Off piste

Early on The Blob would insert Amazon or Amazon-affiliate links next to books I was recommending. Often sharing the delight that such a book was available for $0.01 . . . + $3.95 postage and packing. Even at 4 bucks delivered to my door, it seemed a good deal. Later, schooled by my family and para-social pals, I made a decided about-face and refused to have any dealings At All with the Amazon BezoSphere. It is all white hat vs black hat with me.

Many will express Schadenfreude when Amazon shits-the-bed, takes a pounding or is made to look stupid. Metafilter was delirah [along with BBC, Guardian, NYT, MSN, Reddit] when a sub-contractor driving an Amazon-liveried van followed their GPS into the sea writing it off when the tide came in. Icing on the cake was the news that the driver, on their third day in the job, phoned their supervisor and was instructed to Obey the GPS which would know better than any mere driver. The Broomway, which had mis-led the GPS, is a medieval trackway across tidal mudflats in Essex. It didn't take long for MetaFilter to veer judgmental:

clearly reveals the supervisor as an idiot, but lacking the gumption to force a GPS reroute and tell the supervisor to go fuck themself makes the driver a worse one.
Which was a little bit triggering for me:

Ouch, That's a bit harsh. When I was ~19, I had a job driving an Amazon-like van around rural Devon delivering books to primary schools, using a 1:200,000 scale map with the targets marked as pink blobs.
One afternoon, I set off down a lane which pointed in the right direction. But the median grass got longer and longer until the lane terminated at a farm gate. My available gumption concluded that it would be easier to turn round in the field than reverse for 3or4 km. After a couple of swings at that, each one further down hill, I left the van and trudged across the valley towards a distant farmstead. Kindly farmer looked back at my attempts to plough pasture and took me back there in his tractor, with which he extracted the van pointing in the right direction. It all seemed normal adulting at the time, my toes are curling now. 

That was the second job in my gap year after leaving school. Head office wrote letters to school principals to expect me during one week to deliver the samples; returning to collect the box a week later. It was The Best fun. They reckoned, in consultation with local sales reps, that 20 drops a day was an achievable target. I found out that 40 drops a day was possible (unless, like, doing the ploughing); which gave me half a week to drive my bus around Dartmoor and the Devon coast on someone else's nickel. I am amazed at the luck and Can Do of my 19 y.o. self: I'm less bouncy, not to say immortal, now.

NotAmazon Independents who deliver the goods:

• kennys.ie for books delivered Free to Ireland; 
• uk.bookshop.org for books to England: 
• lenehans.ie/ for any non-book stuff 

Schrödinger's dogs

Like (almost all) sports, I participate in dog-sled racing from my sofa. As a child, I could be in the fastest three or four over 100yd [91m] sprint or 80yd [73m] over hurdles and could complete a 440yd [400m = 2 furlongs = 20 chains] without dying. But I was so out of puff for the half mile [880yd], that I'd have to walk for a bit halfway through to recover some wind. Last time I used a peak-flow meter, the doc shook it and his own head in disbelief at home low was the declared value. But it's not abut me it's about dogs and The Blob has flagged the Iditarod several times and even crunched some dog data.

Accordingly, when MeFi recommended Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod [1994] by Gary Paulsen, I made a note-to-self. Just after New Year, I went to Libraries Ireland to discover that there was but one copy among all the public libraries of Ireland [Athlone, Co Westmeath -- 798.8 -- Compactor Available], I put in a reservation and settled down to wait. My patience has limits and some 7 weeks later, I phoned Athlone to see what gives? 

• Hello Athlone Library, how may I help?
• I reserved a book at the beginning of January, and wondered if "Compactor" meant crushed?
• Oh sorry, we were closed for renovations in October and only got back last week; we haven't processed our backlog yet. The Compactor is the moveable archive shelving we have in the basement for storing little used books. What's is the Title? I can go look later.
• Thanks for the explanation; this is not urgent, but I'd like to read the book sometime. 

