Monday, February 27, 2012

Traveling houses - February 27, 2012

A walk around the park—Anya was rambunctious, which is unusual for her first thing in the morning—and then half an hour with her in the dog park before picking up Daniel from school. It was high 20°s F, a little breezy. Pleasant and bright. We're bracing for a pretty decent storm tomorrow which may be mostly slush, or might be a bunch of snow. We won't know for sure until tomorrow.

One of my morris team is leaving for a term in Denmark. We'll see if he can get out of Minneapolis Wednesday morning.

I've talked in general terms about the extension of the indoors into automobiles and the like, and this is a feature of 20th Century America. We talk about the "Road culture" but Americans have been traveling since before they were Americans. And really even the invention of an indoors on wheels is older than the car with heating and a sound system. For a real mobile indoors, consider rail travel in the days of the Pullman Car.

If you go back even further, consider the passengers quarters in the finer ships of the line, going back... how far? We think to day of the grand age of ocean liners, from the late 19th Century on past World War II, but there were finely furnished cabins in the days of regular travel to India. Not luxe like the Titanic, but still comfortably turned out.

Did these sorts of fittings correspond with the more regular passage of well-to-do women? I wonder. Or perhaps with a more general rise in comfort as a marketable value in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: more cushions, less hard wood pews...


Sunday, February 26, 2012

Arctic clothing... Feburary 26, 2012

It was a bit blustery, but basically comfortable. The higher-up-in-the-sky sun really makes a difference I can feel. I didn't spend all that much time outside, really. And we are supposed to get Serious Weather on Tuesday and Wednesday. Could be freezing rain, could be sleet, could be snow, could be an entertaining mixture of all three. But it will definitely give me more to write about...

I've started into the book Arctic Clothing, and so far interesting. Also interesting that the history of the fur is so focused on the acquisition end and so little on the consumption end. This interesting, if scantily referenced, article from History Today gives some helpful hints, but I'm really curious about the marketing and sales of furs, especially in Europe, when North America was being stripped clean of beavers and other fur-bearers, from the 17th century on. Not to mention Siberia.

One interesting piece so far is that while fur in Euro-American society carries imputations of status, in Arctic societies it is more about connection: the people who hunt the animals are the ones who wear them, and so they develop a more intimate personal and even spiritual relationship with them. I trust this theme will be explored further as we go on to narratives by native Arctic folk.

Why am I so interested in Inuit clothing? Well, a lot of how we dress ourselves for warmth today comes from Inuit models: mukluks, parkas and anoraks are all Inuit terms, even if the forms of modern garments bear only passing resemblance to their hand-sewn animal-skin ancestors. I'm really curious to know more about those original forms, and see if we can find more than formal relationships.


Saturday, February 25, 2012

Other peoples' fur - February 25, 2012

Solar radiation feels good. It wasn't all that warm this morning, but each time I took Anya out for a walk in the sunshine—and she had digestive difficulties today so I took several walks with her. Poor girl.

We went over to the John Rose Oval, the Twin Cities' speed-skating track, which had open skating, which Ingrid and Daniel took advantage of, while our friend Dave and I stood on the sidelines and talked politics.

I've given up on Fur Fortune and Empire. Not that it's a bad book; I was enjoying it muchly, and it does give a pretty fair picture of the fur trade in America, which had a much bigger impact on the trajectory of US territorial history than we give it credit for. History is written by the settlers and their decendants, not by the descendants of traders who exploited a quickly-depleted resource. The book is a welcome remediation this gap.

No, the book's problem for me is that it loses sight of the market for fur. I really wanted to know who was wearing furs, and especially how this changed over time. There are hints of this: beaver hats, for example, which are made from felted beaver fur, not from "furs" as we generally think of them (fur-on hides), were a high-end bourgeouis commodity, rather than a mark of actual aristocracy like ermine. I didn't stick around for the emergence of buffalo robes as a common American warmth-provider, but I do know it was far from a luxury item—Almonzo Wilder has one in his sleigh to keep Laura Ingalls warm as he takes her home from her teaching job through frigid cold and blizzardy winds.

But of course the buffalo herds were exhausted in a matter of decades between the introduction of the railroads through the high plains and the turn of the century. The buffalo robe as an everyday source of warmth probably didn't go out of fashion as much as simply go out of stock.

This is the kind of thing I want to know more about. Maybe a history of fur as fashion.

I have three other books now sitting waiting for me to read them for this blog. Two are social histories of alcohol, and one is a series of papers from a conference ten years ago at the British Museum, on Arctic clothing, especially from the American Arctic. Given how much of our contemporary winter outerwear owes its form to Inuit clothing, this latter should be very interesting stuff.

Finally, I'd like to look a little at the development of modern thinking about building insulation.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Silent snow, long night - February 23, 2012

No snow this morning, and today it apparently all went south. Well, no new snow. I took Anya for her usual rounds around the park at school, walked to work, and then Ingrid and I took her to the dog park together.

