The Happy Wanderer

Another Mark Twain quotation that I have come across recently is

"Travel is fatal to prejudice".

If I won a fortune on the Lottery (which is pretty unlikely since I very rarely purchase a ticket), I'd probably buy a fancy car and a bigger house, but the most radical change I'd make to make to my life would be to travel further and more often.

Travel really does broaden the mind, and the more exposure I've had to people in other countries, the more I get the feeling that humans of different nationalities have far more similarities than differences. Contact with people in their own countries tends to expose the falsehood of racial stereotypes. It lets you see that, for example, not all Irish people are feckless and stupid, not all French people are arrogant and rude, not all Americans are intent on world domination, and finally not all Germans have no sense of humour (thanks to memepool).

Who'd Be A Vegetarian?

My partner in the practice, Dr Death, is a vegetarian. Vegetarians are often the subject of cruel carnivore jokes about them "being as weak as water", "not living longer but just feeling as if they do", etc., etc. For the record, Dr Death is much stronger than I am, and has climbed mountains around the world, including The Eiger.

I like meat, always have done, but if I had to slaughter the animals in order to eat them I think I'd quickly become a vegetarian myself. Most carnivores rarely consider the fact that animals have to be killed in order to produce the pristine, sanitised packages that fill the refrigereated cabinets of our supermarkets. Those that do think about the subject somehow rationalise it by saying that these animals only exist because they were created for food production: as if this makes their lives less valuable!

So-called humane slaughter is bad enough, but needless cruelty towards the animals concerned just to allow multi-national fast food chains to make even more dollars is totally unacceptable. This video clip (via A Girl With A [Dot] Com) about Kentucky Fried Chicken's abysmal animal rights record is truly sickening. I'll never eat another KFC "Bargain Bucket" again!

Makes you think doesn't it? Can you be sure that the animal that provided your meal tonight "didn't feel a thing"?

A Blessed Hiatus

Gsog has sat his final exam, thank goodness. We're now relieved, for a couple of months, of the burden of having to nag him to work. As always, it's difficult to be sure how well he's done. Last year he did surprisingly well in his standard grade examinations with practically zero effort. It's hard to believe that he can get away with it again!

Although we're grateful for the length of the break, it is a bit of a nuisance to have to wait for the denouement in August. In the interim, the three of us will be having a holiday together again in July in Kefalonia in Greece. Gdog will be spending much of the time settling into her little bachelor girl pad in The Big City.

I suspect this may be the "Calm Before The Storm", but we'll see....

Help For The Lazy Blogger

Is your Muse no longer upon you? Are you tense, nervous and irritable, your keyboard moist with the sweat of performance anxiety (not that performance!)?

Never fear, help is here in the shape of Autoblogger! Ever wonder how all those clever little bloggers churn out those effortless reams of witty prose? Maybe Autoblogger does it for them, and they actually have a life after all?

A Shaky Hand....

Mark Twain, the smug bastard, once commented "He wrote in a doctor's hand---the hand which from the beginning of time has been so disastrous to the pharmacist and so profitable to the undertaker."

Like many doctors, my handwriting, for which I won plaudits at primary school, seems to get worse every year. I think the rot set in at university, where I soon realised that I was incapable of writing both quickly and neatly. Things got worse as a junior hospital doctor, when the working hours were much worse than the cushy conditions enjoyed by the current generation of young docs. Then you were expected to write copious notes while barely able to stand, or keep your eyes open.

Now that I'm an established practitioner, the paperwork mountain seems to grow bigger every year, despite assurances from various sources that attempts will be made to cut down bureaucracy for GPs. My writing is so bad that sometimes even I have difficulty reading it! Slowing down makes no difference, and I suspect I am now incapable of writing neatly, no matter how hard I try. As far as I am aware, no misreading of my spidery scribble has had fatal consequences for any of my patients, but maybe I shouldn't tempt fate. Twain has an irritating habit of being proved right, after all.

Interestingly, my late father had very neat legible handwriting, and my sister's script is eminently legible. I can't argue that my genes are against me. Maybe I should fight my usual pessimism, and look here!

One For The Star Wars Fans?

Many thanks to Sapientium for pointing me in the direction of this parody of the new Star Wars film. The real film is likely to be better produced, but I don't think it will be half as funny!

One For The Show-offs....

Here's the computer keyboard for the the smug smarty pants types among you!

You wonder why geeks that use this sort of thing need a monitor. Can't they just visualise and memorise what they type (presumably at lightening speed)?

The Last Page?

There you are, you've finally got there. Now naff off and do something more useful!

And just to make sure, switch the damn thing off!

A New Recipe

Entertaining can be stressful. It's always difficult to think of something new to give your guests. Fortunately, the Web is full of useful information, including this tasty recipe!

Please note that no spiders were harmed in the making of this sequence of images (honest).

Time On Your Hands?

Suffering a bit from blogger's block just now, but here's a link for those who delight in watching paint dry....

One In A Million

Have you ever wanted an idea of how big a number 1 million was?

Well here's pi to 1 million decimal places (I've checked, honest)....

Not quite sure what the point of this is!

Tagged!

I've been tagged by Shooting Parrots. Here are the instructions:

What follows is a list of different occupations. You must select at least five of them. You may add more if you like to your list before you pass it on (after you select five of the items as it was passed to you). Of the five you selected, you are to finish each phrase with what you would do as a member of that profession. Then pass it on to three other bloggers.