Less than an hour later

• Hello Bob, this is Athlone Library, I went down to look for your book and it doesn't appear to be on the shelf. It could be anywhere or gone forever. I even asked another Librarian to look.
• Jings, you had to ask another librarian to find you after you got lost in the stacks?
• Oh no [silly] one of my colleagues double checked to see if that book was hidden in plain sight.
• Dang, well thanks anyway and thanks for giving me closure so quickly . . . and maybe amend your records??

Dang indeed. There is a copy in Trinity College Dublin, and as an external / alumnus reader I could have it fetched out of the stacks to read on the premises. And Kennys.ie have copies for €12 but I am still being all virtuous about not buying books. And when I looked at my Library account the following day, Winterdance had, like Trotsky being airbrushed from Stalin's group photos, been expunged from the record as if it had never been there.

And WTF the title? Schrödinger's [Dublin, 1943, prev] cat is a Gedankenexperiment to illustrate uncertainty about the location and existence of sub-atomic particles. We can't be certain that the cat-in-a-box is alive or dead until somebody opens the hatch (goes down to the basement) to check.

Not too late the phalarope

We got back waaaay past my bedtime from the CCEN - Wetlands film night. Having bugged out before the Q&A finished because one of the panel took three whole minutes . to . say . that . was . his .  last . point. As we left, another handful of politer folks fled in our wake. But I was awake and full of porridge the following morning for a 09:30 Teagasc ConnectEd webinar about integrating wetlands into viable Irish agriculture. I did not feel obliged to watch the screen wet to the knees or dripping frogspawn onto the sofa. The guest speaker was Owen Murphy who is senior project manager with Breeding Waders European Innovation Partnership EIP. A €25 million, 5 year nationwide project, monied by the EU through National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine DAFM 

Their aim is to "secure existing Breeding Wader populations and support population recovery through landscape management and policy development". Given that the talk was hosted by the Ag advisory service and expecting an audience of farmers, this was the key thread thpugh the slides. Although Murphy's love of birds, especially the birds of the Shannon callows of his youth, lit up his face as he ran through his show-and-tell. I'm guessing he'd get a more receptive audience from Birdwatch Ireland than farmers whose bird-knowledge might not run to species by GISS. 

• Dramatis personnae
• curlew crotach Numenius arqata
• lapwing pilibín Vanellus vanellus
• redshank codeargán Tringa totanus
• sandpiper goba dán Actitis hypoleucos
• oystercatcher roilleach Haematopus ostralegus
• dunlin breacóg Calidris alpina
• golden plover feadóg bhuí Pluvialis apricaria
• ringed plover feadóg chladaigh Charadrius hiaticula 
• snipe naocach Gallinago gallinago
• phalarope falaróp gobchaoi Phalaropus lobatus

But take a holistic view. Making things easier / safer for lapwing ups the quality of life of other co-nesting wader species. Not least because lapwing are fiesty and will see off a magpie. And changing the drainage landscape or the mowing regime for dunlin will benefit grasses other than perennial ryegrass as well as orchids, butterflies, earthworms and the microbiome which underpins the whole teetering tower of diversity

What I liked A Lot About the Breeding Waders Project was its pragmatic acknowledgment of where we are now, 50 years after many Irish bird species started taking a nose dive as a consequence of changed, changed utterly, agricultural practice. Even as late as 1966, most livestock farmers were hoping to win the hay in  late June, weeks after most of the ground-nesting birds had hatched, fed and fledged their young. And although scything a hay-field was a thing of the past, puttering round the field reaping with MF 135 tractor gave lingering adults a fighting chance of escaping the blades. Although the coming of silage and wrapping cut grass in plastic rather than hoping for 3-4 days of sunshine between June and September did not automatically change the timing - but it did open the possibility of cutting earlier and maybe twice. Even if you cut early only some years, the cumulative effect has been catastrophic for birds and hares.

How pragmatic? Saving the corncrake Crex crex in Wexford Leinster -that bus has gone in our current timeline. But this distinctive creature is hanging on by its toenails in Donegal and so money, time and resources directed thither won't be an obvious bust. Same for your favorite species of wader: look at the distribution data through time and space and make evidence-based decisions about who shall be saved. How realistic? One sub-project is training 'nest protection agents': IF each NPA is given 2,000 ha., some night-vision bins and a .22 rifle THEN they have a chance to tilt the balance away from mink Mustela neovison; fox Vulpes vulpes; hoodies Corvus cornix; magpies Pica pica; in favour of ground nesting waders. Allocate 1 NPA to 4,000 ha and you're at nothing.