Snow, unilike all other forms of precipitation, is silent. It is not just silent in its fall, It's also silencing when it sits on the ground, especially when it's fresh and full of air pockets. Kevin Pollard has a useful summary of the silent qualities of snow on his blog, and the US Army has investigated the muffling qualities of snow (useful to know if you use acoustics to analyze, for example, gunshot noise). Old packed snow, and snow piled alongside cleared roads and sidewalks, isn't nearly as muffling.

Winter seems like a damper on all the senses. I've long noticed that spring in Minnesota is when you can smell things again... maybe this is why it's seemed so springlike of late. Apparently snow can dampen dogs sense of smell (tell that to Anya). And of course it's darker.

No wonder depression is often exacerbated by wintertime.

One of the points of this blog has been that in making an indoor world, especially in times of heat and cold, we've taken ourselves out of the seasonal cycles. We have lessened their effects on us. I was very interested to see this article this morning, in which researchers discovered it was normal, up until artificial light made "staying up" more normal, to have two stretches of sleep in a night, with a waking period between. I expect that seasonally—in winter—this would have been even more pronounced...

Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap...

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Sleep with the cows - February 22, 2012

Another warm day, started sunny and bright but bands of threatening clouds started gathering in the afternoon, and we had flurries in the evening. I took Anya around the park at school, and to the dog park at 1pm. Still a fair amount of snow on the ground. We may have more by tomorrow morning.

As I write, Anya is curled up on my son's bed. She will wander in and out through the night, and probably spend a part of tomorrow there. This is not the same as, say, sleeping in a stable, but Anya makes a wonderful security blanket. Small wonder that J.M. Barrie picked a St Bernard to be the nanny for the children in Peter Pan.

We tend to think of house and barn as very separate spaces, and even when it is very cold it somehow seems uncivilized to sleep with farm animals (I'm thinking here of the Ingall's family's Long Winter... Why did they persist in keeping the horse in the barn? Why not have them all sleep together? Livestock give off a lot of heat... there's a history of houses somewhere with barn below and human quarters above: fragrant, but warm. Somewhere in Germany... can't put my finger on it now.

Kind of gives one pause, thinking about heating options, doesn't it? If my son can sleep with a St Bernard, why can't we sleep with the cows?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Survivable norms - February 21. 2012

As predicted, what fell last night (a respectable 1 to 1.5 inches) melted off most streets today. I walked Anya at school this morning (after creeping behind an SUV that was litterally sliding up to the curve), then holed up in the office. I didn't pay that much attention to the weather or road conditions, because I didn't have to.

I've been editing a map of New Orleans this last few days, getting down in detail what restaurants are open and closed. The last time I updated it was still very much in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and when I went down for the initial fieldwork it was only a year after the storm hit. There was still a lot of wreckage and boarded up buildings, including a number of downtown hotels and other buildings that simply weren't open yet.

They don't get hardly any snow in New Orleans. The average low in January is 43°F, and in my lifetime (since 1965), now has fallen three times: 1989, 2004 and 2008. A seriously cold snap there is not quite as bad as the one killing the iguanas and pythons in South Florida, but I'm sure it does put a crimp in things.

We build for comfort in normal times, with a fallback to survival in worst imaginable times. And we base these two standards on what we know from experience (ours or others) or by comparison. This doesn't always work out—I think of the poor Lewis and Clark expedition, direly unprepared for a winter of near-constant rain at Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon. Of course, they hadn't built up much of a civilizational groundwork under them either. But imagine a really extreme cold aberration in New Orleans, like a month below freezing and a week below zero—a "normal" winter in Minnesota. It would be a disaster with lots of deaths. Not to mention a terrible environmental and agricultural toll.

Which is part of what makes things like nuclear winter or oversize tsunamis or volcanic eruptions so terrifying to consider: they are beyond the survivable limits we have built our civilization on.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Timing - February 20, 2012

We Have Weather! Finally, a little snow is falling—wet, gloppy snow. Slushy, spring snow. But I'm told that yet another unseasonable week will end with a dash of January as we get down near or below zero... for a moment.

Anya is a little under the weather. She didn't get up until I was gone for the morning, and Ingrid took her out around 10:30 for a stroll. When I took her for a trip to the dog park, she pooped out and looked longingly at the gate after only 15 minutes. I took her home.

What a difference having a warmer road base makes. The roads tonight, driving back home through the snow, were just fine. All slush, even where the plows haven't salted or done anything else. Before tonight, we've had a bunch of light wet snowfalls on cold roads, which result in slipperiness all out of proportion to the modesty of the precipitation.

The winter of 2009-2010, we had a wet snowfall followed by a fast, bitter freeze. Minneapolis got out in front of plowing immediately, while St Paul's plowing began about 12 hours later. The result? St Paul had an inch or more of ice, which itself developed pot holes, and the whole rutted, bumpy mess lasted until the ice finally melted in March. Minneapolis had normal, snowy, not-too-bad streets.

Timing, the secret to comedy and any number of other things... including street plowing. Cities get this, and the big snow cities are not offering online real-time tracking of plows: see Chicago and New York.




Sunday, February 19, 2012

More fur - February 19, 2012

Another missed post yesterday. We had a long day, while Anya played at doggie day care: lunch in Northfield, a baby shower, dinner with friends in Farmington, and (for us) a fair amount of driving. We all went to bed pretty early. And Anya had a fine time with her doggy buddies by all accounts.

