The Rooster – He ain't gonna die

Not by my hand, anyway. Yes, it turns out that I don't have seven hens. I have six hens. That seventh chicken, over the past weeks, started getting this red crown down the center of its head, bossing the other chickens around, and making these remedial cock-a-doodle-do-ing sounds. Then Sunday, it happened. Full on early morning wake the hell up crowing. This is the greatest fear of anyone raising chickens in a compact suburban neighborhood.

I shoved it in a bag and lit out up north to a friend's house. He lives in the country and has plenty of room for it to roam, thought I. But even better, I find out, he lived near a chicken farm. A drive by chicken tossing followed and all the problems were solved.

Well, all the chicken problems. It's been about the most wet late spring and early summer I can remember. The garden is drowning. It rained yesterday for just a little bit and the water pooled on my yard. I think it is all this rain that made my broccoli go to seed before it got bigger than a baseball. And my tomato plants look very sickly. The peppers aren't putting on any height to speak of either. But the cucumbers are going nuts.

Man cannot live on cucumbers alone.

Until next time.

Three hour tour

Yes, dear friends, a short trip has turned into a month – and is not yet over. I should be back in a little over a week and will get back to espousing my never-ebbing surprise regarding how easily I can make a mess of things…

Now to make a short-wave radio out of these coconuts.

This Damn House – Capitalist Structure

“I have a great idea,” said the fellow that built the kitchen on the back of the house eighty years ago. “I’ll pour some concrete stairs and a flat concrete walkway to those stairs along the back of the house. This will keep my boots clean.” Right he was.
“I have a great idea,” said the fellow that owned my house in the 1980s. “I have this concrete walkway and staircase already, but it looks so plain. I will build a raised garden bed along the edge and frame it in with four by fours. This will look pretty full of tulips in the spring.” Right he was.
“I hate flowers,” thought the fellow that owned my house in the late 1990s. “Especially tulips. I’ll build a deck right over that goddamn flower bed, those old concrete stairs, and that stupid walkway and it will raise the value of my house.” A jerk, but right he was.
Also, he was an idiot and a litterbug. I count abandoned houses, old unused roads, and broken down sheds as nothing more than really big litter.
When I moved in, I noticed this odd flowerbed resting under the deck, but figured it couldn’t do any damage. How wrong I was. Over the years, the dirt sloped back toward the house and directed all of the rainwater right back to my basement. I decided to do something about it one night while drinking, I’m sure.
Last summer, I pulled out all of the four by four timbers that held the original bed. The best of those timbers became the edge of my patio in front of my shed. The worst burned in last October’s bonfire. I still had the dirt to contend with.
A bit of back-story on this dirt. My neighbor tells me that one day in the 1990s, a fellow offered him and my home’s old owner a dump truck full of mulch. All but a wheelbarrow full of this ended up inside of those timber frames – slowly turning into dirt – lying in wait to ruin a few weeks of my life.
Beginning last weekend, I decided to spend those ruined weeks. My deck, at its closest point to the earth, is only about a foot up. At the highest, maybe two feet. To remove the five cubic meters of dirt from under the deck, without razing the deck, which was my first thought, I would have to belly-crawl under there with some sort of sleigh, load the sleigh with dirt and drag it out. All this, while lying face down in rotting mulch and being attacked by my neighbor’s dog with vicious consistency. Oh boy.
I have a four by two foot plywood board I found under that same deck last year and a long length of clothesline that was used all last summer and twice this summer in its intended way before snapping in stiff winds, throwing my clothes across my neighbor’s yard. Two good shirts died that day. May they rest in piece (as stuffing for a new pillow). Anyway, I drilled two holes in the board, looped the rope through, harnessed it over a shoulder, and crawled in carrying my garden trowel in my teeth.
Each load is enough dirt to put about three inches around two rows of six plants in my garden. I’ve done this now five times. I’m eaten by mosquitoes every time.
I should be done by August. So remember, dear reader, if you decide to build some new beautiful outdoor structure, remove whatever was there when you showed up. Even better, call a team of archeologists to dig down about fifteen feet just to be sure there is nothing there. They need the work anyway.