Another intervention is headstarting. Dunlin Calidris alpina are globally abundant, if declining, but down to 30 breeding pairs in Ireland. In normal times, they live ~5 years and have a typical clutch of ~4 eggs. At steady state, 18 of these 20 possibles are destined to die with 2 surviving to replace the parents. Stochastic blips or one terrible wet Spring could call time on the species on this island. Headstarting is a cunning plan: take a tuthree clutches of eggs from somewhere marginal, whisk them off to Fota Wildlife Park, hatch and fledge them in a mink-free zone then reintroduce the young adults to a super-favorable habitat where they might double the dunlin audience.

But here's the thing: if you incentivize bird-favoring Ag practice at so much per hectare it may become a minimal engagement box-ticking [✓] exercise. Thus to get the wader subsidy you may have to keep stocking density on the designated area to >1 livestock unit / ha. from March through May. But if The Man explains why these are the specs, the committed farmer might graze those fields hard up until March to freshen up and diversify the sward for breeding season: making the environment richer and safer for the chicks. Payback: the birds convert insect protein into 'free' nitrogen-rich guano!

The book Too Late the Phalarope is a tragedy from apartheid South Africa written by Alan Paton. Let us hope it's not Not too late the phalarope on the callows and marshes of Ireland. 

Wetlands

Back when still part of the Ascendancy, I and others were at Morning Coffee [tea optional] in my department in Trinity College Dublin. My HoD, a leading light in the Protestant mafia started on about turning Achill Island, Co Mayo into a Jurassic wildlife park "re-introduce wolves Canis lupus and bears Ursos arctos - giant Irish deer Megaloceros giganteus were a hoof too far because they were all dead. "and what" someone asked, "would the plain people of Achill have to say about that?" Which put a stop to this fantastist's gallop.

We levered our arses off the sofa on Thursday night for film night in Visual Carlow. It was hosted by CCEN County Carlow Environmental Network and featured a very mixed bag of shorts about Wetlands - with a Q&A afterwards. The tickets were "Free" but there are significant opportunity costs [and petrol] to take 4 hours out of a winter evening to make a 90km round trip. The last 10m film was about the Drummin Bog Project DBP [prev] with local national school youngsters singing a song about bog myrtle and fraugháns. 

At the Q&A, one of the leaders of the DBP ruefully admitted that, 7 years in, it was only blow-ins, artists and poets who came for the open days of bog restoration. Local farmers, supposed beneficiaries of slowing water down in its rush from rain-sodden hills to the sea via the River Barrow, carry on regardless. Another Q&A contributor from the floor described a woeful breakdown in comms between management and inhabitants in Ballycroy Co Mayo where the National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS have designated 150 sq.km as Páirc Náisiúnta Néifinne Fiáine Wild Nephin National Park [R as mapped - yours for €11 - by the redoubtable yomping cartographer Barry Dalby].  A vengeful Queen Medb (or person or persons unknown) set Nephin on fire last April destroying walkways and other access infra-structure. That's my second-hand take on what went down in Nephin. RTE prefers the passive tense [gorse started burning . . . "Public urged to act 'responsibly' after Mayo gorse fires"] rather than finger-pointing. 

If I was really local, rather than a blow-in 30 years a-squatting, one of my neighbours would have told me who fired our mountain last year. But the chances are good that such a finger would have pointed at The Wrong Neighbour, so I am happier not to know. My neighbours are just folk: some kind and some with blunted empathy and some damaged beyond repair.

I don't know any of the details but it's reading like Nephin was conceived over coffee in Dublin rather than in the pubs of Ballycroy. And not half enough of the budget was allocated to bringing people on board. It's not enough to lurry out subsidies and financial incentives. Indeed paying people to do right by the curlews crotach Numenius arquata and plovers feadóg bhuí Pluvialis apricaria  may be a counter-productive perverse incentive. Like the Israeli creche parents - if you pay people it becomes transactional and gets minimal [✓] response. If you can, by tale and example, induce even a minority to love their hares Lepus timidus [prev] and tormentil Potentilla erecta you won't need to pay anyone.

