Irish Hedgerows: The Way and the Truth

There are many different types of woody plant that make up the famous Irish hedgerows (privet is only one…). I only know this because I was told it and given my inability to identify almost any plant species and my rather remarkable lack of drive to learn them, I'll never be able to know this for sure. Whatever the species, every plot of farm and pasture land between Doolin and Carlow, Ireland is boxed in by these things.

Here's what I found to be most charming about this: every few hedged in areas was the house. It's the norm to have sheep and cows living tangentially to the house (and the neighbors' houses, and the road, and the little town…).

According to some various and probably completely sensationalistic and unreliable internet sources, backyard chicken raising in suburban areas is only now making a comeback in the U.S. and the snobbish laws prohibiting poultry in these areas are being overturned.

Where is it that the U.S. went astray? I can understand moving all large livestock out of downtown New York City to the pasturelands outside of Manhattan Island when the intensity of land usage for people alone grew to its present state (a cow has to walk a little from time to time). I can imagine keeping pigs and cows out of the suburbs today (not necessarily the exurbs, though). But chickens? Even two or three without a rooster? These laws look to be written less to protect animals or property than to simply sterilize the landscape.

There are many dogs that bark almost nonstop within earshot of my house. There are some folks that blast White Snake (poor bastards) while passed out in their backyard. I imagine that this happens in other towns as well. And in these other towns, barking dogs and 80s hair metal, for some reason, are lawful while chickens may not be.

Keep barking dogs legal too, but ban White Snake.

This mixture of pasture land and suburban or "small town" living is reflected in France (outside of Paris, no less), northern Germany and Switzerland. That's only my personal account. This was also the practice, in my youth, in some of the small towns in Michigan. However, I, along with everyone else of my age, called these the homes of rednecks. Over the next generation, the older folks died off and severed the last ties with the land their forbearers brought with them from the old country. Those homes (now shacks) are now in the hands of "white trash" – the chickens and goats replaced by supped-up cars and hot tubs they can't afford, or have been abandoned letting more farm land go under a housing development.

Land of Pharma - 2

I need to fill out the description of WMC's products here before I can get into much else:
Hemopres is the marriage, basically, of an API and some excipients (an excipient is a material found in the finished drug product that is not the API). The total weight of a single Hemopres tablet is about 200 milligrams. But we said above that the prescription is for a 5 mg tablet each day. The number of milligrams on the label doesn't mean the weight of the entire tablet – it means the amount of API in the tablet. A 5 mg tablet would be so small that it would probably get lost on the trip from the bottle to your mouth, so it's bulked up with a lot of sugar or some other completely inert substance. Then there are some other things added, like binding agents to hold the whole thing together. This mixture is put into a press where it is all smashed together under huge forces, then it's coated to keep from turning to dust when it's in the bottle with 499 other tablets.
Menengvax is three milliliters of liquid. It's in a sealed bottle that has to be kept refrigerated. In that three milliliters are purified virus particles. In this case, a virus particle is a protein specific to this meningitis virus that has been removed from the virus. So there is nothing infective in this vaccine – you need the full virus (and it's nucleic acids) to get sick. But you'd need a ton of virus particles to get the immune memory you need to be safe from that disease for the rest of your life. So, also in those three mL of liquid is the adjuvant, which hightens the body's response. There are a handful of other things, like stabilizers, and the rest is purified water, which allows for the material to be injected.
With the differences in these two medicines, it's certainly clear that there must be differences in the overall manufacturing process. Sure, we already spoke about tablet compression and filling of fluid into bottles, but that's obvious. Next, we'll explore the buildings where these products are made.

Airports

As I write this, at 6:54 am local Frankfurt time, the sun is rising over the far terminal at the airport. I am watching it climb in the sky. In front of me, I see Singapore Airlines, Air India, Qatar Airways, Thai Air, and Lufthansa. And that big, gorgeous sun in an unobstructed sky.

Traveling for work as much as I have of late can be a drag. You're always on someone else's turf working on their schedule. And time is always limited. So my days stretch and stretch into 12 hours or better in the office. Then I work from the hotel until the end of the workday in the U.S. The work is incredibly rewarding and that's why I go through those long days and those numerous weekends that I lose to airports.

