Spencer is a Genius

A friend suggested that I cut a door flap in the bender greenhouse and then open and close it using laces like on a marquee. At last I can visualise a bender greenhouse door solution that might actually work. I've got loads of gaffa tape (never leave home without it) to reinforce the cut edges and could probably lace with the washing line I found with bits of concrete on it - I KNEW that would come in handy for something!

When I learned finger knitting as a child I had no idea that it would actually prove to be a useful skill later in life...

Budget Bender Greenhouse Part 2

It looks a bit strange but not ugly, it certainly gets warm inside and it hasn't fallen down yet, but I am now having quite serious bender greenhouse problems.

The first thing I did after stretching plastic over the frame and burying it carefully around the edges was to go on holiday for two weeks, and in a fortnight of high winds the whole thing filled with air like a massive balloon and loosened itself so much that I've had to tie it down with string around the outside. It now looks as though I've netted a giant jellyfish. Trouble is, I can't think of a way of making a decent door for it, so opening and closing it currently still involves folding up the loose plastic around the doorframe and piling half a ton of rocks on it to weigh it down.

The recent hot weather has made me realise I'm going to have to put vent holes in it sooner rather than later, but I'm scared to cut the plastic in the wrong place because it was so expensive, and to top it all a couple of the willow branches I made the frame from have started to grow, which I'm worried will result in big spikey bits making holes exactly where I don't want them.

Arse.

Guns

Listening to Radio 4 yesterday I realised that the reason for the huge traffic jam outside my window was that someone had been shot dead in a takeaway a few doors down the road from my house the night before.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/6581435.stm It seems he was killed at about the time I was watching Blake's 7 at a friend's flat next door.

Doesn't seem very long (although having looked it up it's about 18 months) since I last came home to find my house in the middle of a 1/2 mile police cordon, when a man held his former partner hostage in a house on Bayswater Grove and came out to shoot at police cars and put a few bullets through neighbour's windows. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4344402.stm

I have decided that the next time I see some stupid film ad with guns in it on this street, which I frequently do, I'm going to vandalise it as thoroughly as I can and let them arrest me and listen to my reasons in court. It's just offensive.

Removable Seedling Shelf

Casually put some very early seed trays on the windowsill. Fill the remaining space with the first tomatoes, and shove all your lovely ornaments out of the way to fit everything else in. Then knock everything over every five minutes, as the spring gets underway in ernest and there’s not a horizontal space left in the house that doesn’t have some tender seedlings growing on it. Sound familiar?

I have accidentally cooked seedlings that I’d left on the top of the grill, I have carried a six-foot ladder around my flat to water things growing on top of the wardrobes, I have been unable to reach my windows for months at a time because of the precarious arrangements of vegetable racks I’ve used to layer seed trays in front of my windows. I’ve had enough now.

This year I’ve been trying to make better use of the vertical space in my high-celinged flat, and with spring just around the corner I want to double the amount of windowsill space I can grow things on this year. I have a cunning plan.

This is what my living room windows look like



And this is my bedroom window

My plan is to construct a shelf half way up each window where the panes are split. I’m hoping that this won’t block out too much of the natural light coming into the rooms, but for my next trick I’m going to make the shelves completely removable, so that I’m not stuck with a huge window obstruction all year round.

To make the supports as unobtrusive as possible I’m putting in small batons on either side of the frames. Here is me measuring one against the inside of the window frame


I’ll be needing four, two for each set of windows, and a support shelf for the middle of the wider living room window. I sawed the wood for these to the right length in the middle of my living room, on a science lab stool I found behind Leeds University and took home on the bus, topped with an old chopping board that I rescued from a bonfire. Just in case you are having trouble visualising this:


It works a treat.

The next thing to do is to help the fittings (which will not be removable) to blend in, by painting them to match the windows. I used gloss spray paint, but would have used normal gloss paint if I’d had any. I reckon they will get fairly grubby with bits of soil etc spilling on them all the time, so I want to be able to wipe them clean when I take the shelves down.





