Famous for 15 years

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes". There is some dispute about who said it first, but the quote was captured in print in a catalogue to a 1968 Andy Warhol exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It is a wry assessment of the damn-fool entertainment business when so much of it is about ordinary people being projectiled briefly ad astra by the Astra Satellite: X-Factor; Xland's Got Talent; Eggheads; I'm a Minor Celebrity Apply Leeches; and just about any radio programme that takes incoming phone calls. Not to mention MTV's mid-80s show "Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes". And we'll throw in the Lotto here: where the business model is that for €2 = 15 minutes work at mimimum wage you have a chance of buying Porsche or a world-cruise or a three-bedroom semi in suburban Dublin. If we lived in a fair and equable society, where people's ordinary needs - for food, shelter, friendship, respect, are met then ordinary people wouldn't have to hanker after the extremely unlikely. [Irish Lotto big win odds = 1 in 10,737,573, Y{local}MMV - odds of being struck by lightning in the USA this year 1 in 700,000].

Anyway I don't want to talk about the endemic unhappiness of the modern world but reflect on a small boy who in 1899 scored a fabulous number of runs in an insignificant game of school cricket. Some sports are less exciting than others: basketball scores in excess of 100 are normal whereas a soccer match with 10 goals is very rare. Arthur Edward Jeune "James" Collins aka AEJ Collins opened the batting on 22nd June 1899 in a house match at Clifton College in Bristol. At the end of the following day, when his team finished their innings, Collins had built up a score of 628 runs. You don't have to understand the peculiar language of cricket [slip, gully, cover-point, long leg and silly-mid-on are all legitimate playing positions] to know that this was the highest score ever recorded and that the record stood until 2016.

What do you do if, at the age of 14, you've been written up twice in the sports pages of The Times as the most extraordinary cricketer of the age? They even printed a run of commemorative postcards [example R]. If the most common response upon being introduced to an [English] stranger was "Collins, eh, you wouldn't be related to that Collins who scored all those runs at Clifton in the year '99?". You'd never quite be able to live up to the expectations after that.  Well, as an orphan born out in India, as soon as he left school he went on to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich [not to be confused with Royal Military College, Sandhurst] and then joined the Royal Engineers in 1904, married a fine young woman 10 years later and shipped out to France when WWI broke out that Summer. He was killed in a trench on 11th November 1914. His widow lived on and on alone for more than 50 years before dying in 1966 in Haslemere. I could easily have passed her on the street because my family lived in the same small market town 1965-1966.  What a pity, what a waste!

'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'

'None,' said the other, 'save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Wilfred Owen Strange Meeting

Bipap better

For the moment I am coat-tailing a free-to-me 2for1 subscription to the New York Times.  The NYT can get a bit shouty and exasperated with their President but dooeshave good coverage on other matter. With my end of life issues hat on, I was interested in an analysis of the outcomes among 35,000 older people after they were intubated. The answer is, in general, Not Good. Intubation is when the medics thrust a tube down your trachea and attach the other end to a ventilator. It is uncomfortable and/or painful and if you're no all there in your head, you'll be tempted to pull out the obstruction, so you're tranquillised. Even if untranqued, you can't talk with a tube down your windpipe, so you will have missed the time to say goodbye.

The keynote study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society by a team led by the delightfully named Dr Kei Ouchi. Here's the survivorship data:

Age Group	% mortality
Overall	33%
65-74	29%
75-79	34%
80-84	40%
85-89	43%
90+	50%

It is clear that, for surviving the intrusion, younger is better. The difference between 85 and 95 is that at 85 you can cut your own grass while at 95 you can't wipe your own ass. But only 24% of those intubated are discharged home. Those not going home or dead are discharged to a less acute health-care facility. Dr Ouchi is an emergency room physician who found he was better at intubating than talking to the intubatee about whether s/he wanted the intervention. And all too often he'd see patients he had intubated occupying a bed elsewhere in the hospital in a worse state than before he'd treated them. Hence the data-gathering exercise, to see whether, and for whom, intubation was likely to work.

