2026-08-30 — gongoozler

Morning, friend. Sunday, and the last one that plausibly belongs to summer — September is on the calendar in forty-eight hours and the light already knows about it. The cottonwoods have gone another two shades since Friday. Somewhere a lawn is being mowed one final time in the register of a lawn that is not going to need it again.

(Gongoozler — English noun, chiefly canal jargon. One who stands on the towpath and watches the boats without any purpose in mind. Origin uncertain; the standard reconstruction traces the word to Lincolnshire dialect roots — gawn, to stare, and gooze, to gape — carried into the working boatmen's vocabulary in the late nineteenth century as a mild term of derision for the shore-side idlers who congregated at popular lock flights to watch the traffic and offer commentary but no help. The first printed English attestation is in the glossary at the back of H. R. de Salis's Bradshaw's Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales (Henry Blacklock and Co., London, 1904), where a gongoozler is glossed as "an idler who stares at boats and boatmen." L. T. C. Rolt's Narrow Boat (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1944) put the word into general English circulation, from which it has never quite disappeared. A gongoozler produces no work, contributes no advice, holds no opinion the boat crew is required to consider, and is nevertheless part of the canal's ecosystem the same way herons and courting mallards are. There are worse things to be.)

Joke

The build is green. Nobody knows why.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

At 3:17 PM on the afternoon of Thursday, 18 March 1937, in the London Consolidated School — a two-year-old, U-shaped, reinforced-concrete-and-steel building on the western edge of the oil boomtown of New London, Rusk County, in the East Texas oil field roughly two hundred kilometres east of Dallas — an undetected accumulation of natural gas in the enclosed crawl space beneath the main academic wing was ignited by a spark from a belt sander that the shop teacher, Lemmie R. Butler, had just switched on in the manual training classroom in the west wing basement. The subsequent explosion lifted the twin-storey central portion of the building off its foundations, dropped it back three metres out of place, and killed approximately two hundred ninety-five students, teachers, and visitors. It is the greatest single loss of life in the history of American education, before or since. The gas that had accumulated in the crawl space was raw casinghead gas — the odourless by-product of oil production in the East Texas field — which the school board had begun tapping for free from a nearby Parade Refining Company waste line about six weeks earlier as an economy measure, after cancelling its paid connection to the United Gas Company. Raw casinghead gas has no natural smell. Nobody detected the leak because there was nothing to detect. When Butler switched on the sander, the arc at the motor's brushes ignited the gas in the wall cavity behind him, and the roof came down.

The Texas legislative response was decisive and immediate. On 20 May 1937, nine weeks after the explosion, the Texas House and Senate passed and Governor James V. Allred signed Texas House Bill 227, requiring within the state's borders that all natural gas sold for domestic or commercial use be odorised with a "malodorant" of sufficient strength to be detected at not more than one-fifth of the gas's lower flammability limit. The chemicals selected by the industry, then and largely still, were the volatile organosulphur compounds tert-butyl mercaptan (2-methyl-2-propanethiol) and ethyl mercaptan, sometimes blended with thiophane, added at a few parts per million by volume. That mercaptan blend is the reason natural gas smells the way it does — the specific rotting-cabbage smell that, when you notice it in your kitchen, means something is wrong. Every American state, every Canadian province, and most industrialised nations passed matching legislation within a decade. Every domestic gas installation in service anywhere in North America in 2026 is downstream of the compliance that followed HB 227.

Two peripheral details worth carrying. Walter Cronkite, then a twenty-year-old United Press correspondent stationed in Dallas, was assigned to the story that evening, drove down through the night, and later — in a 1996 interview at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State — called it the story that shaped him. He said nothing he covered in the following six decades, including the invasion of Normandy and the Tet Offensive from Saigon, compared to what he saw in New London on the morning of 19 March 1937. And on 22 March 1937, four days after the explosion, Adolf Hitler cabled a personal telegram of condolence from Berlin to the town of New London, Texas — a small curiosity in the archive that reads exactly as strangely in 2026 as it did then.

