Cherish your bowels

One of the gob-blowing experiences of my early life was to consume porridge made with pinhead oatmeal. I was 16 and had been taken on a self-catering holiday for a week in Tobermory, Mull with the family of my oldest pal, because my mother was sick in hospital. The first trip to the shops came back with a bag of pinhead oatmeal, aliquots of which were soaked over-night and boiled up for breakfast each day. Compared to 'normal' porridge it was as oude Gouda to Kraft slices.

[[That was the first time m'mother had been in hospital in her life. She had a bowel obstruction that required surgery to remove a length of her transverse colon and install a temporary colostomy. It didn't require the surgeon to nick her spleen down there in the bloody dark. In recovery, she was allowed home for a weekend, and while pottering about after several weeks in bed, the exercise required some extra red blood cells. Her spleen obligingly puckered up to deliver them and burst asunder. Home was 15 miles from the hospital and she'd lost A Lot of blood by the time she returned to theatre for a total splenectomy. That's when she had her near death experience (tunnel, lights and all). If you've ever had a 'stitch' in your side while running for a bus then you've experienced a splenic pucker-up to release more rbc's as required by the exercise.

Almost exactly 20 years later. My folks were on another Mediterranean cruise. Between Naples and Malta she had a gripe in the guts and was stretchered off the ship in Valetta, operated on by a Polish surgeon and repatriated by plane 5 days later as soon as she could walk to a taxi. Meanwhile back at Caisleán Bob, then in Dublin, The Beloved decided that I should go to Malta immediately to succour my aged parents. In those before-Ryanair days, I had to go to a travel agent to book a charter flight and spend a week there.

And 30 years after that, my mother had a final (asserted to be independent of the other two) blockage at the age of 99. And that is what carried her off. ]]

That's a big long tripartite aside to emphasise the importance of intestinal health . . . and the virtues of pinhead oatmeal in achieving that goal. My correspondent M believes in porridge and bought a 1kg packet of pinhead oatmeal for the full authentico roughage experience. When she got home she twigged that she'd have to boil the oats for "30 minutes" in a 3x volume of water. The 30 min was aspirational, and the porridge wasn't cooked for at least an hour. By which time her teeny tiny bedsit was completely fogged up and even the bed felt wet. The cooking had cost more in gas than the oats. So that's how I acquired 980g of pinhead oats.

I have developed a protocol for beating Flahavan's finest into submission. 

1. soak the oats in 2x water for at least 8 hours
2. bring to the boil on the top of the wood-burning stove [fuel cost = zero]
3. allow it to seeth ["blut blut"] for 10 -20 minutes
4. take off the heat and leave overnight
5. add the final 1x of liquid [make that milk for me, ymmv]
6. bring to the boil stirring assiduously to prevent sticking and to break up the glutinous lumps
7. serve forth to eat with more milk [cream if you have it], {a drizzle of golden syrup | soft brown sugar | maple syrup if Canadien} and a spoon.

Most excellent! Start with a cup of oats and you'll have M-F worth of breakfasts bringing cheer to your microbiome.

The Irish Way of Death

All their life in England, my folks took The Times and The Daily Telegraph. A good part of the reason was to scan the hatches, matches and dispatches small ads to see who among their pals, or their offspring, were experiencing change in status. In 2001 my father fell down the stairs and shortly afterwards died in hospital. His nuclear family sat around the dining table with the undertaker to disburse A Lot of money from the estate to get the Ou'fella up the chimney. We agreed that about ~2% of the spend = €200+VAT should be allocated to The Irish Times, to alert his remaining Irish friends and relations of his death.

In 1997, we bought the farm and moved to the deepest rural midlands of Ireland with two small children. We established a toe-hold in the local community as BlowIns from Dublin - mostly harmless. But we didn't inhabit the pub, nor did we go to mass; so we missed a bunch of funerals which we would def'n'y have attended out of respect to the departed and their relict family. After a few years, our abutting neighbour recognised this deficit in our social connexion and started to tell us when someone in or near the valley had gone. So at least we had a local work-around. 

Then in 2006 rip.ie was launched by Jay and Dympna Coleman, sibs from Co Louth. Dympna lived abroad, and because she was out of the loop, <dang!> missed the funeral of a school-friend's father. They reckoned there had to be a better way for the diaspora to keep tabs on what/who was going down back home. It rapidly became the national GoTo for finding out 

• who had died; 
• times & places of wake, removal, mass, interment;
• where/when of tea and hang-sangwiches continued to be announced, as ever was, at the end of the mass
  
• what were the names of all their collateral relatives, descendants and in-laws;
• flowers/no-flowers; donations; 

Timely transmission of these logistical details is important in a culture that embraces an almost Islamic briskness in progressing the process: if the corpse isn't underground on the Third Day, something has gone awry. In England it's completely different: cold-storage is a Thing and it might be more than a week before the departed, like, departs. It was Ten awkward and fraught days hanging around for this and that in England, before my widowed mother could get shot of everyone and start to process her grief. There is no doubt in my mind that the Irish do it better.

