thiele’s killer debut as a goalie, thiele denying curl, keller fighting curl, shirley double goal, keller checking curl early in the game, alina muller on fire all game, it’s just a beautiful night
Ok so here’s some spicy and utterly unverifiable tea about the Guardian, the British left-leaning newspaper. There’s nothing anyone can do, but at this point I basically want to hire an investigative journalist about it.
A few years ago, a person we know who was researching bioenergy/biofuels was speaking at an event to a prominent academic and mentioned the Guardian’s rather bizarre, oddly personal campaign against burning wood. It’s weird enough to notice. Every winter the Guardian pumps out several really alarming articles stating that burning wood will kill you, based on papers that fall apart when poked. Why bother?
The academic took the person aside, looked around, and said “you know he’s paid off to do that, right?” But then became uncomfortable and didn’t want to be pressed. Our friend ruminated on it for a long time, noticed the ongoing theme and framing about “woodburners” in the Guardian even more starkly, and pondered on the known forces arrayed against biofuel research.
It’s well-known that international fossil fuel lobbies have strong interest in squelching bioenergy, and certain governments are particularly pushy about it. In short, if you were to commission an editor to “whip up alarm about why biofuel is bad for the environment, we need 6 articles a year” this is exactly the sort of material they’d post. “Get Britain to outlaw woodburners through frightening the public” is a clear goal, but is it about “undermine appetite for biofuel” more generally? Or is there just one rich guy in their social circle who burned themselves on a woodburner once, and this is how they’re spending a small amount of political leverage? Or is it just that an editor themselves wants to do it and specifically directs the staff to construct what support they can find? Or is it just baseless gossip and slander?
This person told Dr Glass and I. I was mostly interested for the mischief, and so I can have a giggle when I see the latest article about WOODBURNERS BEING POISON. It’s amused me for years.
Dr Glass, though, treats it like a crossword. He enjoys tearing apart the studies (they’re never good; they’re intentionally misleading; they usually have some extremely funny thing buried deep in the actual paper, basically like the control group being ‘baking’ and baking being found to be, like, 2x worse than burning wood, so they flipped the charts around) and has a little game about the rhetoric and tone used. It’s enrichment for him, and you might enjoy doing it for yourself. There’s plenty of material. The guardian digs DEEP to find evidence for this campaign, and the studies usually don’t even support themselves, let alone the news article.
I mean, there might be some decent research, is the thing! Cos the thing is! Nobody would argue that indoor pollution is a good thing! Everyone understands on some level that “things that smoke” are bad for you!  it’s an open secret that cooking and baking are mildly and continuously polluting! but in order to keep up this rigourous posting schedule, the Guardian has to send a reporter every time a granny in the Hebrides gets asthma. Below is just lucky dip, it isn’t even sorted.
Anyway there’s today’s amusement. Been going on for years. Nothing to be done about it. No harm in pointing it out. Very funny to see and a puzzle to play with.
Highlights a generally under-researched question, which is 'When you feel like you've seen a story all over the media, is it The Media doing it or is it one fucking guy with an axe to grind?'
Something a lot of left leaning people don’t seem to realise is how much the Guardian (UK, I understand this is not the case for US and Australian based reporting) became TERF HQ a few years back. I haven’t really been able to trust them since then.
NO FOR REAL but the sheer amount of apocalyptic reporting about WELSH PEOPLE BURNING WOOD is a household joke! If there is a way to position Welsh people, travellers and boaters, heating small homes with local wood, as responsible for HABITAT DESTRUCTION AND POLLUTION then the Guardian will MAKE IT HAPPEN.
And when you click through to the study it’s always, like, “our study found that Welsh people burning wood are still less polluting than the average middle-class housewife’s dirty ovens” but NOT LIKE YOU’D KNOW FROM THE REPORTING
reiterating @geeoharee’s good point: Highlights a generally under-researched question, which is 'When you feel like you've seen a story all over the media, is it The Media doing it or is it one fucking guy with an axe to grind?'
