On hearing the first

 

. . . cuckoo of Spring is a [rather dreary] tone-poem composed by Frederick Delius in 1912. Which I won't link for you, because dreary. I did, however, do that thing this morning at 0525hrs: hear the first cuckoo. On Thursday I saw the first pair of swallows swoop through the yard scarfing flies. I tell ya, it put a spring in my step as I strode back in to record the data on the kitchen calendar. It is reassuring when the cycle of life continues to turn - the End of Days isn't here yet.

I was up and out with the first cuckoo because I was letting the sheep out from the haggard where I've been sequestering them at night these last tuthree days. The ewes are <surprise!> yeaning on us in a most desultory and ragged-arsed manner. The Beloved bought three ewes for Paddy the Shear at the end of last year to make up numbers for the annual DAFF sheep survey. Paddy said that they had been with the ram and so there were probably bonus lambs within . . . due on Patrick's Day. How could he be so confident about the date? Because he's the farmer! Real farmers limit access for sex to a two week estrus cycle, so a) every ewe gets a chance b) any lambs will appear in a finite window 5 months later. Lambing is a sleepless business and, while any parent knows that you can tolerate broken nights for a fortnight, years of them will adversely affect everyone's mental health. The other ewes were not preg because, with commitments to elder-care we've been unable to guarantee being at home for 14 consecutive nights 5 months from whenever.

It's not worth calling in the scanner for three 'confirmed' hits, so we didn't. But rather girded loins for mid-March delivery. But all these planned certainties were incorrect. I noticed that one of our older sheep was sporting a full elder maybe eight weeks ago and filed that information [what do I know?] to the very back of my mind. But a tuthree days later, a neighbour came by and confirmed that a) none of Paddy's ewes were due any time soon; but b) three of ours could drop lambs any moment. He squeezed a generous gob of colostrum into the air to prove the assertion. Several of the others were maybes. A couple of weeks later he returned to confirm that 13/16 of the ewes would be delivering something this Spring. He also took the two most preg ewes off to his birthing barn to give them their best chance of a safe delivery. Those ladies are back with the flock with two strapping big ram-lambs at foot.

2021 is the year our neighbour-above decided to let some of his ewes lamb in the 12 acre field immediately North of our house. How did we know? because twice a night in the full dark, he'd drive up the lane with his jeep and >!RATTLE-RATTLE!< trailer and career about the field checking the ewes in his headlights. The trailer, we surmised, was essential in case he had to re-patriate any sheep to his home place the other side of the mountain. For me, I've decided it's easier to check the ewes in the dark if they are in a fenced enclosure abutting the house rather than ranging over 5 hectares of fields, ditches and bushes with a flashlight. After several nights of this, there is little pick for them in the haggard - they refuse daffodil greens but have finished the wild garlic - so it's a courtesy to let them out as early as possible for breakfast.

Spring is the most dangerous time of the year.: the bull rushes [Scirpoides holoschoenus] out; the cow slips [Primula veris] about and all the buds are shooting. We have a wonderful bright crop of cowslips in the top [R] corner of our yard.

Borderlands

When I was a kid of double digits but no pubes, I was fascinated by maps . . . and by islands. We must have been taught something about Ordnance Survey mapping symbols and conventions because I used to draw intricate maps of Fantastic Islands: thinking long and hard about whether Littleton-by-the-Sea would be better off with a church-with-tower ■+ or church-with-steeple ●+. Didn't matter in the medium term because me and my pal Gibbo would likely bomb the place to buggery with splats from our fountain pens.

As with pretty much everything, edge cases are the most interesting. The exclaves, enclaves and border-jinks give an insight into where were minds of surveyors and politicians when deciding where their patrimony ended. I have reflected on the narrow point of access to the sea which was conceded to Bosnia through Croatia between Split and Dubrovnik. Contrariwise, victory by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) deprived Bolivia of the saltpeter flats which it had previously controlled and left the country land-locked. This has proved an economic mill-stone for Bolivia's export of lithium from its inland brine lakes.

In the Philips Modern School Atlas 96th! edition 2009, there is far more information on Northern Ireland than on North Korea and the triple point where China, Russia and N.Korea meet [see map at top of post] is on such a large scale that it looks like China might have squeezed ocean access similar to Bosnia-Herzogovina. It niggled me for a few days until I wheeled out the internet to see what's really going on. The answer is Tumen River which forms about 500km of the border between PRC and North Korea. You may have heard of the longer Yalu River which a) makes up the other 800km of border b) featured in the Korean War in October 1950 when the Chinese army poured across the river to confront the almost victorious UN forces.

