Roads

Unpaved roads... I've written particularly about roads in the last light of the day.

Here are two shots of roads on the Cone Manor, and two shots of the Commissary Road on Mount Mitchell - both in North Carolina, off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Click for larger views.

Nonsense!

I was driving and thinking. I find the mind wanders in a particular way when driving. I've read that the right side of the brain gets a bit more control, because the left side (verbal) is bored with the work at hand, and dodges out, letting the right side take over. Driving, folding laundry, washing yourself in the shower - these are all yawns for the left brain.

So when the left brain steps out briefly, the right brain considers words in a different light. Mine tends to herd them together in groups. Like the small pile of whelks on my desk, picked up in Maine, which I almost unconsciously sort and line up like little artillery pieces during long conference calls and phone meetings. I arrange them by size, or by how they're ribbed, or by how weathered and worn they are. With words I do the same, and I started considering words we use when we protest that something is not so.

There are the simple, literal, straight words, like Untrue, False, Lies, Nonsense, Absurd, each with different degrees and blends of mistake or malice implied.
Bunk belongs with this group (from Bunkum, or Buncombe, a word from 1820's Washington about speeches made just for show or applause).
So do Blather (from an old Norse word for chatter) and Blarney (which comes from a particular myth about the Blarney Stone in Ireland, implying the words are nonsense or false flattery).
So does Hooey (from a 1930s magazine of spoof ads, a precursor of Mad Magazine) and Malarkey (origin unknown).
Balderdash is a stronger word in this family, though it's origins are unknown (here are some theories).
Preposterous is also stronger, coming from a Latin idea that seems similar to our idiom "ass backwards."
Humbug also goes here, being an 18th century slang term for a hoax or a joke.

Or we might deride the untruth with words like Foolish, Laughable, Hilarious, and Ridiculous. "That's rich," is apparently in this group, as "rich" is a slang synonym for laughable.

Carrying unintended falsehood further we might insist it's Madness, Lunacy, Insane, Raving, Out of your mind.

Or we might insist listeners should throw out the falsehood as Rubbish or Garbage.
Baloney is a slang usage in this group, probably because bologna was made from the last scraps of meat, that would otherwise be thrown away (though some think this is actually a corruption of Blarney, or came to mean nonsense because the sounds are so close).
Hogwash is also in this group, being the swill fit only to feed to pigs.

Moving further we progress from trash to manure, and this is where the more vulgar slang appears (you have been warned).
Load of crap
Bull dinkey (though the only references to dinkey I can find on-line refer to a type of small 19th and early 20th century locomotive used to shunt cars around a rail yard)
Horsefeathers (which may belong here or up with Blarney)
Bulls**t (though Bull also belongs up with Blarney, as it was used in the 17th century, while the full phrase we know today is American, and is believed to have shown up in the early 20th century).
A Crock (of s**t) (I found the proposed ancient Roman origin, on this website, to be coarsely funny, and quite possibly self referential)
It turns out Poppycock is actually in this category, derived from Dutch for soft feces.

So now that you've suffered through the entire herd, from the cleaner end to the smellier, you should have a better sense of the finer gradations when you insist that someone is speaking drivel, hot air, and twaddle. Sigh - every round up has a few strays that force you to circle round, and I know I've missed more, but we'll leave well enough alone.

The Bubbles

When we visited Maine in September, we split up one day so my wife, our daughter, and our oldest son could all go on a boat tour, visit one of the Cranberry Islands, and possibly see seals. They got their wish (including the seals).

Youngest son (eight) and I had other plans. He had made it clear early in the trip that the one thing he wanted most was to visit Bubble Rock. I put together a hike that took the two of us over both of the Bubbles (in the center of the photo of Jordan Pond above, about a mile off), with a little trek along the shore between them. It was a great hike, nearly three miles, thousands of feet up and down in elevation, including steep jumbled rocky slopes and even a section at the top where we had to use ladder rungs in the side of a cliff. Scary and exhilarating - we loved it.

When we got to Bubble Rock he hugged it, and said he wanted to take it home. Some ladies there on the top near us commented that I certainly needed pictures of him with his favorite rock, and I said I didn't have the camera - it was aboard the boat, since the rest of the family were hoping to see seals, and were going to take pictures of the Cranberries, etc.

So one of the ladies took photos of the two of us and Bubble Rock and got my e-mail address. I got her e-mail on Thanksgiving Day - I had forgotten about them, so they were even more of a gift.

Fall Pie

Many of the leaves are off our trees, and these last few weeks the colors got suddenly brighter, perhaps due to some rain a few days ago, and some cold nights. The Bradford pears, in particular, are starting to look like heaps of hot coals.

When I baked a chicken pot pie last Saturday, I cut the top in an autumn pattern. Liriodendron, as beautiful a name as the shape of the leaves or the arching branches.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. While we are in need, and pray and ask for many things, we have been given much. We are overshadowed with mercy and riches, and lit from within and without by grace. Chiaroscuro in glory. Praise Him.

Urinals - Part 2

More and more I am encountering urinals with no top plumbing.* They no longer flush. I assumed the management of the Sloan Valve Company was losing sleep over this. Having modernized from the standard chrome lever flush valves of the 20th century to the automatic sensor flushing variety of the 21st century, they now face the extinction of their valve products as urinals go waterless.

