The kindness of strangers

My mother was on her last lap this time five years ago: at 99½ she'd had a medical crisis and been ambulanced to hospital. The regular hospital staff reckoned palliative care and a week would see her out. But a young new on the job and tech-savvy surgeon offered her a minimally invasive intestinal stent that would solve the immediate problem and let her be discharged. And it was so! She refused to go "home" but spent the last 4 months of her life in "A Home" in the next village. She then proceeded to 'put her affairs in order' using my power-of-attorney sister as proxy. "Sell the house" she said. "Is there any ready money?" she said. My sister was then instructed to write bequest cheques to a bunch of people unmentioned in The Will. The fellow who pottered in the garden; the other super right-wingnut who mowed the lawn; the chef in the nursing home, whom she'd known since he was a chap and did a neat line in petit-fours. The cheques weren't big enough to dent a 21stC mortgage but enough for a lorra tinnies . . . or petit fours. It must have been nice to be able to wrest agency from adversity and make some acquaintances windfall happy

When Pat the Salt died a month ago, there wasn't any ready money. His 99½ year old estate was there-or-there-abouts enough to cover the funeral and he didn't last long enough to get the windfall centenarian cheque from An Uachtaráin. His decline had been a ten year journey, however, involving care and attention from a couple of dozen people from several different agencies and institutions. Those men and women (mostly women!) had done a lot more for him (and up close and personal!) than mowing his lawn!

Last night Bobby Bunter and the available two of Pat's daughters invited all the carers to a slap up feed in O'Neills at the top of Main Street, Tramore. The idea is not original to our family but it does the job and is recommended. Nobody made speeches and there wasn't much talk about Pat, whose care had brought us all together. But I heard plenty of stories of economic hardship and assault-in-school from the 1960s, 1970s . . . and 1990s. I reflected that poverty and generosity are not mutually exclusive. It also turns out that a well-presented slice of banoffee pie will go a ways to making a young feller happy.

It was also interesting to reflect on the cousinage among the carers. It's almost as if the craft of giving runs in families. As Blanche "Streetcar" DuBois put it "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Or again, Charles de Lint: Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back. And maybe something something Atatürk ?

Dankdag

TIL that every year at the Pieterskerk in Leiden, there is a thanksgiving service on American Thanksgiving [today, 4th Thursday in November] to commemorate the hospitality enjoyed in the city by the Pilgrims on their way to the New World. 

Since 1981, it seems that Butterball [since 2006, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carolina Turkeys: the largest turkey-slaughterers in the States] has funded a support line for the stressed and distraught during the holiday season - Thanksgiving, חֲנֻכָּה Hanukkah, Sinterklaas, Christmas, Kwanzaa. NYT made a micro-doc for behind the scenes. Something running that long is bound to accumulate a bunch of funny-peculiar anecdotes.

"I left my turkey in a snowbank to thaw and now I can't find it" 

This gave me frisson of recognition. During grad school in Boston, I took BI 504 Mammalogy with Tom Kunz [multiprev]. An integral part of the course was The Field Trip. We piled into a minibus and drove North far into New Hampshire bear (Ursus americanus) country. On Friday evening we arrived at a remote scout camp with wooden bunk dorms and primitive 'facilities'. Before dinner, as dusk was falling, we were instructed to lay out lines of snap-traps, wherever seemed good to us, as a way of sampling what small mammals might be present in the locality. I think the course had an old-style requirement to submit skins and skulls of a certain number of species.

Overnight 20cm of snow fell which made trap recovery a bit of a problem. But I was 40 years younger then two week event horizon and had a pretty good idea where my 10 traps were [at the foot of that spruce, under that fallen log, between the two rocks] and was able to recover them all . . . the last couple only by whacking the powdered snow with a stick until the trap exploded upwards. Not everyone was so lucky /organized  and the University had to suffer some shrinkage in its trap inventory. Tom was phlegmatic about the loss "If it hadn't snowed, some of those mice might have been carried away trap-and-all by something further up the food-chain".

Kunz was grievous bodily harmed by a car in while attending a 2011 Bat Conference but lingered on more or less bed-ridden, for 9 years before being carried away by CoViD in 2020.

