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Wool and a Ya-Du Poem

April 29, 2024April 28, 2024humanist55

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

In 2022, Wool was the world’s 663rd most traded product, with a total trade of $3.28B.

Once again, I couldn’t find a Commodity beginning with “Y” so I am going with another “W” one – one I previously had a difficulty in choosing Wheat over – but I did find a Poem form beginning with “Y” so poetry saves the day again…

I live just North of the Leeds Bradford conurbation and those two towns owe a lot to wool – in fact at one time, Bradford had more millionaires than any other city in England! Not to say that every mill was weaving wool – some wove cotton and some mills swapped between the two textiles. Although the industry declined from the 19th Century onwards due to competition from overseas mills using cheap labour – there are still some factories in Bradford which are part of the wool industry. Wool was an important industry in Britain since at least the 13th Century and there are still 31.8 million sheep in the UK today although many of them are raised for meat with wool being a byproduct. So with signs of the wool industry all around me I am glad to have the opportunity to write about it.

Sheep, shown here in the 1240s or the 1250s, became increasingly important to English agriculture.

In Roman times – European clothing was made from wool, leather and linen with cotton from far-off India a mere curiosity and Silk from China a rare and expensive luxury. By the 15th Century, the value of wool trading to England was reflected in the fact that the presiding officer of the House of Lords sat on a Woolsack and since 1275 , a tax on wool called the “Great Custom” had been financing king and country. As the demand for wool rose, acts of enclosure, official and unofficial, stole common land from the common people – a right to which they had been entitled to since Edward the Confessor. Although compensation, financial or in the form of lesser quality land was sometimes forthcoming, it represented nothing like the increase in value of the land to the landowners. In Scotland, whole swathes of the Highlands were cleared of people in favour of sheep who were, after all, low-maintenance agricultural creatures who converted poor grazing into wool and meat…

A herdwick sheep at Rannerdale Knott in the Lake District. ‘The best solution would be to fence off large areas of the fellsides to grow woodland without being damaged by sheep,’
writes Michael Green in The Guardian. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

The bare hills of the highlands are the result of sheep grazing to this day, and preventing the establishment of native trees with which the hills were once clad. The dispossession of people resulted in emigration to the New World and left Britain short of labour and with a reduced military capability all of which caused inflation in the economy. At one time, the government attempted to restrict enclosure for just these reasons. Other effects of the wool trade was the eradication of wolves and the improvement of transport infrastructure – first roads and later, in the 19th century – canals and railways. The Leeds-Liverpool Canal runs from Leeds, skirts Bradford and passes through my village on its way to the port of Liverpool thus enabling coal in and goods out from this industrial heartland – or as Blake described it “dark Satanic mills…” Arguably, wool is the single most important element responsible for shaping many aspects of the English landscape.

In the 19th century, towns were transformed as much as the countryside had been with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and here in my village of Silsden alone, there were two substantial mills. These mills were powered by the new steam engines and one consequence of these steam engines that people today have forgotten about, was the ash… When we first arrived here in Silsden, a stretch of buried culvert was being uncovered as it was in danger of collapsing. One very upset man told me how he had bought his old (farm) house without knowing that he was responsible for the maintenance of this buried culvert. The small valley had been blocked in a triangular section 60 feet across and 20 feet deep, by the town rubbish dump, but in the main – this rubbish consisted of the ash from the mills – that is a lot of ash! It cost the man £60,000 to dig up his garden to a depth of 20 feet in order to have his section of culvert repaired!!! So when I look at all the mills around Yorkshire – I wonder where each of their ash heaps were… The coal to feed the steam engines might have come from Leeds originally but when that area was exhausted, then it came in to villages like mine, from Liverpool by canal.

Between here and Leeds is Salts Mill and the surrounding World Hertiage site of Saltaire Village built by one of the most successful of those 19th Century Bradford millionaires. It is one of the largest mills of its kind and when built, contained the largest room in the world! When it closed in the 1970’s, it was seen s an enormous white elephant until a man with vision bought it comparatively cheaply and repurposed it as what we now understand to be an industrial estate. Jonathan Silver, was also a friend of David Hockney whose work now has a permanent home in the 1843 Gallery which takes its name from the date when the mill was constructed.

David Hockney’s 1997painting of Salts Mill

Looking briefly at the three main wool companied still working in Bradford – British Wool is the intermediary between farmers and the wool trade – I pass their modern warehouse on my way to work and if the doors are open, all you can see are hundreds of identical bales of wool…

Bales of wool in the warehouse of British Wool

Haworth Scouring is just down the hill from where I work and they do the job of cleaning and combing wool – a job which was done as a cottage industry before the industrial revolution and though you nevere see much from the outside other than the odd lorry coming and going, in 2017, they made a A multi-million GBP investment in state of the art Schlumberger Era combing machinery which has the capacity to produce up to 150,000kgs wool tops per week and to comb wools from 22µm – 40µm. All that happens after the cleaning (scouring) part where the wool is washed of wool grease (lanolin), dirt and other vegetable material.

Lastly – just a few miles downt the valley from where I live, is Atkinson Dyeing who complete the final stage of bulk wool production – the dyeing. I love that all these elements of wool production are still up and running and all around me…

And so to the aspect of Wool as a Commodity – as the box below shows – Australia is the largest producer of wool and so the world market in wool is pegged to the $Australian which is quite unusual I think.

🇦🇺🇨🇳🇳🇿 Australian, Chinese & New Zealand Production. Australia is the biggest producer of wool, accounting for roughly 23.4%. China and New Zealand produces 15.5% and 9.1% respectively. These three countries produce almost half of the world’s wool, so any supply disruptions in these countries could have an impact on prices.
Global Demand (Especially China & The US). Although wool is considered to be a high-value, niche product, it’s a globally traded commodity. The US is the largest importer of woollen textiles and apparel, and China is a major consumer of woollen products.
Information from Medium

If you have been following this series on Commodities, you will probably know by now that anything involving trade between the US and China is liable to be subject to a tarrif war and you are not wrong “the US increased import tariffs on Chinese woollen apparel by 15%. This pretty much decreased demand on the US side.” (Medium)

We have not looked at what wool is used for these days – clothing is still the big one but furnishing fabrics, carpets and the surprise newcomer – Ecofriendly Building Insulation. Furthermore, there is the Lanolin byproduct obtained from scouring the wool which is used in “personal care, cosmetic, and baby products, and is also used in pharmaceutical and industrial industries. According to various market research firms, the global lanolin market size itself was about USD 290 million in 2019.” (Medium).

And so to today’s poem which is a Ya-Du:

The Ya-Du is a Burmese form of poetry which consists of up to three stanzas of five lines. The first four lines of a stanza have four syllables each, but the fifth line can have 5, 7, 9 , or 11 syllables.

The form uses a climbing rhyme. The rhyme is required on the fourth, third, and second syllables of both the first three lines and the last three lines.

e.g.:—A–A–A-B–B–B—

What I found difficult with this form, was not the climbing rhyme but simply writing with a mere four syllables per line…

Wool

Knitted in time
for her fine son
the kind mother
is rather proud
of her knit and son…

Teen with Mum clashes
knits old fashioned
no cash for new
so knit you love
love through and through

When old Mum dies
then son flies home
scent lies in vest
to nose pressed now
and rest of life…

“X” for eXegesis and a Wildcard Poem…

April 27, 2024April 26, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Exegesis – “critical explanation or interpretation of a text”

Usually, I review my A-Z Challenge at the end of the month as well as hopping on the Roadtrip to review some of the other blogs I have visited, but over the last week I have started to have a perspective on what I have learned on my journey through commodities. Since with the best will in the world, I could not find either a commodity or a poetry form beginning with “X” – I am going to allow myself time to draw some threads together before going on to “Y” and “Z” next week – oh, and to choose a poetry form that I did not write to already this month!

