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Friday, January 21, 2005
Slaughter of the Cormorants.
Of all the functions of government, one of the least probable is the recent edict allowing the killing of 1,500 cormorants (the Guardian 21.1.05)
And why are these beautifully-named (Phalacrocorax carbo), superbly adapted wild birds being killed? Because they’re better at catching fish than Britain’s anglers. Well boo-hoo. You spend hundreds of pounds on rods and reels and sit there for a numb-fingered blue-faced fishless day watching a cormorant’s agile dive and time after time come up taunting you with a struggling fish in its beak. Then it gets out of the water spreads its wings to fire up it’s digestive system and the outstretched wingtips seem to say. ‘It was this big.’
So the National Association of British Anglers, or what ever your wildlife pillaging lobbying group is called, goes running, whining to the government and asks for the competition to be shot. So that they can better hoik another innocent species out of its natural environment using a barbed hook, not for food but for fun.
And the government, which considers banning foxhunting a matter of 700-parliamentary hour importance, lets these birds get shot, or strangled with bowstrings in the market place, for doing what millions of years of evolution has fitted them. Next time Tony Blair gets dewy-eyed about the environment, someone should slap him across his grinning face with the corpse of a shot cormorant.
Damn you all, anglers and DEFRA or whichever wretched Whitehall department sanctioned this shameless pandering to a pressure-group whose raison d’etre is giving fish unwanted face piercings. May you get pecked off your riverside pegs by Hitchcockian flocks of enraged, revenge-bent birds and may the political gravestone of this government be covered in piles of fish bones regurgitated by the bereaved relatives left by the slaughter of the cormorants, and beneath that fishy vomitus this epitaph ‘This government of persecuting innocent cormorants died away.’
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Dino-dog upsets fossil orthodogsy.
On the rare occasions a science story makes it past the arts-obsessed sub editors in our daily newspapers, it’s usually to do with a comet which will crash into us long after feckless Homo sapiens have wiped ourselves out or some gene has been found which will ‘may’ deliver a cure for some ailment. Occasionally, science pulls off a blinder like Huygens Cassini which not even the most west-end obsessed journalists could ignore.
Dinosaurs are good value, too: big, scary and extinct. Last week news broke that fossils of a mammal carnivore which lived alongside dinosaurs had been found, upsetting a few orthodoxies. Received wisdom was that the mammals which shared the world with the dinosaurs didn’t grow any bigger that today’s cats, on the basis that any bigger and they would be worth eating. And lo! out of the rocks comes a fossilised dog like carnivorous mammal which, ‘probably ate baby dinosaurs.’ And so the science of palaeontology and of evolutionary theory advances.
This causes some questions: many American believe that humans and dinosaurs cohabited, by which I mean lived at the same time, not did the wild thing behind closed doors. While patent nonsense, the existence of a dino-dog may lead them to state if you got a dawg, ya gotta have a man to take the dog for a walk. (There was recently a complete debacle where some creationists published a posed pic of an allosaur skeleton still in the rock chasing a fleeing skeleton of a man.)
The existence of this Mesozoic hound may also provide an answer to the old problem of why the fossil record is incomplete: the dogs took the bones away and buried them elsewhere.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Hermit crab predator evasion behaviour
On the rocky beach betwen Staithes and Port Mulgrave in North Yorkshire there are rockpools with large colonies of periwinkles. Walking towards them, I spotted sudden movement atmy approach: shells rolling off the sides of the rockpool into the mass of periwinkles in the bottom of the pool. After a few minutes of still observation out came eyes, feelers and legs, and the cascading shells turned out to be hermit crabs, which then carried on about their business.
It occurred to me that this might be a predator-avoidence mechanism - see or feel something approaching, release grip on rockpool site, retract legs and fall into mass of identical periwinkles, effectively hiding oneself.
This phenomenon has so far only been observed in northern perriwinkles. Presumably southern ones would climb out, waylay you and bang for an hour about how much their shell had gone up in value since they moved in.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
An American wreckhunter in Whitby
Author and marine archaeologist Clive Cussler has spent the last three summers in Whitby searching for the remains of the US frigate Bonhomme Richard, which sank off Filey Brig after a three and a half hour battle with the larger Royal Navy ship HMS Serapsis which the American captain John Paul Jones captured. An good account of the battle can be found here. Cussler has made two previous attempts to find the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard, which would be of some importance to American naval history, since it was a great victory against the British in home waters, and John Paul Jones has been called father of the US Navy.
