Hehehe…

Hehehehe…

How true is this cartoon? A darkness supposedly filled with dragons which turn out never to have been there in the first place… A perfect metaphor.

Aaagh! Bastard dentists and the NHS

I hate dentists. I’ve been working like a lunatic recently to get some flexitime built up, because time spent at a dentist or doctor’s appointment has to be made up. Accordingly, I’ve been leaving the office later than six this week. It was partly to get time made up for some early days and partly to build some time up against my dentist’s appointment this afternoon.

So I duly left at 3:00 today, and got down there for 3:45, where I saw a strange dentist (as in unknown to me, rather than in a purple hat and singing or something), who told me that my previous dentist wouldn’t see me because of missed appointments.

I was rather miffed, as you can imagine. I’d cancelled one previous appointment because I felt like shit, one appointment was missed because the receptionist gave me the wrong time, and the last one got cancelled because the dentist was ill! He’s now having a hissyfit because he missed an appointment with me!

The same strange-as-in-unknown-to-me dentist was cagey about taking me on as a patient, but once I made significant dinosaur noises and such and explained the situation further, she agreed, and I now have appointments booked to finally get my fillings done.

What a pain.

Many of you will now be asking, as did my wife, why the hell I still go to this practice. And the answer is that I have no choice but to do so.

The practice is the only NHS dentists’ practice within ten miles that will take on new patients. Most of those which accept NHS patients will only accept a certain number of people, or will put you on a waiting list, or only let you sign up at certain points in the year. The rest are private patient only, meaning that they cost you not only an arm and a leg, but possibly one of your kidneys to boot.

The reason that there are so few NHS-only dentists in practice relates to the provisioning of healthcare via the trusts. This is something of a sore point with me. NHS trusts were introduced by the last Conservative government under the stewardship of Kenneth Clarke, otherwise a relatively-sound, middle-of-the-road Tory, in the name of introducing patient choice and internal competition. Like so many ideas emanating from the wretched old beast which is the Conservative Party, it looked like a winner in the short term, but has ultimately led to major problems, notably the postcode lottery for certain kinds of drugs.

The PCT, or Primary Care Trust, is the major unit of local provisioning under the current system. They operate as public sector corporations which receive fixed funds from central government, which they then allocate as needed, or so the theory goes. The internal market system introduced in the 1990s was supposed to stimulate competition and competitiveness, and thus, according to market principles, make things better by the unrestricted driving force of the market.

Yeah, well. We all know how well that particular gem of theoretical, ideology-driven economics works, now don’t we? Come in, Mr Friedman, your time is up, you monetarist bastard.

The provision of public goods according to private principles always, but always, results in failure. This is because public goods must be monopolistic and outside market principles; there cannot by definition be any competitor to the public good, because there is only one public, and only one good.

Yeesh. The sooner the policy ghosts of that rat-faced old fuck, Reagan, and his ginger concubineare exorcised, the better. Now that Milton Friedman is dead, perhaps we can abandon the nonsense and get back to some real economics.

Days 12 & 13

Days 12 & 13 are combined, as per last week, because I regularly visit a family member on a Friday evening. If you’re interested, we drank some beer, watched some comedy panel shows and watched some boxers pummel the living shit out of each other. A good night, in other words.

I’ve been trying to look a little more deeply at the vegan lifestyle this week, and not always succeeding. It’s quite interesting to see the workings of a subculture which you’ve never before seen in any much detail, by which I mean that you see all kinds of interesting arguments. It’s like hearing a fight in a language where you’re sort of competent but not fully fluent — you don’t get all the references and idioms, but find yourself fascinated despite yourself.
Read the rest

I shot a man in Reno for purposes unidentified

Nothing much going on lately. My old boss is back from maternity leave after a year.

Anyway. We’ve just done a large mailshot from the office of over 1000 letters. A mailshot of 1000 may not seem a lot to some of you who’ve worked in mailing houses or large corporations, but it is a fuckload when two or three of you have to fold and stuff the envelopes by hand…

It’s a bit of a primitive method, but there you go.

Noisy sex gets man banned from home

A British man has been banned from visiting his girlfriend’s home after neighbors complained about noisy sex, a local official said Thursday.

