Some useless information*

2 September 2023

A study of 2,350 children (published in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research) found that 34% of children became good readers with ‘normal’ schooling but twice as many (70%) became good readers after being exposed to 30 minutes a week of subtitled broadcasting (Hindi film songs in this experiment).

Warning:  if you tend to squeamishness, skip this paragraph and the next one.  An Australian woman was admitted to hospital in January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.  By 2022, her symptoms had worsened and included forgetfulness and depression and an MRI scan of her head showed abnormalities that a neurosurgeon thought required surgery.  She was admitted to Canberra hospital and they cut a hole in her skull and poked around, only to find a live roundworm wriggling around in her brain tissue.

Being surgeons rather than parasitologists, they consulted an expert who identified it as Ophidascaris robertsi,a roundworm usually found in pythons, who said this was the first time one had been found in a human.

Incidentally, patients whose operations are carried out by a woman are less likely to suffer from post-operative complications.  Doctors in Canada and Sweden reviewed more than 1m patient records from two separate medical registers and discovered that, 90 days after the operation, 12.5% of female surgeons’ patients suffered “adverse post-operative events” while 13.9% (10% more) patients whose operation had been carried out by a male surgeon had problems.  After a year, the men’s patients were 25% more likely to have suffered than women’s.  (I don’t know if they analysed the results by the patients’ gender.)

France is to ban girls in state schools from wearing abayas, the style of long, flowing dresses worn by some Muslim women, because they aren’t in keeping with the French principle of secularism (laïcité).  When I heard this, I wondered if they also refuse to allow orthodox Jewish pupils from wearing a yarmulke on the grounds that “When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them.” Sounds like dangerous territory to me.

To many people’s disappointment, the two biggest British political parties seem to be drawing closer together.  We’re used to the right wanting to keep workers’ wages low so capitalists can get richer, while the left wants to pay workers more and take money from the rich.   However, this over-simplified differentiation goes to the wall as general elections approach and politicians will say whatever they think is most likely to get them elected.

Many people were therefore disappointed last week when Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow chancellor, ruled out a wealth tax if Labour is elected at next year’s election.  We now await the Conservative party’s promise to tax the rich and increase state benefits.

One of the greater hazards of modern life is dust (small d, nothing to do with Philip Pullman).  Dust is basically just small bits of stuff that floats around in the air and settles on any flattish surface, especially (I’m told) on the top of books, and the piano, where it remains until somebody decides to spread it around with a duster.  This allows it to float free until it settles back on the tops of books and the piano, or in people’s lungs where it can aggravate conditions like asthma and other chronic lung diseases.

Dust may be particles of loose skin, or dried earth, or molecules that have wafted off something we can identify, making us think food smells particularly good, or not breathing in the bathroom.  (Does anybody else think that hot brake pads on braking trains smell a bit like chrysanthemums?)

In cars and lorries and trains, it’s more of a problem.  Some of us remember when petrol contained lead and added a certain je ne sais quoi to roadside blackberries but that was banned and we all know of the dangers of the particulates emitted by diesel engines. 

So we’re now being encouraged to switch to electric cars which reduce exhaust emissions although but tend to produce more road dust.  They do reduce brake dust by an estimated 75% but they create more tyre dust and road wear and raise more of the dust already on the road because they are generally heavier than cars with internal combustion engines;  and road dust is a major source of the ubiquitous microplastics that are found everywhere, even in the benthic zones of the Marianas Trench.

And what will happen to the batteries when they wear out.  Are we just hoping that we’ll be able to extract the small quantities of precious metals and recycle all the plastics and other chemicals? 

While I’m muttering about pollution, weren’t we all surprised when Michael Gove pandered to impoverished property developers by removing the rules that stop them building on certain hitherto protected land such as green belt, flood plains, AONBs and other areas of environmental value; and relaxing the rules limiting chemical and farm pollution of waterways. (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”)

America’s heatwave has been causing unprecedented problems in Arizona with doctors having to treat severe contact burns suffered when people have fallen in the street.  The trouble is not just that concrete, paving slabs and rock are at the ambient temperature, which has been around 45^oC, but asphalt is hotter still so road surfaces can reach 80^oC.  Frying eggs on it is not recommended unless you like them garnished with dust.

A couple of days ago, one of those irritating little pop-ups at the bottom of my screen said “Amazing discovery on moon’s surface”. Aha, I thought, that sounds interesting, I’ll look at that when I’ve finished what I’m doing but, when I tried to get back to it, it had gone.  One of my readers will be convinced I was hallucinating and invented it but it did start the old imagination ticking over.  What could it have been?  A half-full packet of Woodbines cigarettes, Rosebud, Hitler’s moustache or even, wait for it, dust?

*          Supposed to fire your imagination (if you’re a Rolling Stones fan)

More genocide, UK (Han)cock-ups, more Brexit problems, Joni Mitchell, jerry-building and the freedom to protest

27 June 2021

I wrote last week about Canada’s treatment of Indigenous Canadians so it seems fair to remember that, south of the border, things were just as bad.  America passed the Civilisation Fund Act in 1819 to pay missionaries to help the federal government “civilize” Indigenous American children by replacing their traditional customs with Christian practices, forcing them to convert to Christianity and give up their own languages.

Some 40 years later, this led to the creation of state-funded schools, often run by nuns, and, in the following 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children in the US were removed from their families and sent to these schools to learn “the habits and arts of civilization”.

