Bill Murray's Blog, page 69
February 2, 2018
Are You Worried About Bubbles?
“Are You Worried About Bubbles?”
Judy Woodruff to Janet Yellin on the PBS NewsHour tonight. Kudos to a human Fed Chair, who deigned to appear without smoke and mirrors on regular TV on her last night on the job.
Me? Last work day, I woulda been down at the Irish pub. Fer sher.
Weekend Reading
Hunting for something interesting to read this weekend? Here’s the list you were looking for. And since we’ve had a couple of posts that touch on British imperialism this week, we start it off with:
The Great British Empire Debate by Kenan Malik at NYR Daily
But wait, there’s more! Enjoy these, too, and have a lovely weekend.
A Bakery in a War Zone by Lily Hyde in Roads and Kingdoms
How warp-speed evolution is transforming ecology by Rachael Lallensack at Nature.com
What science is like in North Korea by Andrada Fiscutean in The Outline
The Person in the Ape by Ferris Jabr at laphamsquarterly.org
America Is Not a Democracy by Yascha Mounk at The Atlantic
How America Collapsed by umair haque at eand.co
February 1, 2018
RMS St. Helena Retires
Now that the St. Helena airport is up and running the RMS St. Helena, the last ship in the world to actually carry the British mail, is taking down her flags. It’s on its last visit to the island this week.
Here are a few photos from St. Helena, a tiny speck of land 1200 miles west of Africa in the south Atlantic Ocean, formerly only accessible via the RMS St. Helena.
[image error]St. Helena is a product of the same British colonialism that brought us the map in the previous post. It’s a place out of time.
[image error]It’s lovely, too.
[image error]The only population center, Jamestown.
There are more photos in the St. Helena Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, and here is a link to posts I wrote at the time of our visit.
A plucky little charter company called Atlantic Star Airlines is arranging a charter flight now for Christmas 2018 from the U.K:
[image error]
Here’s their web site. And here is the local paper, the St. Helena Sentinel.
Map of Empire, Airline Edition
From an intriguing website, new to me, called Tubemapcentral.com.This map comes from a pdf newsletter available on the site. Best way to properly view it might be to download the pdf and then enlarge the map. Brings back a disappeared world. Not entirely forgotten, especially probably if you were a non-British resident somewhere far out in the empire.
The keeper of the newsletter writes:
“Many of you will be familiar with a particularly splendid poster from 1937 advertising air services by Imperial Airways. This included a schematic map in an inset, detailing mileages and frequencies of flights to all sorts of exotic destinations.”
[image error]
January 31, 2018
Quotes: On Speech in Different Cultures
They’re hanging on every word.
A 2009 study by the sociologist Tanya Stivers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues found that it’s the norm in most languages and cultures to avoid overlaps and to take turns in conversation, with some local variation. Delivering an affirmative response to a question within 36 milliseconds is judged ‘on-time’ in Japan, while in Denmark you can take 203 milliseconds and still be judged timely. Even though the ‘huge’ inter-turn Nordic silences observed by non-Nordic anthropologists aren’t all that large, such comments reveal that deviations from one’s own acculturated norms are seen as highly salient. In other words, what is experienced as a ‘delay’ – and thus as an indicator of dissent, since confirmations are generally delivered faster than opposing statements – differs across cultures. A congenial Danish tourist in Japan might well be puzzled to find herself taken for something of a contrarian.
from Getting in the Groove by Jenny Judge at Aeon.co
January 28, 2018
The Clerk’s Stamp is Money
And a reprise of the most telling post from a previous trip to Sikkim:
The northern Indian province of Sikkim, between Nepal and Bhutan, borders Tibet. To visit, non-Indians require an “Inner Line Permit/Restricted Area Permit” issued by the Government of Sikkim Tourism Department.
It’s because of history. China chased the Dalai Lama from Lhasa over these mountains and off the throne in ’59. India took in his cadre and donated a whole city, Dharmsala, to their cause. That peeved the Chinese mightily.
The Tibet/Sikkim border isn’t drawn to either sides’ satisfaction. These are barren, forbidding, 12,000 foot mountaintops. Nearly 2500 died fighting up here in the 1960s. (The border at Nathula reopened for trade in 2006. Goods worth just over $1,000,000 moved through in 2013.)
So they try to keep up with where foreigners are.
The Inner Line Permit is a sheet of legal sized, pulpy paper with wood chips still evident. You can get one at the provincial border for free with passport photos and photocopies of things.
