Morse code: speaking across oceans in lightning and iron
And now we all speak in electricity and rare metals, and the world thunders
Still sparking telegrams
(average length of a telegram – 14 words. Ideal length of an email – 10 to 75 words)
Finally, on May 24, with the wire stretching 38 miles between Washington and the railroad depot in Baltimore, Morse was prepared to officially open the telegraph line. In front of a small group of guests, he invited Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of the patent commissioner, to compose the first message. She chose the biblical phrase, “What hath God wrought.”
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Published May 18, 2024 by Warren Ellis
Starting point. End point for today:
There has been lopping and sawing and cutting.
One of the mini-greenhouses was smashed beyond repair. I’ll finish assembling one single mini-greenhouse out of parts from two tomorrow. I got slowed down by discovering other jobs that needed doing along the way. All four apple trees are unexpectedly fruiting, so they needed weeding and mulching.
And, shockingly, the cherry tree is fruiting. I thought this was one of the figs at first, because I didn’t expect the cherry to live. I double checked with the plant app and it seems to be the cherry!
I also needed to attend to the berry plants – the strawberries are already starting to fruit. Seems I lost a few raspberry canes, and the peaches are probably beyond saving – they came out of dormancy too early so I couldn’t repot them, then they bloomed in fucking February, then it got cold again, and now they are confused and want to die. I intended to write tomorrow, but I need to repot some raspberry canes very fast, and some chives – just hoping I have enough compost left — and then feed everything.
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Published May 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis
Nobody is leaving me alone for long enough to focus today, so I supered my caffeine intake with two spoons of espresso powder in my protein/cacao smoothie and now I’m almost blind
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Published April 7, 2024 by Warren Ellis
And that cherry tree I planted yesterday flowered today.
First thing today, I was up and out and running the garden shredder for an hour.
These pots are deep, I’ve run out of homemade compost and bags of shop-bought are getting pricey again. So I drop some old pots on the bottom for drainage and taking up some volume, and then half-fill with wood chips. I’m also out of Perlite, so I scatter a couple handfuls of grit in there.
Golden Harvest mange tout, germinated and raised in one of the mini-greenhouses, in these very handy re-useable plug pots.
I like the old fashioned tools. Probably down to having watched Jack Hargreaves’ OUT OF TOWN every weekend as a kid. Handling them is part of the meditative pleasure of garden work for me.
All in, bamboo wigwam inserted, some extra rows of twine for support, netting tied in over the top for plant support and hopefully deterring the squirrels.
We will see if they all immediately die. But I got plenty of air and sun (and three thousand steps) doing all that, and that’s really the goal. Peaceful couple of hours.
This year has been nothing but high gales and heavy rain.
And millions of seeds blown in by the storms and then watered in by the bloody rain.
A lot of these weeds are garlic mustard, which is a quaint old name for what is basically THE CYANIDE PLANT OV DEATH.
Anyway.
This broken old mini greenhouse has been righted, put and tied down, with string trellis supports suspended inside.
Redcurrant and cherry put in the ground.
Golden berry and cape gooseberry that I overwintered undercover have been planted out, and tomatoes started indoors have been potted up – one is a variety called Blue Pear that I’m interested to see what happens with.
Cleaned and top dressed the blueberries , did the same with some of the raspberries, emptied a compost bin, dug out a ton of weeds (three tons still to do), started refilling the empty compost bin. Got about half of what I wanted to get done, done, but half is better than none.
I have been trying to recreate the flavour of butterscotch Angel Delight, the lab-created powdered dessert from the childhood that would be whipped into milk to create a faintly alien mousse. Butterscotch was the best. They took all the sugar out of Angel Delight at some point and the flavour just wasn’t the same.
This here is 250ml of whippable oat cream, four teaspoons of Lyle’s butterscotch syrup and a few drops of Monin vanilla syrup, run through the Nutribullet for fifteen seconds. Flavour-wise, it’s 98% there. The texture is too dense to be Angel Delight, but not by too much. No colour to it, but that’s not important. I’ll chill it overnight and see how it behaves tomorrow, but right now it tastes pretty much as I remember the real thing. With no milk. Sugar bad, obviously, but sometimes you (I) just have to.
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Published March 19, 2024 by Warren Ellis
Trying e-cigarettes again. Have attempted to live with them many times over the years, decided it was time to try again. Grabbed some at random from the corner shop. Turns out one of them was…. “Lychee Ice.” It’s weird.
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Published March 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis
I don’t actually know if chickens can get trenchfoot
but I’m not taking any chances
I’m not going to be the one who has to call the vet to report the first ever case of chicken trenchfoot since world war one
The whole point of having a library is so that I can access the things I want to review over and over again, to keep me off streaming services unless absolutely necessary, and to look only at things that matter.
And screenshotting software is a much-used tool here.
It’s true that maintaining a personal library of physical media requires a certain amount of physical space – back in the Nineties I knew people who built vast monoliths of stacked VHS tapes – and that a lot of it can be done digitally. But I’m more likely to have a drive fail than irreparably scratch a disc. And there’s a thing about gathering stuff digitally… if I let myself fall back into that hole, I’ll end up with uncounted gigs of stuff that I may never have the time to listen to or watch. This was the rabbit hole of mp3 blogs, back in the day – I’m sure I still have zipfiles from that era that I never even opened. I have a feeling Simon Reynolds wrote about that some years ago, and there was a distinct ping of recognition from me.
I recently dug into one of my old external drives, in search of a song I only dimly remember – I can hear the sound of its last 40 seconds or so in the back of my head and wanted the whole thing. It was on a label sampler CD that came in a pink-and-white striped bag, of the kind you used to get sweets in back in the Seventies, but the CD came out in, oh, the early/mid 00s. I would have bought it from Piccadilly Records. The receipt is long since lost, and I cannot remember the name of the label. There was a point around 2012 when I digitised a lot of my CDs and got rid of them, because I needed the space, and I still regret that. I’ll never find that CD again, and the song – I only half-remember its title – is either misfiled or disappeared in a digital glitch.
It’s weird to be sad about the loss of a song you can barely remember, I’m sure. But I also remember the pang of frustration when THE DEATH OF STALIN, a film I like very much, was taken off Netflix just as I was in the mood to watch it again and make some notes on its dialogue. So I bought a physical copy.
Now I just need someone to put Jessica Beshir’s films on blu-ray.