That was yesterday. Today (which was up in the 40°Fs), I took her for a couple walks and a session at the dog park. It really is early spring. Trees are starting to pre-bud. Woodpeckers are starting to woodpeck. It's an odd year, but likely a presage of things to come...

I've begun reading Fur, Fortune and Empire, a history of the fur trade in North America. It's very well written, and makes a compelling case for the fur trade as a driving force (and sometimes the driving force) behind American political and economic life for the first couple hundred years of English, French and Dutch settlement.

What isn't covered is the use of furs in clothing, except in passing, when it is noted that prior to European exploitation of North American fur resources, furs (especially the warmest furs) were restricted to royalty... presumably this does not apply to those in the coldest reaches of Scandinavia and the Russian north, but it makes the point that fur was often as much for show as it was for practical warmth.

It appears that, for example, Norse Greenlanders did not apparently adopt the fur-based clothing of Inuit they came in contact with (Shackleton and other European arctic explorers made the sad mistake of not doing so, while Amundsen and others did to their profit).

Fur is wonderful stuff for staying warm in the arctic:
Whilst fur may lack waterproof properties, sea mammal gut and fish skin are extremely waterproof and were used to make coats, anoraks, parkas and boots. These can be combined with fur to keep the wearer warm and dry. Certain stitches also work well to keep garments waterproof - seams are made without piercing all layers of the material so that water cannot penetrate. Sinew is used for sewing and will swell when wet, closing any holes in the seams. - Scott Polar Research Institute
And it's really wonderful stuff for warmth where it is beastly cold. For all that PETA rails against fur as murder—and fur does mean the death of animals, whether you think of that as murder or not—nothing we've come up with in our human-made world of fibers can beat fur for warmth. And why should it? We've been making our own fibers for less than 100 years, and animals have been evolving fur for hundreds of millions of years. See (for example) one dogsledder's advice on dressing for -80°F.

And I have one piece of evidence: Ingrid's inside-out-sheepskin (shearling) coat. It is the warmest thing we own. And the mittens we had made when she cut down its length a few years ago were amazing too.

But... This assumes you want ONE warm item. Polar and high-altitude expeditions tend to dress in layer-upon-layer of less warm but cumulatively just-as-warm material: wool, fleece, waterproof, silk, etc. So in the 21st century, when you really are hiking across Baffin Island in January, it may be that fur, even there, has a competitor.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Shackleton's clothes - February 17, 2012

It really is feeling a lot like spring. I know I keep saying that but when you spend a mid-February day without a hat on, and wearing your less-than-a-parka coat, well... it feels like the early end of spring. I walked Anya this morning and again tonight.

We'll get more snow, I'm sure, but we're getting as much sunlight now as we did a just before Halloween. Now hang on, I thought the "cross quarters" were around the first of the month. Groundhogs Day/Candlemas. And we're 2 weeks past that now. Well, 365 day/4 = 91.25 days in a season, or about 46 in a half-season. 46 days after December 21 is February 4. So we split the difference....

We (Daniel and I) went to see the Omnitheater movie about Ernest Shackleton and his heroic resolution of the disastrous expedition to Antarctica. I won't repeat the story: go read one of the great books about it if you don't know the story. It was a good movie, better than the usual MacGillivray Freeman bombast (and we saw the MacGillivray Freeman cave movie right after, and that was filled with bombast. Whatever).

The story of the Shackleton Expedition tends to be told with a lot of quite true emphasis on morale and the human spirit. It is an amazing story. But as I've been reading and writing about winter clothes, I wondered: did Shackleton dress his expedition better than, for example, Robert Falcon Scott, whose expedition perished only a couple years previously. The comparisons between Scott and the simultaneous (and successful) Amundsen expedition have been examined in detail (nice summary here), and one of the elements is that Scott dressed his party in waterproof outers and wool, while Amundsen dressed his party in furs.

What about Shackleton? a few years later, as he was involved in an operation against newly Bolshevik Russia,
Shackleton's official job description was "Staff officer in charge of Arctic equipment". In all actuality, he was a glorified storekeeper. He had done most of his work in London and the outfits he now provided were doubtful; his own expeditions had been struggles against poorly designed equipment and clothing. The American troops in the region discarded the Shackleton clothing and boots and reverted to their own. -from South-Pole.com, by the American Society of Polar Philatelists
And this article on changing polar-expedition clothing patterns (which is fascinating in itself) says Shackleton had the same bad judgment during the 1900-1904 Antarctic expedition. (really a great reference to stumble across: nice section on Inuit clothing, and even a bibliography).

Shackleton's own 1920 book on the expedition, South, doesn't seem to talk about clothing details at all, that I can tell, though it is a good read.

The question remains: what were Shackleton and his men wearing, and how did they all survive in it?

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Indoor smog - February 16, 2012

More of the same, with sun. I walked Anya in the park at Daniel's school, and again at home. It really is odd, it feels like mid-March, not like mid-February. I expect budding out will be early this year. Anya has so many interesting things to smell in the dirt and piles of dead leaves, she really doesn't want to come back inside when we're done walking.

I spent most of the day at my desk, and sometime around 3, I smelled a whiff of what I at first thought was spray-on adhesive. It kept getting stronger (oddly, I couldn't smell it elsewhere in the office). I checked upstairs, and then I went downstairs, and found some folks spray-painting, at least 50-60 feet away in the big open space under our office. Why it was only really leaking up into my space I don't know, but they opened windows and I put the fan on and opened windows and the chemical dispersed.

So much of our attention on air pollution comes from outdoor sources. As I noted a few days ago, it's really the indoor pollution that has ended up killing more people—and even more so, the direct sucking of tobacco smoke into the lungs. When toxins are in the air and that air can't disperse, that's when things get deadly.

And yet, when air quality is bad, people are "advised to stay indoors." Why is that? Perhaps the ways outdoor air enters most houses, filters out larger particulate. But that wouldn't affect ozone, or CO, or other gaseous pollutants. Maybe its just so less exercise will put less stress on the lungs.

How much indoor air pollution is particulate (smoke) and how much is gaseous (chemicals)? This article ties mostly particulate pollution to COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder), and a variety of other lung health issues. Radon is a known gas pollutant, so are VOCs from drying paint (is that what I smell from the spraypaint downstairs?). There's a decent summary here, which does focus less on particulate pollution.

One of the things The Big Smoke noted was that once the smoky coal-burning was largely eliminated in London, then people began to experience photochemical smog, like ones found in Los Angeles. By blocking sunlight, the cloud of smoke had prevented the sunlight-activated "chemical reaction of sunlight, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which leaves airborne particles and ground-level ozone." That's what wikipedia says about photochemical smog, anyway.

What I'm wondering is, once we got rid of all the smoky fireplaces and ashtrays and obvious particulate pollution sources that used to fill most indoor spaces, were we still essentially setting ourselves up for trouble? Is there the indoor equivalent of photochemical smog?

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Extremes - February 15, 2012

Another day, another light sprinkling of snow, another hover right around freezing. Another quick stroll in the park; Ingrid reports there was a spirited romp in the park.

And I spent a chunk of the day editing a map of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Not walking around it, mind you. Just writing about it from afar. Not fair.

I write about living in the weather here in Minnesota, and I know the really long cold winter is not what most of the rest of the country experiences. There's a lot of the country where enclosed malls don't make any sense for either summer or winter: coastal California, and Hawaii, for example. But the deserts as far south as New Mexico can get pretty cold at night, and there's frost in Florida sometimes. And whatever the weather extremes, that's when you really want good shelter.

We don't need to build shelter for the average days. It's the extremes that end up delineating survivability for any species (just ask the iguanas dropping from the trees in a recent Florida freeze). Perhaps this explains the ultimate failure of the Greenland Viking settlement: it was marginal, and then it fell under the margin.

Here's why I think this is an important point: When we talk about climate, we are talking about averages. But when we're talking about survivability, it's the extremes that end up determining the edge of any species' territory, including ours. It's not the average ground-shaking that determines whether a building is built strong enough for an earthquake zone, it's the 60 seconds of shaking in the maximum event that area will experience. It's not whether you can survive an average winter that determines if settlement is viable, it's whether you can survive the worst winter of your life there. Because if you can't, it will also be the last winter of your life.

They make headlines—they feel like hysteria-inducing, exclamation-point-ridden, excessively-hyped events—but weather extremes ultimately determine what and who will survive in any given place.


Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The wash - February 14, 2012

There was still snow this morning, but it melted by the time I took Anya to the dog park at 2, and then another dusting came tonight while I was at dance practice. The temperature floated on either side of freezing, and it was overcast.

One of the signal changes in America (and the rest of the industrialized West) over the last 150 years, is the mechanization of basic home processes: laundry and dish washing, bathing, and on a more fundamental level, the heating of water. How many cold-water walkups are there still? What percentage of Americans do not have access to hot water from a tap? There are certainly still a fair number, but a growing proportion of those live intentionally.

The results are phenomenal, especially in the lives of women. Even if you don't have a washing machine, how many people wash their washing by hand, instead of going to the laundromat? Just live everyone should have the experience of doing dishes, everyone just once should try washing a load of laundry using a washboard. It's bloody hard work, and hard on your hands. In winter it's cramped, cold work.

It's kind of funny now to hear folks with environmental concerns trying to get people to give up the use of dryers. I mean, yes, they have a point. But for people who work their bottoms off day in, day out, not having to hang out the laundry every day and then take it in again, is a godsend.

I think, though I have no evidence to prove this, that the presence of washing machines also means we wash things more frequently. It takes less dirt to throw something in the wash, if it takes little of our work to clean it. When I discussed the rise of the hairwash over the last century earlier, I noted what a production early shampoo regimes were. Same holds true for body washing: when a bath involved heating kettles of water, even if you believed in bathing, it was a big production. And the same definitely holds true for clothing.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Suburbs and offices - February 13, 2012

Took Anya out for a walk in the park with Ingrid this morning, then to the dog park in the afternoon. It was more of the same: a little cold, no snow, just drab cold. Then it snowed. Not a lot, but it is nice to have a bit of white on the ground. Anya, I suspect, will be in heaven tomorrow.

