Not a misprint for knickers, which I covered in continent-wide depth and mathematical precision in 2013. Dau.II and her bloke had a two night break in a Spa Hotel a while back and I got the low-down during a Skype session a few days later. I asked, because I'm like that and the apple falls not far from the tree, if she'd come away with the shower caps. Apparently not, but she'd scooped the double-wrapped tea-bags & sugar sachets from the complementary tea tray. The Bloke was in the background making loop-de-loop gestures around his head but eroded his high moral ground by coming into the foreground suggesting that the dinky bottles of shampoo and conditioner were more useful spoils of spa.
18ish years ago when the girls were tiny, I was in the international jet-travel stage of my life. As the Irish node of a European quango, I was off to Brussels or Oslo or Helsinki or Lausanne or Bari or Hinxton about once a month. In those days, before Ryanair started a drive to the bottom, you got a 'free' meal served with dinky cutlery on any flight over an hour. Just about functional for scooping some engineered food product from a melamine or tin-foil container, they were just perfick for small hands . . . so I popped a set into my carry on. If I travelled on a different airline, I brought off a different set of mini cutlery, so there would be a choice at home. And, of course, I brought home the dinky bottles of shampoo from the *** hotel where I was billetted. Is that bad? I guess. And it's not a victimless crime - the accumulated pilferring put a stop to the last "luxury" of international travel and contributed to the avalanche of throw-away plastic which is sent to land-fill after one use. Cheaper for the airline, a disaster for the planet. I don't do that any more - too much stuff. I am the only person in The Institute who re-uses the throw-away plastic spoons - mine is now as brown as the inside of my works tea-cup. One advantage of rarely washing my cup, apart from saving water, is that nobody else is tempted to use it.
Back in my travelling day, that cup often came with me on foreign travel because the cups at continental dining-rooms were piffling little things almost demi-tasse in size. I need a good three cups of tea to re-hydrate in the morning and bringing my own, larger, mug meant fewer trips back to the buffet. And yes, I'd bring the little plastic packs of jam back home for the girls - especially if they looked exotic: Aprikose, boysenmarja, aardbei. If I was in Nederland, I'd do my best to nip round the corner to an Albert Heijn and buy a couple of packets of hagel. I paid for the hagel but I think the jam was just as exciting to small girls . . . the taste of not bought but stolen apples.
I got some of my training in this in graduate school. My boss there taught me a lot about genetics and more than I needed to know about parasitology. But he also taught me how to live: how to be thrifty but not mean. He could ask for two fried eggs and a glass of beer in 15 languages. This life-skill only let him down once, in Turkish, when his order was received with looks of incredulity but delivered as two dozen fried eggs. We were on a field trip to Canada once and the flea-bag motel where we stayed had offended him, so, as we were leaving, he threw the toilet rolls and the waste-paper basket into the back of the car. I remonstrated that this clutter would do us no good and he growled "Wha'? I paid for this. I could have been on the toilet all night from the meal we ate there."
Years later, we were visiting Boston when the Senior Center across the street had their annual stuff sale. He was delighted because he could buy himself a new top-coat against the forthcoming Winter. Plenty of choice in high quality men's over-coats - it was an affluent suburb - and Neil secured one for $5. I congratulated him and suggested that it would do for many years if he got it dry-cleaned occasionally. "Dry cleaned??? It would cost $15 to dry clean and I can buy a new one next year for five bucks".
Wednesday, 20 July 2016
Monday, 18 July 2016
Killarney de Luxe
It must be genetic: my family segregates about 50:50 between 'high-maintenance' and 'timeless simplicity'. Dau.II leans towards the latter, having no desire for foreign holidays, fast cars or fancy clothes. She left home just before she got the vote and in short order found a place to live, and a job and started to pay a modest amount of tax. She gets paid less than the much talked about 'living wage' of €11.50 but (of course) more than the minimum wage of €9.15. There are few people with more capacity for contentment. Living wage definition: It is a wage which makes possible a minimum acceptable standard of living. It is evidence based and grounded in social consensus. Consensus gives me the creeps, it smacks of uniformity which makes life so much more boring than diversity. After Dau.II moved into her first apartment in Cork, to express the affluence of their lifestyle, she said "We lack for nothing. Why, there are four sorts of cheese in the fridge". She spends a lot of time in her own kitchen cooking up a storm. Luckily her bloke has one of those young man's metabolisms that, given a toaster and sufficient butter, can work steadily through an 800g sliced loaf and not put on an extra kilo.
