Cleaning up

My home was full of Buddhists on Saturday morning, so I lit out for the Waterford coast to do some meditative scavenging. It was not raining, not too hot: perfick and the tide was bottoming out  as I passed Annestown. Low tide means being able to dance across the rocks of the headland and walk along the beach, totally alone, beneath the towering cliffs of Woodstown [no, not that Woodstown] and Whitefields. I don't do this for the good of my health; but rather to see if I can pick up something for free. WysiwIg: what you see [L] is what I got.  For reasons that may become apparent, I weighed the 4 buoys: which totalled 44oz = 1.25kg.  The tennis-ball, the driftwood, the rope and the large white light plastic ball in the net are a bonus.

There's all sorts of crud [plastic bottles, flip-flop soles, unmatched kids' Crocs, pieces of cord too short to keep] I could be picking up from the foreshore and tide-line, but don't. I'm with my refusnik pal, Wallace Arthur, on that. Picking a bagful of the detritus of littering strangers is not my idea of fun, nor is it my idea of efficient. I'm a fish-box, rope & buoy boy myself: I can get those back into circulation for a second life about the farrrm. Others have more appetite for cleaning up rubbish than Wallace and me. For example, Steven Moody is a plogger, adding clean-up to his daily jog.

Boyan Slat had more ambitious plastic dreams and raised $40,000,000 VC to scan the oceanic garbage patches . . . and pick it up. Slat runs his Stichting as a charity registered in the Netherlands, which requires quite high standards of accounting and transparency. But reports from the pilot study at the end of last year found that Wilson, The Ocean Cleanup's solar-powered plooper scooper was allowing the prey to drift from its clutches before getting bagged. Back to the drawing board lads!

Because of my interest in ocean clean-up and periodic checks on young Boyan's progress, I am become "Mark" for youtube Ads from another ocean-meet-plastic venture called 4ocean. They wear blue t-shirts (or fetching dudey chest-wigs for the sun-shots) and mostly seem to scour the coast-line in plastic pickup meitheals. In Florida this work is carried out by The Voluntariat but in Haiti and Bali, local lads are given pale blue t-shirts and paid to clean the beaches. In contrast to The Ocean Cleanup, 4ocean is For Profit. The company pay Balian fisherfolk by the pound to pull plastic out of the sea, because sure-as-heck they weren't catching much fish. The business model is that they recycle old glass bottles into beads and old plastic bottles into PET braid and combine both into bracelets which you-the-punter buy for $20 . . . each.  I hate it when advertisers state the obvious about the product, as if the reader was either 4 years old or mentally deficient. Porridge oats as "fat free"; hamburger as "gluten-free" that sort of nonsense. 4ocean assert: Hey surfer dudez, these 4ocean bracelets are Unisex and Waterproof. In my BLT handbook ⚥ means bisexual rather than unisex but we'll let that pass. As soon as I saw that my bracelet would cost an eye-watering >!$20!<, I closed the window and moved on. The puff is that your $20 pays a well-tanned but indigent person at the rate of 1lb = 450g / bracelet.

Can that be right? $20 will buy you a bottle of finest Californian Chardonnay or a pound of quality French cheese. If you send $20 to 4ocean their Haitian workers will take a small bagful of plastic crud from the ocean, $20 is 100 minutes of work at California minimum wage [$12/hr]. If you live near the coast, could go to the nearest beach and do a lot more in 100 mins than pick 1lb of plastic off the tideline - like cut the middleman out. My small but perfectly formed haul pictured at the top of the page is worth $50!! in 4ocean credits.  My Are we Having Fun Yet? swinger b[u]oy [R right on!] is, by the same accounting, worth $550 for the planet.

