Superfast jellyfish. Superfast jellyfish.

A few years ago I went through a Penguin phase, not the apparently-Christian-mates-for-life-walks-five-hundred-miles-just-to-fall-down-at-your-door flightless bird kind, but the altogether more interesting book kind. I'm a sucker for good design and frequently fall into judging, and purchasing, a book by its cover, and thus ended up with a collection of classic SciFi by John Wyndham.

You probably know Wyndham, if indeed you do, for his curious mix of Home County Britishness and post-apocalyptic nightmares, where the world has ended but everybody is jolly nice about the whole thing, riding it out with a stiff upper lip and cucumber sandwiches. Take 'Day of the Triffids', where bioengineered sentient plants slowly stalk the battered remnants of a society turned blind by a meteor shower, or 'The Chrysalids', a tale of Christian fundamentalists and mutant telepaths in the post-apocalyptic feudalism of, um, the Canadian province of Labrador, or perhaps you may be more familiar with 'The Midwich Cuckoos', a cautionary story wherein a group of other-worldly identical twins are born simultaneously to women in a small rural English village with unnerving consequences. All very unsettling I'm sure you'll agree.

But I'm almost certain that even if you have read these fine works you are unlikely to have perused perhaps his most chilling work, 'The Kraken Wakes', his 1953 prophetic tale of melting ice caps, rising oceans, drowned cities and political conflicts over remaining resources, all caused by giant jellyfish determined to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. "All very believable", I hear you say, "except for the bit about the jellyfish, now that's just nonsense."

Not so fast, dear reader, for word reaches us today of an incident at Torness nuclear power station in Scotland, where the entire plant was forced to shut down earlier this week because of a unusually large swarm of jellyfish that had became lodged in the cooling pipes that funnel seawater into the reactor, blocking those pipes completely. Without the cooling effect of the seawater a reactor quickly faces meltdown, as happened recently in Fukushima.

"Aha," you say, "but one incident does not an apocalyptic attack make", or words to that effect.

Indeed, but alas this is not an isolated incident. Less than a week before the Torness incident, the Number 2 reactor at the Shimane Nuclear plant in Japan was attacked in an identical manner by another swarm of jellyfish. In 2008 the Diablo Canyon plant in California was attacked by a swarm, in 2006 swarms clogged the pipes of Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Maryland and the pipes for two reactors at Chubu Electric Power Company's plant in Hamaoka, Japan, and in 2005 the Oskarshamn plant in southeastern Sweden was shut down by another swarm. In 1999 the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant northwest of Tokyo was attacked and in 1998 and 1993 it was the turn of the St Lucie plant in Florida.

Concerned yet?

Now, even if you discount the theory of a malevolent undersea menace determined to wreak havoc on a helpless land-lubbing adversary, the fact that nuclear reactors around the globe seem to share an exhaust-port type design flaw that makes them both attractive to and vulnerable to swarms of jellyfish, swarms that look set to increase in size and frequency as both sea levels and ocean temperatures continue to rise, should fill you with a certain level of unease about ongoing British plans to increase the number of plants by eight between now and 2025, five of which would have a direct impact on the East coast of Ireland should anything go wrong.

Its not the actual threat of jellyfish that alarms me (or rather, its not just the actual threat of jellyfish), more the existential threat of the unknowable and unpredictable that the jellyfish represent. Giant swarms of jellyfish attacking your cooling pipes are probably not the type of thing plant designers were thinking about when building their plants, and yet it seems to happen frequently enough that they are not unique incidents and each time the effect is the same, the plant needs to be shut down or risk meltdown. So no doubt the next generation of plants will have better jellyfish defenses. Or earthquake defenses. Or tsunami defenses. But each new design is only compensating for the unanticipated disasters of the past and will never be able to protect themselves against the unanticipated disasters of the future because they are, well, unanticipated. Every imaginable precaution may have been taken with the construction and running of current plants, but that is of little use when the unimaginable happens.

And it has, and it will.