Meanwhile back on the Tumen, a zoom in with Googlemaps shows [L] that the salient of Chinese territory comes to a pointy end among the sandbanks of the river and the last 17km of the river serve as the border between Korea and Russia. The big S bend in the stream just East of Undok indicates how alluvial and meandering the course of the river is as it loops and dawdles to the sea. If you zoom in you can see similar jinks in the border between China and Russia on a smaller scale and downstream. This tells us [check Kentucky Bend] that the river used to follow a different path and has straightened itself out in some more recent flood event. The Chinese have felt obliged to drive a new highway on top of the sandbanks to reach the last exclave of its territory. This has been of interest, not only to me but to BusinessInsider who have had fun looking at the data from the last Google Streetview car in Asia. I'm so glad I sorted that out for myself.

Vaxie's Dargle

Says my aul' wan to your aul' wan

Will ye go to the Waxie's Dargle?

Says your aul' wan to my aul' wan,

I haven't got a farthing. [Pogues]

I R retire; I get the pension; I lack for nothing; Cabbage n Spuds is cheap. Accordingly, I have a farthing or two or three. Indeed, I have the €5.00 which it cost me in petrol to jaunt to the next county for to get vaccinated. As I live a very sheltered life up a lane in the middle of Ballyganáit, the spree passed for a Dargle edutainment, if not exactly excitement: the kind of thing we used to spend €5 for in the cinema. Yes, it is a long time since I was at the movies.

Obedient to the laws, I arrived at the Cillin Covid-19 Centre carpark at 1505 for a 1510 appointment. 

I was asked four (4) times by four (4) separate stewards for the time of my appointment. There was not quite enough room in the short external marquee corridor for everyone with the same appointment time. When I got to the head of that line, I was sent down the hallway to reception desk. 

(5) I confirmed my name to a scribe behind the perspex, and had it highlighted off a printed list: I was expected! He sent me onto a shorter line where

(6) I was handed an information brochure and directed to one of four reception guichets where 

(7) I was again name-checked and asked a catechism of questions all expecting the answer no: had I been recently vaccinated; had I recently copped a 'Rona; had I ever experienced anaphylaxis from any vaccination; had I been through a stroke; are you or have you ever been a member of the anti-vaxx party [kidding].

Then through to a long snaking line [so long and so reminiscent of the Before Times that I started to remove my belt, shoes and change-purse] where I spent 12 minutes in a block of 20 people indoors. That's perilously close to the >15 minutes and <2m which government messaging for the last 15 months means certain death.

8) Eventually I was fetched to one of ten cubicles by John the Doctor who asked me for my mobile# and dob . . . but only to confirm my name. He then asked a subset of the same medical history questions as I'd answered for my earlier catechism. Maybe they are checking for short-term memory loss. After a bit of phatic blather, I exposed my left shoulder [note to 14-week future-self: wear the pink Yes t-shirt rather than your patriarchal 3-piece suit. The prick when it finally came [me looking la la la can't hear you in the opposite direction] was far less intrusive than I've had from my dentist or phlebotomist.

Afterwards I was invited to take a widely spaced chair in the other half of the hangar and told to stay there 15 minutes [honour system] and leave when that was up.

The whole show took 50 minutes - bring a book? You're not allowed to take photos [I guess for GDPR rather than to protect the security] so I had to do the selfie [R] when I got home.

Shill is for shillings

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was born in 1490 in Jerez de la Frontera, where the sherry comes from. Jerez is now a suburb of Greater Cadiz and about halfway between Gibraltar and Portugal so de la Frontera may read peculiar to modern travellers, not least because there are dozens of towns and villages with the of the frontier suffix.  Cabeza de Vaca [= cow's head, great name] lived in exciting times. Before he went to school

• the Reconquista was completed with the capitulation of the Emirate of Grenada [Jan 1492]
• the Sephardim were expelled from Spain [Jul 1492]
• Cristóbal Colón sailed the ocean blue: leaving Palos de la Frontera [Aug 1492]

Young Álvar was connected and secured a paid position on a 1526 expedition to explore "La Florida" and points West on the North American mainland. It was pretty much a disaster: storms, disease and confrontation took toll on the band, but Cabeza de Vaca and his diminishing party inched along the coast to Galveston Island where they lost the last of their makeshift vessels. The restless conquistador set off into the interior with three companions; trekked through unexplored regions of Northern Mexico as far as the Pacific and rocked up the Mexico City in 1537. From the 600 who left Spain, only 4 returned which is a 99% attrition rate like that of the Georgia Flu. Cabeza de Vaca wrote it all up in a best-selling Relación. I mention the fictional pandemic because many of the tribes and people described in the Relación had disappeared completely when organised Spain formally conquisadored the region . . . quite possibly decimated by novel viruses caught from the Europeans.

