This is another podcast about the behaviour of Starlings, but I had to make it because this is very important to me

This is another podcast about the behaviour of Starlings, but I had to make it because this is very important to me Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Speaker 01

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• 1:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Caress the gentle dentist, you sweaty Fidelmas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, maybe consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. Because there's always, there's always brand new listeners. And if you want to become a 10 foot Declan or a steaming Quiva or a steeple chasing Aoife, then go back to the very start. Listen to this podcast from the start. Listen to it like a gigantic novel that I've been writing every single week since October 2017. That's what a lot of ye, a lot of ye actually do that. And I know that a lot of ye do it because

• 2:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  we're almost at 100 million listens.

• 2:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  We're nearly at a hundred million, 100 fucking million. Well, it's 90 something, it's 90 something million. I don't like looking at exact figures. I like to glance at them and then run away just to get a ballpark and then never think about it. I don't like thinking about figures. It's a very, it's an unhelpful way to create anything. It's, I started this podcast by simply asking the question, what would I listen to if I wasn't me? And that's how I tried to write books. Oh, the rain is here, the rain is here, this, oh, for fuck's sake, can you hear that? That is some, I can't even begin to describe, I've got a limiter on now and it's ruining everything.

• 3:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, I'm gonna take the limiter off. The gate, I mean.

• 3:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm in my office, I am in my office, as you can tell, I'm not in my fucking, in my studio. I'm in my office that has a tin roof. There's a storm, there's an aggressive storm outside. Raindrops that think they're hailstones. And I don't want to pretend that they're not here, I'm just gonna welcome them in. They're gone now. It's quieting down now. There was a little, a blast of an intensely heavy shower. If you can hear the rain, that means that I'm in my office, I'm in my office today. If I can record here, I will, simply because I love coming in here and doing a nine to five.

• 4:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  I love getting on my bicycle and cycling into work and doing a nine to five in an office. So if I can do that, I will. But on days where the seagulls are going ape shit, or else it's just raining continuously, then I'll use my studio, which has perfect sound, but it's a bit lonelier. I like the drama, the drama and the excitement and the unpredictability of cycling into my office. I like, I love that, that sets me up for the day. And I have my wonderful window to look out where I can see Limerick City. But yeah, this podcast is coming up to nearly 100 million listens.

• 4:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Which is something I never thought possible. It's not something I ever aimed for or tried to achieve. And it's also something I don't really like thinking about. It's not very helpful to think about things like that. If I'd have began this podcast in 2017, I think it was October 2017. If I'd have began this podcast with the intention of it having a lot of listens, then this podcast wouldn't be here today. I'd have tried to do something popular, which I can't do that. What I can do is, what would I listen to if I wasn't me? And the best way to achieve that, what I've found anyway,

• 5:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  whether it be with a podcast or writing books, writing short stories. I'm not thinking about whether something's going to be good or even bad. I'm interested in, am I being curious? Am I legitimately passionate about the thing that I'm being curious about? And am I being playful? Am I at play? That's what's important to me. That's much, much more important than listens. Thinking about listens, if I focused too much on, on numbers and listens and listeners, then

• 6:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  that would create a block, a block that prevents me from being curious, passionate and playful. And parsing these two things is very difficult. It's very difficult indeed. That's why I say I kind of, I quickly check figures every couple of months and then run away. Let's briefly, let's open this window after that, those fat raindrops. Point the microphone there towards the city.

• 6:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  You should be getting bare city there.

• 7:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Don't know if you can hear much of that.

• 7:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, what's that smell? I'm looking for petricor and I'm not getting petricor because it's been quite wet, but what I'm getting is the unmistakable hum of bard shit.

• 7:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  I knew that would happen.

• 7:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Bard shit.

• 7:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that's what happens. That's what happens in Limerick city centre after a deluge of rain. The entire city smells heavily of bard shit of the shit of starlings. Thousands of starlings come to the bard shit district. They rest in the trees and they do about a half a tonne of shit every single evening. If there's sun, the shit dries into the ground and then it gets awoken by the rain and rises into this unmercifully violent tang that smells like an eggshell's unwashed cousin, à la factory vandalism.

• 8:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, as I mentioned last week, I was I was approached by a local newspaper to write an article about about the bard shit situation. The starling shit problem of Limerick city in the bard shit district. And I did write it. Whether they publish it or not is a different story, but it doesn't matter. I don't even care if they don't publish it. I loved writing it. I really, really enjoyed researching it because I went deep into research and I think I might have had a little bit of a breakthrough.

• 8:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  A bit of a breakthrough that allows me to understand the behaviour of the starlings of Limerick city. Now, I'm acutely aware thus.

• 8:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jeez, I think every single fucking episode of the podcast this summer has mentioned birds in some way. Whether it's the seagulls that torment me on the roof, or the starlings and their shit that I slip on and have to breathe in. You're listening to the podcast of an autistic person, lads. What you want me to do? I can't just turn off the bird shit switch in my head. Aside from that as well, just from my window. There's a small population of pigeons that are roasting underneath solar panels. They're not building nests in drains and chimneys. The fucking pigeons are roasting underneath solar panels.

• 9:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm gonna have to park that until I've gotten to the bottom of the starling situation. And I think, I think I may have arrived at an answer. So there is a street in Limerick City. It's a pedestrianized street. It's called Bedford Row. Heavily paved with the exception of maybe nine trees. Nothing about this street is, is natural. Even the nine trees that are placed into this street, onto the paving. They're not even in art. When you go to the bottom of these trees, there's no soil. It's like this strange plasticky foam substance that you put street trees in.

• 10:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And every night for three months of the summer, thousands of starlings roast themselves on these nine little trees. I wanted to figure out how many starlings might be in those trees each night. So I went through Limerick bird watching records over the past 10 years. Out in Crome, there was a recorded starling murmuration of 250,000. In 2015, there was a murmuration of 50,000 starlings. They're small birds.

• 10:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're just about, they're about the size of an apple. As I record this right now, the sun is going down. And they did, they circled the entirety of Limerick City centre. So.

• 11:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  The entire flock's gonna go past my window, I'd say, sometime within the next fifteen minutes. But based on the, on the figures that I can see, I'm, I'm gonna estimate the flock's size to be ten thousand starlings. So that's ten thousand starlings, roasting in nine trees. There they go, there's the cunts, there they are out the window, hold on, we listen to them.

• 11:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can we hear that? They're flying above the window there. Fucking hell. You didn't hear that, but look.

