If this doesn't make you fucking apoplectic...

Nothing will. Missing this is about the only reason I feel bad about not having a television.

Brain Gym Bullshit

Stuff I have made: An occasional series

we call this an "evolutionary force"

You don't get to breed if you are this stupid. Social Darwinism, ftw~

Yeah, this will work

Cardboard nurses tackle infection
I guess one of skills I have that makes me well suited to nursing is knowing what pushes people's buttons - and how not to push said buttons.

So when I see how some mouth-breather has secured their next pay raise, I just see all the ways this is going to fail. Hard. First off, as a occasional member of staff in an hospital, I KNOW ALL ABOUT WASHING MY FUCKING HANDS. No cardboard cut out is going to elucidate some greater knowledge to me on this front. And as for patients, there are other things on their minds generally speaking. Families? Well, how about you get them to stop sitting on the bed and having the kids crawling around on the floor, first; we'll get handwashing as soon as they realise they're in a hospital, not a jungle gym.

And doctors? [insert cheapshot at the medical profession's attitude to infection control]. I kid, I kid, they are much like the nurses in their attitude to "hand hygiene" - except that they rarely get their hands "visibly contaminated".

All these cutouts are going to be good for is for some wag to amend with a drawn-on moustache. Or a speech-bubble that says something suitably hilarious such as "I love cock!"

A step in the right direction for infection control, they are not.

Frightening amounts of stupid on the internet

Just really. Read the comments and see for yourself.

Or don't. You may be less depressed that way.

Sam Wang on Autism and Vaccinations

(via Respectful Insolence)

I AM A CHILD OF THE EIGHTIES

Hear me express myself through a compilation of other people's music:

Muxtape

Crazy people say the darndest things

Such as "Oh you guys, I think we've been LEFT BEHIND".

The thought that there are otherwise normal people wandering the planet awaiting The Rapture and when a room full of people disappear, frankly terrifies me. Not "Oh, that is not normal", or "There must be some logical explanation", but "This must be the end of the world!"

I do not want these people in charge of anything. Ever. If there is some terrible event, these are the ones who will stop what they are doing and start praying, rather than trying to fix whatever has happened. They are not to be trusted. This is point for me when faith really goes bad. It robs people of their basic (god given?) ability to problem solve. To make a thorough and logical assessment of a situation. Pro's and con's, simple skepticism - I don't think you can get through life without it.

These are not people who should be mocked, they should be cared for in institutions. Or told to stop being nuts, one of the two.

(man, I really hope this is a joke...)

(from RADAR)

On bein' literary

One of the things I love about London is that there is generally always something going on, somewhere. And it my biggest annoyance that I never get off my arse and go do one of these things.

Well, last night I did.

Yesterday morning, one of my feeds updated and Joey from A Softer World announced that he was doing a reading in London that night. I ummmed and ahhhed and then decided to go - pulled on a clean t-shirt ("triple nerd score") and my iPod and went out the door. I quickly realised when I got off the Tube at South Kensington that I had chosen poorly with my clothing choice as it wasn't even dark yet and already too cold for bare arms. This suspicion was confirmed when I walked into the club where the reading was and noticed that pretty much everyone else was smart/ casual and full of airs and graces. Uh oh. After getting a drink I remembered why I don't normally go out in SW - £3.60 a pint.

So far, so "oh man this was totally a bad idea", I sat at a stool by the bar and looked around whilst savouring every sip of my Guinness. People were talking, animatedly, about important, literary things. There were suits, weird old women, young guys with little in the way of sense of humour (the corduroy jacket is always a big giveaway) and one young lady who was displaying some serious hobo-chic. I hated her immediately.

The readings started and a few more people who were definitely "of the internet" wandered in (the ironic t-shirts are always a big giveaway) and we modestly acknowledged each other as only those who read Livejournal can. In a bid to not feel like a terrible Loner I wandered up to a young lady who was somewhere between internet and trendy and started chatting with her. It turned out she was American and had read Joey's blog post, too. Our conversation was cut short as the M.C. started his routine and introduced the first act: An Indian gent who was reading from his satirical epic poem (of sorts) entitled "The Gospel according to Thomas Clarence". Oh, it was going to be that kind of evening, then.

The second reader was a middle-aged, English woman who looked a little potty and her poems reflected this. They started with one about her coat-rack (and it's vital role in dinner parties) and progressed to one about being spanked over a desk by (and I quote) "The best man in the world". Part of me wondered if it was about Hitler, as she used lots of German terms of endearment in it and, well, we all know Hitler was a pervert. I didn't get the chance to ask her, though.

Next up was a terminally dull, weird "poet". I couldn't hear his recitation and I don't really think I missed anything. There was something about clowns in it, but that was as much as I got.

We broke for refreshments and I chatted with my companion a bit more. She, like I, had come for Joey and hadn't really been moved by anything so far. We drank and sauntered down to where the man of the evening was sat, signing things. Neither of us had anything to sign, but I figured this was probably the only chance I would ever get to meet him, so we went up, chatted, shook hands and Jordan got the piece of paper she'd scribbled the address to the club on, signed. I got told that "the angle of the average male errection is 70 degrees". Live and learn, I guess.

The second half of the evening did not begin with much of a bang. First up was a Canadian woman who read from a book she had written on some important battle in Canadian history, that began with a "B". She compared its importance to that of the battle of Hastings. It wasn't very interesting, though.

