How to fix a leaky Submarine

Instapundit has a comment on fixing leaks on a post about NASA trying to stop hydrogen leaks from their latest rocket.

But I am old enough to remember another story on how a common radiator repair fluid saved a sub:

The Parting Glass

 This lovely song is from the ending of the film Waking Ned Devine, about a man who drops dead when he finds he wins the lottery, and since he has no heirs, the town conspires to pretend he is still alive so they can all share in the winnings.

I always assumed it was a traditional song, but apparently yes and no: according to the first video commentary:

Fill to me the Parting Glass was composed by Shaun Davey in 1998 for the closing sequence of the film Waking Ned; the words are traditional set to his new, original melody.

but that melody and the lyrics have a long history according to Wikipedia, which has a long essay on the song's history: apparently it was originally Scottish, and has many variations.

the melody of the modern version is similar to Old Cootehilltown: a song about leaving to work in America.

and the older melody was used in one of Bob Dylan's songs, Restless farewell, and one can see that although these are all different melodies, they have similarities to each other: something one sees in folk songs, which are often handed down by being sung, and those who write them down polish the words and melody.

One other note of trivia: No, the film was not filmed in Ireland as most people think. It was filmed on the Isle of Man, a small island between England and Ireland. The local government (that is semi independent) has tried to establish itself as a center for the film industry over the last 30 years. LINK but is best known for being the home of the tailess Manx cat.

the stuff we keep

an essay on the simple things we collect and cherish.

Moving a lot, I lost a lot of stuff, but the special photos and clippings I put inside my bible.

When I was babysitting my granddaughter, I would often put her on my lap and open my bible and show her the photos of the family and the places I had worked, and told the family stories that were behind the photos.

Japanese wild oranges

 In the tale of Genji, one of his ladies is called the lady of the orange blossoms because she uses this perfume. One commentary on the novel pointed out that baths were rare, and a lot of perfume was used back then. 

But it was only toward the end of the novel that I noticed that the oranges and orange blossom perfumes were local: not imported from the warmer areas of Japan.

In the novel, a girl is loved by Genji's son who respects her and won't do the marriage consummation until her home is prepared, but in the meantime, she is also courted by his cousin who is like Genji, quite aggressive sexually, and who seduces her. It is the middle of winter, but to get away from her ladies in waiting, he takes her to a nearby island of the Orange:

What a very strange place to be, thought the girl. “The colors remain, here on the Islet of Oranges. But where go I, a boat upon the waters?”

oranges surviving in snow?

Atlas obscura has an article on this citrus fruit, the Tachibana orange. It is mainly used for perfume since the fruit is too bitter to eat.

IT’S EARLY DECEMBER, AND SOMEWHERE on a mountain on the Japanese island of Shikoku, there’s a citrus tree laden with golden-yellow fruit, each one no larger than a kumquat. There aren’t many of them in the wild...  

Scratch the peel of one of those tiny fruits, and you’ll release a remarkably powerful fragrance, full of zesty, spicy, bitter notes, a dozen citruses distilled into a single whiff. Its flesh is an electric burst of tart and bitter flavors, far more intense than a lemon or grapefruit, followed by a barely detectable undertone of sweetness.This delicate little citrus is the tachibana.

and yes, Japanese women in the Hainen period did use them for perfume

During the Heian period (794–1185), women within the Japanese aristocracy perfumed themselves with tachibana, tucking sachets of its blossoms into their kimono sleeves or threading the fruits on cords and wearing them like bangles. The Man’yōshū, the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry, contains 70 poems about or referencing tachibana, celebrating its beguiling perfume.

 

Basho

 

fragrant orange- 

when?In what field?

cuckoo.

Emperor Genshō

O, orange tree:

Fruit and flowers both,

And leaves, too,

Even should frost fall on your branches 

Evegreen will you be! 

(translated by David Landis Barnhill) \

 

A tachibana tree growing in front of the Kōfuku-ji Temple in Nara. DEGUEULASSE/CC BY-SA 3.0

the fruit is now being made into a gourmet marmalade, so hopefully it will soon make a come back.

trivia of the week: Who are Wendish

 The OnLineBook page has a link to a book on the Texas Wendish.

Wendish? An Amerindian tribe I never heard of?

Nope. Slavic Wends from Germany who settled there almost 200 years ago.