• 11:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  So right on time, there they were, the beauty of it, the bea-, what I adore about it is that I've been seeing that murmuration, I'm, I'm, I'm here in my office. And if I stay late, if I stay late, like I am today, for when the sun goes down, then when the, the sunlight reaches a, a certain colour, a peachy slant, then I just look out the window and boom, there's the whole flock. And they just do a circle and they, they go all around the city. And as I look at my watch right now, it's four minutes past eight, right? So those starlings, they went past, we'll say a minute ago, three minutes past eight. So tho- those starlings, okay, in their little brains,

• 12:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  they are highly sensitive to spectral changes in the light, in a way that you and I, we're not. I can look out there now, right? And I can look at the angle of the sun on a building and I can describe it using colours. For a starling, whole different situation. So me, mister human being, and you, i- in our eyes, we have what are called cone cells, right? Photoreceptors, cells in our eyes that perceive light. So as humans, we have three, we've got three of these receptors in our eyes. This allows us to perceive our visible colour spectrum, our visible colour spectrum.

• 13:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  When you look at a fucking rainbow, that's the full spectrum of colour, only what you and me can see as humans. So the three cones in our eyes, that, that-

• 13:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  It makes us sensitive to red, green and blue. Starlings have four receptors in their eyes. So they see red, green, blue and then ultraviolet. They're back again now, they're after doing the circle of the city and now they've just come back over the window again. So the starlings have four photoreceptors, four cones. And their fourth one that we don't have, that's the text ultraviolet light. You and me can't see ultraviolet light, they can. When the sun sets, when the sun begins to set, UV light disappears. So I'm assuming for, for, for the starlings, something went a little dark, something went dark.

• 14:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like for me and you, when the sun flat out sets, when the sun disappears and you're dealing with the night sky, now you're experiencing the absence of light, you're experiencing darkness. Well, when the sun begins to set, just like it did there a couple of minutes ago, when the sun begins to set, we have to assume that the starlings experience a type of darkness that you and I are not privy to, the disappearance of UV light. But here's the thing, I'm a human being, a human being with language and critical thinking faculties. And I'm, my summer, my, my summer in my office, I track the days getting shorter. Not by looking at the sunset, but by tracking starling behaviour.

• 14:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  So tonight, the starlings went past my window at three minutes past eight. And when I look up the internet and I say, what time exactly is sunset in Limerick City tonight? The internet tells me it's at eight fifty PM. So those starlings were on the button, they went past my window at three minutes past eight. But the internet tells me that next week sunset is eight forty one PM. So next week, when I'm recording the podcast, those starlings are gonna go past my window at probably seven fifty one PM, we'll say. Now fuck the internet, I don't need it. The point that I'm trying to make is I'm obsessed with the beauty of

• 15:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  the literature of a starling's wings. There they are again, they're cunts and there's a seagull in the middle of them. I should be timing every time they come around.

• 15:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm obsessed with the literature. Of, of the starlings through the sky, I've just read the contents like a book. I'm reading them like a book. The landscape is holding the story and the story is telling me. It's telling me when sunset is. We'll open the window now because they've upset the seagulls.

• 16:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hopefully, let's bring the birds in.

• 16:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hopefully you can get a load of that this week, the starlings are out there. And I've just noticed that like the seagulls are being disturbed by the starlings. It's all kicking off.

• 16:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  The starlings are having great crack up there in the sky. They've really disturbed everybody. And the sun is turning into a dark red, blood orange, like the sky's fucking bleeding, like someone cut the sky's throat.

• 16:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was a bit of a harsh visual metaphor for something so aesthetically beautiful. But it's what came to me in the moment. Bit of a unnecessary metaphor there for, for Limerick City and its, its image issues. We've got Blind Boy Ball Club on the phone, Blind Boy, Blind Boy, you mentioned last week that somebody took out a knife in Limerick City and stabbed the sun. Are things really that bad in Limerick City at the moment? Are things really that bad? But what was I fucking talking about? I got distracted by the, the murmuration, that was really, really beautiful. And it's gone now, it's all gone, it's all gone. I wish I had a camera to show you.

• 17:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's, there were thousands of starlings up in the sky. And then this had managed to piss off the seagulls as well. The seagulls looked really disturbed. The whole sky was alive with fucking birds and they were screaming and shouting. It was astounding.

• 17:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the point that I'm telling, what I adore, what I'm obsessed with, what I find so beautiful is the literature, the literature of a starling's wings. I can read the flock like a fucking story. And the story it tells me, it tells me something very important about sunset. And I know I have the internet now and, and there's other ways to find out. But at one point in our, in our history, that was really important for our survival. I have to assume we had these practices in Ireland, but the ancient Romans referred to it as augury. Augury was a very important religious pagan practice in Rome, where they would make predictions based on the behaviour of birds. And from the practice

• 18:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  of augury, we get words like auspices. Like auspices, it, it literally means, like in Latin, to look at birds, looking at birds. But today auspices means like authority. Like if I make a claim on this podcast, especially an episode like this where I'm swimming in territory, I'm talking about ornithology, I'm talking about science. I'm not an expert in these things. But as a, an artist, as a professional artist and someone who studied art, I was shown how to, how to use and identify solid academic research to back up my artistic

• 19:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  research. So if I say something about human eyes or the colour spectrum, I'm doing so under the auspices of academic research. I'm being supported by that research. I'm confident that the thing that I'm saying is true, because this research here that I'm citing is legit, under the auspices of this research. But the word auspices, that comes from augury. auspices means looking at the birds. So back in the day, in this pagan Roman practice of, how do you know this? How can you predict this about the weather, about whatever? Well, it's under the auspices. I looked at the birds. I looked at the birds. And I can say with confidence,

• 19:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Those starlings are gonna arrive next week, ten minutes earlier, because I know that they can read the UV light and they are sensitive to the sunlight and sunset. So I can tell you that next week, the sun's gonna come down, it will set ten minutes earlier, under the auspices of the starlings. But I can look at those starlings every single night, I can look at them and they tell me when the sun is setting, that the days are getting shorter, that winter is coming. It's one of the many words in, in the literature of my environment that I can read to extract very important meaning from. And it's what I love about being a human being, because, like I said, those starlings, they have this extra sense, they, they can see the ultraviolet light that I can't, but

• 20:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can read their fucking behaviour. And I can, I can read their behaviour and that, and that I can deduct from that, oh, the ultraviolet light has gone. And it's so strange, I don't know why, as humans. Like, we... Starlings can't get sunburned, I looked it up, I looked it up, starlings can't get sunburned, we fucking can. We can get skin cancer from sunburns. Ultraviolet light is very, very dangerous to us human beings. Like, I can see in, in, you know, I, I've got three cones in my eyes to see red, blue and green, right? But I can't see ultraviolet.