Fast forward four hundred to 1935. In that year the US Mint in Philadelphia struck 10,000 commemorative half-dollars [obverse L]  to recognise the depredations of Cabeza de Vaca. Commemorative coins were effectively a licence to print money on behalf of speculators. This one was designed and distributed by a numismatist from El Paso TX called L.W. Hoffecker. The coins were struck at government expense and sold to appropriate parties at face value for distribution. Hoffecker was determined to get his snout in this pork-barrel, first with a 75th anniversary issue for The Gadsden Purchase in 1929 [passed Congress, vetoed by President Hoover]. He made a trip to Washington in 1935 to shill on behalf of the El Paso Museum Coin Committee for a commemoration of The Old Spanish Trail - a cowboy romantic cattle drovers road of yesteryear. According to his letters, five minutes with President Franklin Roosevelt was key to the success of the venture.

The coins were duly struck, Hoffecker paid $5,000 and took delivery of a sturdy chest full of coins. Half dollars weigh 11.34g so the chest tared in at 1 cwt = 55kg more or less. Hoffecker then proceeded to sell these coins "on behalf of the Museum" at rather more than face value to his numismatic friends; who sold them on to lesser punters everyone taking a small cut. The El Paso Museum were given a pair for their collection. Utterly corrupt wheeling and dealing of this nature was much admired by his fellow coin-dealers and he became President of the ANA American Numismatic Association. The President of the United States of America had been used by private enterprise to further its own interests. What does The Blob know about FDR? 

• The Four Freedoms
• The New Deal
• Liberty Ships
• Blanking Jesse Owens

. . . and the Polio. And a long list of lovers as well as his wife Eleanor: Missy LeHand, Daisy Suckley, Lucy Mercer, at least. Although the cuckold's horns are traditionally given to a man whose wife has been bonked by another . . . the Cabeza de Vaca connexion is too good an opportunity to use them here to recognise another form of shafting.

Team AZ

As a thrifty sort of chap, I find it hard to resist freebies. It was with some alacrity, therefore, that I immediately signed up for an opportunity to be covaxxed. Because she's a minus one vintage, The Beloved [TB] registered the following day: dob, mobile#, PPS, Eircode.  It is absolutely typical for Darby & Joans born in the 50s to be about the same age with Joan being a year or two younger. That's because [I know this from having a twin sister] for all the years that matter, boys have an emotional and social maturity a tuthree years behind the girls in the same class at school.

One reason for requiring an Eircode is to strip off the first three digits to match vaxxee to the nearest vaxxination centre. Although that could be more accurately achieved by using the GP's practice address - another data-asset required for vax-reg. I am called [Today, at tea-time!] to the Eircode-R95 Cillin Hill Vaccination Centre, a moribund conference centre on the outskirts of Kilkenny in the next county. It is a round trip of 80km. As I explained before, I am being privileged for the jab . . . because Old. We cannot be the only cases where two almost same-old people are living at the same Eircode and could be given adjacent cubicles in the vaxx-centre and save the planet from two 80km round-trips of carbon footprint. Another example Covid-19 monomania - harrrumph!

There has been a lot of loose talk G5 telephony, vaccination, BillGatesChips and electomagnetic radiation. How could we forget "that friend of Richard Branson" who developed a brain-tumour under the ear against which he held his brick-sized 1980s mobile phone. Well let me tell you, I'm not going to let them chip me in the head while they distract me with their vaccination theatre. The tin-foil hat is better than prayer against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  If The Blob goes real quiet about four days from now, you'll know that I've been clotted. If this channel starts to mutter with knowledge and authority about software fixes for trojan vulnerabilities, you'll know I've been GatesChipped.

Notes added in press: last night after office hours, TB got her call to upper left arms . . . exactly 24 hours after mine. Really [the management of] Covid-19 is no respecter of individual convenience.

Jump around jump around

I'm an Old. This means that, for a lot of internetty things, I was there at the beginning. I sent my first transatlantic email in 1983 when I came back to Europe after 4 years in Boston. Life was hard: the UK's Joint Academic Network JANET started to put order and consistency on domains and, hence, email addresses the following year. My email was bob.sci@uk.ac.ncl.gen; my pals back in the USA had @bio.bu.edu addresses because they were following the DNS [domain name system] big-endian convention. Eventually the Brits had to curb their empire exceptionalist little-endian tendencies and turn their address convention 180°. Before that, tireless programmers had to write software to read addresses and flip them as needed to that they get to the right destination. The joke / urban legend was that lots of mail destined for computer science [.cs] departments in IK universities was being delivered to Czechoslovakia [also .cs].