Is the whole bracelet thing a scam? [12 miuntes] tl;dr, it depends what you mean by scam. IsItBulshit?  That has some less forgiving analysis of 4ocean and the personal experience of picking up 17(!) lb of beach plastic in an hour. Forbes is not so much forgiving as adulatory about the venture and says that +1 million bracelets have been shifted. $20 million dollars will buy a lot of pale blue t-shirts; top-quality editing on the promo vids; hours of intrusive youtube ads . . . and still leave a lot for The Founders. Because it's for profit, there is no obligation to submit a breakdown of costs to you and me and a well-paid accountant will keep as much from the IRS as is legal.

Where's the rabbit?

It's all magic. Life is magic. Follow from yesterday

• Magician Hall of Fun
• Kyle Eschen is in Vienna
• Keith Barry is Irish
• Lennart Green is a doctor
• Art Benjamin is a bit of a pain in the arse
• Apollo Robbins nicks stuff off people.
• Heartwarming department:
• Je suis Là : "T'es-tu d'ici? T'es-tu de là?" alors les mecs, nous sommes tous canadiens.
• Happy. Pharrell Williams et al.
• Chinese. Now I am happier than 5 mins ago.
• Science
• Mark Rober's nieces & neffies perfect a rock skipping robot
• Robo-tenpins - less hokey, no idea how you score here.
• Killerbot - be very afraid [via]
• Any Other Biz
• How to kill a fish with a clean conscience
• Knotty probby?: use a carter's hitch.
• How to make a stone and lime-mortar foundation.
• Withnail & retrospective
• Did a lot of rich people make money on Brexit night? They did.
• Arizona foodbank feeds the poor.
• Village in Bangladesh builds a bamboo bridge and feeds the workers [cooking starts at 14m].
• US taxpayers feed the ex-Presidents

The contribution of others

Last year, the Blackstairs Farming Group landed a huge grant of money to become a pilot study for the sustainable development of Ireland's Uplands. Then they allocated a wodge of that money to the commonage where we run our sheep; and indeed run ourselves if we need a long, largely solitary, walk without having to get in a car. Our 'hill' is 200 hectares but, like the Backstop, bleeds into other commons with porous borders and no impediment to travel. If you go missing up there, then mountain rescue needs to scour something like 3500 hectares [say 6km x 6km] if they assume that you haven't crossed any roads. Last Summer, before Blackstairs Farming Group was really flying, we got to know the area quite well because we had 8 sheep on the mountain grazing heather and needed reassurance that they hadn't died like the unfortunate EI-00445355-4639E. Eventually, with help from two counties-worth of farmers, we got all our ewes back before Winter.

The Blackstairs scheme is partly designed to persuade farmers to co-operate more rather than pursuing their own interests in the quintessence of help-self capitalism. As illustrated above, they do a pretty good job of helping each other out and, in general, not spitefully doing each other in the eye . . . even if they won't willingly talk to the neighbour whose grandfather was slighted by their own: in 1947, in the Mart, at Carnew, it was September, drizzly, shortly after Aunt Mary died of consumption, forget nothing, embellish a little. The first steps to co-operation have been to hold a number of meetings to agree a plan of action that will help develop a better, more diverse, more generally productive, more interesting, dry heathland ecosystem for the sheep to share with grouse Lagopus lagopus scoticus, heath bedstraw Galium saxatile, golden plover Pluvialis apricaria, tormentil Potentilla erecta. There has been a quite understandable reticence in articulating what to do to earn the money, which the Department will only pay out if Deliverables have been delivered.

The Blackstairs Boondoggle has given me an excuse for getting out and about more and for reasons other than scanning the hillside with binoculars for distant white dots with blue LBs on the left haunch. Although yesterday at 1604hrs I found 3 of the 8 which are meant to be somewhere in the sea of heather  and bracken and got close enough to the skittish beasts to snap a pic:

I have undertaken to record evidence [with GPS coords] of trees and shrubs which are to be extirpated to maintain the dry heathland which sheep grazing has created from the primeval dark forest over the last few hundred years. But I am also recording evidence of another use for the hill: as a quarry for granite sills, lintels, gateposts, and artwork. Thursday arvo, I spent 3 hours on quite superficial coverage of the 25-30 hectares nearest to the mountain gate where Hickey's farmstead ends and the Commonage starts. I am getting to know a Redmi Note 5 which The "Of the Generous Hand" Boy gave me for joining the Greys last month. Yesterday, Friday, I was off again more or less making a complete clockwise circuit of our Common: documenting trees, worked stone, known natural landmarks, the state of the 'mountain wall' and its rough secondary gateways. In July, the bracken gets shoulder high which can make walking a struggle and also a hazard because it obscures footing. It may also be a carcinogenic hazard when sporulating [now] . . . and harbour sheep ticks Ixodes ricinus. So I should really have been doing this sort of yomp in March or May when it was wetter, yes, but easier to walk without worry, too. It took me just four hours, including pauses for photos, scanning the horizon, and striking manly poses on top of boulders [I haven't yet, you will be pleased to hear, mastered the use of camera for selfies].

I came down home as the Angelus rang across Catholic Ireland, and I was as bushed as our hill - which is to say, superficially.  Accordingly, I took off boots and socks, made a rehydrating cup of tea and sat on the stoop to reflect on an afternoon without human contact. Sometimes I sets and thinks and sometimes I just sets. I hadn't been at this above ten minutes, when a fancy new white car hove into our yard, paused for a good long gawp, backed out again and parked in our lay-by on the opposite side of the lane. It was soon joined by a slightly older black car; and the two vehicles debouched 8 or 10 people a-whoopin' and a-hollerin' in Spanish. After much 'organisation' the party set off up the hill without pausing to say ¡Hola! , let alone asking ¿puedo aparcar aqui?.  Must be shy, I thought, charitably. I finished my tea, went inside and, sometime later, vaguely heard the Spaniards return to their cars, have another noisy post-mortem and drive off . . . leaving three urine-dabbed tissues behind for somebody else to pick up. Well really! as Bill Bryson is wont to say.

Vergüenza - a pretty name for a girl?

For services to science

In 2006, when Charles J. Haughey, former Taoiseach and perpetual chancer, finally threw in the towel and left politics under a cloud of his own shenanigans, he added a bit of culture to the Dáil record by quoting Othello "I have done the State some service; they know't. No more of that". Any number of clever cloggses, who did better than Haughey on Leaving Cert English but less well in amassing a fortune, noted the omission of the rest of Othello's self-assessment as a man who was "perplexed in the extreme", who had "traduced the State" and was "richer than all his tribe". Haughey is widely condemned for getting himself  "richer than all his tribe" by people who benefitted from his determination to drag Ireland out of the 80s depression and start roaring like a Celtic Tiger. Why, I myself got into a mighty feed of Guinness and oysters when the Great Man officially opened IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in May 1991. That bold expression of a bright and well-fed future could be marked as the birth of the Tiger. That could be characterised by a Shagsperian paraphrase: The Tiger was but a walking shadow, a rich financier that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of bling and feasting, signifying nothing.

Here is a conundrum for governments and other institutions: how to pay people who have done the State some service in a way that neither offends the recipient nor costs the State some money. Both my father and my brother threw in their lot with the United Kingdom, despite having exactly the same King's County roots as me.  In my father's case the shift commenced during the Free State years when the borderline between Ireland and Britain was blurrier. Both of them did better for themselves serving British institutions - the Royal Navy and the BBC respectively - than they would have done in the Naval Service an tSeirbhís Chabhlaigh or RTE. My Dad drove far bigger ships than Ireland can afford, for example. At about the same age, the state recognised their very different contributions with exactly the same medal - CBE - giving them parity of esteem with Anthony "EBV" Epstein but one step below Jocelyn "DBE" Bell Burnell . The Brother's workmates now call him The Commander, by way of saying that only a stuffed shirt would take these things too seriously.