But right now, with this sun (and my morning Bitburger), the edge is dulled. For 22 years in Michigan and now another eight around Philadelphia, I have seen this sun rise in a similarly unobstructed sky. When you watch it come up red and then get yellow on it's way to white, how could you not be happy? Or, maybe more in line with today, how is it that people are scared, mad, or indifferent to our environment (terrestrial or celestial)? It's all so beautiful.

I feel that way and I'm seeing it from a mere airport.

Composting

Those romantics in the crowd will realize that love lost, hard times, and broken dreams pile up and become the foundation of new opportunities. Then there those of us that have given up on that. But those romantic thoughts certainly work for food scraps! Hot dog!
Half of my backyard is turned over into garden and I have neighbors on all three sides. I realized that if I was to compost, I had to find some sort of technological solution or be run out of town on a rail. Through a series of other accidents, I discovered the Lehman's catalog. Much of the goods there are American made, as the Amish don't really live anywhere else except Ohio. There, I found the Urban Composter, a black recycled plastic barrel that composts without omitting hardly any smell.
When I first got the barrel, I put it close to my house so I could easily put my scraps in it. Sounds reasonable, no? Everything worked that first summer. Then fall came. My backyard is to the north of my house, which means in the winter, the sun does not touch the earth close to my house and my big black plastic compost barrel froze solid. Finally, spring came and I started over.
So last year, I moved the compost barrel as far away from my house as possible. This kept the compost cooking – very slowly – all last winter. I emptied it just a few weeks ago and tilled it into my garden.
Of course, I didn't let it cook quite long enough and I fear that as the composting continues, I will leach every last free molecule of nitrogen out of my soil and kill all my poor plants. Where could I find some free nitrogen?
Enter the chickens. Well, more specifically, chicken poo, which is jam packed with nitrogen. Raising these chicks has helped complete the use and reuse cycle of my own little backyard farm. Plus, when fully grown, chicken scratching aerates the soil and the birds eat grubs and other pests. Just make sure to wash the veggies before you eat them…

The Land of Pharma - 1

I'm going to start a new type of entry. I've have some experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry and, with all of the new attention on that industry, on socialized medicine and on the FDA, I figure I should try to explain what I know about the industry.
What are we talking about?
"Big Pharma" is a convenient way to discuss a certain kind of company. However, just as terms like "republican platform" or "socialism", Big Pharma does little to explain anything about the pharmaceutical industry. So let's begin by explaining as best we can everything that goes into this industry. Along the way, we'll do a pretty good job of describing a lot of industries, in case you, dear reader, are interested.
Behind the counter of any pharmacy lies hundreds of different prescription medicines. There's hundreds more in the surrounding area known as Over the Counter (OTC) drugs. That's just the piece found in the store. In every doctor's office are another host of medicines that can't be dispensed through the corner store. These are vaccines, tetanus shots, anti-venom shots, and things like that. In hospitals are another suite of therapies like antibiotics of last resort (those ultra-antibiotics that still work against our ever increasing number of antibiotic resistant super-pathogens). That's the goal. Everything we're going to talk about is a means to that end: medicine.
Let me say one more thing now. There are arguments or editorialists that hold to the idea that our reliance on Type II diabetes drugs is because of the larger issue of obesity. Or that we have these super-pathogens in the first place because of over use of antibiotics medicines and cleansers. They say that Big Pharma pushes it's products on the public and…. Yes, television is littered with drug advertisements and yes, millions of people run to the doctor for a prescription for a little ache or a sniffle. That interplay is incredibly important and interesting, but that won't be explored much here. We'll talk about the social use of these products only insofar as the public does use them and that gives this industry the same capitalist footing as any other industry.
So, the goal is medicine. We'll use the company I just imagined, The World Medicines Corporation, as our example. It's an established Fortune 500 company (way, way higher on the list than number 500, I assure you, as I only imagine big things) with factories and research centers all over the world. It employs many tens of thousands of people. This is the general conception of "Big Pharma," right? The World Medicines Corporation (WMC, as it's known on Wall Street) makes all forms of medicine as well, so we'll be able to look at each sort. And we'll start with two: Hemopres, a pill that lowers blood pressure and Menengvax, a shot that vaccinates against the virus that causes viral spinal meningitis.
Hemopres is one of those first drugs we talked about above. It's found behind the pharmacy counter in your local grocery store. It's called a "non-sterile small molecule" pharmaceutical. This type of pharmaceutical must be taken at some regular interval (this one is one 5 milligram, or mg, pill each day). It's an oral tablet, which means that when it's manufactured, it doesn't have to be manufactured to be sterile. A person's stomach is pretty much a big bag of acid and will kill most any bacteria that gets in there, so oral medicines don't need to be sterile. The small molecule (the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, or API) passes through the stomach into the intestines, where it is taken up into the blood stream. When the API circulates around the body, it can do it's work.
This is in contrast to Menengvax. Most vaccines (a biological product) are injectables (you don't get this in a pharmacy – a doctor or nurse sticks a needle "subcutaneously" and injects the fluid into your body). Vaccines, generally, are based on a protein or other complex molecular structure, which is a "large molecule." Proteins couldn't survive the acid in your stomach, so it's put into your body in a way that bypasses the stomach. But because it doesn't go though the protective acid of the stomach, it must be manufactured to be absolutely sterile. Also different from the small molecule pharmaceuticals, this vaccine will only need to be taken once (or at least only a couple of times). Vaccines make the body's immune system react as if you were sick. When that happens, the body "remembers" what made it sick and will be able to react much faster when the natural form of the illness-causing agent tries to infect the body again.
Before this gets too boring, I'll stop here and go further later.

