Zero waste

On this Our Titanic World, where the water-tight compartments [work; home; holiday; ethics; health; sport] have been ripped open by anthropogenic climate change, the orchestra is still sawing away in the ballroom and the deckchairs put back into neat lines. KLM is bombarding us with ads asking us to book with them - via Amsterdam [because nobody can pronounce Schiphol] - to a Dream Destination - Cuzco or Kilimanjaro, anyone? When will the advertising standards authority implement a Flight-Shaming warning to such encouragements to conspicuous carbon consumption? Not soon enough!

I never believed in an Annual Summer Holiday; never gathered up Package Holiday brochures shortly after Xmas; never the discussed the virtues of Dubrovnik vs Casablanca; never bought a kiss-me-quick hat. It would be ridiculous, and untrue, to claim that I haven't had a foreign holiday in 40 years but I didn't feel a need or compulsion, let alone A Right to have a week near a hot beach each year. Vacations happened because we got invited to share a gîte or a cottage in Biarritz, Almuñecar, Mull; or when we went to hang out with friends-and-relations in Cape Town, Boston, Bloomington, London, Bath. If I had done all those extra air-miles to spend time in a marginally ropey hotel with little to do except eat, tan my inner thigh and dice with melanoma, then I might be feeling a twinge of regret or even guilt that I had spend so much [cash and carbon-foot] to have so little fun.

The Beloved is all subbed up to Zero Waste Chef, which recently had a list of 49 thrifty options for saving money and leaving less mess behind. Less mess includes all the invisible detritus of participating in a packaged world. I'll abstract and comment on some of the ZWC 49 articles. No not the 39 Articles that's a different matter.

• The average US family contributes $1500 to the economy in food waste. Not me. I am religious about making meals from what I find in, and behind, the fridge. The Beloved spends several nights a week minding her aged father Pat the Salt; that's when standards are let slip. If you eat out of the saucepan there is no plate to be washed! All that wasted food is actually an icon of the capitalist way of life: 
• advertise a gizmo that nobody needs so everyone wants it
• make a shit-ton of the gizmo [or here new breakfast cereal with neither gluten nor lactose nor peanuts]; robust enough to get home [suitably packaged in extra plastic and cardboard] but not strong enough to function very long
• let everyone toss the gizmo because it is yesterday, the wrong colour, or useless [or here tastes 'orrible and even the dog won't eat it]; to make room for . . .
• repeat cycle.
• my inventory of shame from LALDL includes: electric chain-saw; e-waffle-iron; self-standing chip-fryer; numerous metal brackets; one-time use walking boots [they lasted a week in the garden];
• Tetrapak of soup €2.99. Not me. There is nothing more forgiving than soup; everything can go in starting with the chicken carcase. No onions? use garlic. No garlic, use chives. The last wretched sprouted potato is a great thickener. No chicken? an inch of a bit of salami, diced. Half a cup of lentils. Something green scavenged from the garden. The outer leaves of cabbage; the brocolli stalk. If you have stale bread butter/oil both sides and fry for croutons.
• Half a kilo beef-steak $9.99. Not me. I cannot justify eating any meat but beef is the very worst because of the methane produced in the rumen. 30% of Ireland's carbon foot-print can be laid at the door of cattle [prev], if we could just park the beef and dairy we could drive our cars round and round the block and still be ahead. ZWC recommends chick-peas on a kilo-for-kilo swap for adequate protein. We most of us eat more protein than we need.
• cornflakes, weetabix, frosties, rice-crispies Not me: porridge oats. The former are sold as a convenience food but are at least 4x the price of reg'lar [keep you reg'lar] porridge. Which can be cooked and in a bowl in about 4 minutes from a standing start. Call the price differential 50c saved vs 4 minutes spent valuing my time at €7.50/hr. Less than our minimum wage. But it scales up. You can cook 4 bowls of porridge in exactly the same time to feed self, spouse and 2 kids. Now you're talking €30/hr.
• Bread! lawks a mussy me, for the sake of sanity make your own bread. Elapsed time may be overnight, but actual work-time is a little as 20 minutes.
• Lunch at work. My works canteen serves a heaped-to-groaning plate of meat-and-two-veg for €5 which is a good deal compared to restaurant meals. But that would require a drooling siesta of at least half an hour from me and I teach most afternoons. Not me I make a cheese [and what I find in, and behind, the fridge] sandwich - from my own bread, in the morning before work [cost? 30c?] That's plenty enough to power the last 3 hours of the working day. You don't need a chocolate bar! You're not 6 y.o.
• Paper napkins $10. Not me. I've got a sleeve.

