2011 — 11 January: Tuesday
Not having had1 a child of an age to require vaccination I've only casually followed the MMR and autism2 story as it twisted and turned. But this British Medical Journal blog entry makes for astonishing reading. Source and snippet:
On 21 November 1953, what is now Britain's Natural History Museum stunned both science and the public by calling the fraud in the case of "Piltdown Man." Today, the BMJ calls the fraud over medicine's missing link: the research linking MMR with autism.
This "Jesus and Mo" strip seems particularly apt, somehow. Not that I wish to sound dogmatic. Well, not before breakfast. It's 09:03, a balmy +8C, and looking rather moist out there. My first cuppa is a distant memory. My need for breakfast is a growing concern. And there's still nothing but Mozart on BBC Radio 3 (but only one more day to go). "All those notes, Amadeus, all those notes!"
Now why didn't I choose "Respectful Insolence" as my online motto (rather than "Blessed are the nonchalant...")? Too late now, it's already been put to good use here.
Angels dancing...
I have considerably less respect for Tony Blair than would fit into the footprint of one of that infinite number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. This astonishing assertion made me smile:
Common to all great religions is love of neighbors and human equality before God.
At least he contradicts himself in the next paragraph. What a piece of work is (that) man. And, by the way, what's with this tosh about "all great religions"? Surely — to borrow from Highlander — "there can be only one!" And that has to be the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No doubt in my mind...
The technology of...
... house contents removal has come a long way in the past 30 years — when Christa and I moved into our first rented furnished flat we had nothing, and when (17 months later) we moved into our first house we either lugged accumulated stuff on foot (across Old Windsor) or jammed it into the car. When I joined IBM in 1981 and we bought my present house, we did basically all our own moving of the books, records, and smaller stuff. Then Christa and Peter moved down here in September 1981 while I was off enjoying myself in Germany on a trainee writers' course :-)
Now that I'm temporarily trapped by the removals company lorry parked across my drive I've ample opportunity to see that the interior of the lorry is filled with essentially a series of wooden boxes into which my neighbours' furniture is being loaded. The really clever part is that each of these boxes can then be lifted on and off the lorry by a fork lift truck.
There's some blue sky visible. I shall celebrate with a cuppa. It's 11:35, or "lemonses" in my reckoning.
Good morning, Mr Postie...
Despite my keen interest in music, I never read "NME" or "Melody Maker". Or watched "Top of the Pops" or "The Old Grey Whistle Test". And I've been to fewer live performances than I need fingers to count them with. I remain unconvinced that you should ever meet your heroes. So the only "Live at Leeds" album I was aware of until three days ago was the one recorded by The Who. The fact that John Martyn also produced one, in 1975, had entirely passed me by...
... it sounds good, but I could have done without the chatter between the musical tracks.
I may be a self-deluding...
... fool,3 or (as my chum Brian has just suggested) it may be that I haven't been faithful to the one true religion, but I tend to think that since the Richter 10 event that was Christa's death other "stuff" tends not to register. So I can calmly chomp my chicken salad, listen to Air's "Talkie-Walkie", and learn that the ground floor of dear Mama's empty house in the Midlands has been somewhat moistened by a burst water pipe. (The one coming into the house before the water meter and the stop cock in the kitchen.) Thank goodness my cousin had already drained the rest of the system, otherwise (as she says) the ceilings would have come down (exactly as my neighbour's did a few weeks ago).
Worse things happen at sea. (And I never did like her choice of carpets.)
In my teens...
... one of my "thriller" writers was Alistair MacLean. Indeed, I still recall dear Mama commanding me to hand over4 my copy of H.M.S. Ulysses to Big Bro for him to read on his first flight to NZ back in 1970. I moved on to Hammond Innes, Geoffrey Jenkins, Helen MacInnes, Robert Littell, Desmond Bagley, Donald Hamilton, Donald Westlake... But two MacLeans still linger on my shelves: The Golden Rendezvous and this one:
I doubt if the 1972 film will prove to be as good as the book was, but we shall see.
Funny what sticks in the memory, isn't it? I never read the last MacLean I bought, as I'd given it to Dad for him to read during his final stint in hospital and neither saw it (nor wanted to) again. The final birthday present I gave him (a glass paperweight in the shape of a pear as, by then, he was blind, but it was a nice shape for him to handle) is now on dear Mama's windowsill in the care-home, though she doesn't seem to realise.
What goes up...
Back from a blagged cuppa over the road (thanks, Peter) to the not-entirely-unexpected news that the chaps I've just switched to for my gas and electricity are putting up their prices. I think I'm still ahead on the overall deal, however, compared with the previous mob. (Source.)
Returning to my opening autism theme...
... Mike lent me, and I've just watched, The Horse Boy. Rupert Isaacson's extraordinary story of his attempts at mitigating some of the symptoms of his son's Western autism with Mongolian shamanism. (There do indeed seem to be more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...! Possibly [in this case] mixed with genes from a manic-depressive maternal grandmother — an aspect picked up by the shamans without prior knowledge. Very interesting.)
Just found a lovely Nietzsche quote that was new to me:
Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
On that note: g'night!