So I should say that I know slightly more than the average layperson about things like public health, energy, and the politics of science. I am perfectly aware of things like “burning wood certainly contributes to air pollution, which is really more of a realistic concern than indoor air quality” and “burning wood doesn’t solve many problems” and “what PM2.5 monitors measure.”
In short: we borrowed a monitor.
My interest here is the backflips the Guardian does to imply that marginalised people living in vehicles burning wood are doing it to give babies cancer. The sheer volume of these reports - instantly pumping out one frantic news article for every half-baked backwater paper they can scrape up, AND THEY MAKE AN EFFORT TO SCRAPE THEM UP - is disproportionate to other environmental issues. It’s clear the Guardian is going out of their way to hate woodburners. Imagine if they put this much intensive targeted effort into dismantling trans oppression, tackling the UK’s fascinating habit of dumping sewage into the ocean, putting a shoulder behind the wheel on topics like public transport, or generally just taking an interest in other topics with the same unified, continuous passion.
Now, all that being said, with The Guardian flinging out headlines like “woodburners may treble children’s exposure to pollution in homes,” Dr Glass and I - having read the actual studies - thought it would be interesting to measure that for ourselves.
We borrowed/bought a little monitor.
We have a woodburner fitted to the highest possible standards, with anti-pollution measures and both of us having a huge amount of experience and skill; and we only burn dry wood. We have a system for drying the wood. We’re both experienced and sensible burners of wood. so we were quite interested to see how - as the Guardian put it - we were selfishly risking our children’s lives and health. We borrowed a benchtop monitor and set about measuring things for fun.
A background reading of 1 on the Temtop PM2.5 meter was pretty usual for the indoor air quality in our home, and is marked Green for “good/safe”. When running the woodstove, we struggled to spike this number much, and sometimes flaring the running stove actually improved air quality, as it sucked air OUT of the house.
We were able to get “treble” the background PM2.5 measurements with the woodburner running in one interesting way. When using the fire to dry laundry, we noticed the numbers go up. Drying a child’s duvet, we noticed we could get quite big spikes - it was at 5.6 here. Further, we could get it to 10 by actively fuelling the fire with the duvet on front of it.
Hurray! We had effectively trebled the indoor air pollution with the woodstove! It didn’t leave the green zone, mind you, but we did it.
We were not able to use the woodstove with our usual methods to get the monitor to turn yellow (moderate). Dr Glass thought we could do it by running it with the door open and burning wet wood, but as that would be stupid, and not how woodburners work, we didn’t bother trying.
Matches and scented candles got us into yellow ranges sometimes, but not consistently, and we don’t use either (we tend to light the stove, etc with a plasma lighter.)
Unfortunately, as we already knew: cooking indoors is the big killer. While the Guardian might be motivated by the purest desire to clean up indoor air pollution, it’s materially obvious from looking at the studies their articles are based on that cooking is more significant and more common. It’s also a fact that you simply know if you’re ever involved with any work on indoor air pollution. That’s why extractor fans exist.
The thing called us out so badly over our dirty oven that we scrubbed it frantically and have been trying to clean it after each meal, which nobody else does. It is also rude about the air fryer, and has a go at you for cooking on the stovetop, but it’s really mean about the oven. Even a clean oven gets judgmental colours.
Here’s the highest reading we managed, achieved by cooking orange sesame chicken. Interestingly, while frying the chicken was what produced the most consistent particles, rendering the house a hazard, this incredible spike was actually achieved by chucking the minced fresh ginger and garlic into the wok.
Anyway, it’s not something that we are SUPER interested in, to the point of continuing or pursuing it. The “trebled” air pollution we managed to create hasn’t pinged a sense of environmental or parental responsibility, when it stayed in the green and the reason we were using the stove was to dry a laundered duvet that a child had pissed on. I defy anyone who wants to challenge me on such frivolous and wasteful behaviour to explain another way to dry a duvet in such emergencies, during a rainy English winter.
