Konnichi-wa ConIFA

Today the FIFA soccer World Cup kicks off with a match between hosts Russia and Saudi Arabia. A lot of the participants, and their governments back home, are going to be taking it all far too seriously. The Boy's Beloved TBB, a woman of remarkable connexion and sagacity, takes the New York Times and recently gave me a dependent read-access online subscription to that newspaper of record. For which much thanks. I try to give it a glance when I wake up in the morning (along with en.Wikipedia for its Recent deaths, In the news and On this day sections). Several times a month, because of this, I'll hold the presses on The Blob and write something time-sensitive and topical. That's part of the reason why I spring out of bed at 0530hrs because I can't dash off 700 words from a standing start in less than an hour. Both of my regular readers prefer to get copy before 0745 to read with their oatmeal stir-about.

So how about this? without the NYT link, I'd have missed entirely the Conifa World Cup Final 2018 in which Karpatalya beat N.Cyprus on the penalty shoot-out.  Below red card for Tibet against Abkhazia:
ConIFA is the Confederation of Independent Football Associations which represents a {congeries | gallimaufry | rattle | grab-bag | bailiúchán} of states which don't feel they are represented by their central government. Here are the boys [afaik it's only boys for the moment; possibly because some of these ConIFA places don't allow women out on the streets] who made the final 16:

Group ‘A’	Group ‘B’	Group ‘C’	Group ‘D’
Barawa	Kárpátalja	Padania	W. Armenia
Cascadia	N. Cyprus	Székely land	Panjab
Ellan Vannin	Abkhazia	Matabeleland	UTD Koreans
Tamileelam	Tibet	Tuvalu	Kabylia

Give yourself a big prize if you can place more than half of these on a world map. I've hypertext-linked those places where you can get a clue from The Blob. I'm pretty confident about the location of another six states-of-mind. But for Barawa? Kárpátalja = Карпатська Русь? Kabylia = ⵜⴰⵎⵓⵔⵜ ⵏ ⵍⴻⵇⴱⴰⵢⴻⵍ? Székely-land = Székelyföld? really no idea, me. Here is a full list of members. I'm sure I could secure ConiFA recognition for Scientists Oppressed by the Arts Block of Government SOBTABOG if I could only find 10 of my friends who knew the difference between a centre forward [Gauss scores a goooooooal!] and the central limit theorem.

ConIFAis a sort of parallel universe to FIFA and I'm sure they have a cleaner record than FIFA the bigger, super-corrupt body which oversees world soccer. Deconstruction of the whole sorry story of money, power and soccer in the LRB. It was founded in 2013 by Sascha Düerkop and Per-Anders Blind when they announced that Sápmi [United Lappland] would host the first non-FIFA, non-UEFA World Cup at Östersund a city in Sápmi with a considerably bigger population than, say, Barawa.  That tournament of giants was won by the County of Nice. Two years later, ConIFA met in Abkhazia, and, like England in 1966, the home team used their advantage to win the competition. This year's 2018 event was hosted by "Barawa" but actually took place in London sponsored by Paddy Power the Irish bookmakers. Twice as many Somalis live in London as in Barawa.  It's like the second biggest Portuguese city in terms of population is Paris.  It's all good fun until teams <Zanzibar> cannot secure visas to the host country and have to be replaced at the last minute. Or teams <Padana> get expelled for "procedural irregularities". Or members <Kiribati> can't find enough money to send 11 players to some distant location. I'll try to remember to follow events in 2020.

Note: Konnichi-wa is short for konnichi wa gokiken ikaga desu ka? or 今日はご機嫌いかがですか？= How are you feeling today? in the same way as folk at The Institute interpreted my bright Hiya as "How are you?" and told me <TMI> just exactly how they are</TMI>. After a while I changed the greeting to "G'day" in honour of my sagacious Kiwi cousin Trevor, which scotches any more than a token response.

Proactive serendipity

Simon Clark [prevlier] has finished his PhD and thinks he must decide forever whether to post-doc and continue in academia OR go all media on himself and turn left into vloggin' and explaining science rather than doing it. Fairy nuff but it doesn't have to be all or nought. Here he is explaining where The Luck comes from and quoting his Dad with proactive serendipity.  I think I agree, although I wouldn't put it is quite the same way. I've suggested that my mother and The Beloved made their own luck by being in the right place at the right time . . . but that only worked because they realised that the place and time was Here and Now. It will sound very Protestant of me if I complain about the state Lotto and the mentality it engenders. If the most effort you can make to bettering your condition is to heave yourself off the sofa and drive [Jaysus! man can't you walk or run 1,000 m for your Lotto fix?] down to the corner shop to buy a 1-in-72 chance of getting your money back and a 1-in-11million chance of winning the price of a house in Dublin 4, then you are not exercising your luck. You have to take your luck out for a run occasionally or it gets rusty and you are unable to see the opportunity that presents itself.