• 21:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it's the only, it's the only, um, part of the spectrum whereby I can literally walk into a chemist and buy a cream for it. Like, that's what, that's what sun cream is. I'm buying a cream that needs to stop ultraviolet light hitting, hitting my skin because it's so dangerous. And apparently, it was, that was some type of human evolutionary trade-off, that...

• 21:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the distant past of our evolution, I'm talking before we were mammals, maybe back when our ancestors were lizards, that there was the ability to perceive ultraviolet light. But anyway, mammals, particularly primates, we're primates alongside apes. Our distant ancestors lost the ability to see UV light because it was more important for our survival to be able to distinguish between red and green, especially in the context of being hunter-gatherers, foragers, foraging in forests for berries and nuts and looking at leaves and noticing how young is this plant depending on the colour of

• 22:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  green on the plant. So because we can't see in UV, we're very good at that. And then you just have to assume that maybe regarding the skin cancer thing, because UV is quite dangerous, maybe our ancestors just didn't live long enough. Prehistoric humans lived to be maybe thirty? Thirty was considered very elderly. So you could have had a trade-off there where, fuck it, skin cancer doesn't matter if you're going to die before thirty. That's just me taking a guess. And if you're wondering, where the fuck is blind by getting information about evolutionary trade-offs and ultraviolet light? That's from a paper,

• 23:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  a paper in the National Library of Medicine from 2014 called "The spectral transmission of ocular media suggests ultraviolet sensitivity is widespread among mammals." So as I look out the window now, it's a navy colour. The sun has disappeared. The sun has disappeared, not completely, but I cannot see the sun. If I look into the sky, I can see the trail of an airplane and that airplane trail is the most beautiful shade of pink. So the sunlight is disappearing and the spectrum is changing and streetlights are starting to come on.

• 23:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because those streetlights have man-made sensors on them, very similar to our eyes or to a starling's eyes. The streetlight sensors, I believe, they just measure the amount of light and then when it starts to get to a certain level of darkness, the streetlight comes on. In our brains...

• 24:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like sunsets are beautiful and so are sunrise, okay, like.

• 24:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I never find myself in the middle of the day.

• 24:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Noon, looking up at the sky and going, oh, isn't that just amazing? Isn't that beautiful? Every so often, I'd be like, what a wonderful, clear blue sky. What a great day. But I'm not looking up marveling at the beauty of the sun as it burns in my fucking eyes. But I think we can all agree

• 24:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  that sunsets are exceptionally beautiful and calming. One of the most

• 24:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I spiritually calming moments of my life was I was in Sorrento over in Italy about 12 years ago on the Amalfi Coast. And I was

• 25:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  having dinner in this fucking bar. And this bar had an outdoor courtyard that was at the edge of a cliff. And as you ate your dinner,

• 25:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  you could see the sun disappear behind the ocean, like a fucking legitimate sunset. The sun disappearing behind the horizon of the ocean. And there was a fella playing a piano there. And he timed not only the choice of song that he was playing on the piano, but the timing of it so that the, he timed his piano to end perfectly just as that sun disappeared behind the fucking sea.

• 25:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I went into a state of pure flow. I wasn't thinking.

• 25:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the only way I can describe it is it felt like I was a little baby and, and, and I was being rocked. Losing myself in that sunset.

• 26:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Brought back memories of being a tiny baby, whatever feeling that was, that feeling of complete soothing warmth and safety and love, that's what I got from that sunset. It felt like how people describe heroin. And I went looking into the neurochemical effects of twilight on the human brain. And what actually happens is, so when sunset happens, when blue light, because we have these three cones, these three receptors, when the blue light started to disappear, when that sun goes down, that releases in

• 26:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  our brain melatonin. Melatonin is the sleep hormone, it's what makes us feel a little bit drowsy and ready to sleep. But then, the stunning aesthetic visual beauty of watching the Mediterranean Sea swallow the sun, the perfectly timed piano music, and probably the delicious wine that I was drinking, that then released dopamine. And the dopamine and melatonin played together to give me a little sense of euphoria. And it was an existentially significant moment in my life, because I remember it clearly, the feeling.

• 27:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was existentially significant because it definitely brought up vestigial memories of being a baby, being a little baby, and feeling safe and cuddled by my ma. But it also felt like how I'd like to die. The thin line of light disappeared, dark pinky-orange, over the ocean, and it was simultaneously birth and death.

• 28:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was like, that's, that's how I want death to be. I want death, if I'm lucky enough, to cradle me like a little baby and then I extinguish. All that from a sunset. So there's something about sunsets in the human brain that we all experience as pleasurable. It's euphoric. Look at Hollywood fucking films, alright? Golden hour, golden hour is sunset or sunrise. We want to see things filmed in golden hour. Hollywood films spend millions shooting in a small window of hours in the morning and in

• 28:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  the evening, just to capture the light, the twilight, that slanty orange. Because when we see movies that are shot in golden hour, whatever it is about the angle of the sun, whatever it is about the quality of light, we experience this as beautiful. We experience that as aesthetic beauty. I mean, look at something that isn't filmed. Carbyon enthusiasm, Carbyon enthusiasm, wonderful comedy, Larry David. Obviously a cantankerous man. We've grown up watching movies in Los Angeles, okay? We know what Los Angeles looks like. Los Angeles is what a movie looks like. Carbyon enthusiasm is filmed all over Los Angeles. It doesn't feel beautiful.

• 29:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  It doesn't feel, I've been to Los Angeles, Los Angeles isn't beautiful. It's, it's a giant barge it district. But when you think of Los Angeles, you think of a hazy orange, because all the movies we've seen have been shot in the golden hour. But Carbyon enthusiasm, probably just Larry David being a cantankerous man, said, I'm gonna shoot in the middle of the fucking day, because I want to have my evenings off. So most of Carbyon enthusiasm is shot at noon, the sun is really high in the sky, and visually it just, it feels a bit strange. Something feels off. Why the fuck am I talking about Carbyon enthusiasm?

• 30:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's some evolutionary reason, right? There's some evolutionary reason why our brains respond so much to sunset. The euphoria and the beauty of sunset tells us this is important. Something important is happening. Nighttime's about to come. Go home. Go find shelter. Find your family. Find your friends. Find fire. Find warmth. Find coziness. Find community. And also, just as an aside there about the golden hour. The golden hour and sunset and the sunset light, which has the absence of blue light in it because it's orangey and slanty.

• 30:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, if you take a photograph of yourself in, like, Instagram even used to have a filter called golden hour. You know, that's how significant this is. But if you want a good photograph of yourself or your friends, summer evening at golden hour with the slanty sun. If you get a good photograph in golden hour, I would wager that you're more, we would appear more physically attractive to other humans in a good golden hour photo. Scientists did studies on the sexual selection habits of starlings. They found that female starlings are attracted to male starlings whose feathers reject and reflect UV light.