There y'are. YMMV but we can all do better to tread lighter on the Earth.

Beardy Beardy Baby

Ah vanity, vanity. What is it with men and their hair?  Rephrase that: What is it with people and their hair?  Comb comb; wash wash; cut cut; frizz frizz; straaaaaaighten; colour; tint. So many ways to spend time and money on the stuff. I last paid money to a barber about 25 years ago when I could get a trim for £2.00.  My regular place closed down and I asked a young buck in the lab next door where he sorted his hair-cutting and went there. That barber feller insisted that he need to to wash my locks first and charged £8! [If I had presented with boobs rather  than moobs, they would have charged €28!] I went round the corner and bought some electric clippers and have managed for myself ever since. They cost £34, paid for themselves in a year and have since saved me about €800, and endless one-way chatter about football and holidays. Male pattern baldness has been late for me which means I have to work to stop myself looking too shaggy to teach. A lot of blokes are really distressed by baldness. Samson's whole sense of strength, potency and manhood was apparently locked up in his locks, which gave Delilah the edge on him. Modern chaps can turn to meds to restore some semblance of fuzz up top. Minoxidil is the go-to formulation and is now widely available OTC without a prescription: ask for Lacovin, Locemix, Loniten, Lonnoten, Lonolox, Lonoten, Loxon or Regain, Regaine, Regaxidil, Regro, Regroe, Regrou, Regrowth, Relive, Rogaine, Rogan. Don't try to wow the pharmacist with the IUPAC name 3-hydroxy-2-imino-6-piperidin-1-ylpyrimidin-4-amine s/he won't be impressed.

Minoxidil has an interesting story. It was first developed by Upjohn 60 years ago as a potential treatment for peptic ulcers. It didn't work for that condition but was revealed as a potent vasodilator and marketed to lower blood-pressure.  In the Phase I clinical trials, one of the side-effects was unexpected hair growth and it started to be marketed off-label for male pattern baldness. Eventually in 1988, 30 years after its first discovery, it was approved by the FDA for hair loss. Seemingly the moribund hair follicles get a new lease of life from a local rush of blood because of the vasodilation.

Meanwhile in a totally different part of Castle Megapharm another smallish molecule was developed for acid reflux and related burp and blooargh problems. This one really does work for peptic ulcers! The inventors called their new drug Omeprazole because IUPAC's 6-methoxy-2-[(4-methoxy-3,5-dimethylpyridin-2-yl)methylsulfinyl]-1H-benzimidazole was too much of a mouthful. It has been around since 1988 and is on the list of WHO Essential Medications. It is long off patent, does the job and has few side-effects so it is one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the US [70 million scripts in any give year] and elsewhere. Every doctor in the Western World will have prescribed Omeprazole - probably as Losec or Prolosec; so it comes to mind when kids present with burpiness. Pediatric medicines which are basically unregulated. Small children have poorly developed livers and kidneys and so drug clearance is a potent problem and makes them radically different from small adults.  It's usually a case of just giving a child a fragment of an adult pill and hoping for the best.

These two completely different drugs collided [El Pais for detail, BBC for exec summary]in the South of Spain this Summer when a dozen infants were taken back to the doctor with hair fuzzing up their faces in a most disconcerting manner. niños con "síndrome del hombre lobo" / werewolfchild was an easy label for lazy headline writers. All these children had been prescribed Omeprazole, and the fine people at Agencia Española de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios AEMPS got on the ball really quickly to identify the problem and get the product off the pharmacy shelves.  Turned out that the local manufacturer of the reflux drug - Farma-Química Sur - committed an 'internal error' and somewhere in the process Minoxidil was mislabelled as Omeprazole. I guess it became most obvious first in infants because we expect their skin to be smooth as a baby's bottom. Big Red Face in Farma-Química Sur but I bet none of the QC managers lost their jobs.