Proactive serendipity is a game of two halves: the proactive is about working hard to accumulate knowledge and skills which are then available to make you aware of possibilities. Young Simon booted his final exams at Oxford and so was ineligible to carry on doing his PhD at same-old-same-old Oxford . . . but he went to U. Exeter where he had a great time anyway. I worked really hard in my final two years as an undergraduate student in TCD.  But I wasn't working at all at the correct coal-face to ace my exams. Indeed I was doing independent research off with the fairies, pursuing evolutionary unicorns in UCD [hey, wrong U, dude] library and making a family tree of the Habsburgs to work out their inbreeding coefficients. Like Simon's, my marks were just below a IIi, the minimal qualification for post-graduate work in these islands. Quite rightly, if unimaginatively, the TCD Faculty didn't see sufficient reason to inch me over the threshold (off with the fairies etc.) and I had to go out into this dark world and wide to earn a living . . . in a zoo in the Netherlands. I worked really hard there and could have stayed to become post-opposser [staff-sergeant] Afdeling Vissen. But I was made an offer I found it hard to refuse - to enroll in the PhD program in Boston University with the bloke who'd supervised my final year research project. There were a few roads diverging in my yellow wood back then but you can only ever go down one at a time and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

If you think it's about being lucky in my choices, as Simon Clark felt fortunate to have washed up in Exeter, then I don't think that's quite the issue - for either of us. If you frame it right, any road is the right road, because it is less about the destination than about the journey. I'll quote here an enigmatic verse from a Ithaka by the Alexandrine Greek poet C.P.Cavafy.

Greek by Cavafy	Tr: Edm Keeley/Ph Sherrard
Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη. Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν’ ο προορισμός σου. Aλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξείδι διόλου. Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει· και γέρος πια ν’ αράξεις στο νησί, πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο, μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.	Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

If that's a tad too pretentious for before breakfast, try this description of life: we are born, shit happens, then we die. Might as well make compost of the stuff in the middle!

The White Stuff

Y'know how people slag Twitter for tweets about what ordinary people had for their breakfats [sic! a first meal of the day without saturated animal fat ain't worth getting out of bed for]. But sometimes the domestic and quotidian can be neat enough to capture. Now it's not for nothing that m'life-partner is referred to on The Blob as The Beloved. A couple of weekends ago we were expected company and TB got a bit aspirational on the catering front. She left on Monday to look after her esteemed father Pat the Salt. When I got back from work that night, I found that the vacuum packed fresh strawberries were a little furry: probably Podosphaera aphanis. Only a little, mind, so I scooped the two worst affected fruit in the compost bin and cooked the rest up as un p'tit compôt des fraises and very nice they were too. Three warm days later and the compost bin looked interesting:

Go forth an multiply, indeed! That will go down a treat in the wider vistas of the the compost heap, and indeed it has because we try not to keep microbiological experiments active in the kitchen . . . except for the sourdough, of course. Then a week later it was white-on-white when I found a white ermine moth Spilosoma lubricipeda trying to look inconspicuous on the bottom of the bath:

Not such a good match, my fine young moth, you should try a touch of blue to match the copper salts that bleed from the inside of our pipes because of the acid water [prevomoan]. We moved the moth to an open window where it can easily escape if it wanted to lay eggs on  stinging nettle Urtica dioica, broom Cytisus scoparius, alfalfa=lucerne Medicago saliva, viper's bugloss Echium vulgare or dandelion Taraxacum officinale.

 And because [white] things always come in threes, I was walking rapidly across campus at The Institute last Friday late for an examiners meeting when I heard the, once heard never forgotten, wook wook sound of flying swans and saw a pair of these wonderful creatures pacing North above the River Barrow. I'm so glad I forgot my glasses and had to go back to the car for them.

