Threeway in the Balkans

I heard about a diplomatic break-through in the Southern Balkans and had to do some research to make sense of it for you . . . and for me. Part of that was to find a map of the Republic of [Northern] Macedonia. I found one [L] which was politically etymologically neutral and was confused by the blue transnational blobs. As I was in the Balkans, it made me think of Brčko, the autonomous region in Bosnia which appears in a different colour on maps. It is different because the different ethnicities -  Bosniaks 42%; Serbs 35%; Croats 21% - were too nearly equal and too interleaved and intercalated to be able to assign to either of the constituent entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina 1) Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and 2) Republika Srpska.  [total aside Meanwhile in Bosnia] What could the blue blobs be? An enclave of ethnic Albanians? Displaced Bosniaks? An autonomous  district for Crimean Tartars? Then <duh!> it struck me that they might be [blue was a clue!] . . . lakes. And it was so:
Here is a zoom in of the Westernmost lakes: Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa.

Prespa is interesting because there are actually two lakes, the smaller of which (Greek: Μικρή Πρέσπα; Albanian: Prespa e Vogël) is almost entirely within the boundaries of Western Macedonia in Greece.  The bigger body of water Big Prespa gets three different names (Albanian: Liqeni i Prespës, Greek: Μεγάλη Πρέσπα, Megáli Préspa, Macedonian: Преспанско Езеро, Prespansko Ezero) and is covered by three different authorities. I have editted the original wikicommons map to show this week's acceptable name for the country [RoNM] responsible for the  care of the Northern half of the lake. The bedrock hereabouts is a highly porous limestone karst and Lake Prespa is continually leaking down hill and underground towards Lake Ohrid to the NW. Similar geology caused the abandonment of the Cong Canal between Lough Mask and Lough Corrib in the West of Ireland. In the Summer the canal ran dry which was a bit of a handicap for the working of barges between the two lakes.

Local naturalists claim that there are as many as nine species of fish endemic [uniquely restricted] to Lake Prespa including Salmo persistericus which is genetically indistinguishable from Salmo trutta, the common brown trout. When your sense of self is all tied up in what other people call you, then biological exceptionalism will bolster your case. We should be a separate country because all the animals are different, and the plants too. A better case could be made for Spongilla prespensis a species fresh-water sponge which has been found nowhere else. Taxonomy -  the naming of biological entities - is not only a dry, idle, academic exercise. It becomes important when-and-if we decide to save species from extinction. We really don't want to devote enormous resources to saving the last few members of a 'species' which could be replaced by individuals from a different 'species' from a place on the other side of that hill.  Before we do that let's hear it for the aardvark Orycteropus afer, the only species in the mammalian order Tubulidentata. There are 1000 species of bats, slightly more rodents. Heck, there are between 180 and 350 species [depending on whether you are a lumper or splitter] of primate including us.  Aardvarks otoh have no close relatives [last common ancestor 100 mya], and are in a class Tubulidentata of their own and a precise ecological niche, and would be hard to replace if they all took sick and died next week.

The PrEPpers are OUT

This is not about Preppers. They are in their bunkers rotating their stock of freeze-dried beef-jerky, beans, bottled water and shot-gun shells in anticipation of RightToBearArmsageddon. It must be a real drag having to eat at-sell-by beans every day rather than go off to McDs like the neighbours and get fat eating burgers and shakes. otoh it's a REAL DRAG if the nukes start flyin' and you're unable to take out the Zombies because you've run out of ammo. What Preppers need is an anxiety cost-benefit analysis:

• Is it worth spending a chunk of your disposable income on your ammo insurance against an uncertain future?
• Should you start paying into a pension fund in your 20s? 
• Is it worth popping vitamin-C even if the evidence tells you it doesn't much affect your susceptibility to the common cold rhinovirus?

Did someone mention viruses? Is it worth taking prophylactic anti-retrovirals as a hedge against an HIV infection which will blow up into AIDS, uncontrollable Candida infection, Karposi's sarcoma and a grim and early death? Dau.I and her pals from @RadQueersResist think so, as does ActUpDublin. And they were out in front of the Dáil on Friday to tell it like it is to Simon Harris our youthful Minister of Health. It's only a month since they were on the same side celebrating the 2:1 vote in the Pro-Choice Referendum.

