Got it! Jane is now doing a continuity read.
I’m consulting notes on our next project. I have a notebook which is one of those ‘what would you grab if there were a fire?’ sort of items, which went missing—it’s my notes. Names, places, timeline—-and it was missing. Searched the trunk, found my collection of Dark Shadows dvds, in the ‘guilty pleasure’ department, and then searched the closet, various boxes, the dresser—I mean, like, oh–dear!
We have of course redone floors, moved things—I would never throw it out, but — it could be buried anywhere.
I’d lent it to Jane on some question about next project, and bless her, she had faithfully kept it right by her workstation, ready whenever I might call for it.
Whew!
People such as Jane are like the lands of the Jumblies!
Great!
Lands of the Jumblies?
The Jumblies Related Poem Content Details
BY EDWARD LEAR
I
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
II
They sailed away in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;
And every one said, who saw them go,
‘O won’t they be soon upset, you know!
For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long,
And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong
In a Sieve to sail so fast!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
III
The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, ‘How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
IV
And all night long they sailed away;
And when the sun went down,
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
In the shade of the mountains brown.
‘O Timballo! How happy we are,
When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
In the shade of the mountains brown!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
V
They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees,
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
VI
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!’
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore;
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And everyone said, ‘If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
I wondered too, and now I know! Thanks, Hanneke andTommie. That was lovely. Heheh.
Delighted to hear that Emergence is finished… And that Jane saved the day! I bet it is not the first time.
Hey, I just realized that I have a new icon here. Where has my old, weird critter gone to?
Rasean, IIRC the critters are somehow generated from the mail-address of your account. Did you change the mailbox you linked to? Or maybe they changed the generating rules…
Woa, trying to get it straight in my mind… ‘Convergence’ is due out in April, is ‘Resurgence’ now named ‘Emergence’ or is there another book in the pipeline?
Yes, I am confused too. Three new books of Bren instead of two? That would be simply frabjous.
And re: Edward Lear’s poems, I have this feeling that in his poems, he’s gently sending up his friends, including making up silly nicknames for them, and that they all had a good laugh up their respective sleeves about his poems.
Resurgence is now Emergence and Resurgence will follow in due course! 😉
Emergence, Convergence, Resurgence does seem a more logical progression. Emergence seems inviting: something new is happening. Convergence and Resurgence seem like continuations of a story; things already established are converging or resurging.
Ahhhh, cool! Assumed it was something like that, but I’ve lost track before! 🙂
Excellent news on the upcoming book and on Jane’s faithful keepingof the Noteboookintact andready! Possibly, Jane needs an attractive hooded cape or cloak, something befitting her mystery mastery. More in the Deerstalker or Ren Fair mode than the caped crusader mode. Then again….
Gene War, please?
Good news about Emergence. I’m always a little lost about the names of the books in the Foreigner series anyway. Just checked and Convergence is not available for pre-order on Amazon yet. If the schedule of prior years is followed, it will be out sometime before April 15th of next year. And it will taunt me until after the last return is extended or filed and I can actually read it!
IIRC, it’s due in early May. It’s available for pre-order; I just checked Amazon. (Sort by publication date and it comes out on top.)
When placing pre-order, please be careful–the sneaky bastards at Amazon (is that redundant?) automatically set it for release date delivery, charging $12.98 for the privilege! Then they make it difficult to fix…
THe scoundrels!
As PJ said, check Amazon for ( Convergence CJ Cherryh ). It is available for pre-order in the US, when you’re ready to order it. Dueout in May in ebook and hardcover.
IIRC, UK fans have said the Foreigner series is not available to them in ebook form, and possibly not in print form, so that they can only get iany of the books in print from a US vendor or store such as Amazon.com (US), rather than Amazon.co.uk, and Continental European customers of whatever country can either get the eboook or not, or order in print from the US. I believe this is so for Australia and New Zealand and nearby. About India and Pakistan, I don’t know, for their large English-speakikng population. Non-English countries, such as Russia or Japan, I suppose have to order from the US or Canada. This is a large portion of the planet that could be reading the entire Foreigner series and other Cherryh books too…and could profit some or several publishers.
Woohoo!! That’s so exciting. 😀 Looking for to it so much. 😀
Today’s Civics lesson, and a computer note. Personal.
I am still looking for a regular cabbie or two or a felicitous third.
Today, one cabbie decided, because I made one offhand comment, to go on his political theory. Up until then, I thought he was OK. But, uh, no. I can be tolerant, but that was wacky.
the interestingpart was the return trip cabbbie. I had not checked the latest population figuresfor my city. I had heard we mght become the 3rd largest US city instead of the 4th soon. If he’s right, we have above 4 million people in my city’s metro area. Staggering.
