I've been avoiding building the latest GNOME out of cvs, but thanks to the effortless Garnome I was able to do a build this weekend to play with and start checking on the docs.
Obligatory screenshot:
Nothing really to see here. You can move along now.
Nora emerged from the intellectual fog late this afternoon, having written a novel in a month. Mother and father are proud.
I don't like to whine here, so I'll make this brief.
On a long ride yesterday on on the west side of town, our little trio of cyclists was honked at only twice. In both cases, there were two lanes in our direction - the drivers had an entire lane of their own. Our sin, what apparently drew their ire, was that we had inconvenienced them by forcing them to change lanes. They didn't even have to slow down. All they had to do was change lanes. Both were driving big ol' SUV's. I'm sure that's just coincidence.
On the bright side, lots of cars passed us politely, without honking. And there was one other honk, a big semi out on a lonely stretch of two-lane. He honked politely when he was still about a half mile away, a quick two-blast toot on his big air horn so we would know he was coming.
On a related note, I have quite literally never seen a muddy Hummer. There are a bunch around town these days, but they all seem real clean. What's up with that?
Drove down to the Bosque del Apache today to see the birds. Mom and Dad joined us:
picture by Lissa Heineman
The chief attraction is sandhill cranes:
picture by Me
It was a pretty cold day, as you can tell by Mom and Dad's bundleosity in the picture above, but much of the bird-watching at the Bosque del Apache can be done from the comfort of a heated car, a network of dirt roads winding through an artificial wetland created by humans to save birds.
I'm in the midst of reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which plays with the premise that domesticated plants - the apple and tulip, for example - have been engaged for years in a sort of coevolution with us, exploiting our desire for the sweet and pretty to extend the reach of their genomes. In that framework, the sandill crane is pretty interesting. It's a magnificent bird that we've gone to great trouble at the Bosque del Apache and elsewhere to save, pulling it back from near extinction in the 1930s. We're often less successful saving less attractive creatures from extinction, I think. Pollan's on to something.
Though there's an interesting sidebar to be worked out here involving spandrels and the snow goose. I wish I could find a better link on Google to explain spandrels so I don't have to, but it's an analogy from a 1979 paper by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. They point to the spandrels in San Marcos Cathedral in Venice, gorgeous painted architectural features created in these weird corner bits left over in the space where two arches meet. It's hard to visualize, but the Gould-Lewontin point is that there wasn't a great plan to create these cool spaces, just a clever use of a bit of architectural leftovers. The evolutionary metaphor is that sometimes features are just an evolutionary exploitation of junk, scraps - like jaw bones becoming the bits in the inner ear.
So what does this have to do wiith Pollan, sweet apples, cranes and snow geese? You can use the Pollan theme to explain the cranes - big majestic birds who have evolutionarily exploited our fondness for big majestic birds. We grow corn for them, and build great refuges. But the snow geese? They're exploiting a spandrel. They're a pest, vastly overpopulated as they hang in farmer Brown's field. Coyotes are exploiting spandrels, too. While the wolf has seen its range drop almost to nothing, coyotes have expanded in the presence of European humans' spread across the Americas. And tumbleweeds. Man, those suckers have found a spandrel. When we cut down the stuff that was in their way, they rolled from the Dakotas all across this great land of ours, exploiting our spandrel.
There's some work required here to sort out the details, but I think there's a fun piece in here somewhere if I can think a bit harder about it.
That's as maybe, of course, because the main deal was that we had a great day today, Lissa, Mom and Dad and I looking at magnificent birds and shivering against the wind.
Two great things I saw today at the annual Albuquerque Turkey 5k.
The first was a teenage girl, obviously quite fast, no doubt on her high school cross country team, dawdling with her dad. He kept told her to go ahead, that he didn't want to slow her down, but she just smiled and hung back with him.
The other was another pair, dad and teenage son. At the starting line, I saw them winding a tether around their hands, and I realized the kid was blind. They ran together, obviously had done this a million times, smoothly and easily, and they were fast. They kicked my butt.
I ran pretty fast for an old guy, 24:48, faster than I've run it in five years. This is my 11th turkey run, and the little chart I keep of all my races is a healthy record of my gentle physical decline into middle age.