A couple of thin layers of spray paint is the way to go, it just drips if you try to put too much on at once and thin layers are also less likely to chip off later.

To fix them to the frame I used 40mm screws straight into the wooden window frame. Then I cut the shelves to length on my homemade saw bench and put them in position resting on the batons. This bit actually took some time because after I’d found woodworm in the reclaimed floorboards I was going to use, neither local skips nor Homebase could provide me with suitable wood. Eventually a neighbour gave me some wood left over from her own shelves, thus saving the whole project just in time. Here is the finished product with all my little seedlings waiting for the sun to shine:

And I can of course use the time they take to grow to hoover all the soil and sawdust out of the carpet…

Tadpoles

Sorry to have kept you all waiting - no doubt with baited breath - for my next installment here. Excuses include being in Mexico, then being in Somerset, then having a massive list of garden and allotment related things I should have been doing when I was in Mexico and Somerset. Some of this I'd planned to write blogs about, but I've been too busy actually doing it all to maintain a cyber presence at the same time.

I'm now back, everything is planted and watered and I've even got tadpoles in the bathtub on my allotment. Time to sit back and look at it all for a minute, and ask everyone to tell me everything they ever knew about tadpoles...

...for instance, I know you can't move frogs to new ponds and you're supposed to start with frogspawn, but is it ok to move them as tadpoles? The water will be different (I know a bit about that from keeping goldfish in an aquarium) and I think mine will be alright because I've used about half rainwater and half tapwater, to which I added chlorine-neutralising stuff designed to make it safe for fish. The tap water tends to be quite acidic around here though, and I've no idea what PH rainwater is likely to be.

And what do they need to eat? Am I right to think I can feed them goldfish food, and how much/how often should I feed them? What should I feed them when they grow into frogs - I'm hoping they'll eat all my slugs, but should I deliberately plant slug-attracting plants near the pond, or will that just stop them hopping further away to eat the ones that are near my crops? Will they get drunk if I also put slug beer traps down?

Suggestions for names would also be very welcome 'cos I guess I need about fifty. They don't exactly have distinctive personality traits yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Old Inefficient Lightbulbs

This is a conversation I had in a forum on My Space. When I'm really bored, I sometimes talk to random Americans who are wondering things like which brand of dishwasher detergent is most eco-friendly and what they can buy to be more "green". Sometimes it gets interesting though, and I thought I'd share this one:

David, Maryland
I have a moral dilemma. These lightbulbs have been in my closet for the past 3 years. They are 75watt bulbs... about 10 of them. Five years ago I spent like $150 outfitting the whole house with new energy efficient bulbs (when they were quite more expensive), which only use 15watts each. What do I do with these old bulbs?! They are perfectly good, but I know I will never in my right mind put them to use.

Vinny, Wisconsin
give them to somebody who will use them.

David, Maryland
I have already thought of that. My problem with that is it defeats the purpose of reducing energy consumption. I feel that it would be like selling my perfectly good gas car to someone, then buying a hybrid car. I am merely passing on the inefficiency to another person. I want it to end with me... I don't want to pass it on. Hmm.... maybe I can bust the glass off from the metal part and put them in their resepctive recycle bins? LIGHT BULB!! I knew it was in me. Thank you for helping me through this thought process... LOL.
Wait a minute... does the recycling process take up more energy than the life of these bulbs? Jeeze... these light bulbs are going to be the end of my sanity!

Give Me Organic, Colorado
David!I'm so glad you posted this problem!I just changed 9 more of these light bulbs in my house yesterday myself, and while I was doing it I was thinking "What the heck am I going to do with all of these!!I'll be checking back to see what ideas people have. I'm with you though, it's like you don't want to give them away because it's like feeding the fire!

Aliya, Texas
There is NO good use for them, that is WHY you replaced them. Dispose of them properly.