I thought there would be quirky facts about various substances, I thought that portraying stuff as Commodities might yield a different viewpoint, but I didn’t anticipate the Geopolitical tropes that would occur time and again or the Environmental recurring themes either. Of course, I have realised that that is partly because of me – who I am and what therefore stood out for me. For example, the imperial atrocities associated with the early extraction of Rubber, both in the Amazon and the Congo. The fact that atrocities are still being perpetrated against indigenous peoples in both those river basins not to mention virtual slave and child labour. How industries rose and fell like the Whale Oil industry between 1780-1860 and only the advent of Kerosene saved many more whales from extinction – and yet the age of oil exploitation threatens a wider extinction through global warming…

Time and again we have seen how commodities like Gold, Silver and Oil – “Black Gold” – have been the driver behind imperial conquest, how enmity between trading blocks has led to fluctuations in the market – Putin’s war on Ukraine has – through sanctions applied to Russia – affected grain prices, energy prices and even more exotic commodities like Palladium – and these are not just effects on the traders who gamble in commodity futures, but ordinary people who have experienced rampant inflation due to rocketing energy prices or in Africa – people who have suffered the euphamistic “Food Insecurity” due to the lack of Ukrainian grain as we saw in yesterday’s Wheat.
It’s not just the politics and the lingering effects of Imperialism, but the environmental issues that have come to light – we first encountered this with Barley – a crop which likes cool conditions but without too much rain and as we have come to know in the last few years (Donald Trump arch-denier notwithstanding) global warming can mean too hot, too cold, too dry too wet – too variable – so sip your malt whisky while you may…

Today the news is headlined by student protests against the genocide in Gaza calling not only for a ceasefire, and the implementation of the two-state solution, but the divestment of investment by their universities, in any company involved in supporting Israel – such as arms manufacturers like Lockheed. In making these protests, the students are not only demonstrating the ongoing ability of youth to see through years of invested bullshit and like the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, see what is really going on and call it out, but they reveal that they understand that the way to tackle it is through economics – hitting companies and errant countries in the wallet – the issues are complex and the histories entwined but much comes down to money… The issues of the environmental, socio-political and geo-political that my skimming through tales of commodities have raised, are much the same – if we want a better, fairer , safer world then it is going to cost us – choices will have to be made, things taken seriously…

Ever since last year, when the poet Misky introduced me to Midjourney – still the best generative AI picture app, I have been using it to produce illustrations – including a number of posts here on the A-Z Challenge. I am a painter and photographer but I would not rate my Illustration skills and so I am delighted by the ability of Midjourney to parse the instructions I “prompt” it with and watching the images form before your eyes is – well magic! But it can take a few iterations to get the AI to give you what you want (and sometimes you have to give up…) so here are some of the “nearly rans” from the past month!

You may recognise the unfortunate Sue (bottom left) from the post on Lacquer. When you ask Midjourney to create an image, it offers you not one, but four images to choose from and you can if you wish, either enlarge one or more of them or ask for variations on it – in this case I was happy with the first iteration.

I wanted an illustration of the many products that can be made from soya beans and although Midjourney made a credible and appetising looking effort, it was not quite comprehensive enough and in the end, I didn’t use it.

These happy families are quaffing orange juice and this illustrates how you can ask Midjourney to work “in the style of” – in this case the style of a Ladybird book cover which produced just the kind of post-war fifties feel I wanted to convey… Again, I went with the bottom left image but asked for it to be redone in a wider aspect ratio.

The problem with AIs is that they don’t fully understand what is going on in the images they learn from and this is particularly the case when asked to come up with something in the style of an old master. Here is the exact prompt I used here “The Goddess Athena impaling Pallas who is distracted by Zeus watching in the background in the style of Michaelangelo –ar 4:3 –v 6.0“. There is confusion about which and who Pallas is and even gender and though some spears are in evidence, they are not always held by the right person, and as for Zeus… You may say that my prompt is insufficient and you may be right but I think dealing with an AI is like trying to talk to an alien! The image I actually used in Palladium, had the following prompt – “The Goddess Athena fighting with Pallas as Zeus watches in the background in the style of Titian –ar 4:3 –v 6.0“

Lastly a series of images seeking to convey the Goddess Freya aka Vanadís for the post on Vanadium. I asked Midjourney to depict Freya Norse Goddes of love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold and magic but Midjourney declined until I removed the word sex from the prompt – Midjourney is a very modest AI… After that Midjourney interpreted the prompt with extraordinary beauty and imagination – I would tell you which two artists (separately) the following images were in the style of but I can’t let you into all my secrets but by all means hazard a guess in the comments and I will confirm if you are right… You might want to look at the one I finally chose (none of these) here.

And so to today’s poem. I used several lists of poetry forms to choose and guide me as to the poems I wrote for the A-Z Challenge but principally Language is a Virus, and The Academy of American Poets – Glossary of Poetic Terms. Looking through to find a form I had not chosen previously, I came across the Contrapuntal poem which combines two poems that can be read three- ways – each separately or together, reading across the lines, to form a third poem.

Knowledge and Wisdom – a Contrapuntal Poem

Wheat and a WaltMarie Poem

April 25, 2024April 25, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

The Worldwide Trade in Wheat 2022 was $73.3Billion and it was the 49th most traded product…

“Give us our daily bread…” says the Lord’s Prayer although the making of bread from wheat is by no means limited to the Christian West and I am sure there are similar lines in prayers of other religions (do please say if you know any…) but it indicates the huge importance of wheat and the bread, pasta, and cake that it is used to make, among other things. “Wheats are a part of Cereals. They include Wheat except durum wheat, and meslin and Durum wheat.” says the OEC website on Commodities. I confess I had not heard of Meslin (which turns out to be a planting of Wheat and Rye together) though I can disambiguate the other main types of Wheat which largely fall into two categories hard and soft wheat – this is not to do with physical hardness – in fact Durum wheat is physically harder, takes more milling, which damages some of the starches, has less gluten and is therefore has higher extensibility. This means they are more easily stretched into long pieces without breaking, making them ideal to use in pasta. Common Wheat on the other hand has a higher elasticity, which helps them bounce back when kneaded. This makes common wheat a better choice when making bread (the elasticity is what allows the bread to trap bubbles of carbon dioxide allowing the bread to rise). So Red Winter Wheat as grown in Canada for example, is a “hard” high-gluten bread-making flour whilst the Spring Wheats grown in say, France, are “soft” (less gluten) wheats and more suitable for cake making. Durum wheat (“soft” in gluten terms but physically hard) is used for pasta making. Below is a chart showing the gluten content of Common Wheat, Durum Wheat and two of the ancient grains from which our modern wheats are descended Emmer and Spelt… Oh and Meslin – is grown mainly for animal feeds these days but was big in breadmaking from Medieval times and its use in baking died out after the Second World War.

With Wheat as a commodity, we once encounter the geopolitical importance of markets and once again the unwarranted war by Putin on the Ukraine comes to the fore. Once described as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has not been well treated by Russia – under Stalin, whose collectivist farming policies were so efficient, that even in a land so blessed in soil and climate as Ukraine – they caused collective failure. Stalin punished Ukraine by taking all the grain including the next year’s seed grain which of course only exacerbated the problem the following year and led to a famine in the Ukraine so severe that people resorted to eating the dead to survive. This little-known atrocity was depicted in the film Mr Jones in which a determined Welsh journalist goes to Ukraine and sees for himself the devastation. This is one of the reasons why Putin, hubristically primed by his revisionist book to regard Russia as the “mother” of Ukraine (and not the other way round as is the real truth) was surprised to find that the people of Ukraine did not welcome him in to take Ukraine back into his dream of a re-unified Soviet state but instead continue to fight tooth and nail to stay free. Ukraine has become the bread bowl to a wider market supplying vital grain to many African countries who in turn, were pushed nearer to famine by Putin’s war. Fortunately, some grain is now getting out…