Why? To keep their religion intact and to keep their ethnic heritage intact.

a lot of Slavic and German mixtures in what used to be East Germany, and the history is mentioned here in Masaman's ethnic lecture.

and the culture is still around in Texas: 

... 

and yes I noted they use the word "noodling around", which is a word that I ran across for the first time a couple weeks ago.

musical interlude of the week

turn up speakers and dance!

Ranker has the story of how that scene was filmed: on the first day, they filmed an actual parade with their inserted float. Then the second day they refilmed it with lots and lots of extras.

And others were just ordinary folk who danced:

Construction workers and window washers can be spotted jamming out to Matthew Broderick's lip-synced rendition of "Twist and Shout." These were not choreographed dancers or extras hired to play a part - instead, they were just people going about their everyday jobs.

Duck stamps

 Ann Althouse reminds us that this year is the 80th anniversary of the Duck Stamp.

WTF you might ask? These stamps:

no, duck stamps are not used for postage, but required for hunting permits.

But like a lot of stamps, stamp collectors buy them, and some people buy them because the money used to buy the stamps is used to buy land for wildlife habitat:

Friends of the Stamp webpage discusses the history of the stamp

They explain: because of overhunting, diversion of wetlands to farming, etc. migratory birds were being threatened, so the government decided to step in and preserve some land for them. The problem? How to fund these purchases.

Voila: Make hunters pay for it by requiring a stamp on their hunting permits.

More about the stamps here.

they are not merely stamps: They have become a collectors item and there is competition to get your design on the stamp.

for movie trivia buffs, you might have run across duck stamps in the movie Fargo:

,,,(in) the 1996 crime-film classic Fargo, you may have noticed a minor stamp-related subplot: Norm Gunderson, husband of main character Marge Gunderson, is hard at work on a painting that he’ll enter into a stamp design competition (he comes in second place). 

there is even a movie about the contest: The Million Dollars Duck Film : available on Amazon Prime:

Animal planet version here:

Here is a short interview with the three brothers who have had their art chosen for the famous stamp:

 

Tales of foreign lands

 I have been pretty well off line due to rain and bad internet connection, but also because the news is so full of propaganda that one doesn't know what is going on. 

Also, here the confusion about getting the vaccine is absurd.

So I am busy reading books on line, old books that are of course out of date and biased, but do give some insight into history.

I began reading Isabella Bird's travel books about the Rocky mountains and then went on to read (actually listen to) her book on Japan (in Manga form here for those who don't want to read through her geological and botanical discussion).

She traveled in the interior of Japan at a time when Japan had only recently opened to the west, and her reports are more like a reporter than a travel writer, with both western bias and sympathy.

Professor Kanasaka has written a book about her travels (in Japanese of course) and has an assessment of her book and prejudices in a lecture about her here, VIDEO, but is so poorly recorded I couldn't get through it.

Ah, but then I looked around for her book on travels in Korea, which were a bit harder to find. Archive has them but pdf and bad epub rip, but I found a good reprint of it on Scribd that I am reading now.

Korea also had been closed to the outside, but she visited several times in the     1890s, and included stories of her travels in nearby Manchuria and Siberia in the books (usually there are several versions published, often the scientific stuff edited out for general interest)... she traveled overland to China after the Japanese coup and after the Japanese/Chinese war in the north of Korea, where the Japanese tried to remove Chinese influence; 

... she did not see the battles, which were over before her travels in Korea, but reported on the horrific debris of war that she found. Her descriptions resemble those of Mrs. John Quincy Adams, who traveled overland through central Europe after Napoleon's defeat: destruction of towns that had not yet recovered, and the bones of the unburied soldiers who died in battles years before. Sigh. most war stories leave such things out.

During her visits to Korea she met the last king and queen, and then later relates the horrific story of the Queen's assassination which she states was at the hands of the Japanese. Not something one expects to read about in a travel log...

She observed the need for reform in Korea at that time: and how the corruption by officials prevented people from working hard (because if you looked rich, the officials would "ask' for a loan or tax you or worse). Her criticisms of poverty, laziness and dirt are often moderated by her observations that the Koreans under the (less corrupt) Russians were hard working and prosperous...observing that Korea needed reform to prosper, because corrupt officials would insist on "gifts:...

I was bemused at her description of a Korean marriage she observed, that actually mirrored the marriage scene in the KDrama Samidang.. a K drama series that we are still in the midst of watching. Ms Bird also mentions the wonderful variations of Korean paper, which was the subplot of Samidang. 

another historical story I read was about Ranald Mac Donald, a Metis Canadian whaler who got off his whaling boat and went to visit Japan, and ended up teaching English to their translators, which was a big help when the US sent in ships to "open" the Japanese ports a year later.

