Toponymie Bretonne

I was reading about the tales of Sir Charles Malcolm's feats of derring-do as a naval officer. He was part of the final invasion of Metropolitan France in the Napoleonic Wars: a raid on Abervrach in Brittany in which the Brits captured a number of vessels in the harbour and sailed them out for prize money. That was on 18 July 1815, a full month after Waterloo and three days after Napoleon had surrendered to Captain Maitland on HMS Bellerophon off the coast of Rochefort. It was lucky for Malcolm that there was no radio in 1815 because the war effectively came to an end on 15th July 1815 500km to the SE on HMS Bellerophon.

Abervrach? I asked, that looks peculiarly Welsh and it is because what we now call L'Aber-Wrac'h is the most Northerly of the rias of La Côte des Abers, the multiply indented coast of Brittany formed when the valleys of numerous rivers were flooded with sea-water at the end of the last Ice Age. Ria is the technical term to geologists - that word has been corralled from Galician=Gallego where a similar coast line is found. And, of course, both places were the End of the World Cabo Fisterra or Cabo Finisterre [ES] for the Iberian version and Finistère which is the département marking the end of the Breton peninsula. I've been to Cabo Fisterra with The Boy and drunk a toast to the setting sun in super romantic circumstances.  The nearest we've got to Finistère was a holiday we spent in a gîte in the arm-pit of Britanny between Nantes and La Rochelle in 1984. The gîte was a cottage in a marsh; the floor of the garage was 5cm deep in seep for the whole week we were there; and the mosquitoes were the size of humming birds.

Aber and Inver are essentially the same word in the two branches of Celtic. I've given a short explanation of the difference between P-Celtic (Breton, Cornish and Welsh) and Q-Celtic (Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic) languages and how a consonantal shift made it harder for people from different parts of NW Europe to communicate. Aber is very common in Wales: Aberfan, Aberdovey, Aberystwith but is outnumber 3:1 in Scotland by placenames beginning Inver-.  The Aber-s are mainly in the East = Aberdeen while the Inver-s are N and W = Inverness.

Mais revenons nous à la Bretagne! Charles Malcolm's raiding party cunningly landed upstream of the harbour at Kerzalou. The landscape is peppered with Ker- names: Kerhavell, Kerbérénez, Kerougoun and Kergongan are all within a couple of km of Kerzalou.  So what have got? All my info is from Claude Evans at U Toronto and Pierre Flatrès [fr.wikipedia] at  Université de Haute Bretagne.

• Aber = estuary
• Ker = stronghold village ultimately from the particle kag-ro Old British for enclosure. Equivalent to Welsh Caer-
• Plou = parish ultimately from the Latin for people plebem 
• Lan = monastery or place of worship; equivalent to Welsh Llan and frequently translated in French as 'Saint' Lanlouran = Saint Laurent.
• Loc = place ultimately from Latin locus
• Tre ultimately comes from Trève a division of a parish; or an old Celtic root Treb = a settlement.  I have mentioned Tre Pol and Pen as place- and personal names in Cornwall.

Somewhere we have a photograph of a very happy Pat the Salt drinking a glass of cold white sitting in a hot bath in Plouhinec on the South coast of Brittany. For a few years he ran a hotel in Kilkee = Cill Chaoineadh Ita [the church of the lamentation of Saint Ita] in County Clare which could claim to be Ireland's Finisterre as the next parish West is L'Anse aux Meadows [prev] in Newfoundland. aNNyway Pat and Souad were instrumental is getting the town of Kilkee twinned with the commune of Plouhinec in the 1980s. When they retired in the 1990s, the family clubbed together to send them to visit their old drinking buddies in Brittany.

votie totie

Here is the story of the UK election is microcosm. My sister lives in Stroud in Gloucestershire about halfway between leafy Cheltenham [GCHQ] and industrial, University-town Bristol. Stroud has a peculiar mix of people: tree-huggers and poets (Laurie Lee); it used to be a mill-town; bankers who commute to London; shop-keepers who sell stuff; retirees who collect the pension and spend it locally. Dau.I also lived there for four years until she repatriated herself  6 months ago. There is therefore a bit of an edge between traditional Labour voters and those who naturally vote Conservative. In the 2015 election, the big issue was Brexit but also the old Left/Right ideals that have engaged voters since the Great Reform Bill of 1932. In 2015, the Conservative candidate won; this time round UKIP was irrelevant (having achieved its one-issue manifesto) and Labour, 5,000 votes behind, really had to up its game if it was to prevail against the Poll-ratings when the election was called.

