half way through November

 

A reliable sorce informed me a while ago that the various AI apps can  - depending on variables such as age, habits, career, family and whatever else they have on you - calculate how many more movies and series you will watch, how many more books you will read, and how many new people you will meet before you die. And here I was thinking AI was mindless shit.

In a convoluted way it does bring to mind the much adored (by me) German performance artist/theatre director/filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief who said shortly before his death from cancer in 2010 that he would give anything to lie awake at night and just ponder whether he had taken out the rubbish or not.  

This post is not meant to be all gloomy but it is November after all and today we had the whole programme from stormy winds to sleet and hail and snow and back to briefly sunshine and now frost. And drizzle. Drizzling frost freezing on the roads. The house makes a clicking noise only I can hear.

Last Friday I finally accepted that the headcold symptoms were getting a tad too intesive and that after two weeks there should really be some improvement and not shivers and fever and later that morning, my friendly GP gave me a stern look and a short lecture about immune suppression and risks and ladila and a prescription for antibiotics with rest. To top it, R has set up a regimen of inhalations and keeps putting very large glasses of water within reach and I have watched a couple of Scandinavian thriller series and obviously, read all the internets.

Here is what I found:

• For decades, scientists have been collecting brittle stars, or Ophiuroidea, a relative of the starfish, and storing them in museums and universities. Now, DNA analysis from thousands of these ancient, prickly crawlers shows that family ties extend across oceans, plural. All that deep water is much more interconected than previously thought possible. In fact brittle stars from the South Pacific near New Zealand, for example, are related to those found as far away as the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic. For marine invetebrates, tiny creatures living on the sea floor, the oceans are a connected superhighway.

• While I watched the inauguration of the wonderful new president of Ireland, Catherine Connolly, and listened to her gentle voice speaking as gaeilge (in Irish) not understanding a word, I, for the hundredth time, decided to finally once again have a go at learning this amazing language (I am the only person in the family unable to utter even a few words of it). Obviously, I was running a temperatur and no, it's not going to happen, who am I kidding. Just consider the word for hole: one dug into the ground after dark by an animal is uachas. Or one made by fish in a sandy riverbed for spawning is saothar. One hollowed out by the hooves of beasts and then filled with rain is plobán. And one where a lobster is hiding in is fach and a hideaway by a wild beast is puathais. The Irish word for president is uachtarán and it translates as the the cream that rises to the top and thus the presidential palace in Dublin is called Áras an Uachtaráin or house of the president or to some, the country's creamery.

And then I found this: