chickenfeet

 Just back from a few days in Australia.  It's been twenty years since I last flew to Australia and, I think, thirty since I did it in cattle class.  Observations:

1.  I'm 20/30 years older than last time.  This does not help.

2. The introduction of new, really long range planes, has changed the game.  Used to be that LA to Sydney was about the longest flight segment out there (12 hours or so).  Now AC flies Vancouver to Sydney (15 hours).  This is quite a big change.  Also much shorter layovers as same plane Sydney to Toronto which makes for a lot of plane time pretty much non-stop (22 hours or so).  I could take this in J/F as it does shorten the overall journey time but it's very hard on the body in cattle class.

3.  It's going to get more that way.  The latest airliners have the range to do Sydney to London in one swell foop.  Guessing 20 hours plus.  The airlines will love this as it means lower costs (less fuel for takeoff/landings, fewer airport charges) and it will be a big win with the front cabin who will certainly prefer shorter journey times and where comfort, already not bad on e.g. 747s now allows for real sleep.  Could be pretty hard in cattle class though.

4.  No prospect of reduced journey times though until someone revives supersonic.  Air speeds are currently up around 900 km/hr which is about as fast as subsonic gets.

5.  I really think this will be my last Australia trip.  Another few years and I really will not be able to take it.

 It's not a particularly nice day today but I needed some fresh air and exercise so I decided to check out some of our new, improved and not so good bike infrastructure today.

So, north on Sherbourne to Gerrard, which is now open again.  The bike lane as far as Yonge is much better than before with more separation and an improved surface.  West of their it's like trying to drive a tank through the Siegfried line, as ever.  North on Bay to College, then St. George and west on Harbord.  All familiar, solid biking routes.  I cut north to check out the new lanes on Bloor which are alleged to have cut sales of kimchee by 40% or something ridiculous.  They are quite nice with decent physical separation as far as Avenue Road, then OK sharrows to Church where it gets really skeezy until Sherbourne.  OK bike lane Sherbourne to Parliament but the section from there to Castle Frank desperately needs flexipoles.  The traffic is really fast and inclined to clip the bike lane.  No fun.  The poled section from Castle Frank to Broadview is a massive improvement.  It's definitely glass half full.  I'm just vglad they don't let city planners design bridges because I swear they would design them with a gap in the middle.  

I then decided to try out Broadview since this is the city's recommended alternative to the currently closed Lower Don Trail.  It's a nightmare.  Clearly the recommendation was made by one of those planners who has never actually ridden a bike.

nanila  asked me to tell you what I was up to in 1992 

Age then: mid thirties
Age now: late fifties

Relationship then: Married with two kids who turned five and three that year.  We'd been married for seven years and were still getting used to having kids and the changes that made.  Also, see below, we were living "overseas" temporarily though the strains of that wouldn't become apparent for another couple of years.

Relationship now: Living happily with the lemur in downtown Toronto.  We've been together more or less since the marriage referred to above broke up.

Where I lived then: This is a bit complicated.  We had recently relocated from Ottawa to Toronto but had transplanted temporarily to Clayton-Le-Woods; a sort of suburb of Preston just off the M6.  I was working on a project at the big Heinz plant in Wigan and had taken the family over.  We were renting a furnished house on the company.  I still had responsibilities in Toronto and frequent need to be in Chicago and London so I travelled a lot.  I was on first name terms with the Air Canada staff at Manchester Airport.  It was a bit weird being back in the UK but not really being back.

Where I live now: A condo in a rather nice, if increasingly touristy, part of downtown Toronto close to the lake.  I can't see moving until they have to put me in a home.  Most of my life is either walking distance or accessible by public transit.

Was I happy then: It was a very eventful year.  The project was immensely high profile and the project partner had the reputation of being the partner from Hell.  I was leading the manufacturing team and would go on  to be, effectively, temporary chief of staff to the client exec responsible for implementation.  I felt under so much pressure from my boss that on one early occasion I suggested to him that if I was as useless as he seemed to think he should kick me off the project.  That's when I learned he was all bark which made my life a little more understandable and bearable.  Also I was the only Brit (let alone the only one who could speak Lancashire) and the only person with hands on food manufacturing experience on our team.  So, the pressure on me was huge.  It remains the highest profile and the second most stressful gig of my career.  So, was I happy?  I don't think I ever had the time or mental energy to think about it. 

Am I happy now: I'm more content in my skin.  I'm older and wiser and have a hell of a lot of scars; physical and mental.  Life is far from perfect.  In some ways I feel I'm underachieving but in a Stoic sort of way I'm OK.

Ask for a year in comments if you'd like one. If I happen to pick one you're not comfortable writing about, please let me know and I'll choose a different one.

 Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker is a very ambitious attempt to summarize and contextualize the various inter-related famines, epidemics and wars that plagued most parts of the world in the middle decades of the 17th century.  It's not easy to give a brief summary of 700 pages covering such a broad range of issues but I'ii try.

I guess the starting point has to be the state of the world as the 17th century began.  With exceptions, the 16th century had been a period of benign climate, long periods of peace and stability and hence population growth with a great deal of marginal land being brought into cultivation.  Given pre-industrial technology some kind of correction was probably inevitable but maybe not one that might have reduced world population by a third and affected all parts of the globe with the exception of New England and Japan.

So what happened?  First, there was a dramatic cycle of global cooling that devastated crop yields directly in the temperate zone and led to severe drought in the tropics.  A reduction in sunspot activity, and hence solar energy reaching earth had a direct effect but also dramatically increased the incidence of El Nino years causing widespread drought and flooding but also leading to a major shift in the weight distribution of the Pacific Ocean, which in turned seems to have led to increased volvanic activity, which reinforced the cooling effect.