When I was a tot in the 1960s, there was series of ads inviting you to "award yourself the CDM". Mother just about manages to close a jam-packed suitcase - then child brings teddy bear. She awards herself the CDM for closing it. Voiceover: Have you been sent packing today? Award yourself the CDM!. Things didn't improve with a noisier jazzier ads for the same product in the 70s. But chaps had longer hair in those post-National Service days too.

The Big Five in academic publishing are King Elsevier followed by Wiley; Springer Nature; Taylor Francis; and Sage.  Their business model is to make authors pay page charges and libraries pay fabulous subscription rates for must have journals often bundled with other journals that would not be sustainable on their own merits. Nobody knows how much Harvard, Heidelberg or my own The Institute is required to pay because the deal is signed on non-disclosure confidential terms. Last year, a former boss [smartest bloke in the room in most rooms] asked me to review a paper for Yeast because, in the Venn diagram, the intersect between my niche expertise and what Yeast would entertain publishing was that close to the null set. I had a great time on the task, dredging up what was second nature to me 20 years ago, reanalysing their data and recommending a number of ways the paper could be streamlined and tightened up. I did a good job, and put in far more work than the other referee. But none of us got paid a cent for the work which is essential for the academic (and by extension commercial) credibility of the contents of the journal.

You're richer as a Wiley shareholder doing bugger-all for the process than people [authors, editors and referees] who actually do work. But it was fun for me, because it happens rarely and I knew I could make a positive contribution Pour La Mérite For Science . . . which I'm not in for the money. This week, exactly a year later, I got my CBV - Certificate for the Bovine Voluntariat [above]. Sometimes, you see in a paper's Acknowledgements "Thanks are due to an anonymous referee who made constructive comments, improved the Inglesi and made it a better paper" not in this case, however. I am not ungrateful, so I wrote back to the robot who sent me the Cert: Thank you so much, I printed it out at A3 and folded it into a hat: really useful to help survive the current heatwave. With care, recipients can ensure that WILEY is displayed at a jaunty angle over the left eyebrow. If we're going to whore ourselves out for Multinationals we may as well wear the cap that fits.

Bagonomics

Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

I try, I am trying, I am very trying about food. Keep it simple, make it yourself, it's not that hard and not that time-consuming and the number of ingredients falls off a cliff.
Eat hamburgers: one ingredient (ground beef).
Eat Impossible Burgers: 21 ingredients [having a Shame! swipe earlier in the week]
To Be Frank [as a change from being Bob], I rarely eat hambugger and more or less never buy the stuff. For a while earlier this year, my meat fix was ground pork, which was very pink, 400g would go a long way: a burger, a couple of pasties, spag bog. In fact 400g would see me[at] through the week for €2. When we want proper meat we go to Mr Dunne the Butcher in Btown. He can actually butcher a hawg, rather than just selling stuff butchered by Letts in a factory far, far away. And he has sourced a number of local, organic, free-range producers.

For the solstice this watershed [Y=65] year, I bought a whole shoulder of pork [weighing 6kg] from Mr Dunne and Dau.II aka Cookie put it in the oven for 24hrs at 105°C - dang but it was good as in Carolina BBQ good. Keeping it simple meant that we could feed 40 people (see L [source] with seconds . . . and ahem, thirds but who's counting) for €30 [= €5/kg] and still be eating left-overs the following week. Those left-overs were aliquotted into plastic snap-lid Chinese take-away containers, of which we have a regular supply because some of our cash-rich time-poor rellies do that sort of thing. Although those take-away containers are designed for one-time use - just robust enough so they don't collapse if stacked 6 deep in a carrier bag - their life-time use can be extended indefinitely and used instead of Tupperware (or similar) for which you have to pay ca$h-mon€y.