There is a move towards the less invasive bipap bi-level positive airway pressure ventilation system. This delivers the air by a tight-fitting face-mask which if probably uncomfortable enough but doesn't require sedation to tolerate. You can also remove it to kiss your wife, have a slug of water or utter a wry comment to keep up the bedside morale . . . you want something waggish for your last words if you don't make it. The other advantage of bipap is that it wins a bit of time to discuss the prognosis and get closer to informed consent with the rellies. Intubation is not something that you can easily stop and start.  Informed consent requires that the physician and patient's "surrogate decision makers" = rellies are on the same page for communications. Too often, it's like they are talking in separate rooms [JAMAnetwork data and analysis]. The NYT article wraps up with the advice that it's better to have the conversation about advanced health care directives now rather when you wash-up in A&E in a crisis. I concur: DNR, please if any of my surrogates are reading. There will be more for you to inherit if you don't waste it on futile and painful attempts to delay the inevitable

Dark Wet Cold

Unless you live in a cave, you will have heard the news that a bunch of teenagers have been found alive and well after nine days stuck in a cave system in Thailand. They aren't out of their pickle yet because the risen water still closes off the obvious exit route - which is the same as the way in. The story set off a chain of memory for me because I have a little more experience than average in the gentle art of spelunking - wandering around underground in the dark with wet socks. That's because the average experience of caving is, to the nearest whole number, nil. For someone as deeply unsporty as I am (my idea of exercise is to heave myself off the sofa in search of more tea) I have a surprisingly wide experience of different sports: cricket, darts, field hockey, paragliding, rowing, rugger, sailing, skiing, soccer, squash, tennis, track-and-field, water-polo - done 'em all. Paragliding and caving I've only done the once. My pal Roy, who took me caving in the Yorkshire Dales, took to spelunking as a sort of natural extension of his hill walking and scrambling.

A couple of years after my novice-level sopping-wet-in-Winter introduction, Roy and his pal Les set off for another caving adventure. They did all the right things: checked the weather; packed food and water; dressed warmly; told their wives where they were going; left a clear note of intentions on the dash-board of their parked car. They went into a cave intending to spend only 20 minutes checking it out before moving on to another more extensive system further up the valley. When they turned round to depart, the water had risen in dramatic fashion and the ingress had disappeared under the torrent. Like the boys in Thailand, they retreated further into the cave and found somewhere dry to sit it out. In those pre-google days they had missed the nugget of cavers lore that all the locals knew about: that 3 days after a substantial spill of rain Sleet's Gill was likely to rise fast and dangerous and stay that way for several days.

After 24 hours in the darkness, they were just beginning to hallucinate from sensory deprivation [R from the TV docudrama] when they heard a voice and then voices. Two lads from the Mountain Rescue Volunteers had scuba-dived into the rushing water to find them . . . and found them. They said hello, then disappeared again before returning with hot food and a flask full of hot sweet tea the colour of tomato soup.  Rescue was at hand because Roy's wife had realised that her bloke was late, late even if he'd stopped for a pint and a bag of chips after his day's fun . . . very late and she's called 999 after midnight to set events in train.

It was a dilemma because the forecast was giving yet more rain and their haven was likely, under those conditions to fill up in its turn. Roy and Les were given their first ever lesson in scuba-diving and brought out through the narrow winding pitch black tunnel that was their only escape route. Nobody died that weekend and Roy went back to work at Tyne Tees TV on the Monday.

He pitched his boss the idea of making a documentary about the adventure and it was broadcast starring Roy and Les as themselves in No Picnic at Sleets Gill. The film captures the sanguine attitude of the rescue party: not expecting to find two living 'tourists' and already thinking about how they'd get the bodies out. Caving is safe enough if you choose a pitch commensurate with your ability and experience AND the weather up-top is normal and predictable. It is bloody dangerous if conditions have changed so that someone requires rescue. Dangerous for the rescuees and dangerous for the volunteers who put their lives at risk. I seem to remember that Roy and Les went back to Yorkshire on the first anniversary of their ordeal and bought the lads a round of drinks. It was more than he himself got by way of thanks after he pulled a boy out of a collapsed sand-dune to join the Brotherhood of St Adjudor. He's dead now, is Roy, but he was alive while he lived: kind, resourceful, funny, sorely missed.