A free lunch

There IS such thing as a free lunch! there is also all this boodle:

I went up to Dublin last week to hang out with my academic pals at the 8th Annual NGS Meeting in TBSI TCD . . . I was misinformed because I only knew 6/280ths of the people there and the rest were unborn when I started in the field in 1990. But it passed the threshold for CPD (continued personal development) and so I submitted a Green Form for expenses. If I'm away from my desk at "HQ" for more than 5 but less than 10 hours, I can claim €14.01 for subsistence. It is part of the disconnected disparate world we live in that one man's lunch at  €14 is what sustains some Irish families [after mortgage, car, debt payments] for a week!

But I didn't need to dig into the €14 because since the 1st Annual NGS meeting, when about 30 people turned up, the event has gone all exponential not only in attendees (N=30 to N=280) but also in sponsors. Sponsors is what paid for lunch when I hosted the VIBE conference in 2014 at The Institute. And last Thursday there were enough exotic sangers, avocado wraps and micro-canapés to satisfy the most starving graduate student. The organisers urged us delegates to talk to the reps from the sponsoring companies, so the latter could at least imagine that they might sell some kit on commission. Being institutionalised, I did what I was told and talked to several of the young people behind tables groaning with pens and post-its A and other give-away nonsense. It would be silly for me to let anyone imagine that this old silverback was going to drop an order for a €1,200,000 Illumina HiSeqXten. Accordingly I asked directly about the freebies, some of which were opaque to my understanding, and took some of them home for further investigation: [see photo of loot on kitchen table above]. I don't need pens, I'm good with pens, I've a life time supply of pens from previous conferences. But I was taken with the black New England BioLabs pencil, so I took one. There were loads of lanyards E including a plain white one round my neck, but I took a black-with-blobs BioSciences one for the spare keys at home. The A6 card marked C above was my name-badge - although what use is a huge name-badge with small print which is dangling in front of your gonads? Excuse me while I stare at your flies trying to read if you're from DCU or UCD.  Organisers in general are useless with name-badges so I invariably bring my own home-made model with print big enough to read at 2m and installed on my capacious left bosom.

The A6 card marked B is just a vehicle for the little black web-cam occluder. You stick the gizmo on your lap-top and can make the slide-thing cover or reveal the eye-of-webcam. Every time you use it you remember the supplier - Twist BioSciences - so it's in your mind or in your face the next time you need some genes sequenced. The thing marked D is a combined phone stand/holder mit business-card holder. I can drop my new retro button phone from a great height without adverse effect but your smart phone can get brushed out of your hand to crack its screen from side to side. Not if you install the ring-pull shaped stand-holder on the back! If someone tries to steal your phone after that, you keep the phone but get your finger broken.

I learned a lot at the NGS conference and I may write a bit more if I can distill a couple of take-homes. But two of the speakers alluded to the $100 genome which will be available for you, and me, soon. The first human genome, an amalgam of five people from five different continents, cost $100,000,000 and took 10+ years to deliver into the public domain by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. In less than two decades it's become a million-fold cheaper to sequence DNA. I've given another more personal example of the exponential in DNA sequence analysis before.

Sunday backstory 100618

Few loose ends or threads need pulling

• Stop action film showing the marvellous diversity of the insect form.
• I've been on before [cruel and unusual - punishment] about the shameful medicalisation of the death penalty to make it humane. I've witnessed the gas-chamber option with mice and carbon-dioxide which is definitely not humane and practiced cervical dislocation myself which at least is quick[er].  I more or less equated asphyxiation with carbon-dioxide and ditto with argon in that first link. This essay into new methods of humane judicial killing points out my error: we have physiological responses to excess carbon-dioxide but haven't bothered evolved a way of dealing with absence of oxygen. BBC is suggesting that asphyxiation by nitrogen, or argon if you can get it, is painless and quick enough.
• Sing It
• Grace Davies from Wales writes her own stuff and gives it SOCKS.
• First failed escape - W!ld
• Making :
• a caravan in 6 hours. 32 a day out the door
• artisan salami in NYC
• Kashmiri parathas - they BIG
• slapping a chapatti to life
• Anthony Bourdain on eating in India "You say Bolognese, I say Vector"
• Winging It. Frank "Catch me if you can" Abagnale talking about the rehabilitative power of fatherhood.
• You'd be lucky to get out of Iris Peavoy's shop, in Kinitty Co. Bookdocks, with only the thing you came in for.
• Hammer time! Mind over matter. Remember Legless in Kampuchea from The Blob?