Vegemite

For being a Good cockroach in a previous life, I was rewarded with teaching a lab section for the Food & Fermentation Microbiology [F&F] course in the Biosciences BSc, The Institute had a policy that no course should rest entirely in a single Lecturer's portfolio. otoh The Union resolutely and repeatably stomped on the idea that such cross-dressing would enable flexibility of delivery in case of, say, a medical emergency. So it was hard to see the benefit. But I was really happy with the assignment because I learned a lot. The Real Microbiologist, who did the formal lectures and carried the other two lab sections, had worked for Guinness in that capacity in both Europe and Africa. He had a particular affection for LABs - lactic acid bacteria - without which no silage, no kimchi, no cheese, no yoghurt and really terrible wine.

That course gave structure to my interest in food engineering which has been a running theme in The Blob while I was still working at The Institute. I was quick to snag a promising Food.Eng earbook from Borrowbox last week Vegemite The True Story of the Man Who Invented an Australian Icon written and read by Jamie Callister (2023). Borrowbox is owned by Bolinda, the Australian audio and large print book publisher. I get to read some Oz-niche books.

Jamie Callister is the grandson of Dr Cyril Callister (1893 -1949) an Australian chemist and food engineer who invented Vegemite in  the 1920s when supplies of Marmite [original and best] dwindled during and after WWI. Like soy sauce, Nattō, Surströmming, crubeens; Vegemite is an acquired taste. Dr Callister had spent much of WWI working in an enormous munitions factory at Gretna on the Scottish borrrder. A large part of his work was QC and process tech, to ensure that neither he nor any of the 16,000 other employees blew themselves to buggery through carelessness or system failure.

invented Vegemite was by no means a >!shazzam!< event. They had a target product in another edible non-meat black paste called Marmite. I know I was confused as a child between *mite and, say, Bovril which ultimately came from beef . . . and was a little more runny? Reducing a vat of beige spent yeast from brewing to something you could slather on toast . . . and eat, depended both on the initial product and the details of the process. A little more of this or a tad less of that and the result could be a sulphurous, curdled mess that not even the dogs would eat. Record keeping is key to reproducibility. And scaling up from test-tube and beaker to a car-sized vat is not obvious to all thinking people: surface-to-volume ratio is one aspect that needs to be calculated and thought about.

And after all the science, it took 15 years of marketing and long-game company belief before Vegemite was washing its face for the accountants. By which time another War was shipping thousands of ANZAC soldiers abroad.  One of those was Cyril's son, the author's Uncle Ian, who became a spitfire pilot and died in a tragic fog-of-war accident while taking off on a mission in New Guinea. He was only 21. The Wikipedia entry on this pity of war the pity war distilled looked a bit sparse "" Between 1919 and 1927 the Callisters had three children: Ian, Bill and Jean, who were "the original Vegemite kids". Drew is a great-great-grandson and loves his Vegemite. During World War II, Ian died"" so I added a Virtual War Memorial Australia link. I hope young Drew continues to get his Nine Words Of Fame for a while.

Turns out that Vegemite has achieved global hegemony is available in  Ireland, so we can do a custard: compare the product with Marmite. Celery surprised me.

Vegemite: Yeast Extract (from Yeast Grown on Barley and Wheat), Salt, Malt Extract (from Barley), Flavour Enhancer (Potassium Chloride), Colour (E 150c), Spice Extract (contains Celery), Niacin, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Folic Acid . €4.00 220g €18.18/kg. [no added cobalamin = vitamin B₁₂ because they tweaked the process to double the concentration in the final product]

Marmite: Yeast extract (contains BARLEY, WHEAT, OAT, RYE), salt, vegetable juice concentrate, vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B₁₂ and folic acid), natural flavouring (contains CELERY) €4.99 250g €19.96/kg 

PS next day: went for lunch with The Beloved at Mount Congreve and I asked what natural flavouring is added to both *mites? hint it's a vegetable. Celery she announced with the confidence of a vegetarian palate.