Unfortunately believing that you have anticipated every possible scenario makes you all the more vulnerable to bad decision making when something arrises outside of your contingency plans, just ask the doomed staff of the first Death Star or their colleagues at NewsCorp who bought MySpace for $580 million six years ago and sold it yesterday for $35 million. Oops. This is my primary concern about nuclear power, its vulnerability to corporate overconfidence, "unknown unknowns", and the catastrophic effects when the two meet and stuff inevitably goes pear-shaped.

Nuclear power is just not worth the risks, any risks.

Especially jellyfish. We have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.

Links
When Jellyfish attack
Torness, Scotland, June 2011
Shimane, Japan, June 2011
California, USA, October 2008
Maryland, USA, July 2006
Hamaoka, Japan, July 2006
Oskarshamn, Sweden, August 2005
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, Japan, July 1999
Florida, USA, October 1998
Florida, USA, September 1993

At least the Germans take the jellyfish threat seriously, they voted today to shut down all their nuclear power plants by 2022. Hooray! Unlike the UK who plan to build another eight within the same timeframe. Boo!

The Kraken Wakes - John Wyndham, more prophetic than Nostradamus and The Kaiser Chiefs put together.

Tea knows no segregation, no class nor pedigree

Sunday is rapidly turning into visitor day here at the Unkie Dave Household. Last week it was the amazing Arjedre, this week it was the turn of not one, but two of my sisters*, and so The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I took the opportunity to bring them to our latest favourite local eat-and/or-drinkery, the altogether tealicious Wall & Keogh just up the road in Portobello.

With a ridiculous array of teas and mores (appropriately enough given that they are a tea house), fresh sushi (slightly more bewildering, but it works), bread and cakes from The Bretzel (yum, yum, yum), good music (Mr Scruff is a fan, apparently), great ambience and a snug but fantastic garden seating area, a comfortable and relaxed few hours were had by all. Apparently they're open until 8pm, and given the lack of either alcohol or coffee on Unkie Dave's menu in the immediate future I can see more than the occasional summer's evening visit on the horizon.

The only fault I can find with Wall & Keogh is that it is exactly the type of establishment I would love to run, but can never seem to get off my backside and make happen. Damn you sirs, damn your industrious fortitude.

* Technically this also counts as all of my sisters. It should also be pointed out that my mum was there as well, but as she had only come from the Northside and not Waterford or London it wasn't as dramatic a brunch appearance however much it was appreciated.

Links
Wall & Keogh on Facebook
@WallandKeoghTea on Twitter

Die Mensch-Maschine

Just back from the final day of the Human+ exhibit at the Science Gallery, not their strongest exhibition but I'm glad I made it in nonetheless. Focused on the concept of the post-human, in particular the interaction/synthesis of humanity and technology, it was a bit more hit and miss than previous exhibits with less interactivity and more pieces of a conceptual nature as opposed to actual functioning and constructed objects.

Despite this I'm still glad I made it down, practically the last thing I did before the whole pancreas thing started was visit the last exhibit, Visceral, on its closing day, so there is a nice bookended symmetry to it all.

Unless its the Science Gallery that made me sick.

Oops.

All of this is essentially just an excuse, as if one was needed, to post some photos of animatronic crystal skulls. Click on any photo to greatly embiggen.

I, for one, welcome (the opportunity to recycle a hackneyed meme about) our new robot overlords!

Links
Human+ at the Science Gallery
More photos
Previous post on Visceral

Way Down In The Hole

Watching Season Two of the Wire I found a troubling feeling building somewhere in my gut near where my gall-bladder used to be, a phantom-memory of bile, perhaps, rising ghost-like to stoke the embers of my wrath and ire. Five episodes in and enjoying it so far, something was troubling me and I only put my finger on it this morning.

In Season One the main bad guy was not any one individual drug dealer, hit-man or crime boss, it was the Projects themselves. While individual criminal protagonists may have had redeeming features, the streets on which they lived had none. The Projects were the source of all their woes, holding them down and oppressing them, forcing them into a life of crime and compromise in a desperate attempt to break free from its shackles. Everything else was coloured in shades of grey, but the Projects, often seen through the monochromatic film of surveillance cameras, were entirely a black and white environment.