To understand who Exports and who Imports wheat and the value of those transactions – go to https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/wheat where they have some amazing interactive infographics but unless you are a commodity trader (and I suspect most of you are not!) then I am going to close the factual part of this post with a word about roller milling and stoneground wheat. The wheat kernel consists of a husk – the bran – inside which are two halves of flour joined together with a little proto-plant – the wheatgerm. In the old days of windmills turning great round grindstones, the grain was fed in between the stones and crushed into pieces but this included the wheatgerm which is a living plant and so if the stoneground flour was not used fairly quickly, the crushed wheatgerm would turn the flour rancid. The modern roller mills consist of heavy metal rollers that can be adjusted so precisely, that they first, delicately crack off the bran which is separated and perhaps further chopped up. Then the rollers gently break the two haves of the kernel apart so that the wheatgerm falls out and is taken away to be roasted – this kills the plant and makes a tasty product in its own right. Lastly, the rollers can grind the flour kernels down with such precision that different grades of flour are obtainable from the outside to the middle. Now if the mill wants to offer 100% Wholemeal Flour, then it can mix the bran, the toasted wheatgerm and all the flour back together and this flour will keep much longer than Stoneground – so what is the difference? Well stoneground flour contains a mish-mash of different-sized particles from pure flour to fragments of the kernel still in its bran and this means that when baked, the flour releases its carbohydrate slowly. Roller-milled flour is essentially white flour with the bran and wheatgerm added back in and that makes it a fast-release carbohydrate – in other words, you might as well be eating white flour in terms of carbohydrate release…

And so to today’s poem a WaltMarie. The Writers Digest University offers this definition:-
This week, a Poetic Asides member shared a poetic form she created. While I don’t usually share nonce forms, I’ve tried this one myself, and I think it’s a lot of fun. So without further ado, I’m introducing Candace Kubinec’s form, the Waltmarie (which is itself a nod to PA members and Poetic Bloomings hosts, Marie Elena Good and Walter J. Wojtanik).
Here are the guidelines for writing the Waltmarie:

10 lines
Even lines are two syllables in length, odd lines are longer (but no specific syllable count)
Even lines make their own mini-poem if read separately

No other rules for subject or rhymes.

Wheat

Give us
   our daily bread or just
the flour
   and we will scavenge fire-wood
to bake
   the staff of life
flat bread
   or leavened if we can manage
for life
   keeping body and soul together…

Women bake bread surrounded by destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis, Gaza during the recent humanitarian pause.
Photo: © UNRWA/Ashraf Amra

(Dedicated to the refugees in their own land Palestine
but also to refugees or those afflicted by famine
whether caused by war or climate change
anywhere in the world…
You can donate here Oxfam)

Vanadium and a Verbless Poem.

April 25, 2024April 24, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide trade in Vanadium 2022 was $38970 million and growing…

When starting to research each of the commodities in this A-Z Challenge, I have only had some preconceived idea of the stories or interesting facts about a few of the items – for the most part – a trip to Wikipedia is good starting point or seeking the answer to the above question on World Trading – but with Vanadium, I have been faced with a wall of chemistry. yes there is a discovery timeline – of course there is – and there is a naming story involving an ancient goddess but more than any other element, my overwhelming first impression is that we are going to have to talk some chemistry…

The first discovery in the Vanadium story was in Mexico, in 1801 Andrés Manuel del Río extracted the element from a sample of Mexican “brown lead” ore, later named vanadinite. So like the “bad copper ore” in Nickel and the ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ we encountered in Palladium, the Vanadium story starts off being an impurity or mistaken identity in the mining of some other substance. Because the salts of Vanadium displayed so many different colours, del Rio initially named the substance panchromium (Greek: παγχρώμιο “all colours” but later renamed it erythronium (Greek: ερυθρός “red”) because most of the salts turned red upon heating. Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the element in a new oxide he found while working with iron ores. Later that year, Friedrich Wöhler confirmed that this element was identical to that found by del Río and he called the element vanadium after Old Norse Vanadís (another name for the Norse Vanir goddess Freyja, whose attributes include beauty and fertility and from whom we get Friday and less salubriously – frigging!).

An image of Freya created with Midjourney

Below is a science experiment demonstrating the reason for the many colours of different chemical states of Vanadium plus if this guy does not look like the original mad scientist I don’t know who would…

Of all the hard commodity metals we have encountered, Vanadium, though rarely occurring as a native metal, has one of the most varied occurrences being present in about 65 different minerals and so it has many and varied methods of extraction. More chemistry required. As well as ores such as patrónite and Vanadinite, Uranium ores such as carnotite, vanadium can be found in bauxite and deposits of crude oil, coal, oil shale, and tar sands, in sea water and in volcanic mineral springs. You can read more about the technical aspects of Vanadium here.

When such oil products are burned, traces of vanadium may cause corrosion in engines and boilers.^[62] An estimated 110,000 tons of vanadium per year are released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels
Wikipedia

Once again, we find a metal which has become vital as an alloy ingredient – about 85% of it is used in ferrovanadium or as a steel additive where it significantly increases the strength of the steel making it suitable for many tools as well as specialist engineering applications like the turbine blades in jet engines (mixed with Aluminium and Titanium) and closer to home, if you can afford dental implants – you may have some in your mouth. Vanadium is used as a catalyst in the production of Sulphuric Acid and thence in many industrial chemical processes whilst the vanadium redox battery is a vital part of grid energy storage and may be important in the development of future battery technologies.

Tunicates such as this bluebell tunicate contain vanadium as vanabins. (Wikipedia)

With the cosmic abundance of vanadium being around 0.0001%, it is hardly surprising that this chemical of complex possibilities has found its role in living creatures – more in marine environments than on land – but even on land vanadium occurs in some fungi including the iconic Fly Agaric.

*Amanita muscaria* contains amavadin. (Wikipedia)

The jury is out as to the utility or otherwise, of Vanadium in the human body – deficiency in rats has been linked to poor growth and some inconclusive experiments suggest it might help with type 2 diabetes, but neither minimum recommended doses of Vanadium as a supplement nor its threshold as a poison have been properly established. Another reflection of the complex chemistry of Vanadium…

As a trading commodity, Vanadium may be less than $Billion which is small compared to some of the commodities we have looked at, but it is a very vital ingredient in the modern world and a little of it goes a long way. But as the quote below shows – looked at in geopolitical terms – two of the top producer countries are problematic to Western interests – especially in the light of sanctions against Putin’s Russia and America’s problems squaring up to China, so these potential instabilities stoke the kind of opportunities that markets like to speculate on…

Vanadium is mined mostly in China, South Africa and eastern Russia. In 2022 these three countries mined more than 96% of the 100,000 tons of produced vanadium, with China providing 70%
Wikipedia

And so to today’s poem which as we are at “V” – is a Verbless Poem.

The poets.org, has this to say about Verbless Poetry in turn a quote from the definition by Edward Hirsch in his A Poet’s Glossary:-
Poems without verbs. On one hand, the verbless poem can create a static quality, a sense of the arrested moment, which is why it has appealed to poets who write haiku and other types of imagist poems. […] On the other hand, the verbless construction can give, as the linguist Otto Jespersen points out in “The Role of the Verb (1911),” “a very definite impression of motion.” That’s why verbless constructions especially appealed to the futurists, such as F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), who eliminated verbs in order to create a sense of telegraphic communication in a furiously changing world.
– Seems an appropriate form for Vanadium…

Vanadium – a Verbless Poem

From a multitude of sources
through a cascade of chemical processes
to a plethora of purposes
vital to our modern world
Vanadium our alloy ally…

Uranium and an Urdu poetry form – The Ghazal…

April 24, 2024April 24, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worlwide trade in Uranium – 2022 – $951.586 Million – 29.32 Metric Tons

What do you think of first when you hear the word Uranium – perhaps you saw last year’s blockbuster Oppenheimer about the moral agonising of that man over the detonating of the first atomic (Uranium) bomb over Hiroshima, perhaps you think of that bomb itself, or perhaps you think of the peaceful use of nuclear power that followed on from that awful event. Perhaps you think of the pressure on Iran to stop it from accumulating enough nuclear material to make a bomb of its own. Science, politics, history and remarkable individuals – all are involved in the nexus which is Uranium.

Uranium glass under ultraviolet light. Image credit: Peter Chow UK / Shutterstock.com

Compounds of Uranium had been used as colouring agents since Roman times and even from the 1830’s glass like the examples above were being made with no idea of the dangers of radiation that they posed – for though Uranium was “discovered” by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789, the idea of radioactivity was not put forward until 1896 when Henri Becquerel determined that a form of invisible light or rays emitted by uranium had exposed a photographic plate on which a sample of a uranium salt had been placed. It was to take even longer for the deleterious effects of radiation to become apparent and Becquerel and his collaborators Pierre and Marie Curie probably all suffered some effects of being exposed to radioactivity throughout their work.

