Q. How do you address your father?

A. Sir!
I've looked with a jaundiced eye at Douglas Hofstadter and all his Gödels works. But an essay of his, on how language embeds sexism and inequality, triggered some interesting discussion on MeFi. Sometimes you have to move the goalposts to make people actually look at themselves and their certainties. I was sitting in her garden a couple of weeks ago with The Girl Who Invented Herself TGWIH. Of almost everyone I know, she gets the most cross when she encounters discrimination and unfairness. She doesn't live in Ireland at the moment but is VP AsiaPac for a multinational in Singapore. I forget the details but she was getting indignant at how the government (largely representing the people of Ireland) keeps migrants and asylum-seekers in disempowering and punitive conditions for years while their cases dither and shuffle through the legalities. She seemed to be saying that she'd be delighted to have a Syrian gynaecologist or a Yazidi metal-worker living next door, if not exactly renting the spare room in her Irish home. I confessed that, knowing nothing-at-all about the community engagement of the average Yazidi, I'd be suspicious if not quite hostile if the one vacant council house in our townland was given to a family of Travellers. And I invited TGWIH to agree that she's feel the same, if push came to shove.  That grain of doubt didn't develop into a pearl of wisdom but I thought it was valuable to look closely at our true, uncovered reactions to The Other.

What Hofstadter did in his cited essay was transpose our view of oppressed women with oppressed blacks and see how smug the standard liberal-leaning  PC reader was then:
Quote: Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on.UnQuote  The MeFi commentary went round the houses and down the street as readers teased out some of the threads in the original essay and struck a few sparks off each other: quoting Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex etc etc.

Reflecting on how language enforces the trappings of power, Sideshow, a youngish patriarch, moaned gently "My 8 year old daughter even threw a "Hey bruh..." at me (her 38 year old father) the other day. I'm a pretty casual dad, but I had to draw the line there. "  Not me, I answer to pretty much anything if I can hear it properly [increasingly doubtful] and intention is clear: Sir, Pops, Bob, Shonks, have all worked in the recent past.

Lollusc reacted to that with far more enthusiasm than anyone else:  OMG that is so exciting (to me, and probably only to me and like five other people in the world who research kinship systems). There's a phenomenon in some languages of the world called "Crow skewing" (named after the Crow language, for which it was first described). It's where people call their cousin by the same term as they call their father or mother, i.e. they would call their cousin "dad" or their dad "cuz". The principle is basically (terminologically) treating people in your own generation and people in the generation above you the same. It's pretty cool and NO ONE REALLY KNOWS HOW IT ORIGINATES. There's quite a bit of speculation. But calling your dad "bruh" is absolutely how this kind of thing could start. "Bruh" being a term of general friendly affection, but ultimately derived from "bro" < "brother". And then it loses its association with one's actual brother, and gradually loses the "same approx age" requirement, and voila! 

Later on ReclusiveNovelistThomasPynchon added 2c worth: the thing i love about sideshow's daughter's use of bruh is the egalitarian, or at least anti-hierarchical, sentiment it seems to embody. sort of like, "yeah sure bruh, you're a generation up from me, don't make such a deal of it." i believe it's the egalitarian aspect of it that sideshow objects to so strongly. i'm so glad that it's apparently a semi-common linguistic phenomenon. parents get hung up on weird things.

I love it: Crow skewing is so random and outré, that Lollusc is going to have very few places where s/he can share this deep knowledge of the human condition. With so many different ways of communicating with each other with truth and respect, it seems a pity that we too often trash talk instead. Here's a test. From the language and expressed sentiments, what sex do you reckon Lollusc is?

Conversion 1400 g to 28 Kb

 August was busy like a hive is busy. We had almost the whole descendant family present at the same time for about a week and various lesser permutations for pretty much the whole month. There isn't a whole lot to do on the farrrm unless you're driving a tractor or chain-saw, so Dau.I and TGWIH graced us some time acting as catalysts for a significant de-cluttering. Actually much more than catalysts - they kitted out with gloves, overalls and Rosie-the-Rivetter bandanas and shifted a lot of boxes. None of those boxes went back indoors at the same weight. There's a certain amount of self-interest here because in 2019 both Dau.I and Dau.II came with me to England after my mother left for a nursing home and a life-time's matèriel has to be rehoused. They've seen what decisions have to be made when under the cosh of time.