I was pretty glad to see that this guy got his ass totally creamed by a big old bus Monday was Dwayne Pafko and not Dave Camp.
I wrote a little DTD of my own over the weekend to use for biblliographic information I'm starting to collect for my book. I needed something to structure the data, and emacs/psgml/DTD seems like a good starting point, since it's a tool chain I already use and am comfortable with. Perhaps this is a wheel I'm reinventing, but my structure is parsimonious (author, journal, date, title and room for open-ended notes), so it should be easy enough to move it into some other data storage bin if and when I decided on making a change. And thanks to python/libxml/libxslt, dealing with the data is relatively easy.
Suggestions for bibliographic dialects of XML and related software are welcome.
The underlying issue I'm grappling with is a need to adapt my work style. Writing newspaper stories, I can just blunder ahead. Both literaly and metaphorically, I can easily keep up to 10 bits of knowledge in a heap (either in my brain or physically, via notebooks or research papers on my desk) and find whatever I need. Beyond 10, though, it gets increasingly difficult to rummage around and find stuff in a way that's quick enough to keep up with the writing. I regularly bang up against the limitations of this technique when writing longer newspaper stories. It obviously will fail completely when trying to write a book.
Nora sends along a link to the word counter.
Plug in a large chunk of one's writing, and you can tell what words you're abusing. Mine, as judged by a count of all my November blog entries, is "great".
So the military has released James Yee, the Guantanamo chaplain who media stories had suggested has become somehow complicit with the Muslim terrorists being held there. But wait! I thought the stories said Yee had become sympathetic with the terrorists, and was keeping classified information on his computer. We'd better go back and check on that, see who it was who mislead us. Oh no! We can't. The stories were based on information from anonymous sources.
Spent some time this evening with an old paper by Tom Swetnam and Julio Betancourt on climate variability and its effects on ecosystems in the southwest. It was published in the Journal of Climate in 1998, which I don't think is on line, though there seems to be a short version here. Reading it years ago marked the first time I really got the linkage between decadal climate variability, drought, and widespread wildfire.
Here's the part that got my attention:
Based on tree ring records (fires leave nice, measurable and datable scars) fire frequency in any one spot averaged about once in every 7.5 years. Swetnam and his buddies in the tree ring mafia have dated scads of these things all over the southwest in order to come up with what everyone seems to agree are pretty good numbers - 63 separate sites with fire records covering 1700 to 1900. (1900's the start of fire suppression, so you have to cut off the study there and significantly rethink the way things have played out since).
If the statistics were essentially random, you'd expected widespread fire years - a whole bunch of sites being burned simultaneously during a single year - to be relatively rare. Here's how they put it: "At this frequency, strictly by chance, we would expect about one coincidence of the same fire date in 21 of the 63 sites (one-third) in about a 35,000 year period." Instead, they found that happened 15 different years during that time. One year (1748) saw 41 of the 63 sites burn ("one chance in billions", they say).
They then compared those widespread fire years with a reconstruction of the Palmer Drought Severity Index for the region and found a strong correlation. Tack on a lag with antecedent moisture conditions and the thing is rock solid. Wet years allow stuff to grow, then drought sets in and stuff burns like hell, all over the southwest.
William Grims on leaving the restaurant beat at the New York Times:
The downside is that you have to do that again and again and again. It’s like “Groundhog Day.” You wake up the next day having eaten a four-star meal, you must go out and eat another four-star meal. And you get up the next day and you have to go out and eat another four-star meal.... And on top of it nobody feels sorry for you. It’s impossible to gain sympathy.
Posted by John Fleck at 07:49 PM
From the Nov. 17 Sacramento Bee:
On Oct. 19th, while piloting the super-freighter The Grande Tetons down the Columbia River, Capt. Jackson collapsed from a heart attack and fell on the ship's control mechanisms, causing the ship to lose control and careen across the river. The massive ship then plowed into the combination Sardine Canning & Dynamite Factory on the wharf resulting in a huge explosion and raining sardines all over the town. A radio announcer nearby was heard to cry out, 'oh the humanity -'.
Details here.
I don't really understand free trade issues, so I've been reading a bit and ran across this. It's about a big country in the Americas where people are upset because their nation is losing manufacturing jobs to low-wage workers in other nations.
I love it when I find out something I thought I knew isn't true.