I've been working at home a bunch lately, as Ingrid has meetings downtown. She usually works from home, but I've been finding it not entirely to my liking. I like having folks around. It's possible I get more done in an hour at home, but only if it's work that I can do efficiently on my laptop...

"The office" is a pretty new concept in social terms. There have been workshops and workplaces for a long while, but the separation of company work into entirely separate neighborhoods from residential living doesn't date back much further than sometime in the 19th century. The first office workers—clerks in trade, banking and law—worked in offices, but modest ones. Ebenezer Scrooge and his assistant Bob Cratchitt (1830's, I think) were more the norm. The really big banking houses and houses of trade required larger staffs, but the sort of large work force we think of when we think of going to work "at a coporation" didn't really get underway until the railroads and great international shipping syndicates developed between 1830 and 1860.

Well, that's my theory, anyway, based on what I can recall from scraps here and there. But no, there were office clerks, armies of them, in service to 18th century government offices. The admiralty was crawling with them. And the East India Company? The Hudson's Bay Company? Surely they had more than a handful of record-keepers and scribes.

And what of suburbs? I think of suburbs as a byproduct of office culture, though there were plenty of blue-collar suburbs too. It's the suburbs, not the offices, that really drove the separation of work and home—people wanting to live away from the stench and filth of the central city, and so, when they could afford it, making the wage-earner into a longer-distance commuter.

Now that our cities are comparatively clean, we see that situation reversing, because it really is a pain in the neck to have to travel an hour each way to earn your living. And once the film of grime on everything is removed, cities are pretty great places.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Fog (part 2) - February 12, 2012

It was crisp but very still today. A nice day to take a dog to a park. A nice day to walk the girl around the neighborhood a bit, and a nice day to misunderstand the Science Museum schedule and so to end up walking down along the Mississippi with my son for 45 minutes. Bright and clear... all that was missing from this perfect winter day was snow.

I finished The Big Smoke last night. It's essentially a history of English, and especially London, air pollution. Centuries of complaint, and only in the 1950s some real effective action. Well, not strictly true: serious fogs tapered off dramatically beginning around 1900, and were a rarity by the time of the Great Smog of 1952. But was this a result of atmospheric patterns changing, or of some change in smoke emission? Unclear.

What was clear form the narrative was the overwhelming power of inertia, even in the face of disastrous conditions. Most of the 19th century, London toiled under an ever-smokier haze: gardens withered, coughs developed (life expectancy for a city-born English child was in the high 20s in the 1830s). And no-one seemed able to do anything really effective. Part of the problem is, there was no off-the-shelf solution. Where there was, there was action—for example see the Alkili Acts, where there was simple technology which, when everyone was forced to use it, cut down on the release of hydrogen chloride from the alkili industry, around St Helens, Glasgow and Newcastle, by 99%.

Part of the issue with smoke pollution is that while the soot was a visible issue, sulfur dioxide was causing a lot of damage both to people and to the physical plant. And 19th century chemistry just wasn't up to detailed monitoring and analysis needed.

Part of it also was that it wasn't just industry. Everyone heated with coal. So, like those trying to figure out how to deal with the catastrophic effects of internal combustion engines, the solution seems impossible because it's embedded so deeply and granularly in every part of our lives. It will take a new technology, like natural gas replacing coal, to really solve the problem. If such a solution comes. If not, Miami is very wet toast.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Prehistoric curry - February 11, 2012

It was a cold one, and mostly I stayed home. I walked Anya as Ingrid and Daniel went off for a day of skating. Then I walked her in the afternoon, and finally at about 10 pm once the family had come home. In between I walked to a neighborhood restaurant for supper. I was chilly, sitting most of the day catching up on the household books, preparing for 2011 tax preparation season. The curry noodle soup was just the thing.

How long ago did people cook soup or stew? Pottery vessels were invented in east Asia during the last ice age, about 14,000 years ago. Ancient Britons were cooking nettle pudding 8000 years ago. A 4000-year old cooking pot with noodles still inside was found in China.

This is a long time after hominids began cooking food. There is disagreement, but it looks as though homo erectus was cooking food at least half a million years ago. Surely someone in all those millenia thought of heating up food in a gourd.

Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables. The Neanderthal Museum describes how food was cooked without fireproof vessels: a leather-lined depression in the ground is filled with water. Hot stones are placed in the water. It boils. Makes sense. And in ice-age climes, it must have helped keep the chill out of the bones.

I grew up thinking of Paleolithic folks as "cavemen," but really they did not live all that much in caves, and by the late Paleolithic, caves had become (at least in France and Spain) sacred spaces... hence cave drawings. Anyway, you don't want to be cooking very deep at all in most caves, as you can easily use up all the available oxygen.

No, the Paleolithic was dominated by nomadic life: what survives in terms of structures are glorified tents made of mammoth bones and skins. Cooking was probably done mostly outdoors, or maybe around a small middle-of-the-tent fire.

But I can't imagine a real modern soup or stew until hardened pottery vessels were developed, in the Neolithic. And the first curry? Still unknown... Can you imagine how they would have been received on a cold day during one of the ice ages?...