In Season Two this two-dimensional filter is applied to Unions.

Five episodes in and I have yet to see any positive portrayal of Union activity. Union bosses are all shown to be work-shy, corrupt and on the take, and while they act to protect their Union brothers they do so through underhanded means funded by the proceeds of criminal activity. If reduced hours leave the ordinary members with a short paycheck they liberate the cargo they are moving to make ends meet, and none of their brothers bat an eye. Everyone is drunk before they even start their morning shifts, and while they talk a lot about simply wanting a fair day's work, even when it arrives they still are happy to help themselves to a few extras from the back of a container when nobody is looking. When this activity is threatened with exposure the Union hides behind a screen of silence and feigned incompetence, nothing is ever stolen, just lost.

While of course the common thread linking Season One and Two is the effects of grinding poverty on a society and the methods by which those trapped in its clutches try to escape, I can't help but feel that the depiction of Union activities is even less sympathetic than that of the drug gangs. Perhaps it is because the drug gangs are only seen to prey on addicts and each other, whereas the Unions strike at the heart of America itself, its economy.

Working in the US I was shocked by how anti-Union everything was. I ran the regional office of a Cable Company and unlike most other larger company offices on the Eastern seaboard ours was not Unionised. My own bosses many miles away lived in constant fear that any day the Unions would swoop down and start a membership drive. We were one of the few employers in a depressed part of town, conditions and pay were good and, judging by the response to my laid-back Irish leadership style, the staff had little problems with management. Productivity was good, workers were happy, management was happy, but even so if I was an employee on the floor I would have insisted on there being a Union because in the blink of an eye everything can change.

The US is almost unique in the world in that it has no national labour laws mandating time off or regulating working hours. There is no national minimum paid annual leave for workers, no mandatory maternity leave. I was genuinely shocked when one of my employees reappeared at her desk less than five weeks after giving birth, HR explained to me that in our State mothers could only claim Short Term Disability if they gave birth, the same as if they had broken an arm or a leg and that this was paid for by the State, not the Company. There were no maternal benefits offered by the Company, you showed up for work or you didn't get paid. If you didn't like it then the Company could just fire you at any moment, because the state had At Will employment contracts, meaning there was no State or nationally mandated job security, no notice period before termination, you could just walk in one day and be told your job was gone with no warning, explanation or compensation. Six months after returning to Ireland I found out that the entire office had been closed down and operations moved 175 miles and two States away.

Despite all this insecurity Union membership is at an all-time low, with barely 12% of workers in the US holding Union membership. Watching a lot of the response to recent events in Wisconsin from those outside Wisconsin I was still amazed by how many ordinary workers parroted Fox News' soundbites about how the Unions were to blame for all the State's woes, and how they certainly wouldn't want to be in a Union or forced to pay Union dues. Thanks to collective bargaining US Union workers earn around 25% more than their non-unionsed counterparts, and yet fewer and fewer workers believe in the value of organized labour, and a major contributor to this decline has to be the portrayal of Unions and Union activities by the media.

Here in Ireland we may criticize the Unions for being ineffective, or too cozy with the previous government and employers, but in the US the prevailing meme is that the Unions are actually criminal enterprises out to destroy the fabric of society. As engrossing as The Wire is I can't help but feel unease watching it as it further reinforces these stereotypes.

Links
The data on US Unions in this post comes from the July+August 2011 issue of Mother Jones. I've written on the ongoing struggle in Wisconsin before and Mother Jones again has a good summary of events there, recently updated.

Splashing in the shallows

Apparently, at least according to the t-shirt of the cheese-monger in our local "I can't believe the Celtic Tiger is with O'Leary in the grave" delicatessen, there is some sort of ongoing kerfuffle in Libya. According to his shirt, he is willing to die to keep Libya free, a pledge probably unnecessary in central Dublin but nice to know all the same.

