Fall in the woods

I never claimed to be a good field biologist, and my photography is even crappier; but I try to maintain a sense of wonder at how wonderful the world is. In mid October, The Beloved gragged me up into the Sitka spruce plantation on the edge of our mountain because it was a good time for fungi. It was about the same time as I encountered three city-boys scanning the sheep-meadows for magic mushrooms. Well it was rather wonderful because I've often slagged sitka forests for being shady deserts and this adventure proved me wrong. Without trying too hard we found at least 14 different species of mushroom.

1,2

3,4:

5,6:

7,8:

9,10:

11,12:

13,14

Any mycologists out there could maybe ID these by name in the comments? Or better tell me something wonderful about how any of these unique organisms makes a living from the forest floor. 

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants -

At Evening, it is not

At Morning, in a Truffled Hut

It stop opon a Spot

As if it tarried always

And yet it’s whole Career

Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay -

And fleeter than a Tare -

Emily Dickinson

Boy grows up at sea

 I was a navy brat; at the age of 14 my father was sent from his home in Dunmore East to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He was 22 when the war broke out and had some adventures in Motor Torpedo Boats before graduating to a more infrastructural role in bigger ships. He survived the war although a lot of his mates didn't and basically never talked about his experiences. Pat the Salt, The Beloved's father had a peculiarly parallel life. Also at the age of 14, Pat ran away to sea from his home in Cardiff. That was the Summer of 1939, which was misfortunate timing for a young chap to join the merchant marine. Unless you believe, with Pat, that "what kills not, fattens": for a young chap an exciting life is infinitely to be preferred to a long one. Three years later on 3rd August 1942, Pat's ship the Lochkatrine was torpedoed on the way to Halifax and Pat had to leave behind what few things he possessed when he landed in the lifeboat. In his later years he'd talk wistfully of a girl called Aurora who showed him a thing or two in Buenos Aires.

I was reflecting on these stories while I was reading a faction called The Lonely Sea and Sky by Dermot Bolger. This a remarkable story which riffle shuffles the experience on Bolger's dad who lied about his age and signed on to the Irish merchant marine during WWII and the true story of the MV Kerlough which picked up 168 ship-wrecked German sailors while returning to Ireland with a cargo of Portuguese oranges on 29th December 1943. The 14 y.o. "Jack Ryan" had a life-altering romantic experience in Lisboa. It's an interesting insight into the shocking hardships that ordinary people had to weather in the days before any sort of welfare net. 'tis a wonder there wasn't a revolution. It also reflects of honour, ethics and sacrifice: not inappropriate reflections in these our troubled times?

Here's Dermot Bolger talking about his book, Wexford, his father and his father's guardian angel.

Knocking off the eight years

Seems that I [R] started The Blob eight years ago today. I was full of bounce and hope:

Saturday, 5 January 2013
New job, nearer home
On Monday, after three decades of teaching and research in the University sector, I'm moving sideways to teach in an Institute of Technology.  This is an alternative tier of Third Level (and indeed Fourth Level) teaching and research, where the student contact hours are much longer and hence the diversity of topics to be covered by one person quite broad.  Insanely broad, I thought, when my new HoD read out the list of classes for which I'd be responsible.  So, whatever happens to the students in the next year, I am going to learn a lot.

That final aspiration was fulfilled: over those years I did indeed learn a lot: about science; about people; about organisations; and about myself. And ranging far and wide beyond the Irish Midlands. It's all there, my whole life [what I can remember of it] in The Blob.

Boiling Bill Bryson

I am a fan of Bill Bryson.  his Lost Continent was the funniest book I ever read on the recommendation of rec.arts.books - which was part of Usenet; which was social media before the World Wide Web turned the internet into something altogether bigger and uglier. In November last year, I saw that an audiobook of him reading his own The Body; a guide for occupants was available on Borrowbox . . . but not until 30 Dec 2o2o. So I reserved it. The very next day, last of 2o2o, I was on a road trip to Cork and picked up a big box of Seville oranges. While the kettle was boiling, I took advantage of Dau.II's unlimited WiFi to download Bill's Body to my smartphone. Such an inconsequential act would have taken many minutes over our rural "broad"band, even assuming our bandwidth neighbour wasn't on a Netflix jag.