Waldseemüller and Ringmann

Fünf punkte for guessing that W & R were German (it's the umlaut, silly) but bonus points for knowing for what the deutsches Duo are famous. They were the lead scholars for a conference that was called to a small French town, St-Dié-des-Vosges un 1507. St-Dié was chosen because it was equidistant between Strasbourg | Straßburg | Strossburi; Basel | Bâle | Basilea; and Fribourg-en-Brisgau / Freiburg im Breisgau, major centres of humanist scholarship in Central Western Europe. The purpose of the meeting was to determine everyone's place in the world. Not in a social or economic sense:

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, 

He made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

But literally . . . cosmographically . . . on a map, like this one

The problem was that data was overturning the cosy certainties of Orbis terrarum Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres with the three continents of Asia, Africa and Europa meeting at Jerusalem the centre of the world.  Think about it: in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed on an island on the far side of the World, claiming it for his sponsors los reyes católicos Ferdinand (Aragonese: Ferrando, Catalan: Ferran, Basque: Errando, Spanish: Fernando) of Aragon and Isabella (Isabelle, Isabel) of Castille. Columbus himself went to his deathbed believing that he had been fossicking around on the Eastern shores of Asia.  It wasn't until his third voyage in 1498 that Columbus set foot on mainland continental America.

Waldseemüller and Ringmann had to evaluate all the evidence available to their committee of scholars to locate these new territories . . . and label them. The doctrine of priority was strong in the world of exploration and geography and W & R & Co. had to hand a letter from Amerigo Vespucci, hereinafter called the Wily Florentine, to his sponsor claiming that he'd made a short walk on the Brazilian foreshore in 1497. Accordingly they wrote America in a big sprawl on the hinterland of the Brazilian coast. Their findings were written up and printed as a heavy Latin tome Cosmographiae Introductio, a huge 1400mm x 2400mm map in 12 tiles and a handy kit for making a spherical globe [which see above]. They printed 1,000 copies of their flat map and these were widely distributed across Europe and presumably taken off to sea on subsequent voyages of discovery. Laws of priority applying, subsequent maps applied the name, not only to Brazil but to the whole new super-continent.  That's sort of appropriate to think about on this The Fourth of July.

Those 1000 copies of the mighty map were used and used and worn out and soaked in sea-water and frittered and used as wrapping paper until they could not be found anywhere. The sole surviving copy was found in 1901 in the library Wolfegg Castle in Germany and purchased by the US Library of Congress for a fabulous sum in 2003. A copy of the smaller map in 'gores' or segments for wrapping round a globe was found in another book in 2012 during a recataloguing exercise in the library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Always have a riffle through books before you sent them to the charity shop: you might find treasure.

Demented

I was just writing about Alzheimer's cures and cares.  That coincided with The Beloved passing on a book to me called Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell. The somebody Wendy used to know is herself before she was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in her late 50s. She was then a super-competent hospital administrator living alone in Yorkshire, her two daughters having flown the nest to pursue their own lives and careers.  The book starts by relating an accident while running, when her legs suddenly stopped obeying the unconscious signals from her brain. That's interesting because we usually associate dementia as only affecting the 'higher' cognitive functions like memory, concentration and speech. For many of us these are what give meaning, not only to our own lives, but also to those about whom we care. One of the early influences / inspirations for Wendy Mitchell was Keith Oliver, a headmaster who started living with early-onset dementia a couple of years before her.

My grandfather was a freemason, eventually Master of his Lodge. He lost one eye in middle age during the blitz in Dover, but he had a spare so was hardly handicapped by the loss. As kids we would speculate about which was the glass eye and whether he took it out at night like his false teeth. In his 70s, the retina dropped off the back of his remaining eye and he was plunged into literal and psychological darkness. His masonic pals came to visit for a while. But when it became clear that he was never again going to be the life and soul of their masonic romps, they fell away and left him to his own devices. I still feel that a bit more care and attention from his 'pals' might <whoop whoop self-interest alert> have pulled him from the slough of despond and made him more rewarding company - quite apart from showing a bit of compassion for a man fellow mason laid low by adversity.

