Posts by Sam F
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Hard News: Floating the idea, in reply to Rich Lock,
We talked about Sebastian Junger's 'Restrepo' book a while back. If you haven't read 'The Perfect Storm' yet, then I recommend it again. It has a fair bit of description on the training and work these guys do. 'Rough' is an understatement...
Oh yes. Read that one many, many times - probably again this summer.
(And I could never quite buy Ashton Kutcher as a PJ in The Guardian a few years back...)
The new book is called War in all markets, I'm pretty sure - Restrepo is rather the name of the doco film that resulted from the same trip to Afghanistan.
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Fentanyl (synthetic opioid approximately 100 times more potent than morphine) and midazolam (benzo with amnesiac qualities) according to my discharge paperwork. Fantastic stuff.
Ah, Fentanyl - that would be what they give to US soldiers in lollipop form when they get hit? Not sure if it comes more powerful than that stuff (no, not speaking from experience, touch wood, but Dad saw it do its miraculous thing when working in ED a few years back)...
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This seems cruel, but there would be a good reason for waiting before they rule out a need for surgery. Anesthetists are understandably nervous about putting patents under if they have been dosed with painkillers.
Fair enough. I suppose it was that they were otherwise basically unoccupied and very slow to actually do that assessment that annoyed us the most.
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Did anyone link to this? Drownings per capita. What's up with Latvia?
Interesting. Don't know how valid it is but this brief study mentions very high alcohol abuse in Latvia, which almost literally flows into terrifying accident rates of many kinds - that and being a coastal nation with a big fishing industry is a bad combination I suppose. Wouldn't be surprised if that also explains the other nearby ex-Soviet Baltic nations in the top five of the table you linked, along with Russia.
(ETA: Estonia's statistics for 2010 seem to bear this hypothesis out.)
We do get regular warnings here in NZ about alcohol and swimming, but I haven't read any relevant statistics myself...
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I know I became a lot more cautious at surf beaches in general after Dad got bowled at Waihi and came out of the water holding one shoulder at a decidedly odd angle. No fun for anyone concerned, most of all Dad who on top of the dislocation and a bumpy ambulance ride had to wait about two and a half hours before the doctors at Tauranga hospital finally deigned to give him painkillers. (They had been busy chatting about their Fiji holiday plans at the nurses' station. Champions.)
I still never ‘got it’ properly. I’m not sure why not.
Me neither - in between lessons at Mt Albert and Henderson, and plenty of mucking around in the ocean, I managed to get to the point where I can do okay in moderate surf but I think proper elegant technique and lap records are going to remain out of my grasp.
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It's disappearing before your eyes (slowly).
As much as I love the beach's new look, that's my impression too - it's definitely dropped off a bit since the work was done. I doubt it'd make much difference to me if it became more of a mudflat again, but then I've never known it as anything else.
Is it the resanding at Point Chev that's made a difference to the return of fish in the shallows, or is the inner harbour generally cleaner than in years past (with sewer separation work et cetera)?
It was a bit tricky explaining to younger cousins how the scallop shells came to be there, yes... thanks to industrial plants up on the Whau, the only native shellfish at Point Chev probably have more heavy metal in their shells than actual shell.
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Can you jack a thread that has simply stopped talking about the original subject? You can't jack an empty car, that's just called theft. So this is probably threadstealing, rather than threadjacking.
Not stolen, just repurposed...
I have had, in the past, strange - what I can only describe as "big/tiny" physical feelings - which happened when I was just about to fall asleep.
I've had somewhat similar feelings before, mostly when in the midst of a flu - nothing seems actually bigger, but rather heavier and dense, like everything in the room (including my own body) has been hewn out of granite.
I wouldn't really ascribe it to anything more than a brain running at higher than optimal temperatures, but it seems like a fun imaginative exercise to wonder what kind of previous life it might point to - or perhaps a parallel life, elsewhere in the multiverse...
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Sympathies abound. Those pesky little varmints would just love some tender Anglicized flesh.
I'll add my sympathies too on behalf of my partner Vivian, who to her ongoing dismay seems to attract mosquitoes like some kind of lightning rod.
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Made good use of Sunday morning by catching up with a cousin who works on Motat's military vehicle collection at their running day. Got to enjoy a spot of paddock bashing in their newly acquired British personnel carrier and a 1942-vintage jeep (both as a passenger, naturally), as well as getting to know a few of the volunteers. All good people.
Got mightily caked in dust etc - that and climbing around a few of the vehicles got me thinking a bit about what it must have been like to exist in these things for months on end - the older stuff in particular is unbelievably spartan. Interesting to note how in the time since I last went along I've swung from interest in nuts and bolts and statistics to trying to imagine the daily experience of people who found themselves using this gear in conflict. Half tempted to blog it somewhere if it was anywhere close to being a novel insight, but y'know...
Anyway, as long as the weather holds, more normal summer activities will resume this afternoon with a trip to Point Chev beach. Excellent.
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Angus, you appear to have found a level of superb ideological balance where neither those alleging “war criminal” nor those alleging “secret Muslim” have more credibility than the other.
Unfortunately that level is at about 90 degrees to accepted reality, which explains the number of people looking at your arguments sideways.
It may not be provably certain that Bush is a war criminal, but there's actually a quantity of evidence sufficient to make this a possibility worthy of serious debate and examination - which makes comparing that charge to the unfounded "secret Muslim" allegations completely ridiculous.