Caisleán na Cailleach

Who shall be saved? That's today's question. It is a truism to say that slaps can be delivered to the head of any one of us - Henry V took an arrow in the face; Terry Pratchett's cortex emptied out; Phineas Gage's was briefly filled with an iron bar - but you'll respond better to life's tonks if you have money or connexions. How the dispossessed are treated is a measure of how civilized a society is. 

It's not enough to aspire to cherishing all the children; elected governments have to allocate resources to ensure that the difficult cases get dealt with. From 2000 Kathy Sinnott took the Dept Education to courtS to vindicate the Constitutional right of her disabled son Jamie to have "free appropriate primary education based on need". Jamie got to vote before he got his rights!  It's pretty clear that, in the 1916 proclamation, Padraig Pearse was cherishing all the children metaphorically not just the subadults. No grown-up nation should allow its citizens to sleep in cars, or in tents, or in at whim B&B accommodation. But that's where we're at. This last Winter there were 15,000 people homeless in Ireland a third of which were children. Not good enough.

Relying on private citizens to make homes available for those who don't have one might have worked sorta in the past. So long as you weren't black, an unmarried couple or <oof> with child. In 1975, with a newborn at foot, as students, we were able to rent a seafront property in Dun Laoghaire. The rent was about 2.5x that of the 2m x 2.5m x 3m shithole bedsit The Beloved and I had shared with a family of mice the previous year. I'm sure, the demeanour of patriarchy (and the accent) got us that room with a view of the sea. Through the noughties, I found that private rentiers could raise rents arbitrarily and evict tenants with impunity. It is only by being born at peak boomer and being lucky in the breaks, that we bought the farm 30 years ago and had a home for which we owned the keys. My correspondent G after 10 years in the private rental sector with her extended family, finally got a Council House in 2022.

I am relieved . . . happy . . . delirah to add my correspondent M to the list of those who have washed up ashore after years at sea in Dublin's rental sector. Whom shall we thank? Maybe Ned Guinness (1847-1927) [R, in his patriarchal prime] whose family had made a fortune in booze. At one time he was the richest man in all of Ireland. Having more money than anyone was capable of spending on racehorses and champagne, he allocated part of his patrimony to The Iveagh Trust [if you're reading from Baluchistan, don't bother clicking that bloatware link but get the gist from Wikipedia]. Still tl;? it's a provider of affordable housing in Dublin. They run a 200 bed homeless men's hostel, built the Iveagh Public Baths and the Iveagh Covered Market, and . . . a home for The Old. M is six weeks older than me and little bit more crocked up. After 50 years buffeted by the winds of change in private rental sector, M obtained the key to a teeny tiny apartment owned by The Iveagh and moves in Today!

All bets would have been off, if she hadn't been old.

Jokaisenoikeudet

Two years ago, I was a bit bereft because a British court had decided that private property bested the common good w.r.t. the right to camp on Dartmoor. 

When I was young, I had  a six month gig delivering books to primary schools. I had to cover a certain number of schools each week but how, when and in what order was up to me. I found that 3½ days "work" covered the modest requirement. For the rest of the week, I had wheels and a per diem and could do whatever I wanted. One afternoon in February, the sky was without cloud and the sun was high so I parked the van at Two Bridges in the middle of Dartmoor and strode up over the moorland.  There was nobody about, so I stripped off most of my clothes heading for the appropriately named menhir, Beardown Man. On the way back I poked about a bit in Wistman's Wood. I was too young and ignorant to really pay attention let alone properly understand why the wood was special nor appreciate just how privileged I was to be busy doing nothing midweek. 12 years later, the rights and privileges of Joe and Josie Publick were codified in

Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 [full text pdf]

The ruling by the High Court that made me sad two years ago was reversed by the Court of Appeal. Last week the UK Supreme Court UKSC doubled down on the intermediate court to conclusively allow wild camping on common land owned by someone with a lorra money: Darwall and another (Appellants) v Dartmoor National Park Authority (Respondent). I've given tribs to the efforts of the UKSC to make their definitive findings readily available to ordinary people. The judgement is always on line in full. There is a two page Press Summary. There is a ~10 minute youtube video (with transcript) of one of the Justices explaining their thinking. In this case, as many others, the UKSC digs out the relevant Acts of Parliament, weasels out the key paragraph - sentence - words - and decides whether they mean This or That - delighting one party to the dispute and plopping the other into a slough of despond. Obvs! it is section 10(1):
B. Provisions concerning public access to commons 

10( 1) Subject to the provisions of this Act and compliance to commons. with all rules, regulations or byelaws relating to the commons and for the time being in force, the public shall have a right of access to the commons on foot and on horseback for the purpose of open-air recreation; and a person who enters on the commons for that purpose without breaking or damaging any wall, fence, hedge, gate or other thing, or who is on the commons for that purpose having so entered, shall not be treated as a trespasser on the commons or incur any other liability by reason only of so entering or being on the commons.

