Sunday Misc0706

What ho! Colman, are all the men mustered? It's the feast of St Colmán of Dromore today, which allows me to use this throw-away one liner. Which I think is original to my brother when he was in AmDram at College a half century ago.

• My USAian pals ask: Can we have this president?
• Then maybe we would have fewer tears at events like this? How to Deal with the Police | Parents Explain 
• Parents teaching their kiddos? Cooking the Kiwi
• The Swiss have moved on
• How Switzerland Stayed Neutral: they used to have all the approached to the Confederation mined for demolition if barbarians were at the gate
• Every bloke is obliged to do national service and keeps his rifle at home Part I
• But they don't do mass shootings Part II
• But before they get too smug, let us remember [Die Göttliche Ordnung] when women got the vote in the Cantons.
• Warfare's aftermath: pouched rats Cricetomus ansorgei clear landmines. Bloboprev.
• Back-catalogue: Ethical condundrum in re land-mines
• D♪♫gly do♫g
• Brian Eno David Byrne Brooklyn Youth Chorus do One Fine Day
• Drake On again Off again
• Mongolian/Latvian Fusion
• Send in t' clowns
• Taizé Veni Sancti Spriritu
• Shut-in Irish farmers are kind to foxes.
• News to me Anna Brees ITV - BBC
• In a similar vein George Galloway tells the truth to power

Lunar Latifundia

Huge tracts of land . . .
As retirement . . . dribbliness, senility and death thunders towards me, there is a little more pressure to "put my affairs in order". All kinds of long forgotten assets are surfacing in my "mind" if not so easily in concrete actuality. My pal P in Boston picked up on my obituary of [monumental installation creator] Christo to mention that she had a piece of the true cloth from The Gates C&JC's mighty extravaganza in Central Park.  It's not even enough to blow your nose on, but is nevertheless imbued with a p'arrrful magick. "The say" that if you gathered all the pieces of the True Cross into a single place there would be enough timber to build a small village. That sharing whooshed me down the rabbit hole of time to remember the Christmas when two of my students pitched in to buy me a present. It only took me three attempts to locate the correct bag in the heaps of papers "archives" containing my Deeds to part of the moon.

The power of junk mail to elicit a response is directly proportional to the number of items in the envelope. My acquisition of 1 acre of the Moon was documented with a lot of paperwork

1. Proclamation declaring the foundation of the Republic of Luna
2. The Deed (see below)
3. A map showing the location of my 4/10ths of a hectare (ditto)
• Tourist information for the region
4. Information about location including a link to an Atlas 
• A shill for the atlas on CD - a snip at $30!
5. A gift card from Lilian and Dave
6. Declaration of Lunar Citizenship vested in me
7. Information about the Kennedy Project
8. Bumph from The Lunar Registry
9. Invitation to send [more] money the the Lunar Republic
10. Aspirational manifesto about The Lunar Settlement Initiative 
11. A page of very small print in which the assignor witnesseth and indemnifies the lien on the property of the assignee their associates heirs and sublessors
12. A Lunar Flag decal for my hovercar.

The thought is The Deed:

Please, show me where Parcel 214 of Tract 1 is located:

0.4 ha or 100m x 40m is enough for a lot of solar panels. There are about 9 billion acres on the moon's surface, so more or less one for everyone in the audience. But you want to look sharp because some rapacious capitalists will be buy-and-hoarding this finite asset.

The thought being the deed, like, I have a mind to buy up other holdings in Tract 1, to consolidate my patrimony. Raids across the border and a few engineered atrocities, and I will march into Tracts 2 and 3. Within a few years, I will have toppled the Republic's rule of law in wide swaths of territory around the Mare Orientale. Lord Bob of Moon shall I be: The Great Influencer, Mighty Homeboy Warrior, Zapper of Mages, Assassin of Creeds. I will rule my empire from my capacious sofa. Moobies shall be the name of my followers; chips will they eat, all the days of their lives; six-packs they will have; swig-chanting they will cry "I have his Moobs I have his Moobs I have his Moobs"
I'll let you know when we're having the housewarming. As ambient temperature during the lunar day reaches 125°C it will be more like a housebroiling. I like my piece of up-there home; so thanks to Lilian & Dave who were big-hearted back then and went on to even bigger things when they flew the nest.