Uranium is the highest numbered element on the Periodic Table to be found in significant amounts on Earth almost always combined with other elements yet it is now thought vital, along with thorium, and potassium-40, in providing the heat – through atomic decay – that keeps the Earth’s mantle hot and the outer core of the Earth liquid – without which there would be no currents in the Mantle , no plate tectonics and no magnetic field protecting us from Solar radiation. We literally owe our existence to Uranium as well as the shape of our continents, vulcanicity and their attendant earthquakes… In the Earth’s crust, Uranium is found in concentrations of 2 to 4 parts per million, or about 40 times as abundant as silver. It can be recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium.

Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel became co-researchers into radioactive elements and Marie Curie in particular, noted that Pitchblende – an ore of Uranium, was more “active” than could be accounted for by Uranium alone and this eventually led to isolating and identifying Polonium and Radium. Marie Curie was nearly not included in the Nobel Prize in 1903 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences until an advocate for women scientists insisted on her inclusion – throughout her early career Marie had worked against the non-inclusion of women in science and so she stands out as one of the great pioneers not just in the work on radioactivity, but as a woman scientist. These three scientists could little have imagined the direction that science would take radioactivity – driven by the impetus of war to unlock the theoretical idea that nuclear fission could be used to develop a bomb of unimaginable strength. Technology is often driven by unfortunate things, the development of home cine-cameras and later the rapid growth of the internet owe a great deal to pornography and the atomic bomb, fuelled by war, came before the peaceful application of nuclear power – an unpallatable truth… Oppenheimer, the movie, unfolds the story of the transformation from scientific theory to a functioning bomb and the soul-ache it brought to Oppenheimer.

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the detonation of Little Boy on 6 August 1945. A separation between the upper mushroom head and the stem is visible. This photograph and its vaguely question mark appearance was used as the inspiration for the insignia of the Manhattan Engineer District, and was widely reprinted globally within days of the attack. Wikipedia.

Production from world uranium mines has in recent years supplied 90% of the requirements of power utilities.
Primary production from mines is supplemented by secondary supplies, formerly most from ex-military material but now the products of recycling and stockpiles built up in times of reduced demand.
The Uranium Commodity Market

Okay so here’s the commodity trading bit about Uranium – “All mineral commodity markets tend to be cyclical (i.e. prices rise and fall substantially over the years) but these fluctuations tend to be superimposed on a long-term trend decline in real prices, as technological progress reduces production cost at mines. In the uranium market, however, high prices in the late 1970s gave way to depressed prices in the whole of the period of the 1980s and 1990s, with spot prices below the cost of production for all but the lowest-cost mines. Spot prices recovered from 2003 to 2009, but have been weak since then.” (Source Uranium Markets).

And so to today’s poem for which there is no form beginning with “U” however, the Ghazal is one form of Urdu Poetry and so that is what I am going with. In poetry (and as the lyrics in songs), the ghazal (Arabic: غزل; Turkish gazel) is a poetic form consisting of couplets which share a rhyme and a refrain. Numerous scholars and poets have attempted to translate ghazals from their original language to English. The task is daunting, as keeping the literal meaning of each poem while respecting the rhyme, refrain, and length of lines is difficult, if not impossible.It was the poet Agha Shahid Ali who introduced it, in its classical form, to Americans and the English-speaking world. Ghazal in Arabic literally means “speaking with women”. The ghazal not only has a specific form, but traditionally deals with just one subject: Love. And not any kind of love, but specifically, an illicit, and unattainable love. I have taken some minor liberties with the form but I hope I have written to the spirit of the Ghazal…
Marie Curie was groundbreaking not only for her work on radioactivity, but also because of the struggle she faced as a woman to have her work taken notice of and even to have obtained an education in science.
So there you have it – a love poem… I have taken a few liberties with the repeating chorus element and I am not sure that the couplets are thematically independent but it is what it is!

Uranium – Explored with Love…

Marie, Science was for you an act of love
Your husband also took science for his love.

Born in Poland under the Russian control
You studied secretly of science- your love.

The Floating University it was who
Launched the boat that was your first love – science.

Moving to Paris to follow your sister
Easier to pursue your lover science.

What is a husband if he does not share your
Passion and your joy in loving all of science.

Eventually with Henri Becquerel they
Won the Nobel Prize for their love of science.

Two Nobel Prizes, first for married couple
Took notice of their science and their one love.

Love of science and mapping its far extent
Radioactive was their love of science.

You had children with poor struck down Pierre but
Marie, Science was for you an act of love.

Tea and a Terza Rima Poem

April 23, 2024April 22, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Tea 2022 – $8.13 Billion – 426th most traded product – representing 0.034% of total world trade…

After water – tea is the second most drunk liquid in the world! In America, the lingering effect of the anti-imperialist sentiment of the Boston tea Party means that to this day, 79% of Americans drink coffee while only 75% drink tea. You can find more fun statistics about tea drinking here. But you can definitely say that a plant which grows in quite particular climatic conditions has been spread by acts of Empire from its original sources and from its original drinkers, to become the world’s favourite beverage – Americans notwithstanding. Originating in China – the name of the species is “Camellia sinensis” (Chinese Camellia) – agents of the British Empire stole plants (remember Rubber) and created plantations in India, Sri Lanka and Kenya. Actually, most of the plants stolen by the British did not survive in the foothills of the Himalayas but they discovered another variety of tea growing in Assam and Assam tea is just one of the many variants of tea available from across the world today. Beyond the different varieties that are picked, there are also many ways of processing the picked leaves and so increasing even further the choice of finished product.

White: wilted and unoxidized;
Yellow: unwilted and unoxidized but allowed to yellow;
Green: unwilted and unoxidized;
Oolong: wilted, bruised, and partially oxidized;
Black: wilted, sometimes crushed, and fully oxidized (called 紅茶 [hóngchá], “red tea” in Chinese and other East Asian tea culture);
Post-fermented (Dark): green tea that has been allowed to ferment/compost (called Pu’er if from the Yunnan district of South-Western China or 黑茶 [hēichá] “black tea” in Chinese tea culture).
Wikipedia

Tea leaves contain enzymes that immediately cause an oxidation to take place after picking and darken the leaves unless quickly dried or in the case of black tea, dried and heated at the same time. heating and drying de-activate the enzyme. Green teas keep least well but black teas can keep up to two years in a sealed dark container.

Teas are often blended to combine the characteristics of the component varieties – Englis Breakfast Tea is an example mixing East African, Ceylon and Assam grown tea to form a strong tea suitable to wake you up at breakfast – although black tea has about half the caffeine of coffee, it has the benefit of releasing the caffeine more slowly. Various additions can be made both to tea proper to create blends like Earl Grey Tea – said to be the most addictive tea of all due to the Bergamot Oil it is flavoured with. And then there are brews which are not strictly teas at all but occupy the same beverage niche like Yerba-maté and so-called Herbal Teas. These spill over into herbalism and naturopathy where aggressive legislation lobbied for by big-pharma have outlawed the medicinal claims of herbal remedies unless they can demonstrate efficacy with double-blind tests – however the teas have promulgated in part due to our insatiable appetite for novelty and customisation and part due to our belief that these herbal hangovers from the past are “natural” and therefore must be good for something… Fruity teas are popular and if they are red, examine the label and you will find that the main ingredient is Hibiscus – a little of which goes a long way.

Brooke Bond Dividend Tea showing the stamps and an Advert citing the “True” dividend…

I remember as a child, both my Grandmother and Mother buying loose-leaf Brooke-Bond Dividend tea which came in a green paper packet with an orange seal from which you could detach a savings stamp inside to collect on a special sheet and also find a collectable card – but most of all I remember the smell of the tea when you poured it into the tea caddy – rich, sweet and like nothing else…

My favourite collection of Brooke Bond Dividend cards – aircraft!