Just in case you get caught in a parallel case later "open-air recreation" includes camping, yes, but is not prescriptive about what folks do to get their jollies. The Judges hope, assume and expect that the Dartmoor National Park Authority will, using good judgment, regulate matters by bye-laws. Don't expect to be able with impunity to buzz folk with drones; set loose your ill-trained dog; or host a concert. But you don't have to ask Mr & Mrs Darwall's permission: they may own the land but they don't regulate the recreation on it.

Stop Press: the morning after I wrote all about theoretic wild camping in a different country, I went for my reg'lar daily yomp up the hill . When I approached the first flat part of the path after the mountain gate, I saw a flash of red stripe and assumed it was a discarded walking pole. Turned out to be the zipper of a tent which was otherwise camouflage against the dullish green background. When I realised that the camper was not sleeping, I called a cheerful 'morning' and powered on past. 30 minutes later I had to go past again and a head popped out to chat. Thomas is a french truck-driver who is having a gap-Summer to walk round Ireland [Dublin - Cork - Galway - Belfast] mostly by designated long-distance footpaths like the Wicklow Way [gregoprev] or The South Leinster Way [whc prev with wild camping].

Time was passing and he needed to get packed and gone, so I took my leave. As I left, I said I'd show him some neolithic petroglyphs [his word] if he was interested when he went past our gaff on his way South. A while later, he arrived. He left his pack [17kg!!!] in the yard and we caught the Ringstone at peak visibility as the sun shone obliquely across the face. Afterwards he accepted a cup of tea, a fill of his water-bottle and a single flapjack before going on his way. Such an open disposition in him; the kind which rains down blessings of hospitality and kindness. Bon v'yage!

 * Jokaisenoikeudet n. Everyman's Right to roam the wilds of Finland. Included is the right to forage for berries and fungi and whatever else you fancy eating. When I was visiting my pal Heikki in Helsinki, he gave me a pair of scissors and told me to come into his back garden and help him cut nettle-tops Urtica dioica for lunch.

20 shades of grape

Did I say that Dau.II was down home and up hill? I did. We went up beyond The Fork the same evening for to see the Sunset - which had been spectacular the night before when she came down from Dublin. The sunset was scheduled for 21:17. But that's when both observer and horizon are at sea-level: we were quite a bit higher than the Castlecomer plateau behind which the sun e v e n t u a l l y dipped until the last bright dot winked out. By which time it was well past 21:20. Had I a nautical chronometer and/or a sextant, I could have calculated the height difference from the time. But I didn't so I couldn't.

Between yomps, Dau.II rolled up her sleeves and leaned into the family freezer which has a tendency to take things in rather than spit them out. A couple of years back, when she was billeted with us, she;d gone with her mother to Malone Fruit Farms and purchased a variety of soft fruit. We also had two years of meagre damson harvest from a sad old leggy Prunus domestica which stands on one of our ditches. And some own self picked bramble blackberries Rubus spp. Four hours of stirring over a hot stove resulted in:

Inventory: 5x blackcurrant curd; 10x black&loganberry; 2x cranberry, clove and anise for Xmas; 8x damson. Well done us. At a cursory glance they all look essentially the same: variations of purple. But every batch is different and every batch is good. Man cannot live by marmalade alone!

Come teatime, I made a batch of scones to act as tasting vehicles: each of the jam options sandwiched between butter and whipped cream à la Devon Cream Tea. [discrete burp] Must do quality control, after all.

Sol sol sol Sol

[solution, solitude, solidarity, Solnit]

I have a friend, in retirement a small-holding wannabee farrrmer like me, who was a Professor of 20thC History at Harvard. He wrote The Book on the extent to which intellectuals were successful in resisting Fascism. Ans: 45 years ago, when Fascism was ceding power to market capitalism, a case could be made that writers and thinkers had played their part in the dissolution of the final solution. Now, was fascism arises from the ashes of globalization, not so much?  Ivy League Profs of 20thC European History are not an endangered species like Profs of Anatomy, but there are few enough of them. My pal inevitably knows Tim Snyder and, unless they've recently fallen out over the political significance of Die Weiße Rose, they are friends. There is no doubt about the intellectual stature of either of these academics, both are fluent in multiple European languages and can read archives in several more. I defer to them, or Norman Davies, for analysis of marches and counter-marches in 1930s Breslau. But there is a long tradition whereby very smart, expensively educated blokes sound off on matter-about-which-they-know-little. Linus Pauling on vitamin C, Dick Lewontin on spandrels, John Sulston on climate; The Blob on ethics. Being a celebrity in one field doesn't give you bragging rights across the board.