I'm not proud of attempting to kill small mammals for no very good purpose. I killed a lot more later in the 80s, trying to establish an ethological connexion between melanin and adrenalin. Then again, I'm not righteous about [not] eating meat. But I've never had any grá for turkey, neither during the holidays nor at any time of the year. At least half my family agree that the key part of celebratory meals is the roast potatoes: everything else (gravy, stuffing, meat, brassica, carrots) acting in support. So:

#Friends #Midlands

Café culture, Bewley's excepted, is a bit alien to Ireland. We do pubs very well; possibly too well given the number of small towns [looking at you Graiguenamanagh] which claim to have the largest count of pubs per head in the country. When we first blew in hereabouts nearly 30 years ago, we had 2 small children at foot. You couldn't really drop into a pub to use the jacks and bide-a-wee out of the rain. But you could, and we did, drop into O'Shea's of Borris because that was a hardware store and a grocery as well as being a pub. There was one table between the window and the fireplace which became a haven. Order a cup of coffee, 2 minerals and a bag of crisps, or a cheese toastie, and old Mr O'Shea would appear from the back and bustle in with kindling to light the fire. It definitely wasn't about the money for him. O'Shea's was a community hub: before EirCodes delivery drivers from the city would lose heart at the edge of the boondocks and leave parcels at O'Shea's for collection. It's where to go to watch the match too.

When the Fərmεntary opened in the Summer of 2021 we still doing masks and social distancing. But we made every excuse to drive into Borris for their excellent buns viennoiserie but also to support a local business. I was chatting to the fellow behind me in line and he turned out to be the Landlord! As a local businessman, he'd consciously made room for a café and cakes shop to boost the social capital of his home-place. As a business, the Fərmεntary was a bit of a punt. You can buy a perfectly serviceable all-butter croissant 10 mins down the road at Lidl in Bagenalstown for 65c. James and Seamus were asking 5x that. If you're not a connoisseur of viennoiserie (and so would know the difference) it can't be about the money. Apart from bougies like us  buying pain-au-chocs at the weekend, apparently mums would buy coffee while their kids romped in the playground across the street.

Whatevs, Croissants in Borris folded, the Post Office moved out of the other half on the building and it's been sad and shuttered for more than a year now. But you can't keep a good baker down and Seamus of Plúr Bakery is now supplying Joyce's of Borris Fri and Sat from 09:00 until the buns run out. Joyce's [pub, grocery, undertaker, B&B] is right next door to O'Shea's in the heart of Borris. It's a better more central location than the Fərmεntar: the pub is warm wooden and extensive against the uncertain Irish weather and Friday and Saturday morning is dead-time for the pub. They've also fill the front yard/garden of the 'hotel' part with picnic tables and massive umbrellas. We've been a tuthree times now: to sit and enjoy the coffee rather than rushing back to the starvin' chicks at home with a bag full of bunz. It could get to be like Friends 25 years after the SitCom.

A [also blow-in] friend of ours confided recently that Joyce's was now "a Social Hub" as if that was A Thing. Who knows? Maybe it is. Maybe Plúr and Joyce's are in receipt of a grant from Carlow Mental Health. I can think of worse ways to spending the rates.

Amenity, though? Borris has come  a l-o-n-n-g way in 25 years. When we arrived in the neighbourhood, there was a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker [I'm lying about the baker but Torc candles are a thing] . . . two steel-yards, six pubs, a draper-and-fancy-goods, a grocer-with-lotto-franchise and the Post Office. Now there's a Website, a library, a bookies, a Friday farrrmer's market, a Chinese, two chippers, two pharmacies, and regular 887 bus service to New Ross & Carlow Town and 881 service to Kilkenny. And a major Arts Festival beloved of the chatterati from Dublin because of the international celebs who headline the weekend.

h

Measure twice, count once.

As a [mighty] land-owner, I've also had another look at land areas [prev+prev]. There were no hectares until the metre had been triangulated out and therefore defined in 1793. A square 100m x 100m has an area of 1 hectare. Obvs from the name, if you have The Greek, there are 100 ares [10m x 10m] to the hectare. Our modest house occupies about a ½ are, while Crowe's, the field downhill from it, is a bit over 1 hectare in size.

