Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Sledging rations
This being the stuff that the likes of Scott went to a lot of trouble with, main thing being to get maximum calories to the eatable gram. Sadly he forgot the vitamin C, not a good plan on a six month journey. His stuff was made, as I recall, from meat fat and other meat extracts and you made a kind of brown porriage with the stuff. The Epsom version is rather differant. Take the remaining basa fillet (see earlier post on the subject) out of the freezer and allow to thaw. Soak 6 ounces of pearl barley overnight. Add some thinly sliced smooth skinned celery (see earlier post on the subject) and bring to the boil. Turn heat off and stand for four hours. Warm up again, adding a little water if necessary. Fry the basa in some butter and stir into the barley, which by now is moving towards a porriage texture. BH and FIL not attracted, so I did the lot for breakfast yesterday. Did not feel overful, but comfortable, and did not need to eat in a substantial way until about 12 hours later. Clearly the stuff to stoke up on when out in the cold, up a hill, or both.
Rather differant was the very brown bread being mass produced for some up-town order today by the baker in Cheam. Bread a rich dark brown, about the colour of the outside of a rich fruit cake. Baked in the sort of tin that you might otherwise make sandwich loaves in. The lady of the shop claimed that it was perhaps a Russian recipe, very good but that there was none of it for sale to the general public. My guess is that it would be good, but that I would not want to eat as much of it at a sitting as I eat of white bread - that is to say ranging up to one small loaf.
Been pondering lately about the vice-admiral (see previous posting) who is master-minding our efforts to contain the Somali pirates. Clearly missed my vocation as same.
Factlets 1 to 4: a big tanker costs around £50m and the oil to put in it might cost another £50m. It might take 50 days to sail the thing from the Persian Gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope to Europe, and the trip might cost £5m.
Suggestion 1 (which the DT suggests is starting to happen): harden up the vessel. Start by hardening up key areas so that lightly armed pirates can't get at them or the people in them. Then move onto armament. This might take the form of tacking light naval guns/big machine guns and searchlights to the side of the tanker. You would need proper mountings for them, hanging out and over the side so that they can enfilade the sides of the tanker, and maybe 6 would give reasonable coverage. Two each side and one each end. One then needs some sort of burglar alarm which would give you enough time to move to action stations (beat to quarters in Hornblower speak). At which point I assume you are allowed to engage. No nonsense about taking prisoners. Maybe the small boats involved do not show on radar, but maybe they could be picked up with sonar, over and above the noise of the tanker itself. One might need ten people to man this lot and on the assumption that you needed them for half the trip, you have spent another £250,000 on staff, plus the cost of putting the stuff in. Maybe a million or so.
Suggestion 2: tighten up on vehicle registration and tracking. Every legitmate vessel is required to carry a tamper proof beacon which provides identification and tracking. Identify the balance using a satellite parked up above and take care of them.
Suggestion 3: start getting tough with places known to be providing aid and succour to pirates. Maybe occupy them and put them under martial law. If it gets really nasty, one would maybe need to move to concentration camps (in the original, Boer war, sense of the word. But still not something to embark on lightly. A rather heavy version of the internment that we had for a bit in Northern Ireland).
Suggestion 4: start on supply lines. There can't be that many places in Somalia capable of making the necessary gear, so start cracking down on the few that there are and on imports. I guess the snag with this one is that there are thousands of miles of rough frontier out in the desert which would be hard to make impermeable without making more trouble than you are unmaking.
Suggestion 1 has the merit that it is something that ship owners can get on with - without waiting for the sort of difficult international agreement needed for the others. Suggestion 2 would need be mounted by a suitable empowered consortium - but I don't suppose you would get public opinion on your back. Other two suggestions more tricky. Other countries in the area might not like the West (which it would have to be) getting as heavy handed as this. What about the inviolability of sovereign states when they are not very sovereign? We will see if anything of the sort catches on. But I start to wonder how much of our prosperity depends on the free and untroubled movement of goods. The benefits of trade would be significantly weakened if the costs of carriage, say, doubled to take care of just this particular menace. Which on my factlets I would think they could, at least in those areas where you get pirates. Maybe I need some more factlets. But the good news is that Greenpeace will probably stop breaching the peace at sea while this is sorted out, in case we start confusing them with pirates.
Rather differant was the very brown bread being mass produced for some up-town order today by the baker in Cheam. Bread a rich dark brown, about the colour of the outside of a rich fruit cake. Baked in the sort of tin that you might otherwise make sandwich loaves in. The lady of the shop claimed that it was perhaps a Russian recipe, very good but that there was none of it for sale to the general public. My guess is that it would be good, but that I would not want to eat as much of it at a sitting as I eat of white bread - that is to say ranging up to one small loaf.
Been pondering lately about the vice-admiral (see previous posting) who is master-minding our efforts to contain the Somali pirates. Clearly missed my vocation as same.
Factlets 1 to 4: a big tanker costs around £50m and the oil to put in it might cost another £50m. It might take 50 days to sail the thing from the Persian Gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope to Europe, and the trip might cost £5m.
Suggestion 1 (which the DT suggests is starting to happen): harden up the vessel. Start by hardening up key areas so that lightly armed pirates can't get at them or the people in them. Then move onto armament. This might take the form of tacking light naval guns/big machine guns and searchlights to the side of the tanker. You would need proper mountings for them, hanging out and over the side so that they can enfilade the sides of the tanker, and maybe 6 would give reasonable coverage. Two each side and one each end. One then needs some sort of burglar alarm which would give you enough time to move to action stations (beat to quarters in Hornblower speak). At which point I assume you are allowed to engage. No nonsense about taking prisoners. Maybe the small boats involved do not show on radar, but maybe they could be picked up with sonar, over and above the noise of the tanker itself. One might need ten people to man this lot and on the assumption that you needed them for half the trip, you have spent another £250,000 on staff, plus the cost of putting the stuff in. Maybe a million or so.
Suggestion 2: tighten up on vehicle registration and tracking. Every legitmate vessel is required to carry a tamper proof beacon which provides identification and tracking. Identify the balance using a satellite parked up above and take care of them.
Suggestion 3: start getting tough with places known to be providing aid and succour to pirates. Maybe occupy them and put them under martial law. If it gets really nasty, one would maybe need to move to concentration camps (in the original, Boer war, sense of the word. But still not something to embark on lightly. A rather heavy version of the internment that we had for a bit in Northern Ireland).
Suggestion 4: start on supply lines. There can't be that many places in Somalia capable of making the necessary gear, so start cracking down on the few that there are and on imports. I guess the snag with this one is that there are thousands of miles of rough frontier out in the desert which would be hard to make impermeable without making more trouble than you are unmaking.
Suggestion 1 has the merit that it is something that ship owners can get on with - without waiting for the sort of difficult international agreement needed for the others. Suggestion 2 would need be mounted by a suitable empowered consortium - but I don't suppose you would get public opinion on your back. Other two suggestions more tricky. Other countries in the area might not like the West (which it would have to be) getting as heavy handed as this. What about the inviolability of sovereign states when they are not very sovereign? We will see if anything of the sort catches on. But I start to wonder how much of our prosperity depends on the free and untroubled movement of goods. The benefits of trade would be significantly weakened if the costs of carriage, say, doubled to take care of just this particular menace. Which on my factlets I would think they could, at least in those areas where you get pirates. Maybe I need some more factlets. But the good news is that Greenpeace will probably stop breaching the peace at sea while this is sorted out, in case we start confusing them with pirates.
# posted by Jim @ 11:20 AM 
