The Tambora Effect

Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo caused in part by Indonesian volcanic eruption

So said an article published in ScienceDaily on 22 August 2018. The next day, BBC Radio 4's Inside Science interviewed the author (well, I doubt if Dr Genge had much to do with it in that format but it was regurgitated more-or-less [probably totally, but I haven't checked] verbatim from an article that appeared on the Imperial College London site on the same day). 

Hmmmph? I wondered. Wasn't all this Year Without a Summer stuff old hat? Hasn't it been debunked, as far as Waterloo is concerned?  Surely, the Belgian rainstorm couldn't have been caused by a volcano that happened just two  months earlier? But have a look at that article, particularly where it says

"Previously, geologists thought that volcanic ash gets trapped in the lower atmosphere, because volcanic plumes rise buoyantly. {HD – which accounts for the lack of  a Northern Hemisphere summer in 1816, but doesn't explain a freak rainstorm in Belgium so soon after the eruption.}  My research, however, shows that ash can be shot into the upper atmosphere by electrical forces."

So this was The Tambora Effect, involving the delightfully named electrostatic levitation.

The paper shows that eruptions can hurl ash much higher than previously thought into the atmosphere -- up to 100 kilometres above ground.
Source

And once in the ionosphere (troposphere schmoposphere, this is tens of miles higher than the volcanic ash was originally supposed to get) the disruption caused by the charged volcanic dust particles , as Dr Genge said in that interview "...can go round the planet in 100 seconds." This YouTube video published by Imperial College London says more.

But enough of volcanoes. I'l leave you with a pretty picture.

Tambora Caldera
Image and and English description: Mount Tambora Volcano, Sumbawa Island, Indonesia, NASA Earth Observatory. 2nd version: Transferred from de.wikipedia to Commons.; originally from https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS020&roll=E&frame=06563

But as it happens, those words (tambora effect, not electrostatic levitation) have a different significance for me (and especially for practising guitarists – which I haven't been for over thirty years).  The most-widely accepted term, says Wikipedia, is the Tambour effect:

Tambour (also called tambor, tamboro or tambora, written in music as tamb.), is a technique in Flamenco guitar and classical guitar that emulates the sound of a heartbeat. The player uses a flat part of the hand, usually the side of the outstretched right thumb, or also the edge of the palm below the little finger, and sounds the strings by striking them rapidly just inside the bridge of the guitar. 

 <creation_myth>
I first met it in its Hispanic form, though, on the sleeve notes of a Paco Peña album...

<meta_digression>
I had been a fan since a concert I went to in Guildford, where my big sister was a student at the University of Surrey. That university was twinned in some way with Battersea Tech, who ran a free minibus service between Battersea and Guildford.

Disguised as a student, in my brother's VI form scarf (though the shortness of my hair was probably a giveaway) I bummed a lift to use the argot of the time. [I've been expecting a tap on the shoulder for the last 50 years, but I reckon it's now safe to admit this peccadillo.]
</meta_digression>

...I read in the late '60s. He used it to marvellous instrumental effect, and in my troubadour days I borrowed it for a setting of Moondog (based on [i.e. lifted from] a version sung by Terry Cox, drummer with Pentangle, with accompaniment on bongos.)
</creation_myth>

Now I come to think of it, though, the two may be related. According to Wikipedia's article on Tambora Culture:

The language of the culture was wiped out. The language appears to have been an isolate, the last survivor of the pre-Austronesian languages of central Indonesia.

But IF the name of the volcano was borrowed from a Romance language (as certainly looks possible), it could refer to the drum-like sound of the seismological rumblings – not the "heartbeat" mentioned in the article on the "technique in Flamenco guitar and classical guitar that emulates the sound of a heartbeat", but a less life-affirming sort of beat.

But the blackberries aren't going to pick themselves...

b

What's in a name?

"Inc." (that's A Thing – sort of news/media/comment/coaching Thing) just published

A Study of 600,000 People Shows the Secret to Managing Millennials Is to Quit Thinking of Them as Millennials

Source

Hmm –  Well, yes, in a trivial sense.

<autobiographical_aside>
I dislike being called a Baby Boomer – as if I had been conceived in a frenzy of post-war optimism more than 5 years after VJ Day  Of course the term has a certain statistical value, but calling me a Baby Boomer says no more about me than – say – that my father was a Daily Mail reader: true, but lazy and misleading. (Besides, the context is very different – the Mail, last time he read it [1961] was... not the same [not to put too fine a point on it].)
</autobiographical_aside>

But that Inc. piece starts 

I just did a Google search for "manage Millennials." I got 28 million results. That's total overkill...

