Albanian Village Life

My apologies for the length of this video. It is an hour long. You can do what I did, I sped it up to 1.5X speed and slowed it down for the parts I found most interesting.

It is from a Youtube "cooking" channel set in Albania. Albania is the European equivalent of West Virginia. It is very rural and mountainous and very clan-oriented.

Unlike West Virginia, it staggered under a corrupt, incompetent, Communist regime from the late 1940s until 1992.

Like all Youtube channels, you have to take what you see-and-hear with a grain of salt. They imply that this is a remote village untouched by modern life and yet we hear jet airplanes descending for landings. Never-the-less, there are gold nuggets to be mined.

The dog is appealing. Several of the chickens are "game-cocks and hens". They have a still and use poly tubing to pipe cooling water to it and seal leaks with a putty made of whole-wheat flour and water.

It is ironic that Albania is perhaps the most "Muslim" country in Europe with approximately 60% professing to be Muslim....and here is this couple cranking out "grappa" and "slivovitz" like nobody's business.

They fill in some of the dead-spots barbecuing fish (probably mullet according to my expert-in-all-things including matters piscine, Lucas)...a saltwater species. The rack for holding the fish is interesting.

The grape trellis posts are concrete.

They have Kaki persimmons drying in the background.

The grape clusters are HUGE.

The apparatus for heating the still seems very inefficient. Also, they would benefit from a "thumper" as a single-stage still tops out at 30% alcohol due to the relatively close boiling points between water and ethanol.

My guess is that they are in their fifties or early-sixties and they are in great physical shape.

My fascination with less economically developed countries is that older technologies are still used on a regular basis and I am inspired by how people solved universal problems like roasting chestnuts, broiling fish, preserving food and so on.

Their other videos

Most of their other videos have the woman making elaborate meals and desserts under austere conditions. She has an undeniable elegance about her! Brewing tea with rose hips, crystal glasses, plum-cakes and massive pies.

I liked this video because the gentleman was more involved and, frankly, I like grapes and I like wine.

Hitting the ground running

What are the differences between snails and slugs?

That is a question that came via email.

 

In a nutshell, a slug is a snail that has been drinking tequila.

Some of the local talent on Giant Foxtail before they head off to the Holiday Inn.

 

Ain't science wonderful?

 

Seedlings

About 60 open-pollinated G.935 seedlings. Since the mother branch was grafted into a tree of Trailman and they both flower at the same time and have the same shade of flowers, it is a good bet that Trailman is the papa.

Do I have a breeding goal? Not really although it would be cool to have a free-standing, precocious, semi-dwarf apple root-stock that can survive -45F.

The roots were very fine and thread-like and they carried their own rootball.

Natural Causes: (Cumberland Saga)

Lliam was up as the sun first started to ease the darkness on the eastern sky. He was going to collect eggs for breakfast. He could not figure out how to get into the hen house.

As he was poking around, the sun rose and he heard the door to the chicken-coop opened with the hum of an electric motor and the excited clucking of the 8 mongrel hens as they came charging out to forage for the day.

Intrigued, he searched around until he found the photo-eye and by shading it with his hand he was able to make the door close. By removing his hand, it opened.

Miss Shannon and her husband Bob were not as resistant to technology as the inhabitants of Copperhead Cove. Where Copperhead Cove had a super-abundance of “labor”, with Bob traveling and Miss Shannon’s time absorbed in caring for her mother...Miss Shannon's operation needed technology or the wheels would fall off the bus.

Lliam filed the memory the photocell and the automatic door in his brain. He also marveled at the rollout nest boxes. Lliam could clearly see advantages other than labor-savings. For instance, the roll-away nests had no eggs that had been cannibalized by other hens, a major source of losses in Copperhead Cove. Another advantage was that the eggs were so clean that they did not need to be washed.

 

Oh, and his ma would have appreciated that the door for collecting the eggs opened to the outside so whoever collected the eggs wouldn't be tracking chicken-shit everywhere they walked.

With nobody collecting eggs for the better part of a week, there were a LOT of eggs.

Back in the kitchen, Lliam and Eddie played short-order cooks. The easy adjustment of the LP stove was a technical marvel to both boys compared to the fiddly, little camp-stove they had been using and the wood-stoves back home. They had two griddles and all four burners fired up as they turned out flap-jacks, fried eggs, jam or syrup made from brown-sugar and coffee.