In 1995 I was set up one of the earliest WWW servers in Ireland and created web-pages for it in raw HTML: all the tags added by hand. HTML was so clever and efficient, text got wrapped at the end of each physical line; unless you specified a </p> paragraph or </br> a line break. If the text contained the information, then the signal-to-noise ratio was excellent. A document would be only a few % bigger because of the scattering of formatting tags. It would therefore be readable instanter even if the data had to be transmitted over a dial-up copper wire up the Congo. The information is the same whether it's in Helvetica or Georgia. Not good enough any more! Web-design is about the user-experience and seduction to buy; even if the product is only Megacorp's reputation. 

A dozen years ago I wrote a webpage for work which consisted entirely of links to other webpages; initially so that I could efficiently run courses in bioinformatics. Then I was sacked the money ran out and I no longer had sys$admin privileges; and I stopped running courses as well. But the concept was sound and I used one of [sites] the many useful services provided by Google to write a similar page for me that I could use as my HomePage both at home and work and in random internet cafés in airports and resorts. It consists of four HTML tables of links which act as a jump-station for the few dozen URLs I use reg'lar. Bookmarks, if you will, but not locked to particular computers - an early example of synchronized cloud-computing indeed:

• mail, blackboard, work directory
• "Hunter-Seeker": Wikipedia, Pubmed, Uniprot, GoldenPath, Ensembl, BBC, RTE
• Blogosphere: The Blob, MeFi, 3Quarks, Kottke, Tywkiwdbi
• Travel: AerLingus, Ryanair, WexBus, IrishRail, StenaLines, IrishFerries, JJK, BusEireann

I created a memorable shortcut with url.ie and it served me well for a decade. Especially in The Before Times when I was more likely to be on a strange computer. The whole thing was about 500 characters and not more than 1kB of bandwidth. Yes One kilobyte! about 1/1000th the size of that crap photo of your boots which you uploaded to the cloud last weekend. 

But retro is an offense to Tech Bros and since 2017, I think, I've been encouraged to port my page to New Sites . . . just click here. Well, I've tried that a few times over that time and the result is a mangled mess. Now we are being threatened with a Hard Deadline of 1st September to archive any useful information because that's when the plug is going to be pulled.  It turns out the New Sites doesn't support <table>s: no wonder it choke on my page. I could start over, but bugger Google . . . and their New Sites is full of blousy templates, heavy on the graphics, over specifying the layout. The very antithesis of the spare, economical HTML of 1990 Tim Berners-Lee [R].

So I had a very frustrating afternoon and evening last week selling my soul to Wordpress, which does support <table>s. Frustrating because, although they offer free web-hosting, the set-up process is insidiously trying to make punters pay - a little, at first - for the service. Which is fair enough, I guess. But with my roaming days over, the need for a personal jump-station is worth rather less than $3.95/mo. Insidious because the free option is at the bottom of the page in tiny print using the Shame font. 

It is, of course not the only Internet operator which is trying to monetize the clicks, and this exercise has forced me to confront the fact that there are dozens of sites which I used to restlessly surf for Blog-copy in 2014 which I now never visit because of paywalls and other limits. Even if I'm allowed 3 free visits a month, I'm not going there because I instinctively hold those visits in reserve for something that matters . . . and that something never comes. I have optimistically retained all the travel-links on the new, trim,  2021 Jump-station:

Okay then, because yo bin good: Jump around jump around

Red Hat Society Day

The Red Hat Society was founded on 25th April 1998 for women of a certain age; "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple, with a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me."

• Time-lapse very tidy ship-breaking
• Richard Wiseman being Persuasive 60secs
• Small homeless homes
• $7,000; 100 sq ft; Palletshelter
• Bronze Age kist in Dingle
• Man, hammer, wedges: splitting stone calmly
• Man, paper, ink: making Ukiyo-e prints precisely.
• Two men, fairies, stories: be the fuck Ned; be da holy John [subtitles!]
• No hurry on Vatersay
• Grady the Engineer on the Evergiven
• Rite of Teletubbies
• Carlos Raza and How to be Hopeless
• Tolkein, The Wanderer
• Brian Mackenwells on Irish names
• Curling, how to