The Lazarus Solution

I've taken full advantage of working in academia pretty much all my adult life. Academic Institutions, even not-exactly-Harvard places like The Institute, have active interest in many different fields and tendency to bring visiting speakers in from Outside. If one of my colleagues takes the trouble to invite someone to talk to their students, then that speaker is unlikely to be a total sleeper. Accordingly I do my best to rock up to hear what they have to say - I've heard from the horse's mouth about being a prison governor, a forensic scientist, running a homeless charity, a boxing coach, an arachnologist, the world's expert on sequence alignment. Last Friday, I taught my last class for the term just in tme for the launch of a sparkling new initiative:

Sports Students as Mentors for Boys and Young Men

As the least sporty person I know - my sporting ventures seem to involve a lot of sofa - that's a pretty unlikely channel for my enthusiasm. For the launch of an official Erasmus / EU initiative, it was pretty chaotic: it started in a different place, at a different time from that announced in an e-mail the night before. Which meant that I got to chatting with a young feller who is doing a Master's in Strength & Conditioning at The Institute; must be a protestant, I thought, to arrive a little early for an appointment. He's doing a MSc because he wants to teach at his Alma Mater and reckons the post-graduate degree will give him the edge. Good luck with that, I thought, because the lecturing staff on the Sporty side of our department are none of them close to retirement and quite cosy in their jobs. But I brightened with the thought: "Y'know, we're having the departmental Christmas party in a tapas bar next Thursday evening, the only thing for it is to forment a terrorist outrage to create some vacancies in the faculty". But I could see that he really didn't have the bottle to thus decisively take control of his own destiny, and I asked what was the fall-back position.

"I want to do exercise therapy with the chronic sick", he said. This gave me a frisson because I could immediately see great possibilities with such an endeavour. The father of one of the admin staff at work had recently died and the obit mentioned that the old chap had spend the previous 8 months occupying an acute bed in one of the major Dublin teaching hospitals. I'm sure he got the best of care, and I'm not suggesting that he overstayed his welcome, and the HSE and the Min of Health think that is the right way to spend out tax-dollars,but that bed cost a nominal €800/day or the bones for €200K for the stay. You could get a lot of exercise therapy around the country for that sort of money. My new pal was chapter and verse on the health and wellness benefits of pushing out exercise regimes among the chronically ill: multiple sclerosis, cancer, COPD, heart disease and diabetes. Getting people out of bed is a one way to prevent bed-sores!  Exercise develops agency, reduces pain, distracts from negative thoughts, stimulates the immune system, develops appetite, increases lung function, engenders happiness. That's a lot of QALYs engendered through one salaried health-care professional.

It's not an easy option! It's damned hard for the patient to do the necessary work - they feel like shit, for starters, chemo drains them, multiple incisions make them delicate. Exercise Man told me that 50% of his clients throw in their cards before the end of the 12 week regime. Whoa! I replied, half your people complete the course! They feel better, they need few pain-killers, their immune system is fighting back, they're less snappy with The Help, the grand-childer see a profile in courage. That's effin' bri'nt, you should be proud.

From the way it actually functions the HSE could be better called the Disease Service Executive because the whole lumbering tottering edifice is based in treating disease with ever more expensive drugs and devices. Only a tiny token fraction of the budget is devoted to prevention or prophylaxis rather than cure. Because exercise and physiotherapy is coal-face stuff and sort of boring it becomes invisible at budget time: so many CAT-scans to buy, so many titanium hips in the store cupboard . . . quadruple heart by-pass? that sounds sexy, let's have more of them. It's a bit like the position with the road-traffic downsides of sleep deprivation: 2 hours lost REM sleep puts you as dangerous behind the wheel as someone technically drunk. But spending of drink aware campaigns is 100x that spent on sleep education.

Dé Domhnaigh gan smál

That would be The Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It was celebrated with great vigour by Irish people in days gone by who would get a day off work from The Creamery to go Christmas shopping in the nearest city. I suspect it has been over-shadowed by Black Friday <kaChing! go the cash-registers> which happens earlier and with more insistent advertising. For those ignorant about Catholic doctrine, the conception which is insullied is that of Mary Mother of God whose birth is celebrated on 8th September.