As I queued up yesterday to buy a sandwich I thought to myself, 'surely this can't be the same Libyan kerfuffle that started all the way back in February? I would have thought that millions in "aid" to the rebel forces, daily poundings by NATO, UN Resolutions and, above all else, a veritable El Nino of Twitter messages would have long ago broken the resolve of any embattled dictator, but apparently not.

Being under heavy medication and/or pain for an extended hospital stay is not the most conducive environment in which to watch epochal events unfold on 24-hour rolling news channels. The ongoing and patronisingly named "Arab Spring", and the horrendous earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan simultaneously transfixed me and passed me by, in that I was both glued to the screen by the immediacy of it all and yet now struggle to remember much of what I saw.

For much of my time in hospital I lived very much in the moment, focused on getting through the next few minutes between pain relief, the next hour or so between medications, making it to midnight and the last check-in by a nurse until 4:30am so I could try and get a few hours sleep. Focused so much on the Immediate, I found it almsot impossible to concentrate on anything; I could not read a book or more than a single article in a newspaper, I couldn't listen to more than a song or two on an album or talk with anyone longer than a few minutes. I just couldn't sustain the attention. I could, however, watch the same rolling footage on TV over and over again, passively, never really absorbing it, never really taking it in on anything more than the most superficial of levels.

In the last week or so I've been able to get back some of my focus, and reading once more has become a thing of pleasure. I just finished "The Shallows", by Nicholas Carr, a pop-sci/tech book examining the neurological effect that sustained Internet use has on us individually and collectively as a society. Carr's basic thesis is that the brain is plastic, in that it continues to grow and develop throughout our lives in response to actions that we carry out. Repetitive behavior strengthens some parts of the brain and an absence of other actions cause reductions in other parts of the brain. We have two types of memory, short term and long term, and both contribute to different aspects of our decision making processes. Internet use encourages growth in short-term memory and a corresponding boost to rapid decision making, but at the expense of long-term memory and, as we understand things better when they are stored in our long-term memory, our analytical abilities. Heavy internet users are capable of multi-tasking, but approach the same problem the same way when exposed to it at different times, with little learning from their previous experiences. The more we use the internet as a substitue for memory, as we become creatures of search and not retention, the more difficult it becomes for us to reason and explore complex arguments as our brains rewire themselves to focus on the instant and immediate.

This all sounded a lot like my heavily medicated hospital experience, and an entire society functioning under reactionary narcosis cannot be a good thing, but it would explain a lot, not least the ongoing NATO/US/UK madness in Libya and Afghanistan.

The Shallows is well worth reading if the Internets are your thing. It grew out of a 2008 article in The Atlantic entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid", and I think you all know my answer to that. The book expands on the article by focusing on the historical development of technological aids to our cognitive abilities, and the subsequent neurological and societal effects.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of summarizing a book on the dumbening effects of the internets in a blog post. But its not real irony, only internet irony. You'll soon forget it.

Photo: Libyan pro-revolutionary leaflet in the form of pre-Gaddafi bank note, as distributed in our local delicatessen.

Links
"Is Google Making Us Stupid" from The Atlantic, July/August 2008
"The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember" by Nicholas Carr

Also serving as a good counter-weight to all the nonsensical articles that have appeared in the wake of the 'Arab Spring', about how the Internets have liberated the oppressed peoples of North Africa and calling for Twitter to be given the Nobel Prize (well why not, they gave it to Obama didn't they?) is an article in the March/April edition of New Left Review by Hazem Kandil on what actually happened during the Egyptian uprising. Gil Scott-Heron would have been disappointed to learn that the Revolution was, in part, televised.

Anarcho-syndicationalism, or why I hate US TV

So last night we watched the season finale of Game of Thrones, and coincidentally enough over the weekend finished watching Season 1 of The Wire.

Short Version: I liked them both.

Medium Version: I liked them both, because they were well written with a consistent narrative, complex story arcs and genuine character development, all features that stand in stark contrast to most US television (no pun intended).