Party	2015	2017	Diff
Labour/Coop	22947	29994	+9.30%
Con	27813	29307	+0.20%
LibDem	2086	2053	-0.20%
Green	2779	1423	-2.30%
UKIP	4848	1039	-6.30%
Voters	60819	63816	+1.50%

3,000 more people came out of the woodwork in 2017, and presumably many of those were The Youth voting for the first time. In Stroud UKIP people seem to have transferred mostly to the Labour guy and I guess many of the Greens turned Red. The Sister would be a natural Green but voted tactically for the Labour candidate. But she didn't want to see her first preference go unrecorded so she signed onto SwapMyVote and agreed to vote Labour IF a stranger in another constituency voted Green.  Her vote for Green wasn't sufficient to get a second Green MP over the line. SwapMyVote is a child of the social media age - how it works - but serves as a stop-gap until the UK really embraces political diversity.  A bit more than a stop-gap, maybe; it serves as a way of showing that there is a real desire for wider platforms in politics. The alternative is to not vote at all because it is nall a waste of time and deeply alienating and depressing that your vote - as a green, as a gay, as an actor, as a separatist, as a republican, as an immigrant - counts for nothing which you care about.

Finally, some commentary on the Results. "Jonathan Pie" longer version starring Afshin Rattansi. Labour apparatchik Alastair Campbell on why embracing the DUP to shore up a minority government is politically insane [go to 2.22 mins] w.r.t. the Northern Ireland peace process.

Sunday sundae 110617

There I was trying to define a short ton - a measure of weight used only in the US - and I found myself at the National Institute of Standard and Technology NIST, Fossicking about there I found a recruitment screen for CSI:

• Go on Sherlock: take their forensic fingerprint quiz
• I got a miserable 63% = 5/8 correct.

That's quite enough work for an over-taxed brain on the weekend. There follows some light relief.

• The latest1 million view viral sensation is 12 y.o. Allie Sherlock, from Cork and home educated. She likes to cover Ed Sheeran: Supermarket Flowers etc.
• Allie sings for her Sundae!
• Lego sorter required when bloke buys 2 tonnes of Lego bricks from Ebay.
• I thought it was only Brits who are too embarrassed to sing in public. Somewhere OZer the rainbow they have that problem too. Not everyone; but some people would rather fold their arms than give it socks.
• Must be on an antipodean jag this weekend. I am Australian – Seekers:
• Just 7500kms away East in Samoa they do Amhrán na bhFiann in Gagana faʻa Sāmoa 
• R2AK race to Alaska started on Thursday [haka soundtrack]
• Now to Galway to see some hoofers from the Claddagh: there is a connexion with Ed Sheeran but you're on your own if you want to find it.
• La légion etrangère marches and sings [prev]
• Rainer Hersch riffs on Pachelbel: seems music is like the blogosphere: rechurning the same ideas rather than creating new.
• That might remind you of Axis of Awesome's Four Chords or with better production values or six chords
• Finally on the heart-warming front, Dad tribs his boy and his boy at their wedding

Cautiously hopeful

A good day for democracy across the water.  The Brits, they do love an under-dog and are happy to see hubris chastised. I was very bitter and twisted about Brexit ,which struck me as an example of the folly of the democratic process. Last year, the people of the UK were given a referendum on whether to remain in the EU or leave. They got that, rare for them, access to direct democracy because of an election promise made by the British Prime Minister to bring the right-wing of the Conservative party back into line and to undermine the rise and rise of UKIP the UK Independence Party. That seemed like shoo-in but turned into a shit-storm when the electorate -  widely ignorant of the economic or social effects of being in or out of the EU - voted by a narrow majority to leave. Brexit is divisive and polarising because nearly half the voted wanted to remain but now have to leave because their parents and grandparents remember WWII . . . and Waterloo . . . and Blenheim . . . and Agincourt.