Acres, which are still what old buffers like me and most of my neighbours are comfortable with, are smaller and older than hectares. Like a lot of old measure [foot, anyone?], acres are "anthropic" human sized rather than planetary. One acre is [1 furlong x 1 chain] or reducing to the same units [40 rods x 4 rods]. As a square 1 acre very close to 70 yd x 70 yd. [rod pole or perch] is 16½ ft long which might indeed be a handy length for a fishing rod [fishing pole in US] . . . to catch perch Perca fluviatilis. Ho Ho, Bob, but perch is rather (etymologically) from Latin pertica which is cognate with pike: the long spear used in early modern armies. They say that an acre was a comfortable day behind the ox-drawn plough. Ploughing being a Winter (= short-day) activity. 

Other plough-related area measures include

• oxgang - area ploughable by one ox in one year = ca. 15 acres. Preferred in Danelaw [N&E England]
  
• virgate - area ploughable by two oxen in one year. Preferred in Mercia/Wessex [S&W England]
  
• carucate or ploughland - area requiring a full team of 8 oxen to plough in the year = 8 oxgangs = 4 virgates = 120 acres = 50 hectares.
  

To the metric / decimal generation "16½" seems peculiar until your redefine it as ¼ chain which is 22 yards [of 3 feet]. And there are 10 chains to the furlong. And to ring gratuitous changes, there are 8 furlongs to the mile. In olden dayes, when I was at school, 2 furlongs = 440 yd was a standard length for running, and furlongs are still used in horse-racing. The athletic standard is now 400m which is 0.5% shorter than 2 furlongs. Easy to train for both when Brits and USAians went to the Paris "Chariots of Fire" Olympics in 1924.

Heck, even the thought of running is exhausting: back to areas!  I was looking at an old mappe of So Wexford in Feb and noted that areas (of townlands, say) are given in Acres, Roods and Perches. In this context [and metrologists must still be chewing their beards about the confusing cross-over), the perch is a square with each side 1 [rod pole or perch] long. That area is as near as dammit to 25 sq.m. A rood is ¼ acre or 40 (sq) perches. In England, "rod" is preferred, Ireland leans towards "perch". Both countries like Poles: in England since WWII, in Ireland since the 01 May2004 EU expansion.

Las Sun Nov Bit Bob

Last year I was on (and on) about liquid measure. The next section 266 from Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic (1924) is shown above. A quartern loaf is 2¼ times the size of your standard 800g sliced pan: I guess, a hundred years ago, families were bigger. A little digging reveals that this loaf starts with a quarter peck [14 lb] of flour which is a quarter of a 56lb bushel of wheat flour. When we were bone-poor students in Dublin 50 years ago, we'd go to Moore Street market and buy ¼ stone of potatoes - same weight of carbs as the loaf! = 3½ lb = 1.6 kg. Boiled up with chopped cabbage, a bit of onion and butter it was rib-stickin' good.

What else?

• Abandonned home 空き家 reno in Japan. Quintessential BBC World Service: earnest, informed, a little gushy
• Using the footprint around NYC Grand Central Station
• Forrest W.A., minding a remote emergency airstrip between Perth and Melbourne / Adelaide
• where? here!
  
• Blow Bar Bafflegab. I have less of a clue after than before. Check out the single comment for alterantive meanings of blow. 
• Drive All Night - The Boss
  
• Exposing the 'Bots: a history of Captcha [bloboprev]
  
• Updating the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française
• Election special: we're off the the polls this coming Friday
  
• At the trough: 14 more seats on offer: TD base salary €113,679
  
• Posters: photogenic is votogenic?  [bloboprev on unappealing posters]
• Abbeyleix goes poster-free
  

 

Heels in the hunt

We have an election a week from today. In Ireland, certain categories of people are excluded from being candidates.

Otherwise there is low no bar. In Dau.I&II's constituency Gerry "The Monk" Hutch has returned from exile in Spain to run to represent His People. In 1995, we were living round the corner from Veronica Guerin when she was shot and wounded at her front door, the day after writing an article about the said same Mr Hutch. The following year Guerin was assassinated by a rival gang of hoods. You might imagine that it would be impossible for someone so outside the law to secure enough votes to get inside the tent and start to make the law. But you only have to look at the USA to appreciate that a bag of hammers the electorate will exercise their democratic rights while fully embracing irony.

And you don't have to travel across the Atlantic for examples. Michael Lowry, former Minister for Communications and former Chair of the Fine Gael parliamentary party has been consistently returned to the Dáil, as an independent, by the plain people of Tipperary North since he was drummed out of the FG party in 1996. In Thurles tax-evasion, fixing contracts, getting lavish gifts from the rich and owning race-horses is just fine and good on yer man. Many people in Ireland look to their TDs to fix their refused planning permission, their kid's place on a school bus, their place on the council housing list . . . and who better than one who successfully fixed the first roll out of mobile phone infrastructure in the country etc. etc.