It is one of the flattening facts of life that shit happens even if you have Tenure at Ivy. Even the best [for some definitions of best] of us can wreck a car or a cruciate ligament. In December 2019, Tim Snyder suffered a series of medical misadventures in several hospitals across two continents.  He nearly died, if he'd been black and uneducated he would for sure have died.  Early in the book he asserts ". . . colleagues were astounded that my wife and I hadn't called in powerful patrons to protect me when I was in the emergency room." But that doesn't mean he didn't (eventually) get better attention and better care than Joe Median. There is no doubt that my late demented lamented FiL Pat the Salt received better than average access to care and services because he had adult children who were articulate and assertive on his behalf. These advocates weren't expert in Alzheimer's or pressure sores but they were not backward in writing letters or making telephone calls.

Tim "book-writer" Snyder was in the news last month, so I checked the Library to see if they had any of his books. That's how I got to read "Our Malady; lessons in liberty and solidarity" (2020) and how got a little TMI about Snyder's lumbar punctures and septicaemia. It's Our Malady because his survival was at least partly due to the active involvement of his wife Marci in [advocating for] his care. Emergency Room? the game the whole family can play! This book is only 30,000 words and could have used every one to document the medical mill that knocked chunks off him and failed for so many weeks to get on top of his condition.

But Snyder chooses to cover the medical trials in quite telegraphic form and then go off on a rant about CoViD death rates, the end of newsprint, the commercialization of health care, the rise of social media and their indifference to truth or human happiness. You, dear reader, and I are as competent to talk about such matters as Snyder. Although, it must be admitted that Snyder can write clearly (if superficially) about anything to which  he sets his hand. His solution to human happiness in the 2020s is articulated several times as "we cannot be ourselves without help, we cannot thrive in solitude without the solidarity of others".  Now Snyder (and I) may be so happy in his own skin as to thrive in solitude. In this sense I had a very good pandemic: I was mandated to sit on my sofa not talking to anyone for month after lockdown month. But solitude is not the majority preference: most people prefer some company, some shopping; some team-sports; some office banter.

Rebecca Solnit has written better [A Paradise Built in Hell; Hope in the Darkness] and with better evidence about how solidarity / society will bale us out when life gets shitty. In the penultimate chapter Doctors should be in charge, Snyder solves all the problems of Western medicine in 4,000 words of platitudes and wishful thinking. Not for nothing did our own Brian Cowen refer to the Health Ministry as Angola because of the prevalence of landmines.  Health care is a story of unending demand-side hardship with never enough supply-side. I don't have a solution but I know that 4,000 words won't do and so should Snyder.

Tim Snyder and his wife Marci Shore [R] are off to Toronto! In a public statement of privilege dressed up as a protest about the dismantling of Academe by the Trump Administration. And it looks like Yale is keeping Snyder's tenured sofa warm with adjuncts for now. The poor bloody adjuncts have to just tread water in Muskopool because there's only room for grade-six-and-above in the lifeboats.

I guess you don't need to call in powerful patrons when they are beating a path to your door. Apparently in 2016, they thought about such an exit strategy "but ultimately felt a moral obligation to stay, to help mobilize the resistance . . .". In 2025, not so much? Last year Snyder & Shore and their 2 kids were granted Austrian citizenship - the chap was born in Vienna while his folks were researching there. 

Delayed by Merlin

I'm in training! My friend P had a neat way of dealing with requests or suggestions with which she didn't agree / didn't agree with her: "No thanks, I'm in training". It was a sufficiently disconcerting response than nobody ever asked "in training for what?".  

A few weeks ago, I started yomping up the hill behind our house as far as The Fork. 

This geographical feature (two tracks diverge on a heather moor not yellow wood) is very close to 2km due North of my sofa and about 220m further from the centre of the Earth. Let's call it a 10% slope; altho some of the track is more or less flat and so the steep bits are steeper.

About ⅔ of the journey is shared by Destination Fursey without the last 1:6 over 500m climb to St Fursey's Altar. This ~daily walk is not a stroll. I'm on a mission to build up stamina = the mitochondria in my leg muscles, so I can walk longer before collapsing in a wet whimpering heap. Also to break in my boots, so that they fit my gnarly feet better. When I started this regime, I could get there and back in just under an hour. Turns out that I take the same time going up as I do with gravity-assist on the way down. With younger legs and more reliable knees, I used to trot down the track where the footing was level and grassy. A peak-flow meter tells me (and my doctor) that I am a bit weak in the wind but I can trot along downhill for quite a while without running out of puff. The lungs aren't the issue even now; it's the lack of flex at ankle and knee such that a loose stone can send me sprawling . . . and sprawling at my age is unlikely to be bouncy-bouncy start off again.

After a couple of days performing this regime once (sometimes twice) a day, my time was down to 26-27 minutes = 10% faster. Last Sunday 18May evening, with a following wind, it only took me 24m. But that's surely the asymptote unless I run. I've clocked the GPS [Lat Long Elev] data from my phone and/or Barry Dalby's map. The GPS is captured by an app Location-on-Phone which I've used before. Generally if I'm outdoors the app is claiming accuracy of (3.22m = 10½ ft) but successive pics of our front gate over the last tuthree years gives {219 217 223 224 218 222 227 210 186 220 231 233}- average 219m;  range 186m - 233m. So take elevations with a pinch, but not a peck, of salt?