Old fashioned socialists believe in tempering ambition and profit with some care for the dispossesed. For them the result of the election, which Labour lost, had them capering about the streets with undisguised glee: Anywhere but Westminster - Jonathan Pie.  Pie chortles "This is The End of New Labour" because Jeremy Corbyn the current Labour leader is the sort of old fashioned, scruffy, beardy, tree-hugging, anti-war socialist that went out of fashion in the 1980s as the patrimony of the country - the housing, the transport infrastructure, the telecoms were sold to the highest bidder in an effort to make things more efficient. First by the Conservatives on a tide of patriotic jingoism durimg and after the Falklands War and then by the 'New' Labour Party.led by Tony 'Weasel' Blair which moved firmly to the Centre and carried on the same careless populism which saw the haves have more and the have-nots get nothing-at-all.  All my adult life the two main political parties fought for the centre because [normal Gaussian bell-curve distribution] that held the most people. In short order you couldn't tell the difference between Left and Right because they all bought into the politics of market capitalism: low taxes . . . to incentivise; low benefits and welfare . . . to incentivise. This would all work IF there were enormous amounts of feather-bedding and sinecures in the public service [which there probably was] ANDIF uneducated young people could find a job if they cycled far enough from home. Margaret Thatcher, to whom Theresa May is too often compared, famously said "There is no such thing as society" but that soundbyte needs to be put into context ro understand her intent.  It is too easy to hear those words quoted in the pub and go first quiet, then angry and then shouty. Heck, if it was easy to solve the manifold problems of a post-industrial society, then we-the-people or our elected representatives would have sorted them.

The election delivered an unexpected change in the balance of power: far from giving the Conservatives a larger share of parliamentary seats so that Theresa May has a stronger mandate for negotiating Brexit, they are now 8 seats short of a majority. A disastrous result for the Tories and Theresa May, personally, not to mention 33 Tory MPs who thought they had a comfy billet until 2021 and now have to get in the limousines to find a job. But it is a good day for diversity. There is now a strong, stable, loyal opposition who will put a stop to the gallop of a Hard Brexit and temper the shameful disparagement of them foreign johnnies by little englanders. It is a pity that the demographics expose the fissures in the no-such-thing-as-society: old vs young; urban vs suburban (there is, to the nearest whole %,  no rural population left in England); white vs others; haves vs dispossessed.  This is why Labour and Corbyn could not - dare not - campaign to roll back the Brexit referendum fiasco because their support came from two almost irreconcilable constituencies: educated youth who are overwhelmingly pro-Europe and the post-industrial ghettos of London, the North and the Midlands who have no clear current or future role and so look back to a rosy fantasy past of cream cake, strong tea, the Blitz and Dunkirk.

Let's look at the data which expose a real and present inequity in the antiquated system of voting from which the UK seems unable to progress. Here are the numbers

Party	Seats	NetGain	Pop%	Seat%
Con	318	-13	42.5	48.9
Lab	262	32	40.0	40.3
SNP	35	-19	3.0	5.4
LibDem	12	3	7.4	1.8
DUP	10	2	0.9	1.5
SinnFein	7	3	0.7	1.1
Plaid Cymru	4	1	0.5	0.6
Green	1	0	1.6	0.2
Ind	1	-4	0.5	0.2
UUP	0	-2	0.3	0.0
SDLP	0	-3	0.3	0.0
UKIP	0	0	1.8	0.0
Other	0	0	0.5	0.0
Total	650

The anomalies thrown up by first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all electoral system means that the largest party tends to get far more seats than the popular vote would give them (compare Pop % and Seat % for Labour and Conservative: by rights the seats should be C 276 vs L 262. And the LibDems should have nearer 50 seats than 12. The only hope minority interests and alternative parties have is when they are geographically constrained: Scottish Nationist Party SNP gets almost 2x the seats they deserve, while Plaid Cymru in Wales and Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein in Norhern Ireland all punch above their weight.  Half a million people voted Green, that 'should' be enough to secure 10 seats but they only retained Brighton Pavillion. UKIP likewise should have won 12 seats but got nothing. Check out your auntie's constituency with the Guardian. Wider view of the result with Vox. In Ireland we have multi-seat constituencies so a lot more than 2 main parties and interests get to secure representation. This is not great for government either because too many woowah single interest people get elected and have to be squared - Free the Gays; Free Water; Free Univesity; Free treatment for CF; Free fish on Fridays; Freedonia!

