26 February 2011

Muswell Hillbillies


(The Heavens gone mad. Potomac Mills sign in better days. Photo Potomac Mills.)

I have decided I must be going through menopause. Hot flashes, chills and sweats this morning. Or maybe it is malaria. I don’t know, for sure, but I do know that there was a lot of lunacy on the road yesterday, something odd for nearly every one of the 426 miles that were recorded on the

You know everyone is nuts these days. I mean, literally. I saw graphic evidence of that on the road up from Virginia Beach. About the only thing you can say about Virginia drivers is that they are not from Maryland, where they are talking about installing turn signals on their cars in the next few years, or worse, the District, where no apparently have no signals or mirrors.

It must be technology. No one could be that stupid, right?

Accordingly, I was delighted to be back in my own bed at Big Pink. Approaching Fredericksburg, I contemplated taking route 3 west to Refuge Farm, but realized my core body temp was slipping into hypothermia as the winds rose to gust at 60-knots as the temperature plummeted from 65 down to the upper 30s.

The wind pummeled the gray steel of the Mercedes, and the farm was going to be ark and cold and I couldn't handle it.

VA Beach was 65 degrees and humid after the passing of a monsoon that caused white-out on the highway. Enough, I thought. Let me get home and I promise never to leave the Beltway again.

Many of us mark the southern edge of the capital not at the Beltway, but at the colossal Potomac Mills sign the towers next to I-95 just north of Quantico. Traffic was creeping, and I looked up in wonder to see that the plastic discs that held the logo had been grabbed by the wind and hurled into the heavens.


(Traffic Camera view of the Potomac Mill Sign- gone. Photo VDOT.)

I shivered in the car, and when I managed to get home, wrapped myself in a blanket and huddled in my brown chair until sweat beaded my forehead.

I have decided that when I am on the road, I am going to actually be out of touch. I suppose I could wreck the car or die, but stay current on all the e-mail, but the hell with it. That meant there were a hundred or so notes to be looked at, and I couldn’t stay focused, much less type.

The weather is one of those things that we are all arguing about these days. I am increasingly a Solarist, which is not at all to say a Denier. Based on the profound chill I feel in my bones, I think I prefer warming, or change, or something.

One of the notes in the long and incomprehensible fevered queue was one about the mad Englishmen. They are in the grip of something quite profound, if the story is to be believed. It was in the Daily Mail, and gisted by an associate who is a confirmed skeptic on all matters of revealed truth.
That may have been what attracted his interest. The UK leads the world in believing impossible, or at least unlikely things, though I am growing increasingly skeptical of our own nation.

Anyway, here is the deal: solar panels are supposed to be one of the ways out of our non-renewable energy jams. The panels, of course, are made from rare earth elements in China in a very ugly and non-green process. They also are not very efficient- the state of the art is a conversion rate of much less than 50% of absorbed energy.

I believe in the solar thing, but we should remember, that the panels do not work at all when it is cloudy. That's a problem in the UK, which isn't exactly Arizona. I clicked the link in wonder.

The title of the story is: “Foiled by the winter: The £25,000 eco-classroom that can't be used because solar panels don't provide enough heat.”

The Living Ark classroom in Muswell Hill is made from sustainable wood, sheep’s wool and soil. But parents branded it 'useless' after teachers decided it was too cold for lessons.


(The Learning Ark at Muswell Hill. Photo Daily Mail.)

Full Story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1360297/25-000-eco-classroom-used-solar-panels-dont-provide-heat.html

Completely mad. A great idea for the desert, certainly, or the Caribbean, but complete lunacy in the cloudy distant north. How do people convince themselves of these things?


(Cover and liner of The Kink’s Muswell Hillbllies.)

I am reminded of one of Ray Davies great tunes. You remember him as the front man and leading light of the Kinks. He penned "Lola" and "Girl, You really Got Me" when he fronted The Kinks. A version of “Girl” was performed at Muhammed’s 60th birthday, I think, though my senility may be more advanced than I think as we prepare to turn a major corner into senility.

Ray did not have a commercial hit with the album he released a year after the droll success of “Lola.” It was called “Muswell Hillbilles,” but critics, over time, have enshrined it as his signature philosophical outing. So, naturally,

The piercing refrain in the track "20th Century Man" was:

"I was born in a Welfare State,
Ruled by Bureaucracy.
Controlled by Civil Servants,
And People dressed in Gray.
Got no Privacy,
Got no Liberty,
'Cuz the 20th Century People
Took it all away from me..."

The classroom on Muswell Hill is a representation of government run amok, political correctness standing reason on its head. Another mad Englishman summed it up nicely in a different time. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing as Lewis Caroll, observed in “The Hunting of the Snark:”

“What I tell you three times is true.”

I think others have said essentially the same thing many times since, that assertion repeated eventually becomes truth. But maybe the best way to sum it up is the Queen’s quotation to Alice in “Through the Looking Glass.”
 
Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

I think a little delusion augmented by a mild fever- or was it a chill?- can really help get things straight. Nothing makes sense for a perfectly good reason. It doesn’t.

What are some of the other five things the Queen would like you to believe before lunch? I know at least one, anyway, since The Judge sent me a personal review of a fabulous analysis of another fraud, penned by Susan Jacoby. Her book is called “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. “

We are such a bunch of chumps. It really is enough to make you die laughing.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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