Bombast meets dotty

The Beloved spends some of her time in pursuit of The Miracle of Mindfulness [it's a book]. It is mildly interesting, but not really surprising, that others in the same practice are angry, vindictive, spiteful and lacking in compassion [not all of them and not all the time you may be sure]. You'd expect better of them, of course but then again if you're a bit out of kilter [unbalanced would put it too strong] maybe that's why you [need to] come within the orbit of walking meditation and calming the mind. You'd expect that scientists would be rational, objective, fair, data-driven and able to change their minds when presented with new evidence. That's the theory, but ambition, competitive behaviour, selfishness, jealousy and prejudice are no less common in the scientific community than among tinkers, tailors [R] or sailors.

In 2013, I lost the rag at a Sunday Times report that ranked British and Irish Universities. The Institute continued for several years to puff itself up on the Best Institute of the Year 2014 despite there being objective evidence that other Irish Institutes were, by the SunTim criteria of judgement, objectively better. There are few things sadder than places which still sport plaques like Tidiest Town in the World 1967, after all the folk that made it so tidy are dead. My exec summ from the 2013 Ranking University exercise was "I want TCD (my Alma Mater) to win and my own employer did win, but it's still absolute bloody nonsense".

That was then, this is now. John Ioannidis has assembled a crack team to rank researchers by their success in the business of publishing their work. There are 6 million published, publishing scientists across the world. There is little point in doing what they are doing, let alone get paid for it, unless other researchers read the stuff, incorporate it into their own practice and cite the original study. I've had occasion to look at the science of citation before and before that. I've also had a slap at the academic publishers who lubricate, and profit from, the process.  The paper itself is only 6 pages long but they have made available citation data on thousands of named scientists. The basic Excel spreadsheet, with 40 columns of metrics, is 34MB is size; which would take 3 days to download on our wireless 'broadband' connection. Accordingly, I downloaded the file at work, used the sort function and clipped out just the Irish data, which is small enough to send as an e-mail attachment. I love data.

I probably wouldn't have heard about this study, if my ear to the ground in Trinity College Dublin hadn't sent me a fragment of tendentious 'analysis' of these data which appeared to show that TCD was a) wonderful but b) could do better. At the very least, the management of TCD should pay attention to the study and do something about it. When I 'analysed' the Sunday Times data in 2013 I found that they had failed to sum columns of figures correctly, and, by their own criteria, given the Best Institute gong to the wrong place. If there are obvious, checkable, correctable errors in data then the safest response is to ignore the whole thing because Quality Control has clearly failed.

The Ioannidis data is available for public download and discourse. Indeed people are encouraged to get to grips with the numbers and do some critical analysis. As I say, I'm limiting my investigations to Irish scientists because, frankly Scarlett, I know nothing about the research stars of Taiwan or Afghanistan. And <brrrzzzzz>, the top cited researcher for Ireland, Luke O'Neill, on the first row most people will look at, is wrongly housed in the Technological University of Dublin TUD rather than TCD! Sorting the data revealed several cases of duplicate entries: Coey J.M.D. (another star TCD player) has a doppleganger called Coey JMD, for the most obvious example. This is why I think we should be super skeptical about data if/before drawing any conclusions from it. If 'they' can't get the names or institutions sorted [easy] how much confidence would you have in the fact that, for O'Neill "hm18 (ns) = 52.79329482". Glaaaarrrrkkk. What kind of table reports woolly metrics like the HM-index to 8 significant figures? I knock that out our students by second year.  Blaa blaa blaa.

