Homeless is Hopeless

"Homelessness is too often accompanied by hopelessness", that was one of the ideas floated across a packed theatre in The Institute yesterday morning, by Fr Peter McVerry the Voice of the Homeless in Ireland. He is a Jesuit priest who, many years ago was working with school drop-outs in Dublin. One day he found one of his charges, a 9 year old boy, sleeping rough. It was huge eye-opener for the good father as he realised that you'd be at nothing trying to keep kids in school if they don't have a home to go to after school's out. The event shook his certainties and he shifted his focus to set up what eventually became the Peter McVerry Trust. I mentioned him a couple of times last year [bloboprev] getting angry but not truculent about the unwillingness of the Irish government to build homes. For him anger is a driver for change.

McVerry was down with us to launch Volunteer Day at the Institute where students, and others, are encouraged to give a bit of time to Fairtrade; or horse-riding with the disabled; or meals on wheels; or the local hospice; or sorting books for Oxfam. He started off by explaining why he had given a life-time to others

• it was the christian, or at least the humanitarian, thing to do
• to express gratitude for the fortunate circumstances of his birth which gave him huge potential . . . if I hadn't joined the Jesuits as a young man. The obvious way to express his thanks was to give back.
• He noted that these push-pulls had been widespread among the religious in his time. Sadly the implementation of humanitarian protocols had been completely un-audited and so had too often degenerated into abusive relationships.
• every day he gets some rewarding feedback. Those endorphins are their own reward. Heck, they'd have to; because these guys aren't driving BMWs between their homeless-hostels.

To a hammer everything looks like a nail, you may say, but McVerry makes a good case that having a home is the prerequisite for a) health [TB is on the rise in Dublin rough-sleepers] b) happiness - rates of depression are higher in hostels than in age matched 'homed' people c) productivity - it's hard to apply for a job if you don't have a return-address and it's much harder to hold one down if you can't get a clean shirt together.  Yes, yes, not all homeless people are deranged drug-abusers: the PMcVT has on its books homeless students and homeless professionals. and only a minority of their client base has addiction issues. But these things are globally relative. In Ireland, contra Bangladesh, everyone has access to clean potable water; although we're unwilling to pay for it. Without clean water you don't reach adulthood in many cases; you're dead of the flux before housing becomes an issue.

Later with a rhetorical flourish the old chap (he's 74 but definitely not retired) asked us what was, for those directly affected, the hardest part of homelessness:

• not the absence of a regular bed; 
• not the boredom of endless days sitting around without purpose; 
• not the hunger or junk food. 

What matters most to the homeless is the feeling that nobody cares whether they live or die. It is a strong policy in the PMcVT that

• phone calls are always returned;
• stories are always listened to;
• respect is always shown. 

Even if there is no bed, no sleeping bag, no food parcel, you don't get the door shut in your face.

Challenged by change
And here's the thing, volunteers are generous with their time, yes, but they also benefit from the relationship. They are changed by the encounters with the dispossessed and if they can take the stress of dealing with such troubles, they are changed for the better; on the basis of what kills not, fattens, if no other. If you are the least bit open to The Other, then your certainties, your values, your prejudice will be challenged. Like US Army grunts who fought next to compatriots of a different colour, and came out realising that white people could be kind and some black people were real crap at the blues. For McVerry himself a key moment was when a young chap told him "The fact that god might exist depresses me" which McV took to mean that the boy felt he was always being judged and found wanting / sinful / bad: that his condition was his fault. The priest absorbed this and turned his face from the god of judgement [R] with whom he'd grown up towards a god of compassion.

Now let's be a bit critical of the PMcVT and its work: they're big enough. In 1980s Britain, the weekly satirical cartoon programme Spitting Image mercilessly guyed the royal family, celebrities and, in particular Margaret Thatcher's conservative government. A case has been made that Spitting Image, which had HUGE viewership each week, acted as a safety valve that prevented a revolution against the divisive changes that were being imposed on the British people.  If Peter McVerry and his Trust did not exist, maybe the government would be compelled to vindicate the constitutional rights of all its citizens. That would require a revolution, of course, we'd have to pay more tax, and the useless mouths of the quangocracy would have to find useful work outside the public service. I've been agonising about the ethics of the voluntariat since at least May 2014. But then you may not believe that the government is capable of organising anything more challenging than ordering posters for the next election. If homelessness hurts then you just have to roll up your sleeves and do what you can. For Peter McVerry, like fellow christian Martin Luther [prev], he can do no other.

