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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.