But in the process of exploring it, we cleaned our oven, worked out that our extractor fan’s motor was noisy but burned-out, and theorised that the fine particles produced by drying a duvet are probably aerosolised detergent.
Which is a learning journey for sure, and worth taking.
The other night I reorganized the folder on my computer where I keep all the weird New York Herald personal ads I post.
Over the years I've been clipping these I've come across a handful of personals that were just straight up written in code.
As I was going through the folder I noticed that almost all the coded ads were printed within a year or two of each other (specifically between 1850 and 1852). Looking a bit more closely I also began to realize that the same coded words and phrases were appearing across multiple personals - suggesting they were all written in the same code (which appeared to be a basic substitution cipher), likely by the same person/people.
Possessing multiple samples of the code, struck by the type of confidence that only hits at 11:30 at night, and having the little know-how remaining from a special interest in cryptology in middle school, I thought... I bet I can crack that.
So I took the longest coded personal I had at the time (the image directly above - I've since found a much longer one), cracked open a notebook and got cryptoquip-ing.
I had a few little hitches due to words being mispelled in the original ad and a few unclear letters due to poor quality newsprint, but I soon found myself with a mostly decoded message...
"This morning at elevn[sic] precisely be at Carter's bookstore two eighty five Broadway. As a prete?h ask for their directory. Don't fail."
I made myself a key (V and W are Q and Z, but as neither letter is ever used in an ad there's no way to tell which is which.)...
...and got to decoding the other personal ads and putting them chronological order.
Let's see what was worth encoding 175 years ago...
July 16, 1850 -
"You have arrived by this time I suppose my own dearest Josie. I shall wait ivpatiently[sic] for the Asia hoping to hear from you. I went to vespers Sunday and sat in your pew. You are never out of my thoughts. I have written down all that has occurred which I thought would interest you. We will read it together on our first drive after your return. I kiss this on which your eyes will rest. Do not forget your own fond devoted Jerry."
---
September 12, 1850 -
"Welcome my dearest Josie; when can k[sic] see you."
---
September 17, 1850 -
"Not one word from you dearest while away or since you returndd[sic]. Have your feelings then changed, See last Thursdays Herald. I dare not see you for the first time at home."
---
October 10, 1850 -
"I’m sick with anxiety about you, love. Will you not see me."
---
The ads then skip almost two years (I'm planning to go through the intervening microfilm by hand at some point to make sure there aren't any sneaky ones I missed)...
June 3, 1852 -
"Dearest - I was very ill whne[sic] you wrote."
---
July 4, 1852 -
"Deareft[sic] - Just return[sic] from Albany write again to me box in post office."
---
July 7, 1852 -
"Today three oclock Jersey City ferry house."
---
July 8, 1852 -
"This morning at eleven south ferry New York side."
Street cars and omnibuses wait outside the South Ferry terminal in New York City, circa 1865.
---
July 13, 1852 (the original message I decoded) -
"This morning at elevn[sic] precisely be at Carters Bookstore two eighty five Broadway. As a pretexh[sic] ask for their directory. Don’t fail."
Carter's Bookstore (indicated by janky arrow) as seen in a panoramic view published in Gleason's Pictorial, March 18, 1854.
---
Another time skip, this time 5 months.
December 14, 1852 -
"Give me a da y[sic] dear."
---
And the final message (that I've found as of writing this)...
December 25, 1852 -
"Mnray[sic] at elevn[sic] Catharine Ferry New York."
It may not be the most thrilling of Victorian espionage, but it still feels pretty cool to read something no one else has read in 175 years.
I've gone through about 3 months worth of microfilm by hand and found two more coded ads that weren't picked up by the text recognition due to blurry newsprint, but it's a slog so it's going to take a while.
So what are our theories? Did these two crazy kids make it? What was keeping them apart? Why the two year gap? What were all the meetings for?
hey guys does anyone else feel like ‘Suddenly it's December and you're not 17 anymore. And you haven't been 17 for a very long time, but sometimes you need to remind yourself.’ or is it just me?
izzy806
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
theartofmadeline
titsay