• 31:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  A starling's experience of sunset is the absence of UV light and our experience of sunset is the absence of blue light. There may be a correlation between sunsets and fucking. The absence of certain light spectrums associated with sunset can increase sexual attractiveness in both humans and starlings. That's what I'm getting at. I'm not sure if those two things are connected, but I do find it fascinating if they are. What the fuck got me onto this? I was trying to explain the sensors on streetlights. So it's now... Almost completely dark outside.

• 32:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  The city is dark, the sky still a little bit illuminated blue. But the city is dark and all the streetlights are on. And streetlights have little sensors on them. And those sensors, when it goes dark, the light turns on. Our brains are a bit like that, but it's not as binary. When the light reaches a certain level for our brains, our brains release chemicals, like melatonin, the sleepy chemical, and dopamine, the euphoric chemical. The dwindling of blue light appears to be the thing that triggers it. Interestingly, this is the same thing that fucks your sleep up when you take out your phone. When you take out your phone and shove it into your face at night time,

• 32:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  you flood your eyes with the blue light. Your brain is like, it's night time, let's release some melatonin. Then you take out your phone and all of a sudden you're awake, like I'm TikTok. I've banned TikTok on my phone at night time because TikTok is the worst. I've gone up to bed. I've been so fucking tired that I can barely drag myself up to bed. I'm like, shit, I'm gonna fall asleep on the couch, I need to go to bed. I've been that tired and I've gotten into bed at that level of tiredness with the eyelids hanging off me. And if I take out TikTok, within five minutes, I'm fully awake again. And it's blue light and then the sheer entertainment and bombardment of TikTok wakes me back up.

• 33:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  But for the starlings that we just saw, it's now getting really dark outside.

• 33:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  This podcast is fucking mental. This episode is insane. I didn't intend this at all, really, to be honest. This is after getting really out of hand.

• 33:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I know I keep talking about, what are we gonna do? I know I keep talking about starlings. It's dark outside now and that means over on Bedford Row in the Bardshit district. I can't hear it from here, unfortunately. But if I was to bring a microphone over to Bedford Row, it would be overwhelming.

• 34:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're talking about a small pedestrianized street, nine trees, 10,000 starlings.

• 34:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the trees themselves are alive and vibrating, vibrating with how many starlings are trying to roost on these nine trees. They can't fit in there, they can't fit in there. There's more starlings than leaves on these trees and they're chattering and cheeping and talking. The noise is unbelievable, chattering all day long. Now, ornithologists reckon that they're, they're literally talking about the best places to eat. They're speaking, they're communicating with where they've been that day and what they've eaten. But when they do this roost, when they're getting ready for bed, that's when they shit, that's

• 35:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  when they shit. It's violent, it's physical. If you were to walk down that street right now, I'm annoyed I didn't, I didn't bring a fucking portable microphone and head over there and just show you what I'm talking about. They shit so much you can hear the shit. They shit so much that if you walk past a tree, you will get splattered with shit. They shit so much that the air smells like shit because there's shit in the air travelling from their arses to the ground. It's unnatural, it's strange, there's nothing like it. And that's happening right now and I can tell because of the colour of the sky outside, guarantee you. And those starlings, you know, they know to do this, their routine begins.

• 35:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like for us, we're triggered by darkness, for them, they're triggered by when the UV lights start to disappear, that's when the starlings know it's time to start roasting in the trees. Now, why do they do it from an evolutionary perspective? Because their, their predators are daytime predators, hawks, falcons, their eyesight.

• 36:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's not like a human's eyesight, but it's closer to a human's eyesight than a starling's eyesight. So those predators, they do well in daytime in bright light. So when the UV starts to disappear at sunset, the starlings go, great, the hawks are going to bed. It's now safe for us to let our guard down, let our guard down, find the trees, go into the trees and have a really loud chat and a shit, because the hawks are in bed. We can have crack now, we can communicate. And then of course, as I mentioned before, they're flying around the sky that we witnessed there. Now, I didn't, I didn't see an exact murmuration, but before they sit down and roost, they create the synchronized shapes in the sky.

• 36:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's them trying to look like a bigger bird to scare off the predators as well. So the starlings go down to their trees, they're doing it right now, right now it's happening. And they shit prodigiously. The shit goes on to the pavements of this pedestrianized street. And it is, it is a serious civic issue in Limerick City. Because you slip on the street, it's disgusting, the whole city smells like bird shit. This is no joke. Because I've started to draw attention to this on the podcast, I've, I've been having an ongoing feud with Limerick City Council. And also I've caused international bird shit

• 37:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  tourism. People travel from Scotland, Australia, fucking New Zealand to come to Limerick and just to see, is this as bad as he says it is? I need to go to the bird shit district. And people are doing it now. So I looked at some data to try and figure out exactly how much bird shit is being shat every single night. Based on, on data, recorded data around the size of flocks in Limerick and its environs. And also, me just simply seeing the amount of birds. I rounded it off to 10,000 birds, okay, 10,000 starlings. Then I went looking for data on how much shit would.

• 38:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  One starling produce in the night time and the figure that I got was 4.5 grams. So throughout a night time roast, sitting in a tree, one starling will make 4.5 grams of bird shit. So for 10,000 starlings, that's 45 kilograms of bird shit every night. Forty five kilograms on a small pedestrianized street with nine trees. Then I went looking up what's 45 kilograms. Well, 45 kilograms is it's the average weight of a 10 year old human child. So the birds in the bird shit district do enough shits every night that it's the equivalent of a 10 year old human child.

• 38:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then I realised that's, that's one of the most mentally insane sentences in, in the English language. I'm not going to be convincing anyone by saying, do you know how much shit they do each night? You could fill a 10 year old child with that shit. Okay, how much is a bottle of Coke? Bottle of Coke is 500 milliliters. Right, okay, what's 45 kilograms? That's 90 bottles of Coke. Now we're talking. Okay, every night those birds could fill 90 bottles of Coke with their shit. And if I could do a visual experiment where I'm imagining, you know, what would that look like? If I had 90 bottles, 500 milliliter bottles of Coke and I spilt them all out on the bird shit district, what would that look like?

• 39:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  It would look kinda like what it looks like after a night of starling shit. That's what we're dealing with. And then I started to obsess. I started to obsess about 45 kilograms, 45 fucking kilograms. And something beautifully poetic happened.

• 40:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I couldn't get 45 kilograms out of my fucking head. I'm like, wow, they're doing 45 kilograms of shit. It, it made me feel, now that I had answers, I started to feel better. It's like 45 kilograms of shit on, on the bird shit district every night. Wow, yeah, that makes sense. I can quantify this.