But at the end of the ride, I was very curious, and asked where he was from. He is from Gabon, a small coastal country off western Africa (I guessed right, which pleased him.) It’s near Congo and another country. He said yes, when I mentioned gorillas. “And lots of other strange animals, and jungle,” he said. In perspective, he said it;s smaller than Texs but has one million people plus about another one million international people. Most are concentrated in about 20 (IIRC) cities, and there is a corrupt government in place, oppressive, but not a civil war as such. This is when he compared the whole population of his current/former country with that of Houston. I’d rather deal with a sane and sensible Afrian man than a crazy white American man, and er, I;m also a white guy and American. I got his number.
I haverun into the same Indian or Pakistani cabbie three times now, and finally have his number. I suspect he is overqualified to be a cabbie.
I had an odd experience the other day with a cabbie who, several times,just cound not get that my street name starts with an A. He kept omitting it when repeating it back to me to do a map search. Finally, I got through to him. But both saying the street name and spelling it out did not get it for several tries. He was foreign, and apparently thought both uh and ay were not part of the street name, spoken as a word or spelled out. This was understandable, except it was too many times for him not to catch this, until I had to stress it and explicitly specify it as part of the name. Thought I was going to have to get a different cabbie, just for that, but got it sorted out OK. — Other than that, he was fine to talk to, but he was not used to it here yet, or so it seemed. (I suspect he’s been here longer than he made it seem. This is is not my first trip around the block.)
The guy from Gabon was very nice, probablyalso very overqualified, but I;ve had better luck with cabbies who could be doingsomething besides driving a cab. And… cabbies run their own small business as contractors working with the cab company, if they are in it to stay. If you can navigate a very large city and its people and difficulties, then you probably have more on the ball than most people think of cabbies anyway. It doees take some sense.
Computer issues are still to be resolved, pending what I find tomorrrow and then possibly before the endof the month, if I am lucky. If I am not so lucky, then I will be stcuck with only this Win7 laptop and without a Mac for months, and will have to do something else towards income. I have only one of the font creation programs I was using on the Win7 PC, and one of tomorrow’s tasks is to find out if I can use my source files on it, or if I am stuck or have to start on new work and put the others on hold until I can get a new Mac. The source files are not the .otf and .ttf files you actually use for your fonts. Rather, the source files are more likean Adobe file as opposed to the finished image or publication you get from an Adobe product. A font source file is a database of outlines, measurements, and relationships between letters, and absolutely every font editor program out there has its own proprietary formats. So… aarrgh. I will know a bit more tomorrow on both that and my ability to buy a new Mac this month, versus much later. One bit of good news: I can return he old Mac through a 3rd party company to get it recycled and get a credit towards a future purchase of a Mac or other Apple products. So I can use that to knock a good chunk off the price of a new one, but not quite enough to really help0 more. So…We shall see.
Thanks Tommie! Totally off topic, I’m feeling very Dutch today and would like to post some links for people who might be interested in taking a look at some things that, for me, are very much what my country is about. It’ll probably get caught in the spam-filter because of more than 2 links, but I’m trying anyway.
CJ if this is too much you can just not let it out of the spam-trap 🙂
Sorry, the versions of these videos that have good English subtitles seem to be the ones with the worst picture quality ;(
*
Maybe because I visited Zeeland last weekend, the province mostly consisting of semi-islands where the last big flood with lots of people killed happened in 1953, that was the start of the Deltawerken.*
And maybe because of Zeeland’s provincial motto “Luctor et emergo”(I struggle and surface/emerge from the waters) and the link between emergo and Emergence; but this is the first youtube-video I’d like to share.
Link to an <a href= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwiPqGvSe8c"energy-company add from 2007, with a song about the Dutch fight against the water, with good subtitles (except in the first shot where they write son when they mean sun)- they translate the song but not the written words at the end. Those are:
The climate is changing.
Cause: the worldwide emissions of CO2.
Result: renewed fight against the water.
Together we can do something about it.
We. And you.
Look on our website for our CO2-reduction plans.
* The BBC series Coast had a good episode about the Dutch coast, with great images for anyone who wants to look at beautiful film of what the coast and the Deltaworks look like now. Alas, I can’t find it to link to on Youtube anymore; maybe Netflix-users can find it there?