Long, Probably Too Long, Version: Extended stays in hospital aside I tend not to watch too much television. I may watch a good few too many television programs, but mostly these will be on DVD or recorded on a DVR. I watch television purposefully, as in I say to myself, "This evening I will mostly be watching... Blahblah", as opposed to an uncoordinated and random number of hours sat sprawling on a couch absorbing anything that is regurgitated upon your eyeballs because you can't quite reach the remote.

This means that effectively over the last three weeks the only television that I have watched has been either Game of Thrones, The Wire or Community, and when you have such a blinkered exposure it is easy to forget that 99.9% of all television is painful and excruciating poo.

In a discussion on Innesentials a few weeks ago on I explained why I really disliked the final season of Lost (and the whole show really), or more accurately the thread was about religious iconography in the show, I just chose to talk about why I hated the last season. As the only qualified theologian in the discussion, I felt no need to stay on topic. It boiled down to the nature of US TV writing, the fact that most shows had numerous writers and it really felt at times that there was no consistency from one episode to another. After watching the first seasons of both The Wire and Game of Thrones I am more convinced about my argument than ever.

Television (excluding oddities like the BBC) is a very commercial enterprise. TV shows are produced to make money for the networks that broadcast and/or produce them. In the US money is made in five main ways: a) through advertising sold by the network to be broadcast when the show airs, b) through in-show product placement, c) foreign sales of the show, d) dvd sales and e) through selling successful shows to local TV stations to show repeat screenings of the show, or syndication. For syndication to work a series normally needs to have at least 100 episodes, because local TV stations build their schedules around blocks of 100 episodes, ie showing a show every weekday at 5pm or 11pm for four months.

Syndication has two major effects on the quality of TV shows, firstly most US network shows tend to run for 22-25 episodes per season with the goal of staying on air for at least four years to hit that magic 100 episodes syndication target. 25 episodes of an hour-long drama would be almost imposible for a single writer to produce (though J. Michael Straczynski managed to write over 90 of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5 back in the 90's), and so producers bring in many writers often simultaneously working independently of each other and unaware of what each other are adding to the show. Quality is often not as important as the quantity of episodes, and while "clip-shows" are less common than ten years ago, "filler" episodes that add little of any substance to the season as a whole still occur with great frequency.

The second major effect of aiming for syndication is based on the future audience's viewing patterns. While a fan viewing the show the first time it airs might tune in regularly each week, when a show makes it to syndicated repeats it is unlikely that most viewers will be tuning in every single day to watch it, rather they will watch it irregularly, tuning in when they have nothing else better to do because it is a familiar presence and they don't have to think too much about it. Because of this irregular pattern of viewing, the syndicated show needs to be self-contained, without asking the viewer to be intricately familiar with what has come before. Think about most police procedurals, or US comedy shows, essentially the same thing happens each week with little character development, it doesn't matter if you've seen it ten times before or only once, you know exactly what you are going to get each time you sit down to watch it.

I hate this, with a passion.

I want a TV series to run like a novel. I want to feel like there is a consistent narrative running throughout the whole series, that things happen for a reason and that characters grow and develop over time in reaction to the events that unfold. I want to be treated as if I have some intelligence and can follow things without constantly having to have everything that happened more than ten minutes ago explained to me. I want to believe that there is a reason from episode one for the series to exist, and that everything over the course of the show's run illuminates and builds upon that reason. And above all else I don't want to feel like the producers are just making it all up as they go along.

This is why I liked Game of Thrones and The Wire so much, and not coincidently they both exist outside the mainstream network/syndication model, as both are produced by HBO. For those of you unfamiliar with HBO, it is a subscription-only cable television channel that neither shows advertisements nor is focused on syndicating its shows out to other TV stations. HBO tends to run much shorter series with between ten and thirteen episodes per series being typical, and this allows for a much tighter production with fewer writers and a greater emphasis placed on storytelling. If a viewer has gone to the effort to pay up front to see shows on HBO, it can be assumed that they will tune in more regularly to the shows and so producers don't have to worry so much about alienating newbies tuning in for the first time halfway through a series. Strong narrative writing with complex story arcs running across multiple episodes thrives in such an environment, and in the bubble-wrapped world of the DVD box set it is easy to forget how unique such shows are.