A National Geographic survey (this site is very dull, unless you’re into pics of men in wetsuits) claims to have found the wreck, the site of which has been protected by the Department of Culture Media and Sport to stop wreck divers looting it, but obviously Dr. Cussler is not convinced, nor are other local marine archaeologists. They cite the lack of cannon found in the wreck supposed to be that of Bonhomme Richard, and Cussler points out that contemporary accounts describe the sinking Bonhomme Richard as having been under tow by the captured Serapsis. Even when finally abandoned to sink, the American ship may have drifted for many miles propelled by wind and tide before finally sinking.
Received wisdom is that the wreck is six miles off Filey Brigg, but Cussler claims that it is further out to sea. During his 1979 survey he trawled up a piece of a Russian trawler, believed to have been a spy trawler which sank in a storm. He gave the position of the find to the Ministry of Defence, which he reports, promptly put an official secrets seal on it. Exactly what harm knowledge of such a wreck could do now is doubtful. And what could they Russians have learned from spying on Filey in the 1970s? That the British had bad clothes, a poor diet, suffered inefficient industries, a crumbling infrastructure and drove crap cars, all rather like Soviet Russia, which at least managed to escape glam rock and Crossroads.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
In harness
If you live in the north, you may hear it said that someone is ‘back in harness’, by which they mean going to work.
Not in the case of the local authority social services professionals whose job it is to manage the care of my foster sister. The latest bright and shining example of their competence is ‘harnessgate’. My sister goes to a local day centre five mornings a week: a minibus calls to collect her, she is loaded aboard in her wheelchair, and proceeeds to limp riot all over the bus despite the presence of a general bus escort and a dedicated escort whose job is to keep my sister safe in her wheelchair. (She can’t ‘run riot’ because her legs are different lengths.)
It is clearly not safe to a have someone unsteady on their pins careering unrestrained around the bus as it drives along country lanes and down a 1 in 4 hill. A high-level meeting was convened to resolve the problem: seven people, all with alleged expertise in this field, were paid to be there. They managed not to find a solution to either manage her behaviour or to safely strap her into either a seat or her wheelchair.
The major achievement of the meeting was to ban the use of the word ‘harness’, since harnesses are used to restrain animals. An academic was cited. My sister is still limping riot all over the bus and causing the drivers and escorts to go ever greyer.
Our complaint to the local social services about the six-week period where the care arrangements for my sister utterly broke down has come to an end. It turns out that no one was responsible. Chaos, like mercy, it seems, droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. Maybe I imagined fruitlessy ringing the number of the charity charged with managing her care trying to find out if a carer was coming on those many evenings.
Note: Social services here contract care of adults with special needs out to a charity to manage properties and staff. Just because something has a charity label, it doesn’t mean it’s good at what it professes to do.
For more on just how well adults with special needs are treated read:
Britain 2004
Unsocial services
Things can only get better
Life in Blair's Britain
More great care for the most vulnerable
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Carved stones and crap pyramids
Summer 2003, someone set fire to a couple of square miles of Fylingdales Moor between Whitby and Scarborough. An ill-dropped fag-end or badly doused portable bbq, apparently. The ground having been exposed for the first time since records (and definitely CDs) began, some remarkable bits of archaeology were unearthed: the usual grot, potshards, scraps of flint, things that only mean anything to those in the know (and I think these TV archaeologists often take the piss, telling us that a morraine of miscellaneous hardcore sieved out of a misplaced dig is Iron Age pottery, or Roman ashtrays) but out also came a carved stone, thought to be about 4,000 years old.
It was photographed and scanned and, in a refreshing moment of originality, returned to the ground whence it came. A curator said words to the effect of, this is where it belongs, not in the British Museum and hurrah for that. It’ll probably have academics brawling for decades over its meaning, so its brief journey into the light has not been wasted. First out of the blocks was a theory that it was an early attempt at representing the local scenery.