Alternatively, there’s a half-hour excerpt from the “Netherlands from the air” series by our public broadcasting company that gives a bit of an overview of the landscape in general. That wasn’t one I was going to link to, but for someone who wants a view from the air it’s OK.
OK, where was I?
We collectively have a great faith in our Water-boards, the oldest democratic institutions in the Netherlands (starting in the 13th century) which are still very active today, preparing the country for the expected rising sea-levels and heavy rain-storms (cloudbursts) due to climate change, so people aren’t constantly worried about flooding. But still, the necessity to defend ourselves against flooding is a small part of almost every Dutch person’s background awareness. The song and images in the Nuon add speaks directly to that, using images from the 1953 flood and more recent smaller inundations.
**
Next up: bicycles!
In the Netherlands almost everyone bikes, as an ordinary mode of transport, so almost no-one here realises this might be a bit unusual. A year ago I discovered David Hembrow, an Englishman who moved to the Netherlands for the biking, who tries to explain on his blog to English and American people how this Dutch style of bike-transport-design works, which opened my eyes and made me start to look around my own area when biking or driving. I linked to his starting page before, when we had a discussion about cycling safety – he is very much a promotor of safe cycling infrastructure – rightly so, in my opinion, but less relaxing than the next guy.
From mr.Hembrow I discovered BicycleDutch’s blog on wordpress, and his videos on youtube. I can heartily recommend these! I’ve found those to be very informative, and also very soothing to watch when I’m stressed! It’s quintessential Dutch cycling, anything from quiet countryside to busy city intersections; so very recognisable and the way we live everyday.
He’s Dutch, but he blogs in English – he explains everything very clearly with a lot of good pictures and I love the videos he posts with each blog.
For anyone who wants a taste of what living in the Netherlands is really like, please watch these videos.
And just for the cuteness, another song-video demonstrating clearly the joy most Dutch babies feel when they can sit up by themselves, and start to explore the world from the front seat of mom or dad’s bike. They ride the front seats from about 9 months to 2 years, then shift to the back seat for riding in traffic while starting to learn to ride on their own somewhere between 2-4 years old; at around 4-5 years they start to ride beside mom or dad, and around 8-9 years old they can ride to school by themselves (though older kids and grownups still get ‘backies’ often enough, but not in the special kid’s seats). In big cities like Amsterdam kids are more likely to be transported in cargobikes ’till they’re maybe 6-7 years old, but if the cyclepaths are calm enough that’s not necessary.
***
And lastly, an older song-video I recently rediscovered, celebrating the Dutch tendency to be a bit averse to rules and authorities… (it talks about 15 million people, but by now it’s 16 million!). That link has good subtitles but bad image quality, this one has no subtitles but better quality images.
And in the same tongue-in-cheek vein, this website: Stuff Dutch people like. (Mostly not that far off reality 🙂 )
OK, that’s enough Dutchness to last everybody for the next ten years!
CJ I posted a long off-topic thing with a lot of links in it, and it’s awaiting moderation. If it’s too much you can just not let it out of the spam-trap!
Thanks Tommie for the poem!
Well done. I look forward to ordering it the moment the magic pixie in the publishing industry allow me to
Got it, Hanneke. 😉 It wasn’t even in the spam trap, just waiting for approval—dunno why the thing even did that, but probably the links. Interesting! I’ve followed the stories here on construction of houses that float above water rise—and I know Dutch engineers came and assisted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, advising on structures and precautions, which people were real interested in hearing. New Orleans was built on one island (the old part) in a maze of swampy channels, and thrived in connection with Chicago, in trade up and down the Mississipi River—Chicago would send flatboats down loaded with goods and many of the boats were broken up and the wood used to make walkways and bridges over the channels as New Orleans grew as a seaport of sorts—it’s why the historic and tourist-catching French Quarter survived Katrina and so much else was lost. The French Quarter, as I understand it, is on the original island.
@Hanneke: Just curious… We have to dredge the Lower Columbia frequently to keep shipping up to Portland open. Surely you must likewise have to dredge the Lower Rhine. Is that silt used to build up the polders, or is it considered too contaminated with heavy metals and such being downstream from the Ruhr?
Thank you, Hanneke. Those sound very interesting, though it’ll take me a while to get to them.
Given sea level rise and increased coastal and inland flooding, the US may need a national polder program. (Does English have a word that means, “To enclose in a polder” or “To construct a polder”? Or does Dutch? English isn’t shy about stealing words!)