It's such a great story - Duane Allman dies crashing his motorcycle into a peach truck, and the boys in the band name the next album Eat a Peach. It's got such perfect literary depth, too:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I was a freshman in college when I read T.S. Eliot, and that whole "eat a peach" line was huge. So to think the good ol' boys could play guitar like that, with those two driving drummers, and quote Eliot and ride their motorcycles until they died was such a romantic notion.
Turns out it's just a story stoned college students tell one another. It wasn't a peach truck. And it wasn't Eliot.
Sigh.
So everyone seems to agree that this is bad. So why do they all keep doing it?
On the way into Costco today to pick up some ribs, I was handed a shopping circular advertising spectacular deals next weekend during their big Thanksgiving sale. Among the choice items:
Teflon pants! While supplies last!
To my previous commenter, yes, I would point out that James Ellroy's work is fiction.
There was a terrific book published in 1997 about the Roswell incident - UFO Crash at Roswell The Genesis of a Modern Myth by Saler, Ziegler, and Moore - that provides a useful framework for watching the evolution of great cultural myths like Roswell or the Kennedy assassination conspiracy(ies).
The authors (two anthropologists and a physicist) offer a tool that can be used to distinguish between myths and history. Historical analysis, over time, tends to converge - as more evidence can be gathered, historians and journalists are able to zero in on some sort of central truth. It is ever contingent, but in general the stories tend to converge.
Cultural myths, without a good truth to anchor them, tend to diverge. That's why, in Roswell, you can now find adherents arguing for no less than six separate crash sites, for example. Some adherents argue persuasively for recovery of live bodies, some dead bodies, some no bodies, some one ship, some two ships, some a late June 1947 crash date, some early July.
The same pattern can be found in the Kenneday conspiracy stories. CIA? Mafia? Cubans? Some sort of CIA-Mafia-Cuban conspiracy? The Jewish bankers? The Catholic Church? Oswald plus another gunman on the grassy knoll? Oswald didn't shoot at all, just the grassy knoll guy? Here's my favorite: Oswald, plus a gunman on the grassy knoll, and then to cover up the grassy knoll guy's handiwork there's a team of surgeons pre-positioned on the plane flying the body back to D.C. that surgically alters the late president's corpse to hide the evidence when the autopsy is later done.
I got started thinking about this topic when I was a young tyke of a reporter in L.A., and I had occasion to make the acquaintence of some of the Robert F. Kennedy conspiracy theorists. I'd hear one argue persuasively for one version of the conspiracy, then another argue equally persuasively for another story line. The funny thing was (and this holds true for JFK or Roswell, the other two similar topics that I've since spent any time with) that the best conspiracy debunkers are the other conspiracy theorists. Each has to debunk the other in order for his theory to hold, and they all end up collapsing one anothers' houses of cards.
What you end up with is a couple of loony lone gunmen killing two Kennedy brothers five years apart, and a secret balloon research experiment landing on a ranch outside Roswell a very long time ago.
As for the specifics of bjc's complaint:
forty years on...? forty days on and enough would have been buried, burned or deported to make sure it was never discovered.
Sadly, there's not much response that can be made to that argument. If there is a complete lack of evidence of conspiracy, there are two possibilities. One is that the conspirators covered it all up. The second is that there was no conspiracy. Take your pick.
This is an amusing but completely consistent pattern in all three of the cases I discuss above - Roswell and the two Kennedy assassinations. If every piece of counter-evidence to a conspiracy can be written off as part of the conspiracy, and all lack of evidence of a conspiracy can be seen as evidence that the conspirators covered it up, there's really nothing to do but have a beer and call it a day.
Forty years later, there has not been a single piece of credible evidence to prove a conspiracy.
Saw my first sandhill cranes of the season today, driving back up along the Rio Grande south of here.
I was gonna ride in the mountains today, so when I saw there was going to be a cyclocross race up in Tijeras, I realized I had a destination.
I've never been to a 'cross race before, but they're all the rage in this fall season among the cool kids. Pictures here (couresy of my neighbor Bill, by coincidence) should give you some idea. Basically it involves riding your bike like a bat out of hell around a twisty closed course, some dirt, some paved, and periodically jumping off and carrying the bike because the dirt is too gnarly, or the course organizers put one of those silly little wall things in the way.