In May this year rip.ie was acquired by The Irish Times, the [protestant] paper of record and a commercial venture. Fair do's to the Colemans to have an exit strategy and be able to cash out on their brilliant and useful service. Their company Gradam Communications,  reported an operating profit of €40,373 for 2023. This is on turn-over of  €1.7 million with four employees. rip.ie is free to use and seems, like FANG, to generate its income from Ads - mostly from funeral directors, florists and monumental masons - who are banking no 60 million page views a month making a return on investment RoI.

 A piece on the RTE Brainstorm channel, digs into the not-for-profit value of rip.ie. This commercial venture has been orders of magnitude quicker at recording deaths than the government bureaucracy. Its archives also offer a unique insight into the Irish Way of Death: through the logistical details as listed above; but also through the capture of condolence messages of which there are an enormous number. And it's an on-line bonanza for where are your people buried? ancestry hunters at home and abroad. Here's a nice LiveLine story [1m15s to 10m25s] about how a 1930s communion photo was returned to its family through rip.ie condolence over-sharing.

The other tom-tom of death is the Local Radio. Death notices are read out immediately after the news several times a day! The delivery is always peculiarly dead - drained of affect without being robotic. Funeral Directors will, on behalf of the family, pay the radio ~€150 for 3x readings of the notice. So the still-living really need to check in every day . . . or miss a funeral that they really should have been at. On foot of the Brainstorm report cited above, the story was covered on DriveTime - the tea-time RTE Radio One magazine programme. They put the question out there:
Q: "What is rip.ie to you and how often do you check it?".
A: "I check the site every day before breakfast. If I'm not listed, I get on with my day!" as one wag put it.

Sun son Nov Luv

Whaaa's happenin'?

• Mosse pottery [as R](Co KK) goes green. Who doesn't love spongeware?
  
• Clutterporn on MeFi: dozens of anecdata about parents who won't downsize their Stuff. 
• The bottle-return scheme [Prev] is finally getting some traction
• Bunch of Danes smelt magnetite sand to iron.
• Our Town cover Tennessee Kamanski
• "We are all better than our worst 15 minutes" Clive Stafford Smith defends people on DeathRow and Guantanamo
• Backstory on Larry Lonchar, his friend
  
• Bring back Waterford Airport
  

Domestique

I've written about Team Work in science: after my old boss was awarded a Mentor of the Year Gong. With 10 year hindsight that reads partly like a tale of master and proles; where the Gong-winner may or may not acknowledge that their success is founded on the work of others - not to mention O Fortuna [♩ ♬ ♫ ♪] dealing good cards. But it also gives tribs to those who share, and give and share again. As aside: read the comment which adds another side to an earlier Othering. 

My recent earbook has been Winners by Alastair Campbell which has a niche pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, post-9/11, post-Crash standpoint although Campbell tries hard to tease out eternal verities from the stories of famous politicians, entrepreneurs and sportistas. Campbell was famously ambitious as a journalist, then editor and then Blair's Director of Comms. For his younger self it was all about the winning: putting one over on Losers so he has empathy and understanding for people hewn from the same well 'ard hard stuff. As it happens, and rarely among Britse politicians, he is fluent in German and French and so understands Le Tour de France and its jargon [glossary]. A domestique is one of the riders who puts in the miles solely to ensure that the star of the team gets over the line firstest with the mostest. Don't presume to call such a one "domestique" to their face though: équipier or gregario is more respectful.

In 10 Downing Street in the Blair years there were a number of Effectives, who had risen to the top of their profession about halfway up the Team Blair hierarchy. Offered a promotion, these folks were astute and self-aware enough to refuse: "nope, I know my limits and my comfort zone and I'll leave the stress to you thanks". I know a number of cases of excellent scientists who took the only available path for promotion and finished up as Head of Dept, or even Head of School and perforce left a large part of their scientific chops behind as they took up cudgels in Admin. Science is top-heavy on spectral types: hyperfocus and obsession with detail makes for success. But those attributes often go together with "shy and retiring" and "lack of eye-contact" which makes them kinda useless dealing with boardroom bluster, let alone family crisis or interpersonal tiff from team-members. Promotion? what a waste of talent!

