Do you prefer masculine or feminine poetry?
‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night.’
‘Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land.’
Metres and Poetry Gender
Archives for August 2020
Book Borrowers
Do you ever wonder where your books end up after they leave your shelves?
At one point in my career, I would leave some of the novels I’d finished in airplanes or airports. I realised that English language books ended up in other language skips so I only left them in English speaking destinations.
Historicity and Othering
If a people has a culture, it also has a present and therefore a history. While the present does not guarantee a future, recording the present helps establish the historicity of a culture. The authority that is conveyed through authentic observation tends to help preserve cultures when those presents are continuously documented. Perhaps the idea of historicity is another concept to add to grievability when we think of human rights.
Managing Expectancy
We are taught early in life that heart muscle repairs itself very slowly. You probably worried that it will wear out one day. So you determine to look after your primary pump by eating carefully and taking suitable exercise. You do what you can to keep the pipes clean and flexible so that your heart can pump some 8000 litres of blood around your body each and every day for whatever term you consider to be your life expectancy. That life expectancy in Ireland was 79.6 years for men and 83.4 for women according to the CSO in 2017.
Bird Migration
Jetting from London to Houston, with noise cancelling headphones isolating me from both a snoring neighbour and the rumble of our propulsion, I imagined a Bantu throwing a spear at a stork. I also wondered what it was like in 1822 when no one could imagine a White Stork making an annual round trip after breeding in Germany, going south of the equator in East Africa to avoid European winters. At that stage in our understanding, the ancient Greek idea that birds turned into fish for the winter was still popular.
Sunflower Ramblings I
I’m not a great fan of the many named Jerusalem Artichoke. I quite like their flavour but I have the digestive challenge for which the sunroot is famed. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’ve been told to increase my microbiome diversity. One way, suggested in monthly newsletters, would be to add inulin to my diet. Inulin is a dietary fibre that is fermented by bacteria. It is considered a prebiotic. Many believe that prebiotics are good for gastrointestinal diversity and therefore your health. An additional bonus may be that they’d enhance calcium absorption. Inulin might therefore be good for the avoidance of osteoarthritis. It turns out that the little tubers of the sunchoke store their carbohydrate as inulin so our biomed service suggested I include them in my diet.
I hope a squirrel doesn’t break it.