Old Pictures Prompted By A Morning’s Frost
A sepia dawn reveals
a two-tone world,
surrendering colour to
frost’s brush,
reminding us of
long ago, of men in
hats with scythes
and Threshing Bees.
A cruel cold heralds
a quiet kill,
testifying intent with
frost’s knife,
reminding us of
long ago, of men in
helms with guns
and Yellow Legs.
I stumbled across this video on the Internet. There’s something strangely hypnotic about the way these ants work – and bearing in mind their size it seems all quite incredible.
It may sound like Day of the Triffids in reverse, but it might just be that mushrooms are about to save the planet.
Bloomberg Business Week reports on the work of Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre and the innovative work on plastic substitutes that they have been doing with mushroom fibres:
It starts with a mash of corn stalks and vegetable husks impregnated with mushroom spores. The fungus eats the plant nutrients, then grows a complex root network that fills the shapes of the molds. The final product is a foam that looks something like a big wafer of nougat candy. It is placed in an oven to stop the spores from growing and to give the material the proper texture, hardness, and elasticity.
“The products literally grow themselves. In the dark. With little to no human contact,” says McIntyre. Each mold can be treated to create a material with different qualities. Home insulation must be fire-retardant and energy efficient; cabinets have to be sturdy; a car dashboard or bumper has to be strong but with give.”
And to get rid of it?
Simply throw it on the compost heap and it is gone in weeks.
The reason this is so important?
Polystyrene is non-biodegradable and so takes hundreds of years to disappear. The blowing agents that are used to expand it can be highly flammable. Some versions of it are made with hydrofluorocarbons that are over a thousand times more potent in terms of global warming potential than carbon dioxide. It is also regularly excluded from recycling services as it is uneconomical to collect and compact (due to its lack of density versus the space it occupies).
The company behind the mushroom fibre revolution, Ecovative Design, has just signed a deal with the packaging behemoth Sealed Air, the company responsible for Bubble Wrap and Cryovac. Both Dell and Steelcase are already using the material for packaging and it promises a biodegradable revolution in how we ship stuff.
I wonder if this is something that the impressive Centre for Process Innovation should pick up here in the UK? They are the increasingly impressive outfit based in Redcar. In their own words:
“CPI helps companies to prove and scale up processes to manufacture new products and create more sustainable, efficient and economic industries of the future.”
There is some real talent out there in the British economy, particularly in the emerging green and high-tech industries. A UK angle on this would help boost manufacturing, jobs and the wider economy, whilst at the same time helping to tackle the huge waste problem there is with packaging.
Spending day in and day out behind a desk in the centre of London, it is easy to forget what an extraordinary, strange and beautiful place the world is.
in 2000, miners in Mexico, two brothers, were excavating a new tunnel in Naica, Mexico when they stumbled across what is perhaps one of the most beautifully strange places on Earth – the Cave of the Crystals. At first glance, as this great piece on the website Earth says, it wouldn’t look out place on Superman’s Planet Krypton.
Built on an ancient fault line, the cave’s space had once been filled with water, rich in minerals, that had been heated by magma and that maintained a stable temperature for nearly half a million years, allowing gigantic crystals to form.
Since 2000, several other chambers have been found, filled with these crystals, and now accessible due to the mining company constantly keeping the water pumped out.
Looking at this, it makes me wonder what we might find in the earth beneath our feet.
I’ve always liked cats.
I’m a fan of dogs, of course, but cats just do it for me with that slightly snide cunning, that sense that they really are the sharpest tools in the box. In that spirit, meet Kido – a very cool cat who plays a shell game and wins every time.
That said, I think mine would rip my throat out if I tried to get him to perform on camera…
I often wonder in more generous moments if the colossal indifference we, as a society, show the homeless – particularly those forced to scavenge an existence from the streets – is because of the fear we experience in recognising that there is the finest line between the life we live and the life we could live if just one or two things changed.
We often fail to see the human being, with hopes, dreams and aspirations that now ekes out an existence on our streets. Somehow he or she is less than human. And sometimes we see the most violent reaction to a person asking for coin to survive. There is an automatic assumption that they are a scrounger or criminal, that they want the money for drink or drugs (and if they do, that in and of itself is a reason not to give them money). We are more comfortable with attaching a label.
I have struggled to reconcile street living with the values of a civilised society.
I still can’t make it fit.
The Beggar Girl
She appals and disgusts,
this beggar girl,
croaking and coughing
down on the pavement,
thin fingers
groping from her
nicotine threads,
a skin-sack of bones,
heaped in her corner,
trolling our evenings for
pity and silver.
She angers and provokes,this beggar girl,
shaking and stinking
down on the pavement,
sunken eyes
searching from her
spit-stained hood,
like piss holes in snow,
dead in her skull,
jabbing our consciences with
hunger and shivers.