Last week, she was asked to take a week's holiday so that the time-manager could roster more of the newbies and get them trained in before August's madness. They could have sat at home looking contentedly down at the swans on the River Lee and making progress through the cheese, but she got in touch with one of her high-maintenance rellies and asked for the best website for a fancy hotel.
And that's how Herself and Himself finished up having a Summer 2 Night Spa Break at the the Muckross Park Hotel. As you see from the promotional picture [above] the rooms are enormous and en suite with spectacular views.
The 2 night deal throws in complimentary limousine bicycles, towelling bathrobes - all the promotional pictures seem to feature fit young people doing unlikely things in white bathrobes like it was a cult initiation - unlimited breakfast and a choice of either one 4-course dinner-for-two or one afternoon tea ditto. They plonked for the dinner but lashed out on the afternoon tea as well to get the full de luxe experience. Imagine having your tea&cakes delivered by a disembodied hand [L] in front of a roaring log fire: soooo Dracula. The tea deal included a soupçon of fruit compote served in a little chocolate cup as well as more predictable iced dainties and crust-trimmed sandwiches. Pity about the unromantic china cups in the picture, eh? they look like the robust catering-ware that we have in the works canteen at The Institute or that Hans Rosling used as a teaching prop at Lindau. As you might expect, Dau.II and The Bloke were, apart from children-with-parents, the youngest customers by at least 20 years. But there was not even the slightest hint by the staff that they were some sort of imposters. Working in the catering trade herself, she was able to have a bit of a laugh with the workers, and I think it must have been a relief for all hands that here was a table that wasn't going to be insufferably pretentious about the claret.
A couple of days after they returned to quotidian Cork, we had a post mortem by Skype. I've been tolots of some fancy hotels - always on someone else's nickel as I'm more of a hostel man myself. But most of them concentrate on the facade and the promotional push and let the details, the crumbs and the accumulated scuzz fall where they may. 20 years ago, for example, the best hotel in Athlone was The Prince of Wales which was all Victorian brass and plush-industrial carpet on the ground floor but shabby and worn out [including a dangerous hole in the carpet] after you turned on the landing towards the bedroom floors. My bedroom had a view over air-conditioning ducts and a discarded sneaker. At least the [different] hotel was clean when I was in Athlone again two years ago. Let me report that, as well as perfectly pitched service, The Muckross Park Hotel was spotless for the 24/2 that the kids were there.
A recent biography of Montaigne [bloboprev] is called How To Live ... [reviewed]. I'm still on the look-out for clues to this perennial question. I think Dau.II may be on to something in thus supporting the local economy. Because I know my own business model [bodging, make-do, austerity and less] is more in step with the 19thC than the 21stC and I certainly don't claim it is good for all times and all people.
A couple of days after they returned to quotidian Cork, we had a post mortem by Skype. I've been to
A recent biography of Montaigne [bloboprev] is called How To Live ... [reviewed]. I'm still on the look-out for clues to this perennial question. I think Dau.II may be on to something in thus supporting the local economy. Because I know my own business model [bodging, make-do, austerity and less] is more in step with the 19thC than the 21stC and I certainly don't claim it is good for all times and all people.
Sightlines
I had a birthday last month and Dau.I the Reader got me a couple of books: one about Dick Feynman and creativity and the other a medical autobiography in essays by Lewis "Lives of the Cell" Thomas. If you follow up the links (I know nobody actually does this), you will see that I was delighted to have had the opportunity to read those books. Last week she was on the Skype and asked if I'd started Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie and I looked disconcertingly blank. As well as the two books that arrived in the post, she'd left that one on the window-sill wrapped in brown paper when she was last at home at the end of May. Sightlines had sunk almost without trace under a clutter of Lidl catalogs and unsolicited circulars for car-insurance.