So basically the nature of US television, the medium itself, is the reason why most US TV shows are so bad. The content is constricted by the format, and quality suffers greatly as a consequence.

Oh, and winter is coming, Beatches! Mos def.

(See, we made it to the end without Spoilers of any kind, unfortunately the same cannot be said of the comments thread. You have been warned)

Best brunch visit, ever.

Just had a very pleasant surprise today, a flying visit from our good friend Arjedre, our favorite Platonic scholar (as in, "a philosopher who studies Plato", and not "a scholar with whom we are just good friends", which we are by the way, but that's not the important bit), home-brewer and all round good person.

By "flying visit" I literally mean "flying", as she had a seven hour stop-over in Dublin on her way from a Platonic workshop (as in "a workshop on Plato", not "a workshop where everybody is just good friends") in the UK back home to the Have' in deepest darkest Connecticut. That's not something you see everyday, a Dublin stopover on the way to somewhere else that's not Shannon.

This was a very pleasant surprise because The Very Understanding Girlfriend had kept the whole plan from me for the last few weeks, nipping out this morning "to buy some milk" and arriving back with the amazing Arjedre in tow.

We haven't seen Arjedre since we were last in the Have' back in September, but as I've thought many times before the sign of a really good friendship is that when you do meet up after a long absence its as if no time has passed at all. Having her here sitting in our front room was like the most perfectly normal thing ever, just amazing!

She still needs to work on her blog though. Very poor show, very poor show indeed.

Haven't felt this good in ages

While I was experiencing what our American cousins might refer to televisually as a "Mid-Season Break", our favourite knitter and crocheter here at Booming Back, the ever talented Ms Snag Breac, went and launched her own Etsy store.

We have a number of friends who are all quite talented in the dark arts of spinning and darning, but as Ms Snag Breac is responsible for both the Extermiknit Dalek and the (almost) life sized knitted Pancreas, as well as a comically large Tramadol pill that amused all the nurses on the ward to no end, she officially gets our douze-points.

Her shop sells felting kits, which are not, apparently, as rude as they sound, and I am reliably informed that they are an excellent gift for someone interested in getting involved in the whole artsy-crafty thing. The "make-your-own-felt-vegetables" is my favourite, having seen a number of pieces of vegetable-shaped jewelry she has made over the years I can vouch for their near nature-identical appearance, though in felt. Think of them as Felticly Modified Organisms (FMOs), and exploit your chosen third world nation with felt-based terminator seeds at your leisure.

Here at Booming Back we wish Ms Snag Breac the best of luck with her new online venture, and encourage all our other talented friends to publicly compete for our love and affection by sending us amusing presents.

You know you want to.

I don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip

I have developed a new habit, almost unconsciously, but worrying nonetheless. As I lie in bed moments after waking but before I actually get up, I slowly draw back the covers and stare intensely at my feet, checking each foot individually for any signs of Sudden Onset Podiatric Hirsutism, or hairy foot syndrome, for I am now convinced that I am slowly but surely turning into a Hobbit.

It is not my non-existant love of fine pipe-weed and hand-crafted pipes in which to smoke it that is the source of this malady, nor my slightly unnerving accompaniment to the shops by a rather small and slimy fellow whispering "My Precious" into his pocketsess, nor even the Hobbo-erotic devotion shown to me by my faithful travelling companion Mr Gamgee. No, my friends, the clearest indicator of my ongoing transmogrification from man to halfling is to be found in my almost unending nutritional cycle.