I worked for 14 years in TCD and 7 years in UCD, 3 of which I was double jobbing in both places at the same time. So I'm interested in the longtime rivalry between the two most internationally profiled Universities in Ireland. One of the TCD analysts was super chuffed that the top 3 most cited researchers for 2018 were all from TCD <puff puff preen preen> but when you look at the data from 2017 TCD secures places 1, 4, 5 because UL's Zaworotko, Michael and UCC's Shanahan, Fergus bounced them off the podium. Those West Country interlopers are 4 and 5 in 2018. It just shows that these metrics are fluid and a bit chaotic and unreliable. No university can depend on a single genius for its reputation unless it be Professor Harry Potter, Master of Quiddich and the Universe.  If you just look at one year and score yourself as 1 2 3 and think that sweeps the board then you are guilty of selection bias - stopping when the result is most favourable for your hypothesis. That is a most egregious scientific sin. Why stop at 3?? If you look at the 10 most cited people from TCD (for 2018 to give TCD its best shot); then they rank as
TCD 1 2 3 11 17 20 21 24 31 32 sum = 162
compared to ranks for the top ten for
UCD 6 7 8 9 12 13 15 26 29 30 sum = 155
smaller is better and this is better than TCD
You may bet that the Publicity suits in UCD will talk about The Top Ten whereas TCD with prefer a gold, silver and bronze metaphor.  But they are both spouting nonsense because the difference in cumulative scores is not statistically significant. A dot-plot [again!] is really useful in showing this:

That illustrates the World ranks for the best workers at the two institutions. The best person the Irish education /research system is  # 477 on the world stage and Ioannidis drew a line so that lowest Dublin scientist recorded [at #129749) is John T Sheridan who studies optics at UCD. Me, I am nowhere! Not even among the grass under the feet of these giants . . . a speck, a microbe. John Sheridan is a really successful productive scientist and he almost didn't make the cut. But here's a peculiar personal thing - Joe Duffy is UCD's Most Cited Researcher in these lists; in 2003 I co-authored a paper with Joe which has accumulated 93 citations.  In a small-small sense, I have made a contribution to Ireland's success in these polls.

But it's not about me. I sent my dot-plot to a bunch of friends (incl some more co-authors) from TCD and UCD with the message "The research outputs of your two prestigious institutes are identical, you really should choke down your sibling rivalry and get married".  Such a merger has been the elephant in the room for at least 50 years.

Anti-pregabalin pilgrimage

Book Review

The Salt Path

Optional background: Don't Give Up 

Peter Gabriel & Paula Cole

Ray and Moth were /are like us, with similar off-centre aspirations: to find and run their own gaff and see what it was like to live a more immediate life: where the hens laid eggs just in time for the children's tea. They weren't interested in making sensible contributions to their pension as a hedge against an uncertain future in old age and infirmity. That's one way to progress; although reg'lar people wouldn't see much 'progress'.  Accumulating a fat pension pot usually goes with a high octane life-style: climbing the corporate ladder because the increments seemed necessary to support the stuff that you need to spend money on. Sometimes you can only get ahead by having the kit [suit, car, shoes, the right sunglasses] that shows you deserve it.

Anyway, Ray and Moth made their bed and lay in it and had two children and a small holding with sheep and chickens and a few paying-guests in the restored barn. It was hard work, living remote in Wales, but that's what they wanted. Somewhere along the way they invested some cash in a business venture of one of Moth's oldest friends. The business failed and the legal small-print said that Ray and Moth would, not only lose all the money they invested, but were jointly and severally liable for all the debts of failed company. After wasting a further three years of life and all their remaining money on lawyers; their home, their farm, their B&B business, everything was all repossessed by the Corporate Patriarchy and they were thrown out on the road with nothing but a peculiar tax-credit / windfall / pension of £48 /week.
That same week Moth was given a name - corticobasal degeneration CBD - to attach to a peculiar set of neurological conditions which had been dogging his active life. Imagine a toxic melange of motor neurone disease ALS, Parkinson's PD and multiple sclerosis MS. CBD, as the second word implies, gets worse as time goes on; the connexions between brain, nerves and muscles get progressively more wonk until sepsis or pneumonia finishes you off because the lungs can't clear themselves. It takes 7 ± 2 years from first presentation to final curtain. Ray and Moth go into denial, as you do when you get a terminal diagnosis. But also because it is now 6+ years since first symptoms and Moth is a long way from being dead.
Could it be something else? they ask.
I am the Consultant! the Consultant replies.
He can't be much more use because CBD is incurable but he give Moth a script for Lyrica / Pregabalin, which we have met before. Pregabalin, (and the alternate treatment for CBD Clonazepam) gives a boost to GABA γ-amino butyric acid, the most well known inhibitory neurotransmitter. But extra GABA will bring a truly frightening array of side-effects [full list] including tremors, vertigo, dry mouth, constipation, vomiting, flatulence, erectile dysfunction, fatigue, peripheral oedema, abnormal walking. That shows you some of the task list for GABA around the body - one of the great multitaskers. It also shows what a blunt instrument oral pharmaceuticals are.  It's like killing a woodlouse with a shot-gun: you may kill the woodlouse but there is a lot of collateral damage to innocent bystanders. On a human level, those symptoms don't give the best launch to a 1000km back-packing camping trip in SW England. But that's what Ray impulsively decides they must do, and soon. The next Summer, as soon as they gather their traps, they start off on the South West Coastal Path from Minehead to Poole and every tide in between:
Vertigo for the cliffs; flatulence and vomiting for inside the tent; oedema in the legs for the walking; erectile dysfunction & fatigue for their intimate relations; tremors for taking notes on the wildlife; and constipation for holding a really crap hand dealt by fate. Neither of them is young any more and their progress, certainly to begin with, is painfully slow and, well, painful. With limited resources [except in bottle!], they inch along the map in their SWCP guidebook. It is a long time between showers, and they would rather eat than use a laundrette because their money won't stretch to both.