Fr McVerry talked about how the people in his Trust, by giving time, respect, homes, support, food and hope to the dispossessed, receive as much back in self-esteem and a sense of worth. Thus give and take become an exchange. That resonated with me strongly because last week I'd seen a fascinating video about Proto-Indo European and what we can deduce about the culture of these our ancestors from linguistic analysis. It turns out the PIE word for give is the same as the word for receive/take! Exchange to mutual benefit is in our DNA. I barrelled up to him  after his talk and shared this insight to him, which meant I got to shake his hand - an honour.

The Peter McVerry Trust is in the middle of a fund-raiser:

Donate?

International Day of the Girl Child

IDG? That would be today, 11th October as it has been for each of the last 5 or 6 years. I like girls, I shared a house with a couple of them for about 20 years and I was delighted to see them grow up straight and tall; becoming canny and independent young women. But, notwithstanding my Victorian father demeanour and insistence that they wear sailor-suits and sing a lot, Dau.I and Dau.II had a relatively easy time of it. With no brothers of similar age, they weren't made to do more than their share of the chores; I didn't insist that they marry a crusty farmer from up the valley; they got access to education even if it was not in school [how - result (whc applies also to Dau.I)]. It's rougher for girls in, say, Africa just because they are girls and the local culture doesn't seem to value or appreciate them. Which is damned . . . stupid, according to Caitlin Moran. Although our girls didn't go to school, I can see that for poor, disenfranchised, girls formal school is a way out of the poverty trap. Reading empowers especially if you don't have an iPad. Chess is good too.

Worldwide here are 1.1 billion girls - females under the age of 13 - and collectively they do 550 hours of housework every day: which is about 40% more than their brothers contribute. But wait, that's only 30 minutes each a day; doesn't sound oppressive to anyone who grew up on am Irish farm like our girls. But there are girls out there, from the First World, who can't boil an egg or sew on a button, let alone make a dress or make a soufflé; let alone let alone fetch 25lt water from a distant well before school and gather firewood on the way home, so I guess the average isn't really the useful statistic.

Much earlier in the year, girls around the world were asked to send in stories about how they triumphed in an adversity which was brought upon them because they had two X chromosomes. Today, at UN HQ in NY NY, they are having a symposium to hear these voices. Can't be there but can bring you some vids on the general subject

• Katy Perry gives a roar for girls.
• Why can't run like a girl also mean win the race?
• Global goals global girls
• Michelle Obama gives it socks for education

Well there wasn't much joy in any of that, eh. Clearly something is wrong with the world. But here's something you can do today. Find a girl, any example will do, give her a big hug and tell her that she is stonkin' wonderful. You'll promptly get arrested by the pedophile thought-police which will help the child remember the event for longer. Recognising your sacrifice on her behalf will ensure that she walks taller, and takes additional classes in assertiveness, which will be good for everyone she encounters. It's a plan.

The Skipper

My father was born in London on 10th of October 1917. That was exactly 100 years ago today. I'd like to get a glass of champagne into his hand to recognise the full century but I can't do that a) because he died in January 2001 at the age of 83 a few months after we celebrated the parents' 50th wedding anniversary and b) with the cremation and all there is no hand. I wrote last July about how his restless and questing acquisition of knowledge finished him off in the end. If he hadn't felt the need to read all the Sunday papers, he might have had a free hand to steady himself on the way up to bed. With his hands full of newsprint he fell back down the stairs with more noise and commotion than he'd intended on his way upstairs. His children were assured that he was doing alright and that a full recovery was expected but five days later he was dead. So none of us got to say good bye. In Britain they are famously inefficient and drawn out over funeral arrangements and it was a full ten days before the Old Man had his final trip to a crematorium.

When I finally got back to work I had an insightful conversation with my boss about [not] saying goodbye to parents. His position was that, if I had failed to have The Conversation with my father, it was because at the time it didn't seem appropriate, so there was no point in beating myself up when the door clanged firmly shut on ever having that Conversation. I thought that was wise, or at least that it provided a ha'porth of solace. I miss him occasionally: usually when I dig up a nugget of information about the sea or maritime history; or when his grandchildren achieve something nifty.

