Sunday Funday 131116

Surfeit of surfing, me, this last week. So I had to unload some yesterday. But here's The Blob's fix of outside input for this Sunday:

• The academy of food decoration.  How far parents will go to encourage Junior to eat his greens.
• Can't ignore the US Election. Cross post mortem by Jonathan Pie. Of all the liberal left talking-heads, he got the outcome correct.
• Empty Hands Pilgrimage with Nimo Patel
• Being Kind is very important.
• What a wonderful world with just the right number of coloured tee-shirts.
• Leonard Cohen gone. You want it darker?
• Super hypnotic: making wooden barrels for the booze trade.

Catchup ketchup 18Aug19

As The Blob gradually fills out the last remote corners of my universe, new stuff is likely to recall a bloboprev.

• Remember 4Ocean $20 bangles = 0.5kg trash? Harry Chan has lifted 80,000 kg of trash
• from the sea. Those surfer dudez from 4ocean owe him $3.2million.
• Three years ago it was bottle-flipping. To which I applied a sciency view. Three decades ago in California, it was cup-stacking . . . but it's only come over my horizon in the last three days at Vox via Tywkiwdbi. 
• The Cup Song and Amhrán na gCupán
• Where Dreams Go To Die - documentary on Gary "Newfie" Robbins and The Barkley Marathons [prev]. If you're invested, you can find out how Gary did in 2018 on your own.
• Courtney "Ultra" Dauwalter runs along.
• The Right Stuff. 17th April 2018, SWA 1380 suffered a catastrophic engine failure between New York LGA and Dallas DAL. Debris flew back and smashed a window in the fuselage causing decompression and oxygen masks. Captain Tammie Jo Shults dealt with the emergency as if it was a hang-nail that needed fixing. Radio traffic between 1380 and Philadelphia Tower; 12 minutes on the edge of your seat. Banker Jennifer Riordan was the only fatality.
• We shall overcome with Nimo Patel [prev]
• The Boss
• The Troubles
• Rev King
• The Baez
• Peter Fonda dead. Play Flow River Flow
• Medical error? [prev] Think a bit before pointing fingers, says Dr Rohin Francis: crap detection needed on poor data.
• Me n Rohin agree on the recurrent pharyngeal nerve.
• WHAT ABOUT THE KETCHUP; YOU PROMISED KETCHUP!
• How to make industrial ketchup [sound off for sanity!]

Miscellania for 3rd May

Failing morale? Try

• Hope Tom Rosenthal and others
• Superhero Nimo Patel & Daniel Nahmod and others
• Government wants us to believe in Government
• Janie's Farm and Mill is shipping flour to the people.
• Carpentry for girls
• Bit more of Nat curse-cooking? Ozzie Risotto! 
• þetta reddast - how to be Icelandic
• American breakfast for the lads from Baluchistan

Better news from the production department. I have been oppressed by the failure-to-thriveness of my swiss chard Beta vulgaris (flavescens). The seeds were started on 20 March in rows of little [⌀ 5cm] plastic pots but they were looking straggly and recumbent all through April. I couldn't plant them out to a hostile environment of rabbit and frost so I was more-or-less waiting for them to die. Dau.II, fed up with my lugubrious Eeyoring, suggested transplanting them to window boxes. That would increase the rootable soil about 50-fold and I could shift the boxes, like patients in the consumption ward, out into the sun when the weather permitted. And it was so [top R] and they doing a'righ'. The green beans ditto pot bound; so reluctantly I repotted them into much bigger receptacles filled with sieved garrrrden compost. Moving them about is a lot more awkward but a Tesco-crate makes it more efficient. Hint: these robust plastic transport crates make great garden sieves.

Sunday Misc 01Jul18

Here's a few items from the bran-tub of idleness.

• Horse-coping in Banagher, King's County
• I've mentioned Chlamydia trachomatis a few times before on The Blob, partly because it's a little bit easier to spell than Neisseria goneryeehar ghondoreeea gonorrhoeae. So it was handy to catch up with John Oliver's report of the way Norway is dealing with the discharge issue.
• The youtube sidebar delivered me to a JO report about deaths and dissection in Danish Zoos. Which reminded me of my happy time in Blijdorp zoo and my encounter with the frozen head-and-neck of a dead giraffe. Giraffes? Been there before.
• Foodie
• Drumully Boxty from Co Caaavan.
• Betty's Poitín Marmalade from Bandon Co Cork.
• Canadian University is all ahoo and taking sides on the difference between Free Speech and Hate Speech after a graduate student teaching assistant started a discussion about gender in grammar. 
• Hate speech? Raheem Sterling plays soccer, for England, but the red-tops have decided that he can't put a foot right off the pitch. He and his mum had a hard life and this carping just ain't helping.
• Canada? CBC report on Easter Island: the statues were all about potlatch and conspicuous consumption to put one over on the neighbours.
• Word on the donor front was that if you paid people to donate blood and/or plasma then only junkies and graduate students would come forward and the supply chain would be dangerously contaminated. The Economist demolishes this lazy assessment of the value of blood and blood products. via MeFi where the comments push back on what exploitation is about.
• Politics
• Sinn Fein leader MaryLou McDonald interviewed by Owen Jones
• Government propaganda about Ireland's Global Impact
• Propaganda about the role of the Irish Defense Forces for 60 years as UN Peacekeepers 
• Read the comments: incl. about Leo Varadkar coat-tailing on the sacrifices. "My father was in the 34th Battalion in the Congo in 1961. We went to Baldonnell in 2010 to the 50th Anniversary of the first deployment to the Congo in 1960. They're was a group photograph. Biffo Cowen was our glorious Taoiseach at the time and he stood right in front of my father in the photo. My father tapped in on the leg with his walking stick and said to him "move up out of the way, sure you weren't in the Congo". I nearly died laughing. He'd hop the stick off Varadkar's head if he was near him."
• Musical
• Nimo Patel and EmptyHandsMusic riff on We Shall Overcome
• Susanne Vega - Luka
• Paul McCartney on Carpool Karaoke.
• Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush - Don't Give Up
• Roberta Flack - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Merit or gratitude