• 40:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then I was going to the gym. And I do this exercise in the gym called a military press. It's a compound exercise. You get a barbell, you lift it up over your head. It exercises your back, your shoulders, great exercise. Normally, my, my military press is about forty kilograms. That's a comfortable military press for me. But I couldn't get forty five kilograms out of my head. I'm like, hold on a minute. I'm just gonna load this bar up another five KGs. And now I am exercising with the amount of shit that the Starling shit in, in, in the bird shit district every night. So I do. Now I'm fucking lifting the weight above my head.

• 41:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm going, oh my God, they do, they do this much shit. Wow, this is heavy. This is heavy. And I'm focusing so much on the idea of the, I'm lifting all that bird shit above my fucking head, forty five kilograms. That I'm not thinking about my farm and I'm not thinking about the fact that it's kind of difficult. And now I have an injury. I managed to irritate my sciatic nerve. Not full on sciatica, but I have a rather unpleasant pinched sciatic nerve in my arse that travels down my leg all the way to my calf. And I really wish I didn't have that. But here's the wonderful poetry of this. This is what I, I, this is why I'm proud to have that sciatic pinch.

• 41:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  In last week's podcast, I told you I was cycling down Bedford Row and my bicycle slipped on all that bird shit. My bicycle aquaplaned on fucking bird shit. And I managed to save myself. I didn't fall off the bike. I didn't injure myself on the bird shit. I injured myself a week later by obsessing about the bird shit, trying to figure out exactly how much there is. And then lifting that amount of weight above my head. Then I get my injury. Then I get my injury, which is.

• 42:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a beautiful poetry to it. I'd write a short story about that. But also autistic people have lower life expectancies than the rest of the population. A huge reason for this unfortunately is the suicide rate for autistic people is very high compared to the neurotypical population. I think it's 17 times higher than the neurotypical population because it's so difficult to survive in a world that isn't designed for you. Another thing that decreases life expectancy for autistic people is injuries. Autistic people just tend to get more injuries, particularly in childhood.

• 43:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  More accident prone, more falls as a result of sensory processing, or in my case, there as a result of curiosity. That's the most autistic injury I've ever heard of in my fucking life. I was so excited and so obsessed and hyper focused that I'm, I'm, I've figured out how much bird shit gets shat on a night time there. And then I'm trying to lift it above my head that I'm not noticing my body, I'm not listening to my body and I'm not noticing this is too heavy and this isn't pleasant and now your form isn't good. And when you lift a weight above your head that's too heavy, other muscles get involved that aren't

• 43:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  supposed to be involved and you end up doing what I did. I pinched my fucking sciatic nerve. So the bird shit got me in the end. But when I was, when I was writing that article for the newspaper, the local newspaper, which was like, give, give us your opinion on the bird shit. And I went overboard with research. Like one of the things I really didn't, I specifically said, please don't frame this article as it just being about there's slipping hazards in the bird shit district and don't make it about claims and personal injury and shit like that. Let someone else talk about that. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in, in the philosophy of the bird shit, the poetry of the bird shit and the

• 44:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  biodiversity of the bird shit. I'm in, I'm into the starling behaviour. I want to know the whys. I'm curious about it. But having said that, if I had have come off my bicycle because of the bird shit that wasn't cleaned by the council, who were supposed to clean it in the mornings, if I had come off my bicycle and seriously injured myself. I wouldn't be paying my own medical bills, put it that way. But where do I stand as an autistic person whereby I became so obsessed with the bird shit that it eventually did end in an injury? Now I'm just taking the piss, I'm absolutely fine. It's just a little pinched sciatic nerve. And it was actually a positive thing because it has me back doing my pilates.

• 45:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the newspaper asked me for solutions to the starling problem. And the most obvious one that jumped out, even though I don't like it, is... I was just thinking about the light, the light and the evenings. And thinking about when I go to bed as a human being and the absence of blue light, you know, releases the melatonin and I get sleepy. But then if I shove a fawn into my face, it wakes me up. I thought, what is the fawn that you shove into the face of a starling to make it fuck off? UV lights.

• 45:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you put UV lights all over the bird shit district pointing at the trees, then technically the starlings won't be able to sleep and they'll leave and they'll go somewhere else. And I was thrilled up myself, thrilled up myself. And then I went looking it up and it's like, fuck, they do this already. They do it for pigeons. They have used UV lights in public settings to stop nuisance birds from roosting in certain areas with varying degrees of success. Okay, let's have a little ocarina pause. Let's have an ocarina pause. I don't have an ocarina. I'm after losing, I've misplaced a lot of my ocarinas, okay? I've got a banana.

• 46:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I have a banana that I ate about an hour ago. I've got the peel of a banana. I'm gonna slap myself into the face with the peel of this banana and you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit, all right? That's how this works.

• 46:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Interesting.

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• 48:25Speaker 05

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• 50:46Speaker 04

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• 51:04Speaker 05

  Hi everyone, it's Katie Couric and on my podcast, Next Question, we love stories about how women are taking control of their lives. They are increasingly leading financial decisions in their households, yet many say they don't feel fully prepared for the long-term financial choices ahead. Real confidence comes from knowing your financial future is protected, whatever happens. Pacific Life has helped generations protect what matters today and prepare for tomorrow with life insurance and lifetime income solutions. It's a promise Pacific Life has kept for nearly 160 years, so its customers can keep

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• 52:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hope it doesn't explode. Remember when you used to smoke banana skins? Remember that? When, fucking hell, why did I used to smoke banana skins? When I was a child.

• 52:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I was a child, because I had a copy of an album called The Prodigy Experience, and on the back of that, Leroy Thornhill, who I once falsely thought I was interviewing in Bristol. When I went mad during Covid, when I went insane during Covid, and I invented, I, I didn't invent the gig. Whatever crossed wires, wires had happened, it had been suggested to me that I would go to Bristol and interview Leroy Thornhill from The Prodigy. And I don't know what happened, I convinced myself it was going ahead, and I think I spent about six podcasts advertising this gig, where I was gonna go to Bristol and interview fucking

• 53:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Leroy from The Prodigy, and it wasn't happening. Fuck me, that was the pandemic for you. But anyway, yeah, I had a copy of The Prodigy Experience, and on the back of that, there was a quote from Leroy, where he said he was gonna smoke some banana skins. And of course, I took it literally, and used to try and smoke banana skins. That was me hitting myself into the head with a banana skin, and you'd have heard some adverts, all right. How would I rate that experience?

• 53:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Not something I'd recommend. I wouldn't be rushing to do it again, but all but.

