blog: do it like aristotle
Moderators: fgagnon, nikos, Site Mods
It doesn't, actually. When wood is properly seasoned, the moisture content is significantly lowered (rarely below 20%) - this is good, in that any remaining moisture contains resins of combustible gasses which when exposed to the primary flame then burn themselves, adding to the total energy-output. However, if the wood is unseasoned (wet), those gasses are mixed with the steam and thus smothered, never burning, and contributing nothing but a negative overall gain.
In fact, it's worse - that steam combines with smoke forming the rather nasty substance called creosote which coats itself onto the chimney lining. As this layer grows deeper over time, it's a major danger of igniting itself at accelerated/combined temperatures high enough to burn away the chimney-lining, and indeed the brick and mortar itself, which is a primary cause of house-fires.
It's this creosote that is stripped away when one has one's chimney "cleaned", like those good fellows do in Mary Poppins (when they're not singing and dancing, as all chimney-sweeps do, don't you know.)
Of course, in the real world, the easiest means of "sweeping" the chimney is to cover the entrance with a drop-cloth, stick a shotgun up the flu (facing upwards, obviously) and firing it. The buckshot will spread out and up, scraping (with great alacrity) all the "bad shite" off the lining, then dropping down to be easily removed in one big pile. This method also has the added benefit of being more fun than normal sweeping, plus it will rather quickly remove/kill/dislodge any birds, squirrels, or Santa Claus's which may be stuck in there.
So, no, don't burn unseasoned wood, kids.
In fact, it's worse - that steam combines with smoke forming the rather nasty substance called creosote which coats itself onto the chimney lining. As this layer grows deeper over time, it's a major danger of igniting itself at accelerated/combined temperatures high enough to burn away the chimney-lining, and indeed the brick and mortar itself, which is a primary cause of house-fires.
It's this creosote that is stripped away when one has one's chimney "cleaned", like those good fellows do in Mary Poppins (when they're not singing and dancing, as all chimney-sweeps do, don't you know.)
Of course, in the real world, the easiest means of "sweeping" the chimney is to cover the entrance with a drop-cloth, stick a shotgun up the flu (facing upwards, obviously) and firing it. The buckshot will spread out and up, scraping (with great alacrity) all the "bad shite" off the lining, then dropping down to be easily removed in one big pile. This method also has the added benefit of being more fun than normal sweeping, plus it will rather quickly remove/kill/dislodge any birds, squirrels, or Santa Claus's which may be stuck in there.
So, no, don't burn unseasoned wood, kids.
Blue is a colour. In fact it contains enough spectral coordinates in and of itself to constitute many colours. And I suspect most stolen babies usually end up dead (if they remain unsold for too long), and the first sign of being dead is turning blue. At least if the correct amount of pressure is applied to the throat so the patient may imbibe the death in the first place. So (I'm guessing here), I surmise that a goodly number of stolen babies end up, in fact, as Blue. (At least until they turn the more comforting sickly-grey we've come to expect of our final demises.)
Blue is a state of mind, like that Joni Mitchell album that belongs on any decent suicide-playlist.
Ergo, Smurfs are actually little suicidal Joni Mitchell avatars - which suddenly makes the whole spirit of the 70's surge up into my mouth. Odd, that.
Oirish babies are not blue, they come out all sticky and red and green-veined to the teeth (if they had teeth) - pretty much looking like mean little Borg Queen avatars, out to push all the little Joni Mitchell avatars off the cliffs of Donegal and into the graceful sea. Ahh, bless.
Ergo, Smurfs are actually little suicidal Joni Mitchell avatars - which suddenly makes the whole spirit of the 70's surge up into my mouth. Odd, that.
Oirish babies are not blue, they come out all sticky and red and green-veined to the teeth (if they had teeth) - pretty much looking like mean little Borg Queen avatars, out to push all the little Joni Mitchell avatars off the cliffs of Donegal and into the graceful sea. Ahh, bless.
That's actually an odd side-effect of what happens when any pop-star decides to try a career in experimental jazz influences. Only Miles Davis had the proper balls the play a plastic trumpet and get away with it - there's just something "wrong" about folk-players so desperate to "find themselves" that they, in fact, lose the run of themselves completely. Making the rest of us ill in the process.