It's an interest apolitical political book. It exposes government delusions about the state of homelessness in England: wilfully undercounting those who cannot afford to put a roof over their heads in post-Thatcher Britain. This selective blindness allows The Man and the comfortable middle-classes to believe that all homeless people are druggies and alkies whom nobody can help. Several times in the book it is made clear that dogs especially my dogs are privileged over dispossessed people. More worryingly othering the homeless allows a yobbier, younger jugend to urinate on people curled up in shop doorways because they are untermensch. The standard reaction to homeless people is to shrink away from them or give them a sandwich - because money would only go towards the next bottle of Thunderbird [BBC's take]. My research reveals SocksAndChocs which supplies that sort of thing to the homeless. As Peter McVerry explained to us two years ago, the very best thing you can do for The Down is to recognise them: eye-contact, a greeting, a comment on the weather . . . like you'd do for the bus-driver or the check-out lady. There are people who refuse water - which falls from the skies, after all - to Ray and Moth when asked for it. It won't surprise you to hear that Moth is in the habit of giving his last few coins to someone who patently needs it more than he does.
Q. How do water-refusniks sleep at night?
A. Just fine because their cold-sore is much more distressing than His stigmata.
The Salt Path was a Sunday Times bestseller: you may hope that people come for the escapism of this week's travel book and stay to look at their own reactions to those insufficiently fortunate to be able to buy a £7 book. Indeed the cost of the book is almost exactly the same as Ray and Moth had budgetted each day for ALL their needs. I reflect often on the fact that I am comfortable, sitting on my own sofa in a reasonably warm, dry house simply from the accident of being born in the 1950s. We could buy a home in England in 1986 for £21,000 when my annual salary was £16,000 = ratio 1.3x. 30 years later Dau.II is looking at a home/income ratio of about 15x. It is iniquitous!

The other arresting sub-plot in the Salt Road is that Moth and Ray realise that they've left his spare vial of Pregabalin meds on the garage floor by mistake when packing their bare essential kit. Without the  medicine which the consultant is sure is the only thing between Moth and perdition, Moth begins to make a miraculous recovery. From being barely able to walk and in constant pain, he limbers up and recovers his libido enough to have some beachy bouncy bouncy with a delighted Ray. They surmise that it must be the oxygen as well as allowing his neurotransmitter to return to a more potent equilibrium.

On the very last day of their walk, a positive encounter with a random stranger lands them a place to live within commuting distance of Plymouth where the miraculously revitalised Moth has enrolled for college. In that flat Ray knuckles down to write her book which is its own small miracle. Those of us who have been transformed by pilgrimage are not richer or more sucessful but have shed a few certainties - and probably a few kilos - along the way. Ray gets to appreciate that Home is a state of mind more than a roof of slate.

Here's a fair-enough executive summary of The Salt Road and its back-story. Penguin's inner view with Raynor Winn.