If I could be a scientist... I'd discover the cure for cancer, then be unbearably smug for the rest of my life.

If I could be a farmer... I'd sing "I've got a brand new combine harvester" day and night and drive my family demented!

If I could be a musician...

If I could be a doctor...

If I could be a painter...

If I could be a gardener... I'd maybe have a lawn that's 90% grass instead of 90% moss!

If I could be a missionary...

If I could be a chef...

If I could be an architect...

If I could be a linguist... I'd be ever so cunning!

If I could be a psychologist... I'd find out what makes Gsog tick, and set about "reprogramming" him!

If I could be an athlete...

If I could be a lawyer...

If I could be an innkeeper...

If I could be a professor...

If I could be a writer...

If I could be a backup dancer...

If I could be a llama-rider...

If I could be a bonnie pirate... I'd make Orlando Bloom and Jonny Depp look positively ugly!

If I could be a midget stripper...

If I could be a proctologist... I'd start at the bottom and work my way up!

If I could be a TV-Chat Show host...

If I could be an actor...

If I could be a judge...

If I could be a Jedi...

If I could be a mob boss...

If I could be a backup singer...

If I could be a CEO...

If I could be a movie reviewer...

If I could be a monkeys uncle...

If I could be a CSI...

If I could be a computer nerd...

If I could be a Kindergarten teacher... I'd probably strangle the little buggers to prevent them developing into teenagers!

That's me done. Now I'm tagging Alfie, Roger and Birdman...

This is a Joke, Right?

Thankyou to Bifurcated Rivets for pointing me in the direction of RentMySon.com. This is a fairly basic website through which trusting parents apparently (surprise, surprise) rent out their male child for various menial tasks. In the spirit of political correctness, there's also a sister site called, well, RentMyDaughter.com. The boys on RentMySon all seem to specialise in "proms" and "parties", apart from little Zach who allegedly helps single men attract women by making them look "the father type". The problem is, I'm not absolutely sure if they are taking the piss or not?

As an experiment, I was thinking of registering Gsog with RentMySon, but I couldn't decide what to put down as his specialties. How about "Provides sound sleepers with experience of insomnia" or "Allows those with high blood pressure a chance to check out the effectiveness of their medication"?

Then, of course, there's Gdog....

Nice To See You?

I'm not, by nature, a very gregarious individual. I don't really like parties much unless I know the participants well. I'm very poor at making "small talk". Like other professional groups, University Medical Years, for reasons I'll never understand, seem to feel obliged to have reunions: usually every five years. They are often organised by the people in the year who were pathologically socially active at University. These folk were always arranging this and that, whether anyone wanted them to do so or not. Organising a reunion of a class of 200 or so people is no minor feat, especially when the people concerned may be scattered across the globe, but, for God's sake, no one forces the buggers to do it!

I've only been to one of these Year Group Reunions. We were living in a slightly remote part of Scotland at the time, and for once the party was being held in a hotel quite close to us. This made refusing the invitation a little harder than usual. I had been a bit depressed, for reasons I won't go into, and Wosog thought that attending the "do" might cheer me up. How wrong can you be?

There were one or two people at the reunion that I didn't mind seeing again, but there were several who I really would rather have never seen again. There was one guy in particular, who had been a total proctalgia fugax at university. He had gone to the USA and was now, appropriately enough, a successful gastroenterologist (or so he told us in endless detail). Then there was the guy who was generally agreed to be a total buffoon at university. He turned out to now have some lofty position controlling a budget of several million pounds! All in all it was a thoroughly dispiriting experience, and I vowed never to go to one of these events again.

I wouldn't like you to think, from the last paragraph, that I have difficulty coping with the success of others. By and large, I am quite happy with my lot in life and I don't begrudge colleagues for whom I have genuine respect their little triumphs. I'm not so sure about this guy though!

Hell hath no fury....

Wosog went to visit her friend Julie two days ago with another friend, Karen. As you can imagine, the conversation ranged far and wide, but one topic was a woman who Karen knew that played a rather nasty trick on an unsuspecting ex-boyfriend. We'll call the couple Jack and Jill.

The two had been together for a long time, but it was apparent that, although Jack was very fond of Jill, the real love of his life was his fancy motor car on which he lavished far more attention than he did on his girlfriend. After some time, the two drifted apart and it became clear that their relationship didn't have a future. Jill knew that they were about to split up, but she was bitter, and wanted revenge not only on Jack, but on the mechanical monster that had usurped her.

While Jack was at work, Jill took a plastic TicTac container that still had two mints in it, and carefully taped it inside the glove compartment of Jack's Pride and Joy. In the fullness of time the couple finally split up, but Jill continued observation of her ex-boyfriend through mutual acquaintances. It seemed that the poor man had started to notice an irritating "rattle" emanating from his beloved car that defied the analytic powers of a veritable army of expensive mechanics. Several hundred pounds down the road, Jack finally parted company with the car, and bought something more practical, and Japanese. He was never quite the same again....

Bloody devious these women aren't they?

You Rang?

First Dream
Originally uploaded by noqontrol.

Another Flickr contributor that I came across recently is Noqontrol. His profile doesn't reveal much about him, but some of his images are amazing: often surreal, frequently grotesque.

Why not check him out?