Last week, Dau.II came down for a tuthree days between shifts at the bain-marie shop. She arrived, through a spectacular sunset, on the last train from Dublin and desired that we would walk up to Stoolyen in the morning. That is a shoulder of Mt Leinster: 1km further from home and another 160m of elevation above The Fork. In other words it's a short but significantly steeper addition my regular regime. It was quietly wonderful to be pacing along with one of my favorite people. 

Maybe, not so quiet though? Because Dau.II has recently started paying attention to the birbs. Once your attention has been drawn to chirps, caws, trills and tweetles it is really hard for them to remain background white-noise. She has acquired the Merlin App and kept stopping to see what Merlin's best guess might be to ID a noticeable fragment of bird song. Turns out that we probably have ravens Corvus corax, hoodies Corvus cornix, jackdaws Corvus monedula and (even) carrion crows Corvus corone. The last is considered a visitor in Ireland having been inched out of their common ecological niche by hoodies. But Merlin was confident that they all were calling on the hill. That's just the big black birds, Merlin was also covering the, more difficult, little brown jobs LBJs which were invisible but vocal in the shrubbery.

Merlin? Magic! It makes it so much easier to make progress recognizing the birds with which we share this part of the planet. Of course, knowing the name of a bird isn't the same as knowing how it lives and breathes and makes its living. But it's a start - for which it is worth pausing the mission-yomp to pay attention.

Walking the line of nicety

Last Saturday, like every 3rd Saturday of May for the last 30+ years, The Wayfarers Association ran organized, the Blackstairs Challenge: a 33 km up hill and down dale yomp from Killanure to Glynn via Mt Leinster [780m] and Blackstair [735m]. In earlier times, the route took in Knockroe [540m] with walkers lepping off the S face of the hill and tumbling 300m in less than 1km horizontal. That hard-chaw route is now deprecated and everyone [N=180 this year] comes down our lane. Last year and most of the previous 20+ years, we have serviced this worthy endeavour: first with a) water, then b) seats, then c) flapjacks. There is no doubt these trifling courtesies are used & appreciated:

. . . especially on years like 2025 when the weather is cloudless because shade trees are absent.  The hike starts at 07:30-08:30 and there is a 13:00 ½-way checkpoint just South of us. If you're not there, by then, you are obliged to bug out. The first runners trotted past our gaff at 09:30 and the sweepers paused to finish the flapjacks at 12:30. The sweepers are super fit Effectives with calves like knotted cords who ensure that nobody is left behind in the hills.

In that window, the participants came through in pairs and clumps, not all of them stopping to bide-a-wee in our yard. In between groups, I nipped out to make sure the tap was shut and there were still flapjacks in the tin. Imagine the mortification when, on such a foray at ~10:30, I noticed a jam-jar full of coins beside the tap. Donations have been made before and they aren't refused, but someone had put a "Trail Fairies" label on the jar, which echoed the "Trail Fairies" I put out on the >>Water>> sign several years ago. The shame that walkers might think we were soliciting money for water like it was transactional!! I was instructed to disappear that jar forthwith. Which solved our face-saving issues but put subsequent walkers to a dilemma . . . solved by putting folding money [as L] under a weight on the flapjack table. The jar? enough for 4 trips across the Waterford toll-bridge!

I, for sure, do not spend the morning chatting with the walkers - they have things to do and places to go. But I was caught at the tap by a feller who said thanks for all the fish cookies: "It's not about the cookies; it's about being seen and received" which I thought was a very gracious way of putting the trail fairy relationship. Being on the tramp (Blackstairs or Santiago or PCT) can be lonely and exhausting, so it's nice to be cared for as you might be at home.

Shortly after the hullabaloo faded away, a delegation from The Wayfarers materialized in the yard to present us with a bottle of whiskey; which is getting to be a habit with them. Even without being a boozer, a bottle of Paddy is always handy to have about the house . . . in case someone faints, like. I intend to make a batch of whiskey marmalade with the frozen sevilles left over from this year's marmalade jamboree.

Digging for Yorick

In short order 10 years ago, my best-ever MiL, and her mother died in the same calendar year.  Their graves were marked with generic undertaker's temporary crosses (a snip at €149.95) until the family could manifest a more permanent marker. Eventually the family network turned up a Master Craftsman [advertisement!] and monumental mason who chipped out a tall white spare holey (sic) sculpture inspired by The Cross of Agadez. Tom the Rock suggested name plates [N = 3] and epitaph carved on slate squircles, running down the vertical leg of the cross. And it was so . . .

