Detroit River

I'm guessing that many Europeans could name some of the Great Lakes (of North America) and at a pinch name (most of) them: Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, Ontario. A lot of the naming rights were taken by Francophone voyageurs and coureurs de bois, who roamed the Great Lakes Region by canoe or on foot making a living by trapping a trading with the First Nations. Sault Ste. Marie names the rapids between Superior and Huron . . . and cities on the Canadian and USian side of the channel . . . and the might Soo locks to raise ships safely to the superior lake. D'etroit is on the narrows between Erie and L. St, Clair which is the smallest of the great lakes; although still 3x bigger than our Lough Neagh.

Lake Ontario is different because it is 100m lower than L.Erie - half of the drop being accounted for by the Niagara Falls. The other lakes are between 173m and 183m above sea-level and Big. L.Superior is about the size of the island of Ireland, while Michgan+Huron+Erie are together a little smaller than England+Wales. 

The Lakes are handy for transporting bulk goods like grain, iron and coal and the ships - lakers - can be huge. They don't travel fast but they can carry as much as 1,000 18-wheeler semis. If your lumpy, goods need transport among Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Duluth, Detroit, Gary, Milwaukee or Toledo and there's no great rush, then lakers are yer only man. I heard about the Detroit River only a tuthree months ago because a couple of lakers were recorded racing for access to the said river in 1992. I assumed that Detroit the city had, for reasons, been built a little way from the shores of Lake Erie and that freighters came up river to unload, like container ships come up the piffling River Liffey to the Dublin Docks. Or indeed the docks of Duluth up the St Louis River.

Wrong! The Detroit River is a mighty thoroughfare 44km long between Lake Erie and Lake St Clair. A similar situation holds from Lake St Clair to Lake Huron by the St Clair River. These three lakes are essentially the same height although the water always flows from Huron to Erie. Windsor, Ont. [W on map L] is in the peculiar geographic position where its citizens have to drive N to visit the USA. Something in excess of 100,000 jobs and $10bn in trade depend ways to cross the Detroit River. The main conduit is the Ambassador Bridge which soars 50m above the level of the water and takes 10,000 commercial vehicles daily M-F. It costs $5 each way for regular cars but . . . the bridge complex also offers duty free gas so drivers can fill up their tanks, saving about 40c/lt compared to Ontario prices. Remarkably for such a crucial infrastructural resource, the bridge is in commercial private ownership.

Nicely the traffic at right-angles underneath the Ambassador Bridge is served by a public utility in the form of the Detroit River mail boat. This is the JW Westcott II, a 14m long motor boat docked on the Detroit side which has an exclusive contract with the USPS to deliver mail to passing freighters on the fly. You can see the Ambassador Bridge in the background. Much joyful honking from both sides after each transaction: ". it was not uncommon for a boat to have 2 or 3 guys aboard that could name the ship by the sound of its horn"  . The same boat collects and delivers river pilots, vid also shows the central part played by the mail bucket. Example address:

M/V Hon. James L. Oberstar

Marine Post Office

Detroit, Michigan

48222 USA

Frontline decisions

What's the point? We're scheduled on the planet for three-score-and-ten . . . and a good bit more on account of antibiotics and clean water: we have to make the best fist of it that we can. Although the World is technically our Oyster, constraints of birth and early upbringing rein in the realm of the possible. If you're born Catholic you almost invariably are shriven to die Catholic; it's difficult for Patriarchs to be postmen [altho I did briefly achieve this]; not many options for kids born in mining villages in West Virginia or up the Rhondda; navy brats know about Service. And a disconcerting number of doctors have doctoring parents - it all rather shows a want of imagination (and opportunity). David Nott's [prev] father was an Anglo-Burmese doctor, who married a Welsh nurse. An only child of unhappy parents he wanted to please and scraped into Medical School at the second attempt. Remarkably [and hats off] he was able to realise his boyhood ambition of becoming a commercial airline pilot as well. 

