Next Sunday

Baby mammals look so cute. Saiga tatarica [R]

• Saigas [bloboprev] are making a come back
• Sarah Miller despairs over the climate wars
• Gotye -Supercut that I used know
• Natalie Merchant & David Byrne - Let the Mystery Be
• prev by Iris Dement
• Restoring a scrubby painting by 18thC Venetian Giovanni Battista Piazzetta
• Did somebody mention realgar? They did.
• Surfside update - remaining wing demolished.
• Q. Were residents allowed to go back to collect keepsakes?
• End of Days department: new hot-dog eating record
• Don't do this at home while downhilling on yer bike
• Handcrafted trowels

TEU

It was different times when The Boy was born in 1975: no cell-phones; no internet; half the number of people. But somethings haven't changed, and the standard intermodal shipping container is one of them. I have internalised this because the first thing I saw when I dazed off the grounds of St. James's Hospital after hearing about his arrival was a Hapag-Lloyd TEU whizzing past on a flat-bed truck. TEU? = Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit. It seemed like an omen, so we added " Hapag " as the poor wee scrap's middle name.

Shipping containers were the brain-child of Malcom McLean the owner of a trucking company from North Carolina. In the early 1950s he bought a couple of WWII T-2 tanker ships [500ft 150m long x 70ft 20mbeam] and converted them to carry corrugated steel boxes port-to-port. He appreciated that sending several truck-loads by sea was more efficient that sending them severally by road. Slower, of course, but much less fuel and time wasn't crucial unless the cargo was lettuce. The first voyage of the SS Ideal-X from Newark to Houston in April 1956 carried just 58 containers 35ft long. That being the maximum load length for NC roads. One of the innovative break-throughs was to separate the trailer chassis from the box containing goods. Many of the other engineering innovations are due to Keith Tantlinger an engineer from Fruehauf Trailers. He invented and perfected the twistlock [L] system for securely connecting containers to the transport base; be that a semi-trailer or the hold of a ship. Connectors need to be strong enough and yet easy to separate at the end of the voyage. The top joint of the twistlock is a round-cornered rectangular pyramid which fits an equivalent hole in the base of the container. a 90° turn locks the pyramid into the hole. Similar "mid-locks" can join two containers vertically. Tantlinger also invented the spreader bar so that a crane could seize one end of the container for lift and transport. Such systems only scale up if everyone agrees to standardisation, and Tantlinger was one of the key movers in this aspect of global trade. If there was a Nobel Prize for Commerce, Tantlinger would definitely have secured at least one. And while we are on secured loads, clock this cowboy [L] delivering fuel in Waterford. It is normal to see coal lorries with piles of Polish coal in 25kg plastic sacks on the flat-bed. It would take quite a jolt to launch a sack off the truck and onto the street and even then it would not travel far even if it didn't burst. Those gas cylinders though? Wouldn't want to be a cyclist having one of those bowling after me.

We all know about the Evergiven backlog in March. On 3rd June 2021 the OOCL Durban had a parallel-parking fail at Kaohshuing, Taiwan: colliding with a smaller moored vessel >!screeeeeeagh!< and carrying away a couple of gantry cranes. Another PoV. That put the port out of commission for a while. At the same time a Covid outbreak put the port of Kantian, China off-limits in a lockdown. 25% of all Chinese trade is funnelled through than port. More importantly, commerce has taken just-in-time inventory to the max because warehousing is a cost. This accident and quarantine has knock-on consequences across the world as ship after ship fails to meet its schedule in a domino cascade. You may have to wait for your lawn-furniture and sweat-shop shirtings.

102 Crystals

I'm not sure why I haven't written about David Crystal, Britain's favorite linguist, before this Summer. I've read a number of his books: he wears his erudition lightly but his stuff isn't lightweight. Then in the last couple of weeks, I've compared another book about language to my penultimate Borrowbox audiobook. I pronounced Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words to be original and best. We've met his son Ben Crystal, actor and producer, using his best Shagespian voice. 

Here [L] they are father & son, appropriately enough in the Globe theatre in London. David was born 6th July 1941, so I hope he gets a big cake and a bit of a knees up to celebrate this weekend. For someone who is even older than me, he seems to be right truly down with the hood, and up to date with the English language as she is spoke. In that sense he is, like Gretchen McCulloch, very much a descriptivist, celebrating how people actually express themselves, rather than a proscriptivist, nit-picking and tsking about how the young of today should be speaking.