I have lost a lot of weight. Were I a lady-person society would no doubt be congratulating me and offering me a job wearing dresses on a game show, or being an Italian MEP, the skills necessary for the two roles being apparently identical. Our society being the double-standarded abomination that it is, I am instead being told by my doctors that I am now "Too Thin", and "Need To Gain Weight". Never in all my years of glossy magazine reading and Hollywood film watching have I ever heard anyone say anything so ridiculous, it's as if my doctors are suggesting that the media deliberately portrays an unrealistic and unachievable body image as a societal norm to condem the citizenry into ever increasing circles of shame and self-loathing that can only be temporarily alleviated through the consumption of ineffective, immorally sourced and tested and ever more expensive faux-panaceas. But surely we all would have noticed a conspiracy that blatant and rejected it wholesale?

Still, realising that none of my clothes fit me anymore, that my waist has gone from 34" to under 30", and that 134lbs is probably not that great for someone who is 6' tall, (unless I'm trying to be an extra on the Big Bang Theory) and after talking at length with a dietician in the hospital, I have been put on an extreme (by my standards) weight gain program. Given that for much of the last three months my entire digestive system was not working, being either fed through a tube or not at all for weeks at a time, my stomach has shrunk somewhat, and it and I no longer agree on what is an appropriate amount of food to eat in one siting. It is not simply a matter of eating more, it is rather a case of eating more often.

I have thus fallen into a routine whereby the seven traditional meals of Hobbitdom have become the calendar around which my day revolves. First Breakfast begins at around 9, Second Breakfast at around 11, Elevensies confusingly at around 12:30, Luncheon somewhere around 2, Afternoon Tea at about 4, Dinner sometime after 6 and finally Supper anywhere between 9 and 11. My diet too has been altered, under medical instruction, to include such wonderful delicacies as whole-fat milk, cheese and butter, items that have been off my menu for many, many years. In between these seven regular meals I have been told to start snacking and to (I kid you not) "Keep fruit and vegetables to a minimum as they may fill you up and keep you from eating higher calorie foods".

If I were your typical Irishman, gaining weight would be no problem. I would simply nip down to the pub every night for a week or two, have a reasonable four or five pints while sitting on my arse watching the footie and talking shite with the lads, then grab a curry-chips and a batter-burger on the way home. Job done. Unfortunately I am a) unable to drink alcohol, b) a vegetarian, c) have no interest in football and, most importantly, d) would rather like to avoid developing the lumpen and misshapen potato-like physique of the typical Irish male.

Thus I am left with the unhappy dietary regime of eating early and eating often, despite the frequent protestations of my body. After nine days of this I can report that while I have not actually gained any weight doing so, at least I have not lost any more.

Now if you'll excuse me there's a group of short, grumpy-looking bearded men outside who are looking for directions to some sort of depressed mountain or sad hillock nearby, and it's almost time for second breakfast.

Another sad week in politics

Further contributing to 2011 being a double-sized episode of "Reeling in the Years" comes this week's sad news of the passing of Brian Lenihan. This is sad news because the premature passing of anyone before their time is to be regretted, and not because of any particular positivity I felt towards him as a politician.

Indeed it has been unpleasant to watch the unfolding cavalcade of hypocrisy in the media, who have in the course of the last week rushed over themselves to eulogise on the talents of a man whom until so recently they vilified for being the source of all of Ireland's problems. Partly motivated, no doubt, by a genuine wish not to speak ill of the dead or to lay criticisms on someone no longer able to defend themselves, and partly, perhaps substantially, stemming from the desire not to be seen to be so publicly negative, his cannonisation has been fast-tracked more swiftly than that of John Paul II, and with even less merit.

Only time will tell whether he was simply the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if his actions represented the willful and consistent protection of his party and their financial backers at the expense of the citizenry of this country. Either way his actions as Minister for Finance were disastrous for this nation, and his tragic death at such a young age does nothing to diminish that.