Closer to home one of the 20 candidates on our ballot is "John O'Leary, of "Rossbrook", Kerry Pike, Co. Cork Businessman" which, fair enough, you don't have to be resident in the constituency to stand there. But O'Leary is on the ballot in Carlow-Kilkenny -- Cork E -- Cork NW -- Cork NC -- Cork SC -- Cork SW -- Kerry -- Wicklow. If you want to congratulate Mr O'Leary for putting one over on the man with his Count Binface jape going head to head with the current Taoiseach in Wicklow then send him a postcard T23 PK10? But I wish he hadn't cluttered my ballot with noise: it's enough to keep in my head a (quite long enough already) DO NOT VOTE list of misogynists, god-botherers, racists and haters, without adding numpties.

Farmer wellbeing

Despite Silicon Dock in Dublin and MegaPharm in Cork, it is politically necessary to maintain that Ireland is an Agricultural Nation. Pharma accounts for [55%] five times as much export earnings compared to Farmer [9%]. There are 15 million mammals on Irish farms but only 130,000 [9%] are, like, farmers. As farmers are outnumbered by their livestock [soon enough to be deadstock on your plate], so there are thousands of salaries coat-tailing on their hard graft and long hours. So many advisors, creamery managers, feed suppliers, agri-bureaucrats, hauliers, auctioneers, researchers, slaughterers meat-packers. My pal Mick, a reluctant farmer and enthusiastic historian and yomper, rocked up to a Teagasc sponsored demonstration a few years ago.  There were two farmers present, Mick and a bloke in a trench wrastling with hanks of yellow land-drainage pipe. Observing from a safe distance in spotless green wellies were two dozen suits, scoring a day out of the office and a generous mileage claim.

The wider agri sector does provide useful services to workers at the silage clamp face [L]. IF the poor bloody farmers can win a half day between mucking out and applying a top-dressing of lime to the 9-acre. I'm not the farrrmer here, I'm just The Outdoor Man, The Beloved is the one who fills in the forms and has an accountant. This year, she signed up for a knowledge transfer KT scheme which paid for her to go on monthly jaunts round the county: learning stuff and sharing information. It was under this rubric that we hosted a visit to our traditional hay meadow in June. The Outdoor Man was allowed in the kitchen to bake a great big brack and a slab of flapjacks. 

The penultimate jaunt of the year was a  Farmer Wellbeing Day, at Carlow Mart sponsored by Healthy Ireland [Hi] and Carlow CoCo. A couple of cars-full left the valley in good time to be sure of parking and a trip to the jacks before things got going. Only one of The Beloved's passengers availed of both the free hair-cut and the free health-check. When I worked at the institute, I used to take the annual free health check done by the Strength & Conditioning students: my BMI went down and my BP held steady. The "Enjoy a delicious complimentary lunch" was a disappoint: cardboard cup of soup and ham&cheese sandwiches but the Merch was mighty . . .

• Merch
  
• grey Hi watch cap
• grey Hi baseball cap
•  HiViz  waistcoat
• a brace of snoods, if you believe in such things
  
• First Aid kit with enough sticking plasters to outlive their sell-by date
• a new A5  hard-cover notebook  to take over from my nearly full [Nov 2022 start] one
• a  Positive Mental Health  wrist-band
• pens and post-its I guess farrrrmers don't have as much use for them as scientists
  

So a win for me: all that kit and no requirement to stand around in the cold being advised by <synecdoche alert> suits spotless green wellies.

Higher than a breadbox

One rough locator which I've used to describe where we live is "the South Face of Mount Leinster" , as an ironic parity-of-esteem claim to the Eiger-Nordwand, ahem aka Mordwand. Let's face it, Ireland is really not mountainous on the global scale. My old biochemistry Prof Frank Winder is chiefly remembered as the first person to climb a particular route in a quarry in Dalkey, Co. Dublin which was thereafter known as Winder's Crack (1949). And you're welcome to wedge your fingers in there. Frank had to go to The Grand Tetons to climb, like, mou⛰️tains.