It cautions that the visitor must not overstay or go beyond the restricted areas, and must register at all check posts. It has us write down on paper what the NSA already knows: our arrival point, arrival and departure dates, names, nationalities, and passport information. This form requires a bureaucrat’s stamp.
The bureaucrat’s stamp is money.
•••••
[image error]
We hurtled to a stop (driving is purposeful in India) outside a building labeled Ministry of Handicraft and Handloom and presented ourselves and our papers to two gentlemen inside. We wished to enter Sikkim via Rangpo town.
The presiding official wore a Millet brand down jacket with a tall, zipped-tight collar. He examined our materials for several minutes.
There would be no small talk. This was Official Business, far too grave a matter for that. Or for that matter, cordiality.
I think he demanded respect with his silence, or at least TAKE ME SERIOUSLY. This was his domain and these were his number of minutes and it was not our privilege to question or expedite things in any way.
Look here now: I can slow down anybody I want.
Here sat a man whose circumstances were not like our own. If he stayed warm at night, it wasn’t by pressing a button on his thermostat. He had a stove, or something. But the road to Gangtok spread before us. He held our progress toward our nice hotel in his hands right now and we would – if we wouldn’t do anything else – we would note it. He pulled a ledger to his blotter and began recording our passport and visa details both on the ledger and on our permit.
The official and his colleague presided across battered and aged metal desks and facing them, we had the better view. Picture windows at their backs revealed the permanently stirred up frenzy of the street, and on the other side of it, well, Ricki’s Cocktail King.
The Ministry of Handicraft and Handloom was sort of a rambling, half open, ad hoc thing. A clock ticked and a bird made a lot of noise somewhere behind us, up in the rafters.
Ultimately our application to enter Sikkim caused no incident (or uttered word), and in time out came The Stamp. It pounded around a few places including our new Inner Line Permit, and, naive as we were, we imagined that that was that and we’d be underway.
And underway we were, not to Gangtok but under our driver Sunil’s escort, picking our way on foot across traffic asserting itself along the pocked lane and a half of tarmac that constitutes the main road into Sikkim, down a hill to the right past Ricki’s Cocktail King toward a bridge.
Nobody in there. (I cast a longing gaze.)
Chaos prevailed unruly on this side of the street. Over here, besides rooms with clerks inside, other clerks stood in windows onto the street, labeled Excise Tax and Forestry Department and more, pay windows for goods carriers inbound to Sikkim where men stood belligerent and flushed and pointed and hollered.
We stood facing green pastel walls in an office lit by a swinging bulb. Two new gentlemen. The inferior clerk sat at his superior’s side on a rolling office chair that had no back, wielding sheaves of paper, fretting. The boss man sat behind a half window with space for pushing critical documents back and forth beneath the plexiglass.
Letters on his window spelled out “C. O. I. Verification Officer.” The C. O. I. Verification Officer took our papers, examined them with a practiced eye to detail and frowned. He wore a high-collared parka similar to the gentleman in the Ministry of Handicraft and Handloom, only it was Kappa brand, not Millet.
With the joy of a cat in a cloudburst, he reached for a sheaf of papers like his adjutant’s and began his work. Which consisted of copying our same details into his papers, performing a vital verification, no doubt, of his could-be conniving colleague up the hill.
There would be a delay now, for the inferior clerk riffed through his stack of papers, shook his head and spoke. The C. O. I. Verification Officer put down his pen and gingerly leaned back in his chair. It was one of those chairs that at a certain point in its trajectory of recline, collapses all at once the rest of the 45 degrees backward.
So the Verification Office was careful, and when his chair settled without capsizing he and his clerk discussed matters for a time. At length, with no small amount of labor he summoned himself upright and handed his clerk a stapler.
During the process a small, older gentlemen entered, puttered here and there, then headed back and down the darkness of a hallway. His movement led my eye to a hand-painted sign farther down, the entrance to the Forestry Department. Between us and the sign an open electrical box on the wall stuck wires out into the hallway. There was just the faintest smell of piss.
In his own time, the C. O. I. Verification Officer completed his work and looked none too happy about it. The Stamp came out and pounded around the C. O. I. desk and our papers.
And we were free to go. Silently.
World Breakfast, Sikkim Edition
My post earlier in the week about the helpful Sikkim government sent me back to review what I wrote at the time. Here is a list of articles about the Indian state. Enjoy them over breakfast, Sikkim style:
[image error]
The breakfast buffet as served at the Mayfair Hotel Gangtok, the Sikkimese capital: Coriander vada, chicken roll, pineapple, onion uttapom, aloo matar ki subzi, club kachori, dhosa (a south Indian pancake), idli (rice ball), various chutneys and onion and chilli accompaniments, fresh squeezed pineapple juice, mineral water and coffee.