Friday, February 10, 2012

Fur - February 10, 2012

It turned markedly colder overnight. I didn't walk the dog myself this morning, but came home from dropping Daniel off at school and an early meeting, to find Ingrid out walking Anya. She also took her to the dog park this afternoon, which was good as she was very cold when she came back.

Anya doesn't seem to feel the cold. I mean, I know she has all that fur and all, but still... It's 9°F with a 12 mile per hour wind, and it's cold. And she just wants to go sniff stuff.

When Almonzo Wilder took Laura Ingalls out in his sleigh to get to her teaching job a few miles away from town, they wrapped up in buffalo robes. Fur is the stuff you need, as Anya will tell you, and if you want to know how to stay warm in a world before central heating and polarfleece, there's your answer. It's also the first great fortune-maker in North America.

The closest I've come to wearing fur (as far as I know) is the shearling (sheepskin with the fleece still attached) mittens I wore and sadly disappeared a couple years ago. Man, were those great mittens. Ingrid has a shearling jacket she got in Australia, and it too is just the thing when it gets to -10°F. Nothing like an inside-out sheep...

As PETA will tell you, though, there's not much you can do to avoid the the fact that most furs are obtained through techniques that do not do well by the animal. Friends are sending me links about a renewed campaign to end sea clubbing, and an awful lot of the links when you google word combinations with "fur" are anti-fur activist sites.

And so I will stomp out in the freezing air tomorrow and walk Anya in my nice goosedown parka, and call it good...


Thursday, February 9, 2012

The Great Defugging - February 9, 2012

We woke up this morning to fire engines racing past our house. There was apparently a minor fire two blocks down; the fire chief was still there when I walked Anya half an hour later, and he said everyone was all right.

The day was unremarkable weatherwise, except that it's the beginning of February and things were boringly back in the 40°F's, which is remarkable itself. Anya did not want to go back inside, or leave the dog park when I took her this afternoon.

Fire used to kill a lot of people. Not as many as you may think—the old story that lots of colonial women burned to death is a myth: most died of disease or childbirth. But still, with open hearth fireplaces the norm until sometime in the 19th century. Even the Franklin stove... how many of you picture a potbelly stove, or other free-standing cast-iron affair? Nope, check the link. It's essentially a modified hearth.

It's hard to imagine a world where even heating is done from a hearth, rather than a furnace-style stove (which essentially what a potbelly is: a miniature furnace), and even harder to imagine life before hearths became common, and homes were heated from an open fire in the center of the room, with a hole in the roof above. Being born in 1965, it's hard to imagine a life in smog like existed in 1950's London. I remember friends who smoked—heck, my grandfather smoked a pipe when I was kid. But the kinds of fuggy rooms, filled with incineration of one kind or another, that were the norm for aeons before the de-fugging of the last half-century (that's what it should be called, too, The Great Defugging), are now hard for me to imagine tolerating.

But one of the things we've done as we've switched to gas and electric from wood and coal is, we're burning things which leave less obvious footprints: it's the carbon dioxide, not the soot and sulfur, that we need to worry about. People don't die of their clothes catching on fire, or hack up a blackened lung from the coal smoke. But that doesn't mean we're not still burning our way to a sorry end.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Commuting statistics - February 7, 2012

It was colder this morning, taking Anya out for a walk at a little before noon, and even colder with a breeze walking home tonight, though it is nice to have it be light out at 5pm. The breeze had died down when I took her out again at 11 pm for an emergency outing—it is cold but pretty nice. The sky is clear and it's a full moon.

I really like that I can walk to and from work. It's not the same as being on an industrial-style schedule:
It's dark when I goes to work, and dark again at night
On Sundays and in summertime is when I see the light
Yes, on Sundays and in summertime I hear the small bird sing
But when you're two mile underground, you never hears a thing
—"Working on the Coalface," Dave Webber
Our house was built as housing for workers in the railyard behind us. It was an easy commute, just go through the gate beside the house and there you are. When it was built in 1890, somewhere around 42% of working Americans worked on farms, which mostly meant they lived on farms, either as farmers or as hired hands.

1890
Total Employment 23,740,000
Agriculture 9,990,000 (42%)
Manufacturing and hand trades 4,750,000
Construction 1,440,000
Transportation/Utilities 1,530,000
Trade, Finance and Real Estate 1,990,000
Service 1,500,000
Domestic service 1,520,000
Mining, forestry. fisheries 660,000
(Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Census Bureau 1976)

By contrast, in 2012, out of total employment of 139,064,000,
Farming, fishing and forestry were only 987,000 (.7%) of the population
Management, professional and related occupations were 51,743,000
Sales and office jobs were 33,433,000
Service occupatiosn were 24,634,000
Construction and mining were 7,175,000
Manufacturing ("production occupations") were 7,998,000
Transportation was 8,182,000
and "Installation Maintenance and Repair Occupations" were 4,911,000

Most people who are not stay-at-home workers have to "go to work." Nowadays, "working from home" is more likely to mean some sort of piecework or professional service from a home office, than an agricultural job.

