2025? It's a wrap!

 Three years ago, I quoted Minnie Haskins' 1908 advice for moving forward at Turn-of-Year. We had a perfick Christmas: lorra food, some healthy; a moderate amount of ethanol; a brisk yomp up the hill; only one item of shouting at family [sorry]. I had to cede space on the sofa but they didn't send me to the tunnel. I was given a weighty-blanket: which is supposed to help with anxiety, insomnia or the spectrum. It is colour coordinated with the sofa and I reclaimed my place with added gravitas after Dau.Book and Dau.Cook returned to the fray in Das Kapital. I have to learn how to operate the blanket because it can be quite a struggle to throw it off if the door-bell or the telephone rings. D.B and D.C were across the water earlier in December hangin' with the niblings and found themselves at a concert in Bristol Cathedral.

Dau.II [not wearing her toque there!] was interested to see an easel in the narthex = porch = vestibule = entryway of the cathedral but was delirah at the message written there. Turns out that the sentiments are not original to the Dean and Chapter but were probably borrowed from The Church of St John the Evangelist in North Vancouver, BC, CA. "When we at St. John's say that All Are Welcome, we really, really do mean it.  The words of welcome in the sign are part whimsical, part spritely, part purposeful but all of it sincere. ". You can find the full text at the StJohn link above incl.: " , , , You are welcome here if you are just browsing, just woken up or just out of prison. We don't mind if you're more Christian than Saint Paul or more Anglican than the Archbishop of Canterbury, haven't been to church since you were a child, follow a different faith, or have no faith. . ." 

That's a rather different christian message than the brutal caedite eos pushed by Arnaud Almaric in 1209. There are far too many Almaric wannabees in today's polarized world who are punching down on folks who are having an even crappier time. Not going to preach at you. But my new year resolution is to be kinder [and less shouty].

All the best for '26! 

Mind & body

I'm not the brightest and persist in checking if things are HOT by touching them. Sometimes, anticipating merely warm I apply a finger and get surprised >!yarroo!< by how hot it is. It takes < ½sec to get the signal up-processed-down. But although I feel the pain, there is often no obvious damage to the skin. It's a bit like a small child who falls over, gets up and carries on unless s/he sees blood, in which case waaaaiiiill. Is it that my 'mind' is deciding nothing to see feel here don't bother with the blister?

I was recently reading two books by Irish neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan: The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness [2021 Guardian] by Borrowbox earbook and The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far [2025 Guardian] as a regular page-turner. Dr O'Sullivan is the new Oliver Sacks [whom prev] - an expert on the working of the brain who can tell a tale. Neither author writes much about the bump-and-grind [concussion, MS, epilepsy, dementia, stroke] of their clinical work but has picked and anonymized the oddities among the oddities encountered in their practice. 

My memory of Sacks is that telling the weird [The man who mistook his wife for a hat etc.] in some detail was sufficient to secure an advance from a publisher. O'Sullivan is more polemical and political and none the worse for that. 

My first para begins to address the Mind/Body problem famously addressed by René Descartes in his 1637 Discours de la Méthode . Descartes' soundbyte was Je pense, donc je suis or more impressively in Latin cogito ergo sum: he was sure only that his mind was credible and accepted that his body and its sensations might be illusory. So there's a lot to be done teasing out Who is in charge anyway? Can we think ourselves well? Are we defined by our disability? Does this really hurt?  O'Sullivan takes a different duality to task in both of her books: that no sick person exists in isolation. We are all embedded the seven circles of our social life: our family, our village, our county, our class, our country, our united states, our species. [Don't hold me to seven, I'm just making this up as I go along.] All of these layers will influence our unconsidered certainties and sense of self. For e.g. I don't question the fact that my knees work and it took a conscious act of empathy [never my strongest suit] to walk at the pace of Pat the Salt's zimmer frame. I am better than some but still Other [transitive verb] folks who have facial hardware, better tans or drive white Hiace vans.