A couple of days ago, I reminded my brother and sister that today was Der Hundertjahrfeier because its hard to know where to send the birthday card and I didn't want to let the day slip by entirely unacknowledged. I wrote last January about him being a stickler for time keeping; how he was late for his own funeral; and how the irony of such a final comment on a life-time's cultivated habit would have tickled his sense of humour. Sunday lunch was not only at 1 o'clock +/- 2 minutes, it had a comforting predictability: a joint or a chicken, vegetables, gravy and roast potatoes followed by pud. He would volunteer to wash the dishes but that meant that we three children had to facilitate the process: one to clear the table,  one to dry the dishes and one to put them back in their cupboards. He was willing enough for the chore but casually terrible as a plongeur! If something appeared on the draining rack that was really unacceptable, the drier would pass the offending article behind the Old Man's back to the table-clearer for another go through the suds. At Christmas there would be a huge to-do in one corner of the kitchen as he made bread-sauce <glarrk>. Nobody else in the family would eat the stuff, but it was an immutable tradition. The other food-error that he was never allowed to live down was when he was once tasked to make breakfast on a family holiday, but burned the toast, used lard instead of butter and tried to disguise the shambles with a thick layer of marmalade.

The Skipper grew up in and around boats in Dunmore East where his father was harbourmaster. He was interested in maritime history because he was a career naval officer through the war and afterwards at home and abroad.

He could paint [above - on the beach at Duncannon with sweaters: when shall we three freeze again?], leaving behind a huge collection of water-colours. He could also play the piano nicely but did so rarely; he preferred it if music from an extensive collection of classical vinyl was roaring through the house - no head-phones till much later. But the records that got worn out weren't Bach or Brahms but Tom Lehrer poisoning pigeons in the park Ottilie [Patterson]'s Irish Night The Ould Lammas Fair and Peter Sellers taking the piss out of Ottilie's jollitie. I dunno, I guess you had to be there and we were, we were. I will finish with a limerick, a verse form of which the Skipper was fond . . . but one which breaks the rules, another thing he felt able to do:

There was an old man from St Bees

Who was horribly stung by a wasp

When asked did it hurt

He replied: quite a lot

But I'm jolly glad it wasn't a hornet.

A sad loss for science

In science you can't cover everything, you just have to pitch in to an area where you believe you can make a difference. Because of increasing specialisation, after a couple of years of contributing and reading the literature; and a couple of conferences presenting your results and listening to what your rivals are up to, you know all the Effectives in your field. You also identify the make-weights who, however diligent and worthy, are not going to set the world alight anytime soon. Just after the turn of the century, I got a seat in one of the first labs funded by Science Foundation Ireland SFI to give the frontiers of biological science a really good shove.  I recently wrote about those exciting times as a way of giving tribs to a very smart woman, then a graduate student, now CSO of a biotech company. That lab worked (and worked damned hard) because of the intra-group chemistry. Including the boss, there were about a dozen really clever people, half Irish half Other, rocking up to work each day. If you hit a wall or had half an idea, you could always find someone to help you to a solution.

I'm really sorry to report that one of that band of brothers and sisters! is no longer available to help us thrash out the big questions. Mario Fares [R] died, far too young, over the weekend and will be buried tomorrow evening. It is a  huge loss to science: he was only 45. If we had in biosciences the equivalent of Erdős numbers, then I'd be particularly proud to have a Fares number of 1. That paper, which was published after our days together in the crucible of SFI, came about because Mario was extremely generous with his time in mentoring our graduate student in the the correct way to approach the analysis of positive selection in populations. The standard tool for carrying out such analyses was/is called PAML, invented, maintained and distributed by Ziheng Yang from UCL. I quietly boast that I am one of a select [N=384!] group who has found a bug in PHYLIP, another key software suite in the field of molecular evolution. Mario, de lo contrario, during his PhD in Spain took his data through PAML, stress-testing it against every option and parameter in the program. At the end of that journey, he understood PAML better that anyone on the planet except, maybe, Ziheng Yang. You couldn't ask for a more authoritative source for the down-and-dirty on this sort of analysis.