January 27, 2018
Legacy Material
“Legacy” is just ad talk for “old,” pretty much.
This morning I spent a bit of time visiting with my legacy self. Up until June of 2013 the Common Sense and Whiskey blog was hosted at typepad.com. It looks like most of the content is still there.
It brings back memories. We were up to our usual shenanigans, skirting around dicey travel locations without getting too close. In fact, the old CS&W has just inspired a new post about the Balkans, coming soon.
For now, have a look at some legacy posts for yourself.
Brief History of the Acadians
Many will know that the Acadians begat the Cajuns of bayou country, with the name evolving something like
Acadian —> Cadian —> Cajun,
but put me on the list of those who didn’t know a thing about Acadian food. I can’t say I even knew it was a thing. Until now. Can anyone speak to whether rappie pie really tastes like congee? I’m skeptical.
A Brief History of Acadians in Nova Scotia (and their food) as told by Simon Thibault from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.
January 26, 2018
What About Giraffes!?
They’re fascinating animals, that’s what.
Consider:
You may not be able to talk while breathing through your nose, but a poor giraffe cannot even have a drink of water without putting itself in mortal peril. Watch giraffes before they drink. They survey the waterhole at length and in great detail before they commit, because once they do it takes effort, and precious seconds, to splay themselves into their ungainly, legs-spread stance, and just as much time to clamber back upright.
Valves in giraffes’ necks close when they put their heads down to drink, to keep all their blood from flowing to their heads. That’s why they spread their legs wide apart because they’re apt to get a little light-headed. And that is when the big cats might strike.
Rumbling along a safari track once upon a time, B. (short for Bonnetswe, our guide in the Okavango Delta) told us the single most dramatic thing he had ever seen; it was the time he watched a giraffe kill about ten lions before finally going down to the final five.
If a horse’s kick can seriously injure a man, he grinned, “Imagine the giraffe,” whose foot is as wide as a dinner plate. And so lions usually leave giraffes alone. Except when they’re drinking.
As it happens, and thankfully (if you’re the giraffe) they needn’t drink more than every second or third day. To minimize the time they have to spend in that vulnerable stance they manage to get most of the moisture they require from the leaves they eat (For this same reason they need not migrate).
Consider the browsing life of a giraffe. While other animals compete for food on the ground, up in the trees, up there, if you’re a giraffe, it’s mine, all mine. Which means giraffes can afford to be discerning eaters.
Using half meter long prehensile black tongues, they take branches in their mouths and pull their heads away, leaves along with them. Their preferred leaves are thorny acacia. They grind the thorns between their molars (In the Okavango the acacia is known as the toothpick tree. They also use their thorns as sewing needles.)
Now, every bit of explanatory science I have ever seen notes the giraffe’s tongue is prehensile, and then goes on as if everybody knows what that means. What prehensile means is “adapted for holding,” from the Latin prehendere, “to grasp.” Unlike a giraffe’s hoof or a dog’s paw, our hands are prehensile, in the sense that we have opposable thumbs.
The giraffe uses his up to eighteen-inch tongue to slide up a branch and grab a bunch of twigs and leaves (They prefer acacia, which are important sources of calcium and protein. Plus, tender acacia twigs may contain 74 percent water.). Nobody except maybe the largest elephant can reach twenty feet from the ground to eat, and you can see this at work in areas rife with giraffes, as they create a “browse line” along the trees.
But if eating is a walk in the wildlife park, with the pick of only the very best leaves in the tree, it takes a lot of leaves – and a lot of time – for a giraffe to get his fill. A 3000-pound bull needs around 75 pounds of food a day, and it may take him three-quarters of the day to get it.
•••••
Charles Darwin developed a theory of natural selection but he didn’t claim it was efficient. To the contrary, he called it clumsy, wasteful and blundering.
Clumsy or not, evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology David P. Barash points out that natural selection has to work with what it has got.
In the giraffe, he writes, “natural selection has produced a creature that on the one hand is spectacularly adapted to its peculiar ecological niche” and on the other is a poster child for Darwin’s clumsy, wasteful and blundering.
Barash points out that to pump blood to the head, seven feet over its heart, giraffes require “exceptionally high” blood pressure. To keep blood from remaining in their feet they have “evolved the equivalent of compression stockings” (which would also be useful for visiting Americans on the long plane ride to Africa to see them).
Barash notes “giraffes are fully six feet taller than other competing browsers, which would seem to argue that competitive foraging as such hasn’t been the main driving pressure behind their altitudinal evolution.” And thus he coyly presents a peculiar practice of male giraffes that he suggests could have furthered positive evolutionary selection for those long necks.