As he acknowledges in the preface, he wouldn't be the first to adopt the trope of 100 Xs to summarise Y; and in doing so he has been as idiosyncratic as a publisher and his agent will allow an old chap rich in experience with the uses of English. With some rhetorical flourish, the First Word /100 "roe"  is chosen because it is arguably the first word in English where the artifact on which it was written has survived to the present day. That artifact is an astragalus from a roe deer [pic L] found in a cremation urn at the post-Roman settlement of Venta Icenorum near Norwich. The other bones in the urn were identified as coming from sheep. Someone thought it would be helpful to carve the runes for raïhan = "of the roe". Perhaps the urn contains the remains of a chap called Raï, and this was an ironic reminder of how he got his name.

The Last Word in Crystal's book is "Twittersphere" which, given that Twitter was still in nappies when the book was being written [published 2011], is as up-to-date as can be. He has chosen 98 other words to cover the span of the language over the 1,560 years between the two coinages:

• 5. out 
• 10. What! - as in what ho! rather than the interrogative what? 
• Hwæt. we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum 
• þeod-cyninga þrym gefrãnon
• Beowulf
• 15. arse - because we're Eurses rather than USAsses
• 20. skirt - not [quite] the same as shirt
• 25. wicked  - whose meaning changed from bad to good
• 30. royal  - a triple with regal and kingly
• 35. gaggle - collective noun
• 40. de[b]t - Latinized by acquiring the rogue b [debitum]
• 45. skunk - one of several words borrowed from folk displaced by colonists
• 50. billion = 10^9 or 10^12 ?
• 55. polite
• 60. species - naming of parts in the natural world adds a lot of words to the dictionary
• 65. lunch . . . or dinner? lunch-money for the dinner-lady
• 70. schmooze - via la yiddish
• 75. DNA - is a very short 'word' for a very long molecule
• 80. Watergate - and all the subsequent other -gates 
• 85. Alzheimer's - is an eponym
• 90. bagonize - the anxiety to which we are prey while waiting at the luggage carousel
• 95. jazz - named as the word of the [20th] century
• 99. unfriend - the 2009 word of the year.

There you have it, one man's choice. Your wordage will vary, but at least this list is coherent. Another bonus is that the book is read by author. And that author is sensitive to the medium being the message, so he's compensated for what doesn't translate well from the page and used the sound-track in ways that are impossible on paper - win-win!
hh

Fraxinal tears

Of all the trees that are in the wood the most huggable, for me, is the ash fuinseog Fraxinus excelsior. Last to show leaf in Spring and first to shed in Fall, the mature trees provide shade from the sun. If forage is short, I can cut down a branch for our sheep who will pile in and strip it bear in a feeding frenzy. In contrast to hawthorn sceach Crataegus monogyna, ash trees never blow over because their roots are strong and deep. The branches do tend to break in storms though and you shouldn't park the car under an ash tree if a big wind is forecast. In my days of making objet trouve anthropomorphic sculptures ash and hawthorn both played their part. And all those fallen ash branches have, over the years, been sent up the chimney of our wood-burning stove. The twigs make excellent kindling, the branches provide a graded series of small to big logs and the really large lumps split cleanly in a most satisfying work-out. We've never had to cut down any tree for fuel, everything comes down of its own accord.

That looks like it is about to change because the dreaded ash die-back has arrived on the farrrm. Crap is the photo is, you can see the symptoms clearly in the canopy of the tree pictured [L, R next to the house]. <Look, no leaves!> This is caused ultimately by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, an ascomycete fungus first described in 2006. The tree [L, L] above the red-roofed shed is also ash, but not so badly infested. It looks like ash, as we know it, a distinctive and valuable species familiar across Europe, is likely to follow the elm Ulmus procera which was extinguished by Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970-80s. DED was also caused by an ascomycete fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi but also required the intervention of bark beetles including Scolyus scolytus. For ash-dieback otoh the fungal spores are wind-dispersed and effectively impossible to interdict.