. . . except for the four digits to mark Pat the Salt's endpoint. When the cross was erected, he was still determined to live forever get the Presidential bonus for passing 100 years. That was several years in the future and, surprizingly, nobody was prepared to have a punt on how long he'd last. Pat didn't make his centenary but he died in October last year. Tom is getting on himself, so adding "1925 - 2024" was not something to be indefinitely delayed. 

The original items of script had been added in the Glendon atelier in Loughrea: in the dry, on a horizontal work bench at a convenient height. For just 4 digits, it was clearly a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain Déise rather than the other way about. A date was fixed and Tom requested-and-required that someone dig a 600 x 600 x 600 mm hole in front of the work-surface, so that he could sit at his work with his feet out of the way below grade. This off piste grave-digging was cleared with the Parish Office; and someone was BobTheShovellist.  

We set off from Caislean Blob on the first Friday of May with a mattock; a short D-handled garden spade; a long-handled navvy's shovel and a One Tonne bulk-material bag. An hour later, I was breaking ground and an hour after that, I had dug down almost to Pat's nose and transferred ~300kg of clay-and-rocks into the big bag. 

We left to get breakfast at the Copper Coast Geopark Visitor's Centre: Seri's home-made bakewell tart is to be recommended. As we left, Tom arrived with his (rather more delicate) tools and set to work a-lettering; telling us to return at 12:45.

It was [gravity assist!] a lot easier to drop the clay back in the hole than it had been removing it. Because 1-tonne-bag, the second half of the spoil could be blurfed in all at once rather than by the shovelful. We stood around for a bit at the graveside feeling delighted with 1) project closure, 2) the weather and 3) being alive and not, like, down-under. Then we repaired to Mount Congreve for lunch. Where, at (76+70+69)/3 = 72 y.o. we more-or-less matched the average age of the clientele . . . which was about 3x the age of the minimum wage servers.

In many parts of rural Ireland it is still the custom for the neighbours to dig the grave while the family are waking the deceased. As I write above, it took unfit office-handed me one hour to create a 600x600x600mm hole. A grave at 600x2000x2000mm requires about 10x as much soil removed. But it doesn't take 10 times as long: because  a) participants take turns shovelling and joshing b) there's more elbow room in a bigger hole.

The sun also rises

We are going, going Gone [photvoltaic] PV Solar because we desire to save the planet and save a packet. I lose track of time, it has been so long a-coming but having 'expressed interest' in December 2023 and signed papers about a year later, ground-works started at the beginning of April and took a bit longer than they or we expected. But we were blessed with ground as dry and hard as you get round here without being like the drought of 2018. Then we had snow and a week of rain and half a day's work in the drizzle. But finally, finally, Eco Horizon's sparkies came on the last day of April, installed the DC→AC 'inverter' and connected all the wires. We are now supplying surplus electricity to The Grid.

The 18x photovoltaic panels convert photons into electric current whenever the sun shines. I am told that they generate more ooomph on crisp sunny Winter days because the PV works better if the panels are cold. Who knew? The deal is that at max drive, the array generates ~5.25kW. This is when to switch on the immersion, wash the dishes and all the bed-sheets [but not together], bake cakes, invite all the neighbours and boil banks of kettles for tea.  If we run out of sheets, or are off-site on our free travel-passes, the surplus electrons are sold to The Grid for €0.20 /kWh. The ESB or their subcontractors sell it on for €0.38; and indeed that's the price we pay for units used after dark or when it's raining. The Solar energy is not free: we, and the Planet, would be better off if we didn't boil so many kettles. But it's half price using our own solar power.

We could just make zero change to our habits and life-style and watch our grid consumption go down. But where's the fun in that?  One of the sparkies held my hand while I down-loaded the Fronius Solar.Watt app onto my smart phone. Typical display shown above [L]. It clocks the incomming; and splits that between what we are currently using and diverting the rest to The Grid . . . in real-time with a lag of about 5 seconds. This particular snapshot shows that somebody has switched on the immersion heater before our PV panels are ready for the task; so we're pulling from The Grid. We don't, yet, have any batteries so that icon is not active. Here's the whole day's PV traffic showing inter alia the draw from the immersion heater at 0900hrs. Looks like, on a day of basically continuous sunshine, we are generating max electricity from ~11:30 to ~17:00. For much of the morning, we have a row of tall pine trees shading the panels.

I am unaccountably, hand-clappy, delighted with our new kit. And look, it comes with a bus shelter for when we get an electric car to charge.

Slots and wriggles

Occasionally, I'll be reading a book and come across a passage that makes me think "are we twins separated at birth?" because it sounds a bit like me. eee, but I do like a list, preferably alphabetical. So I took a frisson of recognition with "Adam's apples, beards, behaviours, breasts, clitorises, erotic orientations, gonads, hair, interests, labia, menstrual signs, penises, prostates, scrotums, skeletal proportions, uteruses, voices, vaginas, and vulvas".  Jakers? Wot's 'e reading now? 