The next morning was the First of 2021 and I reckoned that the oranges were not going to marmalade themselves. Accordingly, like Leap Day 2020, I cherry-picked as many oranges are would fit into my tallest and most capacious saucepan and set it to boil-then-simmer for 3 hours. I could / should have halved the fruit before packing and cooking them but forgot to do that . . . because I R old, forgetful and can't read my own notes. This is the easiest part of the Marmalade Protocols because it is perfectly possible to let the fruit simmer and multitask about the house: emptying the grate; counting the sheep; making tea; making water; gathering Winter fuuuelll. Note to self: I went at it again on 2nd Jan because we had sugar and jam-jars sufficient unto the task. This time with hemispherical fruit - this allows only about 10% extra packing. 

But this is just the lull before a storm of pain as the fruit are eviscerated with a sharp knife and a scooping tablespoon. It's quicker and more fuel efficient to do this hot, but begod ye need asbestos fingers. That yielded 4-and-a-tad pints [~2.3 lt] of pulp which will take 4kg of sugar by past experience. The skins were rough-minced with m' trusty Spong mincer and cast thereto.  Actually those quantities are about twice as much as can be conveniently handled with my ⌀ 40cm jam-pan; so I split the task into two batches. The second batch was cooked a little longer than ideal and so will support a standing spoon as well as being darker in colour. By tea-time I had 17 pots of marmalade: sealed, labelled and ready for the Armageddon bunker.  By tea-time the following day I had another 17 pots full of the warm south. Outlay in cash makes it about 75c /pot for quality [organic] 3 ingredient [water sugar orange] calories. And I still have 6-7kg fruit à la peau.

It certainly helped the yaroo pain to have Bill Bryson burbling along in the background about dermis and the microbiome. But I'd much prefer to be meithealling the marmalade like last year; although that is unconscionable under Coronarama Rules. The day's work really hadn't made much dent in the box of fruit, so I anticipate cooking through the current lock-down until I run out of jam-jars. Then I will freeze any remaining oranges until the jar-fairy delivers more. On the way down to Cork, Dau.II and I were speculating about whether the process of freezing might actually generate the better product - because the cells of the oranges get bursted by the formation of ice within. A bit like bletting?

New Year Senday

What's happenin'?

• A year's wildlife in MN
• Sheela-na-gigs on RTE Bloboprev
• Rohin Francis embracing uncertainty.
• Snig Snog
• Cornershop Brimful of Asha
• Voices Lesbian A Cappella For Justice Heaven knows how we will get there.
• Rhiannon Giddens Wayfaring Stranger
• Sean Rowe - I'll Follow Your Trail
• Annie Lennox & London - Dido's Lament
• The Longest Johns & 500 - Leave Her Johnny Leave Her
• I whored my penguins [see R] out to TYWKIWDBI - a blog I've been following since before The Blob
• The rarest Green Penguins
• IE-EU news. First DFDS sailing from Rosslare to Dunkirk left yesterday at 14:00hrs. Arriving 24 hours later.
• Finally: a homage to arepas venezelanas.

Robot homeostasis

For years, with no paper qualification, I taught Human Physiology to pharmacy technicians. They were enrolled in a two year college course mainly for the Qual at the end of it all which they could use to negotiate for better pay and conditions. Of all the modules in their course, Hum Phys was the least vocational: of obvious use in their profession and [with Chemistry?] the most challenging for those less academically inclined. At the start my only qualification for running the course was "well, I have a body" and I probably knew more about how it was constructed than anyone else in the room.

Over the years of prepping classes and fielding questions and comments from the floor, I really came to appreciate what a piece of work is a man . . . how infinite in faculties. Our core body temperature, our blood pressure, our sodium balance all maintained in quite rigid limits by hormones and neurotransmitters and molecular channels and receptors. When  I started teaching that course, I was in my late 50s, pretty fit and fully functional. As the years ticked off I was able to share how my homeostatic mechanisms were increasingly out of control: I could no longer leap from sleep and nip along to the bathroom knowing that the system would continue to pump blood to my head despite the huge change in pressure due to gravity. And what's with all the needing to pee in the middle of the night??  And is that related to the drooliness at the other end??? They deeper you dig in the mechanisms of maintenance, the more miraculous it all seems.

