Monday, June 23, 2008
B&Q rules!
I learn today that B&Q does indeed stock small and very small bags of bonding, universal and finishing plaster. Next thing is to find out whether finishing plaster sticks to sand and cement rendering. I shall certainly not be sticking to the letter of the instructions which presumably lets the maker of the stuff off the hook.
I also learn about a new wonder way of growing rice. Said to be capable of doubling the crop while halving the amount of seed used. So why is it not catching on? Is it a plot by academia to blackball something not invented by them (the wonder way having been invented by a long service Jesuit in Madagascar) or by the agrocombines who are only interested in wonder ways involving lots of their products? Feeling full of beans this Monday morning, I actually get around to asking Mr G about the matter. Lots of hits. And, I should have guessed, all much more complicated that one might have thought having scanned a few square inches in one of the weekend papers. The wonder way itself seems easy enough. Transplant the rice seedlings very young, plant them a long way apart - feet rather than inches - and don't flood the fields from the outset. This way each rice plant grows much much bigger, overcompensating nicely for the much smaller number of plants. What is not easy is deciding whether it works or not. It seems that there are lots of ways for one field of rice to be differant from another and one needs large scale careful trialls to be sure. But Dr Uphoff seems pretty sure he is onto a winner. I would have posted a picture of happy peasant holding handful of giant new rice in one hand and handful of dwarf old rice in the other - but my paint skills do not extend to trimming off the large right hand white space I get when pasting it into Paint for saving as a jpg file - having failed to find the saving direct option. Back to geek school.
Parts West at the weekend, starting with Illminster, which boasts a country drapers with fine stocks of knitting wool and tweed jackets and with handsomely dressed windows. Must be a lot of county types in the area to carry such a place. Opposite, one has the minster. Large, impressive but oddly cold place, more or less rebuilt by the Victorians. Rebuilding included a substantial peice behind the alter, maybe 12 feet high by 8 feet across, full of niches for sculptures of saints and lords and what have you - all painted in the sort of bright colours - lots of blue and white - one associates with statues in Catholic churches - although they had not gone as far as dressing the sculptures. Maybe the church is a touch high. Large gallery at the back of the church but entry to the substantial flight of stairs which would get one there forbidden on grounds of health and safety. Did not seem quite right to ignore such a direction in the house of the Lord.
Having spent some of the weekend pondering that other Lordly matter, the nature of sin, much helped by taking on some liquid freight, have now moved on to the relationship between taste, esteem and price. I declare an interest at the outset, in that I prefer cod and haddock to salmon, which I have always thought to be OK but overrated - even when we went to the lengths of going to a restaurant in Wales somewhere for which the (English, nicely tweeded as I recall) proprietor of the local salmon rights used to provide the daily salmon. Now in the England of my childhood, salmon was much dearer than most other fish and this was true whether it came in a chunk or in a tin - frozen not having been invented at that point. So salmon was posh and cod was what your parents' parents bought for their cats and maids (who thought themselves lucky not to get coley). This didn't run in Scotland and parts of Canada where the peasants were paid in salmon rather than money, but we stick with England for present purposes. Now, fresh cod and haddock have been a lot dearer then salmon for some years. So how long will salmon hold its posh image?
More worryingly, is what we dignify as good taste, little or nothing more than a dishonest, hypocritical way of saying that I can afford to spend more on my fish - or whatever - than you can. Or that I have spent more time and money learning how to tell the differance. But nothing much to do with one being instrinsically better than the other; we just train ourselves to like one more than the other. To the point where both the like and dislike are both perfectly genuinely felt. I am reminded of some savages, I think somewhere near Papua, who used to grow special pigs. The grander the spiral tusks, the more special the pig, the more valuble. So you grow a very special pig, then on a very special day you club it to death. By clubbing, you acquired all the value of the pig, you might even move up a grade or two in the grand order of the pig, and the value of very special pig dropped to zero. It was promptly roasted and eaten. A sort of very conspicuous consumption of something harmless (leaving the pig aside) which does not involve the consumption fossil resources. And there is no fooling about. Growing pigs is about growing status, not about feeding the starving millions. (PS: one has to know about the late Left Book Club Editions, in this case of a book by one Tom Harrisson, to know about such arcane matters).