Last Sunday I acknowledged the death of Clive James without really saying how much I enjoyed his writing back in the 80s when we bought The Observer on most Sundays, not least to read Clive's hilarious film reviews "so funny it was dangerous to read while holding a hot drink". Obit from NYTimes - The Beeb -

• Juggling for larfs [via]
• Woe for The DRC - was Belgian Congo now a basket case
• Paying in forward with bread
• Barkley Marathons? Nicky Spinks gives it bottle. 
• Sourdough errors - many. Hints and theory - plenty.
• Barrow Bridge = New Ross Bypass.
• Mexico Lindo y Querido
• Bill Bryson on reading, writing and listening to words.
• Skint near a library? Fish for coins.

I don't think I have any readers in Britland, even my own family only tune in sporadically. But there is an election going down over the water [and the Nordies are going to their polarised polls too] on Thursday 12/12/19. The Conservative Party to slated to win the most seats, so the opposition (everyone else) is hoping that Gallup and Red C will have got it completely backwards. Jonathan Pie is having an articulate rant exposing 10 years of Tory Misrule.  Frankie Boyle is also hoping against the odds that it will all turn out alright. But intending Conservative voters won't hear the Pie/Boyle message so its really just pissing in the wind.

Cake Filter

Whoa! The Title is not a typo; so if you clicked here to discover the secret recipe for orange-zest butter icing with which I tend to sandwich the layers of Joyce's Chocolate Fudge Cake, then I'm sorry to disappoint. This really is about using cake as a filter.

It's not every year we make a Christmas cake, but they are eminently bankable: I have been known to eat last year's cake which had been quietly fermenting at room temperature for 15 months. In 2018, I needed Cookie Dau.II as a catalyst to overcome the inertia. This year I set to the task commendably early, and on my own, but proved that I really shouldn't be let out in a kitchen or a science lab on my own. At the beginning of The Blob, I wrote about my surprise when I failed to use PPE in the lab and consequently landed a drop of radioactive phosphorous in the corner of my eye. I'm the kind of bloke who will take apart a piece of simple equipment - like a bicycle or a chain-saw - to 'fix' it and still have a couple of nuts on the floor when I reassemble it.

When the girls were small and learning the kitchen trade, I stuck a banner on the wall above the stove asking

"Are we going to measure or are we going to cook?"

That was by way of encouraging experimentation, being flexible and adaptable and discovering a) allowable variation and b) reasonable substitutes. Lard will successfully replace butter; lemon juice for vinegar; golden syrup is really an industrial mechanical honey; gram flour for pancakes; and poitín <hic!> will serve the cook whenever a key ingredient is missing from a well started recipe. But there are limits! as wonderfully expressed in Dilbert's Cooking with Engineers cartoon: "I think marjoram is the french for butter"

The October 2019 cake more or less followed the family recipe from the 1980s. But I didn't have any ground almonds, let alone 80g of them, so I added more flaked almonds to make up the deficit. Fail! That almond powder must have considerable soakage, because there was a puddle of molten butter on the floor of the oven when the cake was done.What a waste. Learning from this, I did a few extra things for November's cake. [I can't be bothered with ground almonds which, despite being packed in inert nitrogen, rapidly lose the last whiff of almondity and become so much expensive sawdust. My pal Ysabel, from Madrid, stoutly maintains that you should only use almonds which you have ground yourself that day]. a) added a couple of extra spoons of flour to compensate for the absent absorbent. b) made a flour and water paste to seal the removable base of my 20cm cake-tin. c) put the cake-tin on a pizza tray to catch the drips if any. That was altogether more successful.

