already talking to 'private' customers to suck up the surplus when the wind blows faster than 10m/s. And at 03:00 hrs when all the toasters and TVs are asleep. Up above, by using "800,000 homes" I've fallen for the standard narrative where demand is imagined as from reg'lar folk just like me: coming home to their 2.4 children at 6pm and ALL switching on the kettle for a nice cup of tea after a hard day staring at a screen. But it's not like that any more: a single data-centre might need 100MW [the same as the entire city of Galway or Waterford] 24/7 and there are A Lot of data centres. They already the consume 3/10ths of Ireland's electricity and who knows how much water for cooling their chips and discs. Dempsey invites us to imagine 'green' industrial parks discretely tucked in behind the dunes: taking in energy from Tonn Nua, Tonn Dó, Tonn Trí . . . and spewing out Gbytes for MegaCorp.

IMO we should all be more intentional and more careful in our energy usage: a shirt could go two days between washes; two baths a week and showers the other days; walk to school; cycle to work; put on a sweater before putting on the central heating. You get my thrift. But I can see Offshore Wind as [part of] the solution to our energy needs. And I'll vote for the party which has a coherent sustainable energy policy in their manifesto: that budgets for safe clean decommissioning when the blades reach the end of their useful life. 

But I will be a very reluctant party to any proposal planning to fill the horizon with turbines which are enslaved to The FAANG Empire.

When things go wrong

. . . then things go down, Maritime division.

I have a couple of friends, one from Central Europe and one from South America, who met while working for the IMO [International Maritime Organization] in London. They were both competent adults, one qualified in international law. When we'd visit from gritty Geordieland, it was a different world. The IMO, and its ~300 workers, had diplomatic status, and didn't have to take the Calais ferry to avail of duty-free. In London, there were several bonded warehouses which served this market each producing a catalogue, like Argos, but with more cases of gin. Transnational ex-pats could order up a tax-free car to potter about the city attending embassy events, galas and conferences. Wheels were also handy for collecting crates of booze when it was their turn to host a party.

The IMO features in a book by William Langewiesche: The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime [2004]. He (1955-2025) was a prolific writer for inter alia The Atlantic, covering cover-ups and war-zones. He was on the ground at Ground Zero after 9/11 for six months and wrote it up long-form for The Atlantic. 9/11? did someone say Multiple Conspiracy Theories? Well there's plenty more The Outlaw Sea esp in discussing the fate of the MS Estonia, a RoRo ferry lost in the Baltic 30 years ago [Mentioned in passing in a 2014 Blob about Zeebrugge]. 

Langewiesche makes, but does not belabour, the point that the IMO has been subject to corporate capture. A great many great ships are owned by MegaCorp but registered in MicroNations like Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands: the three [dwt deadweight tonnage] biggest Flags of Convenience FoC. Panama, for example, flags 30x more ships than the USA. MegaCorp uses FoC because regulations and inspections carried out by 'real' countries are . . . not convenient for shareholders. The Environment [bunker fuel alert] and South-Asian deckhands do not have a seat at the table when the IMO is in session - but MegaCorp is entitled to be part of the Liberian delegation (in an advisory capacity, like). The IMO is funded by nations pro rata by dwt. It's not the Marshall Islands (with a population less than Dublin California or our own Dundalk) who are funding the duty free lifestyle of IMO apparatchiks in London. It is rather Evergreen [2021 Suez prev], Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd.

The Estonia was a flag-ship for the recently created Baltic republic of the same name. Everyone agrees that, on a regular over-night shuttle between Tallinn and Stockholm the front fell off in a storm at 01:00hrs on 28 Sep 1994. Hundreds of white people died, so it was front-page news for a while. Although a Swedish company co-owned the MS Estonia they applied their inspections with a light hand: cutting the recently Soviet state some slack in becoming a fully compliant member of the Corporate West. An international committee investigating the tragedy was likewise reluctant to blame Estonians for poor maintenance and top-down management structure. The draft report suggested design failure. The German ship-builder commissioned a much fatter counter report and managed a successful reputational damage control campaign. Nut-job conspiracy theories [Jutta Rabe, bombs, KGB] didn't help reveal what really happened. Which is desirable to stop this sort of thing happening in the future.

The Outlaw Sea only devotes the middle third to the Estonia. The rest of the book includes stories of 20thC piracy on the High Seas; disastrous oil spills [cw: shadow fleet, threadbare hulls, under-paid crews, drunken captains]; and end of ship-life issues on the beaches of Gujarat and Chittagong. In our throw-away world it is just . too . expensive to dispose of agéd ships [asbestos, bunker fuel, TBT anti-fouling paint, copper, steel, bronze] using unionized [white] labour wearing hazmat suits. If Greenpeace achieves a corporate regulatory coup on South Asian ship-breakers, one likely consequence will be an up-tick of mysterious ship-loss at sea. 