As Bill Bryson noted, for the notoriously monoglot USAians, Grand Tetons means Big Titties. Mountaineering involves two quite different goals: a) getting to the top, for the view b) stretching body and mind to make progress up rock-faces. Mt Leinster, for example is a walk in the park. There is a metalled road to the summit which services the TV station there; and Dau.I walked from ours to the summit in bare feet as an 10 y.o. Some mountaineers / yompers in WEA = these islands, are Munro-baggers. Munros were first defined [> 3,000 ft = 940m] and listed (1891) by Sir Hugh Munro, a tweed and hobnail mountaineer, like Irvine. The Munro list is long enough [N= 282] to pose a challenge that can be completed in adecade of determined weekends or a life-time for reg'lar folks.

Not all the Munros are craggy. The easy ones are only really challenging in midwinter, carrying a fridge or with kindergarteners at foot. I was delighted, in a Grand Teton way, to read about Marilyns named by Alan Dawson in 1992 after Ms Monroe and noted for their [> 150m] "prominence".  The Brits call it 'drop' and it is defined as the difference in height between the knopje / peak and the lowest contour that separates the peak from anything higher. It is orthogonal to 'isolation' which is the horizontal distance to the nearest higher mountaintop.  The Marilyn drop is only one of several definitions / lists to set your sights /boots on. Mt Leinster is a Marilyn. As is the much less accessible Stac an Armin [above L] in St Kilda.

• Arderins are Irish hills with a height of at least 500m and a drop of 30m
• Binnions height < 400m but a drop of  > 100m
  
• Carns 100 m < height < 400m with a drop of 30 m
• Deweys 500 m < height < 2,000 ft / 610m and a drop of 30 m in Eng / Wales / IoM
• Fives as Dewey for Scotland
  
• . . .
  
• Wainwrights are hills at least 1,000 ft = 305 m tall with a drop of 15 m in the English Lake District
• YOMPs - Mountain peaks for young and old
• ZOMBs - guaranteed safe during the Zombie Apocalypse

See also HuMPs (Hundred and upwards Metre Prominence); TuMPs (Thirty and upwards Metre Prominence); Corbetts; Furths (Munros not in Scotland); Grahams; Hughs (Hills Under Graham Height); SIMMs (Six-hundred Metre Mountains) . . . and so forth into nicety and pedantry.

Sun Nex

The Feast of St Hilda of Whitby [R hosted the 664 Synod of W]

• In 2005, The Boy headed off for NZ . . . via Petersburg 🚂 Vladivostok and Japan. Here's what it's like in Владивосток 20 years on.
• Canning Sardines
• Minister would be "far better off back in the classroom". Michael O'Leary wants more Effectives in The Dáil . . . teacher's unions react ASTI -- TUI "extremely offensive" . . . "ignorant"
  
• Pics of occupied Paris 1940-1942
• Seems I R a [PubQuiz] genius - 7/7
• Paul Mescal gets quizzed about "Irish"
  
• Rechurning a punt: Kursgesagt scrutinizes the claimed length of tubes in the human circulatory system. 
• All at sea
  
• Cromer UK coastal defenses rip-rap and sand capture
• Steve Marsh yomps across Hoy to unsee the Old Man and visits the Dwarfie Stane
  
• A whole channel of ships passing Passage
  
• Boscastle UK flash flood 2004
  
• Price comparator UK AldivLidl (tl;dr not a Mars bar in  it)
  

 

The Five Giants

The Buddha laid out the Nobel Eightfold Path as a set of principles by which to live a good life: Right Speech; Right Livelihood; Right Conduct etc. When the United Kingdom was back to the wall fighting the Nazis in WWII, several years before victory seemed probable, the coalition government started to plan for a Better Britain. However hard you imagine it is to be poor and/or homeless and/or troubled in mind and body now; life was much shittier in 1938. One of the shameful discoveries is that Joe Median was in general better fed and healthier under a war-footing with rationing [it's the brown bread] and wholesale destruction of the housing stock during the blitz. 