You remember I started hating some hobo-chic woman? I was not disappointed when she took to the stage waving the book she had come to read from: "The Shaman's last apprentice". When I had seen the sizeable carpet bag of them by her seat earlier on, I had hoped it was some hackneyed Conan/ Harry Potter rip-off. It was not. It was something much worse. Something self-published. When an author claims they self-published because they "wanted to keep the message pure" you know the book is going to be bad. I was not prepared for the awfulness, though.

It was Vogon poetry bad. She was an ex-banker, who left London ("born and bred") to travel to Peru, against the advice of her psychic. Personally, as much as I hate psychics, I kinda wish she'd followed this one's advice. Whilst in Lima, our intrepid author had a vision of some Shaman (or "shay-man" as she insisted on saying) and knew that she had to seek him out.

Uh huh.

She left the trappings of the modern world to live with this Shaman and learnt, amongst other things, "healing arts". She read a section about a boat ride and losing her passport and being told by the titular Shaman that pieces of paper didn't define her and the west was soSSSSSSNNNNNggggggSSSsssnNNNNggg... Sorry, I must have dozed off. She finished her set with a poem she had written, or as she liked to describe it "poetic afterbirth from writing the novel". It reminded me of bodily effluent, certainly. It was entitled "The Goddess awakes'. Yeah, inner goddess, love everyone, inner strength, etc. etc. There really is nothing like being lectured on the evils of consumerism by someone in designer glasses.

Finally, Joey was up on stage reading from "Overqualified" and we laughed. Laughed and felt immensely uneasy when we did. It was his trademark dark-as-fuck humour. I can't remember much about the letters he read, but they covered a range of jobs (Overqualified is a collection of covering letters for job applications, that form a narrative of sorts) from Mall Santa to Cage Fighter.

When the readings finished there was a raffle, giving away books that had some relevance to the evening (a Canadian theme, it seems) and I won a book about a topic I didn't even realise was book material - Farming in Depression-era Manitoba.

I'm going to read it, too.

Let's talk about poop

No, really. As my mother says" "If you don't eat, you don't poo. And if you don't poo, you die"

Nursing introduces you to many insightful experiences when it comes to the human condition. And poop figures highly amoungst them. You learn things such as "what exactly does C. difficile smell like?" "What does altered blood in someone's stool look like and what does it signify?"

I shalln't dwell on this too much, but suffice it to say that over the past two years, I have become something of a connoisseur of crap. Which is why the whole enema/ colonic irrigation/ sticking things up your pooper-crowd bother me so much. This notion that somehow you need help cleaning out your back-side of "toxin" and "poisons" is just stupid. And occasionally dangerous - google up "death by enema" if you don't believe me.

I've given plenty of enemas (as prescribed), laxatives and suppositories and invariably this is because someone hasn't opened their bowels for quite some time. A good guide to what is normal as far as bowel habits go is: "What is normal for the person in question?" - 3 times a day to once a week, and anything inbetween. The people who come into hospital and are prescribed some kind of preparation to encourage them to open their bowels generally have some degree of constipation. There are plenty of causes of constipation and I'm not going to go into all of them, but suffice it to say if you've not opened your bowels for a while (several days is normally a good checkpoint for most people, though YMMV) you might be prescribed some senna. Or you might be encouraged to move around, or drink more water.

Normally, though, your bowels don't need much in the way of encouragement. And you don't get things caked to your colon or pockets of faeces that have been there since you were a child. This is because you colon (generally where it is claimed some faecal evil lives) is a tube that sheds it's lining, much like your skin and it is lined with mucus to aid transit, so nothing is going to hang around in there for long. Unless you have diverticular disease, but that is accompanied by a myriad of signs and symptoms, rather than just feeling a bit bloated and/ or tired - a CAM favourite symptom.

All of this was prompted by reading this article on Science Based Medicine. And whilst I'm re-interating a lot of what is said in that article with a personal bent to it, I wanted to crtl+c, ctrl+v something on the Colonix site:

April 22nd - Because there was nothing crazy coming out anymore I upped my dosage to 2 scoops in the morning and doubled my water intake.

April 23rd - I woke up and passed the biggest, longest and nastiest piece of stuff I had ever seen! It was approximately 2 to 3 feet in length.

April 24th - Another very large piece of stuff came out. This was thicker than the rest. I am very glad that I upped the dosage to 2 scoops!

I think this demonstrates rather nicely the kind of people that get suckered by this (assuming that this person actually exists and isn't just the demented dream of the Colonix PR dept.), people that don't put two and two together.

If I told you that you were eating kitty litter (a product ostensibly sold on the merits of of its absorbancy) and you passed the motions on the site, wouldn't you begin to wonder? Especially if you ate twice as much kitty litter as the day before and passed twice the volume of stool afterwards?

But no mind, people who buy into this might not be swayed by logical thought, or by scientific evidence. If the Colonix web-page is anything to go by these people are moved more by logical fallacy (how many can you spot on the page?) and by the belief that if it is "natural" it must be good for you.

And that if you are troubled by constipation, drinking more water, eating more fibre and exercising more are not the first things you should consider.

"April 28th - This was the worst of all. ... I cannot believe that something like this existed inside of me"

Fun fact: before you started eating kitty litter, it didn't

what is del.icio.us?

Well there's a post on del.icio.us I never thought I'd make.

Coffee is a superfood!

I had long suspected that my morning litre of coffee had a protective effect. Though I had always assumed it was just to take the edge off the journey into the centre of London.

Turns out, it can stop you getting dementia.

I counted 12 the first time

This is pretty much the best use of YouTube I have seen in a while.