Archive for April, 2007
Vegas smells of cigars and cars
I’m in Las Vegas at the moment for a work thing, and there’s absolutely nothing to say about the place that hasn’t been said earlier and better by other people. But I did pick up a handy travel tip:
If you’re going on a long-haul flight and the first leg is a domestic one, when the travel agent says you need to be there three hours before take-off, they’re lying. And when you phone the airline to check, and they say the travel agent’s correct - “because you’re checking your bags all the way through, you need to be there early” - they’re lying too.
Airports suck at the best of times but they suck even more when you’re there two hours before the sodding check-in’s open.
Paracetamol and a hot water bottle: the cure for everything
I’d love to panic about Wi-Fi and mobile masts, but this is the stuff that really scares me.
The elderly mother of a woman I know hasn’t been well for some time, and her GP has prescribed a few things - water tablets to help her kidneys remove fluid, warfarin to keep her blood thin. Recently, though, she’s been complaining of shortness of breath, and of quite severe pains, so her daughter has called out the GP a few times.
Incidentally, the woman has dementia, so her short-term memory doesn’t really work. On one visit she asked the GP, “Why are you here?” and he boomed, “Mrs X, you have human rights! If you don’t want me to be here, I will leave!” Her appalled daughter made it very clear to him what would happen if he left without first checking her mother.
The verdict? Nothing to worry about. The pains are muscular. Take two paracetamol, hold a hot water bottle where it’s sore and it’ll sort itself out.
Her daughter wasn’t convinced but hey, doctors know what they’re doing. But when the shortness of breath got worse and the pain got worse, and the GP once again said paracetamol would solve the problem, the daughter took her mother to hospital.
It turns out that there’s a real cause for the shortness of breath: her lungs are so full of fluid that they’re barely functioning. One lung is down to 10% of its normal capacity and the other one isn’t so far behind. That’s treatable, though, and all you need to do is drain the lungs.
One wee problem with that. It turns out that the warfarin she’s on has been massively overprescribed, and her blood is so thin that any attempt to drain the lung would almost certainly kill her. So she needs to stay in hospital for a bit while they thicken her blood.
The good news keeps coming. Thanks to the water tablets - which the hospital doctor says should not have been prescribed for her at all - her kidneys are utterly fucked, and could be days away from outright collapse. Go home and prepare yourself, he tells the daughter. Your mum might not live through the weekend.
But she does, and her blood thickens up, and (eventually - the procedure was cancelled several times before going ahead) they drain the lung (which, I’m told, was extremely painful for her. It’s certainly not a barrel of laughs when you’re otherwise fit and healthy). One lung collapsed and couldn’t be re-inflated, which isn’t fantastic news. But the good news doesn’t stop there. There’s a reason for the fluid in the lungs: cancer. She has three different, very advanced and therefore untreatable, cancers: in her chest, in her gut, in her reproductive system.
You know someone’s situation is bad when you’re glad they suffer from dementia and aren’t entirely sure what’s happening or where they are.
Still, two paracetamol and a hot water bottle will sort her out.
Lost in translation
Ah, the joys of call centres. A company I spoke to last week sent me a letter, addressed to Migmass Strikes Again.
Migmass is next door, dammit!
Mobile bloody masts and wireless sodding networks
We’re doomed! says the Times.
We’re doomed! says the Independent.
Not so fast! say the people of Fark.com, destroying the Indy’s alleged expert with one beautiful, beautiful link and throwing in tedious little facts about the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation, how radiation exposure works, where wi-fi sits in the electromagnetic spectrum and why lightbulbs don’t kill you.
The curious case of the disappearing Blackberry
It’s Friday night, and Mrs Bigmouth and I are in a bar with friends. I’m heading outside for a smoke, and as I get my cigarettes out of my jacket I realise that my phone isn’t there.
“I’ve lost my phone,” I tell Mrs B.
“Did you bring it out with you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s probably in the car, then.”
“You’re right. It’s fallen out of my jacket in the car. I’ll look later.”
An hour or so later, we’re heading home. As we get in the car - me pissed, Mrs B. sober and shattered - I make her wait for ten minutes as I check every inch of the car for my missing mobile.
“It’s not in the car,” I say, eventually.
