ET and Baldness.

As you know ET was hairless, at least the bits of him caught on film. Likewise NASA’s secret internet extraterrestrials. There are even ancient myths that the extraordinary evolution of the human race is in some way a result of extraterrestrial contact. Being staunchly working class I lean towards the baldness explanation. Imagine you are an ape, a monkey or Orangeman covered in hair happily picking nits from your other family members and popping them in your mouth for extra nutrition. You’re warm and good-looking according to the social norms of all the other hairy apes. And then one fateful day there’s an outbreak of alopecia. Bam! overnight you’re all hairless, not only cold you feel ashamed in glossy coated company. You develop a massive inferiority complex. In desperation you slink away and seek a fire to keep warm then figure out how to keep it going and eventually make it. This necessity becomes the mother of an inventive mind. Pretty soon you’re making tools and roller skates and stuff and finding a new use for the skins of all the animals you’ve eaten. After the initial shock this isn’t turning out too bad but you’re still holding a grudge against all those little shites who made fun of you. You progress. You begin to look down on all the animals that haven’t had that necessity thrust upon them and haven’t upgraded to your new outlook on life. You domesticate them, cage them but somewhere deep inside you wish you weren’t an outcast, you wish you could still be in your natural place. You evolve to solve every conceivable puzzle, find the answers to everything, but at every turn that inferiority complex bugs you. It’s summed up in the Eagles lyric, “Who will form the grand design, of what is yours and what is mine?”  I’m looking forward to the day we lose it. Oh and I may be wrong about the roller skates. 

Lime Plaster.

Did you know cement, gypsum plaster and acrylic paints cause damp in older houses? And that lime mortar and plaster, clay and linseed based paints solve a damp problem, and there’s no such thing as ‘rising damp’? My beliefs were re-written last night after a short read. Apparently the first lot create a barrier to moisture, which my poor understanding figured was a good thing, and the second lot are permeable. This permeability allows moisture to breath in and out of walls naturally whereas an impermeable barrier causes moisture to build up behind it. Being stuck there with no means of escape it causes damp. The expert who wrote the article was quite exercised by a whole industry created to ‘solve’ damp problems by these widely held misunderstandings. Excessive water ingress as with my current problem will cause damp but these are usually obvious structural faults often easily fixed. My father in law had three builders fail to overcome damp when it was obvious it was caused by a broken down pipe, a half hour job to fix, and their remedies, using concrete, gypsum plaster and an injection DPC might actually add to the problem. As I struggle to relate this to Donald Trump all I can come up with is that democracy must be allowed to breath and his administration shows all the signs of creating an impermeable layer and the US is getting damper by the week.