Re: blog: do it like aristotle
Great post Nikos, makes me miss my old wood stove :'(nikos wrote:here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/firewood-price-comparison.htm
-Thracx
"Man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer a man."
-Fridtjof Nansen
"Man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer a man."
-Fridtjof Nansen
-
pschroeter
- Silver Member
- Posts: 283
- Joined: 2007 Jan 27, 00:46
Thank you for reminding me how much I love Bruegel. I have been looking at several of his other paintings since I Googled Hunters in the snow.Kilmatead wrote:
(And no, I don't think "Breugellian" is a proper adjectification either, but the life in art should be allowed a few nuances here and there. And no, I don't think "adjectification" is a real word either, but he who holds the sharpest axe gets to decide the grammar of day.
My personal favourite would (of course) be Tower of Babel - I remember annoying the heck out of the security guards in Vienna years ago by leaning on the same column staring at it all day when I should have been out "pretending to be a proper tourist". Although it's exceedingly trite and self-aggrandising to make the same comment "as everyone else" and say that no mere electronic copy can properly represent the details of the original - it's true. That, thankfully, is the one great failure that the contemporary culture's fascination with the internet won't understand until it's too late (for them) - no matter how many virtual-tours through Versailles you create, no matter how many funky 3d-object-"printings" of Rodin you sell through the online store, they will never conquer even the smallest scribble by Hieronymus Bosch in the flesh.
As an aside, I was genuinely shocked the first time I saw a Titian in "real life" - it was tiny! Like everything else in this world, the "representation of things" always blow them out of proportion. It's interesting how we are so gladly deluded by our own educations in the name of minutia that we fail to see the degradation therein. That said, the impact of the Titian was well out of proportion with its modest scale, so I mustn't have been as completely anaesthetised as my elders would have wished in their selfish goal to educate me into mediocrity and death. Which, if you ask me, is the real meaning of the Bruegel at the end of the day, subjective though it may be after a mere 450 years in the wilderness.
As the Wikipedeia entry relates:
Curiously, a closer look at the Wiki page tells us it's called "Jagers in de Sneeuw" in Dutch...
"Sneeuw"? Really? Come on... you think the Dutch would mind if we jiggled the spelling of their nouns a little just so they don't make us snort over our morning coffee with laughter (and the inevitable mess that creates upon our white shirts)?
As an aside, I was genuinely shocked the first time I saw a Titian in "real life" - it was tiny! Like everything else in this world, the "representation of things" always blow them out of proportion. It's interesting how we are so gladly deluded by our own educations in the name of minutia that we fail to see the degradation therein. That said, the impact of the Titian was well out of proportion with its modest scale, so I mustn't have been as completely anaesthetised as my elders would have wished in their selfish goal to educate me into mediocrity and death. Which, if you ask me, is the real meaning of the Bruegel at the end of the day, subjective though it may be after a mere 450 years in the wilderness.
As the Wikipedeia entry relates:
...there's still a lot of life in the old girl just yet, and not merely in my little world.Hunters in the Snow is used extensively in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's films Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1974), and in Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia.
Curiously, a closer look at the Wiki page tells us it's called "Jagers in de Sneeuw" in Dutch...
"Sneeuw"? Really? Come on... you think the Dutch would mind if we jiggled the spelling of their nouns a little just so they don't make us snort over our morning coffee with laughter (and the inevitable mess that creates upon our white shirts)?
At least Sneeuw only has a few superfluous letters and just makes me giggle - you're the man who suffers things that would make regular people choke to death like:
Schwangerschaftverhütungsmittel
Arzneimittelausgabenbegrenzungsgesetz
Dampfschifffahrtgesellschaftsdirektorsstellvertretersgemahlin
...on a daily basis. I'd have to be drunk to even try and pronounce that kind of thing.
Schwangerschaftverhütungsmittel
Arzneimittelausgabenbegrenzungsgesetz
Dampfschifffahrtgesellschaftsdirektorsstellvertretersgemahlin
...on a daily basis. I'd have to be drunk to even try and pronounce that kind of thing.