William Beveridge (1879-1963) was tasked to draft a report on "Social Insurance and Allied Services" which was published in 1942. That same month the fortunes of the Allies were decisively turning for the better in North Africa and at Stalingrad.  Looking for a snappy slogan to focus the attention of mandarins and policy wonks Beveridge came came up with Giant Disease, Giant Idleness, Giant Ignorance, Giant Squalor and Giant Want . . . The Five Giants which is the title of Nicholas Timmins' Biography of the Welfare State. I found the 700 page 2017 3rd edition on open shelves in the local village library about 200km West of the nearest bit of the UK. I can't imagine it flies off the shelves to be read in farm kitchens hereabouts. Reviewed at LSE - Timmins piece to camera [1 hour]

This is a brick of a book but readable and occasionally funny in a throw-away ironic sort of way. Timmins is also prone to run-on sentences for which my grad school mentor castigated me 40 years ago. Bafflexample on p.645 "There was a recognition here that if the Labour government had been right to insist since 1997 that poverty and disadvantage were no longer permitted as an excuse for poor results, it remained the case that disadvantaged children needed committed to them more effectively the many services which existed for them - many of which Labour had enhanced or indeed created" aka Blair's people talked large about children's entitlements but failed to deliver.

What I've learned from the book is that Government is Hard. I've had my sofa-bound say about homelessness and UBI and paying for drugs. We have a phrase in Ireland about hurlers on the ditch who know far better how to win than the actual players on the pitch. I suspect that too many people in politics in the UK [and in Ireland] find it easy to trot out a slogan [go back where you came from; welfare scroungers; privatise telecoms; nationalise railways] but couldn't actually run the coal-face of a government department. It's also apparent that politics was a) nicer b) arguably more effective when political parties were less monolithic and less polarized.

But the key question addressed [on and on; again and again; in the evolving circumstances of history] is how do governments apportion money and services (and taxes) among its citizens in a way that is fair given the vastly different starting points from which neonates begin their journey. If you think you know, you're wrong so bad you don't even know you're wrong! [calling Dunning-Kruger]. And can we please have a bit more evidence-based, rather than ideology-driven, policy everywhere in politics?

As a kid who came to sentience in England during the late 60s and early 70s of the last century, it was odd to have then household names [Macmillan, Wilson, Heath], skitter across my eyeballs for the first time in decades. In 1966 I was at boarding school near Southampton. Time was allocated every Sunday for "writing letters". I brought away a stack of these letters home after my mother died in 2020 but haven't yet got the bottle to read them. One week, I discovered that outgoing mail was subject to censorship by The Man. Ringing the changes on writing home, 12 y.o. me addressed an envelope to George Brown MP esq. | Houses of Parliament | Westminster. This was opened up before posting to reveal, not a bomb threat from a disgruntled Young Tory, but a rather pathetic "Dear Mr Brown, how is it being Foreign Secretary? Can I have your signiture? Yours faithfully Bobby Scientist". The Censor informed me that the letter had been resealed and popped in the post . . . also "signiture is spelled wrong and it's better to use autograph". Which all, fair enough. A week later I got a 15cm x 20cm glossy photo of George Brown, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, with his name scrawled across the pale background near his left ear. 

Note: Brown was a famous boozer but the mainstream press of those days were too deferential to mention it. Private Eye coined the euphemism "tired and emotional" to describe Brown (and subsequently many other public figures) when he was blotto in public.

EV Drive mode

There was time, five years ago, when the EU almost got to boot daylight saving time into the black pit of hell where it deserves to live. But Covid put that initiative on hold and the opportunity seems to have passed: it's off the news anyway. One of the petty annoyances of twice yearly hour-shifting is resetting all the devices: the cooker, the car. This is only annoying because a) the change protocol requires an idiosyncratic combo of menu, buttons, pushes and push&holds b) I've forgotten [two week event horizon] the path in the intervening 180 days.  Frustration also applies with rental cars, because car makers are forever fripping about with extra features and the different brands won't talk to each other to find common ground. It doesn't help that car-rental people have neither time nor inclination to give clients a lesson in the peculiarities of This car that you want to drive off the lot, Now.

So we bought a new-to-us Yaris in September, which was a) hybrid b) automatic c) key-free ignition and that all took a bit of getting used to. The fan, for example, to stop the windscreen fogging up in winter the driver has to cycle through options to direct air at face; face&feet; feet; screen&feet. There is no option [R] to go screen only. BUT the designers claim you can set and maintain different temperatures for driver and front-seat passenger. The written manual is trying to service several different models of Yaris Hybrid with quite different controls: some with buttons & knobs; some with touch-screen some with both [a new dimension to Hybrid]. And the index is woeful: there is no entry for Clock except under M for Multi-Information Display.