I left Boston in the Fall of 1983. For the next several years I got letters from my pal P written while sitting at the hospital beds of a succession of her friends as they died by inches assaulted by a truly wild and bizarre collection of infectious diseases. Those diseases were the consequence of HIV infection. The thing about HIV is that it prefers to reproduce in T-cells and destroying them as the reproductive cycle completes. Without T-cells the immune system is stymied in its fight against other bacteria, fungi and viruses. It was the stuff of horror seeing fit young men, P's pals, turned into cadavers before her eyes. Then along came anti-retroviral therapy ART. It was like a miracle! These drugs didn't do away with the HIV virus but they slowed t'bugger down, so that it was unable to reproduce as quickly. That meant that T-cells could hold their own against the slings and arrows of outrageous pathogenesis. The young men could leave hospital on their own feet rather than feet-first in a box.  The first ARTs were nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors aka NRTIs or nukes. There are now at least 10 NRTIs on the market not to mention 2) non-NRTIs, 3) protease inhibitors, 4) entry inhibitors and 5 integrase inhibitors all of which intervene and disrupt different stages of the HIV lief-cycle. Scientific studies have shown better efficacy if you bundle drugs together and combination cARTs were born.

One of the earliest cARTs to market was a drug called Truvada, patented and manufactured by Gilead Sciences which celebrated its 30th corporate birthday last July.  Truvada combines two NRTIs Tenofovir & Emtricitabine [prev on bonkers names for drugs] and was highly successful and presumably profitable for Gilead. As the patent came due to expire, other companies moved in to develop identikit generic medicines and get a piece of the action. Developing a generic drug has a whole set of manufacturing and licencing conditions different from, but almost as onerous as, creating and marketing the original.

Here's another issue to throw into the equation. If you only go to the doctor when you notice the symptoms of HIV/AIDS, then you've probably left it too late. If your T-cell count is down enough to open the gates to peculiar opportunistic infections, then you already have a lot of HIV particles coursing through your system. Best to minimise your exposure to HIV in the first place. 0) Don't share needles. 1) Don't have sex! 2) If you're a gay man don't have sex with men MSM. 3) If you must have sex then use a condom. 4) Even if you use a condom, use PrEP: pre-exposure prophylaxis, of, say, Truvada (or its generic equivalent). If you embrace Case 4 and you take your medicine every day then you can reduce your chance of getting HIV-infected by 90%.

Last 1st December, to mark World AIDS Day 2017, Teva Pharmaceuticals launched their yellow-pack version of Truvada especially at the PrEP market. Our Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was delighed:
It's potentially lucrative: the cohort of young gay men are expected to spend €4 a day (€1440/yr) for the next 30-40 years. The Gilead branded product is about 3x the price.  That's not insanely expensive if you're on a pensionable salary and buying a couple of lattes a day already. Sure beats getting AIDS, that's for sure. But Varadkar's delight wasn't so great that he instructed the government to pick up the tab by allowing it to be paid for by the GSM medical card or the drug-payment scheme. If you live below the poverty line because you live in the ghetto and/or are an IV drug user, then you're not going to have €30 a week to spare for the blue pill. It is for these poor, dispossessed, HIV-susceptible people that RadQueersResist are fighting. Well, not fighting, or even on the barricades yet, but shouting loudly outside the Dáil in the hope that Health Minister Simon Harris will get off the fence and start the ball rolling on the cost-effectiveness analysis that has to be gone through before yet another drug is added to the allowable costs of the HSE.  Hello! Mr Harris: this problem is not going to go away, young people are not going to shop having sex: HIV is here to stay. Every week you delay effective prophylaxis against HIV/AIDS there are another 10 HIV positive diagnoses. Those chaps are going to have sex and the infection cycle will crank up a notch. It's like Ebola, if you don't act quickly, you have an epidemic which is out of control and then, well, everybody dies.