Because good things always come in threes, I was up at 0600hrs to make December's Christmas cake - yes, we are expecting a crowd for Chrimbo. I was partly seduced to going again because I'd seen and purchased a packet of dried cranberries on Aldi's bake shelves: they are like a smaller, tarter, glacé cherry. Halving the cherries is a major, sticky, chore in the list of Things To Do for Xmas cake. I had soaked 500g of sultanas overnight in a mix of poitín and lemon juice and they had plumped up nicely. I'd also found a packet of marzipan that was only 2 months beyond its best-before. I chopped the slab into sultana-sized chunks and threw them into the flour bowl. I was in the zone and motoring through the task when I realised that I was going to be including the last five eggs and the last half-pound of butter in the house. I paused . . . briefly . . . and then ploughed on. By the time The Beloved woke up, the shops would be open and I could replace the eggs and butter it they were indeed ear-marked for something else. Chop chop weigh weigh stir stir whisk whisk . . . and I smoothed out the dent  (for raising) in the top of the cake and popped it in the oven. It was more or less an hour, including two cups of tea, from the start of the process. As I sat down I noticed a pack and half of flaked almonds sitting on the table looking at me all miffed - I thought we were invited to the hot cake party they seemed to say. That was indeed the intention was all I could reply. More nuts left on the workshop floor after Bob the Blunder has been in charge!

And this cake like the first of the season, perhaps because of short measure on the almond front, also lost a lot of butter. But this time, I caught it and recycled it onto my breakfast toast, it was discoloured and sort of sweet but way better than chewing on dry toast.

Tetrodotoxin TTX

Eee happen, yeh learn something new every day.  Because it is a model organism and one of the first species to have all its DNA sequenced, I know a little about Takifugu rubripes or 虎河豚 the Japanese pufferfish. It's genome is pretty compact being about 10% of ours ~300 million DNA base pairs but having about the same number of protein coding genes. The other thing that Everybody Knows about fugu is that the Japanese eat it for the rush, in the same way that young chaps from Donegal drive cars far too fast and without seatbelts. I was told by a native last week that no-seatbelts is a thing up there. I'm told that fugu is just fishy when you discount the frisson of eating something that might kill you. Perhaps people of affect to believe that it is really special experience when fugu is eaten as sashimi are the same sort of poseurs who blow hard about vintages and terroir with the poor wine waiter in Irish restaurants. The mystique /pretention drives up the price to about $40USD/kg wholesale.

The toxic principle is fugu is called Tetrodotoxin TTX and it accumulates only in some of the internal organs - liver, ovaries, eyes, skin - of the fish. You'll be fine if you leave them on the side of the plate; except that TTX is really toxic in minutely small quantities - 10,000x more killing power than cyanide. If somebody has lain the fillet on the skin, for example, that foolish action might have transferred enough active poison to kill a customer. And how exactly does it kill you? TTX [structure R] is a reasonably simple molecule; in contrast to, say, Botox, which is a biggish protein. TTX prevents the operation on sodium channels which are essential for effective muscular activity. If you eat enough it will prevent the muscles of your diaphragm and ribs from sucking air into your lungs. The only remedy is to get attached to a ventilator for several hours until the toxin dissipates or gets broken down. Because the brain remains unaffected, you will be quite conscious as your lungs shut down and paramedics try to keep you going with CPR in the ambulance to hospital.

You have to wonder what the evolutionary advantage might be for Takifugu to produce and sequester this toxin. The standard answer depends on potential predators learning not to eat that sort of fish. Fugu also deters attack by blowing itself up to look less of a tasty appetiser and more like a choking hazard. Another possible advantage surfaced recently in a paper saying that TTX apparently helps reduce stress in juvenile Takifugu. WTF? How do you measure stress levels in a fish?? Like they measure it in mice and people: the boffins measure serum cortisol levels. In the recent paper they also looked for evidence for the amount of fin-biting that was going down in talks which get TTX in the diet and control tanks which don't. Seems that, instead of chewing their finger-nails like Christians, stressed fugu chew at their neighbour's fins.

Another obvious question is to ask why Fugu don't die from the incapacitation of their sodium channels? Well it turns out that a long time ago an ancestor of all the toxin containing species of the Tetraodontidae family was born with a single mutation in the gene for producing sodium channels. That mutation changes the structure of the channel enough so that the toxin can't do damage but not so much that the channel can't work. Damned clever that evolution, amazin' what can be done with a bit of change to the genes.

