I bet the locals were a bit garum-py over that...

 

For those who didn't know, the staple sauce throughout the Roman Empire of old was called garum.

Garum is a fermented fish sauce that was used ... in the cuisines of Phoenicia, ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage, and later Byzantium ... The taste of garum is thought to have been comparable to that of today's Asian fish sauces.

Like modern fermented fish sauce and soy sauce, garum was a rich source of umami flavoring due to the presence of glutamates.

There's more at the link.

Believe it or not, after about 2,000 years or thereabouts, you can still buy authentic garum today.  Go check out what's available at the link.  If you prefer something slightly less fishy, British Worcestershire sauce is basically a modern version of garum.  It was developed "by accident", with a nasty unpalatable concoction left forgotten in a basement for years.  When rediscovered, it had matured into what we know today.  Read all about it at the link.

So, fermented fish sauce has a long and celebrated history . . . but one can have too much of a good thing, as the residents of St. Mary's in Canada learned to their cost.

Over 100 tanks of rotten fish sauce are finally being removed from a small Canadian town after stinking up the neighborhood for decades.

The supply of what’s been described as “the worst rotted fish you ever smelled” was left abandoned in the quaint town of St. Mary’s after the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company shuttered more than 20 years ago.

Over the next few months, workers will embark on a $1.2 million project to drain roughly 110 tanks, each holding 3,000 gallons of fermented fish sauce.

The stinky sauce will then be mixed with peat moss to absorb the liquid, according to St. Mary’s volunteer mayor, Steve Ryan.

Trucks equipped with giant hoses will then suck up the material and deliver it to a massive pit lined with high-density polyethylene, where the waste will be buried in topsoil.

The dilapidated factory full of ditched fish sauce has wafted an indescribable smell over the town of roughly 300 people in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The liquid kept fermenting as the plant kept turning to ruin, with a blown-off roof and a wall knocked out by a storm in January.

There's more at the link.  Here's a video report on the process.

This is one time I'm truly, profoundly, deeply grateful that "scratch and sniff" technology hasn't made it to the pages of the Internet yet - or to the screens of our electronic devices!

Peter

I had no idea these things existed

 

I've heard of machines that deploy barbed or razor wire, making it easy to set up fences, obstacles, etc.  However, I'd never heard of a machine that got rid of those fences, even decades after they'd been strung.

A wire winder mounted on a skid steer can roll up a half-mile of old fence in about two minutes, a task that would probably take a half-day to accomplish by hand, said John Graves, director of conservation and resource management for the Sheridan Community Land Trust.

“It’s pretty darn cool,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “To sit there in the cab of the skid steer and watch that wire come in, it’s great.”

The importance of removing old barbed wire and woven-wire fences can’t be overstated, said Steve Martin, Wyoming director of the North American Pronghorn Association.

Old fences can block pronghorn from reaching thousands of acres of habitat in the Red Desert and other places in Wyoming and Montana, Martin told Cowboy State Daily.

There are countless miles of fence that must be removed and replaced with wildlife-friendly fencing, he said.

. . .

“Unlike deer and elk, pronghorn will rarely, if ever, jump a fence. They want to crawl under it,” he said.

So woven-wire fences are particularly hard on pronghorn, he said, because there’s no way to get underneath them.

Researchers from the University of Wyoming concluded that fences trapped pronghorn in areas of the Red Desert during the harsh 2022-2023 winter, and many of them died.

Recent upgrades to wildlife-friendly fences in the Red Desert opened up about 10,000 acres to pronghorn, Martin said.

There's more at the link.  Here's a brief video clip of the wire winder at work.

That's pretty ingenious.  I wonder who came up with the idea?  It's just another addition to the huge variety of tools and equipment that can be hung onto or off of skid-steer machines.  I saw one around here that had more than a dozen different attachments arranged in a long row at one side of the yard.  The driver could simply drive up to a gap in the row, drop the attachment he'd been using into the open space, drive to the next gizmo he needed, connect it up, and away he went.  It can't have taken more than a minute or two per attachment.  That's productivity for you!

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 322

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

How about a blend of American and British music?  Lonnie Donegan was a very well-known skiffle player in Britain during the 1960's, but he began by performing many American folk songs and introducing them to British audiences.  In turn, this re-popularized some of them in America, and led other American artists to work with Donegan in later years.

As an illustration of his performance of American songs, here's Lonnie in the mid-1950's singing Woody Guthrie's "Grand Coulee Dam".

However, Lonnie is best known for his humorous (and sometimes ribald) comedy English songs.  Some have remained popular to this day, on both sides of the Atlantic.  Here's "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (On The Bedpost Overnight)?"

No tribute to Lonnie would be complete without his famous music-hall-style comedy piece "My Old Man's A Dustman".  It helps to understand Cockney slang (partly explained at the link), but you can get the gist of it even without that.

You'll find plenty more of his music on YouTube and elsewhere.  It seems impossible that all those recordings are today sixty-five years old or more . . .  Dates me, I guess!

Peter

So much for advanced computer technology!

 

Many of us will know of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a long-standing comic strip by Zach Weinersmith.  Sometimes he can make me laugh out loud.  As an "old-school" computer operator, programmer and analyst, way back in my distant youth, I did so when I read this one.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the comic's Web page (which will also allow you to read the mouseover text attached to the original image).

While on the subject of computer technology, there's an interesting article about Steve Krug, one of the pioneers of Web design.  He thinks social media is the worst thing that's happened in the last forty years.

He lays out his ideal version of social media. Users wouldn't be able to have more than 100 followers, which would tamp down on virality. Short-form videos would also be more difficult to find — only available via search and subscriptions, not through a curated algorithm — and wouldn't be "spoon-fed to you in such large doses," he says. That's a level of friction that he'd enjoy.

"There could have been a really good life for social networking that could have been a benefit to society," Krug says. "It hasn't gone in that direction at all."

He's especially worried about kids. When he was young, there were only three TV stations. Still, his parents didn't let him sit in front of the television every day after school, so he went to run around with the neighborhood kids instead. It benefited him, he says.

"They're designed for addiction, because that's how they make money," Krug says of the social platforms.

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

Peter