Forward Thinking and Hanging Cloth

I was lucky enough to have a week off last week. One of my many little tasks I desperately needed to complete was settling the second story bathroom privacy issue. Long ago, the door, if it could be so called, was pulled down and thrown out. The bathroom, which is far smaller than the inside of a late 70’s Chevelle, couldn’t have a normal swinging door and the closet-style collapsing door made being in that bathroom feel like jail time. After deciding against saloon doors, I settled on a curtain that gives privacy and would still let light in from the hallway.

It has been more than a month since I went to Fabric Row in Philly to purchase the proper cloth to make my curtain. It is an unbacked off white base with soft blue and green stripes matching the colors of the bathroom and offsetting the hallway color (so I’m told as I’m horrible with color schemes). Anyway, it was measured, sewn and hung.
As I made the inaugural use of that bathroom post-curtaining official by washing my hands, I realized I didn’t hang a curtain. I envisioned a dozen drunken friends going into and out of that bathroom and realized no, it isn’t a curtain – it’s a very big hand-drying towel. Tomorrow, I start work on signage for use of the second floor bathroom.

Fury and the Art of Patching Up an Old Truck

Like clockwork here in Pennsylvania, my 1991 Chevy C1500 pickup was tested by the State to ensure it was safe for the roads and met environmental standards. I have been fighting back and forth in my mind regarding the environmental part for years now. How can I square my desire to grow a lot of my own food, by local goods, organic goods, and environmentally-safe / petroleum-free products whenever I can with my utilization of an old truck?

Similar other struggles have been vexing me for years, now. I think that dairy cases in shopping centers are about the dumbest things in Creation. They are refrigerators designed to not have doors, yet keep milk from spoiling. How are these things legal? Then, not only is the milk kept cold by open refrigerators in stores, but dairy products are shipped cold and kept in huge fully-refrigerated warehouses while still at the dairy. That, to me, is a broken system. What to do instead?

I started buying ultra-pasteurized milk. This milk is sterilized, shipped and stored warm. This system could save huge amounts of energy costs and air pollution (unless, of course, electricity somehow went 100% renewable), but the containers for the milk are like big juice boxes. This means many different types of material (a product contact surface, structural layers, paper to print on, etc) compressed into one package. Multiple inseparable materials means that this is a package that cannot be recycled or reused.
Damn it! Why can't any of these things be easy!?! So either you can save fuel energy or you can save waste put in landfills. Right, but I was talking about my truck.

I could buy a Toyota Prius or some other foreign-made ultra-fuel-efficient vehicle, thereby adding to the death of American companies, American jobs, and removing one industry where science and engineering is paramount from the U.S. Or, I could hang on to my Fort Wayne, Indiana-made truck until an electric hybrid is made on U.S. soil by one of the (remaining by then) Big Three.

At least this one has a middle ground. I'm looking for a used Chevy car to get me through. I can keep my truck long-term for the utility of having such a vehicle and have a day-to-day fuel-efficient car to keep emissions down.