***

About nine in the morning, former-Deputy Canina received a text from the Sheriff. “Can you investigate potential homicide? Bodies at corner of Chapel-and-Hendon”

Canina texted back “Can you pay me with gasoline?”

The Sheriff replied “Yes.”

Canina borrowed the supply truck. It took the crew guarding the entrance a few minutes to knock the chocks out from beneath the log obstructing the drive and roll it out of the drive. The “Password” for when she returned was to be four, long toots on the horn. Before she left the drive, Canina double-checked the horn by giving a long toot. It would be just her luck to be borrowing a vehicle with a blown fuse for the horn!

Deputy Canina (she had reverted back to her former life oh-so-very-easily) drove the truck around the block so she approached the intersection from a direction that didn’t reveal that she had only been a mile-and-a-half from where the dead bodies had been found.

There was a very young-looking, thin to the point of painful, man nervously waiting for her. He was wearing "dress clothes" and shiny, leather shoes.

“I am Deputy Canina. And you are?” Rosa left the question hanging…

“I am Reverend Clarke. I am the new pastor at the church” he said, pointing across Chapel Road to the southwest.

Looking in that direction, Canina saw a small, weather-beaten church and cemetery just like the thousands of others that littered the rural South.

“How old are you?” Canina asked.

“Twenty-four. Why do you ask?” Rev Clarke answered.

“First church?” Canina asked. Of course it was his first church. That is where new graduates from second (and third) tier seminaries started...poor, little congregations where maybe 25 or 35 families were registered and maybe half as many regularly made contributions. If he stuck it out for three years, avoided scandals and got married, he would be offered a position in a church with 60 families, and in the fullness of time an associate position in a wealthy church with a 150 families or more.

“Yep. I graduated from seminary six months ago.” Rev Clarke replied.

Reassured that the good Rev Clarke was unlikely to call BS on anything she said, she forged ahead.

“Show me the bodies” she commanded.

Looking at the bodies, Canina was glad that the shower curtain’s pattern of goldfish and seaweed blurred Billy’s girlfriend’s private parts. She didn’t know if the preacher would have been able to keep it together if it hadn’t.

The bullet-riddled faces were a mess and unrecognizable. Canina checked the pockets of the two looters who were wearing clothes for ID even though she knew for a fact that the two looters had been relieved of their wallets.

“Let me tell you what I am going to advise the Sheriff” Canina said. “I am authorizing you to prepare and bury the bodies. If you can figure out who they are, send word to their next-of-kin. If you cannot get an ID on them, bury them as John Doe One, Two and Three and Jane Doe One. Get a snip of their hair and put it in separate zip-lock baggies with their names, JD1, JD2 and so on. Send the bill to the county.”

“Get ahold of your Elders or Church Board. You and them are going to go through the contents of the truck and figure out who it belongs to. Looks like sets of silver and such. Somebody will recognize some of the things. The rest of it, you hang onto for your orphans-and-widows fund. I gotta feeling you are gonna need it” Canina said.

“Don’t you need to keep them for evidence?” Rev Clarke gulped, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.

Canina frowned. “Evidence for what?” She asked. “They died of natural causes.”

Frowning in consternation, the Reverend looked at the multiple bullet-wounds and said “How do you figure?”

“I spent my summers with my Nana. We went to church every day and I heard a lot of the Bible. Doesn’t it say somewhere that “He who lives by the sword shall die by it”?

“Yes” Reverend Clarke said. “I believe that is in Matthew Chapter 26.”

“So if these people were looters, and all of the evidence points to the fact that they were, then their deaths were a natural consequence of the crimes they chose to commit, no?” Canina offered.

The Reverend wavered.

“If I call this a crime-scene, then the people who had their belongings stolen will not get them back until the court no longer needs them as evidence” Canina pressed.

“I don’t see any smoking gun suggesting who might have killed them. The case will get shelved, maybe for years” Canina continued. "They done wrong and got what they had comin' to them. The way I see it, they died of Natural Causes."

“What about the truck?” the Reverend asked, clearly relieved of the responsibility of having to make those kinds of decisions.

“The county has a contract with a towing company to handle abandoned vehicles. I will send them a text” Canina promised. "I won't send it until late this afternoon to give you plenty of time to get the truck unloaded. They will prolly show up late this evening."

