Latkes by lamplight

Hope y'all are fuel-fixed for the winter. Energy prices have spiked because of events at the other end of Europe. We cook on a mighty Rangemaster Nexus [as L, not so clean, less meat] dual-fuel cooker: 3 electric ovens, 5 bottled-gas burners and a plate-warmer / bread-proving drawer. But we also have a Waterford 104 wood-burning stove with a flat top and have cooked on that in an emergency. A couple of un-emergency times we've cooked fondue on the 104 which conveniently projects enough out into the room so that 6 reasonably polite [elbows in!] people can sit and dip together. Standing orders in Chateau Blob include that the brave Waterford 104 has both kettles full of water whenever there is heat within to be captured.

Last Saturday just after lunch, the electricity flipped OFF subjecting a few parishes to a power cut. I was out chopping wood and hadn't washed the dishes but I wasn't too concerned, because we don't live in an Oblast, and as the weather was good and, so the fault was likely to be isolated and fixed soon. Winter storms bring down power-lines everywhere and it can take hours or even days to restore the 'lectric.

The WWWireless soon reported that the fault was located and would be fixed by 18:00, so we kept calm and carried on rather than flapping about making contingency plans - candles, torches, water-conservation, keep freezer closed. But shortly before 6pm, the resolution time was pushed out to 7pm and then to 20:30. And that was how I finished cooking a slightly sloppy pan of potato latkes by the light of a single candle. Because sunset was at 18:03 and it was full dark inside [astronomical twilight] by 19:00. 

It didn't help that the gas started to sputter just as I started cooking; and I had to switch cylinders outside round the back of the house. Last time I bought a 34kg gas bottle it cost more than €100 and it won't be that cheap when I replace this one. We have two cylinders connected to the cooker by a flip-valve. In the old, only gas cooker days, when we were catering for four, a 12.5kg cylinder would last exactly 3 weeks - baking all the bread is not free.

I'm not make predictions about energy availability this winter but this event has been a handy wake-up call to put on my prepper hat. And, not for the first time, I've been reflecting on how casual we are about the utilities of modern life. I don't need to clean out the range in the morning before a kettle goes on the hob and, when it comes to cooking or reading, I defo don't heed that it is  dark outside . We don't have small children, or elders, or chronic illness in our home, so I won't whine if we have to endure a few rolling power-cuts this winter. And being retired, I don't have to make tea / eat dinner / take a shower between 17:00 and 19:00 when national power consumption maxxes out. Take care, take it handy.

Something rotten in the state of Dance-mark

Our girls Dau.I and Dau.II grew up in the rural midlands and never went to school. Their education was very much on the unschooling end of the spectrum and they showed no interest in team sports - presumably taking a cue from the parents. But they spent a lot of time in the car [carbon footprint hadn't been discovered in the 00s] listening to audio-books, singing and wrangling [it all started when she hit me back] . . . while en route to events. Ballet, tin-whistle, flute, speech&drama, painting . . . one year they joined a local marching band, had rehearsals one evening a week, with parades on the weekend. The enterprise was run as a business, run by a family embedded in the community transitioning into its second generation of leadership. It was cliquey and incestuous; week after week our girls got to carry the effin' banner while the other kids played instruments. After a season of paying their dues and learning neither fife nor drum, they jacked it in.

In their other musical endeavours there was  a lot of pressure to sit exams. Music teachers are trying to make a living and there is high turnover in the clientele: mostly sub-teens before they discover sex, booze and rock&roll. Teachers need those exam results to establish their own street cred, any benefit for the examinees is incidental.