The company I work for has a chain of Chaii (Chai= Tea) cafés and at the factory we make up the mixtures for the two varieties we serve – Karak Chaii and Kashmiri Chaii – both very sweet, milky and with spices such as Cardamon and Cinnamon added and in the case of Kashmiri Tea – a characteristic pink colour – further options such as Saffron can be added at the point of serving. Every household, café and restaurant originating in the sub-continent of India/Pakistan, claims its own special recipe to be the best…

@thenewyorknest
Let’s make Kashmiri chai together, a floral tea made from green tea leaves that’s extremely popular in South Asia. #ad I’ve been making pink chai for years, and over time, I’ve finally perfected the perfect pink color. To show it off, I found the perfect glass teapot and mugs from @HomeGoods. Our local store has a great selection of kitchenware, no matter what your aesthetic you’ll surely find something you love! My saucepan, ladle, milk jug, strainer, nearly everything is from @homegoods – providing necessities alongside beautiful and functional homeware items. Recipe Cinnamon stick (1) Star anise (1-2) Cardamom pods (handful) Loose green tea leaves (half cup) Milk (2 cups) Sugar (per your liking) Salt (dash) Baking soda (1.5 teaspoons) Place cinnamon stick, star anise, cardamom and green tea leaves in 3 cups of water. Bring to boil approximately 2-3 times. Aerate/whisk the liquid so much that it evaporates and reduces to one cup, then add ice cold water to replace the evaporated water. Add baking soda, and a pinch of salt. Allow that to boil for approximately 15-25 mins on medium heat, if water reduces, keep adding more cold water to replenish. After a while, the liquid should start changing color toward a dark red/burgundy! Strain the tea leaves. Separately warm up milk, mix the tea with milk. Add sugar to your liking and top with pistachios or almonds! Enjoy! #HGFinders
♬ Pieces (Solo Piano Version) – Danilo Stankovic

And so to today’s poem which is a Terza Rima form:
Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameters are generally preferred. (Poetry Guide – Language is a Virus)

Tea

Who made and sipped the first cup of tea
took boiling water and infused some leaf
from stress and toil set mind and body free
for stress and toil are of your life a thief
but time for a tea is never wasted
but a meditation that brings relief
through a ceremony, you have waited
for fresh or dried leave in the cup to steep
and perfect draught of tea created

They needed fire, cups, and a vessel to heat
the water drawn from pool or flowing stream
before experimenting with which leaf
soothed, stimulated or made one dream
what to pick, how to store, when to use it
what to add – lemon, milk but never cream

Just leaves from your herb patch if the mood fits
each cup unique and never repeated
whether with friend or with a stranger – sit
dissolve the tension of times too heated
recall times past and friendships history
moments recalled and moments secreted

See whether, in your mind’s eye, you can see
who made and sipped the first cup of tea …

Soybeans and a Solage

April 22, 2024April 22, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Soybeans in 2022 whether or not broken” exceeded $93 billion

If you have any doubt that Soya Beans (Soybeans) ar the most important of all the beans – just take a look at the table below – note how many bolded figures (Top value of the comparisons) fall to Soy Beans! Just on this nutritional guide alone (Courtesy of Wikipedia) you would know that this bean was important before even considering it’s history, it’s culinary story and the confirmation of it’s value as revealed in the International Trade Figures… However, there is a dark side to the Soya story and one which commands our attention – more of that later.

Staple	Maize (corn)^[A]	Rice, white^[B]	Wheat^[C]	Potatoes^[D]	Cassava^[E]	Soybeans, green^[F]	Sweet potatoes^[G]	Yams^[Y]	Sorghum^[H]	Plantain^[Z]	RDA
Water content (%)	10	12	13	79	60	68	77	70	9	65
Raw grams per 100 g dry weight	111	114	115	476	250	313	435	333	110	286
Nutrient
Energy (kJ)	1698	1736	1574	1533	1675	1922	1565	1647	1559	1460	8,368–10,460
Protein (g)	10.4	8.1	14.5	9.5	3.5	40.6	7.0	5.0	12.4	3.7	50
Fat (g)	5.3	0.8	1.8	0.4	0.7	21.6	0.2	0.6	3.6	1.1	44–77
Carbohydrates (g)	82	91	82	81	95	34	87	93	82	91	130
Fiber (g)	8.1	1.5	14.0	10.5	4.5	13.1	13.0	13.7	6.9	6.6	30
Sugar (g)	0.7	0.1	0.5	3.7	4.3	0.0	18.2	1.7	0.0	42.9	minimal
Minerals	^[A]	^[B]	^[C]	^[D]	^[E]	^[F]	^[G]	^[Y]	^[H]	^[Z]	RDA
Calcium (mg)	8	32	33	57	40	616	130	57	31	9	1,000
Iron (mg)	3.01	0.91	3.67	3.71	0.68	11.09	2.65	1.80	4.84	1.71	8
Magnesium (mg)	141	28	145	110	53	203	109	70	0	106	400
Phosphorus (mg)	233	131	331	271	68	606	204	183	315	97	700
Potassium (mg)	319	131	417	2005	678	1938	1465	2720	385	1426	4700
Sodium (mg)	39	6	2	29	35	47	239	30	7	11	1,500
Zinc (mg)	2.46	1.24	3.05	1.38	0.85	3.09	1.30	0.80	0.00	0.40	11
Copper (mg)	0.34	0.25	0.49	0.52	0.25	0.41	0.65	0.60	–	0.23	0.9
Manganese (mg)	0.54	1.24	4.59	0.71	0.95	1.72	1.13	1.33	–	–	2.3
Selenium (μg)	17.2	17.2	81.3	1.4	1.8	4.7	2.6	2.3	0.0	4.3	55
Vitamins	^[A]	^[B]	^[C]	^[D]	^[E]	^[F]	^[G]	^[Y]	^[H]	^[Z]	RDA
Vitamin C (mg)	0.0	0.0	0.0	93.8	51.5	90.6	10.4	57.0	0.0	52.6	90
Thiamin (B1) (mg)	0.43	0.08	0.34	0.38	0.23	1.38	0.35	0.37	0.26	0.14	1.2
Riboflavin (B2) (mg)	0.22	0.06	0.14	0.14	0.13	0.56	0.26	0.10	0.15	0.14	1.3
Niacin (B3) (mg)	4.03	1.82	6.28	5.00	2.13	5.16	2.43	1.83	3.22	1.97	16
Pantothenic acid (B5) (mg)	0.47	1.15	1.09	1.43	0.28	0.47	3.48	1.03	–	0.74	5
Vitamin B6 (mg)	0.69	0.18	0.34	1.43	0.23	0.22	0.91	0.97	–	0.86	1.3
Folate Total (B9) (μg)	21	9	44	76	68	516	48	77	0	63	400
Vitamin A (IU)	238	0	10	10	33	563	4178	460	0	3220	5000
Vitamin E, alpha-tocopherol (mg)	0.54	0.13	1.16	0.05	0.48	0.00	1.13	1.30	0.00	0.40	15
Vitamin K1 (μg)	0.3	0.1	2.2	9.0	4.8	0.0	7.8	8.7	0.0	2.0	120
Beta-carotene (μg)	108	0	6	5	20	0	36996	277	0	1306	10500
Lutein+zeaxanthin (μg)	1506	0	253	38	0	0	0	0	0	86	6000
Fats	^[A]	^[B]	^[C]	^[D]	^[E]	^[F]	^[G]	^[Y]	^[H]	^[Z]	RDA
Saturated fatty acids (g)	0.74	0.20	0.30	0.14	0.18	2.47	0.09	0.13	0.51	0.40	minimal
Monounsaturated fatty acids (g)	1.39	0.24	0.23	0.00	0.20	4.00	0.00	0.03	1.09	0.09	22–55
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (g)	2.40	0.20	0.72	0.19	0.13	10.00	0.04	0.27	1.51	0.20	13–19
	^[A]	^[B]	^[C]	^[D]	^[E]	^[F]	^[G]	^[Y]	^[H]	^[Z]	RDA