Copper City

The other day I was on about Smeerenburg in Spitsbergen where the whole economy was driven forward by whale oil. The climate up there, even at the height of Summer, is brutal. It's the kind of place where, as soon as the temperature rises enough to take your jacket off, the midges [no-see-ums; punkies; Culicoides spp.] rise in clouds and eat you alive. The rest of the year it's dark 24 hours a day [75+° Lat; Arctic Circle 66°]. The idea that there was a city-sized community flensing, baking and turning tricks really didn't have the ring of truth if you thought about it for 2 minutes or said "Show me the data".

Much further south, on the Waterford coast is the village of Bunmahon where my aged in-laws washed up 30 years ago. Everyone complains about the weather in Ireland but the climate is, unlike Svalbard, just perfick. One thing the two locations have in common is that they have been much more active and populous in the past. I hope that readers worth their Blobbosalt will cry out "Show me the data" at this point. Here's a clip from the Ordnance Survey of Ireland showing the mouth of the Mahon River in about 1840, when Bunmahon was at the centre of a thriving copper industry:

And here is the same area surveyed 165 years later in ~2005. [And terrible pale is looks too]

The GeoHive map-browser allows you to float over the island and zoom into any area of interest. The best feature is a fade-slider that lets you start in 1840 and gradually replace the pixels with a more modern map. Over on the left side, the built environment is much unchanged; dominated by the Church and the row of 8 modest two-storey houses, then called Osborne Terrace. On the right, however, 40 or 50 similar dwellings have been swept into the dustbin of history and replaced with a handful of slightly larger homes. On dit que there were 2,000 people living in Bunmahon in the mid 19thC, served by at least 20 pubs, shops and a pawn-broker.

Six years ago, I was speculating on the population of [the bishopric of] Ferns in Co Wexford. Why keep a dog and bark yourself? I asked my new pal and local historian Barry Lacey and he replied: "I managed to track down the source. In Billy Colfers book 'Arrogant Trespass' he mentions 49 burgage plots in Ferns for the year 1296 (Page 76). These ones were wasted so perhaps you could add a few more during Ferns hay-day. If you were to associate a number of people per burgage plot and add a few more for luck it might be one way to guess its population." Okay, I'll bite: each of 5 dozen burgages holding a dozen people. Ferns in 1250 CE housed 750 people = about half today's population. Barry is talking tonight in New Ross about the South Wexford Brigade of the Old IRA.

After 50 years, the seams of copper were played out by the 1870s and the miners all upped-stakes and moved elsewhere: to Wales for the steam-coal and elsewhere. Bunmahon retracted to a two-pub village again leaving a well-worked landscape scattered with shafts, adits, spoil heaps and ruined buildings. Every so often, someone will see a business opportunity associated with the sweeping white sand beach and /or the industrial heritage: the surf shop; the Café in Kennedy's old drapery; Farouq's general stores and chipper; Ronnie's chipper on the sea-front . . . but these businesses have all bloomed ephemerally and faded away leaving the entrepreneurs more or less out of pocket.
It's hard to imagine that Bunmahon was all a-bustle 150 years ago.

A ding, a dunt, a pock, a worry

Last week I was over in England, at short notice, for 48 hours. I was amazed and delighted to be able to secure a seat with RyanAir DUB - BOH (Bournemouth) for €12.99 and €12.99 BOH - DUB. This was 2 coffees less than what I paid for 3 days of car parking at the airport. It's also cheaper than the return fare on the bus to get to that far on a journey. Go Ryanair! I was not bothered by their somewhat aggressive baggage policy and extra bag charges because I can travel super light by leaving behind laptop, high-heeled shoes and a spare pair of chinos. If I have a accident I reckon I can buy a new pair of trousers abroad which will probably better fit my much diminished waist. But then the expenses, the addditional features, the add-ons started to accumulate.