As well as eating through left-overs when I'm alone in the house - which is about 50% of the time given the elder care and other rotations - I also make all the bread, buns, scones, pasties, pastries and cookies. But far the handiest way to pause this bakery [rest those croissants in the fridge for 30 minutes between roll-and-folds etc.] is plastic bags. But do I buy plastic bags? No sirree, I do not: there is a goodly supply coming through the kitchen from other products. Some are more use than others and some are so flimsy that one-time use is all that is possible. Rocket leaves, baby spinach, mixed salad leaves - those bags go straight to landfill - for shame. Bags for cheese, shop-bought bread, granola are much more robust and get several uses in my kitchen because we're not above washing them out.

Whoa?! is that a good idea . . . for the planet?  Does it cost more carbon to use hot water and dish-soap than it does to make a new plastic bag in a factory in China? You can obsess about the economics but we live too remote for trash collection so are more careful than most about separating and re-using our discards and even one reuse is better than no reuse. The average lifetime use for a plastic bag is 12 minutes; which is the same as the average lifetime use for an electric drill. NPR had an interesting essay on the unintended consequences of plastic bag levies.
Without an inexhaustible supply of 'free' plastic bags just robust enough to carry groceries from shop to car, consumers had to add 'garbage bags' to their shopping lists and create a market for heavier bags that last longer and are more effective in suffocating seals.

This land is New Land

Because I was a high-function cockroach Blattella vaga in a previous life, I was born in Dover, this time round. I left almost as soon as my mother could walk after the ordeal of delivering twins. Back then the preferred method for inducing a reluctant labour was to load Her Vastness into the midwife's Morris Minor and bucket about along off-road tracks on top of the white cliffs. Not nearly as effective as intravenous oxytocin and prostaglandin but mildly more exciting. Since we left in 1954, there have been many changes in the town and country of SE Kent. Perhaps the greatest economic changer has been the creation of the Channel Tunnel which by-passes tthe Ports of Dover and Folkstone and loads all the road traffic for France onto trains.  It's more expensive than going by P&O ferry [£200 vs £160 Dover-Calais 17/07/19 Calais-Dover 24/07/19] and the view is much less expansive.

Q. What do you do with 5 million cu.m. of spoil from a massive tunnelling project?
A. Dump it as close as you can to place where it is being generated.
The tunnel digging consortium got planning permission to create a hoe (a jutty out to sea parcel of land) where some of the servicing plant (banks of fans mainly) for the ongoing maintenance of the chunnel could be sited. But that only occupied a fraction of the available area and the rest was called Amenity and given over the Samphire Hoe Country Park. Access is through a tunnel under Shakespeare Cliff and you can park your car, have a pee and a cup of tea [probably in reverse order] and go for a limited yomp across a 30 ha. area which is gradually undergoing ecological succession to chalk heathland. I think I approve of that transition. Although I guess the wrasse (Labrus bergylta), conger (Conger conger) and pouting (Trisopterus luscus) who were minding their own business among the rocks at the base of the cliff, were less happy.

Lydden Spout is the beach at the West / Folkstone end of the Hoe and both are a cracking place to fish for rock species not least because most anglers prefer to shoal together on Admiralty Pier in Dover; because it's nearer to the pub. Apart from tea, sea-air, emptying your dog and fishing, you can look for fossils.

Le Radeau de la Méduse

On this day 203 years ago, the French frigate La Méduse  ran aground off the coast of West Africa. It inspired the 27 y.o. Théodore Gericualt to paint his Scène de Naufrage [above], which captures the moment when 15 survivors were spotted by a rescue ship, the Argus, 13 days after a hastily constructed raft was launched into the sea with 150 people aboard. The rest of the 400 ship's company having piled into 6 boats with the intention of rowing to the African coast 100km away. It was a huge scandal for post-Napoléon France because the raft had been cut adrift from the boats, which had intended to tow it to safety, without adequate food or water for the company - cannibalism, fighting and suicide ensued. A mess! . . . but a great source of parody and pastiche:
Asterix
Indonesia
ZhangGong
Don't do this a home kids. Or at least don't participate if you are small and weak.