It never occurred to me to ask how TTX gets into the ovary and skin of Takifugu or what enzymes were necessary to fabricate the weird-shaped toxic molecule. With 20/20 hindsight, it's not in the least bit surprising that Takifugu does none of the heavy chemical lifting. That is rather done by Bacillus horikoshii one of several commensal bacteria which have the biochemical capability. Those bacteria are are really random selection of wholly unrelated microbes - Gram-positives, Gram-negatives Alcaligenes, Bacillus, Caulobacter, Enterococcus, Flavobacterium, and an alphabet soup of others. This is not the sort of complex system that you expect to evolve several times independently; so my current thought is that the gene-complex for making TTX must have been acquired by horizontal transfer. This is all super-intriguing: enough to fuel at least two possible final year research projects next year at The Institute.

Surprised by Joy

We're half-way (or more) through Library Ireland Week but I didn't realise it until a got an Info Bulletin from Wexford CoCo's PPN Public Participation Network. It doesn't say much for intra-family comms that I have a daughter in the Library Trade and I had to hear from strangers that there was a competition, with prizes, associated with the Week. They are asking for essays, tweets and whatever people to on Friendface on the subject of How Libraries Inspire. The best complection I can put on it is that Dau.I is angling for the prize herself and is seeking to nobble any competition from her father. The great thing about having a Blobarchive of 1.8 million words summarising my life and times is that I have an anecdote for peretty every occasion alreadt written and just needing parcelling up. For the Inspired by Libaries gig, I dug out an old Blob about scanning through books shelved in random order in a hunt for weekend reading. Bob of the Generous Hand is selflessly giving You a chance to win with your own sentimental story about turning a corner in your life because of an encounter with your local librarian.

I could, rather, have written about my recent discovery of Talking Books [100 Objects; Why We Sleep; Bill Bryson's Journeys in English], which have recently given me more direct control of what I get to hear in my 45±5 min daily commute from Home to The Institute. That might sound contrary to my hymn to the unexpected in the previous paragraph. But the content on Newstalk FM and RTE can get really rather predicable and, even if not, it's nice to have another option if both channels are interviewing the Minister of Corruption about just how uncorruptible his government colleagues are.  Bill Bryson's book is a) 20 years old b) commendably short at 6 half-hour episodes but I raced through it in a couple of day's driving. It came to an end, somewhat abruptly, halfway between Thomastown and Kilkenny as I buzzed up the M9 from Tramore on Wednesday morning. For unaccountable reasons, when the CD popped out, the wireless kicked in with Raidió na Gaeltachta RnaG, in particular a morning music show called Nead Na Fuiseoige [Lark's Nest] which had just started playing Ceap Do Shuaimhneas [Make your Peace].

Ceap Do Shuaimhneas has a sort of reggae beat and bouncy tune which put me in an even better mood than I usually develop as I approach the working day at The Institute. Here it is on youtube; YMMV, but it was so good that I spent half-an-hour yesterday evening trying to track down a playlist Ceol ón gclár for the morning's programme; it must change each day, so you want to do your follow-ups sharpish. My Irish is utter crap, so I couldn't pick out two consecutive words to google up the source. Turns out the singers are Imlé who in turn are Fergal Moloney, punk poet Marcus MacConghail and rapper MC Muipéad with Bassist & Producer Cian MacCárthaigh. It's wonderful that there are authentic voices writing, singing and rapping in Irish and not being held back by or held in thrall to traditional diddley-idey fiddles, harps and bodhrans. Go Imlé!

Stuff it

If you haven't read Cold Comfort Farm yet, you really need to get it out of the library before Chrimbo. Although published in 1932, as a parody of loam-and-lovechild rural romances, it is peculiarly up to date, not least because some elements and episodes [private planes etc.] in the story are clearly science fiction for the time. Cousin Amos is a worthy alternative to Ian Paisley Sr, or any tub-thumping evangelical in the US. Even if you read the story with care and attention you'll never fully understand the "something narrrsty in the woodshed" which so traumatised Ada Doom when she were a girl-child. For me, the most empathic character is the 90 y.o. slightly simple family retainer Adam Lambsbreath; and that really for iconic habit.