Random inspirational events steered him into general, especially vascular, Surgery. Like Dr Kay, he climbed the ladder while learning his trade: a lot of varicose veins, haemorrhoids, lipomas, hernias and appendectomies with occasional more exciting "clamps!" aortic aneurisms. In 1993, at the age of 37, he signed up for Médecins Sans Frontières for a stint in Sarajevo during the Balkan War. He discovered a couple of things: he got a rush from dodging bullets; he could keep calm and carry on in shocking poor conditions. Keeping calm is at least as important as knowing where to cut. In war zones, patients / casualties come in lumps - all at once and then none at all. Effective triage is often the key to maximising survival; someone has to decide where the surgeons can leverage their skills to best effect. It's like Goldilocks: some casualties are too bad; some are not critical; some get the next slot on the operating table. Some of the last will come back to theatre when things calm down so that the doctors can tidy up the mess.

For the rest of his career as a consultant surgeon he'd see-saw between his lucrative London work and really terrifying, exhausting, thrilling, effective stints in an alphabet of war-zones: Afgho, Bosnia, Chad, Darfur . . . leavened with natural disasters in Haiti and Nepal. I know all this because I've just finished War Doctor, Nott's autobiography, on Borrowbox. It is read by the author, which is usually more convincing. As a fainter, it is probably not the best book to "read" while driving. The line of those whose lives he has undoubtedly saved will stretch down the street and round the block. But triage decisions have consequences too: one young man used up every unit of transfusable blood in Aleppo and died anyway. Those 20 units eked out for several less exciting operations could have saved different lives: trolleyology [multibloboprev] with consequence.

Did I say leverage their skills? I did. At one particularly dodgy third world posting, thinking he might be killed that night, Nott sent a you're cute txt to a younger woman of his passing acquaintance in London. They were married in 2015. Elly Jupp used to work for a think-tank, The Institute of Strategic Studies, so she knows how to get the best bangs for the buck. Apart from two children she has brought The David Nott Foundation into the World.  There are many ways in which you can contribute to the good work. Mr Nott, for all his skills and experience, cannot bilocate like an electron. But he can teach his skills with medics from war-torn, dispossessed countries, so that they can more effectively cope with medical trauma back home. His Surgical Training for Austere Environments (STAE) has upskilled so many doctors that the lines of the saved are starting to fill stadiums.

Covaxx

 If you are aged 66 to 69 you can now register to get a COVID-19 vaccine 

I R an Old. Sunday /yesterday afternoon, I fired up the interweb to register for a fr€€ AstraZeneca vaccine. I was invited to do this on Sunday because I was born in 1954. The Beloved couldn't do it until the next day. It seemed to be more complex than it needed to be. Pat the Salt, my aged FiL, was vax-contacted by his GP because The Man knows how old everyone is, and Pat has 30 years on me. My PPS number, a unique, short number equivalent to a US Social Security # should be all that is needed to determine eligibility - but I was asked for my birthday. I was also required to submit an e-mail addr and a cell-phone number, so that The Vax Man could send me an email that needed a reply AND a txt msg containing a verification code. And an Eircode. And ! my mother's maiden name. And the contact details of my GP. To register I had to submit all these data to create an account, with an over-specified password. I will use this account either once or maybe not at all. What this means is that another database has been created with matching PPS, email, mobile, Eircode for, eventually, everyone in the country. Now tell me this will never be hacked!? Similar over-control and complexity over water ID in 2015.

If the state had joined up thinking, the registration cd/shd have been done through the Dept Social Welfare which already has these data. But no! Welfare doesn't do vaccinations, so Health must duplicate the bureaucratic cross-checking. Whatevs! I am now required to wait an indeterminate time for a vaxx date. I do know that I am selected for Team AstraZeneca which was until 4 weeks ago NOT recommended for Olds. Now <clots> the AZ stocks are being dumped on old people.  It is entirely possible that, between my registration and the actual jab, The Man will have another policy change: privileging, say, teachers; because the congeries of quangos [ECDC, HPRA, NVRL, IEMAG, NPHET, NIAC, NIQAB, HSE, HIQA, LAO'N, WHO] which dictate policy are a) math anxious b) risk averse. 

The AZ vaccine development protocol was, with 20/20 hindsight, poorly designed because it included only a few handfuls of Olds in their volunteer test subjects. This meant that there was insufficient evidence for efficacy and insufficient evidence for adverse side-effects IF drug bureaucrats [FDA, ECDC, HPRA] chose to partition the date into aged cohorts. Jobsworths gonna jobsworth so, of course, AZ vaccines, ordered, paid for and delivered to Ireland for crumblies the most vulnerable had to be diverted or cold-stored until the quangistas had calmed their fluttering hearts. Old people caught Covid and died in the interim.

