"O, My America, My New-Found Land!"

ELEGY XX. TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED. by John Donne

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy ; Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight, Is tired with standing, though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glittering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear, That th' eyes of busy fools may be stopp'd there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime Tells me from you that now it is bed-time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals. Off with your wiry coronet, and show The hairy diadems which on you do grow. Off with your hose and shoes ; then softly tread In this love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed. In such white robes heaven's angels used to be Revealed to men ; thou, angel, bring'st with thee A heaven-like Mahomet's paradise ; and though Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know By this these angels from an evil sprite ; Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.  Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below. O, my America, my new found land, My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd, My mine of precious stones, my empery ; How am I blest in thus discovering thee ! To enter in these bonds, is to be free ; Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be. Full nakedness !  All joys are due to thee ; As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be To taste whole joys.   Gems which you women use Are like Atlanta's ball cast in men's views ; That, when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem, His earthly soul might court that, not them. Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made For laymen, are all women thus array'd. Themselves are only mystic books, which we —Whom their imputed grace will dignify— Must see reveal'd.   Then, since that I may know, As liberally as to thy midwife show Thyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ; There is no penance due to innocence : To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then, What needst thou have more covering than a man?

Wellies for the Red Dirt Girl

Red Dirt Girl goes all googly eyed over  footwearhttp://throughthegate09.blogspot.com/2012/02/frivolous-friday.html. This week's exciting footwear is on her blog.... Shiny red welly-boots. Very shiny. Too shiny to wear in the steamy southern rain.

 Welsh-Walesian blogger/potter/gardener gz comments "I'd go for yellow ones!!  ("Where would you be?" The Big Yin !!)"

 And it occurred to me that the Red Dirt Girl and most of the non-brits reading would not know what the reference is about.
.  All-round larger than life scots comedian, Billy Connolly, a lovely man, had a song, about wellies. (also known as rubber boots, wellingtons, topboots, billy-boots, gumboots, gummies, barnboots, wellieboots, muckboots, sheepboots, poopkickers, or rainboots) I thought I'd post it here.
But before that, I thought I should come clean, and confess I recently bought a pair of uber-wellies myself. My job often requires me to trudge through mud water, and filth, and no matter what the advertising says, I've yet to find a leather waterproofer that works for long. So I end up with cold wet feet. I had some wonderful wellies, they were made by Nokia.
(Yes. Nokia). The phone company was an offshoot of the rubber company's cable division.
(The tyres on my car were Nokias too.) The Nokia boots weren't cheap, but they were lined with thick felt, supple and warm, with grippy soles that would take tungsten studs for grip on winter ice, and my feet would stay warm and toasty in minus twenty degrees C.
Find them here.

My new boots aren't Nokias, they're made by Scottish footwear makers Buckler.
At work I need to wear safety footwear, steel toecap and steel insole protection, in case someone drops something heavy on my poor little pinkies, or I step on timber with upward protruding nails. I've seen someone get a nail almost all the way through his foot on a demolition site. Anyway, if I buy safety footwear for work use, the company pays. I hate cheap wellingtons, they're rigid, cold, foot-chafing monstrosities, usually with no grip. I wanted comfortable warm grippy boots, and Bucklers make such a boot, the uppers are soft insulating neoprene foam, the soles are grippy...
And they're blue and fireball-orange! They're just the thing for wading through slush anf freezing mud, stomping across the field where my leather boots would be sogged in no time at all.

How'd ya like them boots, RDG?!






If it wisnae fur yer wellies where wid ye be?
ye'd be in the hospital or infirmary
cause you'd have a dose o' the flu or even pleurisy
if ye didnae have your feet in your wellies.

wellies they are wonderful
wellies they are swell,
cause they keep oot the water
and they keep in the smell.
and when you're sittin' in a room
you can always tell,
when some bugger takes off his wellys.

If it wisnae fur yer wellies where wid ye be?
you'd be in the hospital or infirmary
cause you'd have a dose o' the flu or even pleurisee
if ye didnae have your feet in your wellies.

Or when your out walkin' in the country wi' a bird
and your strollin' over fields just like a farmers herd
and somebody shouts keep aff the grass
and you think "how absurd"
and Squelch! you find why farmers all wear wellies

If it wisnae fur yer wellies where wid ye be?
you'd be in the hospital or infirmary
cause you would have a dose o' the flu or even pleurisee

there's fishermen and firemen there's farmers an all
men out diggin' ditches and workin' in the snow
this country it wid grind to a halt and no a thing wid grow
if it wisnae fur the workers in their wellies.

If it wisnae fur yer wellys where wid ye be?
you'd be in the hospital or infirmary
cause you'd have a dose o' the flu or even pleurisee
if ye didnae have your feet in yer wellys.

now MPs and the government
they hivnae made a hit
they are ruinin' this country
mair than just a bit
if they keep on the way their goin'
we'll all be in the shit....
so you better git your feet in yer wellies.