Our girls educated themselves at home and left just before they became eligible to vote. After Dau.I left home and country her younger sister was home alone for nearly two years before she, in turn, made tracks. In retrospect a large part of those years was taken up sitting on the sofa watching boxed sets [Desperate Housewives; House; Masterchef] dreadful stuff if you tend the least bit towards judgmental. Two positive notes: a) this binge-watching was in the centre of the family space rather than up in her room b) it was eclectic - didn't seem to matter what she watched or with whom so long as she didn't have to run around in the cold rounding up sheep.

That's how we got to watch all 20 episodes of Harvard professor Michael Sandel's [L,L; Mr Burns, Homer Simpson's devious and ethically-challenged boss L,R] freshman Philosophy Course. Sandel is quite dismissive of Utilitarianism - probably because he's smarter than me - and thinks that there is something to be said for <me: aaaaargh!> Kant. But he is also a great rhetorician and could persuade most normal people to his way of thinking if they were the least bit open to change. His course is heavily over-subscribed year after year and is a prime example of the quality of the education students have the opportunity to embrace if they can overcome the 1 : 20 odds by successfully applying to Harvard.

I wasn't averse to watching Sandel talking for 10 minutes about The Tyranny of Merit. Like Utilitarianism, Meritocracy looks okay at first glance: if everyone has the same chance in life's tests, then the winners can bask in their success while the losers have only their lack of application or native talent to blame. Except, despite the rhetoric, you don't have the same equality of opportunity as I did with my expensive education. In Ivy League America, families from the top $1% contribute more students than the bottom $50% - and that discrepancy is a) self-perpetuating b) "corrosive of the common good". Academic success breeds hubris in the winners who make invisible the role of fortune [both sen$es!] in their ad astra ambitions. A sense of humiliation is to be expected of the hordes milling outside the Groves of Academe. And justifiable anger if they have heaped debt on their shoulders to meet the eye-blinking costs of 21stC higher education.

Sandel wants to stop "college, the best you can buy" being the only arbiter of opportunity. Where opportunity is defined by loadsa cash and the stuff which goes with it. College is not the only avenue for money and accolades: sports and entertainment are other channels for achieving millions and an early retirement. But heck-it your odds in those games are far, far longer than getting into Harvard. And another thing: it's not only about the money [even under today's corrupted values] it is also about recognition that, whatever your métier, your labour contributes positively to the common good. If you look down on your child-minder, your plumber, your garbage-collector you have only yourself to blame when the revolution comes.  

The next day, I started in on All Things Shining: reading the Western classics to find meaning in a secular age by philosophers Hubert Dreyfus [ UC Berkeley] and Sean Kelly [Harvard]. Philosophy, insofar as it has any utility, seeks to understand the meaning of A Good Life and maybe sketch us a road map towards that desirable goal. My pal P sent me the book, for which much thanks, from Boston by UnAmazon. 

There's an intriguing chapter there on trying to figure out what Homer meant by Ἀρετή areté = excellence, virtue. Robert "ZAMM" Pirsig [prev] travelled that same road on his motorcycle. Homer was writing reciting 2,800 years ago and in many significant ways that past is a foreign country. William "Home Rule" Gladstone was so weirded out by Homers kennings [wine-dark sea etc.] that he seriously suggested ancient Greeks might have been colour-blind! Here's Dreyfus and Kelly "Excellence in the Greek sense involves neither the Christian notion of humility nor the Roman ideal of stoic adherence to one's duty. Instead, excellence in the Homeric world depends crucially on one's sense of wonder and gratitude" Note the wine dark text! " . . . the basic Homeric sense of the sacred: that it is the highest form of human excellence to recognise, be amazed by, and be grateful for whatever it is that draws you to act at your best". Plumbers, student nurses, Martin "Ich kann nicht anders" Luther - we see you!

Nimo Patel is grateful.