Eee, but I do love a good book of essays - it's like a chunkier, slightly less ephemeral blog. Many people give tribs, as original and best, to Montaigne's Essaies and I do like parts of that book but I also like very much Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, which is a series of reflections about the immediate neighborhood of Dillard's Virginia back-yard. If you tell it right, then there is something profound in the inconsequential. If you want something less natural history and more embedded in the Arts Block, you may try Ex Libris by Ann Fadiman which is famous for its list of words to prove that you've read a lot: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcalde, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodemon, goetic, opapanax. If you know the meaning of more than five of these then you've had a yet more expensive education than me. Or a very cheap autodidact education; because Dau.I knew a whole bunch of words in that list which I didn't and her education cost precisely nothing. Why, I just used the word sepoy last week. Both Sightlines and Ex Libris are in the 0.01c remainder bin at Amazon. As is Findings, an earlier book of Jamie's essays [reviewed]. Buy any of these for your beloved's bday . . . and you get to read them yourself - win-win!
Sightlines is written by an established writer who is also Professor of Creative Writing at Stirling U in Scotland. Being a writer, especially a poet, is possible if you have tuberculosis and are starving in a garret (worked for Keats) but you get to travel a bit if you're a Professor - either on your own nickel or at someone else's expense. Kathleen Jamie has made copy out of St. Kilda [bloboprev], Greenland, North Rona, paleolithic caves in Spain, the moon and the whale museum in Bergen. No, she hasn't been to the moon, no woman has, but she's made the logistically difficult trek to those other places and found something poetic and interesting to say about them. You know she's a poet because, on page 2 she writes "Goose feathers, caught on the dry leaves and twigs, frittering in the terse breeze". Terse breeze? that's arresting because it's not quite right. But maybe she worked long and hard to craft that sentence so that it was both arresting and true to the poet's experience. The next page the breeze has changed: "It’s a stern breeze, blowing from the land, inscousant now, but, like everything here, it carries a sense of enormous strength withheld." Inscousant? I don't think that's a word - it's used nowhere else in the googleverse. Typo for insouciant? but it can hardly be both stern and insouciant?? Later, in the chapter on an eclipse of the moon, two more challenging words appear: "A shadow crept onwards, upwards, smooring the moon's light as it went . . ." and later "A smirr of cloud drifted across." Now smirr is a good Scots word, which she uses in another essay about the moon: "It shone through a smirr of cloud, spreading its diffused light across the water."
It's just wonderful to be pushed in this way, having to work at the text puts you back in school maybe; but it also compels you to think about what you're reading rather than skimming through to get its general sense. Sometimes there's more to an essay or a poem (or both as with some of these pieces) than the meaning: the metre, the resonance, the precise language is itself a joy.
Eee, but I do love a good book of essays - it's like a chunkier, slightly less ephemeral blog. Many people give tribs, as original and best, to Montaigne's Essaies and I do like parts of that book but I also like very much Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, which is a series of reflections about the immediate neighborhood of Dillard's Virginia back-yard. If you tell it right, then there is something profound in the inconsequential. If you want something less natural history and more embedded in the Arts Block, you may try Ex Libris by Ann Fadiman which is famous for its list of words to prove that you've read a lot: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcalde, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodemon, goetic, opapanax. If you know the meaning of more than five of these then you've had a yet more expensive education than me. Or a very cheap autodidact education; because Dau.I knew a whole bunch of words in that list which I didn't and her education cost precisely nothing. Why, I just used the word sepoy last week. Both Sightlines and Ex Libris are in the 0.01c remainder bin at Amazon. As is Findings, an earlier book of Jamie's essays [reviewed]. Buy any of these for your beloved's bday . . . and you get to read them yourself - win-win!