Carved medieval stones are not the only gems found on Fylingdales Moor, it’s also home to the Watersons and Martin Carthy, often described as Britain’s First Family of Folk. Annoyed at too much saccharine Irish folk being played on a youth sail training boat on which I sail, I bought the Waterson:Carthy CD Common Tongue, a selection of English folk songs and instrumentals. Not previously much a fan of folk, but this is powerful stuff which deserves a listen, and dammit, some of it is good. They have worked hard to preserve and bring to a wider audience songs and melodies which we otherwise risk losing, and songs which, as they say in their excellent liner notes have ‘balls’ or in the case of those featuring women ‘clitzpah’.) The themes are familiar: love, loss, menfolk going to sea or to war, a rake abandoning a pregnant girl, all lyrics which put chart dross to shame. Also some entertainingly strange stuff about a man who mistakenly kills a giant’s pig, a couple of tearingly good instrumentals and rounds off with an ensemble hymn, Stars In My Crown, as uplifting a noise as I’ve ever heard. Put it in your MP3 player and sing it at top volume on a deserted beach before trying the Prozac.
Martin Carthy (guitarist and singer) featured in a recent BBC programme, and on it stood by the early-warning station RAF Fylingdales, which sits on the North Yorkshire Moors between the A169 Whitby-Pickering road and the A171 Scarborough road, although it doesn’t feature on any maps. This, he said, was the kind of thing the protest movements of the 1960s (which spawned many great protest songs) were all about. The RAF part of the name is a fiction to delude the locals: it’s US run, part of their ballistic missile early warning programme from the Cold War, now being upgraded as part of President Bush’s star wars MK2.
The place is intermittently the site of protests, but it’s on the top of the North Yorkshire Moors, no balmy Berkshire Greenham Common this, it’s exposed and very cold in winter. A friend of subversive mind mused that for about £400 he could bodge a cruise missile out of bits bought from Maplin and fossicked from skips and fly it right into the ugly truncated pyramid which is the aboveground radar array part of Fylingdales and disfigures the otherwise bleak, beautiful moor. He’d load it with party toys, he thought, to show them they weren’t so clever after all and inflict a symbolic humiliation on them.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Christmas wishes.
The christmas tree in Whitby Library has some thought provoking decorations: cardboard stars each with a wish handwritten by a child in foster care.
I wish someone wanted me.
I wish my dad would come back.
I wish I could be with my brothers.
I wish I could have my guinea pig with me.
I wish God would make my mummy better so that I can go home.
I wish my mum and dad would stop fighting.
I wish I could have some toys of my own.
I wish someone would listen to me.
Dear Mr Kubla Khan,
I write to inform you that Xanadu Borough Council planning committee has rejected your application to build a stately pleasure dome...
It would have been a great letter to write, even at the risk of being impaled. For a brief, misguided period of my life I worked in for an outfit called The People’s Trust: an apolitical trust which grew out of the failed attempts to found a Movement for Christian Democracy. It was funded by Mohammed Fayed, the aim being to found a revolutionary new force in British politics with cash and office space from a disinterested benefactor (yeah, right) to bridge it over the first few years. We were housed in spare office space in Harrods admin buildings. There was some good stuff in the People’s Trust ideas, but in my experience when Christians assemble there can be a whiff of incense in the air which sometimes turns into things like an irrational prejudice against, say, single mothers and their offspring, a prejudice for more noticeable far more marked among evangelical protestants than Catholics. Being bastard-in-residence I thought I might be able to stamp any such manifestations before they made it into policies or press releases. (More on the MCD bastard files here.) Fayed promised five million, but pulled the plug after six months in favour of buying Fulham FC (bad move, Mo, they got beat 2-1 by Charlton this evening) and sacked us all, without any policy pronouncements being made.
The good thing about this place was that one could go and eat one’s overpriced Knightsbridge sandwiches (they had ciabatta before Italy did) in the Natural History Museum, paying one’s respects to Charles Darwin (whose statue sits at the top of the stairs in the stunning vestibule, staring right up the bony arse of the Diplodocus, or possibly Brachiosaurus skeleton which dominates the place) before going on to look at the Triceratops, surely the coolest of dinosaurs. .