I met Mario the day he stepped off the boat plane in Ireland. He'd signed up to Ken Wolfe's SFI lab but flew in on the Saturday before he was due to start work. It was a drizzly, stormy, soggy, Irish day. One of his new colleagues picked him up from the airport and said there was a garden party down the country and asked Mario if he'd like to drive for 2 hours into the wilderness for his dinner. Back in those days we had a Summer Solstice cook-out up on our mountain and invited everyone down from the city. When Karsten and Mario rocked up at 3 pm, they were the only people to arrive. Everyone else had decided to stay warm and dry at home. We fed and watered the boys, played petanque à la irlandaise in the drizzle and then they drove back to Dublin - a bit of a wash-out.

I wrote a few years ago about a brief 25 minutes when I gave back to Mario by acting as a sounding board for his latest Big Idea. A couple of years after we met, in the drizzle, Mario applied for a job at one of the other Irish Universities. Everyone encouraged him to do so because he was a great explainer and a really rigorous scientific researcher . . . and a walking genius! He applied believing it was a forlorn hope because, back home in Spain you only get places by being the protégé of a much bigger cheese. If you play your cards right and keep your nose clean, your mentor will secure you a suitable place. Mavericks need not apply. We have nepotism in Ireland, sure, but also an official level of transparency that often allows the best candidate to win through, regardless of who is his uncle. In that case, Mario was that best candidate and he went off to Maynooth for a couple of years. Before he left, I gave him some avuncular advice: in setting up his lab he shouldn't necessarily go for the cleverest candidates; successful scientists can be a bit driven and may be a a little too ambitious and such people can be a) a little wearing b) not the best pick for the greater good. If Mario were to pick one person who was good enough at the science, but had also coached a teenage football team or showed some other element of social competence then that might provide the social lubrication for really superlative science. That's the sort of group we had in the Wolfe SFI lab, which had eased Mario into the scientific establishment of a foreign country.

In any case, Mario was back in a couple of years with the offer of a permanent post in the Genetics Department in TCD; which Trinity people would regard as a step up. A short while after that he secured another job back home in CSIC-UPV in Valencia. Since then he appears to have juggled his commitments between both countries and getting paid by both institutions. The fact that the administrative burden of such a peculiar arrangement was taken on board suggests that he was really indispensable to both places. And now he's gone; several big holes, one in my heart, need to be filled.

Identigen clean up Switzerland

Identigen is one of the great successes of Irish biotech companies. I knew all the principals when it was founded as a campus company in TCD 20+ years ago. It span out of an academic research project that was using genetic fingerprints to trace the evolution of cattle. Two of the nicest young middle-class postgrads you could meet showed that they had the bottle to go out to the rawest parts of the Third World to gather and process bovine blood-samples. The academic project was a big success showing clearly that cattle have been domesticated twice: once up the Indus Valley and once in Europe [or more likely in the Near East with subsequent migration into the wilds of uncivilised Europe. The 'Indian' zebu cattle Bos indicus with the big dewlap and a hump on the shoulders are so genetically different from Euro humpless cattle Bos taurus as to suggest a separation of 200,000 years. That's waaaay before humans domesticated anything; so domestication must have happen twice in divergent undomesticated ancestral species. A case can be made that [some] African cattle have incorporated a third strain of wild cattle in their mix.

But one of the young turks in the Bovine Lab, working away on processing bovine blood samples to obtain genetic information, had the idea of monetising his hard-won lab-skills. He never finished his PhD but floated off on the idea that identifying individual cattle with a unique bar-code could help trace BSE aka mad-cow disease. That was the birth of Identigen. Getting the technology reliable and reproducible is only one part of launching a company; you then have to get alongside some venture capital; stabilise your burn-rate; scale up and start delivering product. The product here is information and their slogan is "from the pasture to the plate". Every side of beef is sampled as it comes through the slaughter-house, the DNA is sequenced for a unique code and that information is attached to the number on the ear-tag. If you-the-customer come down with food-poisoning or an as yet unnamed virus, Identigen can sample the container that held the hamburger and finger the farm it came from. If the problem is at source it can be remediated.

Many years later, I asked one of the directors if Identigen was profitable. He went all leery on me and answered "It depends what you mean by profit". I guess he meant that he was drawing a nice salary, as were all the Effectives, but the company wasn't coughing out payola dividends twice a year to its investors.

