2012 — 26 December: Wednesday
Fan though I am1 of doing things along "JIT" lines, it occurs to me that I'm starting to cut things a bit fine for my 2012 batch (year, not quantity) of Xmas greeting emails. We may just have to do something about that, David. But not before breakfast.
I've been wondering whether to watch the Toby Jones / Sienna Miller film "The Girl" this evening. Mind you, I doubt it will tell me much that I hadn't already gleaned over a quarter of a century ago from my copy of Donald Spoto's mildly over-heated 1983 book "Dark side of genius: Hitchcock". I picked that up in a strongly over-heated Florida in July 1984. (Really not the best month for a business-related visit — I was testing my draft of the CICS Application Programming Primer on a batch of IBM and non-IBM COBOL batch programmers.)
How time flies, heh? Now, about that next cuppa...
Am I going mad?
Looks like I won't know until I'm 74!
The Government will require GPs to perform dementia screening when patients aged over 74 attend the surgery for their own reasons. This is not based on evidence. The UK National Screening Committee, which
advises the Government on the evidence for screening, concluded in June 2010 that screening for Alzheimer's Disease "Should not be offered". Why is the Government ignoring their advice?
The danger of this policy is that it will divert the resources needed to care properly for people with dementia to people who are managing well and have minor cognitive changes that do not affect their
lives. This is especially dangerous as people with severe dementia are least able to raise concerns about their care.
Of course, by then it may be too... Hang on. What was I saying? Who am I?
Unamusingly, I was only browsing the Torygraph site in the first place looking (unsuccessfully) for the item reported via a sound bite by the BBC Radio 3 announcer chappie about the halving to 1,878 of the number of UK bookshops in the past seven years (a period that I acidly note coincides with my retirement). Masochists will also find Boris Johnson's tongue in cheek (?) assessment of "50 shades of grey" (which I read and enjoyed) and a Korean 'dance?' video sensation that has somehow completely eluded my attention. The news that several Tory MPs in "safe" seats are all willing to resign to give him an easy route back into Parliament is, somehow, almost infinitely depressing.
Scott Adams' blog...
... remains reliably entertaining:
I've never wanted to run for Congress until now. The job looks boring, but I'm attracted to a system that punishes total strangers for my bad performance. I assume this is some sort of "best practice" that our government is borrowing from a successful system elsewhere. So starting today, if you tell me you don't like my blog, I will pay a stranger to kick another stranger in the nads. If Congress is right about the trigger concept, you should see a big improvement in my blogging performance. I'm all about incentives.
About that breakfast... [Pause] Followed by a late lunch, of course.
While I try...
... to avoid dipping twice in the same well on any one day, a snippet from the current "Private Eye" Medicine Balls column suggesting that the NHS is heading for its own fiscal cliff...
... sits quite nicely alongside another equally provocative snippet from "Mr Dilbert":
You might also want to walk down the hall of a medical facility that handles people in their final months of life. You won't see anything in the eyes of the patients that looks like happiness. It's truly horrifying. Our local facility is upscale and well-run, but it still feels like walking through a meat storage facility in which the meat feels pain and depression.
He speaks the truth.
Next thing I know, it's time to satiate the Inner Man (yet again).
Having reached the end of letter "M" and manhandled 23,731 MP3 files (give or take) I think I shall give it a rest for a while. G'nite.