Category: Society

Happy VD

(This is something of an extremely retrospective blog entry, given that the initial idea was laid down 6 months ago)

Today is St Valentine’s day, with all the corporately driven romantic BS that goes with it. Sure, I did some stuff to remind Simone that I really like her (a lot…) and that the only times I find our relationship frustrating are those times I can’t be with her, but I still was generally sceptical about the whole “you should express your affections today because Hallmark say so” sentiment underlying it all (did you know that Japan has separate Valentine’s type days, one for men to give to women and vice versa?).

That aside, I think that the funniest part of the day was when Sarah, one of the ortho reg’s I’m currently working with, arrived and announced to everyone in earshot, “Good morning everyone, Happy VD”. Now of course we all got the double entendre and chortled accordingly. Just like VD, Valentines days was one of those things that you ended up having inflicted upon you when you fell in love, and were cursed with for the rest of your life, whether you were still in love or not. 🙂

Alchoholic tendencies

Since starting work I have developed some interesting (semi) alcoholic tendancies.

Simone has commented on them.

My Mother has counselled me on not letting them get out of hand.

It’s all rather interesting.

Now I should probably clarify at this point that my drinking is still disconcertingly mundane (largely becuase I only have time to have a drink 2 or 3 evenings a week) and definitely within the safe range as defined by the department of health guidelines, but I still can’t help notice that between Simone and myself (OK, so it’s largely me), we do seem to have been making a pretty concerted dent in our liquor cabinet.

As a kid I never understood the appeal of a small whiskey after a hard day at work, or a little something before bed (as was the semi-regular habit of the father and mother respectively), but now I find myself following in my father’s footsteps of walking in the door, kissing my wife, loosening my tie (I’m not quite prosaic enough to call out “Honey, I’m home”) and heading for the amber relaxant (although I also quite like my Brandy, which sets me apart from my father who was a solely Whiskey man (although whiskey is probably still my drug of choice).

Now IÂ appreciate how wonderful it is for taking the edge off the world, and providing a cognitive separation between the discipline of work and the independance of home life.

As an aside I read a really fascinating article in New Scientist the other week about the possibilities for removing the negative effects (memory loss, nausea, addiction in alcoholics, etc) from Alcohol, by specifically blocking certain receptors in the brain that ethanol appears to act unfaovably on, while leaving other with pleasant effects (eg euphoria, social disinhibition) alone. It’s quite an interesting read. Unfortunately they make one point that in my mind guarantees to stop these effort from ever becoming reality – alcohol is regulated as a foodstuff, while anything that limited or modulated it’s effects would be regulated as a pharmaceutical with all the restrictions that go with that.

New Tobacco

Have you noticed recently how pervasive the whole mobile phone marketing apparatus has become?

It’s everywhere.

There are phone shops by the dozen in any shopping mall you walk into. Almost every sporting team or event has some sort of mobile phone sponsorship. Ads for plans and handsets are everywhere and seem to be constituting larger and larger segments of TV ad breaks.

In my mind I can’t help think that the other industries that have been able to employ these kinds of mega budget advertising campaigns have been the likes of alcohol and tobacco, and as a result I keep on wondering what skeleton is going to eventually come out of mobile phones’ cupboard…

After all, anything that lucrative cannot be entirely healthy or wholesome, can it?

Water and power from poo

Straight from the “How we should really be using our brains” files, comes this story about the guy who built the segway (if you have no idea what that is, have a look at the site: they are an astounding piece of engineering, but are equally a spectacularly frivolous toy in almost all applications) who has designed a 1kilowatt power plant and a ~1000L/day water purifier system that work by burning cow dung (or for that matter, just about anything you can find that you can set fire to…).

The notion is that if they can get the price of production down, and put one or two in each small african and asian village, then the villagers will have clean water (which in effect = no water borne illness, which = decreased illness, increased productivity, and better lives) and power for small applications (like a community refrigerator, or a light bulb in each house (which will allow them to spend evenings in recreation, education, or further productivity)).

For all the brilliance and creativity of our modern science and engineering, there are far too few of these ideas being developed as far as I can tell, and so we must loudly aplaud this guy for his genius and his social responsibility.