Well, seeing as you asked, I ordered Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (2015) from the library. Probably because I'd listened to an interview [as prev] by the author Alice Dreger. In case the title is ringing a bell, that disembodied finger pointing to high heaven, was one organ covered by Suzie Dent's 2024 Vital Organs: A History of The World's Most Famous Body Parts [whc prev]. Dreger's book hasn't much to do with The Digit, which features more as a talisman because Galileo is an inspiration as an early advocate of evidence over authority. She reckons that Galileo had a feisty sense of humour, which is always an asset in a hero. She is not without a wry quip or two herself: "Some sex variations occur at the level of sex chromosomes, some at the level of hormones, some at the level of hard-to-detect internal structures and some at the level of anatomical parts that you can see with the naked eye (assuming your eye isn't the only thing that's naked)"; indeed and ho ho.

Dreger has spent a lifetime hoping [we're not there yet] to establish common ground between activists and evidence. Her experience is that activists bond in an echo-chamber of like-minded advocates for a cherished cause . . . and are less open to contrary evidence than people who really don't have skin in the game. Pity, because, in an ideal world, truth / evidence would be the touchstone which informs all our actions even if it requires admitting we have been wrong. Dreger has saddled up to rescue biomedical researchers who have published evidence-based findings which run contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist.

She started off her career as a historian researching 19thC attitudes to, and outcomes for, those born with ambiguous sex or gender. That led her to meet many living people who didn't really fit in the binary M or F ideal. And that got her involved with Mike Bailey and his Trans Wars. Bailey promoted the ideas of Ray Blanchard that some transgender women have gotten there through autogynephilia - getting off on the idea of being a woman. The standard dogma was that sex had nothing to do with transgender. Dreger was indignant at coordinated ad hominem attacks on Bailey and his family rather than on the evidence he marshaled in support of his hypothesis. In defending Bailey against the misinformed hue and cry, Dreger herself was targeted by The Opposition in ways that were wearing and distressing. 

Later, Dreger put the hue-and-cry boot on the other foot to pursue Prof Maria New for pushing prenatal dexamethasone on pregnant women who might be carrying an XX fetus with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia CAH [whc prev]. Dreger could find no evidence [it's that data again!] that prenatal dex had ever been properly trialed or evaluated before being pushed as safe and effective for both mother and child. The Feds (FDA, and the OHRP Office for Human Research Protections) investigated and concluded nothing to see here. Dreger begs to differ on that, but does concede that Maria New believed (she died last year) that she was giving the best available treatment to the problem of ambiguous presentation of gender at birth. Galileo's Middle Finger would read like a real life thriller in the vein of National Treasure if it just covered racing though the corridors of gender power. But there's more . . .

• Napoleon Chagnon (1938 - 2019) was a US anthropologist who spent years living with, and gathering data about, the Yanomamö [two of whom R] in the jungles of Venezuela. He concluded from his data that [this tribe of] hunter-gatherers were not so much noble savage as savage savage and wrote it all up in Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968). Like Bailey, Chagnon [rather than his science] was attacked by journalist Patrick Tierney in his 2000 book Darkness in El Dorado. Cudgels were taken up by the AAA American Anthropological Association who castigated Chagnon for his genetic determinism and sociobiology research ethics. Dreger spent a year working to help rehabilitate Chagnon and expose the bias and tendentiousness of Tierney's thesis . . . and the US anthropological establishment. Chagnon's last book was Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (2013).
• In 1998, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman  concluded "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples", and it was published, after peer review, in the Psychological Bulletin. They found that not all victims of childhood sexual abuse (a very broad spectrum of adverse activity) were irredeemably traumatized by the experience. Ask me how I [N = 1] know this to be true.The Press and Politicians distilled this modest discovery as a "license for pedophiles" and made hay about degenerate scientists - rather than, like, reading the paper and criticizing the sample size [N = 36,000 as you ask] or the stats.
  
• In 2000, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill published A Natural History of Rape. Their thesis was that there was a sexual element to sexual assault. That ran counter to the belief of some feminists that rape was all about [unequal] power and violence against women. Palmer and Thornhill also concluded that there was variation is the experience of, and recovery from, the trauma of coercive sex. Dreger interviewed Palmer some years after the event and they compared notes about how to deal with, and recover from, an ad hominem social media shit-storm.

Sorry, not sorry, that's as far as I go. There's no point in editorializing any more than I have because I'll either be preaching to the choir or being flung across the room [I hope your phone lands on the sofa not !ploosh!  in the kitchen sink]. Wikipedia will fill in the details, if you don't have time to read Galileo's Middle Finger. But Dreger's bottom line is carpe datum before you sound off with your certainties. It was easier to read the book detached [insofar as that is possible when we're getting one side of the argument] from, and skeptical of, the righteous certainties of the author.