I was in the lab next door and a few years later we also developed some IP = intellectual property. We were working in the field of innate immunity and carried out some experiments which opened a door to the problem of antibiotic resistance. The results were preliminary but we had our own young turk who was ambitious and scientifically competent but more importantly was interested in money and the stuff that money can facilitate. We also had a medical consultant with wodges of folding-money in his golf-cart who might be induced to buy shares in a campus start-up. I had absolutely no interest in monetising my ideas and The Boss had a full time job and lots of extra-mural commitments already. I can't remember why or when the prospect of becoming share-holders in a new biomedical venture went tits up. But it never got off the ground and our tame senior medico never realised how close he came to being shaken down for some ca$h. We were capitalist wusses altogether.

Their entrepreneurial spirit has landed Identigen a 5 year €17 million contract to keep tabs on the quality, purity and provenance of Swiss beef and beef-products. For the next five years it will be much harder to get horseburger [bloboprev] in Zurich.

Whacaccino go again

[You're getting this because of a weird blogspot glitch. I wrote an earlier version of this piece but when I pressed the [publish] button the thing disappeared from 'drafts' but failed to appear on the website. So I sat  down to recreate the post while it was still fresh in my 'memory'. An hour and a half later, I recd an e-mail from one of the handful of folks who get Blobs delivered, at their request, by e-mail a) saying thanks and b) attaching the whole text of the lost ms. Turns out that the recreated rewrite was pretty close [see alignment at bottom].  So apologies if you've seen something very similar to this before. Further investigation showed that the post, launched on 7th October was somehow published with a date of 28th September; probably because I messed up on 'scheduling']  
Mais revenons a nos breuvages!

What do you call a dentist who doesn't like tea?
Denis.
Why do Communists only drink infusions? 
Because proper tea is theft.
I've been having a fare amount of tea anxiety recently. Me, like George Orwell, I'm a simple chap, and because of the culture in which I was brought up, I like a nice cup of tea [R source] When I was young and full of vim, I made tea by spooning leaves into a mug and brewing the stuff hot and strong. When the restoring cuppa was finished, I'd often spoon out the soggy tea-leaves and eat them too - rrrrroughage!  Now, however . . .
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound
. . . I make my tea weak. So weak indeed that it is more like making mystical passes with a tea-bag over the cup than actually brewing tea.

I have no time at all for 'infusions' of chamomile, rooibos, ginger&goatsblood, bedtime, woowah-lift, fennel. These are not tea. I am with Wikipedia for the definition: Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to Asia. I'd even make a, not really strongly argued, case that these infusions are potentially hazardous because, while tea and coffee have been extensively investigated by biochemists and medical science, we know much less about the chemical contents of random herbs and bushes that you find behind the potting shed.  While I'm moaning about misnamed beverages, I'll have a swipe at almond, soya, oat milk. I'm sorry but these are not milk any more than chamomile is tea. What evolution has developed as a miracle elixir for raising mammal-pups, the food engineer has to imitate with chemistical emulsion. Compare:

• Soy milk
• Filtered Water, Whole Soybeans, Cane Sugar, Sea Salt, Carrageenan, Natural Flavor, Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Vitamin D2, Riboflavin (B2), Vitamin B12.
• Milk
• Milk

Quite apart from the semantic objections, here is a list of reasons why soymilk is dodgy. To ring the changes in an exciting life, on Saturday, at home, if it is going, I'll have medium-large cappuccino. I don't do Starbucks, so I don't know the difference between cappuccino and latte, and I may be getting the latter. This Saturday coffee ritual was a cause of huge amusement to our Polish pal Tadek who stayed with us for two winters 10 years ago: "Hej Bobek, saboda, kawa har har har" then he'd make me keep him company eating chunks of cold pork fat because we were men.

Occasionally, coffee will be off-menu and the current replacement is Macaccino which is a combination of three completely different plant-products:

• Carob is the bean from the carob tree Ceratonia siliqua which in Order Fabales included with peas, beans and the locust tree.
• Maca from the root of  Lepidium meyenii a member of the Order Brassica / Crucifer which includes mustard, kale, radish and cabbage.
• Lucuma is from the fruit of an Andean tree Pouteria lucuma, Order Ericales, the heathers, but  also including tea, persimmon, azalea and blueberry.