I was thinking about this last week because I watched the latest clip from Boston Dynamics about how well their robots are performing normal everyday tasks which we take for granted. It's nothing about BP, and fluid balance however; it's more sense of balance [proprioception] because the BD bots are dancing. Which requires them to stand on one foot and jump off the ground while turning 180°. You and I learned how to do these things with not a bother between the ages of 3 and 5 years. All those muscles, tendons and proprioceptors in dialogue with our inner ear to implement actions with uncanny precision: landing on our feet without falling over is not something people think about much . . . until the whole system starts to collapse into unreliability. When you can no longer stand indefinitely on one leg, you should make sure your will is written, because a fall is likely round the corner and a fall may finish you off. They have gotten to "graceful" because they have been shoved about, fallen and subject to redesign.

The dialogue at home and on Metafilter largely referenced the opening scenes of the Terminator movies: if robots can dance they can for sure pick up an Uzi and mete out death to everything that moves. For me what's remarkable and, with caveats, delightful is how much progress the dear robots have made. When I last cited Boston Dynamics in 2018, their giraffebot was opening a door [see above L: note how the creature is holding the door ajar so it can take another tug at the opening process]. Now t'buggers are shimmying their hips. But in 2015, the robots, despite looking substantively the same, were clearly a work in progress. What's really interesting is the lad leaving the golf cart at 1m08s clearly has a Parkinsonian tremor in both legs. If you don't have Parkinson's, you can stand up, sit down and lift a spoonful of soup to your mouth without getting the shakes. But that's because the counter-balance of biceps and triceps; extensor carpi and flexor digitorum; are all exquisitely fine-tuned albeit extremely active as they control both sweeping and miniscule movements of the limbs. Parkinson's causes over-reaction and over-compensation. 

So I was telling Dau.I and Dau.II about this and they drew my attention to LiftLab; a feedback spoon that damps the tremors enough so that the business end of the spoon is stable enough to transfer peas from plate to mouth. Okay, in 2014 each spoon cost the bones of $300; so it's not going to be rolled out across sub-Saharan Africa. But what's not to love that Uncle Jimmy can maintain agency about feeding himself!?

New Year tunnel

Yesterday, I spend pretty much the whole daylight dayin the Yaris  repatriating Dau.II to the People's Republic of Cork. At about the same time The Beloved set off in the opposite direction running the same service for Dau.I. We did this because instructed to do so by the troika of NPHET, the HSE and Bill Gates. Old Bill wants us to distribute his Location Chips as widely as possible. I thought traffic might be like the last day of a bank holiday weekend, so packed a thermos and sandwiches. But I was wrong [as yet again!] and we sailed West on a truly gorgeous sunny winter morning. The sea was sparkling and the frost persisted only in hedge-shadow. We would, of course, preferred to run that trip after the New Year weekend but The Man mandated full metal lockdown starting in synchrony with Actual Brexit.

Bereft without the daughters.

But bitter tears butter no parsnips. I had phoned Sam Dennigan's Cork warehouse on Monday to discover a) they had taken delivery of their first truckload of Seville oranges b) they were open for biz until 2pm on Thursday. Their gaff looked truly shuttered when we arrived outside but there was a light in the office window upstairs and someone came down to let me in and carry off a 13kg fruit-box of potential marmalade. If we are not allowed out from home, I may as well do something useful.

I woke this morning <late, knackered> to a peculiar dream that resonated with the Annual Summer Camp we ran with/for the girls over seven years while they were still more children than adults: I was up the lane with a shovel tricking about with drains [as ever] when I heard a boinggy sound issuing from the 20m⌀300mm pipe that take the water under a gateway. After a short time a small boy, about the age of Gdau.I and Gdau.II, in now muddy white shirt and shorts, emerged grinning from the end of the pipe; followed by half a dozen similarly triumphant children. They'd been set a challenge, embraced it with gusto and carried it through to completion. There is light at the end of every tunnel! Looking forward to seeing how 2021 plays out: elbumps to all my reg'lar readers.