Most of us drive to work. About the same number of us work at home as walk to work, and te number who bike is very small indeed. 40% of us commute suburb-to-suburb. All this is such a radical change in how we physically relate home to work, as to make my head hurt.

Statistical overload

Bars - February 6, 2012

It was a beautiful warm spring day, highs way up in the 40°s, and I didn' walk outside at all. And now it's too late; temperatures are going to drop today, by 15°, dropping down to 5° tonight. Back to something approximating winter.

Last night was one of two monthly sings I'm heavily involved in, both based in bars. It's funny how people in varying cultures build these spaces for social interaction, and specifically to contain consumption of intoxicants. It makes sense: if you're going to drimk/smoke opium/otherwise get high, it's best to keep it away from small children and heavy machinery. And it's also good to keep it in some sort of controlled environment where there's a gatekeeper. Not that it always works that way: barkeeps are also in the business of selling booze. But especially in social pubs, there's pressure to keep behavior relatively normal.

Hrothgar's mead-hall again comes to mind. But as you enter more moderate climes, you also get beer gardens, and terraces and piazzas where to drink wine.

I wonder how much correlation there is between bars and organized sex. Certainly in the Wild West of legend, there was a lot of overlap between bars and brothels. And Roman and Greek symposia and bacchanales shared wine and availability of women (and young men) for sex. Japanese pleasure houses whose clientele was depicted in ukiyo-e prints mixed entertainment, drink, and beautiful women.

So why bars? How did the American institution of the neighborhood bar emerge? There's an element borrowed from English pubs, of course, and the German Biergarten. There's an element in large cities of saloons erected by individual breweries to promote their own brews (also a common feature of British Isles pubs, and maybe Continental beerhalls?). There's the hotel bar, and the bar/brothel in the opening West. The speakeasy period presumably figures in, as does the continuing influence of social clubs, including ubiquitous American groups like the Elks, American Legion, VFW, etc. In Anglo-America, these spaces are indoors, with outdoor drinking being more of a German thing. What about other ethnic groups? Russians tend to have an indoor drinking culture, but in public spaces? What I've heard of it is mostly in private homes.

Another interesting line of research...

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Terror Time - February 5, 2012


It was kind of dreary, but reasonably warm day. High somewhere near 40°F. Anya walked with me down the block this morning, and then we went to the dog park for almost an hour this afternoon. There's almost no snow left on the ground, and not much prospect of any. Just February gray. Even the heavy frost is gone.

Some friends came over to sing tonight, and they brought up Ewan Macoll's "Terror Time," part of his cycle about the "traveling people" in Britain: Roma (Gypsies), tinkers, and other itinerant wanderers.
The heather will fade
And the bracken will die
Streams will run cold and clear
And the small birds will be going
And it's then you will be knowing
That the terror time is near

Whaur will ye gang
And whaur will ye bide
Nou that the wark's aa dune
An the fairmer disnae need ye
An the council winnae heed ye
An the terror time is here

The woods give no shelter
And the trees they are bare
Snow's lying all around
And the children they are crying
For the bed on which they're lying
Is frozen to the ground

When you need the warmth
Of your own human kind
You move near a town
And the sight of you's offending
And the police they soon are sending
An ye're on the road again

-Ewan Macoll, © Stormking Music, from Macoll's 1964 Radio Ballad, "The Traveling People."
 There is a kind of endless bleakness to this time of year, and a sense of winter stores beginning to not seem so endless, which we have utterly lost in our modern world. Mostly. Those who are homeless and living rough... for them this is indeed the depth of the year. I'm guessing for many, they are happy with this freakishly mild winter, and still looking forward to real warmth.

I don't think there's much more to say. Macoll said it all pretty much.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Sublime - February 4, 2012

This morning the forecast was for "freezing fog," which sounds ominous, but translates into a silvery frost on everything. And there was a light frost. Took Anya for a walk around the neighborhood where Daniel was having his tutoring, then later in the afternoon to the dog park. By then the sun had broken through into a beautiful mid-30°s day. A lovely day at the dog park, and in general.

The beauty of the most stunning winter landscapes, whether sheathed in snow or coated in frost or ice, is one of silence. Once things really begin moving in earnest, there are muddy tracks and bootprints... it's the initial, early-morning hush and the magical coating of frozen water in whatever form it takes, that makes winter landscapes so wonderful.

Maybe because of the physics definition of "sublime" (the change of state from solid directly to gas, as most widely seen in the "evaopration" of snow), I was thinking about the philosophical idea of the the "sublime." The word in common usage is about exaltedness, of a quality "above the lintel" (that's apparently the root of the word) and so out of reach. In aesthetics, it's contrasted with "beauty." The sublime has a note of fear in it's awesomeness, perhaps like the character of Aslan in C.S. Lewis' Narnia books being "not a tame lion." Both beauty and sublimity expand one's sense of the universe, but sublimity evokes a sense of one's smallness.

Severe weather can be sublime when it isn't downright horrifying. Oddly though, I think this is less true of winter weather. Blizzards just wear you down, unlike summer thunderstorms and tornadoes. Think of a Hudson-school painting of a thunderstorm... there's real drama there. In a ice-storm or a blizzard, there is a muffling, numbing silence, or a stead, howling moan.

