December 1, 2014
Moins cinq
We are day 3 of the ‘Polar Streak(er)’ weather event. A stride of -5 has struck us. It was anticipated but preceded by a band of sun that suggested there was no way this polar could streak through. Crowd control would melt him!
Last night I had to declare it life-alteringly cold. But the polar streak by night becomes a bounty of sun in the morning, which must give us pause to recognize, perhaps, this is how Winnipeg and Edmonton live to see another day when it’s -37.
It’s excellent reading weather, though suffice to say reading is weather-proof.
Globally weather-wise Britain seems balmy, Brisbane bonkers and the rest you’ll have to discuss amongst yourselves.
November 14, 2014
The Polar Invasion
This weather event, henceforth localized to the “the blood will drain out of your feet” weather event has been termed the Polar Invasion in the US. (the successor to last year’s Polar Vortex)
Colorado perished last night and the Texas Panhandle recorded a temperature of -10.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean there was localized flooding in Ireland with the yellow alert being raised to an Orange alert.
Here we have -2 for an overnight low, dipping to -5 in the mysterious titled sheltered areas. (Definition forthcoming)
Here’s the full forecast. I am too timid to click on Edmonton, so click amongst yourself if your fingers aren’t already frozen.
November 13, 2014
Consider: The mighty kidney
“Each kidney (bean-shaped organ) weighs about 5 ounces and contains approximately one million filtering units called nephrons. Each nephron is made of a glomerulus and a tubule. The glomerulus is a miniature filtering or sieving device while the tubule is a tiny tube like structure attached to the glomerulus.”
This is the closest I could find to an image of one nephron.
November 12, 2014
Weekend view
This was my Saturday/Sunday view. 12th floor at VGH. It was somehow redolent of Legoland that H. Heliport landing.
Thank you to the nurses & doctors for their excellent care. Thanks be to everything else for public health care and Sir Alexander Fleming for inventing antibiotics.
November 11, 2014
Sorry, Mrs O’Duffy
My latest piece for the LRB blog can be found here
“I should like to apologise to Brigid O’Duffy (née Davis), who served in the Irish Citizen Army during the Easter Rising in 1916 but did not see her military pension until 1937. Her pension application (MSP34REF20583 in the recently digitised Military Service Pensions Collection) is date-stamped December 1936 by the Department of Defence. The files of 433 other women have also been unveiled.”
November 11, 2014
Middling: A Berlin Chronicle
“It is likely that no one ever masters anything in which he has not known impotence; and if you agree, you will also see that this impotence comes not at the beginning of or before the struggle with the subject, but in the heart of it…” Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle from Reflections. Translated by Edmund Jephcott
October 8, 2014
Influenza in Ireland
There’s a lovely hint of vibrancy in the latter part of this sentence. I enjoyed its determinate quality!
“Lowering the death rate must in the end cease and it is well to emphasise the fact that the object of public health is to prolong life to old age, not to secure immortality of terrestrial life. “
Influenza in Ireland. Feb 17, 1900. The British Medical Journal Vol 1. No 2042
(Note the date is 18 years before the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918)
October 3, 2014
Rooms That Have Had Their Part – Joanna Kavenna
This Joanna Kavenna piece was a remarkable read this week: I share this large chunk and then go here to read ALL. Joanna is the author of numerous novels and critical writings and has a brain seventeen times the size of most of us. Buy her books.
“The whole temping experience made me dislike the modernists as well, or some of them. It made me lose faith in those post-Nietzscheans who condemned the ‘ordinary man’ (or woman), who decried ‘the masses’ and assumed the masses all felt and thought the same. Often, as I waited in some random flock of people, I thought about Ezra Pound’s seedy protégée, Richard Aldington, who stood in central London and wrote:
The Masses at Piccadilly
Are sordid and sweaty
We suspect them of vices
Like marriage and business
We know they are ignorant
Of Hokkei and Rufinus
Or Amy Lowell, ‘imagist’, who added:
Fools! It is always the dead who breed!
The little people are ignorant
They chatter and swarm
They gnaw like rats . . .
I ranted my way home each night – as I stood with my kind, as we swarmed into a mass, as we breathed in unison, like ladybirds in a cluster, related and merged organic matter, as I stood and swayed – I hated Aldington, Lowell, felt that had they not been so utterly dead I would have found them and beaten them to the ground, a futile fantasy of vengeance on the long dead, but I thought, how easy, how glorious, to set yourself against the masses, when you have been saved by wealth or accident, how easy to denounce the Others –…”
September 28, 2014
Outlook: Talking about suicide
By chance after a conversation about the work of Édouard Levé last night at a gathering, the World Service were broadcasting this edition of Outlook, which features Cara Anna (her name reads like the opening of a love letter) bravely describing her own experiences with suicide attempts while working as a reporter in Beijing for the Associated Press. I admire her practical intentions with this blog and her work to reduce the taboo of discussing the subject of suicide attempts. Her blog Talking About Suicide is here
World Service Outlook programme can be heard here It’s rapidly becoming one of my favourite listens. I seem to chance upon accidentally every Saturday night.
September 28, 2014
Fog followed rain
I must pause to record the first rainfall warning of the season last week. Perhaps two rainfall warnings or perhaps one that lasted 2 days. It was a relentless rain that fell. Grey on waking, grey on sleeping, lashing in between.
Hark today we are back with megawatty sun bright! But what came in between, what came by chance was eiderdown to the mind. Yesterday driving North in Washington there sat fog. By the side of the road fog. Small bowls of fog. I was tempted to call it rolling fog but it wasn’t rolling. It was sitting in a bowl-shaped-pudding fog.
I was puzzling out whether this was particular only to Washington State, when I found more patches of it sat identically on the side of the road once I crossed the border. Curiously though on the Canadian side it was more square-shaped. Are we therefore square to Washington’s pudding?!
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Teashops they are a changing. Yesterday I met my first ultra slick and swifto tea hustlers. Usually teashops have one man, bedraggled or reading a mystery novel at the back or a hung over student or a woman juggling the dishwasher and the tea selling. Not yesterday’s encounter. It was doubles tennis rebound tea selling. I have never seen so many people selling tea in such a small space. And selling tea swifter than the sample could traverse the tongue. So you’ll be wrapping that tea up and taking that tea home will you? Unfortunately the tea in question was sweetened and decorated beyond recognition — it tasted like tea-ish cool aid.
What can we deduce? The Venture Capitalists have landed on the tea leaf. Still enthusiasm for the leaf is never an entirely unhappy thing, just in this case a tad pressured and go easy on the sweetener.
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I faithfully disagree with Colm Tóibín’s point in his weekend Irish Times interview about tea in the novel. You can never have too much tea in a novel dude. Tea is the word. True progress will announce itself when beds come with built-in kettles. (along with my other unrelated but much belaboured desire for 24 hour swimming pools).