Might be cobblers

Only a week ago I was all excitey about a massive study which showed that hydroxychloroquine HCQ, much pushed by POTUS, was more likely to kill people than cure them. As you do, I accepted that the data were okay and had a cursory look at the statistical analysis and more-or-less accepted the conclusions of the paper. That was a Convenient Truth because, after 3½ years of political iconoclasm, I think I prefer old-style, slightly boring, statesmanlike statesmen rather than comedians, hacks and braggarts. I could / should have polished my crap-detector rather than the bottled genie because I've had to flag the old post with this new disclaimer:

</bollix Alert> 04Jun20: The paper which triggered this post has been flagged EOC by the Lancet. EOC Expression of Concern is a not-quite[-yet-]retraction. The Grauniad has investigated the company which supplied the data on which the original study was based. Also check out commentary on Metafilter. </bollix alert>

The Grauniad, which would probably be with me on who should be POTUS, was less invested in the HCQ=Bad than I was. They noted out that on 21st April, the "Lancet dataset" was reporting a cumulative Australian death-count of 73 whereas JHU was claiming only 67. Now that could have been a date mix-up because there were 6 extras deaths in the following two days OR an Asian hospital could have been inadvertently included in the Australian dataset. This last plea comes from the Database Company's Response.  But, smelling something fishy, The Grauniad's terriers started to unravel some other threads in the dataset and/or the credentials of the people who had assembled it.  It's a bit like applying the Fodor's guide test to it: if you easily find an error or inconsistency you push a bit harder on other elements of the edifice.

In the lynch-mob spirit of duffing up The Lancet, its editor, the paper's referees, I'll remind you that The Lancet published Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper which set out the antivax stall that MMR ⇨ ⇨ autism. They are cranking up their reaction time at The Lancet because the current EoC flicked up 12 days after they published the original paper. It took them 12 years to slap a 2010 retraction on Wakefield's study. It's a problem that far fewer people read retractions than the original splashy paper; especially if they are invested in the results. On Wakefield, which had a sample size of 12, you could have wished for the Lancet to be more "extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof". The current paper ironically had numbers too big to be credible. Call Dr Goldilocks, she knows all the best bars reasonable datasets.

That "extraordinary claims  . . ." is an autoquote from an earlier Blob which riffed on how easy it is to publish rublish. Even Science, the premier general science magazine West of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, had egg on its face over an incredible paper suggesting a form of life that managed without phosphorous a key ingredient of DNA. One of the targets of Trumpian populist spite is the WHO. The World Health Organisation is an intergovernmental international quango with jobs-for-the-boys for more than 7000 people from more than 150 countries. In these pandemic times it is vital to have a single authority and coordinator of medical, epidemiological responses to health crises. It is large but not beyond criticism and could certainly have some of its fat trimmed off. But we are far better off with the WHO and all its warts than without it and fighting ineffective, fragmented,Them/US battles against HIV SARS MERS Ebola Zika CoVid-19 Cadbury-99. Not unlike the EU; [necessary] criticism of which has decidedly toned down through these Brexit years.

In response to a single paper in The Lancet, the WHO abruptly stop shuttered its own investigation of the efficacy and safety of HCQ in treating CoVid-19. And then abruptly go started it up again in response to a single article (and the sound of  fffrrrrrPPP hitting the fan from other directions) from the Guardian. Agile reaction times are an asset in any large organisation but we could hope for something a little more magisterial and considered in its decisions. If, despite the buffets and nit-pickets of the pack of critics, the Lancet paper is found to be substantively correct, will WHO stop their study again?  On again off again begin again Finnegan.