VexxingVixxen, Georgia
I have a friend that recently changed religions, and instead of donating all of their books dedicated to the prior "religion" they BURNED them. I was horrified, but they explained it to me by saying that "if they were a reformed drug user, that they wouldn't pass along their used crack pipe to someone else".While a very poetic and noble way of looking at it, it is also very unrealistic.There are still plenty of crack pipes out there, and still plenty of light bulbs. Destroying yours isn't going to make a homeless shelter (or other worthy cause) stop using energy consuming bulbs, they will still buy them. Donate the bulbs and move on. :)

Alice J
Some ideas:

Make art with them, incorporating the paradox and conflict symbolised by the objects themselves into your work of art.

Write to your MP (should that be "congressman" in America? Or "congressperson???) and send them the lightbulbs. Explain your situation and ask that they either give you a logical way of re-using or recycling them, or use their influence to help bring about a ban on less energy-efficient lightbulbs. Might be quite effective if we all did it.

Paint them with glass paint and sell them on Ebay. Charge as much or more than your efficient bulbs cost, so that the buyer will be taxed for wasting the extra energy they'll use, and you will subsidise the purchase of your more expensive efficient bulbs.

Write to the company who made the inefficient bulbs, explain your situation and ask them to dispose of them in a logical way, since they created the problem in the first place. A mass campaign like this would be absolutely brilliant and could work with all kinds of products - let me know if you're up for spreading this idea around a bit!

Wire them up, stand well back, and run a high current through them so they explode. This will at least give you some enjoyment, and you could video it and put it on YouTube with an explanation, as an educational video about saving energy.

Give them to someone with a dimmer switch, as energy-efficient bulbs can't be used with dimmer switches. Of course you should also explain that you'd rather they got rid of the dimmer switch so they too could use energy efficient bulbs....

The Butcher's Shop

The butcher’s shop on my street has halal meat delivered twice a week, in a big white van tall enough to stand up inside. As I walk past, three or four men in blood-stained white aprons unhook whole carcasses, skinned and raw, and carry them over the pavement to the huge stainless steel worktops in a special room beside the shop, leaving ten or so at a time still swinging with the rocking of the van.

Because I don’t eat meat I don’t often have to deal with the sight of it raw, its bloody smell or its similarity in texture to parts of my own body. I am not often confronted with such graphic reminders of death, so this sudden proximity to so many large dead bodies has a capacity to shock me that is probably lost on most meat-eaters. Other passers-by show little interest in the meat deliveries and carry on walking, negotiating their way around the pallets of vegetables stacked up on the pavement at the front of the shop.

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In the early stages of a change from democracy to brutal dictatorship, many ordinary people must feel deeply uneasy about what is done by authorities in their name, at least while the pretence is sustained that authority is still held in the name of a people. Those who are not directly persecuted themselves are not necessarily on the side of the oppressors, but while it remains possible to do so, people go on with life much as they always have. They shop, wash clothes, make dinner and go to bed each night much as they always have, and houses and trees stand where they have always stood, with familiar people and shops and schools where they have always been.

Even a familiar dread of the news reports, of the next government policy, the next initiative, the next prosecution, the next bout of mass hysteria can seem normal when our immediate surroundings are kept reasonably constant. A gradual deterioration is borne like this, living from one moment to the next, right up until the façade of denial is finally, irreversibly cracked. Then our horror is compounded by our knowledge that, while the massacres took place, while the gas chambers were filled, we ourselves were washing clothes and making dinner and creating a normality for ourselves, our fear and doubt squashed firmly to the back of our minds in order to concentrate on doing the washing-up.

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So it is in my nightmare.
I know that somewhere in this country, out of my sight, this government on this soil tracks down people fleeing for their lives and sends them back to their deaths. I know that some of the weapons used to torture and kill people – for believing what I believe – are made and sold by my own country. They have nuclear warheads enough to kill us all many times over on submarines moored off the Scottish coast. And yet this knowledge lives most of the time on the very edge of my consciousness, as I go shopping and wash clothes and make dinner, much as I might in any other deteriorating situation, waiting for reality to bite.

