May 29th 1835
From Eugenie De Guerin’s journal: (pardon the accent omissions)
“Never did a storm last so long, it is raging yet. For the last three days the thunder and rain have held their revels. All the trees bend under the deluge: it is cruel to see them look so wearied and faint amidst the bright triumph of May…”
May! Jaysus! A three-day storm in May? Crikey. A nice meteorological nugget to ponder from 1835 as we brace for global warming.
Einstein’s Fiddle
Einstein partial to the fiddle: interesting radio piece on Einstein’s relationship to the violin here.
Richard Ford
Richard Ford in yesterday’s Graun:
“Writing doesn’t just come, it requires a lot of furrowing of my brow,” he says, which is one reason he has rarely written about some elements of his life – hunting and fishing, for example – that he would rather just do: “If I wrote about those things, I’d have to be thinking and thinking and thinking.”
He is dyslexic, which he believes may account for his need to concentrate, in his view, particularly hard. “I have to work at making the things that I hear, and also the things that I read, break into my thinking, otherwise they can go right by me in a blur…”
I’m familiar with that blur, it’s reassuring to have it articulated thus….since I assumed a lack of sleep was at the root of it.
Freethinking encore
Tis back. The Freethinking Festival is on in Liverpool and BBC Radio 3 right now. Last year there were some interesting ruminations on the brain.
Check it out this year here
Fr Rumsfeld
The small Puffin and I have been scouring the Fr Ted Parish Magazines for reading material. We’re particularly gone on the Fishtank shop adverts. I’m sunk with confusion as to how anyone who wasn’t raised a Catholic and is a raging ice hockey fan could relate, at such a tender age, to Mrs Doyle’s household tips for wives, mothers and crayturs or the top 100 priests and the “I shot JR” references, but agree to broaden his Fr Ted education.
We find why thats delightful Graham Linehan’s blog and are momentarily confused. Puffin intrigued sees a picture of a man: “is that the guy who wrote Fr Ted?” He asks excited. A glance. Unfortunately he’s eyeing a picture of Donald Rumsfeld. No, alas I have to inform him that is the bright spark who thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq.
Scroll up the page to reveal a picture of said Mr Linehan, who in this particular snap, chosen to illustrate his recent annointing as a genius, gives him the look of inside out sock crossed with a mild touch of the squished hamsters. “That’s him?” Puffin squints at said pic. It’s a nice bridge to explaining to small Puffin that being a writer, if he hasn’t already noticed, is indeed a complicated life and stick to his plans for ice hockey goalie domination or metereologist and keep practising the ski-ing. The rope tow may well be kinder than the full stop.
Blah Cliath: Seymour Hersh
Here’s a link to the video webcast of an Amnesty International Lecture in Dublin, given by Seymour Hersh recently.
Slan to Brendan
Sad news today for weather intrigued folks the great Irish meteorologist Brendan McWilliams has died after a short illness. His ruminations and knowledge will be missed.
More prosthetics: International Red Cross link
In my quest for information on prosthetics and Iraq I came across a whole bunch of articles on the International Red Cross website who continue to help civilians in Iraq.
You can also donate directly to their Iraq projects here you just have to select the area of the world that you want to donate to. So many NGO’s have been forced to withdraw from Iraq because of the violence that it’s critical we support the ones who remain.
$240 bucks will provide prosthetic materials so that four landmine victims can walk again, while $25 can provide first aid care for a war wounded assisted in a first aid post. If you’re lucky enough to be flush then donate $8,000 to provide surgery and hospital care for 100 war wounded patients until their discharge
Alternatively, if you wish to make an immediate difference to someone by tomorrow morning then support the Rapid Prototyping for Baghdad project (RP4Baghdad)
- Donate 250$ and help us treat a patient with a head injury.
- Donate 750$ and help us treat a patient in need of a leg prosthesis. This includes mould making, model making, transport and model fitting.
There’s full disclosure on their financials on the website, this extraordinary organisation have an annual budget of $32,000 dollars and I am very struck by the immediacy of the work they’re doing, as they can help a patient in a week from obtaining a three-dimensional CT scan of the patient in Baghdad then having models made elsewhere that are sent back to Baghdad swiftly and the patient is operated on.
This a very unique and intelligent project delivering essential humanitarian medical support Applaud it by helping finance it. It feels to me that only tangible form of protest against the unbelievable civilian suffering right now is to provide relief.
Raise
Now and again, usually infrequently, you come across something that’s so intelligent and progressive that it’s difficult not to slap your head repeatedly and wonder why oh why can’t governments come up with and support such promising and necessary possibilities.
I give you the Open Prosthetics Project. A gang of inventor/industrial designer dudes (Tackle Design) from North Carolina joined forces to collaborate and establish this. Bloody brilliant.
The Open Prosthetics Project is producing useful innovations in the field of prosthetics and giving the designs away for free.
Another interesting project is RP4 Baghdad
Rapid Prototyping for Baghdad supports severely injured people in Iraq by providing Iraqi surgeons with surgery equipment, prosthetic limb sockets and tangible 3D models.
The situation for amputees in Iraq from what I can gather is supremely shite. It’s very difficult to obtain information, so it must be ridiculously difficult for Iraqis to actually get access to prosthetics.
These assertions are supported by the following recent articles:
Interview and slides from photojournalist Farah Nosh: Iraq’s Brutally Wounded
Demand for prosthetic limbs by amputees outpaces supply in Baghdad
If anyone knows anything further about the prosthetics situation in Iraq please comment or email with more links or info.
We, outside Iraq, on central heated sofas, despite our vehement (and unsuccessful) anti war protests need to urgently take this kind of suffering a lot more personally.
Autumn weather and brains
It’s Autumn so necessary to nest with my two Autumnal obsession the weather and the brain.
And how we’ve been tantalized by prospects of windy weather that has not actually landed. Tropical storm Ling ling’s leftovers joined us yesterday. It was like the dumping of a giant melting icecube. Seemingly we’re going to experience La Nina weather cycle this year. Last year’s big storm prompts the reoccuring image of trees falling straight through houses.
And on the brain, of which we truly know so little, two fine BBC Radio 4 program links:
This one is all about the science of acquiring and learning languages
Brain scanning is perhaps the most extraordinary and powerful technique scientists have for exploring how people’s brains work. Dr Mark Lythgoe, a neuroscientist at London’s University College, investigates whether it will ever help those who have mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.