In March 2019, Mary Annette Pember, whose mother had been sent to one of these schools, wrote about what little her mother had told her and her attempts to discover how true it was.  Her mother had said the principal was Mother Superior Sister Catherine of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration was known as “the evil nun” for her cruelty to the children in her care:  beatings, shaming and starvation.  She told Pember “One year during the Christmas season, Sister was marching down the cellar steps to check if we stole any food, she fell on the bottom step—crash! She hit her head bad! Not long after, she died.”

“What a silent cheer us kids made!” she continued. “Maybe it was terrible, but it was the best Christmas present we ever got!”

Pember had always wondered how much of this was true, looked through old records and finally found a letter from the Sister Secretary to the Right Reverend Monsignor William Ketcham, the director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions saying “By the time these lines reach you, our dear Mother Superior Sister Catherine will, no doubt, have been called to her eternal reward. On December 19, she fell off the second last step leading down to the kitchen entry.”

America hasn’t offered any significant apology for the treatment of these children although Barack Obama did sign the Native American Apology Resolution on December 19, 2009, apologizing for past “ill-conceived policies toward the Native peoples of this land” but it’s had no real impact on federal policy on Native Americans.

Pember headed her article “Death by Civilisation”.

On top of the impact of the Covid pandemic, Britain is currently suffering, if not death, then certainly a severe illness caused by Brexit with all sorts of small stupidities being added to the bigger ones of what we already wot.  The latest are that pigeon fanciers will no longer be able to release their birds in France to see which one gets back to Bridlington first and, despite saying earlier this year that they wouldn’t, EE will be reintroducing those extortionate ‘roaming charges’ for many UK customers using their phones in Europe.

Even the Brexit minister Lord (David) Frost has admitted that Leavers didn’t anticipate how Brexit would sour our relations with the EU and he believes Leavers are quite surprised that the UK’s duplicitous negotiations and agreements weren’t welcomed by the EU.  Frost also hinted that he thought Britain had “underestimated what sort of impact” the protocol would have on the movement of goods. 

Within the English government, the most curious things about the CCTV pictures of Matt Hancock having a serious grope with one of his staff is that he didn’t know there was a CCTV camera in his office.  Apparently it wouldn’t be difficult to identify the person who sold the pictures to the Sun but the government won’t be launching an enquiry to identify them because they would then be fired, claim they were a whistle-blower and take the government to an employment tribunal which would be, um, interesting for Hancock.

Boris Johnson accepted Hancock’s apology for breaching the Covid distancing rules and ignored the affair, probably because, as a recidivist himself, he considers it normal behaviour and, anyway, he didn’t want to lose the person he was going to blame when all the government’s (Han)cock-ups become public, but Hancock and his (obviously willing) gropee have both now resigned so Johnson will need to find a new scapegoat.

Interestingly, I heard the Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment, Nadhim Zahawi, talking on Wednesday and was unsettled to hear him talking exactly like Johnson, the same pauses in the wrong places, the curious rise and fall in pitch and even the same vocabulary (though his voice was quite different).  Very unnerving.

Part of the UK’s and Russia’s defence strategies have always involved routine forays close to what the other considers its territory in order to see how the other side responds.  The interesting thing about this week’s naval venture near the disputed territory of Crimea was that, instead of the more usual “They shot at us” / “Oh no we didn’t”, the exchange was “We shot at them” / “Oh no they didn’t”.  There’s a plot for a pantomime in there somewhere.

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of the release of the Canadian singer Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, ‘Blue’, widely regarded as her best album.  Fans have claimed that she’s as good a lyricist as Bob Dylan and is musically his superior. 

There’s no doubt about her musical superiority and some of her lyrics do conjure up images and feelings that stay in the mind but, for me, there’s no doubt about Dylan’s lyrical superiority.   However, consider these lovely lines from ‘A Case of You’:

 “Just before our love got lost you said / “I am as constant as a northern star” / and I said “Constant in the darkness, where’s that at? / If you want me I’ll be in the bar.”

Back in 1968, a gas explosion tore out some load-bearing walls and, as a result of poor design and construction, one entire corner of a two-month old 22-storey tower block in East London, called Ronan Point, collapsed like a pack of cards. 

By 1974, new building regulations had been introduced and Grenfell Tower was built in West London;  in 2017, it was refurbished and fitted with cladding panels that had been known to be inflammable since 2005.  A few months later, the entire building was gutted by fire.

Last week, three years after an inspection had identified “major structural damage” at a 12-storey condominium in Miami, including a failing concrete slab on the floor with the pool and “abundant cracking and crumbling” in an underground garage, a wing of the block containing almost half the apartments collapsed.

Now the UK has cut foreign aid, wants to sell Channel 4 and spend £200m on a new national yacht while the pandemic rages through third world countries and more people are being made homeless and desperate in the UK.

And HS2 want an extra £75m from the government to compensate them for “violent and disruptive” protests along the route and claim they are “very exercised” about this.  By the most amazing coincidence, this claim is being made as the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts bill is tiptoeing its way through parliament and could become law later this year. As a serial demonstrator (from Aldermaston marches to peaceful sit-downs in Trafalgar Square to the huge protest against the Iraq war), I find this very frightening.  The law aims to criminalise protests that are “noisy enough to have a relevant impact” that might cause “serious unease, alarm or distress” to other people.  This would give the police power to make arrests on their personal and subjective view of somebody’s distress as individual freedoms are further eroded.  Memo to self:  remember not to call the fuzz ‘the fuzz’.