There is no point in keeping books which I'll never read again; and every time we go through this exercise the bar for worth keeping is raised. Not only books but papers. The precious collection of scientific reprints upon which my PhD thesis and subsequent research was based? All gone! Ten years ago The Boy asked "These scientific papers, hm? If you wanted to read them again, they'd be available somewhere as a PDF, yes?"  They have indeed all been digitized. But the real point was to reflect on the likelihood that I would every need to read this old paper again when there are prairies of new things to think about. Last week I came across:

That's the 1990s in promotional wall calendars! High quality stock, glossy pics, room to record appointments and meetings. They've weathered a damp shed for 20 years with only a little mildew - but they're no longer pretty . . . or current. So I spent an evening transcribing the information into a multi-tabbed Excel spreadsheet. Each year is a sparse matrix: a lot of days when nothing particular happened. So 1.4 kg of card-paper has been converted to a searchable archive with a file size of 28 kilobytes. 

Every month for a couple of years in the early 90s I attended the C.U.C. But I had to sleep on the problem to remember that it was the Computer Users Committee rather than Credit Union Clondalkin. I am baffled as to the identity of several of the people with whom I had a power-lunch 25 years even now that I have their names. And really, if the Excel file corrupts itself, these data are of no interest to anyone. Nobody is going to write my biography! 

Mappa Hiberniae

I come from a jig-saw family. If I know the location and shape of all 50 US States, it's partly because I re-re-re-assembled a [wooden] jig-saw puzzle map of that part of the World as a sub-teen. Ditto English counties; although that's less useful because the UK administrative boundaries have been serially re-re-drawn since 1965. Irish county lines are more stable . . . for the GAA. But 32 or even 26 counties is history. Lookit: the Six Counties of NI have since 2015 been rejigged as 11. You task is to match their names to the numbers on the map [R]: Antrim and Newtownabbey ; Ards and North Down ; Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon ; Belfast ; Causeway Coast and Glens ; Derry and Strabane ; Fermanagh and Omagh ; Mid and East Antrim ; Mid Ulster ; Newry, Mourne and Down. What crappy uninspiring names! You can't imagine shouting Up Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon at a soccer match; maybe they call themselves the ABCs, I would. And The Man quartered Co Dublin into The City, Fingal, DunLaoghaire-Rathdown, & South Dublin in 1994.

TGWIH of the generous hand was out shopping a while back and characteristically bought gifts for everyone while doing the messages. Dau.II was home and she'n'me were given The Irish Map - a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of an old style political map of the island or Ireland. We had a fight measured discussion about whether the picture was a genuine old out-of-copyright map lazily printed and processed by a company in China OR a modern map cleverly aged with the place-names artificially written in an olde scrypte. What do you think?:

If it's a modern map artificially aged, then it's got to be at least 100 years old because Co.Offaly and Co.Laois are still sporting their plantation names.  There are several other interesting anachronisms: in the picture above, Birr is transitioning from Parsonstown; Maryborough hasn't yet become Port Laoise and Durrow is still Castle Durnow. Elsewhere the jig-map has Ballyborris for Borris, NewtownBarry for Bunclody, Newboro for Gorey, Macromp for Macroom, and Lough Deirgeart for Lough Derg. Too small back then [before the railways?] for Bagenalstown to merit an entry on this map, the village / townland was still Money Beg. There is significant push-back in the town today against adopting Muine Bheag as their toponym. The past tells us where we've come from. RTE on placenames.

Build your own education

I'm a couple of weeks into retirement and have already acquired a couple of students to shout at. Not my students, I hasten to add; they are somebody else's students. OR, and this is the point of the polemic, these youngsters are their own students and not teacher-chattels unless they choose to be. It's about taking ownership of your own education through assertiveness and the exercise of choice. The interesting students are those who kick over the traces and do something unexpected. Like the two lads who set off from Ireland, with sketchy school-french but plenty bravado, for Dijon in Summer 2019 to find work in different science labs.

My most recent acquisition has that in spades. It is an option for Irish undergraduates to spend one of their 4 years of studenting in America. It's like the wonderful Erasmus scheme, without any of the infrastructural support. It therefore takes an exceptionally determined, and well-connected, kid to make that happen. But this fellow had made in happen and thereby broadened his horizons considerably: geographically, socially and educationally. e's now in his final year and has signed up to do a project which has a significant slant towards molecular evolution and bioinformatics - hence my appearance in his orbit. Depending on how charitable you feel, my toolkit in the field is either 5 10 or 20 years out of date. But my crap-detector is better than any 20-something: it goes with the territory along with the silverback and missing teeth.

