AFOL LEGO BURP

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

pic.credit Caroline South

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

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

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

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

Hallowe'enish 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Kokoro 心

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kati

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley breezes past

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

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

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

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

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

French Shore

tric-trac

• The reason St.Pierre-et-Miquelon is a collectivité d'outre-mer français
• Saving Lithuanian or lietuvių kalba as they call it
• Grady on landfill
• Hurr.Helene: Hickory Nut Gorge and ChimneyRock ⬤, NC geomorpology meets weather explainer: stream-capture; orographic lift etc. etc.
  
• Paramotor footage from Mark Huneycutt [whom see also last Sunday] 
• Guardian gives explainer on Ireland's Transition Year ( the only time when any education happens in Ir secondary schools).
• Royal Society opens its peer-review archives 1949-1954
• On the homogenization of McDs, a forgotten graphic artist, paying attention and a neat ending. via MeFi
• Speaking of MeFi, two days ago, I posted there about a 16thC card trick. I am a net sponger on MeFi; but still contribute more than most.
  

Rodents for larfs

I checked into the front page of RTE.ie a week ago and was given a surprisingly rich and varied array of Top Stories: scandal in a homeless charity; €500K anonymously gifted to schools in Cork; and the outfall fall-out of a report from the FSAI, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. 

Of all the existential threats to global equanimity, hygiene failures in burger joints don't make my A-list. That's partly because the regulatory environment seems to work and a monthly report that fingers 16 perps across 26 counties (Glens Takeaway; Hearty Sunshine; Sizzlers; Grace’s Garden; Koffee and Kale; Café Sol; Osteria 99; Antonio's; Red Robin; Coolmine Shawarma; Polonez; Lord Lucan; Spar) is small enough that it's unlikely to catch me talking to the porcelain telephone. It's not my Polonez in New Ross [excellent fresh tomatoes; reliable fresh yeast], it's one in Walkinstown D12, for example. 

Then again, it might be that FSAI is so underfunded and the inspectors so overworked that they can't cover their patch effectively. But FSAI don't reveal their baseline - how many premises were inspected in September 2024 - so it is impossible to gauge whether 16 is a big number.

In 1998 we had a big knees-up to celebrate 25 years together and invited new neighbours and old friends from three continents. We decided to put together a short-list of nearby accommodation from fancy to hostel and send our guests a list. One of the neighbours did occasional B&B and The Beloved went to see what the available rooms looked like. While discussing costs on the upstairs landing, a mouse appeared behind the host's shoulder sauntering bold-as-you-like across the carpet between two of the recently viewed rooms. Similar unfortunate timing at FSAI: "a live rodent running across the floor of a food storage room" just when the inspector calls. Even though a single running case is an anecdote not data; it nevertheless gets you closed down - quite properly i.m.o.  Graphic images to add to the fun?: a "gnawed chocolate bar" in the food storage room and clear evidence of a rodent attack on a bag of rice. 

But many of the adverse events caught by FSAI are a tedious run of cafés, shops and take-outs being cavalier about basic levels of food safety hygiene: wash hand basins, soap, hot water; basic obvious cleaning; woeful ignorance about food safety culture. These are much more likely to cause the runs in clients than Speedy Gonzales whizzing through the pantry. Then again, if food premises can't get the in-plain-sight issues sorted, it's a strong indicator of failings at the invisible microbe level.

It's more than 10 years since I was channeling FSAI There's a Fly in my Soup and Now Wash Your Hands. It's time for another airing, so.