Great read. It's 20+ years old now but I bet the basic principles are relevant today . . . with added shadow fleet. Next time you order garden furniture, solar panels, shoes, shirts, skirts, mutter a prayer for deck-hands and dolphins?

PIE for beginners

 If you're reading this, you are either a) struggling or b) part of the anglophonie. English is a bit peculiar because all the short words are "germanic" related to Nederlands and Frisian but the $10 words - from cooking, law, politics, science and tech - come from the South mainly Latin, via [Norman] French, but with a smattering of Greek. We'll ignore the obvious loan words like adobe, bungalow, chutney, divan, embargo, fjord, gulag, hummus, incognito, junta, klutz, mantra, nark, opera, poteen, Qi, robot, sauna, Tory, ukulele, veld, wanderlust, yacht, zero. These blow-ins can be a poser, but not a problem for linguists digging into the origin of languages. The origin of Language itself is another, deeper, more speculative, problem.

The Blob has had much to say about PIE (Proto Indo European) but, because there's 2½ million words schlubbing about in the archive, and because I eat more than I speak, I've had more to say about Pie [apple, mutton, lemon-meringue, scotch]. When Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025) by Laura Spinney [critical review by Franis "Pagan" Young] was mentioned, I was all over it like a rash reserved a copy in the library. Spinney is a journalist rather than a philologist and so is better equipped to write a pop-sci account than someone who has internalized the phonetic alphabet. Not least because her investigation draws on three, previously quite separate, threads of research: linguistics (both written and spoken), archaeology and genetics. 

Since my pal Dan Bradley [FRS] pioneered the sequencing of ancient DNA thirty years ago in Trinity College Dublin it has become a booming speciality. Not just permafrozen mammoths and neanderthals but regular "recent" humans who may have spoken PIE or one of its many descendants. Now, the grave goods (bronze, beakers, beads) can be cross-referenced to the Y-chromosome of the honoured dead and inferences can be made about whether the interee was local or colonizing blow-in from the steppe. This doesn't always help with the language because there are cases where invading hegemons adopted the language of the natives, like the Vikings and Normans in Ireland; and also where their language because the aspirational prestige language of power, as with Normans in England.

I didn't twig that Baltic and Slavic were two different branches of the PIE bush. That would have added some friction to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth aka Królestwo Polskie i Wielkie Księstwo Litewskie (1569 - 1795) before it was finally dismembered and gobbled up among Russia, Austria and Prussia.

Who doesn't love the fact that Elfdalian / Övdalian is a separate descendant of proto-germanic spoken by about 3,000 folk in one corner of Sweden. They have mobilised 7 extra letters to help with the pronunciation: Ąą, Ęę, Įį, Ųų, Y̨y̨, Ą̊ą̊ and Ðð. And, just to be contrary, the language was written in runes until just over 100  years ago. Needless to say, like all the Gaeilgeoirí in Ireland, all speakers are fluent in Swedish, because they need driving licenses. 

Spinney throws judicious hat at a Ukrainian [as opposed to Anatolian, south across the Black Sea] origin of Proto. Most likely a crew by the name of Yamnaya, who buried their dead in pits under kurgans [barrow, tumulus]  and sprinkled them with red ochre before covering them over forever. 

Did someone mention Ukraine? The War there has put a bit of a damper on excavations of known or new Yamnaya sites. Archaeologists are happy out digging with a trowel and a paint-brush but are understandably ill-equipped to deal with land-mines and unexploded munitions. But there have been some wins among the tsunami of losses. In 1930, the Soviets decided to build Azovpol a steel plant in Mariupol. They weren't totally oblivious to culture and when the zeks uncovered an ancient burial site, Mykola Makarenko was allowed in for an emergency dig. It was rushed but careful and the artifacts and drawings were lodged in the Mariupol Municipal Museum. In Feb 2022 the Azovpol steelworks turned into a meat-grinder during the Russian invasion. The stellworks were destroyed along with the museum and everything in it. Very slow hand-clap.

otoh, in 1956,  during the next five year plan, the R. Dnieper was dammed for hydropower and irrigation at Kakhovka. The resulting reservoir covered the oldest known Yamnaya site at Mykhailivka, putting it off-limits to further excavation. The dam was blown up by the Russians or sabotaged by the Ukrainians in June 2023 releasing 18 cu.km of water. 60 people and uncountable livestock were killed and 40 communities flooded  . . . but the meadows at Mykhailivka became accessible for the first time in 60 years.