So I ended up riding up Tijeras Canyon to the race site with Barbara Tyner, who was the organizer of one of the two big fall 'cross series here in town. I don't really know Barbara, but we'd met (she organized the Lance Armstrong Foundation fund-raising ride I rode in last summer, and she also kicked my ass in the Moriarty time trial) so I reintroduced myself and we had a fine chat as we rode up the canyon.
Barbara's husband was racing, she was just out for a spin, so she spent some time explaining the whole goofy 'cross sport to me, and gave me racing tips - ("Bring your trainer to a time trial and warm up really well. The shorter the race, the longer the warmup." Stuff like that.) Then I watched the boys jump off of perfectly good bikes and carry them through the mud, and it was a grand thing. Neighbor Bill was there racing, as was Lou Metzger, who I had met at Moriarty. Lou's teenage sons race, and now his wife, and he's become the quintessential bike racing support staff, digital camera in hand. Vince Metzger came in second in the B race. It was a fine little social morning in the mountains.
Then of course the wind picked up, and I had to ride home. Whatever, it was still a great fall day.
Fine dinner this evening at TaeJa, and as a bonus the chopsticks wrapper provided full amusement:
Take a closer look:
It's a minor point, but worth noting — the restaurant is Korean.
Full text of the Energy Bill (sans the tax provisions, which oughta be released later today) is here.
Here's something I wrote elsewhere which I want to shout as loudly as I can. Cherry-Picking the Science (scroll down to what is right now the third item, sorry, no permalinks to this blog so in a few days it'll be off the bottom):
Reading the sometimes vociferous debate over the last couple weeks about global climate change in the comment sections of David Appell's excellent blog has reminded me of the journalistic minefield presented by these sort of debates.There are a number of topics like this - the evolotion/creation debate comes to mind, as well as the debate over the risks of low-dose radiation exposure and the safety of genetically modified foods. In each of these cases, there is a relatively well established scientific consensus about a particular view (a clearly unassailable consensus in the case of evolution). But in any interesting scientific debate, there are outliers - serious scientists who disagree with the consensus, or who pick at the questions that the consensus view cannot answer.
It is the same in relativity theory or quantum mechanics, too, those niggling little outliers swimming against the stream. But in relativity and quantum mechanics, there is no political question linked to the outcome of the scientific debate. And that's where the cherry-picking comes in.
Churning through unread bits of the week's mail ("chewing", as Michael Meeks so charmingly puts it), I finally this morning got to Luis' answers to questions of GNOME board candidates. He said a bunch of stuff I would echo, especially this:
Q: What do you see as current threats to the future of a complete Free Software desktop? And what would you like the GNOME Foundation to be doing to address these issues?A: Data, data, data. If all the good data is in some format we can't read in a Free operating system (IE-specific Javascript, DVDs,1337-new-Office 'features', stored on unreadable or otherwise unusable devices) then we're going to lose. Period....
Past this, the Free Software war is won, IMHO- we have a Free kernel and we have a high quality and now pretty usable Free userspace. As long as we can continue to run said kernel on new hardware, and open data that we get from others so that we can benefit from (or at least not be savaged by) network effects, the rest is details. Big details, butdetails that we are sure to win.
Yo, Luis! This is one of the main reasons that part of what little free software time I have right now is spent on libxml, which I see as a key piece of infrastructure enabling free data exchange.
More on the game theory in the Energy Bill, this from the Washington Post:
Negotiators sprinkled in dozens of sweeteners sought by states and congressional districts, ranging from nearly $1 billion in shoreline restoration projects to tax credits for a company that produces fuel by compressing turkey carcasses.
So I showed my continuing ignorance of how Washington, D.C., works this week in grand fashion pronouncing to anyone who would listen (poor sops) that there wouldn't be an energy bill. There is. Still unclear whether it can pass the senate, but I clearly was wrong.
I've been looking at it as a hideously complex game theory problem, Here's a great example, from today's New York Times story:
Lobbyists and lawmakers said the key to passage might be the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle, who has pushed the ethanol plan to benefit corn growers in his home state, South Dakota, and across the Midwest. If Mr. Daschle supports the measure, they say, the threat of a filibuster will fade.
