Sunday catch up 210118

Was he going on about crisps? He was. He is not the only one. With fabulous synchronicity we have:

• Whether food engineers can capture The Essence of something exotic and spray it on a potato chip? They can.
• Next question: what captures to Essence of Being Irish? The Legend of St Dara of Tayto.
• What is the World coming to at all at all? The [Tayto] Crisp Sandwich is being ponced up by Millennials.
• So this Tayto? It is religious, yes? Well there is a hymn.
• And you can buy them on-line . . . here.
• Where does the salt come from? Not from Iapetus - it's far too expensive for Tayto.

But there is more to life than Tayto Cheese & Onion. There is:

• Phil Rosenthal eating himself silly in N Italy. Tnx to Dau.II
• Life boat heroism
• Life life well lived: threw up Law to make furniture. Tnx to Russ.
• Musical marble runs
• Wintergatan 2018
• Wintergatan 2016
• More music: 
• Alela Diane - Ether & Wood
• Mumford and Sons - Thistle & Weeds
• The Oh Hellos: On The Mountain Tall
• Tallheights - spirit cold
• And poor troubled Dolores O'Riordan died, far too young, this week
• Linger
• Dreams

Old style 240917

Miscellany:

• Irish kids have to learn Irish in school and many of them hate it [crap teaching, mostly]. To help them through the hoops of exams, many of them will ship out West for a week in the Gaeltachs. Learning the language doesn't have to go with the Catholic church and the GAA. Here's some examples of pop as Gaeilge which might, just might, give meaning to this not-foreign language.  Communal singing worked well for the London Capital Children's Choir; worked for me aNNyway. Here's TG Lurgan helping a bunch of youngsters sing it out.
• Fanfaidh Mé Ortsa - “I Will Wait” le Mumford” & Sons as Gaeilge
• Ar Mo Thaobh "Stay With Me" le Sam Smith as Gaeilge
• I've given tribs to Anna Kendrick singing the Cup Song. Here's the TG Lurgan version Amhrán na gCupán which is, in its ranks of identical movement, worrying reminiscent of a Nuremberg Rally Reichsparteitag.
• More from the Arts Block
• Full contact improv
• Hollywood dance battle
• Sam Black, a plasterer, sings 60s. I feel better for that.
• Florence & sings Shake it out. You've heard this before but could bear it again.
• Rubberbandits sing a message of hope [them previous, like]
• Petting your dog: the key for relaxation
• They say that a good job is all in the preparation. That's certainly true with painting walls. Slapping on the emulsion is is the least of it. Stripping off the old loose paint and filling the holes from previous lives takes at least as long as a couple of coats of slappy. Here's a video showing how to split a great big rock using plug&feathers. It helpfully includes one mis-split and a perfectly beautiful example. But the bulk of the 20 minutes is a voiceless (and musakless!) explanation of how to forge the required iron-mongery. Restful, fascinating and informative.
• We've had (quite enough of) walk like an Egyptian. Here's how to walk like a medieval peasant.
• I wrote last year about Dewey Decimal vs Library of Congress classification systems for libraries. Here's a Mental Floss factoid collection about libraries.
• Life and death? I wrote a couple of years ago about the mechanics of baling out from a burning WWII bomber - 50mm wider doors made a huge difference. Here's the civil aviation equivalence today: more people, fatter people, narrower seats make your escape less likely in an emergency.
• Better to do a little (or a lot for a few) than do nothing with your million$$. Harris Rosen gets the local kids educated.
• . . . and did you ever think to go back and thank your inspiring 3rd grade teacher?

Miscelladay 141018

Does it matter that anyone is reading this stuff? Not really. I do it 'for the record' so that I'll have something to read when I retire. But I wish the freakin' parasites of the interweb would leave me alone. Over the last tuthree months I've noticed a blip of interest from a variety of peculiar 'referrer' sites which turn out to host advertisements for monetizing your blog. There is now another pattern (see above) where, ever other day, 60+ readers tune in all at once and then drift away to the next bright inconsequential thing. I though this might be in response to a tweet about my stuff and a loyal and immediate response from followers. But I think it's just robots. Subtracting that, it looks like, to the nearest whole number, you are the only person reading The Blob today.