She defies and disturbs,this beggar girl,
whining and weeping
down on the pavement,
once alive –
dancing with her
sister and friends,
swimming in an ocean,
eating floss in the wind,
imagining her future of
chances and lovers.
She confronts and questions,this beggar girl,
pleading and praying
down on the pavement,
now dying –
tiring from our
fearful silence,
forgiving embarrassment,
appealing for release,
grasping her moments of
softness and giving.
A Cold Night
This night is bitter –
like you.
With your words cracked
like ice.
With your smile sharp
like glass.
Ink and songs
like camphor.
I warm myself –despite you.
With my tears spilled
like wine.
With my sighs soft
like rain.
Blood and dreams
like apples.
We often grumble about the potholes that seem to appear overnight. Water freezes into ice, placing stress on an already cracked pavement or road, and the chunks of surface between the cracks are dislodged. Rain washes away more and more and before long we realise that what was once just a small depression is now a ruddy great hole, in danger of ruining our bikes and cars. (Those – usually Lib Dems – with a greater than normal interest in them can read more about potholes.)
In some parts of the world, however, the potholes that vex County Councils and insurers across the country pale into insignificance. Sinkholes are of a very different order of magnitude. Once again, there is an interaction between water and minerals, but the result is of a wholly different order of magnitude.
One of the most shocking stories in recent years comes from Guatemala. For weeks local residents in Guatemala City had heard rumblings and had no idea what was causing them. Then, suddenly, in February 2007, the ground suddenly fell away 30 stories almost instantly. It is quite breath-taking, both in its geometry and scale, two dying and a thousand being evacuated.
I can’t imagine it. Going to bed one night, everything as you expect it, the next day seeing a hole in your back garden hundreds of feet deep. Somehow, we develop a sense that nature changes slowly. Sinkholes join earthquakes and other “sudden change” phenomena that somehow seem unnatural.
Guatemala City
In Venezuela, there is a flat-topped mountain which is punctuated with the Sarisariñama holes, four sinkholes that are particularly beautiful to look at. Each is a self-contained eco-system, some supporting species found nowhere else on Earth.
The largest sinkhole is in Egypt, where the mindbogglingly large Qattara Depression is 80km wide by 120 km long. Unlike the Sarisariñama, the Qattara Depression is completely lifeless.
For more information, the Sinkhole Report logs new sinkholes in urban and natural settings. Below is a gallery of these strange, beautiful but terrifying phenomena.
And finally, and judging by its record with Essex potholes, I hope Essex County Council doesn’t have to deal with one of these any time soon.
I don’t drive but am fairly confident that, if I did, I would avoid this particular mistake. Even with a GPS…
Flanders News reports the rather amusing/alarming/entertaining case of a Belgian who, wanting to drive to Brussels, programmed her GPS and ended up in Zagreb:
The woman identified by Het Nieuwsblad as the 67-year-old Sabine Moureau told the paper: “I was absent-minded so I kept on putting my foot down.”
Sabine started her journey in Erquelinnes on the morning of last Saturday week. “I was going to pick up my friend in the Brussels North Station” she told the paper.
The journey should have taken just over an hour, but she ended up 1,450 km from her starting point.
Sabine continues her tale: “I switched on the GPS and punched in the address. Then I started out. My GPS seemed a bit wonky. It sent me on several diversions and that’s where it must have gone wrong.”
“I saw tons of different signposts, first in French, later in German, but I kept on driving.”
Sabine had to fill up twice and slept a few hours by the wayside, but claims she never really caught on to the fact that she might be on the wrong track.
“It was only when I ended up in Zagreb that I realised I was no longer in Belgium.”
Oops!
According to the last census (2011), there were still 176, 632 Jedi Knights in the United Kingdom. As the Guardian reported, that represented a significant decline on 2001 when around 300,000 Jedi Knights were keeping us safe from The Empire (coincidentally, George Bush was US President from 2001 to 2009), but they are still a force to be reckoned with. And thankfully, we are not in Star Wars: Episode IV “A New Hope” territory yet.
Hopefully, the ranks of aspiring Luke Skywalkers will be emboldened by the latest announcement from the White House. In responding officially to a petition on the White House website calling for America to build a Death Star, Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, offered this formal response:
“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:
- The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
- The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
- Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?”
The geopolitical ramifications of building a Death Star aside, Shawcross is quite right to remind folks that actually it wasn’t exactly a masterpiece of robust design. Perhaps a little more worryingly it shows just how deeply imprinted Star Wars is on the American psyche. But let’s not go there!
Anyone wanting a little light relief and some reassurance that, just occasionally, government officials do have a sense of humour, should read his full response.
Fragments and Reflections 