Babel Fish for Today

I use Google Translate A Lot. Since Christmas, I have needed wanted to say Happy Birthday; Good Luck; Onwards!; Stay safe, stay sane . . . in Russian, Telugu, Portuguese and Italian. All of that to communicate with residents in Ireland. It's the most wonderful element of change since the Celtic Tiger started roaring. Free the gays; Wikipedia; GPS photos; Google maps; the NCT; these are all very well but, for me it's the coming and staying and contributing and sharing of the New Irish. There are 182 different ways of describing the world; 182 different ways of thinking to help solve the problems of our uncertain future. Caitlin Moran maintains that excluding {BLTs | Blacks | travellers | women | teens} from political debate makes countries stupider. The flip side of that is multiple Ways of Seeing (and dialogue among the differing worldviews) make a creative solution more likely.

The Irish language has a special privileged place in the politics of the country. It is important in the maintenance of the myth of Irish exceptionalism. I despise exceptionalism but I love the idea that people work diligently bringing the language of Cúchulainn and Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin into the 21st Century. Now we need bithfhaisnéisíocht, tointeáil spáis and fón póca. Nevertheless more people speak Polish at home in Ireland than Irish. Here are the languages spoken by more than 10,000 people resident in the Republic.

Polish	119,526
French	56,430
Lithuanian	31,635
German	27,342
Russian	22,446
Spanish	21,640
Romanian	20,625
Chinese	15,166
Latvian	12,996
Portuguese	11,902
Arabic	11,834
Italian	10,344
Yoruba	10,093

Did you ever pause to think how Google Translate does it's work. Because it's certainly not because there is someone on call 24/7 who bilingual in Pashto and Slovak ready to give the word for torque-wrench in both tongues.The EU was a rich source for GT because of all the documents and regulations about the size of apples and the quality of water are essentially parallel texts in the 24 Official Languages of the EU: Bulgarian; Croatian; Czech; Danish; Dutch; English; Estonian; Finnish; French; German; Greek; Hungarian; Irish; Italian; Latvian; Lithuanian; Maltese; Polish; Portuguese; Romanian; Slovak; Slovenian; Spanish; Swedish. That's so political: millions of €€€s are spent every year so that everything is rendered into Maltese and Irish but Catalan speakers have to struggle through with French or Castillian.

It's not often I get excited by public service announcements from The Man. But this announcement from the HSE appeared in my Inbox last week.
For those whose first language is neither English nor Irish, we have translated public health information into 24 other languages. These include Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Simplified Chinese, Czech, Farsi, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Urdu and Yoruba. We are also working on developing resources in Somali and Eritrean.
How many copies of these will be printed in Albanian and Urdu? And should that paper be better purposed to make more tissues?  It is a shame that my love of linguistic diversity is not matched by much facility in the area. Last weekend I was riffing on how Latin was a painfully closed book to me as a child. Later, because I was working and walking in the relevant country, I got some fluency in  Nederlands  and Portugais but only through hard work. I could at one time read the newspaper in either of those languages (and french) but I'd need pictures now. Here's a sentence from the Portuguese advice on hand-washing [R]. Após tocar em cortes, pústulas ou quaisquer feridas abertas. I saw "tocar" = touch and "aberta" = open and decided it must be about fomites: door handles, counter-tops ["cortes"] and light-switches ["pústulas"]. Nope! It is urging you to wash hands "After touching cuts, blisters and open wounds" which sounds a lot more like Ebola than Corona to me. My Portuguese clearly needs polishing: I could only understand half the words in that short sentence.