Half and half

I've been baking bread, almost all the family eats, for more than 30 years. Back in the last century, when I used to brew beer, I often took a generous spoon of the beige sludge at the bottom of the brewing keg, put it in a kitchen mixing bowl with water, flour, and salt and made perfectly acceptable loaves of bread. But I never drank enough to have this as the sole source of yeast for bread. I started off using little 7g sachets of dried yeast which worked out at about €25/kg! and comprised about 15% of the ingredients cost of a loaf. The 18c pressure on my wallet was enough to precipitate me out to an industrial estate to buy 500g of dried yeast in a tin.

A few years ago, I caught the sourdough bug, which was good because I didn't need to buy dried yeast anymore. But it was also relentless: because I was solely responsible for the the health and welfare of my sourdough starter, I had to keep feeding the ferment and occasionally spring-clean the jar which was its home. And of course I had to eat bread with every meal to keep up with the starter turn-over. I still had about 80-100g of dried yeast left in the last 500g tin and would occasionally use this to make 'sweet' bread or, very occasionally, croissants.

Time runs fast when you get old, and I can no longer remember when I last topped up the original yeast tin with a packet from the Dublin Yeast Co. Must be more than 3 years ago anyway. I did get the sense that it had lost its ooomph as a raising agent. Last weekend, with my birthday and all, I agreed to make flat-breads for the party. But, when I opened the tin, the yeast looked ever so slightly furry and I decided that sourdough flat-bread would be Just The Thing. On Monday, I brought the yeast into the lab to have a closer look with one of our new microscopes. Under the 4x objective, a salt-spoonful of yeast looked not so much furry as alive. It seemed like about 50% of the volume was crawling creatures, which on investigation turned out to be Acarus siro, flour mites. They aren't insects because they have eight legs and are more akin to spiders and ticks [whc prev]. The picture [R] is from a video by Victor Fursov from Ukraine, because I wasn't clever enough to capture my own image on the fancy new tablet-enhanced microscope. When I got home, I added the yeast, mites and all, to the compost heap where they'll have to fight their corner with a lot of small rough kids from the wrong side of the tracks. This means that, after 30 years, I've completed a cycle and am back to buying yeast in sachets and infrequently.

This reminded me of the old advice to never look at your favourite cheese down a microscope because several of the most interesting and tasty cheeses - Mimolette, and Tomme céronnée for starters - add mites to the mix deliberately in order to improve the flavour. Life would be insupportable if the only 'cheese' available was American Sandwich Slices.

Interesting video on the cheesy aspects of a mites life:
One comment:
Depuis avril 2013, la Food and Drug Administration (l'administration fédérale américaine chargée de la sécurité alimentaire) bloque les importations de mimolette aux États-Unis. Le fromage est jugé « impropre à la consommation » par les douanes américaines et 1 500 kilos de fromage vont être détruits « Cet article semble être, en totalité ou en partie, composée d'une substance dégoûtante, putride, ou décomposée, ou autrement inadaptée comme nourriture », ont écrit les inspecteurs de la FDA, pour expliquer leur refus d'autoriser désormais la célèbre boule de fromage orange, plus ou moins vieilli, sur le sol américain. Comme motif, les inspecteurs de la FDA indiquent que ce fromage compte plus de 6 acariens au pouce carré (6,45 cm²). Ces animaux, ou cirons, sont des acariens microscopiques cultivés à dessein sur la croûte, dont la FDA affirme qu'ils sont allergènes.
The US FDA acting on behalf of the plain people of America, deemed Mimolette to be "disgusting, putrid, decomposed and unfit for human consumption". The cheese eating surrender-monkeys of France know better.
Another comment (it's all a matter of taste):
Beurk!