Anything goes

I've given tribs to Gavin and Dan the SloMo Guys, who have a super-high-speed camera which can capture the detail of fast changing events and crank them down in speed so that we can really see what's happening. It's interesting to note, therefore, that their latest video is about as exciting as watching a bath fill up. The story is interesting nevertheless: Dan is laid out on a trampoline, an empty monster balloon is placed upon þe coddes and gradually filled with water.

Trampolines are dangerous things to have about the place:

• My niece sustained a horrible compound fracture to her arm 13 years ago by compounding the bounce a trampoline and a space-hopper [pic], taking flight and landing badly.
• My boss's neighbour's boy otoh leapt off the roof of a garden shed onto a trampoline, flew briefly, and broke his neck landing in a heap
• Our trampoline took off in a storm and flew 40m up-hill and broke its back against a pine tree. I was glad to see it gone

The danger for SloMo Dan is that, as the balloon fills with 400kg of water, the weight pushes his knees in the wrong direction because the trampoline provides only elastic support.  It is part of the design that human hips bend in the other direction, so Dan's are okay under the weight. As the pain in his counter-flexed knees builds he reflects that it might have been better to carry out the experiment directly on the lawn. The slomo part, when the balloon is burst with a screwdriver, is almost an anti-climax.  All good fun.

Less good fun was a crushing accident sustained by singer song-writer Cole Porter in October 1937 when his horse fell and rolled over his legs crushing them both in a bloody mess. Porter was at the top of his game and his maternal grandfather was 'the richest man in Indiana', so he could afford the best medical treatment then available but spent the rest of his life in pain and undergoing a series of surgical interventions because osteomyelitis set in. That is an infection of the fabric of the bone, often prosecuted by Staphylococcus aureus - the SA in MRSA. Even today, bone infections are the very divil to cure because the density of the fabric of bone hinders perfusion by the antibiotics. 1937 was pre-penicillin, although sulphanilamide and other Sulpha drugs were available. Eventually, in 1958, the doctors amputated Porter's right leg at mid-thigh in a desperate attempt to control the infection. "Miraculously, through physical anguish, drastic surgical procedures, and the grip of addiction, he could still trip the light fantastic in his mind and reliably inspire the rest of us to do so as well. Such stories remind patients and doctors alike that regardless of the outcome, the human spirit remains the most formidable foe of illness." (Howard Merkel)  Porter died in 1964 at the age of 71 vacillating between terrible pain and a haze of alcohol and analgesics. A case has been made that 'I've got you under my skin' is all about heroin addiction.

But enough, already. Today is Cole Porter's birthday 9th June 1891 and I'm sure you'll want to sing along with some classics as you use both legs to go to work:

• Anything goes in Indiana Jones
• Night And Day, from The Gay Divorcée with Fred and Ginger
• That's quite ahead of its time: gays divorcing 80 years before the marriage referendum
• Just One of Those Things - As Dorothy Parker once said To her boyfriend, "fare thee well"
• Dorothy "quotable" Parker that is
• Begin the beguine
• I get a kick out of you - Peggy Lee
• Let's do it, let's fall in love.

Chapeau bas!

Een aardige wetenschapper

A kind scientist

"Ce n'est pas génie, ni gloire, ni amour qui reflète 

la grandeur de l'âme humaine; c'est bonté."

Henri-Dominique Lacordaire

I was writing recently about how recorded history winnows with such extreme vigour that only some of the corn is saved. Even in the current era when 'everything' is available on the internet, it can be hard to find what you want about things that are not tied down. Mountains and islands are all captured on Google Earth as are the scores for soccer matches in La Liga and anything reported in most newspapers over the last, say, 15 years. Celebrities - soccer players; pop stars; mass murderers and minor royalty - are also easy to track down. They have a wikipedia entry and that snap-shot of their lives is re-churned across the blogosphere. For unceleb people you have to fall back on the skills which my mentor employed as a researcher for the New England Historical and Genealogical Society NEHGS: paper ledgers at the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths and trunks of papers in somebody's attic. Some of these records are getting digitised: after a fruitless afternoon peering at headstones in a Manchester cemetery a few years ago, we were able to track down The Beloved's grandfather's grave on-line.

