stuff 'n other stuff

Anyone interested in my slightly cyncial $0.02 on the discovery of Richard III’s remains should head on over to http://knowledgegeek.tumblr.com/post/42300155337/richard-iii …

get your hotmail now, a photo by moncur_d on Flickr.

Last week we withdrew from social media.

Involuntarily.

We spent last week in a cottage at Yanakie near Wilson’s Prom in Victoria. We’d been there before in 2007, but then we didn’t take laptops with us andd phones were just phones, good old GSM mobiles that just worked. This time we had smart phones and we took a laptop to let us check the weather and the news, send the odd email, upload pictures to flickr and the like.

We took the windows netbook that had worked so well during our trip to South Australia. We didn’t expect stellar performance, but we expected something. The same was true of our smart phones – we expected to check the weather and email, but not much more. We were on holiday and tweeting and blogging were off the agenda.

How far off the agenda internet access was became clear the first time I powered up the laptop. It successfully connected to Virgin, but at speeds reminiscent of a slow early nineties dialup link.

In those text based days you could do a lot at 2400 baud, and 9600 baud was stellar, but of course we’re no longer in the text based world. Things timed out on us, so much so that accessing websites was a near impossibility.

Our phones would still let us collect email. I’d guess that twitter would also have worked though I didn’t try. Apps, which are of course really single purpose content display web clients didn’t, for much the same reason the web didn’t work on the laptop. Too slow, too many timeouts.

Fortunately we didn’t need to do any online banking or pay bills while we were way – if we had that would have necessitated a drive to a population centre with a decent 3G service – meaning that we could just revert to a relaxing disconnected world.

We had the radio, we knew what was happening in the world, cellphone coverage was just good enough to let us successfully call and book a table the truly excellent Trulli’s Pizza in Meeniyan the one night we went out for dinner, and that meant a forty minute drive across country Victoria on the one night it rained, but in truth we just unwound and disconnected.

And in the course of this we discovered the pleasure of not being connected…

I recently posted on the suggestion that the Romans sometimes used bits of pottery to clean themselves after they’ve been to the loo.

Other cultures are known to use stones as an alteranive to more flexible solutions, so the use of pottery fragments in long drop dry latrines shouldn’t come as a surprise as a solution in a culture that hadn’t yet invented toilet paper or had universal flushing toilets and the infrastructure to deal with toilet paper.   The cynical might say that the user experience of Victorian hard toilet paper (think Izal) was probably not that dissimilar to using pessoi.

One could imagine a cultural rule that went something like ‘if there’s a spongestick available use that, otherwise it’s pessoi‘, just as in Greece and Turkey today if there’s a little bin in the loo, it’s for used paper – paper goes in the poo-paper bin rather than down the loo. There are other examples such as the etiquette around bucket flush toilets in south east Asia.

Now this comes back to what I’ve previously said about how learning a language is actually about learning a culture. In the case of the Romans they’re all dead so we have to reconstruct the culture using a mix of archaeological and literary sources, but the same problems apply to learning a culture, and it’s the everyday ones that trip you up – like German campsite toilets with a toilet paper dispenser outside the stall rather than inside – things that of course you know about but don’t because you are not from here.

I’m using toilets as an example as most people from most cultures are reticent about talking about or asking questions about what what you do and how you do it in there.

For example I once helped train some aid workers from Somaliland on how to look after their computers which were used to track food distribution to refugees. These were educated, funny, literate people, but they had a problem, they kept slipping off the toilet – why? – because they were used to squat toilets and couldn’t (a) get the idea of sitting on a western wc, and (b) the men had never developed accuracy as when they normally peed it was from a squatting position.

In other words learning languages are about learning a culture, and should include questions like ‘what do you have for breakfast?’ – important as I once inadvertantly put flaked dried fish on muesli in Borneo thinking it was some form of crushed seeds to add body to the muesli, ‘how do you use the loo’, ‘how to you buy x‘, etc, etc

Closing the circle, this is one reason why studying the European classical period has value – it’s well researched, has a vast knowledge, but because it is subject to ongoing research we periodically come up with left field discoveries like pessoi – and that helps us think about gaps in our knowledge about other cultures …

The archaeological world is mildly agog today over the suggestion that the Romans used bits of pottery to clean their bottoms.

Now we know about the infamous sponge sticks and we have remains from the cesspit at Bearsden fort that suggests that Roman soldiers may well have used sphagnum moss to clean themselves, but pottery?

It’s not as unlikely as it seems. The Anglo Saxons and the Vikings used leaves (leading to a joke about the only leaf not to be found in a toilet being the holly leaf) or scraps of cloth, but what do you do if you live in a dry climate without access to water?  If there’s no leaves and no water and you need to scrape yourself clean after a difficult moment you need to be inventive and use something as a scraper – and a stone would do the job.

Bedouin tribesmen are reputed to do exactly this. And I found this youtube video about some people in Peru that did the same thing. After all toilet paper was a Chinese invention and unknown to he Romans and while we might feel that a sponge was a more acceptable and comfortable alternative, if you can’t wash it out you’re left having to carry something fairly disgusting round with you after you’ve been – after all sponges were expensive and most people were nowhere near rich enough to afford to throw them away.