Cute of the Day:
We read a book that suggested you ask your kid what an appropriate punishment for misbehaving would be and then carry it out. 6 yo son pinched his brother or something, so we asked what an appropriate punishment would be. He said “pluck out my eyeballs and throw me over a cliff?”. We didn't follow through. And stopped reading parenting books.

Go on what's bin happenin':

• Music:
• Mumford and Sons are back in the saddle Guiding Light. or Vevo version.
• An Ròn [The seal] Julie Fowlis 
• Lonesome Friends of Science John Prine 
• Dvorak Humoresque.
• Eric Satie Once upon a time in Paris
• Philip Glass Metamorphosis
• Pushing Bright Phoebus by the Watersons tribute in words
• Watersons more trad: Hal and Tow.
• Jonathan Pie on [Offensive] Free Speech
• Age quod agis [= do what you do] making a longbow  
• Housework? Woman makes beds  nothing to do with sheets! mostly bamboo.
• Bois de chauffage en Bretagne? Rault Philippe c'est le pied!
• Haute Savoie cyclisme vertical
• Playing Magnus Carlson at chess.
• Genius? My Son the Engineer Dilbert.
• Irish people try Krispy Kreme Donuts for the first time "This is like my first lesbian kiss: I'm confused but I love it" - "This might be the best donut I've had in my whole fuckin' life" - "I might actually drive the whole way to Blanchardstown for that"
• Food? Did someone mention Le Jambon Beurre Sondwich? KISS my sandwich! Keep It Simple Stupid.
• We survived Storm Callum. Hurricane Michael in Florida not so much. Bloke fixed his running GoPro to an immovable object and left town. Starts off with a bit of roof lifting off across the street and after a few hours of horizontal water shows where the street has lifted off it's foundations; no house where the roof was.

Music on the travel 121116

Leonard Cohen - Traveling Light
Panama Limited by Tom Rush
Steam Train Blues by Chris Rea
This train is bound for glory by Mumford & sons
Nimo with A Universal love song on the NYC subway . . . and in a fountain
Much ado about the world must be peopled by a fountain.
All wet now? The Leaving of Liverpool by/with the Dubliners.
Soaked in urine waulking the tweed is necessary to make it water-proof

Sunday singsong 291115

• You may pretend you don't like country music but that's because you haven't heard Iris DeMent singing Our Town or in duet with EmmyLou Harris with two blokes gently playing fiddle and dobro - magic!
• Leaning on the Everlasting Arms (from True Grit)
• Winter Winds - Mumford and Sons
• Turning to the Morning - Gordon Bok, [last week] Ann Mayo Muir, Ed Trickett
• Metronome trictrac. song without words?
• Mappy link to US Midwest map/definition. via Metfilter NOT a song.

Equinoxic meanderings

Hey folks, Autumn equinox this weekend! And, no, it is not always on the 21st. Summer is over, a sunny evening is seen as a bonus and a blessing. A few things have popped above my horizon:

• Monday last I mentioned having met Bruce Darrell, organic gardener and experimentalist.
• Here he is quantifying the benefits of sowing a green manure.
• Biochar thoughts. Me, I use the ash-sifted charcoal from the wood-stove.
• Clearing a really rrrrough part of the site to bring it into production. Bruce treated it as a Javi Problem: make a plan, start at one end and keep going.
• Lactofermenting surplus veggies. I've just put up 3 coffee jars full of fermenting green beans.
• Only Us by Thrice. Peculiar video story. Reminds me of Mumford & Sons [prev].
• Doc on One (RTE) Death: Don't Leave It To The Last Minute
• Five things you know about grief that are prolly wrong.
• Alexander Skarsgård
• D'ye know Danny Macaskill? You do!
• His Austrian oppo is Fabio Wibmer
• Drogheda stomp. Irish tap.
• Y'know, a snakebite won't kill you . . . unless you're allergic to cider. Jimmy Carr
• Upbeat:
• Pata Pata by The Muses. More? . . . Perfect.
• The Tide is High - Dano's Island Sounds
• What a Wonderful World - Playing For Change
• Gortaz a Ran - Breton song with Enya undertones
• The weight - playing for change.