The book (Borrow here) has lots of background on whaling off the coast of Japan, which is why the Yanks wanted access for water and food supplies, and does a good scholarly job on trying to sift the story from the various sources.

more here

And HERE.which has links to the books in Japanese and in English.

 What is missing however is insight into the personality of Mr MacDonald: so why did the Japanese like him, and why did they ask him to tutor the local translators, instead of the more numerous American whalers that they also had in the local jail?

But at the end of the book, it describes him as sitting around telling tales of his adventures in the evening. So the picture of the stoical Native American of "Anglo" stereotype quickly morphed in my mind into the laid back, sardonic and humorous Native American who resembled those I worked with (but who often, to outsiders, kept these friendlier traits hidden, hence the myth of the "stoical Indian"...). 

The story would make a good movie, if they had more input from his family's tribe and the Japanese to get the cultural nuances right... indeed, it might be more "accurate" if it was a novel, because novels and stories change the history to give insight into the reality behind the "facts".... indeed, there is a Japanese novel about his friendship with the students he taught, especially with Moriyama Eintosuke

,,,,,,,

longer version that includes his life as a gold miner and his other travels:

Chess: staging a come back?

 for those of you who have Netflix, you might be aware that the latest "hot" series there is about.... chess.

Chess? As in:

....

based on a novel (i.e. not a true story) that was a coming of age novel, with the chess part inspired by the life of Bobby Fisher, but interesting nevertheless.

no I don't play chess: It requires you to think about patterns and predict which way to move to be successful...

And in medicine one is doing that all the time (finding a pattern in symptoms to diagnose a disease and then planning treatment that will fit in with the patient's lifestyle).

in other words, chess is not relaxing for me because you have to think...

I prefer playing piano or doing crochet or cooking to relax, because these things allow the subconscious mind to work and think while your body is kept busy.

but I suspect that the film/miniseries will increase an interest in playing the game, which in the long run will be good, since it requires you to actually think logically (something the snowflakes and PC who insist teaching that 2+2=4 is racist will hate).

Chess, of course, is a variation of board games that date back into ancient days and in many societies including India and China.

,,,,

there is now a meme that Trumpieboy plays 3D chess, ( a game invented in the original Star Trek series) because he plans complicated moves to overcome his opposition... 

but as this article points out, he is really playing poker (another Startrek meme)

well, anyway, thanks to the Netflix miniseries, expect an upsurge in kids learning how to play chess, including (maybe) the 3 d version of the game

Win one for the Gipper

there is an old joke about a chaplain who said a prayer at the start of a football game between Notre Dame and a rival team. At the end of the prayer, he reminded the teams that "God has no favorites", at which point one of the Notre Dame players said: NO, but his mother does.

American football is nothing like world football, which we call soccer. And at a time when political correctness is destroying the love of the game for many fans who resent being dissed by millionaire football players as racists and "despicables", it is a good time to point out a time of when Football was almost considered an American religion, and some of football's religious ties.

A few blogposts back, I used the phrase "Hail Mary Pass".

That has it's origin in the University of Notre Dame's football team.

From Wikipedia:

The expression goes back at least to the 1930s, when it was used publicly by two former members of Notre Dame's Four Horsemen, Elmer Layden and Jim Crowley. Originally meaning any sort of desperation play, a "Hail Mary" gradually came to denote a long, low-probability pass... attempted at the end of a half when a team is too far from the end zone to execute a more conventional play, implying that it would take divine intervention for the play to succeed.

For more than 40 years, use of the term was largely confined to Notre Dame and other Catholic universities.[1] The term became widespread after a December 28, 1975, NFL playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings, when Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach said about his game-winning touchdown pass to wide receiver Drew Pearson, "I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary."

Here is a video about Notre Dame's rise to fame via Knute Rockne:




Another related factoid: President Ronald Reagan was often called "the Gipper": the origin of this knickname is explained here:

Asian factoids

who are the Chinese? Masaman's latest video on Chinese ethnics in Asia:



earlier videos on Asian ethnicity.







and other videos discuss the peoples of SEAsia: trade in this area goes back thousands of years, so explains the Arab Muslim/Chinese/Hindu etc influences in the majority Malay culture.





and not just in Asia:

did you know that the Philippines has a huge history of contact via Mexico?




a lot of this is because of the Manila Galleon trade route. instead of going around the south of Africa, they went east, crossed Mexico and then went across the Atlantic to Spain.