Anyway, the suggestion was floated that Wozzayank could benefit from this on-line Coursera in sequence analysis and 20 minutes later maybe that Coursera would be better. With a certain amount of justification W affirmed that he saw value in either of those options but asked which one was the preferred? 

To which I replied [bear in mind that I'd never met the chap]: "Ah now W, don't put it back on us; have a look at each syllabus and see which one best floats your boat. There are so many dimensions to the subject and you'll feel more comfortable in some. They say "the Y-chromosome carries the 3-D visualisation gene" and you produced some beautifully informative overlays of homologous structures in your prelim report. But you may be more productive looking at rates and constraints of evolution. Then again, you might think that one of the courses will beef up something not in your current tool-kit. Or, finally, look NOW at the second hand of your watch. IF it's an odd number do the First Course IF even do the Other Course."

A couple of days later, I was talking to TGWIH about which of several modules in her OU course she should sign up for this coming academic year. I was therefore primed for that question and I think it is useful to summarise the polylemma in three Fs:

• Fun
• Choose the course which seems most interesting. If you're grown up and/or protestant that might include embracing a challenge, even if daunting. Far too many young people have been duffed up by the system and their crap teachers into believing that they can't do math or foreign languages or cooking or soccer. College is maybe your last chance before retirement when the pressure is off and The Past is behind you and you can re-invent yourself as a building-jumper.
• Foundation
• You may be young but you have skills, talents and aptitudes. It might be sensible to choose the next course because you have nailed some of the pre-requisites in your lived experience. That way you can leverage what you know already rather than starting with a blank slate.
• Future
• look ahead and think where you want to be at the end of the module or, better, at the end of the course. Which of the options will look best on your CV. Which will most likely turn into the dream job or the mighty salary boost that you surely deserve.

Arrrrrgh! Whatever you do don't take the last option unless it includes substantial elements of the other two. Imagine if in 2016 you had reluctantly signed up for hotel management, or flight school, or RADA because of a family connexion or parental expectation or because you had expectations of driving a Lexus before you were 30. You would have endured 4 years of tedium, struggle and financial haemorrhage only to find that those careers are now dead in the water.  But don't over-think the problem either. There is a fourth F:

• Flip
• Make your own luck. If you have the capacity for happiness you'll thrive in whatever course you take, so you may as well flip a coin.

Her lovely horse

For a few months in 2016, we had "Young Bolivar" aka A Good Pair of Hands staying /WWOOFing with us learning English. His last project was building a mighty, and mighty handy, woodshed at the bottom of the yard. We measured up and decided that for the desired design we'd need N=130 lengths of western red cedar Thuja plicata to clad the walls. Jim Davis in Graigcullen didn't cut to length and threw in a few extra planks for luck, so we were left with a big stack of surplus planks not to mention many offcuts of different lengths from 150mm to 900mm in length. Heck'n'jiminy that's seven (7) years ago! The cedar planks have been stacked at the back of the woodshed all that time, quietly drying out some more.

This Spring Dau.II would have nothing but that we build a tree-house for her niblings down in our sustainable micro-forest. That's as well as the refurbed garden seat. And, because cedar is naturally pest-resistant and because it was already on site, we robbed the stack in the woodshed to fabricate the base of the tree house. 

The latest QALY adjustment here is planting salad and other veg for home consumption. But ppl can't live by bread alone and the democratic majority has voted for The Return of The Sweet-pea Lathyrus odoratus to grace the front of the house.In years past I have constructed functional outdoor beds for either side of the front door. But the pallet-wood aesthetic is sooo yesterday and when these planters stand directly on the ground they become a residential hotel for slugs, snails and ants; for which the democratic majority has little tolerance. Furthermore, pallet-wood definitely doesn't last forever when it is permanently butted up against wet soil. Accordingly, I pulled out all the longer [800-950mm] cedar off-cuts and paired them off to those of equal length and then started making jardinières / window-boxes / Blumenkastenpflanzer. I also sourced 4x ash logs from the wood-pile that were close enough to 30cm tall. 