The best we can hope for is that there are strains of Fraxinus which are naturally immune to this specific fungal species. It is certain that H. fraxineus jumped the species barrier from trees which had long ago come to an accommodation with the fungus. One of the silver linings to the continuing disaster which is Covid-19 is that I can use comparative immunology terms like jumped the species barrier which would have needed a paragraph of explanation when I started blobbin' back in 2013 when nobody had heard of  武汉 or knew the Latin for pangolin. I hope that there are plant pathology labs across the world which are getting funding to study the effects of anti-microbial peptides AMPs on fungal hyphae. Better still if the AMPs come from Fraxinus or Fraxinus-adjacent trees of the Family Oleraceae. You don't see olive trees or lilac copping a dose of die-back - that might be a place to start.

Unrat cleansing

When we lived in England, the neighbour's daughter kept an albino rat Rattus norvegicus as a pet. The rat's party trick was to run up inside one arm of the girl's sweater and emerge from the other. Spectators could, of course, track its movements - thinking about Loa loa is optional here. Most people, otoh, consider rats to be a noisome pest [Ger: unrat Schädling], which eat animal feed [dang!] and occasionally transmit Weil's Disease and a variety of other pathogenic bacteria and viruses - plague anyone? Humankind has had a loong-time relationship with rats, the rodents having trained us to gather food into one convenient place for them to sample. As near as dammit, wherever people are, or have ever been, there you will find rats, both brown Rattus norvegicus and black Rattus rattus aka the ship rat. If it was only that they ate the leavings of people, it would be containable. The problem is that rats are omnivorous and "food" includes the eggs and chicks of ground-nesting birds. Native birds which had been living the good life for thousands of years until people, largely European started the Age of Exploration and introducing their domesticates - goats, rats, mice, cats, pigs, foxes, rabbits, donkeys - willy-nilly. It is very difficult, and fabulously expensive, to put the rat genii back in the bottle - it cost about $10million and took 10 years to eradicate invasive rodents from South Georgia. Interesting chemo-ecological relationships between rats and seabirds in Chagos archipelago.

In the news last week was the fact that rats have been eliminated from two of the smaller islands in the Galapagos. To put this is scale: the entire archipelago is a little under 8,000 sq.km in extent - about the same area as County Cork or Las Islas Canarias. The 'clean' islands are Seymour Norte (the speck indicated with the red arrow) and an even smaller islet called Mosquera situated between Seymour Norte and Baltra / South Seymour. The map above [from LatinRoots Travel] neatly shows the parallel system of names applied to the islands since a) Ecuador annexed them on DarwinDay 12 Feb 1832 and b) Darwin himself arrived on HMS Beagle 15 Sep 1835.  It was considerably cheaper and quicker to clear Seymour Norte [190 hectare] than South Georgia [390,000 hectares], because scale. But also because they used drones . . . to deliver a payload of 20kg of the rodent specific killer bait. I was talking about this with Dau.II when the news was hot and she thought if might be a great crowdsourced project for the next round of elimination. Recruit teenage Call of Duty first-person shooter fans to fly hunter-killer drones from their bedrooms in Romford. The drone [L] carries a bait hopper and a GPS tracker and is operated from a ship to deliver the poison quickly and precisely. Far quicker and more reliable than a bloke with a rucksack.

Bell Labs designed the rodenticide and are talking large about how non-target species are not at risk from consuming the poison - it dissolves in two or three weeks before native birds get a chance to eat it . . . but hangs around long enough to give the rats every chance to eat a fatal dose. It's not clear which specific "rodenticide" is being used on the Galápagos. Could be any of bromadiolone, brodifacoum or diphacinone [anti-coagulants which are replacing warfarin] or bromethalin [neurotoxin]. In the realpolitik of conservation, a certain amount of collateral damage is tolerable. The project hopes to play the [rat] extinction is forever card, at least locally; so long as enough breeding adults of the birds survive then I guess some considerable by-catch is acceptable. 

Note added in press: slight ArsTechnica report on the relationships among islands - rats - seabirds - guano - phosphates - coral - fish biomass.