But enough of these anecdotes, get the full overview by reading the book! I've returned 'my' copy to the library. 

Courthouse steps

It's a little more than 10 years since I was called for Jury Service. In 2016, I attended the County Courthouse, along with ~70 other citizens, three times over an elapsed week. On day two I came within an ace of making it onto a jury but was rejected by the defense counsel. I had some sour things to say back then about the cost and inefficiency of vindicating people's rights to trial by jury.

Well Tiocfaidh ár lá I was re-called to attend the Circuit Court in April and joined 75 fellow citz, crammed into a room with only 65 seats at the County Court House [view from the steps R] on Tuesday last at 14:00hrs. We were roll-called as if it was 1926, with no pretence at GDPR. Which enabled me to discover a) that my distinctively / uniquely named neighbour had failed to answer the summons b) the name of a distinctively-faced former colleague from The Institute whom I hadn't seen for 6 years. We watched by video the arraignment of someone in the main court room but he pled guilty. So no trial, no jury, and we were requested and required to return the following day at 10:30 for the reserve team match. 

It took the rest of the morning to reduce the mill of people to 12 who were a) unobjectionable to prosecution and defense b) not proffering a last minute excuse. Despite wearing my Tweed Jacket of Patriarchy TJP, I was accepted as one of that week's jurors. We were told that the case was estimated to take 2-3 days and that we should cancel other arrangements for Thursday and Friday with a outside chance of being required for the Tuesday. Then we went to lunch to be back at 14:10 sharp. Lunch was at the Hotel Generic with 3 choices: meat, fish, other meat. Enormous portions. Dessert = tea or coffee and a sliver of biscuit, whc fair enough: nobody needed more Kcals after the meat&carbs. The case continued until 16:00, most of which we spent in the tiny jury room as legal arguments surged back and forth in the court. Obvs I can't / won't give any details of the case. Or identify any of the jurors about whom I got to know rather TMI as we chatted idly in limbo or to, fro and at lunch.

I am the third member of our family who has recently been doing the state some service (jury division). Funnily enough all three cases hinged on evidence from cctv footage. In his summing up, our Judge referred to the admissibility of chinese cctv data. An unintentionally hilarious comment on the surveillance state we currently inhabit. He was, of course, referring not to the PRC but to the camera outside the Hop Kweng Schezwan Restaurant round the corner. One of the lawyers had a tendency to $10 dollar words (animus, disharmony) [betting they graduated from TCD]. At one point they asked if some key shrubbery was exuberant, to which the witness replied "wha'? it's about knee high".

It seems that, in our current state, anyone over the age of 65 can ask to be excused jury service. Which is further proof of the power of the grey vote. Every pensioner who refuses to serve the community (which is supporting us with free travel, fuel allowances and medical cards) is pushing an unwonted burden on someone younger who is currently struggling with a cost of living crisis, unattainable house prices, child-care and existential angst. Check your privs, Gramps! 

Anyway, I'm glad I finally got my chance to Do That Thing (many are called but few are chose etc.). But I have to say I left the courthouse on Friday evening feeling slightly soiled with what we had had to do. I ambled up the railway station where I was meeting The Beloved on her way down from Dublin.  A couple passed me on the platform and I heard her say " . . . that was not fair, the whole thing was based on a pack of lies". I'm about 60% certain (i.e. not beyond reasonable doubt but on the balance of probabilities) that they also had just come from the courthouse. It gave me pause.

One final comment: the courthouse has A Lot of steps: imposingly running up to the big front doors but also serving a warren of rooms and corridors inside. There is a single lift, so it is formally wheel-chair accessible but heck-and-jiminy I wouldn't want to try escaping from a fire.

Blackstairs Yomp 2026

Almost very year this century walk we have acknowledged the annual Blackstairs Challenge: an up and down yomp of 33km along and 1.5km up organised by the Wayfarers Hiking Club. We were here for them this time last year. Caisleán Bob is 300m up from the county road where the 13:00 cut-off check-point is located; so the tide of people, walking poles, ruck-sacks and gaiters drains away from us at ~12:45. We have always provided water:

The pixellated sign says "Trail Fairies / W A T E R". Over the last several years, for the craic, I've baked a few slabs of flapjacks for the troops and these all seem to disappear. 2.75kg flapjes / 180 hikers =  ½oz each. But not evenly distributed because some people take two and [so] some get none.

The weather in mid-May is usually pretty good: neither sno-blizzard nor sun-broilard but today was the drizzliest it's been for a few years. I felt I should add our agéd beat-up Aldi-speciaal parapluie to the support kit:

. . . not that any of these hardy hikers would cower under cover at the first splash of rain. 