Here's one story from The Sleeping Beauties. Dr O'Sullivan was bizarred out to discover that there were ~170 cases of catatonia among teenage refugees in Sweden. In Sweden? why in Sweden and not Switzerland or other West European democracies. So she made some enquiries and contacts and went to visit some of these cases of resignation syndrome. Not to oversimplify a complex and disparate set of tragedies but the normal way of processing applications, and re-applications and appeals and re-appeals for asylum in Sweden involves the entire family. Not least because the kids are far better speaking Swedish than their Yazidi [or whatever] parents. The kids have been in school for several years as the mill of immigration rules grinds on. The Swedish system decides that Turkey is safe enough for such people and in parallel decides that this paperless family is probably Turkish and so asylum is refused. The kids go home, go to bed and go coma. Except it's not coma as neurologists normally see it; the data details [muscle tone, BP, pulse, MRI] are unique to teenage refugees in Sweden. They are none the less Real and super distressing for all concerned. There is little that a neurologist can do except order more tests. Physiotherapists are essential for ameliorating the symptoms [jaysus, not the bedsores - these kids have enough to suffer etc] but cannot manifest a cure. The cure is for Sweden to stamp the papers obestämd uppehållstillstånd = indefinite leave to remain. But De Man might have saved a lot of trouble by not including [fragile, impressionable] children in asylum hearings, judgments and appeals. And of course that has very uncomfortable geopolitical implications [aka floodgates] for the Swedish taxpayer and those whom they elect.

I like the cut of O'Sullivan's jib. You can get a sick note from work if you have an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription. But you can't if you just feel crap today. I dunno about hangovers being sick-notable. If we trusted employees to do their best and treated them like responsible adults then feeling crap would be good enough. Medicalizing the extremes tails of the normal range of human affect / health / happiness lays off all the solutions on MegaPharm to the glee of shareholders. Doctor's lists are long: the new normal is that each patient is allowed 7.5 minutes: just time to write a script but not enough to listen.

Good health requires good food; a warm winter home; a sense of community; maybe a bit of nookie. The dispossessed may have none of these essentials. But they have a medical card.  Maybe making The Minister responsible for supplying these basic needs is too much to hope for? People want to be heard as much as they want a square meal. See also Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Invisible handle extension

Boo-hoo, my favorite aluminum pot-belly saucepan is finally declared beyond the capability of ShonXrepair inc. When we found it in a Gt Boston yard-sale 45 years ago, it had already done a generation of service for an American family. Probably cast and assembled ~1950 at the height of Boomer material space-age prosperity. I guess the base was originally flat, so it would work efficiently on a 1950 vintage General Electric stove. Since then the saucepan's bottom has acquired a convex sag; but then so has mine. Worked fine with our gas hob.

In recent years, I Sugru'd up a crack in the wooden handle, first in blue and then green but now the internal bolt [steel] has rusted out - and I can't get the anti-grav hover mechanism to kick in. My old partner will have to join me in retirement. Eeee, they don't make 'em like they used to.

In other news, Dau.I the Book and Dau.II the Cook came down for Christmas. I was tasked to source a nice piece of organic bacon collar for the carnivorous half of the family. Obvs I went to Rathgarogue Organic Pork [whc Prev for eggs]. Cookie baked that on Christmas Eve to give oven-room for a chicken the following day. VegHalf had musharooms Wellington. A colourful variety of vegetable sides filled the corners. After dinner we sacked out to watch The Birdcage [1996] an American remake of the wonderful La Cage au Folles [1978] which we saw in a multiplex in Albany NY in Oct 1980. We were much younger then than our girls are now. Counting our blessings - it's been a crap Christmas for too many people across the county, the country and the world.

Disappointment calendar

In the 1990s, for several years, I made an Advent calendar for Dau.I and Dau.II. This required printing out two identical pages of 160gsm card covered with 24 randomly scattered rectangles. On the back sheet, I used the rectangles to frame 24 age-appropriate, ironic pictures [ZwartePiet ☻on the 5th; tools 🛠 on the 7th; Rudolf's nose ⬤ on the 9th; a menorah 🕎 on the 15th; a parcel📦on the 24th]. On the front sheet, I cut 3of4 sides of each rectangle with a craft-knife and then covered the whole thing with a holiday themed picture. Dobs of glue were put between the rectangles on the back sheet and especially round the outside edges and the two sheets pressed together. It was shoddy, shonky and crafted with love. Valuing my time at the minimum wage, each calendar was 'worth' ~€60 yoyos. Somewhere, there is an archive of these unique objets d'art for some definitions of Art.

Sometime in the second week of December 2025, there came into our possession a Kinnerton [who? about] Advent Calendar [as L]. I understand that Bluey is a TV doggonality which might be attractive to kids the same age as Dau.I & Dau.II were when I made Advent Calendars for them. Not all modern parents [or aunties?] value their time but some do and and so they buy an Advent Calendar: a snip @ €4.95. The Kinnerton Calendar front has far better production values that my home-made kludges but the rest is deeply disappointing: the 24 (35mm x 40mm) doors cover a 6 x 4 blister pack, each cell of which contains wafer of chocolate [by some definitions of chocolate] the size of a toe-nail. I kid you not, each door hides 1.7g of matter. The total edible part weighs in at 40g or 1½oz in old money.