“It’s probably still in the house, then,” Mrs B says, preparing to drive away.
“Hang on! It might have fallen out when I got out of the car!” I say, hurling myself out of the passenger seat and checking underneath the car for my mobile. It isn’t there. I get in and we go home.
Half an hour later, we’re home. I’m wielding the house phone, redialling my mobile.
“It’s not in the house,” I say. “I’d hear it ring, and it’s definitely ringing, and I can’t hear it ringing. So it isn’t here.”
“Are you sure it’s not in the car?”
“Yes. But I’ll check anyway.”
I sit in the car, redialling the mobile, ear cocked for the tell-tale sound of the ringer. No sound in the car.
“Maybe it’s in the pub after all,” I decide. “I’ll call in the morning.”
I call the pub at 9am. No reply. 9.10am. No reply. 9.30am. 10am. 10.03am. Finally at 10.30am a pissed off-sounding cleaner answers. No, she won’t have a look for me. Call back when the staff are there, at noon.
I call my mobile another dozen times in the hope someone will answer it. I check the car again. No joy. I mentally retrace my movements from the night before. Hang on - I filled up the car before we went into town. The phone must have fallen out then.
I jump in the car, drive to the petrol station, ask whether the phone has been handed in. No. I go back out and peer at the ground around last night’s petrol pump. Nothing. I call my mobile a few times on the off chance I’ll hear it ring. Nothing. I drive home again.
I call the pub at 12.01. No, nothing’s been handed in. Leave your number, though, and we’ll call you if it turns up. I do.
Inspiration strikes. My phone’s definitely on! That means it’s registered with cell networks, and if it’s in town it’s easy to locate! I call O2.
“When my phone’s on, it registers with base stations, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does.”
“So you can tell me where it is?”
“Well, we can tell you where it was when it was last used.”
“Yeah, but you can get its location by triangulation, can’t you? That’s why the police always ask kidnappers to turn on their phone!”
“Er…”
“Can you do that? For me? Now?”
“Sorry, sir. We can’t. We don’t get that data for two or three days.”
Two or three days? I make a mental note: don’t get kidnapped.
“We can tell you when and where it was last used to make a call, though.”
My phone was last used the day before, in my home town, by me. Damn.
“If my phone is really lost, how much would a replacement be?”
£208 plus VAT. Damn.
I call the mobile a few more times in the afternoon, and then persuade Mrs B that we need to revisit last night’s bar. So we drive into town. I ask the bar staff if the phone’s been handed in. No. Is it OK if we go look? Yes. I come up with a clever plan. I’ll dial the mobile and Mrs B and I will listen for it. No luck. No ringing.
There’s a couple having a romantic drink in the corner we’d sat in last night. We go over, apologise for bothering them, ask them to move. Mrs B digs around the back of the seat to see if the phone’s there. I’m ringing the number and listening for a sound. The woman is being really helpful and digs around underneath the nearby bar stools. She doesn’t find anything and gets up, smacking the back of her head on the stool. It’s a very solid stool, made from a very solid bit of wood. She’s moving very quickly. There’s a very loud noise.
“Oh dear,” she says, her eyeballs rotating in their sockets.
“That was sore,” she adds, wobbling in her seat and turning very white.
“Are you okay?” Mrs B asks her, trying very hard not to laugh.
“Yes,” says the woman, as a lump grows Pinocchio-style on the back of her head. She’s clearly concussed.
“I don’t think the phone’s here,” I say. “We should probably go.”
Mrs B is going a funny colour as she fights against the giggles.
We go.
On the way back to the car I call the mobile a few more times, scanning the gutter for the tell-tale lights of a ringing mobile. Nothing. As we pull out of the parking space we see the couple from the bar. She’s rubbing her head and talking animatedly. She’s swaying a bit. I don’t think it’s because of booze.
We drive home. “Hang on!” I say. “I moved your parents’ car last night!” We pull into the driveway and peer through the window of their car. Between the front seats there’s a silvery gleam. It’s my mobile.
Mrs B gives me a look.
“Well,” she says. “At least nobody got hurt.”
Attack of the Big Issue sellers
Nothing much happens in my wee corner of suburbia, other than the odd crazed pensioner driving her car off a bridge in the pedestrian precinct (this happens a lot). But not today. We seem to be having a Big Issue turf war.