When I was young and wet behind the ears, we [me, The Beloved, The Boy, His Diaper Bucket, The Beloved's Brother, His Guitar] went on a road trip from Dublin to Siracusa, Sicily in a blue Citroen Dyane with two holes in the roof. The bucket caught the drips in a downpour near Turin. We were headed for, and I was due to speak at, The 1st International Conference of Cat Population Genetics and Ecology. Sicily was hot but drip-free and the conference was a success. On the way back North, we detoured to Utrecht. The contributors at the conference published most of their research in either Journal of Heredity or Genetica. The editor of Genetica was a cytologist called Janny van Brink [R, younger than when I knew her] and she worked in was the Genetics Department at Universiteit Utrecht.  I left TB and tb in the car [The Brother had parted company in the Alps) and went up to the Genetics Department.  They - van Brink, her post-doc and the post-doc's wife - were just sitting to afternoon coffee and. natuurlijk, offered me a cup.

I had a proposal: having knocked off the population genetic variation of the cats Felis catus of Ireland, I was now ready to carry out a similar analysis of the cats of the Netherlands . . . and did they know of any pot of money I might tap into to service this venture? Even in 1978, that was a stupendously naive suggestion. van Brink said she didn't think there was any such fund but why didn't I come to dinner that night and we might discuss it further. When I mentioned that I had two dependents downstairs in the car-park she, natuurlijk, told me to bring them too and told me what time we were expected. We ended up spending a week in her home before we found a well-serviced campsite in the forest nearby. Even after a flurry of calls the following day, there was no immediate money for genetical field work, so I applied for, and got, a job in a factory making plastic herring-barrels. The other reason we had washed up in Netherlands was that they had a Hfl.10/hr minimum wage.  I was due to start work in the factory the following Monday but more phone calls from van Brink had revealed that Diergaard Blijdorp in Rotterdam needed a grunt extra pair of hands for the World's Largest Aquarium Exposition. One of her ex-students was on the management at the zoo.

I signed on in Blijdorp the following Monday instead and spent the next seven months feeding fish, pushing a broom and sifting crocodile shit for money.  I would never have been able to afford the fees for graduate school if Janny van Brink hadn't adopted me and my caravanserai.

But it's not [except insofar as it's my Blob] about me me me. Janny van Brink's PhD research was in the field of cytogenetics and she was the first person (1959) to get a reliable count of the chromosomes for the echidna = spiny ant-eater = Zaglossus bruijnii. Echidnas are important because they are one of the few species of monotreme - egg-laying - mammals that we have on the planet: there are 3 or 4 different species of echidna and Ornithorhynchus anatinus the duck-billed platypus. The sex-chromosomes are peculiar in monotremes because they don't just have XX vs XY [with pathological variants like XYY and XXY]. Nope: monotremes have their X & Y chromosomes split into a number of different chunks.  The sex-chromosomes of birds show that this method of determining sex has evolved at least twice independently. Birds are ZZ or ZW with males being the homogametic ZZ sex and females ZW.  It is a wonderful example of good-enough evolution: either way ensures that the sex-ratio is about equal but neither is better than the other: both work.
van Brink went on to specialise in studying variation, especially of the chromosomes, of damselflies and dragonflies Onodata [See R for Microgomphus jannyae]. An indication of the respect in which she was held by her colleagues lies in her having five (5!) species named after her:

• Cordulegas vanbrinkae Lohmann 1993
• Coenagrion vanbrinkae Lohmann 1993
• Archaeogomphus vanbrinkae Machado 1994
• Microgomphus jannyae Legrand 1992
• Epigomphus jannyae Belle, 1993 

If you see these recorded as Cordulegas vanbrinki etc. you can point out these these coinages are wrong showing no knowledge of Latin grammar, tsk! So bonnets off to Janny van Brink, committed to science, intrinsically kind and can-do-no-other generous. 5th May 1923 - 28 Mar 1993

More women in science.