A court barred Adam Hinton, 32, from being within 110 yards of the apartment of his 29-year-old girlfriend, Kerry Norris, Brighton and Hove City Council spokesman Mike Taggart said.

Residents of Norris’ publicly owned home had been complaining since 2006 about thumping music, banging headboards and screamed obscenities, Taggart said.

MSNBC News

HT to Lottie.

Wow. Sounds like they were really having a good time…

A busy day

Well, I think it can be said that the first day at the new office went well.

I found all of the stuff that I had packed sitting on my desk, and I mean all of it. A huge pile of stuff. I got most of it put away, and then we moved onto the filing. There were approximately 35 boxes of it, packed full. Not small ones, either – each of them is about 1 1/2 metres long, half a metre wide and the same deep. That’s a lot of filing, I’ll tell you right there.

I then spent most of the day teaching other people how to use the phone system and new photocopier-printer-fax-scanner thingie. This despite having only this morning been taught how to use them myself by the ICT people. Further real work was prevented by my database playing up. On the plus side, I do have a new computer, factory fresh. On the negative, so does everyone else, so I also spent a long time setting minor problems to rights with them, too… All in all, it’s been a busy day, but satisfying in a way: we’re completely moved into the fancy new building on the business park, and while the office is open plan and shared with other teams, by the time they move in, we’ll have been there months already and will have superiority and they’ll have to adapt to us, rather than the other way around. Office politics.

I’m still working on the bit about I Am Legend, but will have it soon.

In other news – the most popular search term for me right now is Charles Darwin, and untold numbers of people are looking at the birthday post I did way back when. And I have no idea why.

Speaking of searches, one of my most popular terms is dinosaur noises. Whoever is consistently searching for dinosaur noises and finding me, I salute you – your nutty persistence is a testament to human weirdness. As strange as that is, it pales in comparison to the newest persistent search term, which is pirate noises. The third most popular weird search is donkey in a bathtub and variations thereupon.

You people are weird.

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I am currently damaging my ears with Electric Samurai (again) and Gone Gone Gone by Charlie Feathers. Yes, I know listening to a Japanese axe-master and a 50s rockability one after the other is odd.

On my film list recently: The Evil Dead, The Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness. Look forward to reviews, campers.

The Gospel of Science

Hehehe… Actually, the title is technically appropriate: “Gospel” is a calque (word for word translation of a foreign word) of the Greek euangelion, which simply means “good news”. I have some good news to report, science-wise.

While the title might itself make for an interesting post roaming over the hope and interesting things science has given us, how it can make for a better life and give us hope for the future, my brain isn’t up to that today. So it’ll have to be literal good news about science.

And yes, I know I said I would post again over the weekend, and it’s now Tuesday. So sue me.

Latest search weirdness

Weird and unusual terms people have used to search in the last week:

obesity
dinosaur noises
hitchens and coren
fidel quits
medicine blog
odd medical procedures
tooth abcess
why should i believe in jesus?
good doctor
disadvantages of one chamber parliament
mike huckabee for president
chuck norris
ben stein is an idiot
yorkshire goth
lawrence vibrator
tricks for smart baby guinea pigs
reaction towards prostitutes
atheist chesterton believes
odd science stories
most common nouns
jeremiah ch. v.
conception takes place on odd dates
rowan druid women
plurality voting disadvantages
jessica curlett
purpose of fire olympics
your mum hottie
english makes me feel good
roman catholicism and communism
nonsense homeopathy
prostitution,uk, human traffic, harman
“compact gtl”
prostitution reaction
bbc look east. suffolk murders
blog of the week award
cow lemming
a jackass
“compact gtl” explosion
meaning believe jesus
anime girl dildo
communist christians
big big fat ben
chuck norris photos
“christian communism”
donkey in a bathtub
are there any arguments against hybrid c
weird stats
internutter
abcess

I’ve linked where I have a clue what the hell someone actually came up with. Some of the terms are just genius, though: tricks for smart baby guinea pigs, english makes me feel good, donkey in a bathtub.

Not to mention that dinosaur noises has come back again. Someone (or lots of people) is searching for that very regularly.