Then the effn clocks changed on us and neither I nor my two 20-something effectives could discover how to make the Yaris clock go back an hour. That's not the end of the world. But it is still legitimate to take a swipe at the designers of a) the car b) the manual. Then for the first time in my life, I saw a key battery low alert on one of the several Multi-Information Displays on the dashboard. Nothing of help in the user manual but youtube offered several ingles-not-first-language explanations about a) what this meant b) how to prise open a keyfob c) the necessity to buy a CR2032 3v lithium coin cell.

I R old, I R the Patriarchy, so I felt no compunction about dropping into the Toyota dealer to change the key battery and the clock. The chap behind the service desk was ever so slightly patronizing. He didn't call me Gramps, let alone blithering ould fule, but you could sense him s l o w i n g down to s h o w me how to change a key-fob battery. I was therefore ever so slightly gratified, when he was unable to change the clock and had to fetch one of the mechanics from the shop-floor. Of Course and, like, well obvs the clock change is mediated by an unlabelled menu button on arm of the steering wheel [R]. That menu multi-button services: ABS brakes; Bulgarian dictionary, Cam-shaft optimizer, Dashcam, Eco-Fuel monitoring device, GPS integrator . . . far too much to fit on a label smaller than the steering wheel itself.

It is engagingly peculiar that in a User Guide so telegraphic that it omits mention of clock controls and key-fob batteries, the editors [and indeed the vehicle designers] found room for an oddly specific highly focused image of social engineering. Down on the floor nigh-invisible near the hand-brake is an [EV] button. I quote: EV Drive Mode in EV drive mode, electric power is supplied by the hybrid battery and only the electric motor is used to drive the vehicle. This mode enables you to drive in residential areas early in the morning or late at night, or in indoor parking lots etc. without concern for noise or emissions.

Real Men (don't) eat cake

Years and years ago, when we lived in England, one of our pals had a significant birthday and we schlepped 500km down the A1 to help him celebrate. After a sketchy start in college (booting his first year exams and having to do Autumn Repeats), he had his knees firmly under the table in one of the big corporate law firms in London - his niche expertise was buying and selling airports and power-stations! A large number of brightly coloured helium filled balloons were bobbing about in the flat the following morning. After a restorative fry-up (are we not Irish? after all), we piled into their car with the balloons and tooled around South East London. Every time a short human hove into view, the car screeched to a halt and the child was presented with a free balloon. Reaction was mixed: surprise, some delight, a lot of bemusement. But at least the balloons got a second life.

I've written about how [last para]the youth of a subsequent generation disdained free sandwiches. Giving the lie to the meme of starving graduate students. At that same hospital, we had a New Irish (Uganda via Botswana) IT guy. He was pretty forthright about not wanting Irish dogoodniks to ship clapped out, refurbed computers to Africa as if everyone sub the Sahara should be grateful to receive our cast-offs.

Did I mention that my aged FiL Pat the Salt left his safe harbour on this Earth to continue his v'yage in the Great Beyond? I did! We waked him at home on Friday and buried him on Saturday and there were soup and sangers at The Generic Majestic Hotel for afters. People came from all over to pay him respeck and many, as you do, brought food. We 2x over catered at the hotel as well and the staff packed up dozens and dozens of sandwiches and handed them to the nearest [bemused, bereaved] member of the family. By Saturday evening, the tide of people was ebbing but the fridge was Full of cake.

I too an executive decision & nipped down the hill to the nearest [R] Direct Provision Centre (there are several in town). I've written before about the shame, bordering on horror, of what we do for asylum seekers and refugees. There were two burly chaps sitting in the garden and I went up, introduced myself and asked [because as a young man Pat had lived and loved among the Hausa in Nigeria] "Are there any Hausa Men here?". They, poor fellows, were naturally confused about the micro-ethno-geography of West Africa and it didn't really matter. Changing tack [are you clocking all the nautical metaphors in this piece?] I asked them where home was. 

• Forget Nigeria", I said, "Iran will do: would you like cake? My agéd father has died and we have buried him today and now we have A Lot of cake. I don't want to offend you but if you would like cake, then I will go home and fetch it.
• Yes we would like cake; will I come and help you carry it?
• There is not that much cake! I will return in 5 minutes.