But actually, no! They have gotten into the waterless urinal cartridge business!

I've been wondering how these flushless urinals work (another thing to do during an otherwise pretty bring moment). I guessed some kind of filtration, but I couldn't think it out much further on my own, so I did some research. It turns out they have a cartridge where the drain would be, and the cartridge has a layer of fluid that floats on water. The cartridge is constructed to let urine pass through the layer, into the water/urine beneath (on which the fluid floats) and then, with the use of a clever baffle, water/urine goes down a pipe in the back, sediments collect in the front, and the level of the urine (and the floating permeable fluid) remains constant. The fluid keeps urine from having contact with air in the men's room, making the whole affair sanitary. Apparently the fluid wears out, or sediment collects and fills the front, because they have to be replaced about every 7000 uses. See a short video of the process at Sloan's site (no worries - no bodily functions, people, or parts of people appear in this video).

Since the cartridges must be regularly replaced, this new technology creates a more permanent revenue stream for Sloan. No longer dependent solely on new or replacement plumbing jobs for orders, the more of their units are installed, the more regular orders they will receive.

But they have competition, and judging by what I'm seeing in restrooms, Sloan might not be winning the war here in the Southeast. While Sloan plumbing is almost universal, and on the web the marketing blitz for waterless seems to be in Sloan's favor, I've seen very few of their waterless cartridges yet. Instead, I keep seeing another brand...

Falcon Waterfree is the brand I'm seeing nearly everywhere. Why? Various hints and portions of articles in the green building cybersphere look like Sloan and Falcon are working with two former partners' products, that a parting of the way and a non-compete agreement prevented Falcon from marketing for 5 years, and that the time was up several years ago. So Sloan had the big head start - making Falcon's ubiquity even more puzzling.

The cartridges seem to be $39.95 from either company. Both seem to last the same amount of time (about 7000 uses**). So why am I seeing so many Falcon cartridges, rather than Sloan? Because the news about the competition is old news. Sloan and Falcon signed a partnership in 2003 - so Sloan distributes Falcon products. In other words, it's all Sloan.

So with all the water savings, are there any drawbacks to waterfree urinals? Yes, it turns out. Some public agencies and governments are hesitant because the waterfree urinal requires regular maintenance (cartridge or sealant fluid replacement) or sanitation goes down the drain. (Actually, the problem is that it doesn't.) Certain cleaning chemicals seem to interfere with the cartridges. Cartridge maintenance is apparently messy. The sealant fluid is supposedly biodegradable, but I wonder and I'm sure others do, too. And the cartridges themselves represent another plastic disposable for our landfills, have to be manufactured and trucked, etc. so it doesn't seem like a very green solution, after all.

Another company has already come to the rescue. Ecotech Water LLC manufactures a cartridge replacement that will fit Falcon and Sloan urinals, is made of more heavy duty plastic to last, and has a totally different solution. There is a funnel shaped rubber valve inside that curls up and stays airtight when no urine is passing through it. It uncurls and lets pass whatever amount of liquid enters the funnel. It's the same technology used for urinals in space (where gravity and water savings are both issues). These cartridges are much more expensive than the Falcon and Sloan disposables ($159 compared to $39.99) but they last many times longer and there is no sealant fluid to handle. I'll be looking for these replacements as I use public restrooms.

Urinals - Part 1

* This is cutting into my quiet personal quest to decipher the difference between Royal and Regal lines of Sloan valves...

** Another newcomer to this market, Issainterclean, out of Florida, has a waterless urinal (Zeroflush) that claims to get 15000 uses before maintenance...

Ayrmount

I took a walk today at Ayrmount. I took my best friend.

We strolled the Poet's Walk and looked at the light on the yellow beech leaves, the ripples on the Eno River, and the warm sun shining on the valley spread out beyond the four Adirondack chairs set on the brow of the hill behind the old house. Then we walked the whole thing again, backwards, which we've never done before. It was like walking a new trail.

During the entire walk I was nearly bursting with two paintings that are trying to get to the surface. I have now struggled much of the afternoon with one, and feel worn out and a bit discouraged as I can't get the vision from inside to come out on the paper. The spirit of the thing isn't coming through. I don't know how to draw playfully enough to make it happen.

But I'll keep at it, maybe Wednesday. Meanwhile, the best thing all day was time spent with my best friend. After dinner, she and I have a movie just for the two of us. And after that I'll go to bed earlier; she gets insomnia if she comes to bed too soon. And perhaps I'll wake when she does come to bed, so I can hold her a while before we both go to sleep.

Dragon Rampant

For Halloween this year our youngest decided (on his sister's clever suggestion) to be a medieval knight or king. He could carry a sword, belt up a long shirt as a tunic... He liked the idea.

The night before Halloween I got inspired and made a really tall yellow crown, and a long shield of foamcore. I thought he'd like a dragon rampant, and I asked him what color he wanted it. "Red with blue eyes," he replied.

Here's the costume that resulted (we don't show our children's faces on our blogs). The sword was made long ago out of foam tubing cut lengthwise.