If we’re going to keep New Orleans as a major port, we really need to get serious about it. And Louisiana and Florida have this is common: their average height is only 100 feet (30m) above sea level; Delaware averages only 60 feet (20m). A lot of the coastal areas of states on the Atlantic and Caribbean have similar areas. We could lose a lot of major cities.
The states on the Pacific have a coastal mountain range protecting much of them, though we’re going to need locks under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Glad someone likes some of this; I was so enthousiastic about those BicycleDutch videos.
@Walt: the Dutch word is “inpolderen”, for the whole process of enclosing in a dike and pumping the water out. Just putting a dike/dyke around an area would probably be “omdijken” (om = around, surrounding, and ij is a dipthong, one letter not unlike y); Dutch is rather flexible in combining words and word-parts into new words, so it might be “bedijken” if you add some dikes but not all the way around.
Inpolderen would work in English if you leave of the Dutch plural verb ending: ik polder in (I polder in, create a polder), wij polderen het Ijsselmeer in (we polder in the IJssellake, turn the IJssellake into a polder).
@Paul, I’m not a water-engineer like my sister the physical geography major with a hydrology specialisation. I’ve heard a little bit from her when she worked for the commission that studied the best ways to resolve the increasing flooding risks due to heavy rains upstream in Germany/Belgium/France, but don’t know much.
One thing I do know, that Committee came up with a plan called “Room for the river”, including making cities along the rivers stop allowing building in the “winter bedding*” of the river to stop impeding peak flow, adding extra temporary-overflow areas that are developed as nature or meadows, and slowly getting pavement with fast run-off changed where possible into more permeable surfacing to help replenish sweet groundwater and lessen the necessary peak runoff/pumping capacity during cloudbursts.
* I don’t know how this is done on American rivers, but his is what I learned in primary school geography. Every big river has two beds, one narrow and fairly deep that’s the permanent channel which has water even in summer, where the shipping channel goes; this is bordered by fairly low dikes (the summer dikes) designed to be regularly submerged. Then there’s the adjoining floodplain or winter bedding, which fills up when the rivers are full of rainwater or meltwater in winter and spring, bordered by the higher winter dikes that the water is not supposed to cross.
Some cities were eyeing parts of the floodplain, traditionally only used for summer pasture, as prime riverside real estate. But anything built in there, even a cowshed designed to be flooded each winter, obstructs the flow and thus causes problems upstream.
There is dredging to keep shipping channels at the right depth. But the silt that the rivers transport to the seacoast at Zeeland and Rotterdam gets moved by the sea-currents north along the coast and replenishes the beaches and dunes, the natural barriers that protect most of our North Sea coast. Then it gets deposited in the Waddensea and built onto the east ends of the Waddenislands which form the northern edge of our country. The sea nibbles on the west ends of the islands and deposts sand at the east, so the islands slowly migrate (the uninhabited tiny eastmost one has almost moved to Germany). If you dredge the river channels too much and take the silt away, you remove the natural replenishment cycle and our sea-barriers would wear thin. That’s not acceptable, so there has to be some balance. One of the ways that balance is kept is by dumping the dredged sludge at sea, at several specific spots. There’s lots of information online about this in Dutch, but I can’t find much in English, though this video about the “Sand motor” created in 2011 might be interesting.
And finally for any interested hydraulic engineers this last video about the newest plans for improvement to the Afsluitdijk, which will benefit fisheries and nature as well as water safety.
SOorry I made a mistake in the link for the Sand Motor video.
I still haven’t had the time to watch the videos.
It doesn’t surprise me that English has already stolen inpolderen, though changing it slightly to impolder, impoldering, etc. An English rule I’d forgotten requires in- to become im- when followed by b, m, or p. Impolder is quite a rare word; I suspect it will become more common in the future.
Some places, especially on the Pacific coast, impoldering could be paid for by selling the land reclaimed. Indeed, it would be quite a profit. When it comes to impoldering all of Florida, I just don’t know.
@Walt, that’s the way impoldering started in Holland in the 1600s: groups of venture capitalists got together the money to build the dykes and windmills around large lakes or marshes, pumped them dry, built a few roads and then sold or rented out the land for farming.
You can see something similar in the L.A. river, south of Arroyo Seco. The channel is wide and deep – about 200 feet wide at the bottom, and 40 feet deep. The summer channel is about six feet wide and maybe two feet deep.
I’ve see the river nearly full after a winter storm, with spray clearing the railings on the Main Street bridge. It was doing about 30 miles per hour (its normal speed through there), and had whitecaps.
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0675712,-118.2244319,3a,60y,1.27h,85.05t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sekZwbnelzBt1WMZX3vKg-A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en