Blow out yer dead

Did I mention our polytunnel? I did 
For nearly 20 years, it has been central to our lives: drying laundry; growing beans, tomatoes, spinach; sawing, stacking and storing firewood; saving pot-plants from frost; eating lunch; entertaining children. No more than myself, the tunnel is a bit leaky in its old age, but is still much drier than outside.

And therein lies a problem: it never rains in the tunnel, so every drop of water has to be brought inside. I do as much of this hydraulic movement as possible by gravity or by siphon and the tunnel-faucet is the source of last resort. Usually [cw: Ireland!] the rain falls on the regular and when there is a ppt-pause we have 2½ tonnes of storage capacity to keep the plants alive. This winter, I've been working to bring water into the tunnel even if nothing much is growing - I think I'm storing most of the surplus deep in the soil - there being resistant to evaporation.

Crates and herring barrels, buckets and watering cans and Lots of 20mm pipe make up the infra-structure, which among other things stops the laundry getting covered by dust-storms. The Beloved emerged from hibernation in mid-Feb to put manners on veg-beds in anticipation of Spring sowing. She complained about A Smell emanating from either the once-pink storage crate or the watering cans. Mortified I was and went up to give the crate its annual scrub: (rain-water + sunlight = algal sludge). I then took the empty crate down to the nearest water supply - the 120lt herring barrels [in the middle distance R] - for a rinse. I filled the green watering can from one barrel and started to pour . . . but it blocked up after a few seconds. Sooo, as y'do, I put the spout to my lips and >!ptui!<. That was but a temporary fix and after three [3x] blow-back attempts I gave up on the watering can and sluiced out the crate with a bucket.

I then turned the watering can upside-down over the now empty bucket 
Q. to forensically investigate [cw: scientist!] what was causing the obstruction. 
A. A dead mouse, when long steeped in water, is soft enough && tough enough to exactly stopper the spout of a standard watering-can. I've been sucking and blowing on hoses and pipes [cw: siphon] all my life and have been 'surprised' often -- but killed = never.

How he lost Tuesday

Shortly after it was published, we were given a copy of "WONDERS: writings and drawings for the child in us all [1982]" eds Jonathan Cott and Mary Gimbel [prev]. It was a fat [600+pp] book with short works from a few dozen authors some, better known than others. Quality and appropriateness was patchy also, but the bits we liked we read and re-read until the poor book burst asunder. It's captured in the Internet Archive, if you can make that work for you. One of these favorite stories was How I Lost Tuesday by Evan S Connell. Connell died, in the fullness of his years, shortly after the Birth of the Blob but his words live on. 

The premise of HILT is that the narrator, as a grown up, decides to climb Longs Peak in Colorado; having summitted the mountain as a 12 y.o. kid. On the way up he encounters a teenager and they get into a race to the top without either saying "race you". They get to the top, the view is The Whole World, they have lunch, they hang out - more or less ignoring each other, then they yomp back downhill. Longs Peak is a 14er at 14, 256ft [although nobody starts from sea-level! - the car-park is at 9,400ft] and the hike from the car-park and back is ~30km. So it's a hard days hike. The narrator gets back to his hotel shagged out at 21:00hrs and falls into bed. When he wakes, he sees that it's lunchtime . . . but on ther wrong day. He's been asleep fro 39 hours. The End

Well imagine my feelings when my pal Tom from Colorado sent me a New Year card with this picture:

That's Tom [L] and his son Tommy [R] with a "helpful" 24px x 6px sign. Game On! Trained researcher me went full metal Sherlock with a magnifying glass and Wikipedia and deduced Quagmire . . . Quandary Peak 14,272' . Quandary is a few feet higher than Longs Peak but the topology is a bit easier but close enough [~100mi = 160km close]. Whatevs, I sent them my 3x jpgs version of How I lost Tuesday and Tom replied:

What a great story. This truly hits home because Long's Peak is the 14er I was originally going to hike with Tommy. We decided to start with one less difficult but it is still on our list to do, hopefully this summer. The main reason is that I feel it is taunting me. We look out our picture window to the beautiful mountain view of Long's Peak every day.:

The view from Ft Collins CO: Mt Meeker [L] Longs Peak [R]