25 years ago I was hired to work in one of the first SFI Science Foundation Ireland multi-million showcase labs to make sense of The Human Genome. I was surprised because I was for sure not the smartest man in the room (nor woman neither!). When SFI hands you money-no-object millions, you can hire the best in the field (who are prepared to migrate to a provincial backwater off the coast of Europe). It transpired that, a few months earlier, I had been talking to my then office-next-door colleague and now boss. I'd given him a candid self-assessment that I was an infrastructural guy whose ambition genes were shot off in the war. At least part of that was true nature but part of it was being brought up as a navy-brat with a strong sense of service. Anyway, my new boss took me at my word and gave me a desk and a laptop and a task to see if human genes were clustered into 'operons': units of related function. I started off robbing code from the Young Turks who were much better programmers than me but then developed a local expertise in displaying data using a particular graphics package. I was happy to have this code robbed by my colleagues when the need arose.

In Campbell's book, there's a neat anecdote about John F "Winner" Kennedy going on a Presidential tour of Cape Canaveral to see how his Giant Step for Mankind project was going. The consummate pol noticed an old black man pushing a broom across an enormous hangar. Although it was kinda obvs, Kennedy asked the elder what he was doing there. "I'm helping to put a man on the moon" was the reply.  Because, dammit, John Glenn and Alan Shepherd and the rest of the NASA team couldn't do their work unless somebody emptied the bins and swept the floor. Quite so!

The pipes are calling

Pat the Salt, BJB, has departed this Earth for further adventures elsewhere. Born in 1925, he grew up in Cardiff around the middle of thirteen sibs in the Hungry Thirties. He ran away to sea as soon as he left school at 14; and clocked up thousands of sea miles between Liverpool Halifax Fremantle Buenos Aires Oran. His ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in August 1942, but he wasn't for drowning. He lost all his kit, though. A few months later, through a rambling series of unexpected encounters, he was given a set of new-to-him bagpipes in Australia. And these became his signature dish ashore and afloat. By the time he returned to Blighty in 1945, his last Cardiff home had been blitzed, both his parents were dead and one of his sisters was full of shrapnel. But he made sure his younger brothers and sisters were fed and presentable if The Social came to the front door looking for orphans.

Evidence from the Irish Press [R] shows that he came to Ireland in 1948 and went on the tramp from Dublin busking at least as far South as Laragh Co Wicklow. He was probably heading for Passage East where he knew his people were buried. No work in Ireland, so he started with Kellogg's in Manchester where the family had washed up. In another life, in other times, that would have been an unexpectedly comfortable billet but he'd seen things you people wouldn't believe. Soon enough he was working for Elder Dempster in colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He survived, thrived and shipped up country to Kano in the Sahel near the French border with Niger.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the city a young woman of startling elegance and exotic beauty was nightly praying to St Patrick to beam her up out of this khaki dusty backwater to somewhere greener. Seeing a personable young chap with pipes she thought "I'll have him" and she did. Pat was then doing well in the groundnut trade, his wife Souad was working for BOAC out at the airport and the two of them scrimped and saved and did without to buy a farm back home in Ireland. And it was so. But trying to wrest a living, in the 1950s, from sixty stony acres near Dunmore East was even harder graft than shipping before the mast in wartime in the 1940s. Opening the first chic Parisian boutique in Waterford City wasn't enough to ensure solvency.  But while the farm spiraled down into murrain, blight and debt, the children were growing up honest, literate and determined. 

It's not about me, except to say that I bumbled on stage in this up and down drama about a year after The Farm was sold and Pat was wearing a white coat behind the counter of his store in Freshford Co Kilkenny.The joke was that, while my lab coat indicated I was a mere student of biology, Pat's showed he was a nuclear physicist master of a cyclotron in the ball-alley behind the shop. {Despite | because of}my very expensive education, I had a lot to learn. Insofar as I have any manners (and I don't mean fish-forks) now, is largely due to my being accepted into the family in 1973. Blimey, that's 50+ years ago. It's been a journey: all of us have put in restless miles a long way from where we were born.

Somewhere along the way, Pat's Australian pipes went missing. So I never heard him play The Minstrel Boy. About ten years ago, Pat and Souad, well into their free travel years, washed up in the centre of Tramore. They picked up with old friends and made new ones. One of the latter was, inter much alia, a piper. Pipers are a community in the same way as Cosa Nostra is a community.  Shortly thereafter, in a way maybe not so very different from the return of The Boy's bicycle, Pat's pipes mysteriously re-appeared. That piper had a daughter, TL, who was to the manner born a piper in her own right. As well as being an accomplished musician, that child had the biggest heart and the most generous hand you could ever hope to meet. They're grown up now, soldiering though college in another part of the country.

But in May this year, just before Pat turned 99, just after his care went full palliative, TL returned home to Tramore to play the pipes for Pat. Everyone agreed that to play the pipes in his bedroom would smither Pat's dentures and have his hearing-aids blow a gasket. So TL stepped out into the garden and gave her old pal The Minstrel Boy at full blast through his open window. Ah bless! is it dusty in here, or is it dusty?

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.