At least they never opted for Irish Dance where there is an additional burden of the fake hair, the fake tan, the bling of sequins on electric-coloured synthetic costumes, the bleeding toe-nails, the money it all costs. Modern dance-frocks cost as much as a wedding dress: comfortably into the $X,xxx range. A couple of days ago, an Irish Dance cheating scandal blew up. From the headlines it seemed equivalent to the competitive fishing fixing [covered in puns by MetaFilter] or chess cheating [Guardian] and I was all set to post it to MetaFilter as another example of how money and power corrupt every pastime they envelop: even had a clever title which I have recycled above. It's easy to play these things for larfs when a) nobody died and b) we can other the protagonists as bib-overalled rubes [competitive catfish fishers] or cerebral wonks [grandmaster chessters]

Someone else posted a MeFi link about the scandal so I didn't have to. I dithered because, as I read around the story, suddenly it wasn't fun, let alone funny, anymore. A series leaked txts mentioned "exchanging sexual favours for higher scores" which sounded like teachers whoring out their pupils and radio chat-show host Joe Duffy had a segment where the father a dead dancer called in to say that the community and culture of competitive Irish dancing hadn't helped his daughter's mental health. I learned later that the sexual favours were more about teacher taking one [up the oompah] for the team than pimping which brings it down to ordinary consenting adults levels of eeeuw.

Don't get me started on Michael Flatley's Riverdance fascist extravaganzas. Worryingly Lord of the Dance is performing [tix €50-€100] in Meistersingerhalle Nürnberg on 19th October 2022. Just 88 years and 880m from where Leni Riefenstahl shot Triumph des Willens.

Diary of a Nobody

DoaN: Gowing's always coming and Cummings' always going

• ↓ & ↑ the Grand Canyon on a mule
• Grand Canyon by water  
• Atlantic ocean by water: Damian Browne landfalls in Galway. 
• Ragnar coming home
  
• Breakfast 
• Fried egg sandwich
• Hagelslag
• Galão e pasteis de nata
• Idli; vada pao; kheema pav;   
• Dead: coal miner's daughter Loretta Lynn
• Making images small with Kilogram
• Making images not Vermeer 
  
• Skimming off the tourists in Czechia
• Skimming off nitrates with riparian buffers
  

Undoctored

Adam Kay was clever, shy, gay and confused when he was eased into Med School by his GP father and sundry other doctory relatives. A kindly mentor suggested that, as well as learning the name of every nodule and muscle-attachment on his 'half-skeleton', he might contribute to the Christmas revue. And it was so, and he was good at that and happier there than in other aspects of his medical training. I wrote about how he jacked in his scrubs after a harrowing death under his hands.

That first book This is going to hurt, was a [surprise?] run-away best-seller which allowed him and his partner to move out of a shit-hole into a nicer place to live. A few years later, because he hadn't practiced medicine, he lost his certificate to do so. He published a second book of memoirs Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, at least partly because that was going to support his agent, his publisher and WH Smith. These books are funny and intermittently harrowing, which is a genre. 

Now there's a 3rd volume Undoctored, also on Borrowbox, which is harrowing and intermittently funny. While the previous books were not without introspection and self-analysis, this one is much more personal / confessional and frankly uncomfortable reading. There is a belief that you can achieve psychological relief from your mental roilings by articulating the memories with a trusted person: a catholic confessor, maybe; or a psychotherapist / analyst. Adam Kay chooses to share a lot of intimate personal details with thousands of random readers rather than one discrete qualified person. Given that he was, for several months, stalked by an obsessive admirer he had encountered on Twitter; his sharing in Undoctored borders on pathological. But what do I know? I'm altogether too buttoned up.

Whatevs! I regret getting far too much distinctly unfunny information from & about this comedian.

Will walk with water

I have notions about how to walk places. 

• Pilgrimage is best taken alone. If you go with a pal, you will turn towards each other in adversity rather than embracing the threat opportunity.
• Unless you really know your {butterflies | dicots | fungi} onions, a guided walk in the hills may be of value. It's nice to be shown a thing or two; and you may even remember some of the names. If you go with a pal, chances are you'll turn your heads inwards (for the natter, like) oblivious of the hen harrier Circus cyaneus cruising above your nodding heads.
• If you want a natter, like, then a riverside walk is recommended.

