Armageddon outa here

Last night, I watched a programme on TV that blew the whistle on the end-of-the-world Carbon Dioxide theory of Global Warming. They convinced me of something that I always wanted to believe anyway, and that is that the Global Warming humans-are-fucking-up-the-planet proposition had been hijacked by various groups to pursue their own political ends: Maggie Thatcher to bludgeon Scargill's miners back into the Stone Age, and the eco-freaks to find another stick to beat Capitalism - and the USA - with. Plus the scientists who have found a rich source of grant funding (Want to research the ecology of woodlice? Say it's a study into the effects of global warming on crustaceans and the funds roll in)
Oh yes, and those stringy geeks on bikes who want me to give up my car.
According to the programme, it is solar activity, not carbon dioxide, that influences the ups and downs of our climate. Indeed, apart from the fact that CO2 is a trivial proportion of the cocktail in our atmosphere, its rise and fall follows, not precedes, changes in global temperatures.
They presented a convincing case. Well, what you and I believe won't make a scrap of difference, but it does bother me that it is so difficult to separate the facts from the fantasies in this matter. Time to put the kettle on and make a cup of tea - if that's ok with the IPCC.

Getting into the spirit of things

The Barn Owl box was erected to day in the Widow's Barn. This time, in order to make sure the platform on which it was to sit was level, I had brought my spirit level - no more guesswork, no more doing it by eye. And then we stood back, David and I, and realised that the platform had a distinct tilt, pointing, if my internal compass serves me well, in the general direction of Abaddon. My reaction was to tell David that it was a deliberate tilt, a drainage feature, but he, not fooled for a moment, went back and re-positioned and re-screwed the brackets holding the platform. Then it was straight, parallel to the Earth's surface, no longer Hellbent. Then, box up and woodshavings inserted (one and a half inches: would YOU want to lay eggs on bare boards?), we left.
What I want to know, though, is what went wrong with the spirit level. Has global warming done something to the bubble, giving it a cant to compensate for the reduction of the Greenland ice-shelf? Hell, if you can't trust your bubble, you could end up living your whole life on the slant.

Reminder: posting comments

Please don't be deterred by the fact that all comments are moderated.
I have to do this to keep the pornographers, life-insurance agents and suicide-bummers at bay.
I promise you I will post all comments that are not from the foregoing.
After all, if Mrs Trellis of North Wales can do it.....

Good old HB!

I cannot let the sun set, nor indeed the moon rise, on my endeavours - I am still talking about the making of Barn Owl nestboxes, you understand - without acknowledging my debt to Hieronymus Bosch, inventor of the Cordless Power Drill.
How did we ever make little holes in wood, how did we ever drive screws in, before he came up with his brilliant invention? It's a difficult concept, the Cordless Power Drill - he must have gone through Hell.
Say what you like, but I believe in giving credit where it is due: without old HB, a lot of Barn Owls would be homeless today. Yes, all things considered, a helluva guy.

About tomatoes

"Billies-the-Kid", what a daft coinage, you might think. What's wrong with "Billy-the-Kids"? you might consequently think.
Blame the Italians. Better yet, blame Guiglelmo Recupero. During my happy year in Brescia, which is where I learned Italian, I was told by my friend and mentor, Guiglelmo Recupero, that the plural of pomodoro should not be pomodori but pomidoro. I can see you straining at the leash for an explanation. Nouns in -o make the plural in -i, eg, ragazzo-ragazzi = boy-boys. But, etymologically, the word pomodoro (tomato) is pomo d'oro (golden apple), so, according to my purist informant, the plural of pomo d'oro would be pomi d'oro, so........ well, you grasp the argument.
Me, being an inveterate showoff, went around after that seeking, in fact MAKING, opportunities to talk about "pomidoro". I finally realised that I was the only idiot in Lombardy using this pretentious form.
But I haven't given up, no sir. As anyone who has read this far will know, many pasta dishes are grammatically plural: spaghetti, lasagne, tagliatelle, linguini, etc, so I taught my children to say things like "The spaghetti were really tasty" or "The lasagne are excellent", "Are the tagliatelle fresh?". They drew the line at pomi d'oro, however.
But that lingering memory of Guiglelmo's stricture is the reason why I instinctively wrote Billies the Kid, only realising afterwards how daft it must sound. Never mind, it gave me an excuse to write this piece and show off my knowledge of Italian tomatoes.

Thinking inside the box

STOCK DOVE
Yet another triumph of optimism over experience, I have completed the Barn Owl nestbox for the Pining Widow. It is, of course, tempting fate to call it a "Barn Owl" nestbox, even if it is designed for that species. What I mean is that there are a number of other species that might well occupy it, of which the likeliest is Stock Dove (Columba oenas), known in the Fens as the Blue Rock, often confused with the common Wood Pigeon and as such blown to smithereens by local Billies-the-Kid.
Swift Nestbox update: one of the two experimental boxes erected in the middle of Cambridge has been occupied. By Starlings. The house occupant, aka Pluvialis, is very happy about this, so naturally I am happy about it too.
Ignore the sound of my teeth grinding: I am still thinking about Stock Doves taking over the Pining Widow's box.....

"What's that you said?"

Living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, which I and my family did for a time in the 70’s, is something which scars, sorry, marks you for life. Language is a major barrier. Swiss German is as rich and as valid a national language as Dutch, but for some reason, the Swiss have relegated it to a dialect: all official communications, spoken or written, are in Hoch Deutsch (High German) , that is, the formal language of Germany. The result is, given that the Swiss actually HATE High German, that they refuse to speak “proper German”, but resent any foreigner who tries to speak Swiss German. I tried a few times and grew very sad very quickly.

Forget it. Personally, I love all kinds of German. I love a language that can produce words like Dampffschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsgemahlin and Generaloberfinanzkriegsunddomänendirektorium (blame Frederick the Great for the latter). I love a language that can build from “krank”, meaning “ill”, to “krankenwagen” (ambulance) and “krankenhaus” (hospital) to “krankenschwester” (nurse). I love a language that produces literalnesses like “Auspuff” for a car’s exhaust, and “Durchfluss”, literally “through-flow”, for diarrhoea. When you arrive at a carpark, you go in via the “Einfahrt” and leave via the “Ausfahrt” – the former sounds to me like a painful experience.

But wait. That noiseless “fahrt” comes from the verb “fahren”, meaning “to go other than on foot”. If you go on foot, the verb is “gehen”. And if you think that is complicated, welcome to Russian, which not only distinguishes between going on foot (xhodit’)and going in a vehicle (yezdit’), but has parallel verbs for all sorts of other activities which may be carried out on foot or in a vehicle (come, jump, fall, arrive, depart, carry, bring, take, fetch, etc). Add to that that each of these pairs of verbs has an imperfective and a perfective form (aspect) depending on whether the action is perceived as ongoing or completed and you have a conjugation of verb forms that makes Latin look like Esperanto. Someone once described these things as "the diseases of language" and he was probably right, but for me they are all part of the fun of being unable to communicate with 90% of the human race.