<autobiographical_note>
I struggled to avoid an automatic lip-curl reflex (LCR)  at the abuse of the word overkill (which has a particular political/military/economic sense –  a world away from the almost meaningless Jolly Big sense evoked by the author, 'Contributing Editor' Jeff Haden), but  life's too short to get upset about  this sort of illiteracy...
</autobiographical_note>

... especially since a recent study published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology shows there are much greater attitude and behavior differences within generations than between generations.

I tried out the first of Mr Haden's links, hoping to see further evidence of that Google-based finding. But no ... it's a link to another Inc. article.

<fact_check>
For the record, when I search for manage Millennials (two separate  words, no quotes) I get just over 23 million hits, and when I search for "manage Millennials"  I get fewer than 17,000.  I suppose Mr Haden's overkill figure is based on the first of these (with the extra 5 million being attributable to poetic (that is, lazy/Internet) licence.
</fact_check>

In other words the link does not lead to relevant information. Vannevar Bush (inspiration for Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext [that's what the H and the T stand for in  HTML]) would turn in his grave; what it does is irrelevantly drive traffic to another Inc. page.

<irony_alert>
Which I've just done. Oh well...
</irony_alert>

But the grass has started growing again. Nunc est MOW-endum, as Horace might have written (if only Latin had a W).

b
PS: A couple of clues –

• Plunge into millpond, say, making for fortunate coincidence (11)
• Christian? About time for a trouble-maker. (4-6)

Update: 2019.02.05.13:00 – Nested paren. fixes (natch) and added PS

PS

Crossword answers: SERENDIPITY, ANTI-CHRIST

Hoist with his own "favoletta"

In the aftermath of the terrible events in Genoa on the eve of Ferragosto...

<glossary>
Ferragosto is the heathen name of the feast known to the One True Church as the Feast of the Assumption...

<meta_digression>
I was once asked 'What do Catholics assume on 15 August?' Well, lots of things. But the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a belief in an extraordinary end to the extraordinary life of the mother of Christ. Not for her the messy business of dying and rotting (before, of course, being raised incorruptible); she was assumed (i.e. taken up) into Heaven. I forget the details, but there were probably various meteorological shenanigans at the time (as there were when Elijah 'went by a whirlwind to Heaven'...

<text source="Excerpt from Mendelssohn's Elijah">

</text>

... A bit like Dorothy going to Oz, except not in Kansas of course.

This tourist site , though, suggests that (like most 'Christian' festivals) Ferragosto has deeper roots.:

Ferragosto, the Italian name for the holiday, comes from the Latin Feriae Augusti (the festivals of the Emperor Augustus) which were introduced back in 18 BC [PS – HD: a good half century before the end of Mary's earthbound phase], probably to celebrate a battle victory, and were celebrated alongside other ancient Roman summer festivals . These festivities were linked to the longer Augustali period - intended to be a period of rest after months of hard labour.

</glossary>

... La Stampa reported that Beppe Grillo, not inappropriately for a clown, had got egg on his face by a remark in his blog lampooning public infrastructure spending.

I first heard about this faux pas in a BBC news report, hedged about with the sort of weasel words that suggest it is dealing with mere rumour; but it should be a simple matter of fact, I thought – Did he write it or not?

This page was no help either, at first :

"We have been told about the little fairy tale of the imminent collapse of the Morandi Bridge." That is how Five Star Movement co-founder Beppe Grillo reportedly referred to warnings about the collapse of the bridge on his blog. [My emphasis]

 But the same page goes on:

The blog post was apparently removed yesterday but a screenshot of the post has been published by Ligurian local daily Il Secolo XIX.

Aha. "I think the little legal department knows something about it", as they used to say (more or less) at the end of Bill and Ben. He wrote it, but events on Tuesday made it a bit of an embarrassment, so he unwrote it.

I'm not convinced he should have, though. On the face of it, it was a bit... tactless. But the administration of the bridge maintenance looks like a bit of a gravy train; and money spent on the administration of maintenance  does seem not to have gone exclusively into actual maintenance. And, as always with the Internet, someone somewhere was bound to have kept a screenshot. So rather than trying to hide his embarrassment, only to be caught red-handed – shamefacedly, with his finger on the <Delete> key: "Who me?" – I reckon he should just have toughed it out, with an update to the blog.

I'm glad about one thing, though – the whole sorry issue has introduced me to the word for "a little fairy tale": Una favoletta. Take away the diminutive suffix and you're left with una favola (stressed on the first syllable). Screw your eyes up and you can see the word fable. You live and learn.

b

PS And a couple of clues:

• They're polar opposites, capisce? (7)
• Set values anew or make a bit clearer (11)

Update: 2018.08.18.17:20 – Inline PS, in red.