There are so many interests pro and con to be balanced here that the game theoretical alliances and defections may very well be intrinsically too complex to grasp.
Watch and learn.
This was pretty much irresistable - a pair of papers in today's Science about the evolution of maize, from the wild teosinte to the grain we know and love today:
Call it "the tortilla gene." It is a little piece of corn DNA that may have improved the way corn starch sticks together.If scientists' hypothesis about it is correct, it would have allowed early Americans thousands of years ago to mash up corn kernels to make the first tortillas.
With a handful of similarly useful changes, early Americans turned a wild Mexican grass called teosinte into the highest yielding grain crop in the world and changed human culture on this continent.Nurtured by early Native American farmers, the genes turned the bushy teosinte grass into the cornstalks we know today, and the rock-hard teosinte seeds into the tender kernels that grace modern cobs.
(If you're at university or somewhere that has a subscription, the full papers are here.)
This is serious:
What is known about these cancers is that Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in detectable and biologically significant levels in virtually all tumors and other cancerous and pre-cancerous growths.Cancer research has made significant advances in the detection and treatment of many forms of cancers. With each new advancement, the role DHMO plays in the cause of cancer is likely to be better understood.
Fabulous note this afternoon to the libxml mailing list:
The reason for this email is to really congratulate the people that wrote
this software. I am on AIX (IBM rs6000). I needed no help at all beyond
the supplied documentation and web site. Everything works as
documented. The interfaces are easy to understand and implement.My background is 20+ years 'C' programming experience and almost no xml
experience. One of the easiest packages to integrate I have ever found --
even for the xml ignorant. The code is very readable and well structured
and written, making anything not completely documented in text easy to find
in the source.
So I'm looking for a Trekkie who can tell me whether it's true that the Enterprise never used its transporter when the ship was in warp drive. This is for a newspaper story, email me at work. (I know, this is a weird request. It's a weird story. But I definitely don't want to get it wrong and risk the the certain wrath of a thousand Trekkies.)
Had a bit of an adventure today installing the new Fedora. It rather conflicted with my old bastardized installation in unpleasant ways, so the only solution seemed to be to blow away the entire Linux partition and start from scratch. Just as well, as it needed cleaning out anyway and I have good backups. This took time, and there was a moment (a looong moment) of upleasantness when the old Lilo was gone but the new Lilo was not there to replace it, and I was blessed with a large beige paperweight. But it worked OK in the end.
The method to my madness was/is to settle on a stable installation for my working environment and stop all this "I'm a hacker" upgrade stuff. Repeat after me. Stable working environment. Stable working environment. I'm going to move all the gonzo GNOME 2.5 stuff to an entirely separate userspace so that I'm not tempted. Well, maybe I'll just cheat a little and keep up-to-date on the latest libxml stuff, but that's it. I swear. I don't wanna be a hacker.
On this date 14 years ago, the Germans opened the Berlin wall.
One is reminded of Ronald Reagan's remarkable speech two years before:
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Great political speeches are all sleight of hand, because things are never that simple:
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.This much we pledge—and more.
Of course we were unwilling to pay an price. Of course it took far more and different than Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Reagan. But great political moments are crystalline, because the complexities are so much harder to understand at the time, and even harder still to grasp from even the short distance of history that separates us now.
Here is the complexity I learned today. It was proposed that German Day of Unity be celebrated today, Nov. 9, in honor of that first accidental opening of the wall, until it was realized this was also the anniversary of the first night of Kristallnacht.
For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.
Kennedy was too optimistic and too pessimistic there by a long measure, we weren't watching his hands closely enough, but damn it was a great speech.
Went to a talk last night by Bill Perry, former defense secretary during the Clinton Administration. He was bent on scaring the crap out of us in his discussion of North Korea's nuclear ambitions and the danger they pose to the world. He suggested that, if North Korea's program is not constrained, there is a grave likelihood of a North Korean-suppled nuke ending up in the hands of some transnational thugs who don't like us and want to blow up Tulsa or Manhattan Beach or Manhattan or something.
I rode bike this morning in spirit with my friend Jaime, who's doing Ironman Florida as we speak. I don't really understand the swim bit, so I've no idea whether 1:12:45 is any good, but he averaged 20.24 mph on the bike for 112 miles, which as far as I'm concerned is kicking some very fast ass. As we speak he's in the second half of the run. Go Jaime!
