BBC NEWS | Health | Neonatal units ‘are overwhelmed’

I can’t get over some people. A charity has commissioned some research into UK neonatal units and found that they were “overwhelmed”.

They then go on to say that “..putting in 2,700 additional nurses could save the lives of up to 500 babies a year.” Well, that’s proportionate, isn’t it? How many adult lives could an extra 2,700 intensive care nurses save? What about specialist palliative care nurses?

It’s not even as if there are decent long-term outcomes for a lot of premature babies that require neonatal intensive care.

What really galls me is that services for elderly people are woeful – disgraceful in fact – and these are people who have paid taxes all their lives.

Dickheads.

God, I’m on one today and I’ve not even started yet!

Just had this e-mail

“Following the terrible events of the London bombings, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell, and Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone have announced that a two-minute silence for victims of the London bombings is to take place at 12.00 noon today (Thursday 14 July 2005).

Staff may wish to observe this silence as a matter of respect if they are able to do so.

Regards

Communications Officer”

In other words: “Shut the fuck up, or you’ll be seen as an uncaring cunt!”

No doubt, we’ll also get the usual, “I don’t know if you know, but we’re having a 2 minutes’ silences for the London bombs at midday, so…” from somebody hovering at the door, but only after going on about how hot they are and how hot it got in the office yesterday afternoon and how it’s going to cool down and how they can’t cope!

I wouldn’t mind, but they’ve only just stopped talking about the attacks here. Thank fuck they didn’t happen in the local bloody town!

I think all these two minutes’ silence are getting a bit much. Is there a sliding scale of grief or respect? I mean how do the holocaust and the World Wars compare with the Asian tsunami, 11th September, Madrid and London? I think we should have at least 30 minutes’ silence for the World Wars if that’s the case. And what about the 1918-19 flu pandemic? That one got about 50million people worldwide!

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t demonstrate their respect for the victims, or their outrage at the attacks and the twisted philosophy behind them, but for some things, we really do need to get a grip or we’ll never get on with our lives.

Perhaps I’m just a twat.

An Edit: Our Communications Officer (who is lovely, but has a duty to communicate anything that people ask her to) has just sent out a “thought for the day”, which has been put together by the Chaplaincy Team. It “may be of comfort to staff at this time”. Is it just me? Is there something wrong with me that finds this sort of thing utter bollocks?

And they wonder why we’re £7 million in debt.

For fuck’s sake it was a terrible event, appalling, outrgaeous, disgusting. I have sympathy for the victims and their families. But please, get a fucking grip people!

I blame Princess Diana.

Getting ready this morning; I’d got out of the shower and lifted the toilet cover to discover we’d been invaded by aliens:

More disturbing was the realisation that I’d had my morning tinkle and flushed immediately before I’d closed the toilet lid: the fucking bastard must’ve been right near my arse all the time!

Fucker.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that it’s something that was in my curry last night that’d transmutated in my colon. But that would mean that I’d lied about only having a tinkle (which is true, at least at that point), or that it actually came from my front bottom, which it didn’t. In fact, it didn’t come from either of my bottoms, it came from outer space I’m TELLING YOU!

It must’ve been constructed from some sort of organic alloy or resin that was resistant to TWO flushes:

DIE, you fucking bastard from hell!

After the events in London last week, a campaign is gathering pace for people to have their emergency contacts clearly visible in their mobile by prefixing important phone numbers with ICE: In Case of Emergency.

How clever.

Anyway, I’ve done mine:

Poor Mothers around the world are going to be getting ever so excited to think that their offspring have finally decided to contact them, only to discover that they’ve been involved in a horrible accident.

You can imagine the scenario should some disaster befall the Cakesniffer and Mother be contacted:

“Hello, Mrs Cakesniffer. This is Constable Bleeuurghh from Greater Manchester Police. I have some bad news, there’s been a terrible accident on the motorway and all that remains of your daughter and her 2 tonne Nissan is this bit of plastic; it’s a bit scratched, but it’s in perfect working order.”

Mother would quite rightly be shocked, but I’m sure she’d soon get over it and then be thrilled at being able to upgrade her phone with my old one before the end of my 12 month tie-in period.

Of course, when the Government has its way and we’re all microchipped, all those that don’t carry mobiles will be identifiable too.

The Cakesniffer is no more!


Sorry guys. Trillion here. This is a takeover.

The blogger you all know as Tina has decided that she no longer wishes to devote so much of her time providing pleasure to you all. Instead, she has left to join a band of travelling librarians.

The lure of the blogging community can no longer compete with evenings of certain ‘costume dramas’, regular games of rounders and I dare say a fair bit of connielingus (shock news: yes that is a real word but she’s yet to discover its meaning!).

They’re a rough lot, those librarians!

So, it is through Tina’s selfish abandoment of her loving nightly audience that I have braved the near suffocating temperatures of my attic-cum-den-cum-office-oh-cum-on-baby! to bring you this breaking news. Right at this moment, she’s gorging herself on a post-match curry. Yeah, you heard right. Curry! Without Trillion. Hope they forget the garlic wings.

I’ll make you regret the day you taught me how to html!

[Edit: See also “Too quick to judge” (below)]

The problem with speaking the best language in the world is that loads of other people have adopted it too – Bloody British Empire! Because of this, there are lots of different versions of English and not all represent the same language.

Now, not being a linguist myself and having a limited knowledge of English grammar (just a working one really), I’m not qualified to get into an argument about the differences between UK (proper) and US (fly by night) English. However, as a user of UK English, I’m perfectly justified in getting totally fucking pissed off with Microsoft Fucking Office for always defaulting to US bastard ENGLISH! Fuckers!!!! (And this comes after my defence of Microsoft earlier, hypocritical bitch that I am).

You install Office and you can cope with menus and things being written in US English, you have no choice (although I don’t see why we can’t have a British English version since the Welsh and all other languages have their own). Anyway, US English menus and shite you can cope with, but you set all your defaults for Word, Outlook, Powerpoint – Office in fact – to UK English. Everything goes brilliantly: you tippy-tappy away, write your documents, send your e-mails, and everything is nice, in good old Blighty Lingo. Then you get an e-mail that you open in Outlook, you need to reply or forward it and something very, very annoying happens: it defaults back to US English!

I’ve actually written this after the “English” post, but I wanted it to appear below it on the page so I’ve just fiddled with the time. Never realised you could do that… clever…

Anyway, for those of us who have been villifying good old Microsoft, I actually had a look through the office menu and I saw this:

British drivers tend to spend a lot of time in their cars, going nowhere. The same is true in many parts of the world for people who need to drive to get to and from work, or to carry out daily chores.

In-car entertainment systems can help alleviate the boredom of being stuck in traffic; switching between radio stations, changing CDs, even trying a good old cassette. But soon the novelty wears off and the poor, trapped motorist’s attention drifts again. They become tetchy and irritable – this can be made worse if the weather’s particularly hot, or the driver needs to go toilet (just ask Trillion about last Monday when Coldplay were on a the footie stadium that she passes on her way home).

But what other things can a person do when they’re stuck behind the wheel? This is what I find myself doing:

• Option one is always phone Trillion. A (hands-free) conversation can help keep you awake and you can also establish your relative positions in the traffic (we share part of the route home). If you find that you’re relatively close (a few cars away) you can turn your stereo up and have a sing song through the traffic without even needing the phone.
• Repeatedly squirt screenwash. Can’t help it. I don’t know whether it’s an addiction to the smell of the solvent or what.
• Wipe dust off dashboard with an index finger.
• Check car is in neutral – over and over again.
• Use eye lasers to vaporise cars ahead of you in the queue.
• Play with trip computer. You can see how many miles you done on that tank of petrol, how many miles you’ve got left, how long you’ve been driving on that tank/trip, what your fuel consumption is and also your average speed. Brilliant. Watch in despair as your fuel consumption plummets from 35mpg to about 28mpg over the course of your journey home.
• Pelvic floor exercises. Well, not really, but this all depends on how full your bladder is – the discomfort is psychosomatic and is inversely proportional to your speed.
• Play with stereo settings. How much bass, loudness and volume can you have before the speakers blow up?
• If all these fail to relieve the bordeom, go for ROAD RAGE. There’s nothing like getting involved in a bit of argy-bargy to take your mind off the fact that you haven’t moved in 20 minutes. This gives the driver the opportunity to use their full vocabulary of “colourful” language.

Motoring irritations
These aren’t irritations that are inflicted on motorists by their fellow road users. I’m referring to things about your own car that drive you to distraction.

• Squeaky, streaky windscreen wipers.
• Idiopathic rattles: you’ll be driving along there’ll be something unidentifiable rattling or squeaking, just generally making an irritating noise somewhere inside the car.
• Indicator switches – do they have to be so loud?
• Speaker distortion – my own fault, that one.
• “Devil in my car” stereo: the cleverer car stereos get, the more things that go wrong with them. Mine has this thing that increases the volume the faster I go. Brilliant! But it sometimes changes the volume, up and down, for no reason whatsoever. The traffic bulletins often kill the CD too.

Of course, left hand drive cars and North American models may have different problems associated with them…

People who wear watches tend to wear them day in, day out and never give them a thought until the battery needs replacing or the face gets destroyed in a drunken fall. But watch straps are disgusting things: over time, they accumulate bits of skin and God knows what else between the links, on the back and around the crown of the watch itself.

Dr Cakesniffer sports a Seiko these days, although she did favour a Tag Heuer for many years. The Tag Heuer has a rotating bezel and this is a great dirt trap, especially for people with lab-based jobs who wear powdered latex gloves.

Let’s see what happened when Tina decided to treat her Seiko to a bath today…

This is what it looked like to start off with. I think this could be about 3 months’ worth of cack.

The watch was suspended in a solution of fabric detergent and the effects were immediate; the dirt is visibly dispersing in the third frame.

After an hour or so and a quick rinse, the watch is much cleaner.

Unlike the bathwater:

Only just got up after a codeine-induced lie-in.

After conducting a little experiment in her virtual laboratory, Dr Cakesniffer presented her results to her peers in the Blogosphere:

Introduction
Weblogs (“blogs”) provide contributors with the opportunity to project their ideas, present their work or create online journals via the a user-friendly interface of a personal webpage. The quality of blogs is variable and, although no systematic reviews of blog quality exist, anecdotal evidence suggests that most are poor quality, incomplete, and ill thought-out piles of crap. It was therefore timely to conduct some preliminary work in order to collect pilot data that will inform protocol development for a larger study.

Methodology
All blogs currently represented in the Cakesniffer blogroll, plus a selection of others, were visited sequentially. After the pages were allowed to fully load, the “Next blog” button was pressed in order to activate the migration from the named site. The resultant pages were viewed and the urls recorded.

Results

Angry Chimp > http://mkumanipulators.blogspot.com “MKU Manipulators”

The fridge-mag.net > no next blog button

connielingus > http://deanmichael.blogspot.com “Sisyphus today”

pissoff > http://eleternodejavu.blogspot.com “El eterno deja vu”

Trillobites > http://scifipundit.blogspot.com “Sci-Fi pundit”

Walls come tumbling > not blogger

Karentertainment > http://fatdans.blogspot.com/ “Dan’s poker story”

Aasmodeus > http://ummlayla.blogspot.com “The Egyptian’s wife”

How can it seem so right? > http://chiangi-san.blogspot.com “Chiangi”

Cakesniffers beware! > http://ieouaarticlesofliberty.blogspot.com “Articles of liberty”

Dreamer’s reality > http://speedating.blogspot.com “Speedating”

Idiot roommate blog > http://top-mortgages-info.blogspot.com “The mortgage guide blog”

Why oh why must everyone have a blog? > next post button
not operational because of making poverty history banner

Blog convict > http://manifestomusical.blogspot.com “Manifesto – musical”

Post secret > no next post button

Half an identity > http://all-about-golf.blogspot.com “All about golf”

The table shows the originating page and “next blog” for each blog in the Sniffy Blogroll. The “next blogs” were generally not very interesting, some consisted of advertising sites, none warranted any action other than copying the url and blog title.

Conclusions
Most blogs are shit. How I found Angry Chimp amongst that crap is beyond me.

Next time you’re visiting a blog and you think “This is really good”, tell the author and tell your mates.