There is something strange and specifically homo sapiens-y about this. Weather is weather, on the surface. Why should an blizzard have less of a sense of awe about it than a thunderstorm? It's as though our sense of drama is dependent on time. Which of course it is. Even if it's the same change, we react differently to an overnight change and a year-long change.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Dog shampoo - February 3, 2012

They said on the radio this morning it was going to be more heavy fog. I was unimpressed. I drove Daniel to school and then came home, gave Anya a quick, groggy walk down the block. She really wanted to go back to sleep. And to eat the chicken wings someone had chucked onto the grass verge.

Ingrid took her to the groomer down the street because, to put it delicately, she was getting stinky. Now she's stinky in a new way, because there are no scent-free shampoo options here. It'll wear off in a couple days, and her fur will smell once more of corn chips. Fresh corn chips. When they smell like rotten corn chips, we'll take her back over.

Dog grooming for show is nothing new. Long-haired dogs need to be kept brushed to avoid matting, and I assume for as long as dogs have been close working companions, we've been helping them get burrs out of their coat and keep them healthy and functional. But shampoo? Given that humans only started washing their hair with shampoo (in the West anyway) about a hundred years ago, I wonder where the practice of dog-washing started? Was it a thing the nobles did with their fancy dogs who were allowed into the throne room or its equivalent? I can't imagine Beowulf washing the dog to let it into the mead-hall. But the Emperor of China? Sure.

In any case, I can't imagine serious dog grooming taking place (except to remove burrs and such) when the dog basically lives outdoors. It isn't until dogs become actual house pets that how they smell and the dirt they track in really makes much difference.

So when did that happen and where? I'm guessing it's a breed-specific and culture-specific back and forth. Salukis in the court of the Pharaoh? The Pekinese in the court of the Chinese Emperor? See this article from the British Royal Family's web site about dogs and royalty.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Fog (part 1) - February 2, 2012

Woke up this morning to fog. We don't get fog like they do near the ocean, but sometimes, especially when we have warm-ish moist air over ice-covered lakes, it does come on. It was pretty, and not dangerous.

I grew up thinking Sherlock Holmes and Oliver Twist walked through a London shrouded in sea mist. London is on the Thames, after all. But no, I eventually realized. It was a thick blanket of coal-smoke, mostly. Lots and lots of Englishfolk died of respiratory disease. Half of English city kids had rickets in the late 19th century, in large part because they seldom saw the sun (yeah, OK, part of that was child labor in factories, but still).

The book I'm working on, The Big Smoke, by Peter Brimblecombe (and what a great English name that is!), is supposedly centered on the 1952 smog episode that killed thousands of Londoners and was a major impetus to switching away from coal as the fuel for the city. But it is at root a history of the use of coal, and the problems that have come with using coal, since medieval times. The curse of smog came and went multiple times from the Norman Conquest on, and it really did follow the use and replacement of sulphur-heavy coal from Newcastle. People complained about the smell from the get-go; at first it was a back-up fuel for the poor, when firewood costs got too high. It was used for some industry, but not favored for brewing or any other activity where it would flavor the food.

Wonder how folks would have reacted to coal-fired pizza, popular in these parts—and the foundation of the American pizza business. It's a reminder that American cities had the same sorts of pea-soupers London was known for. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis... A lot of cities were just as begrimed.

But because the London fogs have such a literary weight to them, their disappearance—and several decades of cleaning the soot-encrusted buildings they left as a legacy—is all the more dramatic. Really, in the States, the only city transformation that comes close in sheer drama is Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh didn't have Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Frozen in Florida - February 1, 2012

It was another lovely early-spring day, a couple months early. It was 36°F when I took Anya to the dog park in my green wool jacket and a hat. As I've said before, I kind of rank the weather on what kind of clothing I need. Today was a medium-weight coat day. Anya enjoyed smelling all the smells...

I've gone on and on about life in winter up here in Minnesota, but it gets cold elsewhere. We took a trip to Cedar Key, Florida in January 2008, and it was definitely warm, but it was light windbreaker weather, not walk-around-in-your-skivvies weather. Cedar Key is in the northern part of Florida, but still...

Florida had a cold winter last year, especially in December 2010. Tropical imports like iguanas and pythons began dropping from the trees, which is good if you're trying to maintain local native species. How do you stay warm in a world where it almost never gets this cold? The advice is pretty much the same as anywhere: layer, keep your core temperature up with hot food, stop drafts...

The average annual low temperature (on average, the coldest it gets in winter) is the basis of the USDA's hardiness zones, which have just been revised. Note that almost none of the US avoids a freeze in an average winter: New Orleans, Orlando, Dallas and Palm Springs, CA, are all within the zone that in a typical winter gets down to between 25 and 30°F.

How do people stay warm in Zone 8 or Zone 9, when it really does get cold? How do folks in the desert southwest typically heat? I know there's a lot more dependence on stored radiant heat—this is one of the great advantages of adobe. Wherever you live, is there just a point where normal habits of activity and dress break down, and people just huddle around and survive until the cold breaks? It would make sense in general not to spend too much time building in preparation for an event that might only last a couple nights a year.