Balkan punctilio

You may call me Bob, or Bobby Big-nose, don't make me no difference. I'm used to meeting people who are also called Bob, Bobby Two-Socks, Roberto, Rabbie, Roibeárd . . . I don't bridle at the idea of sharing a name with someone else. I don't feel diminished in their presence. I am also a piss-poor patriot: flag-waving is utterly alien to me; as is supporting a soccer team because I happened to be born in a place over which I had no choice or control. I left that country, anyway, almost as soon as I was able to vote and have spent 8/10ths of the subsequent years living and working 'abroad'. I share an office at The Institute with a woman who similarly was born in one place (a small town in Δυτική Μακεδονία Northern Greece); she left home to go to college in one country; then to find a job in another and raise two kids at the other end of Europe. We are good pals and support each other but we have agreed to differ on the matter of patriotism. I'm pretty sure she stands straighter when she sees the Γαλανόλευκη Galanoleuki run up the flag-pole and knows all the words to the Hymn to Liberty. I assume that, being born in Macedonia, she feels even more proprietal about the name of her province that do the people in distant Athens.

In 1991, when Jugoslavia broke up into its constituent parts, more or less on ethnic[-cleansing] lines, the Southernmost part of the country, wedged between Albania and Bulgaria, achieved its autonomy and independence quickly and cleanly, despite having about 25% of its citizens ethnic Albanians. They called themselves Република Македонија = Republic of Macedonia. This caused a shit-storm south of the border in Greece because three of their 13 provinces use the same official demonym - Δυτική Μακεδονία; Κεντρική Μακεδονία; Ανατολική Μακεδονία και Θράκη [W-M Central-M and E-M & Thrace]. An independent Republic of Macedonia north of the border implied that those South Slavs had imperial designs to dismember the Greek State by actual, cultural, or  metaphorical imperialist invasion of their Macedonia[s].

The 'error' was compounded by the Republic designing a flag that incorporated the 16-pointed Sun of Vergina [L above]. But that was the symbol was adopted from a yet more antient Greek usage by Philip II of Macedonia the father of Alexander the Great! Alexander [356-323 BC] was by some accounts the last throw of the dice of the Glory That Was Greece. From Greeks conquering and ruling the World for a few short years, they slipped back to a rustic economy with a landscape liberally peppered with extraordinary ruins that nobody had the money to maintain. Heck, those guys up North didn't even speak Greek! The Greek government imposed an economic blockade on the land-locked Republic, lodged an exclusive-use trademark request with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), prevented the new flag from being flown at the United Nations and generally made it difficult for the new state to take her place among the nations of the Earth [Robert Emmet]. The Republic caved in to this bullying and changed their flag to something less offensive to the neighbours [R above] even if the design looked a bit like the battle-flag of Imperial Japan.  Whatever they called themselves at home, the outside world - UN, EU, NATO - could/would only deal with "FYROM" = the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Last week, a 20 year sojourn by UN Special Envoy Matthew Nemetz and others [reports:NPR and BBC] bore fruit by conjuring a name which would a) satisfy the current Prime Minister of Greece Αλέξης Τσίπρας = Alexis Tsipras and b) be acceptable to the current government in the Republic led by Зоран Заев = Zoran Zaev. This is

Република Северна Македонија

= the Republic of Northern Macedonia.  I emphasise the 'current' on both sides of the border because you can bet your sweet bippy that when either or both of these polities slides to the Right, someone will be delighted to stir up the shit again. RoNM is one of the smallest nations in Europe with a population just scraping above 2 million - a bit like a Baltic State in the Balkans. The economy is not going to get any better if there is a similar haemorrhage of youth and talent to The West. A tanked economy is fertile ground to sow the seeds of discord. Discord becomes riot, riot becomes revolution, revolution becomes war, and war becomes tanks across the border. What price The Sun of Vergina now?

More quirks of flags.

Der Tag

Cuando me haga viejo y pierda el cabello a muchos años de hoy . . . eso sería hoy!
Silverback = 2^6 years +/- 5 mins
Party-time: Low Tide
Party-place: Trá na mBó, The Déise.
GPS: 52.1345N -7.37564W
OS: X427981
als je het haalt, zal er taart zijn
oops não, não esse bolo, aqui está uma que fiz antes:

It's a cinnamon&ginger marzipan&sultana simnel-teabrack. Maybe a bit heavy on the ginger. If it is Cake or Death, today I opt for cake.