As you see these ingredients are not a million miles from recognisable food-plants but each will have its own pharmacopoeia and who knows what will happen if the raw ingredients are dried, powdered and mixed with hot water?  Part of the effort to push this beverage out on the market so that some entrepreneur can build a ranch-house with a hot-tub overlooking the Pacific coast, is to present a lot of dubious claims and hype on a web-site. I've been to macaccino.com and been snowed under with data, which I love because data-is-analysis but also presented with dubious claims and assertions Dense superfood nutrition  - boosts immunity - adaptogen energy - healthy fatty acids etc. But there's also a sort of patronizing gloss to the snow-job. Here's Aaron telling how to make a cup of his product. How difficult can it be to spoon powder into a cup and add white emulsion and hot water, that it requires an instructional video?

But we haven't time to be drinking hot beverages all morning when there are data to analyse. Aaron has employed some real biochemists to digest the proteins in his cocktail to their component amino acids and reports their concentration in mg/10g powder. This is has the ring of truth because two of the twenty protein-constituent amino acids are missing. The amides Asparagine Asn N and Glutamine Gln Q aren't in the list because when you do a proteolytic digestion you destroy the amide bonds as well as the peptide bonds and convert these amides to their equivalent acid: Aspartic acid Asp D and Glutamic acid Glu E. I give the three-letter and 1-letter abbreviations [prev] in all cases. What's troubling is that Cysteine Cys C is nowhere to be found in Macaccino. That cannot to be true and must be a piece of slack-bob editting. Elsewhere on the site, an infographic of the benefits of particular amino acids appears. Cysteine appears there <whoop whoop internal inconsistency alert>; but Serine Ser S is missing and they've invented a 21st amino acid called maganese. Thinking from those errors and inconsistencies that the whole list of ingredients might be a bill-of-goods,, I compared the relative concentrations to the proportions found in UniProt the database of protein sequences. The graph of that analysis [R], show that the proportions are 'within the normal range' and that Arginine and Glutamic acid are higher in Macaccino than you might expect. As well as being an essential component of all proteins, Glutamic acid, serves us as a neurotransmitter. If the marketeers at Macaccino were scientifically literate <harrumph!> they might seize this information and add it to the miracle-grow benefits of their product.

Shorts Sunday 081017

I really must get up to the Faroe / Faeroe archipelago, The Blob has only looked at the islands from afar. Despite the isolation and windy weather, some 65,000 people are hanging in there with their own distinct language and culture. They are making an effort to bring a cascade of $$$s and €€€s into the island by giving the region a higher profile. If you want a sentence translated into Faroese you type it in here, wait a few seconds and you call will be routed to a real islander who will say it back  in her/his native language. How cool is that? Don't, like me, try "Let us kill more whales" though, they are fed up with that old cliché and a nice lady will refer you to whaling.fo where you will be lectured about regulation and sustainability. via MeFi where some interesting commentary about bandwidth and infrastructural support in Faroes vs Shetland and other remote parts of the UK

• Tom Scott on reaction ferries which cross rivers without power.
• Half as Interesting does the UPU which reckons the cost of postal delivery worldwide.
• Eccentric weights and measures section
• The Smoot
• Eccentric old buffers section
• Irving Finkel on the Lewis Chess-pieces.
• On cuneiform
• Michael Poliakoff on Periodic Elements
• I have written about the virtues of communal music
• drums [prev]
• singing [prev] Turns out that, in the UK, more people sing in choirs than do amateur soccer: infographic on the rise and rise of singing together
• I wrote about Educating Yorkshire this time last year. Here is the formerly stammering Musharaf all grown up and dating. And the daft bugger is now vlogging.
• Sporty people cheating
• in camera
• On the Appalachian Trail [prevlier]
• on the Pacific Crest Trail
• In case you haven't read enough about the virtues of the Finnish school system. Here is a piece on the issue from Smithsonian.
• How to live to be 100+. Advice from those who made that far.  The best advice I have heard came from a centenarian who was asked 
• "To what do you attribute your longevity?"
• "I never drank, smoked, or went with a woman; until I was eight"