Imagine… a world without Yoko Ono

I was watching a bit of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony this morning, and while the ceremony was by and large pretty cool (I especially liked the acrobats doing the dove dance towards the end), I have to say that I really find Yoko Ono pretty blood pathetic.

She somehow involved herself in the ceremony, reading the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine, as some sort of poem to peace, and while I like the song, it’s lyrics, and the unquestionable genius of it’s original creator, I find it pretty sad that whenever Yoko wants to make some public statement or be in some public appearance she trots out Lennon’s work or memory for her own use.

If she had done other things of genuine note then it might be different, but as far as I can tell she’s simply another of those myriad irritating people who have remained famous simply for being associated with someone famous.

As one london Newspaper art critic put it: “”She’s shaped nothing, she’s contributed nothing, she’s simply been a reflection of the times…I think she’s an amateur, a very rich woman who was married to someone who did have some talent and was the driving force behind the Beatles. If she had not been the widow of John Lennon, she would be totally forgotten by now…Yoko Ono was simply a hanger-on. Have you seen her sculpture or paintings? They’re all awful.”

and while there is relative agreement in art circles that her early work in visual and performance art was contributory, she has certainly doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly note worthy in several decades, and the continual riding on the coat tails of John Lennon’s ghost seems rather pathetic and distasteful.

I always rely on the kindness of strangers

Today I made a major error of judgment and relied on the Public transport as part of my getting to the airport plans. Having arrived back at the hospital in time I wandered across to the train station in the rain, to find that there was a blockage on the line which had stopped all trains going into the city.
After a bit of cursing I managed to find another person who needed to get into the city and we agreed to share a taxi. Of course everyone else must have had the same idea, and we couldn’t get through to the taxis on the phone.
At this point I was starting to get a little anxious.
Then out of almost nowhere one of the other passengers waiting on the station asked if we were trying to get into the city, and offered us a ride, seeing as she was now going to have to drive in to the city so that she could get to work.
So I ended up getting a ride with a uni student in her early 20’s from west Australia in a souped up little Mitsubishi.
What can I say. I love the kindness of strangers. It absolutely saved the day…

Poor Whites

One of the interesting things I have noticed is that post-apartheid South Africa participates in equal opportunity poverty. Whereas the government used to pretty much guarantee a job for every white (apparently those who could do nothing else would be employed in the railways or in the post office…), now they don’t, and so while you don’t see as many whites within the poor and ultra-poor, you do see them, in the hopsital and begging on street corners and at traffic lights. It’s sad that anyone should be in that situation, but here I find it even more confronting because most of my previous experience has been that the poor tend to be non-white minority populations (and so somehow detached from my personal situation (I have rather startlingly realised since arriving here how easy it is to let your western upbringing and conditioning bring out some quite startling passively racists views in you)), and of course this is the first country I’ve spent time in where the resident minority population are whites.

Rubbish Bag Man

To illustrate the depth of the poverty and associated social problems here in Johnannesburg I just saw a guy walking along the side of the motorway wearing (literally) plastic rubblish bags and hessian sacks.

Garbage Men

Today is rubbish day here in parkview, and up until now I had always seen this suberb as something of an enclave of normality (from the perspective of my Oz/NZ upbringing) against the surrounding seas of hardship and poverty, but as I was driving to the hospital this morning I saw three separate guys looking through the neighborhood’s rubbish bins. There is a lot of prosperity in Johannesburg, and also a significant amount of economic development and improvement (particuarly in the poorer black areas), but with social problems so deep that it results in people scavenging through suburban rubbish bins, where do you start if you want to implement meaningful social improvement and change?

Predictable

Turns out that mobile phones can predict your behavior. Well not the phones themselves, but a computer program tracking where your phone goes, when you go certain places, and who you regularly come into proximity with.

After tracking you for a while it can pick up patterns of movement and socialisation, and can begin to (eventually quite accurately) predict your future movements etc on the basis of your historical actions.

I wonder how long it will take for the intelligence community to start doing it….