Personally, sphagnum seems a hell of a lot more comfortable, but there are times when needs must …

This week’s hot weather and bushfire alerts have not done us any favours in the fruit and veg department with the hot dry winds scorching off the raspberries and the zuchinis not to mention that possums stripped the fig tree bare and managed to get under the net on the apricot tree and have a go at these.

So today we mounted a rescue effort harvesting any of the apricots that looked more than half ripe and stripping off the ones the possums had taken a bite out of. Fortunately my being slack about staking the tomatoes has saved them from the wind meaning we should get a few kilos in a week or two.

So what to do with a sudden influx of not quite ripe fruit – the best of the apricots went to jam and he rest to an asian style fruit and chili pickle – and is the result:

not bad for an afternoon’s work …

Yesterday we had a serious bushfire alert, but despite a searingly hot day  with winds between 50 and 70km/h  and the smell of smoke in the air from grass fires to the west of the city, we’re still here.

Yesterday morning it was already 25C when I left for work and in the afternoon it was unpleasantly hot and windy, something round about 36 or 37C, but as I was going up the on ramp to the Commonwealth Bridge, the sky turned black and there was a squall of rain like gravel hitting the car and the temperature dropped a welcome six degrees in as many minutes. Driving back was fun with lots of bits of tree flying about but everybody seemed to be being careful.

All the national parks and bush reserves, including the one on the hill above our house were closed yesterday, and are staying closed today, but by about nine o’clock yesterday evening it had dropped to under 30C. As the sun went down we could see (and smell) smoke in the distance and this morning when I went for walk there was an orange glow to the south from smoke caught by the first rays of the sun.

However today it’s cooler, and while there’s still a breeze, the worst has passed for the moment …

Everyone makes them, everyone fails at them.

Mine this year is to get fitter and lose some weight. This isn’t really a new resolution, I tried starting running again back in 2009 and found that really didn’t work for me – basically my ankles and knees wouldn’t take it anymore.

Since then I’ve been pretty full on with work and house renovations and while I’ve been able to reduce my weight a little, the idea of regular exercise has been honoured more in the breach than the fact.

Diet, apart from a fondness for a decent glass of wine, isn’t really an issue I’m a muesli/yoghurt/wholemeal bread/fruit/salad/pasta type of guy, with a couple of veggie only days most weeks and I eat a lot more fish and chicken than I do red meat.

It’s purely lack of exercise. Working in IT you spend a lot of time on your bum and the trick is to get off it on a regular basis. Social media doesn’t help, as these days work and life blends a bit with me finding myself answering emails at weekends, not to mention checking twitter a couple of times a day – some of it’s recreational stuff to do with my interests, some of it’s work, and some of it’s in between.

Up till now everything’s been more or less ok. I might not be the fittest, but I thought I was ok for a man in his late fifties.

And then last Friday we got up at five o’clock and drove down to Pebbly Beach for a swim and a gentle bushwalk to mark the end of the end of year break. I swam, I enjoyed myself but I found it a lot harder than I expected – sometime between climbing Ohlsen Bagge in South Australia this winter past and now I’ve reached some tipping point.

Taking it as a wakeup call I was up at 5.15 this morning for a twenty minute powerwalk – just me and the kangaroos – amazing how many there are in the suburbs in the early morning – and ten minutes cardio on the exercise machine we bought some years ago for cross country ski training and never used seriously.

I plan to repeat this three days a week and get some other exercise in at weekends – be it a bushwalk or a bikeride. I might never be able to run 10km again but I can still keep fit …

Piqued by our upcoming transiberian trip I’ve been doing a lot of reading around the subject, and about Kolchak, the civil war, the allied intervention and more. Even Chekhov.

And in the course of this, purely by happenstance, I happened across Tent Life in Siberia by George Kennan.

The story is simply told.  In 1864, roundabout the time of the end of the American civil war, before there was a railroad across America, before Alaska was part of the USA, some investors decided to build a telegraph line between Russia and America.

Their reasoning was simple – undersea cables were unreliable and difficult to maintain, as had been shown by the first trans Atlantic cable, so building an overland cable would result is a link that was easier to maintain and one that would allow a direct connection to Europe via Russia. Telegraph lines were very much the internet of the nineteenth century, and like the railways there were always investors and speculators wanting to get on board with the latest technology. Much like the venture capitalists of today.

Kennan was one of the survey team on the Kamchatka part of the route.

While there was a Russian presence in Kamchatka it was little known or explored, the Russian settlements hugging the coast, just as the early west coast settlements in the US hugged the coast as sea was the most viable mode of travel between them.

Tent Life is rich in ethnographic detail, well written, and recounts his adventures surveying the line. And there are odd little facts – like the fact that Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the administrative centre of the Primorye (Vladivostok did not yet exist) was attacked by a combined British and French squadron during the Crimean war – that make the book truly engaging as well as a description of Kamchatka in the mid to late nineteenth century.

Like Beth Ellis’s An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah truly a gem of nineteenth century travel writing, and like Ellis’s book, one that deserves to be better known.

It’s available as an epub through Project Gutenberg, or as a free download for the Kindle through the Amazon store. There’s also a number of print editions available.