 

Canina wanted as many people to see the truck as possible. An object lesson doesn't work if it is kept a secret. She knew that if the truck sat at the corner all day while it was unloaded and the contents processed, at least a couple of local gossips would see it and spread the word.

As she was thinking that, a neighbor sidled up to them and asked “Kin I take some pictures to put on F-book? I been gittin' a signal a couple-a hours a day.”

Canina said “No pictures of the bodies. They deserve what dignity we can give them. But you can take pictures of the cargo and maybe help the Reverend find out who it belonged to.”

As an after-thought, Canina said to the preacher “Make sure you log who claims what items. There might be a few people thinking to take advantage. Knowing that you are keeping a record might discourage some of that.”

Then, looking at the Reverend “Do you think you can handle this?” Canina asked.

The very young Reverend drew in a deep breath and then slowly let it out before answering. “With God’s Grace, I can do anything.”

Rain, Pollen, Mediocrity, Snails and Beer, Jews and Japanese and Amish

We picked up 0.1 inches of rain last night. Just enough to make the mosquitoes frisky.

I am running the sprinkler.

Timothy (grass) and chestnuts are at peak pollinating @ 1100 Growing Degree Days b50.

"Only the mediocre are always at their best."  Attributed to Somerset Maugham

Every day will not be a Grand-Slam Home run. Every post will not be AWESOME!

Snails and beer

We will see if beer-traps for snails work. This year stands out as having an exceptionally large number of snails. I found them on peppermint, nettles and a host of other plants that I assumed would not be attractive to them. I was wrong.

Jews, Japanese and Amish

The people we have come to know as Jews wandered through the inhospitable desert for two generations, a pariah people with no allies other than God. Imagine being trapped in an elevator with your Mother-in-law for forty years. Having no other options, you would gladly accept God's rules for harmonious relations as the alternative was to be cast-out, into the inhospitable desert.

The Japanese have very little arable land as much of the country is mountainous. As an island, they were able to isolate themselves from outside pressures and influences for hundreds of years. Imagine the pressures to not waste resources as Maltusian pressures mounted. Imagine the pressures of a regimented society where antisocial behaviors could not be erased by moving elsewhere.

While many modern Jewish people embraced secular "progress" and the pressure-cooker of pre-1860 Japan eased, the Amish voluntarily chose to live lives with very narrow and limited horizons.

All three of these groups developed highly refined codes-of-behavior because of the restrictions of their environments where "costs" could not be externalized because there was no "external" to dump them to.

Consider a young company that sells gourmet hamburgers for 3-to-5X the cost of the most expensive hamburger on McD, BK or Wendy's menu. Growth is initially explosive as everybody flocks to the new restaurant to see what the "Buzz" is all about.

The company borrows money to open many new outlets. They want to saturate the market before the me-too competitors do. They determine that the buildings formerly occupied by an auto-parts retailer were optimally located and cheap, cheap, cheap...even though they were 8000 square-feet.

The bank is very happy to loan the money. The paper-work to loan out $20M is not that much more than to loan $20k. The footprint of the new Gourmet Burger company more than doubles year-to-year-to-year....

And then they implode.

The massive inflow of borrowed money masked the fact that very few outlets were making a profit on a stand-alone-basis. With the books swimming in cheap-borrowed-money, nobody felt any pressure to sharpen their pencils, rationalize manpower, eliminate waste.

Explosive growth, saturation...and then collapse.

The Jews, Japanese and Amish (besides being favored by God) were spared this fate because there were no sugar-daddies, no banks looking to make loans, no inheritances to subsidize (and mask) non-viable businesses, no vassal-states, conquests and booty to paper over losses. It was/is hand-to-mouth. Stupid choices were almost instantly painful.

It was my father's opinion that every young person should have a challenging  first-job: Picking pickles, roofing, paving, laying carpet...

His thinking was that it would provide motivation to upgrade our skills. It would give us a safety-net should the economy collapse. And ultimately, knowing how to survive on meager wages makes it very easy to save money when you start getting generous paychecks.

Stone-Cold-Killer (of Poison Ivy)

Today's mission was to go out to The Property and spray Poison Ivy. I put four gallons through the sprayer.

I started spraying at 9:30 AM and was done by 10:30. Rain is predicted for 10PM so the active ingredients will have 12 hours to soak in. The label says that the product is "rain fast" after four hours, so I should be good-to-go.