"Our Safe Nut Promise means that you and your loved ones can enjoy delicious moments reassured that we really care about our products totally nut-safe". In this case, say one moment is < 2 seconds. Then you're paying €5 for ~one minute of  deliciousness. Or €300/hr - suddenly my home-made advent calendar is looking like Value!

Or to put it another way, this food adjacent product retails at €125/kg. More than 2x the price of insect health bars or in other blobwords cheaper than bayleaves but more expensive than nutmeg. 

Ingredients [did we say No nuts? we did in FI DK NO SE as well as English]
Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Sal, Shea in varying proportions), Dried Skimmed MILK, Dried Whole MILK, Cocoa Mass*,  Emulsifier (Lecithin), Vanilla Flavouring, *Rainforest Alliance Certified.

Fear not! The Blob has your back on Sal Shea Palm vegetable fats. Whatevs, today is Christmas Eve, last door for most Advent calendars!

What is the Magyar for woodpecker?

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, we lived in a rented farmhouse out by Dublin Airport, maybe 12km N of O'Connell Bridge. My landlord mentioned that he had done his homework at the kitchen table by paraffin lamp until, when he turned 16, rural electrification f i n a l l y rolled out to his parish and he could see what he was doing after dark. I never got a date on that or indeed Paddy's DoB, but early-50s seemed correct. The Shannon Scheme went live in 1929. Our house was built in 1941 probably w/o the 'lectric. 

A few days ago, through the drizzle, I heard a car-door slam and went to chekkitout: because we were expecting UPS and they needed to turn where that car was probably parked. It was a white van and the driver was thrashing about in our shrubberies on the other side of the lane!?! Turns out he was a contractor for ESB networks checking to see if the electricity poles hereabouts were fit for purpose. I told him I knew that 'our' poles had been installed in Spring 1997. That's information but only a proxy for whether the poles were fit for purpose. And, he added, you're wrong: this pole was erected in 1956 ['56 as circled R]. I had to defer to his domain of knowledge and admit that I had been incorrect about the number of new utility poles (N = 1 [✓]) we got in 1997. And indeed, now I had the correct search-image, I walked downhill to other pole and found a similar tinplate label with "1997" on it.

Me, as a Network Know-nothing, might have put more credence in another sign [L] on the first pole saying "COBRA 1978". Both poles have QR-codes that will contain a lot more information about signage, location, quality, provenance, age; but I don't read QR. We continued to chat in the not-quite-drizzle. Transpired that this Effective had been born and brought up in Hungary but was here because the work was here. Go! Stay The New Irish. Hours of electronic training playing Grand Theft Auto really don't equip the Youth of Today to stand a ladder up against a pole in the rain. It was just as well that we'd had Glavey Tree Experts in July to thin out the jungle and trim some, fell some, trees around that electric pole. According to my new Magyar pal, the best tool for assessing the utility of utility poles is a hammer. Like a um woodpecker! The first few tonks by a woodpecker can assess whether wood is hollow enough to support insects enough to make this tree worth the effort. Apparently ESB networks had, several years ago, acquired a ship-load of Swedish poles which below standard wrt core integrity as per contract and these had attracted A Lot of woodpeckers in a futile hunt for insects.

I've noted before that hitting things with a hammer can yield key information for stone-masons. 

And farmers can get compensated for having ESB poles on their land. Who knew? 

And I'm sure you're hopping about for the answer to 
Q. What is the Magyar for woodpecker?
A. Our newly re-native woodpecker is Dendrocopos major = the great spotted woodpecker. In Hungary they call it nagy [big] fakopáncs or harkály. My Dec'25 conversation about birds was a lot easier [not to say charged with electricity] than one I had [Garrulus glandarius = Vlaamse gaai = Jay] with a monoglot farmer from Gelderland in 1975.

Two degrees of connexion

So what's it to be with crime - punishment or rehabilitation? Having done stupid, dangerous, illegal and cruel things in my life [but not all at once!] I vote for rehabilitation. Recent Blob disagreeing with the cries of bang 'em up and throw away the key for killers. 