If it wisnae fur yer wellies where wid ye be?
you'd be in the hospital or infirmary
cause you would have a dose o' the flu or even pleurisee
if ye didnae have your feet in yer wellies.

But dreaming is for moonrise And moonlight ails his tired eyes

I thought we'd escape
I packed a fishing line and counted on it
I thought we'd escape
I packed a fishing line and counted on it

But dreaming is for moonrise
And moonlight ails his tired eyes

I treat him like a lady
I treat him as I would he unto me
Give Rose rose-seller a run for her money
With silicone and poetry
But it's the end of me

I thought it could change
I'd wake up one morning and find nothing to rearrange
I couldn't get there behind his wall of Sunday papers
I thought it could change
I'd wake up one morning and find nothing to rearrange

But dreaming is for moonrise
And moonlight ails his tired eyes

I treat him like a lady
I treat him as I would he unto me
Give Rose rose-seller a run for her money
With silicone and poetry
And it's the end of me

Here I am
Here I am
And here I stand
Here in my kitchen where I'm familiar with every brand
Here I am
A front line with labels where I witnessed custard's last stand
Here I am

"Bulimic Beats", from Catatonia's album "Equally Cursed and Blessed", released 1999.
The singer is Cerys Matthews.

Shakespear's Sister

It starts a bit slow... hang in there.  Splendidly gothic.

The Book of the Blog!

You read the blog, Now get the book!

Oh yes. I is an author.
Or maybe not.

The purpose of this post is not to sell the non-existent book of the blog, but to talk about the danger of losing your blog, terrifying thought. A|person very close to me has, in the past, deleted blogs and later regretted losing their content. That need not happen. There are ways to save a blog in its entirety, and a while ago, I was thinking about the 'what ifs'. What would happen if blogger deleted my blog?
Can't happen? You really think so?
It does happen, not just on blogger, for all sorts of reasons. If you google things like "blog deleted" or "can't access my blog", you'll see some scary stories.
What to do?

(Disclaimer. I'm not involved in any way with the sites mentioned, I'm just sharing what seems to me to be a useful resource. i.e., I'm not being a shill for them).
I found a handy site called Blogbooker. Works with Livejournal, Wordpress, Blogger...
It turns your blog into a pdf book, complete with pictures and comments. Okay, it doesn't include video or music, but the pdf is handy, can be read offline, or sent to a printer.


Blogbooker does the pdf conversion of your blog for free.
I won't be printing mine out, because it says there are more than sixteen hundred pages. (There are links on the site to various online printeries.)

Sixteen Hundred!! What?!

 What I recommend is that you do it to your blog(s) right now, and store the files in a couple of places. Offer to store a friend's blog, perhaps,  so it's disaster-resistant even if their house burns down or is hit by an asteroid.
Grit in the Gears blog-book pdf., from december 2006 is a 50.4 MB file.

 All the instructions, which make the process easy, are on the website.
http://blogbooker.com/

Another backup?
http://blogbackupr.com/
I can't speak for this one, I have not tried it  yet.

That's it. Ask yourself, "Would I be upset if my blog and all I uploaded to it was lost forever?",
If the answer is yes, then save it, back it up to your own hard drive and/or a friends.
Good Luck, Bloggers.

Aurora Borealis, The Icy Sky at Night,

I should point out, for the benefit of those, the majority of my readers, I'd guess, who have not yet had the good fortune to see the aurora, that all of the clips below are significantly faster than real-time. The gunuine artice is usually gentler and lazier in its movements. Look at these as the auroral equivalent of speeded-up cloud sequences. This year's solar activity promises strong likelihood of the Auroras being seen from far beyond their usual latitudes.
Let's hope we all get a chance to see them.

The Great Anti-Pode Conspiracy

I'll bet you all think I'm too lazy to write a proper blogpost?
Well, you're wrong, so wrong wrong wrong. Truth is I write dozens, hundreds, dozdreds even, that never get posted. "But how can that be?" I hear you ask, wonderingly.
Well, it's just that I write them in my head in the shower, in the kitchen, whilst driving to work, whilst at work etc. And of course, in bed, whilst not sleeping.
What happens to them?
Bzzzzzt! gone.
They exist for a short while, then get overwritten by my memory, or just fade away. Either way, when I do get to the keyboard I stare at it blankly and can't remember the extremely clever things I wrote in my head a few hours before. Anyway, the Red Dirt Girl has chastised me for not writing, whilst leaving blogpost sized comments elsewhere. That's part of it... I'm better when triggered by somebody else's topic. That's of no importance today, because we are going to reveal the antipodean heresy.