--------------------------

related item: under the "westernization" of Asia lies the traditional stories and mythology:

for example, are you aware of the mythology that explains Princess Mononoke?



there are lots of myths here, which is why horror films are so popular here. Here is a summary of Philippines monsters:



if you prefer the more serious discussion:



and question for you: Can Filipino monsters defeat Godzilla?

Happy Margarita day

EvilBlogger lady says: February 22 is national Margaritaday.

Yes, I like margaritas. But it's been 30 years since I've had one, mainly because as a doctor I was always on call so had to stay sober, and Lolo had a alcohol allergy so we rarely had alcohol at home.

According to Smithsonian magazine, the drink was named for Ziegfield girl/aspiring actress Marjorie King.

As the legend goes, Herrera dreamed up the cocktail for one of his customers, an aspiring actress named Marjorie King who was allergic to all hard alcohol other than tequila. To make the liquor more palatable to his fussy client, he combined the elements of a traditional tequila shot—a lick of salt and a wedge of lime—and turned them into a refreshing drink.

most people use the margarita mix, but here is how to make the drink from scratch.



and, of course, sing along with me:

the great hedgerow (wall) of India

Most people know about the Great Wall of China, but how many have heard about the Great Hedge (wall) of India, careful built over many years to stop the smuggling of salt that hadn't been taxed?


Atlas Obscura article discusses this ultimately futile barrier. Here they discuss the difficulties in finding plants to make the hedge.

At first, the hedge was made mostly of dry branches lugged into place and piled high. But that proved a fruitless task, since it had to be replaced year after year. The line was divided into patrolled sections, and in some places the patrols started to plant and cultivate live hedge, with the idea of creating something more easily maintained and permanent.
Growing a live hedge wasn’t easy, though. The British tried using dwarf Indian plum trees, babool trees, prickly pear, thuer, bamboo, and many other local plants. In some arid places the trees just withered and died. Elsewhere, seedlings were swept away in floods. In other spots, the soil simply wasn’t rich enough to support the growth of anything beyond scrub.

read the whole thing.

it has since disappeared and the line was paved over as roads.

(Trumpieboy take note).

this video discusses.



Hedges are simple plants to form a fence, but a hedgerow is quite complicated, because it is interwoven.

I wasn't aware of this until I was listening to a John Bachelor podcast that discussed a book on the subject (no link: I downloaded it awhile back and can't find when it was posted).

But anyway, the difference between a hedge (line of plants) and a hedgerow is that the latter is interwoven to make a thick barrier.

often you cut down the tree so it would sprout and stay low, or cut it partway then bent it and interwove it to make the barrier.

and not just a barrier, but a source of food: a lot of the discussion was about using (and harvesting) hazelnut bushes in these hedgerows.

Here is an old film about making/repairing British hedgerows:




these barriers were quite thick and difficult to penetrate.

Which is why, when you read about the difficult World War II fights in "hedgerow country", it didn't mean just going through a thin line of bushes, but the barriers of thick hedgerows that made a  thick heavy barrier (eventually, they put plows on tanks to flatten them).

Factoid of the week: Throat singing

I had written about Tuva, in the past, including a video of their traditional "throat singing".



but I didn't know that this type of singing is done in other cultures,, or how they do it.

Atlas Obscura has an article about throat singing in Sardinia, and notes:

Throat singing shows up in various musical traditions, the most famous of which is probably Tuvan, or from a remote Russian republic bordering Mongolia. For some reason, it seems to appear most often in the native music of cold-weather communities: the Sami people of Scandinavia, the Inuits in Canada, and among Buddhists in Tibet.

the article also explains how it is done: by using the "false vocal cords" in the throat.

if you can sing or speak—using your regular vocal cords—while vibrating your vestibular folds, you end up, incredibly, harmonizing with yourself. The vestibular folds will vibrate at one octave lower than whatever tone you sing. That specific difference in pitch is consistent, and even the most experienced throat singers can’t change it.

Tuva (or bust)

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning scientist and his lectures on physics are still on the internet, but he is most known nowadays for his objections to the Challenger disaster report, which he dramatically showed to non scientists by putting an O ring into cold water and showing the press how it became stiff.

"For a successful technology," Feynman concluded, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

sound familiar? That is the theme of Chernobyl...

Richard Feynman was interested in everything, and once he decided to find out about the country of Tuva... a small independent country that got absorbed by the Soviet Union. His friend wrote a book about this, Tuva or Bust. and this Horizen video is about their quest.