During the rut, male giraffes will stand shoulder to shoulder, parallel with one another and use their necks, as Barash puts it, “roughly like a medieval ball-and-chain weapon, or flail.”
And this can hurt. Giraffe horns, called “ossicones,” are harder than the keratin of cattle horns. They are skin-covered cartilage, actually fused to the animal’s skull, that over time hardens into bone. Only the giraffe and okapi [which deserves its own article] have ossicones.
Giraffes hammer each other with their heads until one of the opponents gives up and cedes dominance. Barash speculates that since the longer the neck, the more force behind each blow, females may prefer long-necked giraffes, and this preference may be passed along genetically. This is the “necks for sex” hypothesis.
At least that is one idea. Cynthia Moss’s 1973 Portraits in the Wild precedes Barash’s work, and back then she was having none of it. To Moss, “A necking match is a lovely sight.” She calls it “gentle sparring,” punctuated by pauses to stare into the distance for some time, affecting “a slight air of superiority.”
Moss notes too that giraffes are different in different places. She cites different researchers’ variable findings.
Giraffes may be found “singly, in twos and threes, and in herds of up to fifty.” One of the researchers she cites, Carlos Mejia, says “They are gregarious but they don’t interact.” Mejia, she says, can’t figure out why they come together at all.
She found researchers agreed that giraffes’ social structures are loose, open, “with giraffes coming and going as they please.”
On the one hand, in Mejia’s study in Tanzania herds may be made up of “males, females, and young, all males or all females, or any combination….” and a “herd rarely comprises the same individuals for more than a few consecutive days.”
On the other, “the sexes in Nairobi park show distinct preferences for different areas. The females and young stay on the plains, whereas the males tend to stay in the forested area.”
•••••
In the Thula Thula Royal Zulu Game Reserve in the Kwa-Zulu Natal, we once saw a very baby calf, so newborn that it only just reached its mother’s knees, far below her body. She kept her calf tight to her side and remained most attentive to us, but that after-the-fact tenderness doesn’t cover up for the brutality of birth.
The giraffe calf receives a jarring first wake up call, being dropped head first some 5-1/2 feet from the womb to the ground, but it is soon standing, close to six feet tall and weighing 150 pounds.
And they grow so fast! In their first year some four feet, and Cynthia Moss cites reports that they can grow nine inches in a single week.
•••••
As a ruminant, the giraffe swallows its food, which must then be rechewed. Ruminants have a four-chambered stomach. Received by the reticulum, the vegetation forms into fist-sized balls and is regurgitated, chewed, swallowed and then passed into the other chambers, the rumen, omasum and abomasum, all in the process of digestion.
This is a three, four, five hour a day process that we call “chewing the cud” in the farm animals back home. All the ruminant are mammals, including yaks and goats and sheep, deer and antelopes and cows.
All that eating takes up most of a giraffes’ day. Moss tells us that in a giraffe’s day no more than five to thirty minutes at a time are spent sleeping. And even then, giraffes, especially moms with young babies, may sleep with one eye open, a practice they share with flying things like bats, ducks and chickens and, it is said, dolphins too.
•••••
If giraffes ran like most other hoofstock, their extra-long legs would be liable to get tangled up, so they move both their legs on one side and then the other, alternating sides. This is called “pacing” and has the effect of making the giraffe seem to run in slow motion when in fact those long legs cover prodigious ground. The giraffe can flee a pursuer at 55 kilometers per hour, though not for sustained periods.
In fact, the word giraffe comes from “zafarah,” for “one who walks swiftly.” Zafarah is Arabic, from the land of camels, and the camel runs like the giraffe; it also “paces.” Perhaps that similarity half accounts for the giraffes’ Latin species name, camelopardalis. The “leopardalis” part? There was an archaic belief that the giraffe was part leopard – because of those spots.
•••••
As with other animals on the African plain in general, Moss writes that “It is rare for a giraffe to die of old age; when it becomes very old and weak, it is usually taken by a predator.” Back in the 90’s, when I was very new at this, I remember a visit to Ngorongoro Crater, when a wildlife guide named Godfrey showed us a zebra with a broken leg on the edge of a herd, and said it wouldn’t make it until morning. This horrified me, and I lay in the dark and thought about it that night.
The system in the African wild is efficient, and it is surely ruthless, too. If we humans (some of us) have the good fortune to die in bed, pain-mitigated, that surely is not true on the African plains.
•••••
Got a minute to buy me a cup of coffee?