Human agency seems to have directly reinforced the climactic impacts.  In Europe, the 80 Years War, The 30 Years War, The War of the Three kingdoms, the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and major revolts in Naples, Portugal and Catalonia all contributed to a cycle of rapacious soldiery being billeted on starving populations with a good chunk of religious hatred thrown in.  In China the 60 year struggle between Ming and Qing had similar effects as did religious turmoil in the Ottoman Empire and dynastic revolts in India.  In Africa the desertification of the Sahel caused population migration that drove the wars that provided the raw material for both the Mediterranean and Atlantic slave trades.  No one cause explains all these events of course but Parker posits the rise in "composite states"; where one monarch ruled multiple people of different customs, as one factor.  The monarchical impulse to impose uniformity leading to trouble and an inability to compromise.  Charles I's attempt to impose Laud's Prayer Book on Scotland would be but one example.  A general tendency for such monarchs to tax their subjects in polity A so that those in polity B could be brought to book seems to have been a general source of discontent made intolerable by prevailing economic conditions.

The evidence Parker marshal's is impressive both in relation to the human record and the natural record.  Rarely can so much tree ring data have been correlated with so many primary sources!

The bottom line is that governments coped very badly except in Tokugawa Japan, where the government seems to have learned from the catastrophes of the previous century and invested in famine amelioration rather than foreign war and New England where a sparse European population largely avoided the epidemic diseases that hit most of the Americas and was able to expand very rapidly.

The question it raises of course is that if 17th century governments dealt so badly with climate change can we expect 21st century ones to be more prescient?  The answer to that of course is obvious.  The ray of hope is that if the world can recover once from a combination of natural factors and gross governmental ineptitude perhaps it can do so again.  Even if it takes half a century of Hell to do so.

OK so this isn't as flamingly American high school as most of the genre:

1. Do you like blue cheese?
Quite a lot and usually the bigger and bolder the better. Bring on the Valdeon.

( More questions - with answers already )

I haven't done one of these in ages and I'm only doing it because it seems so utterly loopy in the context of the time and place the events took place.

My Senior Year = My Upper Sixth year.

The year was: 1974-5
1. Did you know your spouse? I'm not sure I knew anybody of even the same nationality as my two eventual spouses.
2. Did you car pool to school? I walked.
3. What kind of car did you have? Oh c'mon.
4. What kind of car do you have now? I don't.
5. It's Friday night...where were you? Probably either the pub or the local arts centre.
6. What kind of job did you have in high school? Holidays I worked for a bank. I think the summer between Lower Sixth and Upper Sixth would have been at Stock Exchange branch and the following summer at Mincing Lane.
7. What kind of job do you have now? ehealth guru and opera critic
8. Were you a party animal? Not until a year or two later when I became a Labour Party animal
9. Were you a cheerleader? About as likely as that I should have been keeper of the falcons.
10. Were you considered a jock? I was a keen but not very good cricket and rugby player. I tried sufficiently hard that I got some respect from people who were actual good at such things.
11. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Nope though I did act in a few school plays.
13. Did you get suspended or expelled? No. One of my my closest friends got suspended for pouring a jug of water over the head boy when he was sat next to the head at lunch. Said head boy was an utter prat..
14. Can you sing the fight song? We had a school song to words by Browning. Junior boys were typically made tomlearn it by being stood on a chair and having darts thrown at their legs until they got it right. I can still remember bits.
15. Who was/were your favorite high school teacher? Ernie Charlwood, head of maths, though he had left by the time I was doing A level double maths. He's probably responsible for getting me hooked on maths.
16. Where did you sit for lunch? We were supposed to eat lunch in a rather avant garde octagonal dining room. The food was awful so mostly I just didn't bother..
17. What was your school's full name? Bishop's Stortford College.
18. What was your school mascot? Do what now?
19. If you could go back and do it again, would you? No. University I might have another crack at though
20. Did you have fun at Prom? Not in the sense that's meant.  I did go to a few prom concerts when working in London during the summer holidays.
21. Do you still talk to the person you went to Prom with? See above.
22. Are you planning on going to your next reunion? No.
23. Are you still in contact with people from school? Very occasionally i've bumped into someone but no, not really.
24. What are/were your school's colors? The school tie was navy and red but by Upper Sixth almost everybody had a right to wear something different for one reason or another.  Rugby/hockey jerseys were navy, maroon and yellow.

This really doesn't make much sense does it?

 I'm looking for a good general work on The Thirty Years War.  I've read Wedgwood but I'm wondering if there is something a bit more up to date.  Suggestions?

 I guess nothing had come up to remind me about until today but I think it was probably exactly fifty years ago come Easter that I first stood on the terraces at Old Trafford with my grandfather.

 So the power went out in a few parts of downtown last night.  It was weirdly localised; three non-contiguous pockets in the general area bounded by Front, Queens Quay, Parliament and York.  Ours went off at 5pm and came back on at 4.30am.  Given how small the pockets were (apparently just 16 buildings) there must have been some serious damage somewhere to need 12 hours to repair.  Our building was completely blacked out and we needed a head torch to get down the stairwell and back again, after going out for dinner.  Bags of fun when one lives on the 1oth floor.

Things I could have bought for $15 at the market this morning:

• 3 or 4 not very fresh looking sardines ($37/kg)
• A reasonable size Muscovy duck breast  ($28.50/kg)
• 1.5kg of pork belly ($10/kg)

It's a bit absurd really.