Sightlines is written by an established writer who is also Professor of Creative Writing at Stirling U in Scotland. Being a writer, especially a poet, is possible if you have tuberculosis and are starving in a garret (worked for Keats) but you get to travel a bit if you're a Professor - either on your own nickel or at someone else's expense. Kathleen Jamie has made copy out of St. Kilda [bloboprev], Greenland, North Rona, paleolithic caves in Spain, the moon and the whale museum in Bergen. No, she hasn't been to the moon, no woman has, but she's made the logistically difficult trek to those other places and found something poetic and interesting to say about them. You know she's a poet because, on page 2 she writes "Goose feathers, caught on the dry leaves and twigs, frittering in the terse breeze". Terse breeze? that's arresting because it's not quite right. But maybe she worked long and hard to craft that sentence so that it was both arresting and true to the poet's experience. The next page the breeze has changed: "It’s a stern breeze, blowing from the land, inscousant now, but, like everything here, it carries a sense of enormous strength withheld." Inscousant? I don't think that's a word - it's used nowhere else in the googleverse. Typo for insouciant? but it can hardly be both stern and insouciant?? Later, in the chapter on an eclipse of the moon, two more challenging words appear: "A shadow crept onwards, upwards, smooring the moon's light as it went . . ." and later "A smirr of cloud drifted across." Now smirr is a good Scots word, which she uses in another essay about the moon: "It shone through a smirr of cloud, spreading its diffused light across the water."
It's just wonderful to be pushed in this way, having to work at the text puts you back in school maybe; but it also compels you to think about what you're reading rather than skimming through to get its general sense. Sometimes there's more to an essay or a poem (or both as with some of these pieces) than the meaning: the metre, the resonance, the precise language is itself a joy.
Sunday, 17 July 2016
Love is deaf 170716
I didn't set out to find three short amateur movies about the trials of being young and deaf in a hearing world but I did:
One of the family e-round-robins fingered a tweet by AC "longhair/philosopher" Grayling citing this flashmob as an example of the European culture that Brexit was leaving behind.
More filmlets without deaf people:
One of the family e-round-robins fingered a tweet by AC "longhair/philosopher" Grayling citing this flashmob as an example of the European culture that Brexit was leaving behind.
- Ode an die freude is the EU anthem, I bet less that 1/100 know the words.
More filmlets without deaf people:
Community compassion
You might wonder where my recent interest in the treatment of the demented sprang from and I'm not about to tell you. But I will share with you that, in Ireland, the police have no specific training in dealing with demented people. That seems a bit of a hole because there are a lot of people who qualify for being on the Alzheimer Society's books and that number is not diminishing. In one small Irish town, the local cops get an "Alzheimer Call" about once a week but that is almost always a missing person call. That can be dealt with in a relatively generic way: missing child, missing dog, missing granny - there's a protocol. Once they've hunted down the quarry, they deliver it home and write a report. They don't have to speak to the dog or the demented old person. There might be questions asked about why the child legged it, but not the other cases. But what if the demented person isn't missing but in the police station? Is there an efficient, compassionate, effective way of dealing with her? We all appreciate that not all dementias are Alzheimer's; there's syphilis-induced General Paresis of the Insane GPI and schizophrenia for starters. Also there are degrees of being bonkers but the diversity and difficulty of diagnosis isn't sufficient excuse To Do Nothing.
I was listening on the wireless to an interview with someone who worked for the Asperger's Society. She was shilling for her people and her charity, of course, but she was also informing me and Joe Public about what it's like to be on that spectrum. They (we?) don't like to be touched / hugged, for example. I thought it was because I was British. If everyone appreciated that touching and personal space might be an issue here, then we'd have more appropriate approach distances and make someone else a bit more comfortable. Making people comfortable is the key to good manners.
A young chap I know found himself in trouble with the police recently and was shocked at how little consideration he got. The beat cops didn't want to hear his story, they just wanted him to do what they told him and do it now. Hmmm, that was instructive. In Ireland, the police are not armed, so there was no chance of my young pal getting shot - he passes for white for starters - but his treatment / objectification was on the same spectrum as that experienced by the black chaps who are getting offed by law-enforcement at the rate of one a month in the USA. Kottke has a piece on the mentality of would-be law enforcement officers which is consonant with my superficial psychological analysis from two years ago.
If young men have an excess of compassion then they sign up for Médecins Sans Frontières MSF or the Red Cross, not the police. But I suggest to you that we all have some level of compassion and that, with appropriate training / intervention this might be nurtured. It just takes a passing thought of "there but for a very expensive education go I" to give us pause before demonising The Other. If the Minister of Justice makes a Compassion Course a merit-winner in the dreaded CPD [continuous professional development] requirements for police officers then there may be slots for the rest of us to fill if a particular course is not fully subbed up by the Gardai.