Kitchen garden

This year I've been quite active in the garden, perhaps because normal life was a bit off the rails. It's been nice to get something for nothing even if that's limited to 3 random Spring Greens - ramsons, parsley, chives - which happened to be actively growing when lockdown slammed so many doors shut. But when you're sprinkling chopped parsley on the porridge then something must be done. In consultation with my window-sill gardening consultant aka Dau.II, I'm giving sprouts a go. When we were late-arrival hippies in the 1970s we roasted dandelion roots for "coffee"; The Beloved made her own yoghurt (and koumiss); I brewed beer in a bucket; and I'm pretty sure we sprouted mung beans Vigna radiata. Didn't have any mung dal in 2o2o, so I went to the Brexit bunker to see what we did have. Not a lot of variety there I'm ashamed to say. Of the 16 species [and hundreds of varieties] of common eaten legumes, I could only find 2: pinto beans - a variety of Phaseolus  vulgaris and Lens culinaris "lentilles vertes" and "green speckled lentils". By way of experiment, I weighed precise quantities each variety [including two batches of speckled with different sell-by dates. For containers we have a large collection of fashion accessory soups from Cully&Sully [original and best], Supervalu and Tesco. These are twice virtuous because a) I didn't buy the product myself - how hard can it be to make soup? b) they have become our standard not-tupperware fridge container and have been reused multiple times - despite the shameful business model of use once on the way to landfill. - wot are we like, like?? These containers are certified for food-use so must have less BPA than can start a small man lactating. It is comment on our times that we have more varieties of once-off soup than we have of plain leguminous seeds that could be the backbone of an infinite variety of soups - every one delicious and every one different and none of the requiring more than a handful of ingredients including the water.

Mais revenons nous a nos lentilles germées. The containers hold water but not in the right way, so I begged a very old bath-towel from laundry and cut ovals of towelling to fit in the bottom of them. Towelling strikes me as being an excellent surface for sprouting beans: it is designed to be water-retaining but the little thrums in the cloth keep the sprouts from immersion. But that's experimental; we'll see how they serve. Leave the lids off! to circulate air and keep the fungus at bay.
Here's where we started:

Beansprout Diaries
Startime	Where	What	Much	Water	Sell-by
310520	SH&SC	Speckled Lentils	½oz	1tbs	Nov-19
310520	L&SBS	Speckled Lentils	½oz	1tbs	Jun-20
310520	C&VS	Pinto Beans	1oz	1tbs	Jul-21
310520	CT&B	Lentilles Vertes	½oz	1tbs	May-21
310520	C&C	Unwin FenuGreek	½oz	1tbs	Sep-22
Identity Notes
SH&SC	Smoked Haddock & Salmon Chowder
C&VS	Chicken & Vegetable soup
CT&B	Creamy Tomato & Basil
C&C	Carrot & Coriander
L&SBS	Lentil & Smoked Bacon Soup

What? Fenugreek? That's a spice! Indeed so, alert reader, but Trigonella foenum-graecum  = methi, fenugreek, is assuredly a legume, albeit a smelly one. The fenigreek towel was bright yellow after 2 days of contact. It is also loaded with plant secondary compounds like coumarins which tend, like BPA, to be hormone analogues. Fenugreek has been used to start uterine contractions and to stimulate milk production in breast-feeding mothers (although evidence is weak). If my moobs start weeping we'll have a publishable result.

Update: I am amazed, and delirah, to report that all of replicates are beginning to sprout with max shoot length ~8mm. About 50 hours from first wetting.

Jeanne-Claude et Christo ensemble enfin

Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon and Christo Vladimirov Javacheff were both born on 13th June 1935 but a world apart in Morocco and Bulgaria. They met in Paris in their early 20s and were "an item" for more than 50 years. She died in 2009 and he's gone to join her since the last of May this year.

Do you know what Art is for?
Answers on a postcard, please because I'm damned if I know.
Many scientists will have a much clearer idea of what science is for; but they will be deluded in their beliefs even if, maybe especially if, these believers point to technological changes that have been wrought by science, Every good thing that science has brought down upon us could be reconsidered from a wider perspective. Cars are dead handy except for the dead cyclists and pedestrians. Ryanair is mighty convenient for people and and a scourge for all Earth cohabiting unpeople. Vaccines & the green revolution, have led to a world despoiled by wheat and corn fields to feed us all . . . and our goddamned cattle. Social media and the internet allows us to store uncountable numbers of really terrible photos on server farms somewhere. Those servers require 2,500 TWh of electricity each year [10% of the total!]. Server-farm consumption is conveniently close to 100x the electricity bill for Ireland Inc.  That's a crappy bargain from science and technology IMO. Whoa! Bob; calm down man could you get back on the Arts side?