Earlier in the week I was talking to an ex-Institute colleague, now also retired. He used to run the Institute Hill-walking Club whom we hosted 13 years ago. He said he'd never made it to The Challenge because the demand far out-strips supply. But he'd done the 33k route several times in a smaller group (saving €46 each on the registration and logistics fee). All good fun. I'm glad I was up early to set everything out, before it started to rain in earnest.

And the rain stopped shortly after the local cut-off time, which meant I could tidy up after 2026's challenge. Just about to close the gate when a delegation from Wayfarers Centraal came up the lane in a vehicle to deliver a bottle of whiskey: a much appreciated tribute which is getting to be a habit with them. Thanks! We took that dry moment also as a window for moving our sheep to a greener field. Then I strode up the hill to collect [another 2026 innovation] my water-warning sign [R] from the mountain gate. There behind the sign is the bottle of Jimmy. 

Not all great though. When I collected the sign, the mountain gate was open and my neighbour-above's cattle were out on the side of the hill munching through the heather. I called. The cows are meant to be there. But ne↑ghbour added the info that, when she went up to check the cows at noon, both gates were open. Which leaves the cattle with an unimpeded path all the way to the county road and Freedom. Wch is a mighty pain in the arse for their owner. Tsk! and, like, FFS.

Kangaroo Euclid

Most of us account [dyswidt?] math-anxiety an unfortunate outcome for any system of education. Some adults struggle making change from £5, or sawing a 8ft = 2400mm 4x2 into three equal parts. When I was in school, we were just moving out of rote-learning our times-tables and grinding through obviously artificial 'problems' that filled the pages of Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic [my edition is 1924]. Didn't make me no differ, I was 'good at maths' and institutionalized biddable, so the medium of teaching was largely irrelevant. I remember wetting myself when I cracked a code that was printed on the cover of the SMP text-book series that was the basis of math-ed at my school. But I gotta admit that teaching math there-and-then didn't light any fires. It wasn't FUN.

Gdau.I is in secondary school in England and "good at school" like me, and quite competitive: unlike me. With encouragement from her teachers, she signed up for an extra-curricular math jam called Kangaroo Math run by The UK Maths Trust, "the leading charity that advances the education of young people in maths". The programme is derived from Kangourou sans Frontières which in turn owes a debt to a programme started in Australia by Peter O’Holloran and Peter Taylor in 1978: hence the Kangaroo label. Gdau.I's parent shared a link to Past Papers [2015-2026] from the UKMT scheme: grey kangaroo is for younger kids while pink kangaroo is aimed at "A" Level = last two years of secondary school. As I say above, I was great at the tricks to get good marks in tests [incl "A" Level] for The Calculus and other advanced math stuff.

Kangaroo is attempting, like so many school-math reforms, to go beyond instilling basic numeracy in the populace. They are hoping to bring more kids over the threshold into math can be diverting and intrinsically interesting and maybe even inspiring; rather than a merely functional, doubtfully useful, skill. As the least competitive person I know, I could wish this was achieved without pitting children against each other. Because if there are winners, there are losers and that gives people's self-esteem a biff.

But, out of solidarity with the young herself, I've been plugging away at some grey kanga past papers . . . as an alternative to sudoku, like. The set-up is for each paper to have 25 multiple choice questions: starting easy and getting harder. It's good fun (for the likes of me) and I can, with furrowed brows, motor through Q1-Q15.  Beyond that, I have to mobilise a pencil&paper. But, because it's recreational, I give up on the last tuthree [difficult for 15 y.o.s] Qs because my life doesn't depend on getting 100%.

2016 Q12 Two kangaroos Bo and Ing start to jump at the same time, from the same point, in the same direction. After that, they each make one jump per second. Each of Bo's jumps is 6 m in length. Ing's first jump is 1 m in length, his second is 2 m, his third is 3 m, and so on. After how many jumps does Ing catch Bo?

Possible answers: A [10] B [11] C [12] D [13] E [14]

2019 Q9 In the diagram, PQ = PR = QS and ∠QPR = 20◦. What is ∠RQS? 

Possible answers A [50°] B [60°] C [65°] D [70°] E [75°] 

Don't know about you, but these Qs seem a bit more fun than Pendlebury's equivalent 100 years ago:

99. A ship 600 miles from shore springs a leak which admits 6 tons of water in 20 minutes. 60 tons of water would suffice to sink her but pumps can throw out 70 tons in 4 hours. Find her average rate of sailing that she may reach shore just as she begins to sink