Anti = Opposing
Podes = Feet

It's all about where is the opposite side of the planet. Any kid in England, knows, (KNOWS!) that if you dig a hole straight down and keep digging long enough, you'll find kangaroos, because directly below our feet, through the centre of the earth, is Australia. Any American kid will tell you that if you dig deep enough, you'll come out in China.
And these beliefs follow us toward  adulthood. I, of course, being inquisitive, questioned my geography teacher, who told me it would be New Zealand.

"Yonde in Ethiopia ben the Antipodes, men that haue theyr fete ayenst our fete." ["De Proprietatibus Rerum Bartholomeus Anglicus," translated by John of Trevisa, 1398]

Bartolomeus Anglicus, "Bartholomew of England", as translated by John of Trevisa was an early conspirator in the whole antipodean thing. Back in the thirteenth century, the luxury of google earth was not available to learned scholars, possibly because there was no electricity to run their laptops.



Also, there was not really a great set of world maps, or even globes, being that:

1. Although some people had figured out that the world was indeed round, it was somewhat unwise to say this, as most people, especially the ones who could have you beheaded, or boiled in oil, believed otherwise.
2. Most of the putatively globe-shaped earth was as yet unknown (to those in europe, where Bartolomeus was writing). I suppose the people living in the "undiscovered" bits had no great difficulty in believing they existed.
3. Not a lot of people felt the need for maps, as they weren't going to go beyond the horizon during their entire lifetime.
4. Most of the maps then existent were pretty much based on guesswork anyway.

So, it's no wonder that Bart gets it wrong when he thinks that on the opposite side of the globe to his feet are the Ethiopian's. Bartolomeus was english, though he wrote his book at Magdeburg, in Saxony. 

But no matter. Not even if you take on board the concept that Ethiopia was not, to a mediaeval person, the country it now is, in north east africa, oh no. Ethiopia was the whole dark mysterious continent we now call Africa.

Thing is, if you dig from Magdeburg, you don't come out anywhere near africa.

But that's the point. If you dig from America, you won't come out anywhere near China.
Nor does will any English kid ever meet kangaroos tumbling into the tunnel.
Nor Kiwis.

The truth is, both kids, if kids could really dig for 7,296 miles through the earth, through rock, magma, molten iron, all of that, both would drown instantly as their shovels pierced the seabed above their heads.
Have you ever thought of the logistics? How your little sister would have to haul each bucket of earth on the world's longest rope, and tip the bucket out before lowering it for the next shovelful?



So, how can you know where are your antipodes?
I puzzled about it whilst brushing my teeth, and dental floss gave me the answer. If you have enough dental floss, and know the earth's circumference....
Well, if you have a globe, and enough dental floss to circle it at the equator, then halve the resultant piece, then, if you stretch that floss tight, holding one end at a spot equivalent to your current location, the other end is at exactly the opposite spot on the sphere. To do this in full scale you'll need half of 24,901 miles, or 12,450.5 miles.
(But you might need to adjust for mountains...)

It gets more difficult.. The earth is not a perfect sphere. It's more of an oblate spheroid, but not even precisely one of those. In fact, there is only one word that gets it perfectly right, it's a geoid.
Nobody can argue with that because the definition of geoid is 'earth-shaped'.
I like that. Perfect... "What shape is the earth?"  "It's earth-shaped!".


Oh. And if you did have a hole all the way through the planet, clear and unobstructed, and filled with only a vacuum,  (no friction) and you stepping into into it, in your space-suit with air supply and ipod, how long do you think it would take you to free-fall to terminal velocity, and rise, decelerating until you arrive at your antipodal point?

Answer in the comments.
(in a vacuum, you'd rise to the opposite of your start position, then return, if there was no friction, you'd do this forever, a perfect pendulum... What do we remember about pendulums? (pendula) Ah. Equal time per arc.
(The earth's spin, and all forces other than the earth's gravity, are imagined to have no effect on your straight-line path.)

no, I don't expect you to calculate it, I certainly couldn't and I'm not expecting that any of my readers will be physicists and rocket-scientists.
But I'm told that there is a calculated result and it's nowhere near what I'd have guessed.


Is that enough? my poor typing finger hurts.

Aurora Borealis

This week, in my neck of the woods, northern england. This photograph was taken at Dunstanburgh, Northumberland, others can be seen here: (Daily Mail).

The Tan Hill Inn is the highest (altitude) pub in England, a lonely moorland pub, apparently there for no reason- it has no neighbours at all. But it was once a welcome stopping place where the tracks of cattle and sheep drovers crossed, where pack-horse trains rested. This week, it was a perfect place for viewing the aurora- (see the pic in the link).
About 80 miles north of me. Tonight, and last night, the sky's too cloudy. And I live within the urban sprawl of streetlights.