Across the road from the office was top tat house to the rich, Harrods. I only went in there once, to deliver something to Fayed’s office, but was not there to see the gilded staircase open. Someone reliable told me that he had gilded an entire stairwell and behind a pillar had inscribed ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works ye mighty and tremble.’ Apparently you had to know exactly where to look. And be arsed.
A shame, because Britain needs a few more follies, and acts of joyous spontaneity. I’d love a midsummer party on our local beach, but the thought of trying to organise it fills me with dread. Any attempt at staging a good natured get together for all the locals and holiday makers would get gatecrashed by people who’d drunk their own weight in Stella and would start fighting, the Health and Safety Executive would raid the barbecue with an armed response unit, the local council would send a team of (in my mind polyester shirted) enforcement officers to stop it pending the purchase of £5 trillion public liability insurance and a full risk assessment. Hosing teenagers would get buried in a cliff-fall, some idiot tourist would inevitably get cut off by the rising tide, it would probably rain, the beach would end up littered with crap and the whole thing would be a disaster.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Hikers boil my piss
People who advocate revolution for all sorts of worthy reasons miss the point. The point of a mental revolution is to allow oneself to do things like advocate the mass guillotining of people like hikers. Not all hikers, but certanly the joyless, miserable, red-sock wearing wretches like those I cycled past recently. Well, I didn’t. They being hikers and by nature tetchy, I stopped my muddy ride along a bridlepath to let them safely past and bid them a polite good day as I did. Their look of contempt nearly froze my piss, their lack of manners then boiled it.
This is not the first time I and fellow mountain bikers have been treated with contumely by these degraded joggers. Next midsummer there should be a mass trespass on public footpaths by mountainbikers ending in stupendous parties all over the country, climaxing in a wicca-man style burning of David Blunkett effigies, the flames being lit with copies of the Spectator.
One American politician said he’d be in office unless caught in bed with a ‘live boy or a dead girl’. It is clearly the job of all people who care about the strange death of liberal Britain over which Blunkett is presiding to seduce him at once, then open their hearts to the tabloids about the resulting night of passion, making up lurid stuff about cellar dungeons (oh please let him be discovered to have one of those...) until he gets packed off to the backbenches and takes his ID cards with him.
Note to non-UK readers: David Blunkett is the wildly illiberal Home Secretary in the UK government. He is currently in lumber for being caught bending one in to someone else’s wife.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
More great care for the most vulnerable in society
Social services here contracts its care of adults with special needs out to a charity. Bear with me here, there’s something worth getting outraged about coming up.
My multiply handicapped foster sister was for many years well looked after by my mother, with this charity playing a ‘supervisory’ role. After my mother’s stroke, they tried to find alternative accommodation and care for my foster sister. The story's here and hereif you want further reason to man the barricades.
The places they found were deeply unsuitable and in some cases downright squalid but, bullying my then very ill mother, this charity and the local social services tried to force us to put my foster sister into one particular home, wher ethe carers had been trained and vetted. Today we spoke to someone who had allowed her son to be ‘cared’ for there. During his time there, the ‘carers’ neglected him to the extent he lost six stone, and when he went into hospital for a hip replacement operation they first had to feed him up and administer a large blood transfusion.
That place has since closed, so this charity swung into action to find more high-quality care. His next home didn’t have downstairs facilities, but, the owners assured the charity, by the time he arrived there’d be a lovely downstairs bedroom and ensuite toilet. When he moved in, there wasn’t and, still recuperating from a hip operation, he had to crawl up and down stairs to get to his bedroom and the toilet. One night, caught short, he wet the bed. The next day, someone called to take him out to be told by these latter day Wackford Squeerses (read Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens) that he was being confined in his bedroom for the day to teach him a lesson.
The social services department proclaims its commitment to ‘quality services’. What a relief. Imagine the debacle if they didn’t give a shit.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
BBC news
needs to stop reporting that the Home Secretary David Blunkett ‘used his position to help his lover’. Took the weight on his elbows, I suppose. BBC Radio 5 Live encourages listeners to text and email their opinions and reads out entertaining contributions. When Nicky Campbell hosted the 9-12 morning show, he presented at a furious pace and there were some people with little better to do that try to get him to read out invented obscene names. ‘Blairzac Hunt’ and ‘Min Jeeter’ got their opinions on air, and you could hear the silent dismay the moment both names left the loudspeaker.