• 53:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't know, quite, quite a lot of humility in that, isn't there? Hitting yourself into the head with a banana peel. Very humbling, grounding. The worst part, of course, is, so when bananas are picked, they're picked, green, completely unripe, from the tree, and then bananas are sprayed with a chemical called ethylene, ethylene gas. And what the ethylene gas does is it, it triggers the banana to begin ripening during transit. But it, it can shock the banana a bit, and then the banana ripens quickly and it releases

• 54:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  very cheesy compounds called esters, esters. But as a banana ripens, it releases these

• 54:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  quite a strong cheesy, strange smell. You'll know it. You know what, when you go to the supermarket and you get some fucking bananas, you're like, what the, what's that smell? This is not a banana adjacent odor. What's going on here with these bananas? Well, this banana unfortunately

• 54:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  had a bit of that, and now my hair smells like that. So I regret that choice there now. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, solace, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, some people listen to it just to go to sleep. I'm okay with that.

• 55:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying for the work that I put into the podcast, because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. So I rent out my office, so I purchase my equipment. It's how I survive and exist. This is my job. This is what I do as a professional artist. I adore it. I love making this podcast each week. That's why I never miss it. That's why I always put my heart and soul into it. But if you listen regularly and you enjoy it, please consider supporting the podcast directly, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.

• 55:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based in kindness and soundness. If you are signing up to Patreon, don't do it on the Apple app on your iPhone, because Apple are greedy bollocks as they take 30%. Go to your web browser and sign into Patreon that way. Similarly, don't join up as a free user. If you are joining Patreon, make sure you become a paid user. And also, some people were, some people who've become patrons were wondering, why is my Patreon page completely blank?

• 56:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I don't post to Patreon. I, I want to try and keep it so that everybody gets the exact same experience, whether you pay or not. I want to avoid a situation where people who pay get more than people who don't pay. I'd like to try and keep it equal if I can. And also, because this is a listener funded podcast, I'm not beholden to advertisers. Advertisers advertise on my terms and they can't dictate or control what I speak about in any way. Upcoming gigs. Gonna be at Electric Picnic on the Saturday. All right. You'll figure it out. It's Electric Picnic. Come along to that. No goals. Uh, September,

• 57:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ficker Street up in Dublin on the 23rd of September, a wonderful Tuesday night gig that is now almost sold out. Come along to that Ficker Street gig. Then up in Derry on the 27th, which is a Saturday. Come along to that and give me a message on Instagram, Flying by Boat Club, and tell me who you'd like me to have as my guests, or who you'd like to hear me speak to at any of those gigs. Right, so I really did not intend for this week's podcast to be about barred shit. Last week's podcast was partially about barred shit. But then I spoke to the wonderful Debs Newbold about the history of Shakespeare and theatre. That was wonderful. But

• 58:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  yet this week's podcast was supposed to be about the Old Testament. And I'm aware that I've been, I've been meaning to do an Old Testament podcast for maybe five weeks. But at the start of this podcast, when I mentioned that.

• 58:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, we're coming up to 100 million listens. I don't know how I did that, but I can tell you what I definitely, what I definitely never do is,

• 58:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  yes, this was supposed to be an Old Testament podcast. That's what this was supposed to be. But I followed my thread of curiosity instead. Curiosity and passion. And what I really wanted to speak about, I needed to get deeper into the bard shit. That's, that's what I needed. Bard shit and the behaviour of starlings. That's where my curiosity was. That's where my passion was. And if I'd have redirected myself and said, no, no, this podcast is about the Old Testament. Why are you talking about starlings? Second I do that, the podcast is over.

• 59:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's no room for that type of thinking in a creative space. In a creative space, it's about playfulness, curiosity. The starlings murmured outside the window and they basically said, no, this week's podcast is about us.

• 59:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I didn't resist the starlings. I didn't consider them to be a distraction that was taking me away from the Old Testament. I went, no, this is really fucking interesting. You've got things to say about these starlings. Let's do this instead. So that's why we're here, but I want to speak about.

• 59:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  So as you can tell, I've been doing some hardcore starling research, okay? But specifically what I was interested in finding out was. So if those were talking about a pedestrianized street in the middle of a city with nine trees, that they're real trees, but they're planted in this strained rubber substrate.

• 1:00:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  The bard shit district, it's, it's not natural. There's not a lot of nature going on. It's a lot of fucking concrete and a lot of pavement and a few strange trees sticking out. It, it's not natural. Why? What's going on? Why do the starlings, year after year, return to this strange little street with its strange little trees? This isn't Los Angeles. This isn't San Francisco. They can find trees very easily. They can find trees three minutes away. There's a fucking park. What are they doing in this street and why? What's going on? And I wanted to get to the bottom of that and I think I may, I think I might have gotten

• 1:00:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  to the, the bottom of this issue. And it tells us a very interesting story about climate change. So what I started to do is I started to look at old maps of Limerick City and the street in question Bedford Row, which I've done, I've done podcasts about this street before. So this street is, it's quite close to the River Shannon. It's not on the River Shannon, but it's a one street away. It leads down onto the River Shannon. It's on the banks of the River Shannon. Limerick was built in the eighth century by Vikings. Now Vikings, as you know, they had their long ships. They were masters of the sea

• 1:01:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  and rivers. And Vikings loved to build cities on what's called a riparian habitats. Examples of Viking cities that would be built in riparian habitats would be Wexford, Cork, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Rowan in France. A riparian habitat is, it's like a seasonally flooded forest on the banks of a river. Okay. It, it's a buffer zone. It's nature's buffer zone between land and a river. And it's not quite forest. It's not quite marshland.

• 1:02:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's trees, but riparian zones, they flood, they're supposed to flood. And the trees that grow there, they grow in soils that are supposed to flood. The Vikings loved riparian zones because they were easy to get to on the ships. The trees would provide a certain amount of defence. Riparian zones often have small little islands, like where Limerick was actually built by the Vikings, just a bit upriver from the Bardshit District, where King John's Castle is now King's Island. That was the original Viking settlement. But riparian zones are very unique habitats and they're very important.

• 1:03:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're nature sponge. They, they're supposed to flood. They absorb floods. They stabilise the banks and the land so that rivers don't completely erode the land. A riparian zone keeps a river healthy. It provides shade for fish. They're very, very important. And one of the issues that we face in the world today, when it comes to global warming and the risk of flooding, some of the big risks, the human populations. So it's not just that the water levels are rising and there be more floods and more extreme weather.

• 1:03:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's that older cities like Limerick, early medieval and older, humans tended to build on riparian zones. So our cities, Limerick, Cork, London, Paris, whatever the fuck you have, we built concrete over nature's floodplain. We took the sponge, the natural sponge, the buffer between river and land, and said, brilliant, this is where we're gonna build our city. And we're gonna use all the wood that's here and we're gonna cover it in concrete. So now when it floods, it fucking floods because you're building cities on floodplains and you're taking the sponge out. And Limerick is no exception to this.

