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.
Resentments
I was educated amidst resentments. Equality was a threat to the more equal and in Ireland, the more equal folk had a code word for denigrating the less equal. The code word was and is ‘begrudgery’. I grew up scared that begrudgery would undo society while the more-equal missed the point entirely.
Begrudgery is all about identifying resentment. It is resentment but it is also a pejorative term for the alleged resentful. And I wonder if begrudgery could itself go pandemic to become the single biggest threat after Covid-19.
2016 Bouncy Castle 
2013 three day old clasp 
2016 Third Birthday Cake 
2003 Harefield Swans 
2010 Inukchuk Tableau 
2010 Inukchuk Wave
Controlling Robots
New gatekeepers have emerged to fill the vacuum created by a media increasingly needing ‘likes’ for a codependent life-support system based on advertising revenue support. Such codependency is maladapted and objectivity is a price the media seem prepared to pay. The Bellingcat group is good place to look for accurate reporting. But how did we get to needing citizen journalists for our truths?
Third and final view, it was clearer than yesterday but not quite Summer.
Memories of Being Short
RTSP
I remember a schoolbook from when I was eight and nine. Reading To Some Purpose, always abbreviated by our teachers to RTSP. I understood that RTSP was easier to say but if you were reading to some purpose why would you abbreviate it? And why only RTSP? Why wasn’t there a WTSP? Weren’t we also being taught to write to some purpose such as expressing ourselves?
Which reminds me of catechism. The teaching style of the era involved learning by rote and one of the things to be learned was catechism. We had to learn the rules of being catholic from a green book of rules.
Foggier than yesterday.