^A raw yellow dent corn
^B raw unenriched long-grain white rice
^C raw hard red winter wheat
^D raw potato with flesh and skin
^E raw cassava
^F raw green soybeans
^G raw sweet potato
^H raw sorghum
^Y raw yam
^Z raw plantains
^/* unofficial

Evidence for the domestication of Soya Beans predates writing but has been found in China from between 7-6,500 years ago. Because, like many legumes, they fix nitrogen from the air and send it to the soil, the plant was quickly recognised as helpful in crop rotation and yet even as recently as World War 2, that benefit was being “rediscovered” in America when fertiliser supplies were compromised. If Soya Beans were discovered today they would be touted as a Superfood if not a “Miracle” food

Prior to fermented products such as fermented black soybeans (douchi), jiang (Chinese miso), soy sauce, tempeh, nattō, and miso, soy was considered sacred for its beneficial effects in crop rotation, and it was eaten by itself, and as bean curd and soy milk.
Wikipedia

One of the interesting aspects of Soya is just how many ways it is processed into other products beyond just eating the beans direct – they are the world’s largest source of animal feed (creating protein which humans then eat), the second largest source of vegetable oil and these two uses consume 85% of the soya crop leaving just 15% to be sold as whole beans. Out of that we then get soya milk, from which is made bean curd and tempeh (from the leftover of soy milk production), then Soy Sauce and various forms of Miso – these latter being fermented soya products without which both Chinese and Japanese cuisine would be unimaginable. I have to declare an interest here since among the many jobs I have done, I worked briefly for one of England’s leading Tofu (bean curd) producers creating and making new products out of tofu – previously he made only a plain and a peanut burger and I added two flavours of pastie, tofu quiches and a tofu “eggless” custard to his range. So this feels like a good place to offer two tips that I picked up in that job. Many Western people never take to tofu because they find it tasteless and unfortunately we don’t have access to some of the specialist variations available in the East such as deep-fryable pouching tofu whose crisped casing can be stuffed with tasty things – but there are a couple of ways to make tofu tasty… First you can buy (hard) tofu in a tub of it’s own whey and carefully peel back the lid, spread a layer of Miso (another soya product) on the top surface of the Tofu, cover and leave it floating in the whey in the fridge for a few days. The Miso is a live culture, fermented product so the quite strong taste will not simply permeate the Tofu, but will interact biologically to create a new flavour. Secondly, take an unopened packet of Tofu and freeze it – upon defrosting, the frozen crystals of whey which will have formed – compressing the Tofu – will melt and leave a network of holes in the now tougher, compressed Tofu so that it will hold together better when added to say, a stew and each chunk will act like a little sponge holding the gravy so that you can even use the mixture as a pie filling! If you have only encountered one or two kinds of Miso, the map below shows some of the many regional variations in Miso.

Types of Miso from around Japan

*Various Regional Varieties of Miso and their Respective Grain Base*

Where does it all come from – this vital, amazing Soya Bean crop – well for something that originated in China – these babies have roamed far from home as the diagram below shows – 34% from America and add in Brazil 29% and Argentina 18%, that’s 81% of the world production comes from the Americas and China’s demand for Soya has increased beyond their capacity to grow it – not least because with growing affluence – the Chinese demand for pork grew and soya beans were needed to feed pigs – anybody see a problem…? Actually there are several problems – during the Trump administration – that genius of Foreign Policy decided to play to his base by launching a Trade War on China – the US already had a 25% tariff on $250 billion of Beijing goods and Trump threatened a further 10% tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports. Naturally, China responded by slashing its U.S. farm purchases by 53% to $9.2 billion from 2017. Soybeans (American name) purchases took a huge hit, falling nearly 75% to $3.1 billion. Trump had to pay out a lot of money to support the farmers and the stockpile of Soybeans mounted… This in turn put pressure on other areas like South America (mainly Southern Brasil and Argentina) to increase their growing of Soya and this led to increased deforestation – agriculture drove up to 88% of forest loss in Latin America and up to 81% in Southeast Asia between 2000-2015. So once again we see how geopolitical issues can have a huge impact on the commodities market not to mention the environment…

Proportion of global production exported

Just a couple of other fun facts about Soya beans – Soya is one of the fourteen notifiable allergens – that is it must be highlighted in bold in any ingredient list and as we have seen, soya can turn up in many guises – about 0.3% of the general population of adults and children are allergic to Soya. Another factor requiring labelling of Soya is that Soya was one of the first crops to “suffer” from Genetic Modification (GM) and the backlash against such “Frankenstein” food has been damaging in addition to the highly industrialised style of farming and the ecological effects of the crop worldwide. The expression “Full of Beans!” refers to horses who behaved with varying energy depending on which fuel they were fed – Grass – Ordinary – Oats – Friskier – Beans – Full of It and I wonder if it was Soya Beans that they used…? And lastly a film quote – Rick saying to Ilsa at the end of Casablanca, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” A rare example of an anti-romance ending – the plight of the world is more important than a soppy ending…

That is my quite cursory glance at Soya (considering the importance of this crop) – other commodities I might have considered for “S” include Sugar and gold’s poor relation – Silver. And so to today’s poem which is a Solage:

Solage is a specific form of humorous verse with the following properties:

It has three lines (called the hook, the line and the sinker) of irregular length.
The rhyming structure is AAB.
The third line is a pun based on the previous two lines.

The form was invented by the Sydney-based performance poet Cameron M. Semmens.

Soybeans

To know where the wind is seen
Be sure to eat more beans
Windy bottom…

On a more serious note, today is

Earth Day

and you can read an account of how Earth Day came into being by the excellent Heather Cox Richardson here.

Rubber and a Rhyme Royal

April 20, 2024April 20, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Rubber 2022 – $18.4B – 239th most traded product representing 0.078% of total world trade.

Gentle Reader – this post should probably carry a warning – for it contains true tales of Theft, Violence and Depravity on an Imperial scale – it will visit a city 900 miles up a river, surrounded by jungle that nevertheless afford to build an opera house with imported marble and talent, it will visit both the geographical and metaphorical setting of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and reflect, not for the first time in this A-Z Challenge, on the evils done in the name of Imperialism. You have been warned…

The story of rubber begins innocently enough with a ballgame – archaeological evidence shows that the Olmec people of Mesoamerica played a game with a rubber ball made from the sap of the Hevea tree which grew extensively in the Amazon rainforest and which could be tapped to allow its white sap to be collected – this is called latex rubber.

Vintage illustrated collectible tobacco card from the Products of the World series published in 1909 by John Player and Sons Cigarettes, depicting agricultural exports and natural resources of world cultures and countries, here with two Indian workers tapping sap from a rubber tree, the first step in the mass production of rubber (Photo by Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images).

The English polymath Joseph Priestly received a small sample of latex and noted that it was very good at rubbing out (erasing) pencil marks and thus coined the name “Rubber”. In the nineteenth century, the development of first the bicycle and later the motor car, created a demand for rubber that far outstripped the sources of natural rubber and drove the discovery of synthetic elastomers – the technical name for rubberlike substances. The initial problem with developing rubber as a commodity, was that the Brasilian rainforest was the only source of Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) and Brasil had a stranglehold on the market and one thing that commodity markets don’t like is a monopoly. There was no specific law banning the export of rubber plants or seeds from Brasil but nevertheless it was a closely policed prohibition – and no wonder – the wealth generated by the monopoly of the supply of rubber paid for that lavishly marbled opera house in Manaus, far up the Amazon, and for a stream of European opera divas to grace its stage. It took until 1870 for the seeds to be smuggled out and the monopoly broken…

“Henry Wickham, who in 1876 directed an operation smuggling 70,000 rubber tree seeds”

In 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to Kew Gardens, England. Only 2,400 of these germinated. Seedlings were then sent to India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Singapore, and British Malaya. Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber

I well remember this story of derring-do smuggling from my geography class at school in the 1960’s but looking back, there was no hint of a question as to the ethics of this act of theft and the geopolitical shift that it meant for the British empire – it seemed that was just the way of things. An even more heinous crime was happening across the Atlantic in a similar river whose basin held a hard-to-penetrate tropical rainforest – the Congo. From 1885 to 1908, while the development of British rubber plantations in the Far-East were still being developed, the Belgian Congo, operated as a private estate – the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium – was another source of latex rubber. Congo rubber comes from vines and the wives and children of a village were held hostage whilst their menfolk were sent off to fulfil their quota of vine rubber. The depravity did not end there, with a bureaucracy that would have been the envy of the Nazis, every bullet used by Belgian soldiers had to be accounted for and justified, so if soldiers went hunting for meat or even sport – they would go into a village and chop off as many hands as required to justify their bullet allocation – claiming a police action as justification. No wonder Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece “Heart of Darkness” is set far up the Congo River where a European trader has gone rogue… So many people died under these imperial rules that though the exact figures are indeterminable, estimates range from 1.5 million to 13 million and the story of this genocide can be read here.