I'm about halfway through Mitchell's book and clatter of a incidents require me to make an interim report on how "to deal with" Alzheimer's and dementia. There is a <whoop whoop self-interest alert> here too. It's really hard for the person inside the dementia; it's not a drift off into a benign indifference. It's rather a fight to maintain as much normality as possible in as bright a way as possible. Negative language is not helpful here. If you say your Mum suffers from rather than lives with dementia, then the old lady starts to suffer and feels a little crappier than she strictly needs to. If you think, let alone say in her hearing, that Mum is a burden to herself and others, then the bottom falls out of her day. And you want to go easy on the does s/he take sugar front and assume that Mum no longer has her own preferences, desires or wishes by answering for her. And don't just give up on your old friend because you hear she's gone demented or into A Home. Dementia is progressive: it takes years before you're 'gone'. Meanwhile affection, kindness or courtesy request-and-require you to go visit, to send a card. Don't call on the phone, though: that is confusing because the voice is disembodied and the chatter too fast to cope with effectively. Don't stop visiting because you don't know what to say: most conversation most of the time is inconsequential chatter essentially the same as picking lice out of each other's fur. One of the last things to 'go' is a sense of humor: there's still plenty to laugh at and that's a more appropriate response than getting angry.

Sorted!

On my birthday a couple of weeks ago, I dragged everyone in the house down to Trá na mBó, The Déise, before cake. That beach is a little exclusive, because you have to leave your car in the village and walk either a) up over the hill along a farm-track and down a rather steep path or b) along the rocks at the foot of the cliffs and round the headland. Neither is remotely possible in a wheelchair. If you meet anyone on the beach, which is rare enough, they are likely to be a little bit interesting. It's where I swapped quotes about The Way with Senator Grace O'Sullivan in 2016. In that piece, I called it The Secret Beach but that is a bit of a conflation because the next beach West is secret really exclusive: you can only get to it a) by entering a cave and scrambling up a 1:1 slope to a hole through which you can slip into the light on the far side or b) by kayak. Far from wheelchairs, that beach is only accessible to people with good knees and climber's fingers. The roof of the cave where the hole penetrates the rock has slumped a little since I was last there making the hole a bit bigger but also more crumbly. I think I'll give The Secret Beach a miss until the geology settles down. Anyway we all, from 24 to 64, went through the portal to see what we could see. Me, I could see a tangle of colour at the far end of the beach and was delighted that it was a) on the surface rather than half buried, b) light enough to carry away and c) interesting enough to be worth the effort. He[R]e's me with my birthday gift from Poseidon: I look miserable but inside I'm dancin'!  There is virtue in picking this stuff up off the beach while it is briefly there, because it's much more expensive and awkward to leave it for Boyan Slat to fish from an Oceanic Gyre.

And it's better to have it in landfill because it's all plastic and that's one way of locking up carbon for a long long time.  Quite apart from no longer choking turtles and strangling albatrosses. But re-use beats re-cycle and last week I spent a couple of hours in my yard at home under the broiling sun [wearing my hat instead of sun-cream] reducing the raffle to its component parts:

It's a puzzle, it's an optimisation. The buoys are strung on a blue cord and a monofilament net is attached to a white rope. The two ropes are then tagged together every fathom or so with a characteristic whip of white twine. The trick is to snip the whips and salvage as much line, in the longest possible length, and as many buoys as possible. The monofilament could be used for supporting beans but is really too much trouble to process. The tally:

• 42 orange floats (two cracked) in three different designs
• 30 fathoms of 10mm white rope in 12 lengths
• 22 fathoms of 6mm blue cord in 20 lengths
• 5 litres of monofilament, frayed ends, ugly splices, and pieces of rope too short to keep.

Even 1 metre of rope is useful for tying shut a gate or repairing the handle of our aged wood-basket. When we were down on the beach, I mentioned that I intended to use the orange floats and some blue ones salvaged earlier to write messages in code to hang in our 2016 woodshed. Another afternoon in the broiling sun and it was so:

Which the following morning finished up in place:

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