In my dream I am walking along my street and everything is where it always is. The houses and trees stand where they always stand, with familiar people and shops and a familiar white van parked outside a familiar butcher’s shop. Three or four men in white aprons unhook whole carcasses, skinned and raw, and passers-by show no interest as they walk around the vegetable stalls on the pavement. And I see hair. The door of the white van is open, and on the carcasses swinging from the meat hooks I see human hair, human faces, human feet hanging six inches above the floor of the van.

For a moment the feeling of shock is disconnected, suspended without quite attaching to any meaning or consequence. Then cold realisation rushes through me, horrible clarity and fear and sickness, and I keep on walking around the vegetable stalls, normality forever shattered and in its place a trap.

Because I knew all along. I have known for a long time that they were killing people, I just never saw the bodies. And everyone around me, if they think about it at all, has accepted this as normal long ago. Some have had their own moment like this one but my horror is worthless now, coming so late. Human corpses have been incorporated into the unending pretence of normality, since after all it is such a small incremental change to the contents of the same white van that’s been delivering to the same butcher’s shop, on the same street with the same trees that have stood since anyone can remember.

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Budget Bender Greenhouse

Now I've got my camera working again I can post pictures of the home-made polytunnel I've been working on. It's tiny, but any extra greenhouse space is going to be useful this year 'cos I've been digging over the patch of weeds that I've had under cover for a year, so this time I'll have twice the space for planting that I had last year. That means I'll need twice the number of seedlings, and my windowsills aren't any bigger than they were…

I found a small willow tree on a footpath near the allotment, with nice straight branches just right for building a bender. The number of suitable branches really limited the size of the bender, but it's still big enough to be worthwhile. I've never built a bender before, and had to take it all apart and start again a couple of times until it came out a good shape – having used a tee-pee shaped greenhouse last year I really wanted to make sure this one would have a good amount of headroom, so I kept rebuilding until I made the sides go more or less straight up instead of sloping inwards towards the top.

I ordered clear polythene (guaranteed for five years against deterioration in sunlight) off the internet from here http://www.polytheneone.com/polytunnel_polythene_super_strength_clear.htm
and only realised when it arrived that I'd struggle to get it from my house to the allotment without a car. I managed by kind of folding my arms around the roll at its balancing point and stopping a few times for a rest. But I was glad after all that I hadn't saved up for a bigger roll which would have been cheaper but harder to move.
It would have been harder to unroll, too. Luckily I'd measured up ok – I'd been worried because the bender's shape was so irregular that I wasn't sure I'd got the highest point, but 7m x 7m turned out to be just right. I dug a trench around the base of the bender and got help from another plot holder to unroll it over the frame, and then spent a whole afternoon folding it neatly to fit flat into the trenches and filling them back up with soil.

As you can see it was getting dark by the time I'd finished. I went back the next day just to admire it over a cup of tea. The next problem is what to do about the door. At the moment I've just folded the loose plastic at the front to one side and weighed it down with bricks, but it's a huge hassle to get in and out, in fact I haven't been inside since I filled the trench in case it disturbs the plastic before it's settled firmly into the ground. Here's a glimpse through the side:

It's only been up a few days so I don't know if it will withstand high winds, and I still lack a real plan for the door, which I'll be working on in the next few weeks, but I'm quite pleased with progress so far!

Dishwashers vs Washing Up By Hand

I finally found some source research on whether it's more economical to run a dishwasher or to do the washing up by hand. Several people have told me scientific trials have shown that a machine uses less water and less energy than washing dishes by hand, but it seems so unlikely that I've never quite believed it.
You can read some "scientific" research for yourself here: http://www.landtechnik.uni-bonn.de/ifl_research/ht_1/EEDAL_03_ManualDishwashing.pdf
Suffice to say, I was right all along.
The trial participants who did the washing up by hand weren't even TRYING to save water or energy. Some of them, as I had suspected, just let the hot tap run the whole time - some even when they were DRYING the dishes!
The water and energy used to manufacture, transport and dispose of the machine at either end of its useful life were not accounted for, and neither was the energy wasted by the damned things when they finish washing but don't turn themselves off. Another appliance on "standby", another huge waste of energy.
There's no mention either of the environmental damage caused by very nasty chemicals found in dishwasher detergent, which are much worse than normal washing up liquid.
They do, however, factor in the effects of running the machine half-empty sometimes. It's just a pity they didn't deal with the average washer-up's half-empty head...