4th July 2021

Flags optional

• ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪
• Don MacLean - American Pie
• Carly - Let the River Run
• Indigo Girls - Closer to Fine
• Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am a Man Of Constant Sorrow
• Monkees - Daydream believer
• Vienna Tang - Level Up
• Hank Williams - I saw the light
• Bo Burnham - All eyes on me
• Brickit - the app that reads a heap of Lego and suggests a build
• Unknown knowns - the dark heart of dead Rumsfeld
• Martens and squirrels [prev]  to be cooked by capital [UK]
• Cronyvirus pandemic [UK]
• An archive of Saki [prev] read by Richard Crowest in his best Edwardian voice
• Getting your feet wet in Miami in 2030.

creep feeder

 Discerning carnivores, like my late-lamented mother-'t-law, talk about getting very young meat - suckling pig, kid, veal - because these products are unavailable in retail Ireland. Actually, Souad talked a lot more wistfully about mutton, which she claimed tasted of something. But then again she was a terror for <gnarr, gNARR> cruibíns [pigs trotters], marrowbones and all the wobbly bits inside. Me, I'd rather eat lentils for the rest of my life than gnaw sustenance from cartilage. Irish people eat a lot of meat but almost all of it appears <shazzam> on supermarket shelves in neat slabs and squares so that nobody has to reflect on the fact that a week ago that hamburger was eating grass. No business likes to have their capital tied up for too long. They like a return on their investment as quickly as possible. So it's economic to feed animals up to the gills, so that they reach "market weight" before the competition. This is most extreme in the case of chicken where 41 days is all it takes from hatch for 2.3kg of soya+corn to be converted into a trussed, shrink-wrapped, oven ready bird of 1.2kg.

Nobody likes mutton, and most folks are squeamish about eating lamb that has as much meat on it as a fat chicken. The Market dictates that "lamb" is a bruising great teenager of 45kg. Getting a newborn to that weight in, say, 15-17 weeks requires more than milk and a nibble of grass. You need to feed the ewes, sure, but you really need to supplement the feed of the lambs even if you have to pay ready money for nuts. Farmers want the best of both worlds of course ad lib milk but also nuts and something has to prevent the ewes from shouldering the lambs aside and scarfing up all the <yum> concentrates. On commercial farms where dozens or hundreds of lambs are growing through their paces every year a creep-feeder [R] is yer only man. There are many ingenious designs out there from swish powder coated monsters to rusty old yokes welded up from sheet-metal and steel tubing.

The deal is that creep-feeders allow unlimited access to the lambs while effectively excluding adult sheep. Bearing in mind that sheep can smell the goodies and will push over or crush anything insufficiently heavy or robust. In the past we have borrowed a creep-feeder from our neighbour after his lambs have gone to market. That monster required 4 grown men or a tractor front-loader to move it. Note the roof in the feeder [above R] - it's best to load in several days of feed at once and let the lambs work their way through it. You must do what you can to exclude a) rain b) ravens. I think it's called a creep feeder because many designs require the lambs to approach the feed on their knees.

This year after an outrageous number of false hopes and misinformation, we have a total of two [2] ram lambs which are each about 36-38kg. These b'ys need feeding up because if we can get them up to weight in a couple of weeks, they can piggy-back with the neighbour's crop on their final journey. So I needed to jimmy-up an exclusionary feeder from locally available materials. In the distant past, I had used two 12ft steel gates with one end attached to fence posts and the open end kept apart with a block of wood and a lot of knotted ropes. That creates a triangular lamb-only paddock where a bucket of feed may be placed. This year a far better solution occurred to me [not for nothing do I wake up at 3am, screaming].  I used a couple of 90cm x 200cm sheep hurdles, made locally by Daniel Whelan Engineering, which are a lot handier to handle [see above L]. We're leaving this all a bit late as you can see that the lambs are almost as tall at the shoulder as their dams. More to the point their head'n'shoulders are almost as wide.

Holding the door open with a block of wood wasn't going to answer, quite apart from the fact that I had no idea what was the crucial discriminatory distance between ewe-shoulder and shoulder of lamb. Experimentation is the key! I found a handy length of timber, cut it into 2 x 20cm lengths and pre-drilled holes every 2cm along the top edge. The Whelan hurdles, in contrast to a 12ft gate, have a couple of eyed lugs welded top and bottom at each end. Four robust wood-screws and some washers worked a charm.  A bit of adjustment revealed that 18cm was a pretty good distance. We still have to carry a couple of cups of sheep muesli up for the boys a tuthree times a day but we should be doing the journey anyway to check that the bould brats haven't gotten their heads caught in the sheep wire or indeed escaped into the forestry from pure divilment.