Feast of the Assumption

[feastofassumption]

Scotland’s Candymaking Tradition

A wonderful bit of stamp collecting is this blog post: https://scotiafile.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-sweet-tooth-scots.html 

Scotland got its candymaking industry because Caribbean sugar plantations didn’t have on-site refineries, so unrefined sugar was shipped to Glasgow and refined there for tinkerers to experiment with.  I was enamored enough with some of these that I made an outsized order from “Saltire Candy” https://www.saltirecandy.com/sweets/boiled-sweets/  to try several out. My favorites were the rhubarb custard and the barley sugar. 

[in-stenography]

you forget so easy

My girl Iris Murdoch talks a lot about attention, attentiveness. What does this mean?

As I’m writing this, there is a very small but not negligible possibility that we will see global thermonuclear war, which may (if my high-school debate cards were correct) lead to human extinction.

G. W. F. Hegel, our favorite German idealist, saw time as a march towards consciousness coming to know itself. An inevitable march, actually, thanks to the cunning of Reason. (To be fair, he was writing at the very beginning of the 19th century, and he couldn’t possibly have known the 20th century would happen.)

Fiction writers, who are generally the better philosophers, have generally seen things differently.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

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[feastofassumption]

Biathlon And Humility

In the realm of international sports, ‘competition’ is right there in the name--but time and again after biathlon events, one will see competitors from across borders clap each other on the shoulder in celebration after a hard win, or empathy after a bitter loss. There’s a time in recent memory when French leading man Martin Fourcade broke a competitor’s pole during a pass, then turned around to offer the competitor his own pole in replacement.  The Lithuanian in this video is even sweeter--his times are usually too slow to qualify for the World Cup mass start, and his first (to my knowledge) appearance in the race sees him stoop down to save a Czech competitor from having to return for a missing ski.  https://youtu.be/T7TWihCQgIA  If you pressed me to develop a theory, I’d tell you that while all sports are tests of strength and will, the shooting component of biathlon is exacting, binary, and humbling. Everyone slots into comfortable grooves, “T is fastest,” “V will usually finish strong but struggles on hills,” “L is a good shooter, but takes shots slowly,” --but every once in a while, wind will throw your shot away, and the expected finishing order will be overturned. 

And I suppose that having been flat humbled by The Winds helps biathletes to see each other as competitors and simultaneously as peers, who can be knocked flat in a struggle against Nature, just as sure as we ourselves can. There but for the grace of a gust of wind go I--and so I will stoop to pick up your ski. 

[feastofassumption]

Folk Music Is More Participatory Than Meets The Ear

The thing with recorded contra music vs live contra music is a: recorded cd tunes are like 3 minutes, you need 10 minutes to dance to b: most folk bands never wind up with the upfront capital (or patience or desire?) to sit in a recording studio controversial point c: bands and dancers are actually interacting in realtime, band senses dancer zest and amps up zest levels in the played music, in a feedback loop of (whatever the dance, the tune, the dancers, and the dance being called suggest). Thus a band recording in a studio is missing 2 major ingredients of "what normally makes their tunes great in a dance hall.”

[feastofassumption]

Kentucky Bend Communication

You've seen what's called the "Kentucky Bend" region of Tennessee, yes? The Mississippi river has moved (drastically, due ot an earthquake once), so there's this little thumb of Kentucky that is landlocked on 3 sides by the river, and on the south by Tennessee, and so that little thumb has no telcom service. You can't get the phone line to run you a phone, because the TN one won't do work in KY, and the KY on can't lay line across the river.  It matters less now that there' s cellphones, but that entire several hundred acres of land became just farmland with no houses on it, because people couldn't get phone line.

[feastofassumption]

Ice Fishing Patterns

Ice fishing fulfills the courtyard pattern. You build a little shanty village every day with huts (if you're fancy) or chairs (if you're not) around a central courtyard  that is divided between tipups, and a fox&goose track for the toddlers to run in. Adults are facing in both to monitor the food-gathering, and the 'the kids aren't falling in the hole or getting too cold'ing,  and you pack the whole village out of your truck in the morning and back into your truck after sunset so you get to build a perfect fresh village each day. Fox&goose also a brilliant innovation really: you stomp or scrape a big wheel-with-spokes into the snow, and the kids play tag but the rules are you can't step off the scraped pattern; this means kids will never fall into the fishing gear. It’s especially effective because "don't put your footprints outside the stamped pattern" is the kind of rule that children love and will self-enforce. (I don't mean 'none of them will step outside the lines,' but I mean 'when someone steps out of the lines, the other kids will say HEYYYYYYYYY and stop playing until the defector is following the rules again.)