This is not to say that there were not many deaths of native Amazonian Indians as a result of rubber tapping in the Amazon but they have been overshadowed by the obscenity of Leopold’s genocide. It may be considered a boon then, that the theft of rubber tree seeds from Brazil and the subsequent establishment of rubber plantations in the Far Eastern countries of the British Empire, brought to an end the depradations in Brazil and the Congo… However, life on the remote plantations of the Far-East was at the very least a lonely station for the young men and women of the “Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets” as the globe encircling British Empire was sometimes called. Somerset Maugham (whom my mother “specialled”, or nursed one-to-one as a young nurse and who she described as a bitter old man) chronicled life on the plantations which we later watched dramatised on TV and if I can distil a typical story of his into one sentence it would be “Young planter comes back to England to wed from amongst the surfeit of girls following the First World War and returns to Malaya with his bride who later discovers he has a second family living at the bottom of the garden with a native wife – bitterness ensues…”

Somerset Maugham and some short stories of his…

Let us leave the sordid world of the early sourcing of rubber and move back to the uses of Rubber as a commodity. We have already seen one source of the name rubber, but another product that became synonymous was the “Rubber” or Rubber Johnny – prophylactic to who knows how many unborn babies… there are car tyres, cushioning and shock-absorbing devices, and still there are Rubber Balls and many more uses besides. Eventually, as demand for rubber exceeded production of natural rubber, Synthetic Rubber was invented and American dominance in the market was advanced by the Second World War, when the Allies, with their access to Far-Eastern natural rubber, stifled Axis efforts by bombing synthetic rubber factories in Germany, Italy and Poland.

Natural Rubber is still an important commodity despite synthetic products which have burgeoned over the years – styrene-butadiene rubbers , polyisoprene, neoprene, nitrile rubber and last but by no means least Silicone rubber. Even without being a chemist, that list may have conjured for you, wetsuits, surgical rubber gloves not to mention heatproof cookwear…
More than 28 million tons of rubber were produced in 2017, of which approximately 47% was natural. Natural rubber still goes into tyres and to dothat, the process of Vulcanisation had to be invented – a method of hardening the Latex or “India Rubber” (yes – the “stolen” rubber plantations of India gave their name to the raw material too) and this was eventually perfected by Charles Goodyear as a process involving heat and the addition of Sulphur.

Worker placing a tyre in a mould prior to Vulcanisation
Vulcanization. (2024, March 18). In *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcanization

Many other plants other than the Hevea Tree produce latex but have never been successfully been exploited and the price of rubber is volatile – for example, during the Covid crisis, the price of rubber spiked because of the demand for rubber gloves yet many small family-run plantations had rubbed up their crop to grow more profitable lines at the time such as palm-oil. Now plant diseases (which especially affect monocultures) and climate change are threatening the supply of natural rubber further…

Before proceeding to my own poetic offering, I cannot leave rubber without referencing A.A. Milne’s wonderful poem “King John’s Christmas” which takes us back to the very first discovered use of rubber and if you were unlucky enough not to have been brought up with his poems or only know of Winneie the Pooh – let this extract introduce you to a Wold of joy…

King John was not a good man,
He lived his live aloof;
Alone he thought a message out
While climbing up the roof.
He wrote it down and propped it
Against the chimney stack:
“TO ALL AND SUNDRY – NEAR AND FAR –
F. Christmas in particular.”
And signed it not “Johannes R.”
But very humbly, “Jack.”
“I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don’t mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”
An extract from King John’s Christmas by A.A. Milne

One of E.H. Shephard‘s incomparable illustrations for A.A. Milne’s poetry books

Which brings us to today’s poem for which I have chosen the poetry form Rhyme Royal:

The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for a good deal of variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems. (source Language is a Virus – Poetry Guide)

Rubber

Has ever extraction so cruel
been visited on poor people
our industrial needs to fuel
our market trade coffers kept full
wealth from the Third World, First World pulls
stolen plants new plantations
bring relief to tropical sons

The smooth ride of the motor car
or even humble bicycle
wrote a trail of blood from afar
ignorance of the genocide
no excuse for the denial
when now we know how goods are wrought
with blood, sweat and tears they’re still bought

Blood diamonds the savage crop
from where bloodied rubber once grew
blood from Congo’s gold and coltan drop
tin and tungsten to name but a few
not just the Congo to give it’s due
children of seventy-eight lands
make goods never mind adult hands…

You can find a report into all 457 goods made or mined using children – let alone adults, from 78 countries in this report…

Pepper and Quatorzain Poem

April 19, 2024April 19, 2024humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

I could find no Commodity beginning with “Q” so I am looking at another important “P” – Pepper as a commodity however the poetry form is a “Q” – the Quatorzain Poem…

Woldwide Trade in Pepper in 2022 $5.13B –
548th most traded product – 0.022% of total world trade

It is axiomatic that the Spice Trade from the Far East to Europe was important because without refrigeration, foodstuffs, especially meat, sometimes needed a little disguising and spices not only hid any dubious smells but in some cases, had antimicrobial properties that made meals safer. Of course, if curry spices were all that effective then there would be no such thing as Delhi Belly, but there is sufficient antimicrobial action that scientists are now looking seriously at spices from a medical standpoint. Of all the spices, Black Pepper is the oldest and most widely used – what restaurant table does not have a pepper pot? Turmeric, clove, nutmeg, cumin, and cinnamon are also contenders for medical research but Black Pepper has been such an important spice, traded for so long that it was used as currency in its own right – sometimes referred to as “black gold”. The legacy of this trade remains in some Western legal systems that recognize the term “peppercorn rent” as a token payment for something that is, essentially, a gift.

Black, White and Green Pepper are all true peppers from the plant Piper Nigrum (part of the Piperaceae family). This vine is native to India but grows in most tropical areas. Pink Peppercorns are from the Peruvian Pepper Tree, members of the cashew family Sichuan Peppercorns: also not peppercorns but rather “Chinese coriander”.

Black pepper is produced from the still-green, unripe drupe of the pepper plant. The drupes are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying.^[9] The heat ruptures cell walls in the pepper, speeding the work of browning enzymes during drying.^[9] The drupes dry in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the pepper skin around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer. Once dry, the spice is called black peppercorn.

White pepper consists solely of the seed of the ripe fruit of the pepper plant, with the thin darker-coloured skin (flesh) of the fruit removed. This is usually accomplished by a process known as retting, where fully ripe red pepper berries are soaked in water for about a week so the flesh of the peppercorn softens and decomposes; rubbing then removes what remains of the fruit, and the naked seed is dried.

Green pepper, like black pepper, is made from unripe drupes. Dried green peppercorns are treated in a way that retains the green colour, such as with sulfur dioxide, canning, or freeze-drying. Pickled peppercorns, also green, are unripe drupes preserved in brine or vinegar.

All these treatments of the pepper drupes result in slightly different flavours as well as colours so for example, you might use white pepper in mashed potato in order that it doesn’t show as black pieces. For many years, I had by my bedside as nighttime reading, a book which I would still recommend as the definitive encyclopedia “Herbs, spices and Flavourings” by Tom Stobart and from the large section on pepper I learnt this – the single most important thing to know about pepper in relation to cooking – piperine is the flavour element of pepper and is easily evaporated during cooking whereas the resin that gives the heat remains – and so rather than adding pepper to say, a casserole before cooking, pepper should always be freshly ground at the table – even ground pepper loses its piperine by evaporation over time.