Saturday Morning Post

I'm clearing the social chit-chat, commentary decks from tomorrow Sunday in favour of Cake. Here is your Something For The Weekend:

• Did you notice that the Soccer World Cup 2018 just kicked off in Moscow? With good timing in the politcal poke stakes, the BBC has identified a Russian teacher sacked for Instagramming her body in a swimsuit. The implication being that Russia is a desperate retro thought-police state and that will be the reason England didn't win the soccer series.
• Ireland was doing that sort of thing in the 1960s & 1980s
• in 1982 Eileen Flynn sacked for living in sin as if that was worse than living in New Ross the most depressing small town in Ireland
• in 1965 John McGahern was sacked for writing his dark-brilliant novel The Dark and shamefully abandonned by his trade union.
• The Dark? Turns out the Phil Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment [tl;dr: we're all Nazis] was a stitch-up.
• I've found some happier stuff on the interweb this week
• The Lost Brothers [who?] - Echoes on the Wind
• The Boss
• Brown Eyed Girl
• Give a boy a break in Brisbane
• Reina del Cid [who?]
• Tupelo Honey
• Wildflowers
• With Josh Turner [not that Josh Turner]
• Dave Brubeck - Blue Rondo a la Turk
• Tony Hawkes hitched round Ireland with a Fridge
• Processed 'food' is often cheaper than real food. Recursive recipes.
• Tune into your pheromones.
• And it's Bloomsday!

Northern Lights

Bill Bryson tells a story about going to Hammerfest in the hope of seeing the Aurora Borealis and being told that success was iffy. People would travel hopefully, long and hard to get to the remotest parts of Far North and stay there until they had to go back for work and . . . see nothing except Norwegians drinking beer while eating reindeer steaks and lutefisk. Bryson got lucky on Day 16, and can now die happy. Of course like Simon Clark and my mother, Bryson made his luck by making the laborious trek.

For many people, it's like that with St Kilda [prev], which operates a powerful draw on a certain category of pilgrim souls. It's damnably difficult to get to St. Kilda; even if you have a private yacht the weather closes the place off for weeks on end. Even after you set off for the 5 hour journey in calm seas and a glorious sunrise, a ferocious storm can blow in without notice and kibosh your paltry pilgrim plans.  I've just finished Love of Country: a Hebridean Journey by Madeline Bunting. It's a book, it's a travel book but it's not an original travel book. It's not really a wholly derivative In The Footsteps of . . . [insert one of AlexanderTheGreat | PeterFleming | Hannibal | RobertLouisStevenson] sort of book and it's not a gimmick like Round Ireland with a Fridge or walking the Camino de Santiago in Reverse.
Nevertheless Ms Bunting is standing on the shoulders of others who have sought themselves in the remoter, bleaker edges of this our Western European Archipelago WEA. Despite citing Norman Davies in her references, Bunting slides easily into calling the conglomerate of islands off the NW coast of Europe The British Isles. Aaaaaargh! Nope! That designation is a value-laden label that sits easily only if you live and breathe in London. The title itself has a tendency to rile me up because I'm with Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson on "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Dr.  Johnson is great source for comparison with a modern experience of the Western Isles, and Bunting draws on his views and sardonic comments on Scotland and the Scots. OATS: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Bunting does get to St Kilda but only on a day-trip. Her plans to spend a couple of weeks there in a tent are set at naught by the weather. On a walk along Tobha Mòr beach in South Uist [pics], she comes across a tide-washed office chair and muses "A sampling of the tons of plastic which circulate the globe was scattered amongst the shells and seaweed: brightly coloured bottles, odd shoes, buoys, bits of old rope and fishing crates."  I don't know if I'll now be able to walk the Hebridean Way with all my gear in a rucksack: the waste of leaving all those fish-crates behind may be too painful. I guess I could leave them alongside the fence at Howmore Hostel [as L].

I think part of my dissatisfaction with Bunting's Hebridean book, in contrast with Poacher's Pilgrimage: an Island Journey by Alastair McIntosh, is that it is editted from a great many visits to the Hebrides over a span of decades. If you're on The Way to discover or reveal some truth about your place in the Universe, then you're better off to commit a chunk time away from the office, the school-run and a familiar bed. If you flit in and out you're not working hard enough to make your own luck. But what do I know? I only saw the kingfisher once on my walk through Spain