I was listening on the wireless to an interview with someone who worked for the Asperger's Society. She was shilling for her people and her charity, of course, but she was also informing me and Joe Public about what it's like to be on that spectrum. They (we?) don't like to be touched / hugged, for example. I thought it was because I was British. If everyone appreciated that touching and personal space might be an issue here, then we'd have more appropriate approach distances and make someone else a bit more comfortable. Making people comfortable is the key to good manners.
A young chap I know found himself in trouble with the police recently and was shocked at how little consideration he got. The beat cops didn't want to hear his story, they just wanted him to do what they told him and do it now. Hmmm, that was instructive. In Ireland, the police are not armed, so there was no chance of my young pal getting shot - he passes for white for starters - but his treatment / objectification was on the same spectrum as that experienced by the black chaps who are getting offed by law-enforcement at the rate of one a month in the USA. Kottke has a piece on the mentality of would-be law enforcement officers which is consonant with my superficial psychological analysis from two years ago.
If young men have an excess of compassion then they sign up for Médecins Sans Frontières MSF or the Red Cross, not the police. But I suggest to you that we all have some level of compassion and that, with appropriate training / intervention this might be nurtured. It just takes a passing thought of "there but for a very expensive education go I" to give us pause before demonising The Other. If the Minister of Justice makes a Compassion Course a merit-winner in the dreaded CPD [continuous professional development] requirements for police officers then there may be slots for the rest of us to fill if a particular course is not fully subbed up by the Gardai.
Saturday, 16 July 2016
Mealamine not!
Melamine also combines very handily with formaldehyde [the body pickler] to make thermosetting plastics like Formica. Formica was The Thing when I was growing up: super for counter-tops - a swipe with a wet cloth sure beats scrubbing down a deal table with a bristled brush. Back then the other techno-wonder was 'melamine' cups and plates which are essentially the same as Formica. You could fire a melamine plate at the floor and it would bounce. Much lighter than china, too, if you're going for a picnic.
Switch tracks here. The difference among the major food groups fats, carbs and proteins is that the proteins are made of amino [-NH2] acids. Each unit has at least one nitrogen atom. I think most of us think of 'protein' as more valuable than mere carbohydrates. None of us, not even the vegetarians, in the West have diets deficient in protein although vegans [no eggs, no dairy] have to work hard to make up their quota. In the Third World, otoh, getting enough protein can be a bit of a scrabble, and this is particularly imperative for infants: without sufficient protein you have really short kids.
How do food manufacturers get the data to fill in the 'quantity of protein' line the table-of-contents? They use the Kjeldahl test, a classic 19thC chemical assay invented by Johan Kjeldahl in 1883. I've done [or students have done under my supervision] a Kjeldahl test and, ominously mistakes were made. But if you leave me out of the equation, the Kjeldahl test is universally adopted to estimate the protein content of foods, because it is simple, reliable and reproducible; and it scales up.
But Kjeldahl is 'gamable': you can adulterate, say, milk powder with a white dust that is particularly rich in nitrogen . . . Melamine! Today marks the anniversary of when the Chinese milk powder scandal of 2008 blew up. Mao and his people in the PRC had a vision of a socialist paradise where no child was left behind and everyone had a fair chance at getting an education and making an honest living. But it's really difficult to make everyone a saint and as the PRC started to join the rest of us in a financial incentive driven economy, opportunities presented themselves. ANNyway, on 16th July 2008, 16 (sixteeen!) infants in Gansu were diagnosed with kidney stones. It must have been a bit like the multiple cases microcephaly that's blown across South America this year. Nevertheless, it took a smart epidemiologist to recognise that there was a case to answer. Then it took a bit of legwork to a) find further cases in neighbouring provinces and b) track down a cause. A nice controlled experiment I reckon - some Chinese mothers still using their breasts for the purpose intended and some thinking that 'formula' was the coming thing. The formula babies had all the kidney damage. In the heel of the hunt, 300,000 small children were found to have consumed the melamine-tainted milk, 54,000 were hospitalised and a handful sustained so much kidney damage that they died. Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping, adults, died as well - executed by the central government for making too much money distributing 'protein-rich' milk. Multinational capitalism had a case to answer also because Western dairy combines, including Nestlé, Unilever, Heinz and Cadbury, had bought into Chinese concerns because, frankly, the market in China is HUGE. The market in China affects the price Irish dairy farmers get at the farm gate - that's globalisation.