• 1:04:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I went looking at old maps of Limerick and before Bedford Row was built, it was a little riparian forest. It was built on a riparian zone. It was built on a forest of probably willow and alder, maybe a bit of wetland.

• 1:04:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm guessing what it was like based on directly across the river. So directly across the river from Bedford Row, if you go up a little bit, you have untouched riparian zone. You have the untouched riparian habitat of the River Shannon is on the opposite side. It's in a wetlands area called Westfields. And this is a special area of conservation. And because of that, it means that there's fuck tons of biodiversity reports about the place because it's a special area of conservation. So I can look at the area Westfields across the river, look at the data from that about the animals that lived there, about its role,

• 1:05:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  its importance to the river. And then from that, I can say, oh, okay. Well, Bedford Row was probably like that at one point. So 800 years ago or 700 years ago, 800.

• 1:05:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where those starlings are now, what was there was a little riparian forest, a wetlands marshy type forest with trees that was supposed to flood a couple of times a year. The starlings would have loved those trees. First off, the swampiness of the area meant that the insect population was fucking huge. So the starlings would have been roosting in those trees and eating loads of insects. You'd have had food web dynamics, which means that the presence of so many starlings in the trees, that then brings in hawks and fucking falcons and all this shit.

• 1:06:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  That then keeps the invertebrate population under control, mice and rats and otters or whatever the fuck that the hawks are eating. The starlings are looking after the insects, making sure that the insect population doesn't get too out of hand. But the main role that the starlings would have had in this forest that was there, right? This is where the bird shit comes into it. This is where the 45 kilograms of bird shit a night comes into this, the specific riparian habitat that would have been on this area a few hundred years ago. So the starlings act as what's called a nutrient pump. A nutrient pump is it's a species within an ecosystem that takes nutrients from one area and transfers it to another.

• 1:07:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  So riparian zones, right, these, these forests that act as sponges,

• 1:07:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  they frequently flood, but when they frequently flood, the water carries away the nutrients, in particular phosphorus, nitrogen. In steps, tens of thousands of starlings roasting in the trees and shitting like crazy. All that starling shit in a riparian forest is fucking perfect. So the riverbed, the nutrients are washed away, okay? Nutrients are getting washed away by flooding. The starlings are flying all over the countryside, eating insects, eating fruit, taking those nutrients from the countryside, then they're coming to the riparian forest by the riverbed.

• 1:08:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then they're re, they're distributing the nutrients from the countryside into the fucking soil of the river. Not only are they depositing nutrients from their shit, there's also a lot of seeds. The starling shit is then carried away by the river, right? And this nutrient-dense shit travels upriver. It feeds wetlands, it disperses native seeds for plants to grow, it fertilizes soils that can become infertile by seasonal flooding. So that's what, that's what I think we're dealing with.

• 1:08:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a population of starlings who are still behaving as if that area is a riparian forest, but it's not. It's, it's nine trees where a riparian forest once was. And now they're still shitting like mad, but nothing is washing that shit away. It's just fodder, it's going straight onto concrete. Nobody told the starlings. They don't know, they're just doing their thing, but they don't know that they're not in a riparian habitat anymore. We've built over it, we've built a city over it, we've concreted over it. And that there is the literature of nature. The fact that the starlings are still there, even though the forest doesn't exist.

• 1:09:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's like their behaviour is a folk memory, or a mythology, or a legend of what the land once was. And I can read that. I mean, that's what I did. I just couldn't stop thinking about the fucking starlings. Couldn't stop them. Why are they there? Why are they there on this street? There's just nine trees. What are they doing? Why is it every year? It's not even practical for them. What is so special about this street that they need to return? And I reckon it's because I consulted the maps. It's because it was once a riparian forest. And it reminds me of that. I've spoken about this on previous podcasts, but the absence of linear time in Irish mythology, where you can have stories, you can have

• 1:10:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  vision literature, Imram's, they're not as Imram's specifically, it's voyage literature. It's where you have stories where a central character has a vision that they go on a great voyage. Examples would be the voyage of Bran, or the voyage of Mael Doon. I think I've done a podcast on the voyage of Bran, about a year ago. Irish mythology and quantum physics, I think is the name of the podcast, where your hero goes off onto a boat and visits the sea. And when your hero is off at sea, they will encounter beings. And these

• 1:10:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  beings at sea are riding horses and chariots. And then you're left with this conundrum of, but my hero is out in the middle of the ocean in a boat. How can these beings that he encounters, how can they be riding horses on the sea? And then it becomes apparent that the lads that are riding the horses are living in a separate spectrum of reality, a mirror reality, a parallel reality. They're riding horses because from where they're standing, they're in a field. And they're in a field, and they're going, how the fuck are those lads in a boat? We're in a field. But then the lads in the boat are going, we're on the ocean. How are those fuckers on horses? And it's a motif that you see

• 1:11:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  frequently in Irish mythology, old Irish mythology, where there's an absence of linear time, where you have this. Ambiguity about parallel realities and parallel universes. And the fucking starlings in Bedford Row remind me a bit of that. You see, I'm walking through a city. I'm walking through a city in 2025 and I can see everything is paved. Everything is fucking paved and the trees are in this weird, spongy shit. And I can see all these starlings and I'm going, what are these starlings doing in this city in 2025? They're shitting on the ground and I'm slipping on it. But if this was a story in Irish vision literature, in old mythology, if this was a story in old mythology,

• 1:12:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm walking down the street in the here and now in 2025. But the starlings see me walking through a field because from their spectrum of reality, they are still in a forest 800 years ago. This isn't happening. Everything's happening in the here and now. We're after building a fucking city and the poor, no one told the poor old starlings. They, they're still, they don't know what to do. Something about the darkness and the microclimate makes them think that this is still a riparian forest and they're just doing their thing instead of moving somewhere else. But it just reminded me of Irish vision literature and those two parallel realities operating side by side. But as I demonstrated earlier, we are living in parallel realities because the starlings

• 1:13:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  are able to perceive ultraviolet light and I can't perceive ultraviolet light. So what's my solution for the bird shit in the bird shit district? I don't have a solution, but what I do have is a fucking dream and a vision. So first off, the starlings aren't the problem. The starlings are doing what they're supposed to do in that area. They are shitting prodigiously because their shit serves a very important purpose. To the floodplain. That we've paved over. Now they're forty five kilograms of nightly shits. It's just staying on the pavement and being washed off the next day.