I live a very sheltered life: retired, rural, no-pals. IF I cop a 'Rona, the consequences will likely be more serious for me [I R an Old] than for The Boy, who is 20 years younger. BUT he lives on a crowded street and has two kids in school each sampling the whole local community by sharing spittle in the play-ground. Risk analysis is the product of likelihood x severity. My likelihood approaches zero so the potential severity is irrelevant. Logic dictates that "my" vaccine should be given to a teacher or an asthmatic, or someone with CF. But I belieeeeve <hallelujah> in vaccination and will be getting my jab asap [before my birthday in mid-June] pour encourager les antivaxxers.

St Laserian of Leighlin Sunday

St Laserian, local saint: his feast-day today

• The Flemings take down the ould bodhrán
• Fair tocks to Mr Fleming
• The Gardiners hoofing the bróg chniogrince for StPs
• Tommy Tiernan: Peter McVerry: you can Trust him
• HMG-UK: Lord Willie Hay - can't trust him
• Elsewhere
• John Oliver: caring for the elderly [spoiler: Frankly Scarlett]
• Just one day without Dale
• Dr Mabry: talking bridges, engineering
• B1M: talking tunnels, cruise-ships
• Twins separated at birth + DNA + FB + hugs
• Werner Herzog - Legend!

Breaking the rules

We are getting to be more active Zoom-rellies with the Grandchilder across the water in England. I learned a good bit of my how to deal with children patter from my father, who was born, an only child, in 1917 and doted on by ranks of Victorian aunts.
"How old are you Aunt Norah?"
"As old as my tongue and a bit older than my teeth"
. . . that sort of thing. Last Saturday I was recording some Nasreddin tales, which are even older than those long-dead Victorian aunts. This on the assumption that, if they have been going for 700 years, they must have timeless appeal to kids. Seemingly so, indeed, as Gdau.II and her sister have actually asked for more. Their auntie Dau.I kited a Limerick at them and this, apparently novel, form of entertainment appealed. Limericks were popularised by the quintessentially Victorian versifier Edward Lear [R] but that form, where the last line reprises the first:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna,

Whose Grandmother threatened to burn her;

But she seized on the cat,

And said, 'Granny, burn that!

You incongruous Old Woman of Smyrna!'

I find ineffably boring and, well, Victorian. My preferred Limericks are those which break the formal rigid rules and I have a small fund of them to perplex kids who are familiar with the trad form. I can't be expected to remember all these clever-cloggsie members of the Limerick Canon, so I tried Google with "transgressive Limericks" but that search only acknowledged that the most popular Limericks almost all are like to bring a blush to the face of any remaining maiden aunts . . . Nantucket etc.  A few years ago there was a piece in the Guardian by Michael Rosen and the comments covered most of the rule-breaking Limericks which I was trying to recall.

There was a young man from Japan

Whose limericks just wouldn't scan

When asked why that was

He said it's because

I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can."

or this

There was an old man of St Bees

Who was horribly stung by a wasp.

When they asked: “Does it hurt?”

He replied: “quite a bit

but I'm jolly glad it wasn’t a hornet!”

Diminishing returns:

There was a young man named Wyatt

Whose voice was incredibly quiet.

And then one day

It faded away

There once was a man of Dundee

Whose limericks stopped at line three.

Though no one knew why

There was an old woman from Crewe

Whose limericks stopped at line two.

There was a young man from Verdun.

This thread will devolve

into endless limericks

or maybe haiku. [source]

((12 + 144 + 20 

+ (3 * 4^(1/2)))

 / 7) 

+ (5 * 11) 

= 9^2 + 0

There is a plan OEDILF where participants are attempting to define all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary in Limerick Form. They have 100,000 entries from Aardvark-Hazard and are soliciting help to fill in the gaps.

My party piece remains:

There was a young woman from Ryde

Who ate some green apples and died

the apples fermented

inside the lamented

and made cider inside her inside

Spoiler for the matherick: “A Dozen, a Gross and a Score / plus three times the square root of four / divided by seven / plus five times eleven / equals nine squared and not a bit more.”

