Sitting watching Dr Alice Roberts: Don’t Die Young which is all about male reproductive organs. This has got to be a guy’s worse nightmare: An attractive woman giving sex education!

Although it has got some pretty cool images including a couple having sex in an MRI scanner. Romantic!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00cv2vd/

Its sunny. I have a pint in my hand. Im sitting outside a pub.
Bliss.

I spent a long time sitting in the district hospital today.

It gave me time to think. About life and my place in it. About the people in my life. And the people not in it.

There’s lot of people to watch in a hospital waiting room. Most looking a little nervous. But then who wouldn’t be. There’s the older looking guy with the glasses. Hes got a paper with a dirty magazine hidden behind it. I know because every time he goes to turn the page he goes through the motion but doesn’t actually do it. When he leaves he rolls it up tightly and I catch a glimpse of it before he tucks it inside his jacket. Then there’s the teenage girl waiting with her mum. She doing a good job of looking bored and uninterested but whenever she speaks her voice falters slightly. She keeps glancing at her watch as well. There’s also the young woman on the other side of the room whose face is covered in bruises and cuts. She has a concerned looking friend with her who looks even more uncomfortable than she does. What’s here story?

All waiting to be called in to see the doctor. You might have an idea of what they’re going to say or recommend but you can never be sure.

Who chooses what colour to paint a hospital? And why do they always choose pink or yellow. Or off-white. If the room was stripped out of all its fittings you could still tell exactly where you were. The low dirty ceiling tiles, the rubber bump strip around the wall at a height slightly too low to actually protect it and the yellowing fire detector in the middle of the ceiling. The posters on wall look like they’ve been there for years and warn against the risks of smoking, drugs use and missing appointments. Presumably  they lead to the say thing. The receptionist is constantly hacking away at her computer, occasionally turning round as the old style dot matrix printer screams into life and spews fourth a stream of paper which is neatly separated in to different treys.

Most of the staff at the hospital seem to wonder round as if nothing is urgent. Its only the odd few and patients on their way out that go anywhere at speed. People in smart uniforms and peaked caps come through while other do their rounds with trolleys laden with paperwork. There are very few people in wheelchairs. That surprises me for some reason.

GLENDA COOPER in The Daily Telegraph had “a fantasy that, come nine o’clock on a Sunday evening, as Top Gear finishes transmitting on BBC2, a curly-haired man wearing slightly too tight denim trousers leaves the studios, looks furtively around him, before hap¬pily cycling off into the night to recycle newspapers, cook a lentil bake and then settle down to sing his favourite Elton John songs. Surely even Jeremy Clarkson deserves an hour or two off a week from being Clarkson?”

My current avatar, in use in several forums.

I’ve just been to the dentist and it’s not good news. She found one hole in a tooth which needs to be filled but she also said I need to have to have two of my wisdom teeth out. My wisdom teeth are a little strange because they grow at right angles from the back of the jaw towards the front. That’s not been a problem before now and they were probably never going to even erupt. However the gum has receded away from one of them and is starting to go on the other leaving a cavity (where the uneven ‘top’ of the wisdom tooth is resting against the tooth next to it. She said it’s only going to decay and its best that they go as because they are on their side they can’t be filled properly. So I’ve been referred to the local Dental Access Clinic whatever one of those is.

Fun

It’s a Conservative policy I agree with.  Well that and the scrap the ID card one…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7176032.stm

http://waiterrant.net/?p=65

I was browsing around tonight and re-found the Wychwood Brewery website and their gift shop. They sell a pack of posters with some of the beautiful artwork of Bob Venables on them. I was about to buy when I realised I have nowhere to put them.

Nevermind.

Here are some of the Wychwood Posters and a couple of other choice morsels you may recognize.

Other Bits

Peterborough Regional College recently installed London underground style swipe entry and exit barriers. We all have to carry an RFID transmitter embedded in our student cards around with us.

The college said it installed the barriers for fire saftey and for general security but over the last few weeks I have managed to prove (albeit just to my self for now) that flaws in the gates design and implementation mean that these two issues are not addressed.

The big problem I have with them is the massive queues that form for people trying to get in and out of the college and the fact that we were not told that we were carrying around a transmitter. No one seems able to tell me what is on the cards.

I found one of the visitors cards in the car park yesterday and performed a little dissection:

Photos and description here

I think this is worth fighting. The college can’t just implement something with this range of privacy concerns without any consultation and with out explaining the risks. Without wanting to be melodramatic RFID tags have been linked to cancer and even the US Department of Homeland Security do not consider it appropriate to use them for tracking humans.

The rights of the ‘free’ world are slowly being eroded. At some point we are going to turn around a realize that we don’t have any rights left.

Thoughts anyone?