Until very recently there was one Big Issue seller in the town centre (which isn’t a very big town centre), and his pitch is just outside Marks & Spencer. He seems to have been replaced with a young girl, though, and an older woman. And another older woman. And a bloke. And another bloke. Depending on the time of day, they’ll be in the main street, outside Tesco, outside Marks & Sparks, at the train station or somewhere else entirely.
One of the blokes tends to favour Tesco, but apparently there was a fist-fight between him and a rival seller in the supermarket car park yesterday. This is according to a Tesco employee, who was telling this to the police. She was calling the police because today, the bloke is hanging around the junction where Tesco traffic joins a dual carriageway. Apparently he’s been perfecting his sales pitch, and today it involves jumping in front of cars and haranguing the occupants.
Needless to say I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. I suspect the new arrivals may be commuters from Glasgow. Is anyone else finding Big Issue sellers jumping in front of cars and punching one another in their previously peaceful town centres?
Guns don’t kill people, Bill Gates does
Jack Thompson rides again: the VT massacre was Bill Gates’ fault, because Microsoft published the Xbox version of Counter-Strike.
In other news, Rockstar Games gets the equivalent of a restraining order against Jack Thompson.
Making a killing from a massacre
Another, more ambitious, would-be profiteer asked for $100,000 for five sites he’d registered through GoDaddy, including vamassacre.com and vatechcarnage.com. He covered his ad in American flags and described his sites as “Great Domain Names for a Memorial Fund Development… Our Hearts go out to all the victims and families of Virginia Tech Massacre!”
Matt Owens opened bidding for virginia-tech-rampage.com at $1,000. He set his Buy It Now price at $10,000. On the listing, Owens wrote that virginia-tech-rampage.com is a “great domain name for development!” He posted a photo of an angel in a short white dress hovering next to a cross.
BBFC states the obvious about violent video games
The BBFC has published its research into video games, and there are some reasonably interesting stats about the preferences of male vs female gamers, the age groups playing games and so on. And in the not-very-surprising category:
younger games players are influenced to play particular games by peer pressure and word of mouth, but negative press coverage for a game will significantly increase its take up
“Ban this sick filth” coverage boosts sales! Who’d have thunk it?
For God’s sake, vote
The Scottish elections take place in a few weeks, giving the country the chance to choose from the usual bunch of yahoos with slightly different ideas about how best to make the country worse. No matter how cynical you are, though, you need to vote. The barbarians are at the gates.
Well, not barbarians. Christian nut-jobs.
Under the Scots voting system, minority parties stand a good chance of getting a place in the Parliament - and one such party is the Scottish Christian Party, whose platform (I hope) would offend any right-minded Christian. Their manifesto contains lots of gems, like this:
The Scottish Christian Party believes that the provision of Christian religious education should be mandatory, (with no obligation to promote ther faiths), the history curriculum should reflect Scotland’s rich Christian heritage and the science curriculum reflect the evidence of creation/design in the universe.
And this:
The Scottish Christian Party would seek to replace the standard of beyond reasonable doubt’ with the more biblical ‘evidence of two or three reliable witnesses’, reducing the tendency for the guilty to evade justice.
And this:
The Scottish Christian Party will seek that the Mechanical Copyright protection enjoyed by songwriters should be extended to featured recording artists and record producers.
You just know there’s a bitter musician in the party somewhere, don’t you?
Anyway, back to seriousness: they’re the usual anti-evolution, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-progress lot, whose big concerns are about evil gays, sneaky sex-changers (they’re very upset that people who’ve had sex changes don’t have to tell anyone; presumably they’d prefer it if transgender people had to wear a big badge and maybe ring a bell too), parents not being allowed to beat their kids (not being able to smack the weans is a form of child abuse, says the manifesto), swings being swung on Sundays in defiance of the Lord, and all that shite.
But - thanks to our voting system, we have to take them seriously. While you or I might think “ah, voting’s a waste of time”, their supporters will definitely be “putting their cross beside The Cross”, as the leaflets put it. And I suspect that if sensible people are apathetic and don’t bother voting, there’s enough idiots in Scotland to give them a few seats.