Jeanne-Claude & Christo may, or may not, have had notions of what Art is for. But they had very big ideas about what Art is. It wasn't, for them, painting a well-fed lady with an enigmatic smile. J-C&C came over my horizon in 1976 when they built Running Fence [at top, catching a stiff breeeze] across 25 miles 40 km of Marin and Sonoma counties in California. The "fence" was composed of 2000+ bright white nylon curtains 5.5m tall suspended from a very long curtain wire held aloft by 10cm ⌀ tubular steel posts.
It was a mighty breath-taking project that was 4 years in planning, negotiation & making and was taken down after precisely 2 weeks. The local landowners and ranchers got to keep the posts and panels. Nothing was left in place  >!poof!< all gone, done and dusted. The Art was in the process - and the community formed to make it happen - not The Thing in Itself [I Kant stand it]. I guess, like lumps of the Berlin Wall, there are sections of Fence in attics and barns across the region even now. [microdocumentary]. Did somebody mention Berlin? Christo & Jeanne-Claude also wrapped the Reichstag in 1972 [R]

Other C & J-C projects: Valley Curtain  - - Wrapped Coast - - The Gates

Being looked after

At the start of Coronarama, An Post gave each household in the country a brace of postage-paid post-cards as their contribution to combatting social isolation. I dithered for a loonngg time about who would get this limited / precious resource from me. Eventually they went off to the chosen two. As I was handing them to Pete-the-Post, I asked if he had any spares and got another handful. That meant
I could send one to everyone in the audience. Feedback suggested that this simple action was the best thing that happened to the recipients since the lockdown got in the way of their consumption of lattes-in-cardcup. Efven in the best of times, I was far to mean to lash out €3.50 on a cup of joe, even with added Oatly unmilk. But a pal at work asserted that she had one every working day because a) she enjoyed it b) she could afford it because she was in work c) it was a message to say she deserved a treat. Both the postcards and the cappuccinos said "somebody cares" and that's important all the time not just in pandemonium.

I was chatting along these lines with Dau.II on the Daily Show from Cork and she drew my attention to Grace Dent, once-upon-a food columnist with the Grauniad, who now has licence to write about whatever comes into her head because there aren't any restaurants to review. At the beginning of May Dent was writing about being a food puritan in her own kitchen. "It was time to dispose of the aubergine. The one I acquired 39 days ago. Once firm, noble-seeming and purple, it now sat there looking forlorn – mottled in places, with a slightly jammy undercarriage. I picked it up several times on Tuesday and edged it closer to the bin, but I couldn’t bring myself to make the final push: chucking food would be an admission of defeat."

She then goes on to riff on how she was dreaming of the day when she could bust out of this Sarajevo mentality and eat something bright orange, crisp, piping hot and loaded with salt, MSG and bad cholesterol. Looking after herself, virtuously polishing her plate, wasting nothing . . . because there was a war on: it was all getting too wearing.

In January, I wrote about how Old Vic cared when my widowed mother was assigned a billet in a nursing home for the final 4 months of her life. When she was much younger, in uniform for much of WWII, it wasn't an easy life, but at least there was someone in the background to cook the food and there was enough of it, Her own mother had a much harder life, with butter, eggs and bacon all rationed at just enough to get by on. With two adults in the house, my grandmother was allowed 2 eggs a week, and you may be sure that The Man of the House got them both. That went on for 6 years, so you can see what ordinary people are capable of enduring. It is nevertheless entirely appropriate to deliver a slab of flapjacks, a dozen eggs, a pot of marmalade or a postcard to show you care.