Another option is to add legs to the boxes which make them a lot lighter and more convenient to move around. But the ash-logs are prolly better for the sweet-peas because that allows the planters to get up close to the wall all the better to string-up the peas. Yes, yes, I know it's possible to have two vertical legs at the back and stabilizing splayed legs in the front - speak to my carpenter. The problem with four legged furniture is that unless the floor is actually flat it is a royal PITA to get all four legs touching base and sharing the weight equally. You can see my third iteration in the foreground [L]. Notwithstanding George Orwell's “Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” In this case three legs is best of all. The top may not be spirit-level flat, but all three legs must be in contact with the ground and doing an equal amount of the work. That's why milking-stools have three legs.

Sharing is caring! It seems invidious to construct such lovely functional outside furniture and become all hoarder about it. The Girl Who Invented Herself [who prev] is WFH really hard while juggling her caring commitments. The [only?] good thing about WFH is that the inevitable 'unproductive' office time is not spent waiting for a meeting in your cubical or chatting at the water-cooler. TGWIH, by contrast, can nip out into her own garden for a bit of dead-heading or weeding as the sea-mist rolls in. The lawn is out to contract mowers but the rest is a mix of raised beds and jardinières containing a striking array of plants shewing off their reproductive parts. In her younger days, she was mad about the nags and spent a few years shovelling shit for a pittance and meagre board before she came to her senses. It turned out that, like Jack Woltz, we have had a spare horse's head about the place since Dau.I and Dau.II dragooned their HomEd pals [and associated parents] into a perf of Cinderella at the village hall. Said head and a plywood cut-out wheel painted silver had been screwed to a baulk of timber to conjure the arrival of cinders at The Ball with his glass slippers. All it took was a hank of straw stapled to the other end et voilà - cheval! My ♩ove♩y horse, indeed.

Biltong! buy me biltong!

♬ ♪ Came to de market before daylight ♫ ♩
Gotta sell me biltong before de night  

At the start of my very expensive education, I was parked in school in the 1960s, at least partly because my father was away at sea for unpredictable periods and we moved houses every 18 months. At least if the school was the same, that provided some continuity and grounding for me. In those days, abandonment, separation anxiety were ignored despite John Bowlby writing about attachment theory and normal development in the 50s!

Another of the detached chaps at my school was the son of a hotel magnate in Kenya. When he returned from the holidays in Nairobi and the beach at Malindi, this fellow often bought several parcels of biltong [beef jerky] to replenish his tuck-box. It was different from the gob-stoppers and sherbet fountains with which the rest of us courted dental caries and was, therefore, tradable. When I final arrived in Africa [teaching a binfo course in Pretoria and Capetown] 35 years later a chew of biltong was on my bucket list.

Accordingly, when TGWIH went up the Okavango last month, more as a quip than a quest, I asked her to bring me back some biltong. But, regrettably, EU food&ag theatre forbids the import of cured meat products from outside the Union. I'll just have to fantasize about giving my gob a braw workout. Interestingly the ToC for Original Sliced Springbok Biltong is, like Nestlé Munchies, engagingly vague about exactly what's in there:

Meat (kudu and/or eland and/or impala and/or gemsbok and/or wildebeest and/or springbok in variable amounts); seasoning [salt, spices (irradiated), cereal (maize, flour, salt), sucrose, acidity regulator (E262), preservative sodium sulphite (E221), MSG flavour enhancer (E621), spice extracts, flavour enhancer (E635)], vinegar, worcestersauce, pimaricin.

Note 1 E635 enhancer is a combo sodium salts of the natural compounds guanosine (E626) and inosine (E630) two of the many bases that are found in nucleic acids. Basically another blast of umami.

Note 2 pimamycin is an anti-fungal agent naturally made by some species of Streptomyces and now produced in vats by BigPharma.

Note 3 surely you don't think I'd be satisfied with anyone using English common names for the various artiodactyls which may finish up in this brand of biltong? Nope! Why not use Phofu for eland as in the Lesotho stamp above? Or Spießbock for gemsbok? Here are they are with full Latin binomers so nobody can mistake what we're talking about.

• kudu Tragelaphus strepsiceros
• eland Taurotragus oryx
• impala Aepyceros melampus
• gemsbok Oryx gazella
• wildebeest Connochaetes taurinus and/or C gnou
• springbok Antidorcas marsupialis