My own experience these last three months have, however, softened my attitude towards Brian Lenihan the human being, as opposed to Lenihan the politician. Any illness involving the pancreas can be incredibly debilitating, the pain I experienced was like nothing I can even describe. I spent days in hospital connected to a morphine pump, injecting myself every six minutes at the worst of times, and even the best of times were still a nightmare. How Brian, with pancreatic cancer, was able to get out of bed every day let alone attempt to deal with the worst financial crisis this nation has ever faced is something that I find nothing short of amazing.

Whether his decision to carry on as Minister once he had been diagnosed was based on a desire to focus on his work as a way to retain a semblance of normality in his life, or because there was simply no-one else in cabinet who was willing or capable of taking over (much like Mary Harney's inexplicable retention of the Health portfolio long after her party had ceased to exist) is something that we probably won't know for many years. While I feel that this decision to carry on was wrong for both man and nation, I can't help but admire the strength of the man for being able to do so.

I certainly could not have.

Vincent Browne has a good article over at Politico.ie that's worth reading. It makes a difference from all the hyperbole in the Irish Times and Independent.

Update 15/06/11: Browne has an even better article in today's Irish Times.

Something Wonderful

It would appear that while I was in hospital something truly wonderful happened to this fair nation of ours, a sign, if ever one was needed, that the doom and gloom of our long national nightmare might just be at an end, and an eternal summer of sunshine and sprinkles may just be over the horizon.

This, my friends, is Mountain Dew. Irish Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew brewed, bottled or possibly just distributed here in Ireland.

Wahoo!

As long-time readers will know, my time in the States left me with two unhealthy addictions, the Green Bay Packers and Mountain Dew, both courtesy of Mr Tim. Since returning home in 2004 I have at various times ordered it by the case online, supped it surreptitiously for breakfast in Poland, or had friends bring it over from the US in their hand-luggage. And now, after almost seven years, it is finally available over the counter here.

This reminds me of my great American Smithwicks adventure. Before I went to the US I was a Smithwicks drinker, and could never find it, or Kilkenny, in any bar I went to in the States. After a few attempts to import quantities purely for personal use ended with tragic consequences, I gave up on ever quaffing its amber goodness again. Then two days before I returned home to Ireland, it magically appeared in one of our local Irish bars, but by that stage I had lost the taste for it. I never touched the stuff again.

I mention this anecdote here because, in a rain on your wedding day moment of irony, Mountain Dew finally arrived in Ireland while I was in hospital for pancreatitis. That would be the pancreatitis that has forcibly removed both caffeine and carbonated beverages from my diet for at least the next six months, if not forever.

Poo.

I am unable therefore to tell you how the taste compares to the real thing, but a quick glance at the ingredients shows a distinct lack of either high fructose corn syrup or brominated vegetable oil. It almost sounds healthy. Except for children and pregnant women, neither of whom are advised to drink it. Yes, Irish Mountain Dew comes with a health warning.

That makes me want it even more.

Damn you Pancreas, damn you all to hell!

Now available in wireless

Today, three months to the day that this whole pancreatitis mess kicked off, I was released from hospital after an altogether rather successful surgery. Everything happened the way it was meant to, no alarms and no surprises, followed by four days under intense observation in the High Dependency Unit and a further week of recovery back on the ward. Over the weekend they removed the last of the tubes, wires, cannulae and other assorted intrusive devices from my body and for the first time in over two months I was officially wire-free. Three days of no pain-killers and a general (if episodic) confirmation of motion in the intestines was all the green-light the doctors needed to send me home, and so here I am, foot-loose and fancy-free.

I'm still quite sore if I move too much, or in an direction other than robotically forward at a snail's pace, but progress is progress. Given that I crossed over the 10 stone barrier the wrong way (now hovering around 60.9 kilos, not great for someone who is 6' tall) the first priority of the day is to try and put some weight back on, for which my surgeon helpfully suggested Mars bars and chocolate biscuits (which is why he's a surgeon I imagine, and not a GP). It'll be a slow six weeks ahead of home recovery, and I'm told not to expect to be firing on full thrusters for around six months, but if all goes well the chances of this ever happening again are very slim indeed.

A huge thanks to everyone for all the thoughts and best wishes, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of it all now.