Perhaps because of its historical role as the source of pepper, and although the majority of pepper today comes from Vietnam, India is a hub for both importing pepper from around the world and then processing and re-exporting it. India imports large quantities of pepper from Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. Usually, the majority of the pepper is just sent once again as whole black pepper to different areas. A lesser amount of the imported pepper is utilised in the production of different goods. Pepper trade makes up one-third of the net volume of spices traded globally.

World Pepper Production and Trade

Source Wikipedia

Country	Production (tonnes)
Vietnam	270,192
Brazil	114,749
Indonesia	89,041
India	66,000
Sri Lanka	43,557
China	33,348
Malaysia	30,804
World	747,644
Source: FAOSTAT of the United Nations^[1

The quote below shows how Pepper futures typify the role of all futures in the trading world…

Farmers use commodity exchanges as a buffer against price volatility, but a pepper trading platform and speculators complicate pepper trading even more. Commodity markets’ speculative character draws people and organisations looking to make money off of price changes.
To place well-informed wagers on the future course of pepper prices, speculators examine economic statistics, market patterns, and other variables. Their involvement gives the market more liquidity but also creates a degree of uncertainty.
On the other hand, traders and investors use pepper trading for a variety of purposes, including risk control and portfolio diversification. They may engage in the spice market without physically handling the product, thanks to the Indian stock market.
Pepper Trading

Whilst on the subject of a food-related future – Pork Bellies were once almost the icon of futures trading even being mentioned in the film “Trading Places” which we encountered under Orange Juice – but icons come and they can go too. Pork bellies have yielded in popularity at the table to bacon year by year until they have fallen below the threshold at which Futures Traders find it worth investing in and Pork Bellies have been dropped from Futures Trading…

And so to today’s poetry form which is a quatorzain (from French quatorze, fourteen) is a form of sonnet. It consists of 14 lines and is, like a sonnet, divided into two tercets and two quatrains. According to my favourite source for poetry forms, Language is a Virus:-

The term is used in English literature, as opposed to sonnet, for a poem in fourteen rhymed iambic lines closing (as a sonnet strictly never does) with a couplet. The distinction was long neglected because the English poets of the 16th century had failed to apprehend the true form of the sonnet, and called Petrarch’s and other Italian poets’ sonnets quatorzains, and their own incorrect quatorzains sonnets. Almost all the so-called sonnets of the Elizabethan cycles, including those of William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel, are really quatorzains. They consist of three quatrains of alternate rhyme, not repeated in the successive quatlains, and the whole closes with a couplet.

Was Shakespeare wrong – this sounds like an academic storm in a tea pot, but whatever, this will be a quatorzain or as Shakespeare thought of it, a sonnet…

Pepper

Pepper you were known as “black gold”
precious drupes of Piper Nigrum
grown and processed in far India
sought for heat and taste, your role
was to fuel world exploration
you drove many a man’s career
searching for the better shortcut
they found instead America
then sought to go North-West but
cruel ice and snow crushed dreams there
dreams of spice isles and quick richness
so gaps filled in the atlas
bought only fame and stories told
of their futile quests for “black gold”…

Palladium and a Pylon Poem

April 18, 2024May 3, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Palladium in 2022 – $29.4 Billion

To be a Commodity, a substance has to be both important and tradeable on a sufficiently large scale and so most of the commodities are easily recognisable items such as iron, cocoa and orange juice – but in Palladium, we come to an element, for such it is, that most people will, if they even know the name, have no idea as to what it is or why it is sufficiently important as to be a tradeable commodity. Yet if you drive a car with a catalytic converter, are fond of white gold or are diabetic and use testing strips, you are (like rats) closer than you know to a small amount of Palladium.

You may not have heard of Palladium, but its sibling is Platinum and grouped together in the Periodic Table, the members of the Platinum Family (platinoids, platinides, platidises, platinum group, platinum metals, platinum family or platinum-group elements) consist of ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. As is often the case with elements found close together in the Periodic Table, they have similar properties – their main characteristic has determined their greatest utility – they have many catalytic properties and so the major driver of Palladium as a commodity is the demand for Catalytic Converters in car exhaust systems. Incidentally, palladium recycles well and so there is a trade in used catalytic converters which sadly also drives the theft of them too…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_group

As early as 1700, miners in Brazil were aware of a metal they called ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ this demonstrates that alloys can occur in nature – and ouro podre is a native alloy of palladium and gold and today, Palladium is one of the metals alloyed with gold to make “white” gold for those who don’t want the gold colour but want jewellery that is stronger and less tarnishing than silver. However, these native metal sources are not where Palladium is commercially extracted from – the ores are limited to four main sites in the world and 37% of the Palladium sold comes from Russia. So once again, Putin’s unwarranted war on Ukraine and the sanctions that followed it, have been a major lever in the trading prices of Palladium just as we have noted they were in oil and gas prices. Incidentally, every commodity has a Trading Identity Number and for Palladium it is HS Code 71102900.

A comparison of “gold” colours including Palladium/Gold alloy

Lastly, Palladium was named by its discoverer (as an element) William Hyde Wollaston in 1802 after the asteroid 2 Pallas, which had been discovered two months earlier. The nymph Pallas was killed by her childhood friend – Athena – daughter of Zeus who – seeing Athena and Pallas sparring, wanted Athena to win and distracted Pallas who was then accidentally impaled by Athena’s spear and Athena was thenceforth known as Athena Pallas. As recompense for killing her friend, she created a STATUE that looked like Pallas and she named it the Palladium which was later housed in the city of Troy. Pallas Athena had many responsibilities as Goddess of War, Wisdom and Health which is a rather mixed job description…

Athena and Pallas sparring whilst Zeus watches from the sidelines – in the style of Titian generated by Midjourney

And so to the “P” poem for today. I had a choice of a Pantoum – a form with a lot of repeating lines giving an incantatory feel which didn’t feel right and so I am going to go with another poetry movement, this one before the Second World War. The Pylon Poets made reference to, if not celebrating, modern technology – taking their name from a poem by Stephen Spender called The Pylons. Other Pylon Poets included W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice. Most famously was perhaps W.H. Auden’s Night Mail which was also made into the soundtrack to a short film. I have chosen the Duplex form which is one of my favourites for the way each couplet passes a theme on to the next one creating a great sense of progress.

Palladium

Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas
Was first a statue made by her killer

The wooden statue was protector of Troy
A job not done so well so history tells

Her story languished for many decades
Later her name graced a minor planet

When telescopes revealed the heavens
Then science paid yet another tribute

When Wollaston found another element
With minor use named for a minor body

But now we crave the miner’s hard-won produce
for catalysis, jewellery and more

At last we found purposes for “useless gold”
Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas

In 2022, Wool was the world’s 663rd most traded product, with a total trade of $3.28B.

Wool

Exegesis – “critical explanation or interpretation of a text”

Knowledge and Wisdom – a Contrapuntal Poem

The Worldwide Trade in Wheat 2022 was $73.3Billion and it was the 49th most traded product…

Wheat

Worldwide trade in Vanadium 2022 was $38970 million and growing…

Vanadium – a Verbless Poem

Worlwide trade in Uranium – 2022 – $951.586 Million – 29.32 Metric Tons

Uranium – Explored with Love…

Worldwide Trade in Tea 2022 – $8.13 Billion – 426th most traded product – representing 0.034% of total world trade…

Tea

Worldwide Trade in Soybeans in 2022 whether or not broken” exceeded $93 billion

Types of Miso from around Japan

Soybeans

Earth Day

Worldwide Trade in Rubber 2022 – $18.4B – 239th most traded product representing 0.078% of total world trade.

Rubber

Woldwide Trade in Pepper in 2022 $5.13B – 548th most traded product – 0.022% of total world trade

World Pepper Production and Trade

Pepper

Worldwide Trade in Palladium in 2022 – $29.4 Billion

Palladium

Woldwide Trade in Pepper in 2022 $5.13B –
548th most traded product – 0.022% of total world trade