Doing some reading on climate variability, I ran across a web page for the Climate Variability in Agriculture program, an Australian research effort. My research has been focused on the southwestern U.S., so I don't know a lot about the nature of decadal-scale climate variability Down Under, but the underlying theme of the CVA project seemed entirely sensible - thinking about climate variability not as some weird aberration from the way things are supposed to be, but rather thinking about it as the norm. Climate varies...
DCV is very important for Australian cropping systems. While there have been many examples where farming practices in Australia have been developed during periods of above-average rainfall, research found that in later decades reliable rainfall patterns did not persist. In some cases this led to environmental degradation, a rapid decline in productivity, and increased farm abandonment, all of which have been at a great cost to individuals and the nation as a whole.
Intriguing paper in tomorrow's Science about the connection between drought in Africa and dust in Barbados:
Great quantities of African dust are carried over large areas of the Atlantic and to the Caribbean during much of the year. Measurements made from 1965 to 1998 in Barbados trade winds show large interannual changes that are highly anticorrelated with rainfall in the Soudano-Sahel, a region that has suffered varying degrees of drought since 1970. Regression estimates based on long-term rainfall data suggest that dust concentrations were sharply lower during much of the 20th century before 1970, when rainfall was more normal. Because of the great sensitivity of dust emissions to climate, future changes in climate could result in large changes in emissions from African and other arid regions that, in turn, could lead to impacts on climate over large areas.
Prospero and Lamb (subscription required)
The "varying degrees of drought since 1970" bit coincides with the elevated rainfall period in the southwestern U.S., which ended in the late 1990s. This suggests and area for further inquiry.
Good rant on Slate by Jack Shafer about a pet peeve of mine, the amazingly excessive and corrosive use of anonymous sources in D.C. reporting these days. Shafer's point is that anonymous sources have their place - protecting the nameless whistleblower inside government or whatever from harm. But mostly these days it's handed out willy nilly to shield people from accountability for their words. That's different, and it's bad.
It was on of those true cycling moments.
Got lights for the town bike, riding home from work after dark for the first time, cutting through the industrial neighborhood near my work, got a flat. Hisshisshisshiss as the tire spins in the dark. I popped out a CO2 cartridge, tried to nurse the tire (it had slime in it) but no go. So I'm sitting in the wind in a parking lot along a busy street, wheel popped off changing the tube, and a bike guy rides up.
"Got everything you need?"
I've asked the question a hundred times myself, and whenever I'm stopped changing a flat on the bike trail someone else riding by will slow and ask me. "Got everything you need?" And they always have everything they need, and I always have everything I need, but there's still something powerful about the gesture, like we're all in this together.
It was especially comforting sitting in a parking lot in the wind after dark at the side of a very busy street.
Maybe I'm loony to apply the collective open source free software model to everything, but I think it may apply to ecosystem restoration.
Lissa and I went down to the bosque this afternoon to cut some salt cedar. As you can see, the cottonwoods are in full color, and it was a beautiful warm afternoon. We walked into the La Orilla burn site, where a fire in the spring of 2002 torched 35 acres or thereabouts. It's become a case study of restoration - well cleared, with new cottonwood poles planted. But the invasive salt cedar is pushing its way back in.
The coalition of government agencies with jurisdiction here, led by the city, is trying to keep on top of the situation by revisiting the site periodically and whacking down the salt cedar to give the cottonwoods room and time to take hold. But what if a bunch of the users of the space took matters into their own hands and just whacked down salt cedars here and there as they walked in the bosque?
Couldn't hurt.
Our ulterior motive in this case was art supplies - the slender salt cedar shoots have a beautiful red bark, ideal for making stuff out of, and Lissa has long coveted a working supply. So we haulted out big armfuls. I think we need to make it a habit to go back and get lots more.
My Book of Days tells me that November is "Tachwedd" in Welsh, which translates as slaughter. "Similarly, the Dutch used to call this month slachtmaand, since beasts were slaughtered in it." Old English similar, though I despair of reproducing it here.
These early November hours
That crimson the creeper's leaf across
Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,
O'er a shield: else gold from rim to boss
And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped
Elf-needled mat of moss.
- Robert Browning