Adam is required to cletter the dishes after they have been used in gargantuan meals served to fuel the family and the hired men. Flora the heroine is a distant relative and city sophisticate who comes to stay in Cold Comfort Farm and she first encounters Adam when she rises, late, after everyone else has had breakfast and is back at work in the muck and sleet. "He was carrying a bunch of thorn twigs that he had just picked from one of the trees in the yard . . . 'Ay, them'll last me till Michaelmas to cletter the dishes wi', there's nothing like a thorn twig for cletterin' dishes. Ay, a rope's as good as a halter to a willing horse' ". Flora resolves to buy Adam a little mop to wash the dishes more effectively and efficiently. But when she gets round to the purchase and presenting of the little white-wood mop, Adam wilfully mistakes it's purpose. "His gnarled fingers folded round the handle 'Ay . . . 'tes mine. No house, nor kine, 'tes mine . . . My little mop. 'Tes too pretty to cletter those great old dirty dishes wi' I mun do that with the thorn twigs, they'll serve. I'll keep my liddle mop in the shed. Ay, 'tes prettier nor apple-blooth, my liddle mop' ".

I reflect on this image often: whenever I am expected to land-fill something that clearly is robust enough for re-use, never mind recycle. Take Cully & Sully soup tubs, f'instance [R]. There is no way I'd spend €2.50 of my own money on 400g of soup. in 15 minutes from a standing start, I can thrash up a great old dirty pot of soup from whatever I can find in, and behind, the fridge. It will almost always include onions and chopped spuds; cabbage if I can get it; a handful of lentils for thickening; some sort of a vehicle for fat: salami, bacon; chicken stock if the family have visited the previous weekend. That can be A Lot of soup but quantity don't worry me none. I'm quite happy to trencher through the stock-pot twice a day until the last gobbets can be lashed into a pasty for works-lunch on the Friday.

Other members of the family believe that soup is a chore and/or they like a bit of variety through the week and/or desire something that uses only a little of some key ingredient - a few clams for chowder; a tbs of chopped kidney for hunter's hot-pot; a handful of diced chicken meat for chicken-noodle soup. So someone nips up to Supervalu and, spoiled for choice, picks something tasty and nutritious from the extensive Cully&Sully range. The carton is robust poly-propylene PP which, because of its thermostability, is preferred for micro-wavable food. The tapered sides mean that they stack efficiently, which is good for C&S's warehousing, but also for storing in our kitchen cupboard. The family are chronic over-caterers - always ready for the unexpected guest - and these soup-pots are ideal for left-overs. Accordingly, often when I visit Pat the Salt, I come away with next day's dinner in another Cully&Sully soup container. I'm not a groupie or a purist, so some of these pots were filled by Tesco or Supervalu but they all stack together regardless. If I don't feel fat on my diet of home-made soup, at least I feel virtuous about the packaging. Why would you buy, even at knock-down ALDI-special prices, snap-lid, air-tight tupperware food-storage containers?

It is a running theme in my nocturnal tik-tiks to imagine Gdau.II's daughter wandering about a car-less, iPad-free, GPS-less planet and discovering a huge artificial hill close to the River Barrow. Catching a glint of light on the hillside where there has been a small land-slip, she pulls out a jam-jar half-filled with earthworms. Taking it down to the river, she cleans it out to reveal a thing of beauty and utility: crystal-clear, water-tight, reasonably robust - clearly useful for preserving berries through the winter; much better than the rabbit-skin the other people use. Being smart, determined and hard-working like her mother, the young woman starts mining the old landfill site for discarded treasure. It becomes the wonder of the age! All this wonderful, indestructable, stuff: glass, steel, aluminium, copper, ceramics with wonderful pictures, magazines and newspapers perfectly preserved in the anaerobic environment. The latter a catalogue of the things our generation was induced to buy, use once and throw in the bin.

Wot are we like?

is saoránach mé

Jakers, it's been a long time a-coming, but I/we have now returned home . . . whence my father departed in 1931 at the age of 13¾. That was when he enrolled in the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth and effectively joined the navy. In 1931, a decade after the end of the War of Independence, he was living in Dunmore East, Waterford, Irish Free State - Saorstát Éireann - nominally still a constitutional monarchy. Ireland didn't dump the last vestiges of Tory Misrule until 18 April 1949 when the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force. Purist should note that the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 was not finally repealed until 1962. My position is that, for many at that time, issues of identity and loyalty were more fluid and less  Black-and-White  than now.

Whatever! That young chap needed to find some sort of career and the choice of jobs, for one of his class and religious background, was limited. It was, for example, inconceivable that he'd become an aircraft mechanic; butcher; costermonger; dentist; . . . yogi; zoologist. After WWII, he fell for a girl from Dover and all their children were born in that slightly ramshackle ferry-port. As a serving Royal Naval officer, he could hardly hold anything other than a British passport and all his children followed suit. When I started in Trinity College Dublin in 1973, a British passport / domicile worked rather well because I got a grant from the UK which was chunks better than what, say, The Beloved was able to claw out of Kilkenny CoCo. For the next 20 years we bounced about - Dublin, Rotterdam, Boston, Newcastle upon Tyne, Dublin - without really developing roots but needing some sort of passport to service these movements. In the mid 1990s we bought the farm and were gifted two small girls and round about the turn of the millennium it became obvious that I was likely to end my days in the Ould Sod.

Shortly thereafter, I set out to vindicate rights to citizenship through my paternal grandfather who grew up in The Big House in King's County at the end of the 19thC and, after an adventurous and much travelled life, became Harbormaster of Dunmore East at the foundation of The Free State. But no amount of searching could turn up a birth certificate for him and baptismal certs were not valid to establish birth on the island. One of his older brothers was registered but not the other: it was as if the family couldn't be bothered to register their offspring with the state. There didn't seem to be any urgency about colour of passport in 1999, so I sank back exhausted from the abortive search and mollocked along as a Brit. I felt about that nationality, as was said of the Duke of Wellington by Daniel O'Connell “The poor old duke what shall I say of him? To be sure he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse.” This lack of a sense of belonging, used to cause a far-too long, much qualified, <TMI> answer to the innocent / inquisitive question "where do you come from?" . . . "Well, I was borrrn in shadow of the white cliffs of Dover but . . ." Now I can just say "King's County, and you?"

But I did, and do, have a very strong sense of being [EEC/EU] European. I gave a lot to Europe as the director of the Irish node of a European quango; through teaching and administration, I helped benighted regions of the continent [Turku, Helsinki, Uppsala, Cambridge, Nijmegen, Oslo] to equilibrate upwards - a key concept in Eurospeak. I also benefitted tremendously from the sweep of the European Vision, meeting interesting and hospitable folks on many trips to Brussels, Bruges and Bari and a teaching gig in South Africa and another in Istanbul. Those EU days are behind me but the ideas underpinning the European Dream are still as valid as ever.  French students in The Institute? Yes! courtesy of the Erasmus Scheme.

Along with thousands of others I was badly shook by the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the political opportunism and posturing that came in its wake. I was galvanized to pursue a much less obvious route to the Foreign Birth Registry FBR. I'd always known that my Scottish Grannie was born in Limerick. It was pretty much the same accident of birth that had me being born in Dover two generations later. Her Father, John Vass, was a shipping agent from Ayrshire on the West coast of Scotland and was posted to mind the office in Limerick for a couple of years in the 1890s. His two daughters Lilian Valentine (Grannie - guess the date of  her birthday; hint Feb) and Greta were born there. Later he shipped out to Dover to manage the company's affairs there. And that's where Lily and Greta grew up: going up town to view Blériot's plane after he made the first flight across the English Channel. From step one, obtaining a certified copy of Lilian's birth-certificate, I started assembling the identity audit trail of birth, marriage and death certs that the FBR requires to ascertain who can play soccer for Ireland and/or apply for an Irish passport. With hindsight, I could have been more efficient, but it took several months and €€ & ££ in 2018 to  compile the dossier; then start the process on-line; then pay over another substantial pile of money (40% more than for getting married but much less than the fee for becoming New Irish as opposed to Born-again Irish) and then sit and wait for the FBR fact-checkers to check their facts.

At the time of submission, the FBR website was talking about a 6 month lag time but it actually took exactly 365 days for the Certificate of Registration [slip shown at top] to come into my hands; including 6 weeks just to mail the parcel of documents back to me after the Cert was printed on 14th October.

Táim fós san Eoraip.