Next Pres 2025

I was rabbiting on about the betting on the next Pope and then remembered that Paddy Power is usually running a book on the next President of Ireland. Michael D. Higgins swore up and down that he was only in it for the one term when we elected him in 2011. But he couldn't surrender the trappings of bling in 2018 and sojourned another 7 years in the Áras. He has to go now before November 2025. And a very wide field is

9/4 Mairead McGuinness [FG former EU Commissioner] Seen [R] eclipsing a star.

4/1 Frances Black [Singer-Senator]

6/1 Heather Humphreys [FG]

8/1 Seán Kelly [presumably the FG MEP, not Sean "fada" Kelly the cyclist from the Déise??]

8/1 Catherine Connolly [Ind TD WAS Leas-Cheann Comhairle ]

10/1 Bertie Ahern [FF]; Michael McDowell [PD] ; Frances Fitzgerald [FG]; Fergus Finlay [Lab. Barnardos]

16/1 Emily O'Reilly; Micheál "Taoiseach" Martin; Tommy Tiernan; Barry Andrews

20/1 Mary Lou McDonald

25/1 Mark Daly; Roisin Shortall; Miriam O'Callaghan; Jarlath Burns

33/1 Catherine Murphy; Joe Brolly; Holly Cairns; Cynthia Ni Mhurchu; John Finucane; Lynn Ruane

40/1 Luke Ming Flanagan; Enda Kenny; Peter Casey

50/1 Aengus O Snodaigh; Gerard Craughwell; Gerry Adams; Ruairi Quinn

66/1 Linda Martin; Sharon Keogan; Eamon O'Cuiv; Colm O'Gorman

80/1 Mary Davis; Olivia O'Leary

100/1 Leo Varadkar; Gareth Sheridan; Regina Doherty; David Norris; Kevin Sharkey; Pat Cox; Eamon Ryan; Ivana Bacik; Sean Gallagher; Philip Nolan

200/1 Tony Holohan; Richard Bruton; Dana Rosemary Scallon; Niall Boylan

500/1 Gemma O'Doherty; Damien Duff; Cecelia Ahern; Ryan Tubridy; Joe Duffy; Roy Keane; Shane Ross; Nina Carberry; Panti Bliss

Bookmakers are not making moral or ethical judgments in assigning odds but they are making value [max profit while min risk] judgments. But you have to ask why, of all the people in all the world, they are making public their assessment that nobody likes broadcasters Ryan Tubridy and Joe Duffy. Is it just Ukraienvy that gets stand-up comedian Tommy Tiernan shorter odds [16/1] than MaryLou "I am always serious" McDonald [20/1]. I captured these odds on 28 Apr 25. I'll try to remember to take another scrape in a month's time or at the end of June for comparison. As with polls and popes, the dynamics of probability / odds is more informative than a single snapshot.

Tagging the lobsters

I guess I'm Dr Know-it-Some ? South American capital cities; 19thC British politics; European railways; synonymous codon usage - I'm a handy addition to your table quiz team. Although codon usage doesn't come up often. I am hopeless with other areas of knowledge and expertise. But I'm willing to learn . . . enough to write 700 words for a Blob. I've really cut down on my YouTube perhaps because I am too broad-minded for The Algorithm?? But I recognise enthusiasts by the cut of their jib regardless of what their cargo is.

I have something of a grá for John Locker, a Geordie who now lives with his family in Cornwall because the fishing and weather is better than the North Sea. Vlogging their adventures with flounder Platichthys flesus and conger Conger conger turns out to be more interesting than watching paint dry. That's partly because his excitement is catching but it's also about the endless and colourful variety of what gets drug up from the depths. 

So last week Locker was crab-pooling along the rocky shore. I won't call it beach-combing because, contra me, he was ignoring buoys, cracked fish-boxes and hanks of old rope. It was a revelation to adult me how many crustaceans could be hidden in the crevices of rock-pools. Maybe not to 9 y.o. me because then I had time to immerse myself in those small contained worlds and really l◎◎k. Later he gets into a wet-suit and snorkle and plunges into the sea. After a bit he surfaces with "a berried hen" which was a totally new label for me. Female lobsters Homarus gammarus produce A Lot [10,000 to 100,000] of eggs but she keeps then about her person after fertilisation. There the larvae develop, changing colour as they do so, until, after about a year, the young detach from their mother's apron strings and start an uncertain life as a small nutritious piece of plankton.

People love lobster. One of the traumatic events of my life was going to a sea-food restaurant in New England with my boss. As a seafood noob, I got to sit inside the table looking out across the room. Just over Neil's shoulder was an enormous woman wearing a plastic bib voraciously tearing a lobster apart with the help of pliers lobster crackers. There was drool. My clam chowder was excellent. But the demand for lobster can easily outstrip supply and something must be done. 

Of course, in an ideal sustainable world, lobster fishers would toss back any berried hens that make their way into the pots. That would add 10k - 100k to the larval stocks. But that is a vague benefit for The Commons and The Future and a loss for the poor wet lobster-fisher on which the supply-to-table depends.  Chances are that none of those thousands of larvae contribute to the next generation; because prey. 