And it was so! I was assured afterwards that they get enough [cheap] cake in DP Centres because those who cater can ring up some carb Kcals to satisfy the official nutritionist: Don't take them cake; rather bring nuts and fruit. Well, I'm sorry, but we didn't have nuts&fruit, we had cake; and my new Iranian pals were all smiles to get it.

sun bit bob nov

Very miscellaneous

• B1M wake-up call [R] for 17,000 'fracture critical' interstate highway bridges in USA 
• Crumbling US infrastructure - inland waterways division 
  
• YE-ZB Hayrake: getting carrier planes back home in WWII
• More info
• Clive Stafford Smith see also last sunday links
  
• Michael Lewis [whom prev] on TRIP
• Hawaii grid gripes
• Small Things Like These [prev] now A Filum 
• Hunicke: Your most reasonable effort is whatever it takes
• We go to the polls 29 Nov 24 - how Irish elections are financed
  

Darwin Glass

The Blob's Southern Correspondent TBSC aka the BiL in Kaapstad ZA sent me an enigmatic email:
>> Subject: Darwin . . . May be of mild interest to you.
but no attachment; to which I replied:
>> Subject: Re: Darwin . . . Missing link Darwin? or Oz City? or Uruguayan footballer? 1999 asteroid?lunar crater? All interesting.

But closer to home than the moon, there is Darwin Crater: a terrestrial geo-feature near Mt Darwin in Tasmania. This is a circular 1.2km ⌀ dimple in the landscape, about 15km South of the mining community Queenstown (pop ~1800). The peaks hereabouts: Mt Darwin [1030m] Mt Owen [1150m] Mt Lyell [920m] Mt Sedgwick [1150m], all named after 19thC Brit geologists, are 'mountains' in a cosy not very tall sense, such as we have outside our own back door in Mt Leinster [800m]. Although they look a bit more craggy than Mt Leinster.

There are strict criteria for deciding whether divots in the surface of the Earth are cause by extra-terrestrial impacts and none of these have been clocked for the Darwin Crater. But the smart money is on meteorite because a 20km x 20km area round about is rich in Darwin Glass [fragment R]. Geologists, like all good scientists, get narked by by the niggling unknown and so  “[Dr. Ramsay J] Ford accompanied a team that bulldozed a path from the Franklin River Road into the centre of Darwin Crater in 1974. The team drilled cores up to 230m deep in search of diagnostic shock features. “

That quote is from an account by Brad Dare, as part of his project to map and visit all the known, and aspirational, impact craters in Australia. It looked straightforward on the map. All he needed to do was park on the Franklin River Road, find the bulldozer track, yomp in, take some pictures and yomp out - it's only 2 miles = 3 km. Not so fast puny mortal. 

Mother Nature has had 50 years to return the rainforest to its pre-dozer state and soon Dare and his companion found themselves in Woozle status “After battling the swamp for some time, we noticed some footprints and, feeling elated that we must be closing in on the original track, followed them. Our hearts sank when we realised not too long after they were our own footprints, and we had inadvertently gone around in a circle. “ and later their 21stC equipment blinks out “The swamps’ humidity had allowed water to get inside the housing of our electronic equipment. With a flicker of the screen, both the GPS and compass went dead, and we were on our own. “ 

They did make it out, as do almost all folks who are lost in the woods, but it does put into perspective what a daunting task it is mount a search when folks get lost in wilderness national parks. See also when my neighbour lost his dog and his phone forever [last para] in a treeless (but fissured and scrub-covered) area a few dozen hectares in extent.

Turns out that Darwin Crystal is an asset, at least among the Woo: €31.16 Darwin Glass Healing Crystal ~28mm. Having physically transformed by the celestial slam-dunk “Close to 11,250 cubic metres of Darwin Glass was thrown into the air and scattered over a circular area totalling 400 square kilometres.”
Q: What would that be worth aliquotted as €30 = 30mm 🧊s?
A: There are ~30 x 30 x 30 = 30k such 🧊s in 1cu.m so about 300 million frags in total; valued retail at ~€9 billion. That's A Lot of sugar: enough to run all the schools in Ireland for a year.

Imagine! an asset that you just have to pick up from the ground on either side of the Franklin River Road! I've high-lighted the just because it's doing some heavy lifting. By happy coincidence the Darwin glass is spread over 400 million sq.m. or one chunk per sq.m. Since they were scattered far and wide 800,000 years ago, a good bit of a) jungle, b) swamp c) razor sharp grass d) leeches have moved in on top. There must be easier ways of earning $30.

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!