• 1:13:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I said there that one of the, one of the issues that's popping up with climate changes, so so many cities around the world were built on riparian zones, which means that we built over nature's floodplain. So when it does flood, you get these fucking flash floods. Well, one of the countries that's really tackling this and has been tackling it since the year two thousand is China. China is putting huge effort into what it calls sponge cities, where China looks at its cities. I think, I think it first started in Beijing, there were huge floods in Beijing in two thousand and one, I believe. But where China looks at its cities and it says, right, well, we can't move the fucking

• 1:14:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  city and we're after putting a lot of concrete here. How can we make parts of this city near the river? How can we make the city behave like a riparian zone? How can we make the city a fucking sponge? So what they start to do is they start to introduce things like permeable paving, which is a type of paving that absorbs rainwater. Or it's paving that's designed in such a way that rainwater flows through it rather than collects and collects into like little fucking ponds that flood. They put green roofs on buildings. So that's, you might've seen them roofs that are grass and this absorbs rainwater rather

• 1:15:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  than pushes it right down onto the concrete and floods ponds, urban wetlands, bioswales. Now that's an interesting one. So if I had a limitless budget and a vision, you would redesign Bedford Row to accommodate the fucking starlings by completely repaving the street in such a way that.

• 1:15:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a street that behaves like the riparian zone that was once there. So underneath the trees, instead of it being this weird, spongy rubber stuff and just harsh concrete, underneath all the trees you put in bioswales. Now, we actually already have bioswales in Limerick City. There's a couple of them up by the top of O'Connell Street. And a bioswale basically is, it looks like a little tiny wetland that's about the size of a footpath. It's a thin strip that's kind of windy, that contains vegetation in there. It's a type of green drainage ditch.

• 1:16:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it takes rainwater, pollution, and it naturally filters it back into the soil. And imagine if the bards were doing all their shits onto this. How do you build a street that treats the bird shit as a gift? A useful gift, this wonderful fertilizer and seeds? How do you build a street that treats the bird shit as this useful gift from these indigenous animals? Whose arses are trying to tell us about a forest that used to exist here 800 fucking years ago? Create like a little urban shrine of biodiversity to accommodate their bird shit and to let them live there and to do their shits.

• 1:17:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it completely recontextualizes the shit. We're the problem. We built the fucking city and the riparian forest. We're the problem. It's a ridiculous, it's just paved, it's really fucking ugly. It's terrible down there. It's slippy, not because of the bird shit, but because the bird shit has nowhere to go on the pavement. It's fucking expensive because the council is down there every single day washing it off. Get in some experts. Get in some experts in biodiversity, in ornithology. Redesign this street as an urban riparian sponge street. Not only would it be aesthetically beautiful, it'd be really unique.

• 1:17:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  You could contextualize it within. One thing I was thinking about is... So in the 7th century, there was this huge legal tract, this Irish legal, this is before the Brits, this Irish legal tract called the Brekk Bha, the Bee Judgments. It was this massive body of law about the importance of bees to Irish society. Th- th- these were laws.

• 1:18:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  That bees weren't just fucking insects, they weren't just part of nature, they were part of a, a legal ecological commons. This entire legal text around the management of hives, the ownership of hives, the ownership of honey, bee droppings. Bees were protected and highly respected and people understood their value. Why not treat the starlings the same way? They only do the shitting for about six weeks of the year, July and August. Have a starling festival in the bard shit district. A two month long event where you get to learn about the starlings, learn about what was

• 1:18:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  there before a city was built, learning about their role in the ecosystem. And you're doing it in this street that doesn't smell like fucking bard shit anymore. You're doing it in a, in a street that's designed to accommodate bard shit because you have all these bioswales, these artificial little wetlands going between the trees that are taking the bard shit and filtering it naturally as fertiliser. You could even have people collecting the bard shit as fertiliser and distributing it to flowers all over the city. Why can't we have a bard shit festival where all of the public flowers in Limerick City are fertilised only by the bard shit district bard shit?

• 1:19:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Contextualise it all within the Brekk Bha. Write a new text, the Starling Judgments.

• 1:19:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sounds like a, sounds like a fucking Robert Fripp album, a King Crimson album. What was the name of their album? Lark's Tongues in Aspic. But yeah, the Starling judgements. And then anyone who disrespects the law, disrespects the law of the Starlings. Would it be a good punishment?

• 1:20:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're forced to strip naked and get sunburned. They have to get sunburned by UV light that they can't see as the Starlings mock them. I needed to get all this shit off my chest. I've been thinking about this a lot and doing a huge amount of research.

• 1:20:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And all I can say is this is what you need neurodivergent people for. I understand most of what I said is mad. I know that most of this is completely untenable and bizarre and strange. And I've gone way too far, especially with the parallel reality stuff. But this, this is what you need neurodivergent people for. This is what I think the value of neurodivergent brains are in society.

• 1:20:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, people will say to me, you're thinking about bard shit too much. It's not that deep. It fucking is. Yes, it is that deep. And I reckon through the strangeness of some of those ideas, you could actually end up with quite a beautiful solution that benefits everybody, human and Starling. And this is why I don't want a solution that targets the Starlings. I don't want them shining UV light on the Starlings or introducing artificial bards of prey. We built the city on the, on the Riparian fucking floodplain and no one told the Starlings. That's the problem. So where's the, where's the forward thinking solution? Where's the solution that actually looks at the reality of climate collapse and climate change?

• 1:21:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like the other thing I didn't mention is... The bard shit district as it stands, there is no biodiversity there. There's none. There's weird, nine weird trees stuck in rubber with a bunch of starlings on it. That's all there is. If that was turned into a sponge street with bioswells there, you'd have huge biodiversity, not just starlings. You might have fucking frogs, you'd have different birds, insects. It'd improve the smell in the city. Only positive things can come from a solution like that. Anything is better than everybody slipping on bard shit and then a fella who looks like Ross Kemp

• 1:22:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  coming out at 12 o'clock in the day to hose it down with a power washer every single day. And it would put limerick on the map internationally. What's wrong with being mental? What's wrong with a two-month-long bard shit festival? It wasn't mad for our ancestors before the Brits arrived. It wasn't mad for fucking pre-Christian Ireland and they were just like, oh bees, they give us honey. Excellent, let's give them legal rights. Let's write a gigantic law tract all about the rights of bees. Because no one has come here and invaded yet to tell us that that's irrational. You can be decolonial about this too. Right, that's nearly 80 minutes of a podcast just about bard shit.

• 1:23:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, look, we are up to nearly 100 million listens, so I must be doing something right.

• 1:23:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, I'll catch you next week. Hopefully with a podcast about the Old Testament. I know I've been promising it. I really want to do that podcast. I have a lot to say about the Old Testament.

• 1:23:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the meantime, rob a dog, give legal rights to a starling,

• 1:23:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  genuflect to a dragonfly. Dog bless.

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