The Land of Pharma 3 - Buildings

First – obvious but easily overlooked – a building is needed. The WMC is a huge and rich company that makes a wide variety of products, so you'd expect WMC products to be made in nice buildings. You'd be right – mostly. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA) has oversight for medicines. "Oversight" includes the buildings the medicines are made in. Each building must be licensed (approved) for use. The approval process is a long and difficult (and costly) so once licensed for production, it's unlikely that WMC or any other large company would willingly put themselves through that task for fun.
Let's make sure that's clear. The news does a good job of telling everyone when a new pharmaceutical product is approved by the FDA. But the building that it's made in has to be approved too? Yes, indeed. So when WMC first developed Hemopres and Menengevax, it first had to ensure it had a place to produce them.
This wasn't all that difficult for Hemopres. WMC has been making non-sterile small molecule pharmaceuticals for years (in Imaginationland, where this running example takes place). The company already had multiple buildings outfitted with all the necessary equipment to manufacture Hemopres. All they needed was the API, really, and they have multiple API sites already.
The story is different for Menengevax. Where pressing powder into tablets is relatively straight-forward, vaccines are biological systems and each vaccine is different. So each vaccine manufacturing process is different. And every building is different.
But regardless of the product inside, buildings still have their own needs. Heat and air conditioning, for example. Then there's the roof. Most manufacturing buildings have flat roofs so the heater and air conditioner (collectively known as "air handlers") can be put up there, but flat roofs are notorious for leaking as well. Under that roof are offices, hallways, bathrooms that all need cleaning and maintenance. And this is to say nothing about the actual manufacturing process.
Further, the toilets have to get hooked up to the sewers. Electricity lines have to run to the building. And the property surrounding that building is taxed, of course. So despite the fact that there are difficult scientific processes happening in that building, it has all the same, mundane, run-of-the-mill issues that a house has. And parking is a bitch.
So now WMC has a building. But that's WMC. That's just one "Big Pharma" scenario. There's a lot of other ways to fulfill the "building" requirement. And this was obviously a sketch overview, at best. From here, we'll get into some details.

The Heartbreak of Trash

Trash and Waste are two wildly different things. There is nothing that aches with waste. There's foolishness, as waste was something that never got to add anything to someone's life. Packaging is waste. The shavings from a piece of wood on a lathe being shaped to replace a leg on a chair are waste. That leg, though, brings a chair more years of use. Eventually, though, the seat will wear down to a point that the chair cannot be saved and it becomes trash. That's heartbreaking.
Today, I threw a suitcase into my trashcan. I bought it in Michigan one Christmas as the one suitcase I owned was in the Middle East. When I flew home to Michigan from Philly, I had all of my clothes wrapped up in a red laundry bag which I didn't know I owned. I bought the bag with my parents in some big box store and used it very rarely until this past August. It was then that I flew overseas for the first time. I went four more times after that, each time carrying this bag.
Last Friday, stopping at my last hotel before flying home, the wheel broke off. It was dead. So today, I emptied out the loose change, stripped off the metal for recycling, and tore off the "Sonoma" tag for posterity and tossed out the trash.
Trash is something that was very, very useful. Through usefulness, the now-trash becomes sentimental in the way that you expect it to be there. I would open my downstairs closet and without having to really identify the thing as my suitcase, I would grab it out and start packing. Sure I will get another suitcase, but I'll remember the one I used up.
In that vein, I just bought a car. My truck is parked to be used rarely, in an attempt to keep it from being trash. I drove that truck for the first time at the age of 15 to take my grandmother to a chemotherapy treatment. Illegal, but nobody else could possibly take her. It moved me and many friends to college. Hauled some couches and then eventually moved me to Philly. It moved me from house to house until finally I bought one of my own. Throughout that time, it took me back home to Michigan many times. The idea of it being trash someday is heartbreaking. I'll look at this new car, but I'll remember my truck.
My life is full of these things. A pair of boots I've had resoled four times now. My crepe pans and a hand mixer I use to make my crepes every time. Then there's the flip chair that my dad and I sewed up their first visit to my new life in Philly. I have every wallet I've ever carried, which, counting my current one, is only three. A little clock with a date engraved for the year 2020. I could go on naming most everything I own. These things all become more than just useful items, but memories in their own right.
Maybe I'm too sentimental. I certainly am given the nature of the mistakes I tend to make, which always revolves around something becoming trash far too early, if it ever should or could have become trash were I more thoughtful. But sometimes I don't make mistakes and the trash, like my suitcase, is inevitable. But it's still feels like something has been irrevocably lost.

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.