The Boy 'takes' The Economist, and sends me their weekly Simply Science round-up. I read most of this and occasionally ask for a guest-link to the full article. Second week in December there was a piece on quantum physics about which I know as much as would fit on a photon. I perked up at “Don’t worry your head about what’s really going on,” was the attitude of the early quantum engineers, according to Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University. “This is the so-called ‘Shut up and calculate’ school.” Those engineers ended up creating semiconductors, leading to the device that you’re using to read this, and much more. But only because Paul Davies (physicist, writer and broadcaster) [R] and I were both on the U.NuponT payroll at the same time in the 80s. Even back then Davies was a star and he started his meteoric rise to the firmament while hop-scotching through 7 prestigious Universities on three different continents. Knocking off 28 [!] popular science books along the way . . . as well as his day job pubs.

I double checked in Wikipedia that 'my' Paul Davies in 1980s Newcastle was the same bloke as the Economist sound-byter in the 2020s [✓]. My eye slid down the page to Davies was a co-author on the 2011 Science article "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus". Whoa! We know that paper! It was cited by Tony Kavanagh [on The Blob] - extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof, and in this case not even ordinary levels of proof had been carried out. Eeee, he were quite cross, our Tony! Back in 2013, I didn't scrutinize the [N = 12] authors but in 2025 I was in name-and-blame mode and I saw John F Stolz on the list.

I know that guy too. He was in Boston University graduate school at the same time as me 45 years ago! He was doing a PhD on stromatolites and early-early microbial life-forms with . . . Lynn Margulis my late lamented friend and mentor. I guess he had something to add to The Arsenic Paper: having a lifetime of expertise in the oddbiome. As a co-author, you have, in the first instance, to trust that your colleagues are doing the work assigned to them. If we could flip eppendorfs AND grind multivariate statistics AND GIMP graphics then we wouldn't need graduate students and/or to 'buy-in' expertise from another institution. Paul Davies not so much??: Apparently he said "I had the advantage of being unencumbered by knowledge. I dropped chemistry at the age of 16, and all I knew about arsenic came from Agatha Christie novels." WTF? Why are you endorsing the paper if ya know nuttin'? It is entirely possible that, given the power of celebrity in our culture, that adding his name to the Arsenic Paper's author list helped bring it to the attention of the editorial board of Science - and then get it over the line and into print. Of course, that editorial board [and at least two independent referees] were culpable for publishing sexy without conducting due diligence - to get ahead in the Nature vs Science rating wars.

I must add that there is no suggestion that anyone on The Arsenic Paper was making stuff up or finagling the data or being dishonest. But when you think you've found something exo-biology extra-ordinary never found on Earth before then you need extraordinary levels of proof which means going the extra mile to be sure to be sure that you're not going to finish up with a red face.

Maybe I am the connecting link between Stolz and Davies: I'm quite prone to being credulous: my first reaction to a compelling sciencey headline is more likely to be Hey that's neat rather than sounds like a loada bollix. Perhaps Dulled Crap Detector DCD is a contagious virus and I was the vector. That Arsenic Paper was a) controversial and b) conclusively shown to be wrong within a year of publication but it continued in a zombie state to be available online in Science until July this year. when it was RETRACTED. Which is perhaps inappropriate? Because the team may have been wrong but they weren't doing anything wrong. If you can't be wrong in Science you're not close enough to the cutting edge. And <tsk!> the News&Views layperson summary to the paper (which I cited in my 2013 Blob) is still failing to flag that the original paper is suspect; giving ammunition and succour to bad-faith nut-jobs from the Planet Zorg.

And hello Jason Hosken at The Economist who put together the relevant Simply Science round-up which started me off on this rant: when you're looking for a quote next time maybe look over the shoulder of Paul Davies to find someone with less tarnish on their street cred.

Before I sign off, let's emphasize that we should condemn the sin and not the sinner. Everyone can make a mistake or even, like me, do stupid, dangerous, illegal and cruel things. The correct response is not to cross the street when we see them coming, refuse them work or healthcare. Then again it's okay to remember past transgressions and factor that into how we move forward. Life isn't black and  white  it's beige.

BobTheSidebar

After 2030 days contributing to MetaFilter, 
67 Front Page Posts FPPs, and 
1337 comments 
finally . . . BobTheSidebar. It's one of the advantages to having written +2 million words of copy: there is an extensive mine of material to cut and paste. No sucking the pencil required. Obvs, the intersect between what has interested me in the past and what might be relevant to MetaFilter today ie (Blob  MeFi) is not q u i t e ∅ the null set but - close.

But here I was able to rob a couple of Blobs [counting and Wageningen] to edify MeFi.