“Child Genius”, Channel 4, 9pm Thursday 8th Feb 2007

This programme plans to follow ten unusually “gifted” kids through their childhoods and beyond, in a format derivative of the 7-Up study begun by Michael Apted in 1964. Since Robert Winston’s “Child of Our Time” began in 2000 with a new group of children, another series with such a similar format must have needed some kind of freakshow-factor to justify its existence. And which parents of unusual children would be most eager to get them on telly for being as weird as possible? It seems the pushy parents of “gifted” children think that a TV appearance can do them nothing but good.

To be fair, there are occasional interviews with two or three parents who consistently talk about their kids as though they are kids, rather than competition-winning machines. But they’re few and far between in this hour-and-a-half long installment, which almost entirely focusses on how unlike other children their offspring are.

So, a bunch of kids with posh accents (presumably there are no “gifted” children ever born on council estates) go around passing exams, using precocious language and reacting in various ways to the “genius” label that is the sole reason they’re supposed to be interesting. The programme doesn’t challenge this, but simply puts them all through another I.Q. test to confirm their genius and shows them doing the freaky things that genius kids do. There’s no real attempt to assess their social skills or self-esteem, and many of them are treated as mini adults and made to work every waking moment, lest they dare waste any of the precious gifts that they’re supposed to count themselves lucky to have.

The Distinctly-Odd family have five “gifted” children, and traditionally reward each child when they pass the Eleven Plus with piles of gifts and a party, saying “It’s more important than a birthday for us.” Everything has been prepared in advance before the letter is opened which will tell them the exam result, and the pressure on the youngest child when he comes to take his Eleven Plus will be staggering.

Physically isolated and socially unpopular, all the Distinctly-Odd children come across as stiff, formal and cringe-makingly polite at all times, with no sign at all of the horseplay or arguing that is surely the whole point of having brothers and sisters. Since they’re all far too odd for social workers to know what to do with, serious cracks will probably only show when either the youngest turns out not to be “gifted” after all and resorts to getting parental attention by burning the house down with them all still in it, or when the eldest finally flees the nest and discovers casual sex and class A drugs.

Many of the parents have had trouble finding suitable education for their children – not surprising if they really think it necessary for their six-year-old to learn Avogadro’s Law of gaseous molecules. But of course the official curriculum is probably the least important aspect of school life, especially for those who can already read, write and add up. What kids really learn at school is how to manipulate the system, how to make friends and keep them, the finer points of popular culture and the complex code of playground ethics that begin to form our understanding of ourselves as social beings in a wider context than that of our own family. And these kids need to learn this stuff far more than most.

If Little Miss Distinctly-Odd acheives her apparently burning ambition to become a doctor, she will be bored witless after ten minutes of interaction with her non-genius patients. Along with having to spend hours explaining food groups to fat people and expanding her vocabulary of euphemisms for diarrhoea, she’ll be socialising with collegues from one of the most stressed and alcohol addicted professions in the country. Most jobs, even those requiring the greatest qualifications, so rarely require intelligent thought that only creativity and social skills get most of us through the day. And ten ‘A’ Levels will not make anyone but your pushy parents love you, much less remove the experience of failure from your life, for which these kids are shockingly unprepared.

The fact that they agreed to take part in the programme only shows that, however intelligent, these kids are still kids and lack the ability or judgement to resist their parents’ labelling and advertising of them as freaks. From the first programme in the series my guess is that all concerned have been set up to provide us with car-crash T.V., as the mental health of these unusually articulate children deteriorates over the coming years. How many will be smart enough to opt out of taking part before the end of the project remains to be seen.