One way to tilt the process in favour of  survival of the species is to make it illegal to land / sell undersized [carapace < 90mm] lobster. It takes several years to get that big and to start reproducing. Another more recent [how recent depends on country] ban is on the landing of lobsters with a distinctive V-shaped notch in the tail. Occasionally someone gets busted by Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority. Those notches are put there by dogoodnik lobsterers who apply the mark to berried hens before throwing them back in the sea. It is not sufficient to ban the landing of gravid females because it is the work of moments for the unscrupulous to scrape the eggs off before tossing them in the boat's lobster-locker for sale.

It is article of faith that notching lobsters doesn't cause pain. Because we care about that too.

Seneschal at Scullogue

Last Sunday of April?  It's Blackstairs Cycle Challenge time! I can ride a bike, I have ridden a bike, I cycled 60km, for the craic, on Whit Monday 1969, when I was 14 y.o.  Not a bother, no training, just saddled up and cycled to the nearest beach and back. Almost exactly 40 years later, I should have been teaching part-time at The Institute when the car broke down in Waterford with The Beloved on board.  I cd/shd have cancelled class but reckoned that class was only 40km and 5 hours distant . . . and I had a bike. It was fine, I set off, arrived in good time, taught my 2 hour class and set off home for tea and medals.

Well. reader, the return trip was considerably more arduous. It wasn't really the fact that The Institute was 15m about sea level and Home is 200m higher. It was rather that the coastings downhill didn't compensate for many moderate uphills. On the final approach, not only could I not cycle up any incline; my legs were too wobbly to even push the bike and I had to collapse on the verge for 15 minutes. That's the difference between 14 and 54!

I'm still a fan of cycling - good for the planet; mighty for stamina; great in lycra - but I am now an infrastructure guy: I was in HiViz last year directing traffic and I was there in 2019 for the very first Blackstairs Cycle Challenge. In the interim? Coronarama! So, of course, I volunteered to help this year. Here [R] is Seneschal Selfie: point person at the most crucial intersection on the course: where the hard chaws [up for a 110km or even 140km jaunt around Mt Leinster] are separated for those with  more modest ambition, broken wind, spavin, strangles or colic. Miss the signs here late in the day and you could be condemned to wander the Plains of Wexford until the end of time. The Seneschal was en poste for 3 hours and the cyclists came in clots peletons, so I had plenty time to survey the face of our hill to work out where The Perp set the heather blazing on 12 Apr 25. And also to look closely at the signage - which is the same as last year with a new date superimposed on the post-board in not quite the same font. But then >!hark!< a distant chatter manifest in the West and another peleton whooshed past.

They would wave, or at least raise one finger from the handlebars, and many of them would disconcertingly say "Thanks".  Later, an ou'fella stopped to say the same thing, like, in person. I demurred "I should rather thank you for coughing up the entry fee and working your calves into knotted cords; I'm just standing here waving and gurning". To which he replied "Yes, but we enjoy this shit" wch, I guess, is fair enough.

Pointing the finger

And remember how much a hand can express,
How a single slight movement of it can say more
Than millions of words – dropped hand, clenched fist,
Snapping fingers, thump up, thumb down,
Raised in blessing, clutched in passion, begging,
Welcome, dismissal, prayer, applause,
And a million other signs, too slight, too subtle,
Too packed with meaning for words to describe,
A universal language understood by all.

That would be [prev in context] Hugh "Marxist" MacDiarmid suggesting that all human endeavour amounts to a bit of dust flicked heedlessly off God's cuff. I guess we're not usually conscious of gestures - either made by us or seen in others. But that's not to say either a) that we are heedless or b) that gestures don't matter. 

I think that gesture may be treated separately from Sign Language on which I've had a good bit to say: BSL .ne. ISL - Makaton - Koko - Haptic - Washoe - SingAndSign. Tom Scott agrees that they are different; that gesture is co-speech or paralinguistic communication. Maybe like the adverbs of the basic comms.

Lauren Gawne [the Southern half of Lingthusiasm] has f i n a l l y brought her book to publication: Gesture: a slim guide [that's an autopuff alert from Gawne which abstracts 5 cool facts about gesture]. The Blob has been quite the fanboi for Lingthusiasm, the podcast. They took their podcast to YT for episode 30 about Gesture. Obvs you're going to lose a lot in such a dialog if all the info is coming only through your headphones. That's a still clip [R] of Gawne gesturing a tomato rolling down hill. Turkish tomatoes roll exactly the same as English ones; but the accompanying gestures track the constraints of each language. Turkish (and french) emphasizes the down, while English privileges the roll.

If you are a normally unobservant person, you won't thank me for making you aware of co-speech. You'll never be comfortable watching your boss's left hand chopping the air to show herself she's in charge.