Two of the three ingredients are "ester" formulations which are much better at penetrating the waxy cuticle than the "amide" formulations. So far, Gordon's Brush Killer has been an impressive product.

I need to wait about a week and touch-up where I missed. There is a LOT of Poison Ivy in places where people will be.

There is an old shooting bench on the property and a 108 yard range with markers at 25 yards, 50 yards and 108 yards. The bench was wobbly and I added some bracing to it. Portable generators are a blessing!

In case you haven't guessed, one of my compensations for improving the property is that I already have permission to hunt it.

Bonus Video

Hat-tip Lucas

A crisis of incompetence?

One of my buddies just sent me a text.

A couple of months ago he had a new, heat-pump HVAC system installed. It was supposed to be the coolest thing. It is what the Norwegians have been using, almost exclusively, for the last several decades. Of course, Norway is rich in hydro-electric power so it makes lots of sense for them.

The installation was problematic from the beginning. The unit that was supplied would not fit into the crawl-space beneath the house. Maybe somebody didn't know how to run a yoyo?

No problem. They installed it in the attic.

My buddy turned it on after the installation. It did not start.

Owner of company showed up. All of the control-boards had been blown. Somebody had botched the power-hookup.

A month goes by while new control-boards are found and shipped. Maybe from Norway?

The owner of the company "ate" the cost of the new control-boards.

The system ran OK through the cold weather. Hot weather showed up. Buddy flipped it into A/C mode and water started dripping through the ceiling. My buddy made another service call.

Crew showed up and spent a few hours in the attic clanging-and-banging, then they left.

Buddy started it up in A/C mode. Still leaked. Buddy called again.

Same crew, more banging-and-clanging. They tore apart the 1/2" PVC drain-line and re-gooped every joint and reassembled. Then they left.

Buddy started it up again. It leaked again.

Company owner showed up and determined....his new (and now former) crew-boss had installed the unit upside-down. So presumably, the PVC drain line was installed to the TOP of the unit as it had been installed and the condensate was following gravity and flowing downward through the unit.

Crew + company owner took six hours to disconnect electrical and refrigerant lines, spin unit, re-duct, reconnect electrical and refrigerant lines and recharge system. They finished just before midnight.

And that is what happens when somebody in a position of trust does not check their work. EVERYBODY makes mistakes. Competent people check their work as they go along. Finding a mistake is not an admission of incompetence or inferiority. It is part of life.

Judge Ōoka Tadasuke

Judge Ōoka Tadasuke was born in 1677 in Japan and died in 1752. Judge Ōoka Tadasuke was legendary for the wisdom of his judgments and stories about his cases are an integral part of Japanese culture.

In one of more celebrated cases, he solved a case that had been festering for more than 100 years. Two very powerful families contested an ambiguous will. Each family interpreted the will as bequeathing several fields to THEIR family and not to the other. Since the families were both powerful, whichever family lost the judgement would become powerful enemies of the judge who rendered the judgement.

Ōoka Tadasuke agreed to hear the case. His rivals were sure he was going to create enemies. He called senior representatives from each family into his courtroom and he told them that they both had strong claims on the fields and so he was going to solicit divine guidance. He told them that each family was to raise a crop of red beans (presumably what we know today as adzuki beans) and whichever family produced the highest yield (on a per-area basis) was the family chosen by the gods to have the fields.

At that time, as a nation based on a rice-and-seafood economy, protein (and fats) were always in short supply.

Both families were very good farmers and were proud of that fact. They were both sure that they would win.

The family that won had been growing the red beans on a trial basis and had learned how this kind of bean was different than rice. Additionally, adzuki beans will cross with wild-beans which makes finding good seeds problematic if you don't produce them yourself and isolate them from wild-types. They won the trial by a very wide margin.

Everybody agreed that letting the gods decide was wise.

At a deeper level...

Granting the land to the farmers who were most proficient at growing this emerging, high-quality protein source was the right thing to do for Japan as a nation. It increased the resource base for the nation. Using red beans as the test and linking it to divine intervention legitimized the growing and eating of that particular food.

Many, many years later, Dr Taguchi postulated that "quality" and "specifications" had to be comprehended in the context of maximizing value (and minimizing waste) at the societal level and not just the level of the factory-floor or the accountant's ledger-book.

The Japanese industrialists were quick to absorb the message.

I am willing to bet that Dr Taguchi and the Japanese industrialists were all intimately familiar with the stories of Ōoka Tadasuke.