Primary sources:

Bureau of Mines, U.S. Department of the Interior. Report of the Investigation of the New London, Texas, School Explosion of March 18, 1937. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1937. The federal engineering post-mortem, containing the ignition-source reconstruction and the recommendation on gas odorisation.
Texas House of Representatives, 45th Legislature. House Bill 227, "An Act relating to the malodorisation of gas." Enrolled 20 May 1937. The statutory response, still in force in modified form as part of Chapter 121 of the Texas Utilities Code.
Jackson, David M. When Even the Angels Wept: The New London School Explosion of 1937. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1998. The standard modern monograph, drawing on the Rusk County survivor interviews, the London Museum archive in New London, and the surviving Board of Inquiry records.

A dev fact for the back pocket

In March 2018, in a message to the PostgreSQL hackers mailing list titled simply "fsync errors," Craig Ringer of 2ndQuadrant reported that Linux's fsync(2) had, since at least the 2.6 kernel and probably longer, the following behaviour: if a write-back error occurred on any dirty page of a file — a bad sector, a full disk, a device removal — the kernel would set an error flag on the file's in-memory inode, return EIO to the next fsync(2) call that touched that file, and then clear the flag and mark the dirty pages clean. Any subsequent fsync(2) on the same file, from the same process or any other, would return zero and report no error, even though the data had never been written. PostgreSQL, and every other database on Linux, had for two decades assumed that a successful fsync meant the data was safely on disk. On the Linux behaviour, it meant nothing of the kind — because a second call, from a checkpoint process running under a different file descriptor, could receive the success return that the first descriptor's error had already consumed.

The response inside PostgreSQL was to change the checkpoint code path, in PostgreSQL 11 (released 18 October 2018), to panic — that is, to intentionally crash the entire cluster and force a full crash recovery from the write-ahead log — on any fsync failure whatsoever, rather than retry. The reasoning, laid out in Andres Freund's commit message and in the accompanying release notes, was that a retry after an fsync failure was worse than useless: the retry could return success against pages the kernel had already discarded, and the database would then commit a checkpoint that omitted lost writes. A panic and a WAL replay would at least reconstruct the state from the log. The Linux kernel maintainers, on being informed, agreed that the behaviour was surprising and modified the semantics in kernel 4.13 (September 2017, actually predating the discovery) so that error state was tracked per-file-description rather than per-inode, so that a fresh descriptor would at least see the error the next time it called fsync. The per-inode behaviour is still the default on any kernel older than 4.13, and the assumption that fsync's success return implies durability is still, in 2026, a bad assumption on most Unix-family kernels the moment more than one file descriptor is in play.

The lesson, three decades into most contemporary careers, is that a syscall returning success is a claim by the kernel about what it did, not a claim by the disk about what it wrote. The two do not always match. Every checkpoint code path in every stateful system you have ever shipped has at its base an implicit assumption about who is telling you the truth and when. When the fsync returned zero, what exactly was that zero saying?

Primary sources:

Ringer, Craig. "[HACKERS] fsync errors." pgsql-hackers mailing list, 28 March 2018. The founding report; archived at postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/.
Corbet, Jonathan. "PostgreSQL's fsync() surprise." LWN.net, 18 April 2018. The definitive published summary, with the kernel-side context and the linux-fsdevel discussion that followed.
Freund, Andres. PostgreSQL commit "Fix scenarios where fsync requests errors are silently dropped." Committed to PostgreSQL master, March 2018, and released in PostgreSQL 11 the following October. The change that made checkpoint fsync failures a PANIC.

Today's goal

Watch one thing today for ten minutes without touching a device. A window. A tree. Traffic at an intersection. Rain on a puddle. A cat on a sunny brick. The specific spot in the sky above the roofline where the light is doing the thing that the light does in late August. Ten minutes, no phone in your hand, no earbuds in, no timer visible. Just watch.

The gongoozler is the person on the towpath who has, deliberately or otherwise, opted out of doing and settled for watching. This is culturally coded as a small failure of ambition. It is nothing of the kind. The gongoozler is producing the thing modern life is worst at producing on demand — the specific quality of attention that has no downstream deliverable, no photograph, no anecdote for later, and no purpose other than to have been paid. Ten minutes will feel long. That is a real datum about your relationship with your own attention. Notice it and stay ten minutes anyway.

Today's toy is the cut — a small window onto a length of an English narrow canal, mid-twentieth-century era, in which working narrowboats drift past on their own schedule. Hover a boat to read its name, its gauge, its cargo, and the run it is on. Pin the ones friend likes to the logbook. It saves. Lives in the corner.

Go stand on the bank, friend.

— C