Friday, 15 July 2016
Rosetta
On 15th July 1799, a slab of granite was unearthed from the ramparts of a delapidated fort near the town of Rashid at the mouth of the Nile. It had been put there by an ignorant Ottoman soldiery as fill for their defensive position. It is a dull record of tax exemption given to the Priests by the Pharaoh Ptolemy V in exchange for them validating his accession to the crown and indeed to godhead.
The key to the stone's importance is that it served as a key, because the officialese legal niceties of the political transaction is written in three languages: Greek, demotic [wot ve common ppl spoke] and antient/religious hieroglyphs, a form that was then only used in church. Think the Latin mass or Hebrew before the foundation of Israel restored that dead language to a vibrant and effective form of communication. IT's written in greek because the Pharaoh Πτολεμαῖος Ἐπιφανής was a descendant of a Macedonian Greek general who seized power in 303 BCE as Alexander the Great's empire collapsed. In Ireland we don't do hieroglyphs any more but all official documents are written in English and the de facto moribund Irish language - in any translation disputehieroglyphs Irish takes precedence. The Rosetta Stone features as part of A History of the World in 100 Objects [its podcast] by Neil MacGregor director of the British Museum [bloboprev]. I've also mentioned the stone in passing in my piece about Aimé Bonpland.
I've been meaning to write a blob about Champollion and Young and their cracking the meaning hieroglyphs code through Rosetta's simultaneous translation because eeee I do love a code Elvis - Venter - Eircode - DNA - ASCII - COBOL - Enigma - Playfair - Binfo - Bok. And I may find a hook to do a Champollion trib, but today it's about graffiti and history. The Rosetta was unearthed by French soldiers and looted as spoil of war by the British a couple of years later. It finished up on display in the British Museum. When I went to visit as a teenager - before The First War, kids - it was black with the incised letters helpfully picked out in white. Many people therefore believed that the stone was basalt. When it was cleaned in 1999, the stone was revealed to be a gorgeous twinkling grey granite with a pink seam running through one corner. The cleaning also drew attention to a fourth language [see L] etched onto the side: "CAPTURED BY THE BRITISH ARMY IN 1801". After two hundred years, this defacement has become part of history and so seems less offensive. No archaeologist or restorer would have the temerity to leave their mark so permanently today.
The key to the stone's importance is that it served as a key, because the officialese legal niceties of the political transaction is written in three languages: Greek, demotic [wot ve common ppl spoke] and antient/religious hieroglyphs, a form that was then only used in church. Think the Latin mass or Hebrew before the foundation of Israel restored that dead language to a vibrant and effective form of communication. IT's written in greek because the Pharaoh Πτολεμαῖος Ἐπιφανής was a descendant of a Macedonian Greek general who seized power in 303 BCE as Alexander the Great's empire collapsed. In Ireland we don't do hieroglyphs any more but all official documents are written in English and the de facto moribund Irish language - in any translation dispute
I've been meaning to write a blob about Champollion and Young and their cracking the meaning hieroglyphs code through Rosetta's simultaneous translation because eeee I do love a code Elvis - Venter - Eircode - DNA - ASCII - COBOL - Enigma - Playfair - Binfo - Bok. And I may find a hook to do a Champollion trib, but today it's about graffiti and history. The Rosetta was unearthed by French soldiers and looted as spoil of war by the British a couple of years later. It finished up on display in the British Museum. When I went to visit as a teenager - before The First War, kids - it was black with the incised letters helpfully picked out in white. Many people therefore believed that the stone was basalt. When it was cleaned in 1999, the stone was revealed to be a gorgeous twinkling grey granite with a pink seam running through one corner. The cleaning also drew attention to a fourth language [see L] etched onto the side: "CAPTURED BY THE BRITISH ARMY IN 1801". After two hundred years, this defacement has become part of history and so seems less offensive. No archaeologist or restorer would have the temerity to leave their mark so permanently today.
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