Woe to thee, O land

. . . when thy king is a child. That's the King James Version of Ecclesiastes ch.10 v.16. You can declaim that, if you were so minded; but you can't get off on more modern versions of the sentiment. Check out the various attempts to render the word of god at biblehub:

What sorrow for the land ruled by a servant

New Living translation

How horrible it will be for any country where the king used to be a servant

God's Word®

The land sorry will be when Vader is Skywalker

Yoda yodels

I made the last one up, but it's not dafter than the other two.  That chapter of Ecclesiastes is an attempt to pass on some timeless political advice and the rudiments of wisdom in daily life. 

Ireland is a country locked in childish things rather more than some other places in the Western World. When I was a student, I got several mentions in The Irish Times - the newspaper of [protestant] record for the country - because I had a speaking part in that month's contribution to timeless art by the TCD amateur dramatic society. Every week, even today, the I.T. will report the results and give some column inches of commentary on school's rugby matches. Neither of the under 16s rugger nor my appearance as the Second Student in Woyzech could be considered news-worthy by a mature society.  Not surprisingly the bible has that idea captured in 1 Cor 13v11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." It's about time The Times moved on to address grown-up matters like homelessness; the cost of health; the corruption of money; freedom of expression; and cheap oil.

Today, all over Ireland, it is the start of written exams for the Leaving Certificate, the passport to college and your label for life. Almost everyone will be taking English Paper I at 0930; fewer will be doing Home Economics in the afternoon; and it will all be over bar the weeping with Applied Maths on 23rd June.  Yesterday, The Irish Times did their annual piece A survival guide for Junior and Leaving Cert students (and parents) in case there are school-leavers out there (and their parents) who don't know enough to eat breakfast, sharpen pencils and put shoes on [the correct feet] for Der Tag. On the wireless the whole population was being advised to print out the timetable and put it up on the fridge door - so that Mammy knows when she has to drive her spotty youth to the examination centre . . . and cook breakfast . . . and sharpen the pencils in case Petal has forgotten, My colleagues at work are fully engaged with the project of getting their offspring through the ordeal. Which means that articulate, middle-class parents who were good at written exams will tilt the process to favour their dynasty while effective, clever, creative, critical thinkers who don't do well at that peculiar task are closed out from opportunities.

In the evening, a 15-minutes-of-fame Leaving Cert candidate was articulating why he felt the LC was 'unfair' because it privileged a retentive memory and uncritical recall of rather mundane analysis of great literature. Picture yourself at a party in Dublin; you meet an attractive 30-something person and want to now if s/he is younger or older than you. You know how old you are. Quote two lines of King Lear, Macbeth or Hamlet; if your oppo picks up the Hamlet tag they are are 33 or 36 or 39; Macbeth makes 'em 31 or 34 or 37. The Leaving Cert went on a 3 year cycle back at the turn of the century: you nailed One of the great Shakespearian tragedies: the rest of the Bard's works remained a closed book  Pity really: trying to 'nail' Hamlet's, errr, Hamlet's, no Hamlet's soliloquy knocked the stuffing out of any residual love of literature . . . any literature. That's the real danger of a monolithic national education system - every shagger has the same script, so it will be much harder to come up with novel solutions to the problems that are hurtling down tracks towards us.

But the young wannabee pundit blew it for me when he asserted that the flaws in the Leaving Cert were dangerous because they wouldn't - couldn't - equip people for the modern workplace. Bollix! If that's rhe purpose of education, then I'm delighted that Dau.I and Dau.II never bought into school. Through their teenage years they sat on the sofa learning more about what was driving them that week. Dau.I, the poet, read (with care and attention) all the major plays of Shakespeare as part of the maelstrom of printed matter that she hoovered up between learning to read at 6 and leaving home at 18. Their education fitted the girls for life - starting with a recognition that there was more to life than sleep, eat and work. They had a childhood and they grew through it and passed into the wider world without ever sitting an examination. They weren't passing through those precious and creative years as preparation for Work. I never had to help them with home-work - what would be the point? how could I help them in the struggle to understand what mattered. Without the Certificate part of the Leaving Cert there is no straight-forward path to college. After she enrolled in U. Life, Dau.II found out that every adult person - genius or dunce - had a degree. Her response was predictably a quip:

"No degree is the new degree"