Flyin' high, now dead

I was musing earlier in the week about about the death of a 180 year old tree which I've known all my adult Irish life. That is sad but it's not totally out of chronological order. There is an old Buddhist saw for the definition of happiness as "Grandfather die, father die, son die" which sounds gloomy to deathophobic Westerners. But a moment's reflection and you know everyone would be gutted if the Order of Offing was reversed.  It makes the ground under your own feet a little less stable (or a little more inclined to open up??) when leaves of your own age start to flutter off from the tree of life. My pal Barry died two years ago at 59 and Kevin went 12 years ago at 50. I miss 'em both.

Yesterday's shock was that celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was found dead in a French hotel apparently having hanged himself; he was 61. I guess there is some consolation that he was a strong advocate of Live Hard Die Young rather than dressing in cotton-wool and thinking only about your pension. I tell ya, boys, you can't have half as much fun at 82 as you can at 28 - at 82 the knees are crook and you need the bathroom far too often. Bourdain was born into a comfortable middle class family in NYC and went to college. He started vacation-working in fish restaurants in Provincetown: the fist at the end of Cape Cod.  If you read his autobiography Kitchen Confidential (and you should) you'll find that only the deranged have The Right Stuff to work in a busy commercial kitchen. The stress is 110%, the heat is 110^oF, and everyone has a knife. That company is not what you and I might like to keep but the former boy-scout found a well 'ard kernel in himself so that he survived and thrived. The rush was mighty but was also enhanced: "Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get." He dropped out of college after two years because he was now at home in the underbelly. Not since reading George Orwell's hotel catering exposé Down and Out in Paris and London have I felt so apprehensive about eating out.

More recently, Bourdain cleaned up his internal act and started making World Cuisine shows for TV: No Reservations and Parts Unknown which you can pick through on youtube. Last year Bourdain laid into all the apologists for Harvey Weinstein that came within range of his Twitter feed. Being a hard chaw having a way with words allowed him to fillet and mince attempts at victim-blaming.

Chapeau!

Shoulder roll

Nope! Neither of the pics. Shoulder rolls are excellent therapy for desk-johnnies like me to relieve the build-up of lactic acid in the muscles of the upper arm. Rolled shoulder is, for me, the best cut from our slaughtered lambs, especially [as L] if sprigs or rosemary and chunks of garlic are inserted. But today it is rolling the shoulder so as to restrain a horse. The things I find out working at The Institute! I've never sat on a horse, although I did fall off a donkey as a small child while visiting our horsey cousins. This hasn't stopped me from writing about them. You will appreciate that horses are big: significantly bigger than the sub-teenage girls who bend the mighty beasts to their will. Over the last 5,000 years, humans have devised a number of insightful, elegant and energy-efficient ways of stopping horses lashing out with hooves or teeth. One way is to seize a hank of loose skin at the base of the horse's neck in your fist and twist it back against the shoulder. This gives a quick-release grip on the horse to keep it in place. Some believe that, beyond physical restraint, this technique causes an acupressure-like flood of endorphins which makes the horse a bit dreamy and agreeable. It doesn't work for all horses and it definitely doesn't work for all time - soon enough the endorphin receptors get flooded out and are no longer sensitive to the hormones.

It is clearly a bit of a problem because one hand is taken up administering the shoulder-roll and there is a limit to what you can do with the one remaining hand. And what about if you want to get stones out of the rear hooves or check for spavin on the back legs? A lot of horse-handling work requires two people, one of whom just stands at the front end holding on - with or without the ould shoulder-roll. One of our Design students has clearly grown up on a horse-farm because s/he's found a solution to this waste-of-hand problem. It's a fist-sized clothes-peg or bulldog-clip which you attach to the horse's neck in the prescribed manner and leave there: freeing up both of your hands for counting the rings on the teeth or whatever it is that horse-copers do. I hope it works into a successful business proposition.

Got all that? Now a quiz:
1. Which of the following is not a disease of horses?
glanders - stifle - bone-spavin - colic - rainscald - strangles
2. When was "Eclipse first, the rest nowhere"
3. Where [the heck] is Shergar?
4. What's the difference between a mule and a hinny?
5. In what sense is it good luck to have a horse-shoe fall on your head?

Whoa! did somebody mention Horse's Neck? My father used to ply us with these when we were kids. Not tots; but not voting age adults either. It's a cocktail made with brandy and ginger ale in about 1:3 ratio. You can fancy it up with Angostura bitters, a snake of lemon peel and ice, but brandy and ginger is the core. Using whiskey in place of brandy is as a bad a solecism as putting milk in the cup first before the tea: it tastes pretty much the same but is just . . . not . . . done.