During pandemic breaks, I had a short handful of engaging walks along the tow-path of the Barrow Navigation. Walking increases blood-flow and some of that bleeds into the brain, so thinking may be a bit sharper out in the breeze. And it's cheap: two coffees and a slice of cake cost me €15 on a different mentoring gig . . . not to mention sitting in a warm fug of microdroplets from strangers' spittle for an hour.

The Beloved's Bruv + 1 were over in Ireland for a week in the middle of September. They were heading to a different hemisphere for who knows how long and so we went for a walk beside a different river along the Glasbhealach na Déise. Ireland used to be criss-crossed with 5,500 km of railways, at least partly because much of it is flat and so cheaper to engineer rights-of-way. There once was a railway between Waterford and Dungarvan (and Fermoy and Mallow). This involved many bridges, culverts, embankments, tunnels, viaducts; some spectacular. The railway service was closed in the 1960s having run at a loss for too long. But re-opened as 46 km of car-free roadway in 2004. 

It's wonderful. We did a modest section of the route from Killoteran to Kilmeaden where the path hugs close to the River Suir and the dinky little toy train [€10 each seat] runs beside the track. The station at Kilmeadan is a bustling café where we paused for coffee in the sunshine, before heading back. The sign [R] is clear about who gives way to whom w.r.t. trains. But things are much less clear with pedestrians and bikes. I'll confess to feeling a bit h(a)unted by cyclists in lycra but apparently without bell.

Tik Mak Shu

Imagine living in a country where all the signage was new: ვცხოვრობ პურ-ყველის გამო. Where do you even start to make sense of the built environment? I guess you'd start by looking for similar glyphs on shop-fronts ვცხოვრობ პურ-ყველის გამო I've colored the O and V letters in the Georgian phrase in the first sentence. I remember sitting in a harborside cafe in Greece and sounding out φαρμακείο:  Ph - a - r - m - a - k - é - i - o . . . oh! Pharmacy, that's where I need to go for more sunscreen. We are blessed to live in a multicultural society, and we should cut the New Irish some slack in navigating their new home. Waterford would be a poor place without pierogi, pizza and paratha. 

A few years ago, a young Georgian friend [prev] of the family sent The Beloved a txt announcing that she'd bought something nice in Tik Mak Shu. It took a while to twig that the mystery shop was a wayward transliteration of TK-Maxx (shop?) which operates on the slogan Get big brand wins at small prices. 

Some members of my family have bought into that pitch and in their company I have been inside several of Mr Maxx's emporiums. I wonder / wander around the homewares looking for even one win at a small price. What I see are ranks of tasteless tat which an enthusiast from Marketing has persuaded Product Development will be an End of Year Bonus winner.

Sadly not. If that EYBW had been a success, containers of unsellable product wouldn't have been shipped to TKM for ignominious disposal. It's hard to compare, because TKM stock leans to peculiar [as L - does any of that look remotely useful?], but none of it looks cheap. But in most cases, you could get something with more functionality, less bling/blurgh, for the same money in a regular department store.

William Morris is the chap to guide us here "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful"

Sunday gallimaufry

It's a one stop not stop shop [R]

• Tea and medals - MTB patrols in WWII IRL Popoprev
  
• Cork: Paul "The Oar" O'Donovan sells his soul to the National Dairy Council.
  
• Dragon red were my valleys - Michael Sheen
  
• ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
  
•  Québec: Le vent nous portera
• Antonio Soler - Fandango
  
• Xylophones! Camille Saint-Saëns – Danse Macabre
  
• La petite fille de la mer.
  
•  🔧🛠🔨
• Timber processing: never get bored of board feet
  
• Norwegian Wood: felling some up the fjord
  
• REM metro links Montreal 
• Engineers do mining stability too
• And road-building mit hydropower
  
• Parkour wall running in Brighton
  
• aaand the End of the Line = Epping