I also learn about a new wonder way of growing rice. Said to be capable of doubling the crop while halving the amount of seed used. So why is it not catching on? Is it a plot by academia to blackball something not invented by them (the wonder way having been invented by a long service Jesuit in Madagascar) or by the agrocombines who are only interested in wonder ways involving lots of their products? Feeling full of beans this Monday morning, I actually get around to asking Mr G about the matter. Lots of hits. And, I should have guessed, all much more complicated that one might have thought having scanned a few square inches in one of the weekend papers. The wonder way itself seems easy enough. Transplant the rice seedlings very young, plant them a long way apart - feet rather than inches - and don't flood the fields from the outset. This way each rice plant grows much much bigger, overcompensating nicely for the much smaller number of plants. What is not easy is deciding whether it works or not. It seems that there are lots of ways for one field of rice to be differant from another and one needs large scale careful trialls to be sure. But Dr Uphoff seems pretty sure he is onto a winner. I would have posted a picture of happy peasant holding handful of giant new rice in one hand and handful of dwarf old rice in the other - but my paint skills do not extend to trimming off the large right hand white space I get when pasting it into Paint for saving as a jpg file - having failed to find the saving direct option. Back to geek school.
Parts West at the weekend, starting with Illminster, which boasts a country drapers with fine stocks of knitting wool and tweed jackets and with handsomely dressed windows. Must be a lot of county types in the area to carry such a place. Opposite, one has the minster. Large, impressive but oddly cold place, more or less rebuilt by the Victorians. Rebuilding included a substantial peice behind the alter, maybe 12 feet high by 8 feet across, full of niches for sculptures of saints and lords and what have you - all painted in the sort of bright colours - lots of blue and white - one associates with statues in Catholic churches - although they had not gone as far as dressing the sculptures. Maybe the church is a touch high. Large gallery at the back of the church but entry to the substantial flight of stairs which would get one there forbidden on grounds of health and safety. Did not seem quite right to ignore such a direction in the house of the Lord.
Having spent some of the weekend pondering that other Lordly matter, the nature of sin, much helped by taking on some liquid freight, have now moved on to the relationship between taste, esteem and price. I declare an interest at the outset, in that I prefer cod and haddock to salmon, which I have always thought to be OK but overrated - even when we went to the lengths of going to a restaurant in Wales somewhere for which the (English, nicely tweeded as I recall) proprietor of the local salmon rights used to provide the daily salmon. Now in the England of my childhood, salmon was much dearer than most other fish and this was true whether it came in a chunk or in a tin - frozen not having been invented at that point. So salmon was posh and cod was what your parents' parents bought for their cats and maids (who thought themselves lucky not to get coley). This didn't run in Scotland and parts of Canada where the peasants were paid in salmon rather than money, but we stick with England for present purposes. Now, fresh cod and haddock have been a lot dearer then salmon for some years. So how long will salmon hold its posh image?
More worryingly, is what we dignify as good taste, little or nothing more than a dishonest, hypocritical way of saying that I can afford to spend more on my fish - or whatever - than you can. Or that I have spent more time and money learning how to tell the differance. But nothing much to do with one being instrinsically better than the other; we just train ourselves to like one more than the other. To the point where both the like and dislike are both perfectly genuinely felt. I am reminded of some savages, I think somewhere near Papua, who used to grow special pigs. The grander the spiral tusks, the more special the pig, the more valuble. So you grow a very special pig, then on a very special day you club it to death. By clubbing, you acquired all the value of the pig, you might even move up a grade or two in the grand order of the pig, and the value of very special pig dropped to zero. It was promptly roasted and eaten. A sort of very conspicuous consumption of something harmless (leaving the pig aside) which does not involve the consumption fossil resources. And there is no fooling about. Growing pigs is about growing status, not about feeding the starving millions. (PS: one has to know about the late Left Book Club Editions, in this case of a book by one Tom Harrisson, to know about such arcane matters).
# posted by Jim @ 8:39 AM 