.   


last year, that area had a celebration in honor of him, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

the Library of Congress has two videos about that country's culture:






another trivia: a lot of controversy about this, but there might be genetic links of the Navajo to the people of this area LINK LINK2

Tuva is listed as a Turkic language, but other native languages in that area of Siberia are thought to have links to the language of the Navajo.

Trivia post of the day

-------------------and don't miss this cat trivia video:

T Rex Quote of the day

Appearing from Riyadh on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace this morning, Secretary Tillerson fielded a slightly offbeat question...

 Wallace commented, “you looked pretty good while you were doing it – frankly, more comfortable than the President or Commerce Secretary Ross. Had you been practicing, sir?”

Tillerson responded: “Well, I hadn’t been practicing, Chris, but it was not my first sword dance.”

from Powerline:

Wikipedia on the dance:

The term 'ardah' is thought to derive from the Arabic verb ard meaning 'to show' or 'to parade'. It was so named because its purpose was to publicly display the fighting strength of a tribe and boost morale before an armed engagement.

and this article notes that Prince Charles also participated in the ceremony on one of his visits.

Factoid of the week

Why do shoelaces untie?

The scientists expected that the knots would come undone slowly. But their slow-motion footage — focused on the shoelaces of a runner on a treadmill — showed that the knots rapidly failed within one or two strides. To figure out why, O’Reilly and his colleagues used an accelerometer on the tongue of a shoe to measure the forces acting on a knot. They found that when walking, the combined impact and acceleration on a shoelace totals a whopping 7 gs — about as much as an Apollo spacecraft on reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.

this sounds more frivilous than it actually is: Because if an elderly person trips on an untied shoelace, they can break an arm or a hip.

This is also a problem in surgery: Braided silk usually doesn't untie easily, nor does Chromic catgut. We usually do three or four knots (square knots not grannie knots) and no problem.

But newer unifilament nylon does tend to untie itself.

And if it unties before the wound is healed, you end up with the wound falling apart.

Although I found that nylon skin sutures, even with six or eight knots usually don't start to unravel until the wound swelling goes down and the tension on the knot allows it to unravel.

but if a person is malnourished (i.e. low protein diet, diabetes, cancer) the wound could take longer than usual to heal.




when we were in Africa, we used monofilament fish line to sew the skin because the pre packed nylon or silk was too expensive and often poor quality.

The real problem was the catgut and newer absorb able suture: If the catgut (regular or chromic) was old, it could lead to internal bleeding. Not a big problem for under the skin, but for C Sections it could lead to bleeding or other complications (a uterus that would rupture in a later pregnancy, a dangerous complication). We would usually use the modern versions donated to us by German or American hospitals.

and no, catgut is not made from cats: It is made from sheep guts, or as Wikipedia explains:

Catgut suture is made by twisting together strands of purified collagen taken from the serosal or submucosal layer of the small intestine of healthy ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) or from beef tendon.^[1] The natural plain thread is precision ground in order to achieve a monofilament character and treated with a glycerol-containing solution

but it is not used as much nowadays, especially in Europe, because of mad cow disease worries and because there is an alternative.

Elvis trivia of the day

Singer, Soldier, usher in a theatre, and "sbabbos goy"?

(translation: Gentile who helps you on the Sabbath).

During Elvis's senior year at Humes High School in Memphis, the Presley family had moved several times, and at one point lived in the bottom floor of a boardinghouse, where their upstairs neighbors were Rabbi Fruchter and his wife.

  Elvis explained to George that he was the Rabbi's "Shabbos goy." He turned the lights on and off and turned the radio on and off for the rabbi and his wife and did odd jobs and errands for the Orthodox family on the Saturday sabbath, when Orthodox Jews were forbidden to engage in certain types of work and activities. 

Yes. My grandmother did these things for her neighbor when my mom was growing up.

Turning on electrical switches doesn't sound like "work", but it the equivalent of starting fires, which is hard work.

Neatorama via Presurfer.

Olympic trivia

From the BBC:

breaking the 2000 year Olympic record:

Michael Phelps has the chance to break a 2,000-year-old Olympic record by surpassing the 12 individual titles won by Leonidas of Rhodes....
Leonidas of Rhodes competed in four successive Olympiads in 164BC, 160BC, 156BC and 152BC and in each of these he won three different foot races.

and back then, their Olympic uniform was designed by mother Nature...

British Museum:Running man design on a pot dating from c500BC found in Rhodes