Takotsubo

 Takotsubo n. lobster trap

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy n. a broken heart; a condition, brought on by stress, disaster or loss of a loved one where the left ventricle develops a characteristic round bottomed shape (apparently similar in shape to a Japanese lobster pot) before finally calling it quits and stopping. Medical details.

If my beater gets the right training and plays its cards correctly in the rush and fuddle of an emergency, I might be able to slip off at home without the excitement of intubation, futile anti-biotic treatments, CPR and . . .  apply defibrillator paddles, "CLEAR" >!beDOOF!< like in Emergency Ward 10. As we get older, many events - a stumble, a burn, a trip, a cough from the postman, a dizzy-spell on the landing - will start the medical intervention steam-roller and we'll be bundled off to hospital where all bets are off and Advanced Healthcare Directives AHD are left behind on the fridge door.

Thoughtful longform piece in the Guardian by Kate Clanchy who lost both parents this past Coronarama Winter. TSIA: Letting go: my battle to help my parents die a good death. Her parents were middle-class lefty intellectuals who devoted quite a bit of attention to End of Life Issues, tricked about with their AHD / Living Wills [L] and of course updated them when the Mayhem in Bologna told them that intubation was a) a thing b) a thing they did not want.

Mrs Clanchy went first, her comorbidities took her away in an ambulance, her carefully crafted AHD was lost by the hospital because they really don't care about such things: they get in the way of autopilot protocols for treating a lot of people in a properly triaged order. Surgeons gonna surgeon. Nurses are dog-tired, over-extended, grossly under-paid. A sheaf of papers on an old ladys chest gets in the way of the stethoscope. And of course she got Covid, because hospital. 

The family being smart, middle-class, assertive, and attentive learned from that experience for Round Two with Mr Clanchy. "And that turned out to be the right thing to say. With that last, desperate, refusal, my father and I pass through the looking-glass into the world of those dying at home. We are amazed and grateful to find that even in January 2021 the GP will come to the house, district nurses will call twice a day and fit him with a driver for morphine and a fantastic new anti-anxiety drug". It took him 10 days to die, of a takotsubo broken heart, with Covid rather than of Covid, in his own home. Those 10 days were time enough for a a rota of friends'n'relations to take shifts sitting with him and to open the door for the district nurse twice a day for palliative. 

“OK,” I say, “we won’t have any help. Please will you inform the doctors?”

I hope that works as gaeilge.

 How to use a defibrillator: Don't! [not my style, thanks]

Green & Black & White

Dau.I the Librarian Many Talented has been down for essential agri-business on the farrrm: to wit the 2o2i lambing season. We haven't been lambing these last few years because The Farmer has been double-jobbing as The Carer and could no-way guarantee she would be present 24/14 for peak delivery time. That was The Plan this year also; but then several of the ewes entertained a roving ram [or two] and it was clear, from their filling ''elders" that they were expecting. 

Two dropped their lambs [L with quince tree] in the week after Easter; coincident with the arrival <tan-ta-raaa> of the Dau.I sheep cavalry. The Library will have to manage without her for a long week, which will free up The Beloved for her many other duties. Me? my hands are too big. Quite apart from the utility of having an extra pair of [small] hands, it has been wonderful to have a different perspective and a different way of doing things. Not toooo different: she grew up here, after all.

It turned out that she had sent her nieces in England some chocolate Easter eggs, which <Brexit> arrived late. On the family zoom last Sunday she asked if they had finished their scoff and there was a somewhat garbled story that some of the goodies had been consumed by their father to protect their teeth. The Boy, their father, is known to have a bit of a sweet tooth so this grass 'im up tale had the ring of possibility. In 2017, when I went to England for two weeks after my mother had her cataracts scraped. I was only required to administer eye drops 4x a day, so I had time for other things including a deep-clean of the kitchen cupboards. When my nursey duties were over I drove 2 hours N to hang out with The Boy before catching the ferry home. 

I told him that I had brought away some packets of dinky Green&Black chocolate bars [as R] of indeterminate age. We opened the first packet to see if they were edible. All the wee bars had developed a white  bloom  [technical term] where the sugar had dissolved from the choc-emulsion on prolonged contact with moist air. This isn't fungus and the little bars were certainly edible - as we proceeded to prove by eating them. The youngest pack was 2 years beyond its sell-by date. Needless to say we experienced no adverse effect from consuming these pensioned candy-bars. Sell-by is indicative rather than proscriptive.