Friday night in...

"It's all right is this wine

For £3.99,"

Said the girl who was holding the glass.

"It's easy to drink,

I'll be shick in the sink,

And probably fall on my ass..."

Attacked by Macaques

A woman who has a phobia of monkeys after her father introduced a "positively evil" chimp into the house when she was a child, was attacked by macacques when she accompanied a friend on a tour of "Monkey Island" near Phuket.   A monkey appeared out of nowhere and bit her on the wrist, refusing to let go.  It was soon joined by others, who had to be prised off her by the crew of the boat that had taken the tourists to the island.

Ironically, Mrs.Darwell had agreed to join the tour in order to face her phobia. 

See the full, unintentionally funny story at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/thailand/7835641/British-woman-with-fear-of-monkeys-attacked-by-macaques-in-Thailand.html

Breath of Life...

A cystic fibrosis patient has died of pneumonia after receiving the lungs of a smoker in a transplant operation.  An ex-smoker, obviously, since it is not possible to smoke after you have died - unless you are cremated.

The family are distraught and upset, and have been quoted as saying that if their loved one knew where the lungs had come from she would have refused them.

Let's just get a couple of things straight here.  

An organ transplant is always a last resort,  it is a "life-saving" operation by definition.  if the patient survives the transplant they will have an indeterminate life span, but their life will certainly be longer than if they didn't have the transplant at all.  20% of patients receiving a lung transplant still die in the first year, with approx. 43% surviving into their 5th year.  It's a dangerous and tricky business receiving a transplanted organ.

What this tragic girls' family are basically saying here is that their daughter would rather have died than receive the lungs of a smoker.  An organ transplant is an expensive and time-consuming operation:  the surgeons and doctors want the patient to recover and have a decent quality of life, or it's a waste of time for everyone concerned.  Thus, the donor organs get checked over - it's not any old offal that gets slung into a patient just to stop them whingeing.

I'm afraid what it boils down to is that those damn healthy people with nothing wrong with them JUST WON'T DIE.  Not in the numbers needed by transplant teams - and even then there's no guarantee that perfectly healthy organs won't get rejected by the patient's body after transplant.

This patient received five extra months of life that she certainly wouldn't have had otherwise.  The quality of the life is what is really being debated here: was it worth it when she only got five months?  Unfortunately none of us have a crystal ball, not even scientific doctors and surgeons who give the impression that they do know everything.

Death Machine

There is a disturbing story doing the rounds in the press at the moment.  Every turn it takes reveals another dark twist of human nature.

Two youths - neither teenagers nor men - have died in a  room at the Ramada Inn outside Edinburgh, apparently victims of  a version of  the "Deliverance Machine".  Their friends and family  are adamant their deaths must have been accidental, since they showed no signs of being suicidal.

The "deliverance machine" is the brainchild of one Philip Nitschke.  When attached to a laptop, it can administer a lethal injection at the tap of a button.  It is impossible to accidentally kill oneself with it since the button must be pressed three times.  It could, however, cause a great deal of pain of you dropped it on your foot.

 The deliverance machine now sits in the Science Museum in 

London in all its life-ending glory.

The Deliverance Machine is one in a line of  inventions to aid the administration of euthanasia to terminally-ill patients.  There was also the Thanatron and the Mercitron, and since then, Philip Nitschke has gone on to invent death devices with the most seemingly innocuous objects found in everyday life.  He is also involved in the concept of a euthanasia boat which would sail terminally-ill people through international waters, thereby ensuring that anyone involved with their suicide would not be prosecuted. 

But back to the young men, allegedly found in their hotel room, sitting in chairs which were facing each other and with a webcam in the vicinity.  Sinister implications are being drawn: that their deaths were either filmed, or broadcast over the internet.  They were intelligent students, perhaps their motivation was to die by their own invented hand.  But this is all speculation.  There is only one fact: it is impossible to kill oneself by accident with a death machine.

 

Ban the World Cup

This morning the public are being treated to a video made by Staffordshire police regarding the "rise in domestic violence" during the football World Cup.  Someone in the force must have unfulfilled ambitions to be a film director.  Is this really an intelligent use of public money at a time when the coalition government are releasing cryptic messages every day concerning  imminent "austerity measures".  I believe everyone in the country is going to be forced to wear a hessian sack tied round the middle with string and do everything by candlelight as the electricity goes off for the next 5 years to save energy.  Anyway...

According to statistics (and we all know how reliable they are), during the last World Cup, domestic violence incidents rose by 25%, and if  - sorry, when - England were knocked out of the competition, this number rose to 30%.

I have a radical idea to bring these percentages down.  It doesn't involve making videos, or stopping the supermarkets from selling cut-price lager.  If these numbers are directly correlated to the World Cup - and the Home Office says they are - how about this:

Ban the World Cup.

I know it would upset those people who are responsible for selling the  stupid tat that goes along with it (flags for your car, football earrings for the missus, bibs for your baby etc.), pub takings would stay the same, people would carry on going to work as usual instead of creatively skiving off, broadcasters wouldn't go on their usual foreign jolly for four weeks, but hear me out:  wouldn't it be nice to avoid the tornado of madness that this country subjects itself to every four years?  The dizzying highs, the crashing lows.  Thinking about it, being a football fan must be a bit like being bipolar, and you wouldn't wish that condition on your worst enemy.

Let's just do something else for a change.  The World Cup is like anything else: Christmas, the Olympics, it's just there to mark the passing of the seasons in case our lives have got too monotonous and we've forgotten what year it is.

CUMBRIAN PRIVACY

Beware Northerners bearing shotguns.  That would seem to be the moral of the week, as  Britain hears of a killing spree by an armed man.  The usual platitudes are being reeled out: "Were these guns licenced?" - yes, "How can you tell if someone will become a spree killer?" - you can't, "Should the gun laws be tightened?" - any tighter and people will just have to resort to buying them illegally.  24 hours after the Cumbrian massacre (let's just call it what it is) and anyone who wants to add their two penn'orth is adding it by the bucketload.  Including me.

Due to my working hours I caught the fallout of the killings on the  miracle that is the "rolling 24 hour news".  This service is largely redundant 90% of the time, but comes into its' own whenever there is a terrible disaster unfolding somewhere in the world.  You can be safe in the knowledge that your digital provider will pump the information straight into your living room while you remain cosy and detached listening to someone else's horror.

This is fine while it lasts.  Unfortunately for the press, today Cumbria has gone back to it's default setting of "the place where hardly anything ever happens".  The journalists are still there in droves waiting for the latest statement from the police, the local MP, the local hospital (how can updates on patients' conditions be of import to anyone but their families?) and any poor soul who consents to talk to them.  One journalist justified the fact that locals were wandering up to them and giving their side of this multi-faceted tale as "part of the grieving process".  What, having their image flashed across the televisions of Britain as interviewers press them for every single gruesome detail?  The press are hardly impartial observers, however much they protest otherwise.  The events must be reported, but already the bottom of the barrel is being scraped.  Viewers do not need to see the crumpled faces of the broken friends and relatives of the dead as they lay flowers.  The reports being sent are beginning to border on the exploitative.

There will be no firm resolution to this affair as Derrick Bird is dead, and only he can give the definitive account of why he chose to do what he did on June 2nd.  The rest is educated guesswork and speculation.  This can be done without the press on Whitehaven's doorstep coldly filming the aftermath of the unthinkable.