• RyanAixtras
• €4 to book a seat for early check-in and boarding card. 
• €29 to park the car
• €52.40 to rent another car at BOH
• €47.80 for the Excess collision damage waiver insurance.
• £24.30 for petrol
• £18 for miscellaneous parking

There's not a lot of change from €200 to deal with propelling by body about the county between places which are all connected by train. But I'm [fairly] happy to pay that on such irregular and infrequent trips if it gives me flexibility and efficient use of time while shuttling about. If I'd read my own Blobs, I would have realised that buying Excess damage insurance (to mitigate against a potential 'excess' bill for £1,000) from RyanAir is a pain in the tits. Because, if the damage occurs, you have to pay out Hertz or Green Motion and then claim it back from RyanAir's wholly owned insurance subsidiary. If you pay for the same peace-of-mind direct to Hertz a) it's £5 cheaper b) it's all in the bundle: you just walk away from any gravel pinnng chips and tire-scuffs.

The morning after I took delivery of this delicate vehicle, I noticed a bit dunt just right-of-centre on the bonnet / hood / Haube / tapa. Dang! but I didn't do that! The feckers will make a claim against me . . . and I'll probably find that dunts are excluded from the policy I've just bought at eye-watering expense.  It cranked up my travel-anxiety a couple of notches - which I didn't need at all. But when I turned the car in at the airport, the vigilant Hertzman didn't seem to notice it and asked me to sign off the all-clear chit. Phew! Then I was in a tizz lest the next punter to rent that car would get caught for the bonnet-ding, so I started to think how I could tell Hertz about the defect without the bill coming back at me.

I'd calmed down by the time I eventually got home that evening and started to riffle through the fat sheaf of paper-work associated with my trip. There was a VCR = vehicle condition report, the relevant part of which I have abstracted [R]. That form acknowledges the prior existence of "1 damages" with a splat to indicate a dead spider where that 1 damages was. If the people at the Hertz check-out desk hadn't been so mortal busy trying not to delay a line of anxious-to-be-gone customers they would have had the courtesy to tell me about the pock before I drove off. They might also have told me how to switch on the headlights! It wasn't until day 2 and some dicey dusk driving that I was able to twig that the on-off light-switch was about 40cm away from the dip & full-beam switch on the steering column. I never did learn how to open the bonnet . . . which was just as well because I might have been tempted to try knocking out the dent from the inside.

Now here's the thing. The insurance options operated by Hertz and other car rental companies are a stitch up. And the insurance options operated by second-parties like Ryanair is a stitch-up in spades,  Would you rather pay €25 now or risk as bill for €1,000 at the end of the holiday? At the start of the holiday - on top of the flights, the hotel, the anticipated bill for booze, the tapas, the all-you-can-eat buffet - €25 seems like a pimple. Somehow the fact that is €25 per day slips past you and you end up paying an extra €200+ for peace of mind. Companies like CarHireExcess.ie have seen a gap in the market and ask How likely is it that Joe Average will clock up €1,000 worth of damage on a given trip? and gamble against that eventuality.  They will shoulder that risk for €3 per day or €50 a year. So their actuaries have worked out that that less than 1 person in 50 [€1,000 / €3*7] has a misfortune. They know exactly what the risks are - there is a cap of €1,000 to their liability because the Excess is all they cover. The regular base-line car insurance has no cap: you rent a car and sail it by accident and inattention into petrol station then someone might be liable for €1,000,000 for the damage. Regardless of the actuarial math, offsetting the Excess in advance with CarHireExcess or similar is waaaay cheaper than being hit for it as you stand stressed at the Hertz desk.

Sunday Songs etc.

The day that's in it.

• St Adrian's Day today. He's the patron saint of epileptics, arms dealers, butchers, guards, soldiers. Who all need someone to look after them
• наш отец [Our Father] Хор Большого Дона Косакена
• How great thou art. Home Free
• You raise me up. Westlife with schmaltz vid. [doting gparents etc.]
• 1970 by Reina del Cid n pals.
• We crossed the ocean. Special Olympics anthem.
• Parting Glass also by Shaun Davey
• Parting glass. Ceiliúradh at Albert Hall 2014
• Parting glass. Freddie White
• An Gloine Slán. Clodagh & Oisin
• Target fixation by pilot - jaysus near miss.
• TF by motorbike
• New Old Irish words revealed
• Down with the kool kids in Russian
• The Brits talk about brexit brawling in Parliament. 
• In Sri Lanka they brawl. Ozzy commentary
• Ukrainian fisticuffs. WSJ captures more
• Pushishove in Pakistan
• Turkish kickboxing