Don’t get distracted

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With Prince Andrew being arrested this week over his connections with Jeffrey Epstein (although not for that, but who knows where the ongoing investigations may lead), suddenly someone is panicking and pulling out all of the stops in order to distract the world from his connections with Jeffrey Epstein (which certainly do involve that).

Look, I get that “Actually, yes, aliens do exist” is pretty big news, but my first thought was: “Wow. Does he really think that I can only manage to think about one thing at a time?”, but then I remembered that that’s probably true for most of the people that voted for him, and so this is probably something of a master stoke from the Cheeto Cheater.

Epstein Files OUT

X-Files IN

I happen to also think that the current President of the United States sexually abusing young girls on a private island over a period of several years is also fairly important, and I really believe that we shouldn’t let the big orange man let the little green men distract us from that.

OK?

I don’t know what to say

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I said a lot of things here, but sometimes even I run out of words when I read something like this.

The story:

“He just learned how to ride, he got the hang of it right away,” Ethan’s dad, Luis, said proudly. “He wanted to go outside because he wanted to jump on his bike…it was an amazing thing for him.”

Instead, since late January, the schoolboy has been confined to a hospital bed with measles encephalitis, a complication that causes swelling and inflammation in the brain. “He’s pretty much as if he was paralysed,” his devastated father, 41, told The Independent in a phone interview from his son’s hospital bedside.

Sadly, it’s not like anything could have stopped him from being affected in this way.

Well, apart from the measles vaccine, of course. That would have prevented all of this.

But:

Ethan’s parents decided not to immunise him against measles as they did with his three brothers. Three out of four of them contracted measles. Still, despite Ethan’s ordeal, his mom stands by their decision. “We’re not blaming God for this,” said 35-year-old Kristina. “Yes, it hurts, of course, it hurts. But God has chosen Ethan for a reason. God is doing something, and we’re gonna glorify his name regardless.”

“And we wouldn’t change it any other way,” the mom continued. “If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn’t have given my son the vaccine.”

Honestly, read that last line again and then read what happened in the hospital (after they opted to take him HOME(!) for 48 hours while his condition deteriorated further):

“They immediately started giving him fluids, taking blood again, doing all the tests again,” Kristina said, panicking as she watched her son being hooked up to machines.

Then Ethan’s heart rate started dropping.

“The machine started beeping,” she recalled. “And we were really concerned … doctors kept coming in and so then we asked, ‘What number do we need to be concerned?’ And [the doctor] said, ‘Anything that goes under 50.’

“And all of a sudden, his heart rate went under 50,” Kristina said.

The mom recalled that a nurse then shouted, “Ethan, you gotta wake up, you gotta wake up,” and started “pounding” on her son’s chest, before calling for more medics to help.

“It was just one of those moments you just think…no, no,” the mom said, through tears. “This can’t be.”

And then let me share her words one more time:

“And we wouldn’t change it any other way. If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn’t have given my son the vaccine.”

And there it is. If you ever needed any evidence that some people shouldn’t be allowed to become parents. Literally, those last lines are basically an admission of wilful child endangerment.

But these people have become emboldened by what they read on Facebook and by what their pseudoscientific, conspiracy theorist, absolute knob of a Secretary of Health is saying and doing.

“Why do we need to add so much to our children’s bodies?” Kristina asks.

Erm… because it would have prevented your 7-year-old son from having to be fed by a tube (ironically added to his body), from possibly not being able to walk again, and having brain damage for the rest of his life.

To the parents’ relief, doctors were able to stabilise Ethan’s heart rate and he was admitted to the intensive care unit, where his mom and dad sat by his bedside all night anxiously watching the heart rate monitor. The next morning, Ethan underwent another MRI and second spinal tap.

Weird how you suddenly start relying on modern medical science to save your kid’s life once your shitty decisions nearly ended it, hey?

What a horrible, stupid woman.
Good luck to Ethan. And good luck to the rest of her kids.

They’re going to need it.

Weather Man

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Mentioned briefly here, here is some more photography by Russian Arctic photographer, Evgenia Arbugaeva.

This is part of her series Weather Man, tracking the day to day activities of meteorologist, Vyacheslav Korotki for The New Yorker. It’s worth clicking through on this link to see all the images, but the New Yorker piece is behind a paywall, so I have shared the blurb below.

Yacheslav Korotki is a man of extreme solitude. He is a trained polyarnik, a specialist in the polar north, a meteorologist. In the past thirty years, he has lived on Russian ships and, more recently, in Khodovarikha, an Arctic outpost, where he was sent by the state to measure the temperatures, the snowfall, the winds. The outpost lies on a fingernail of a peninsula that juts into the Barents Sea. The closest town, by any definition, is an hour away by helicopter.

He has a wife, but she lives far away, in Arkhangelsk. They have no children. On his rare visits to Arkhangelsk, he has trouble negotiating the traffic and the noise. Arkhangelsk is not Hong Kong. Korotki is sixty-three, and when he began his career he was an enthusiast, a romantic about the open spaces and the conditions of the Arctic. He watches the news on TV but doesn’t fully believe it. Polyarniki were like cosmonauts, explorers for the Soviet state. There are fewer now. Who wants to live like this anymore?

Evgenia Arbugaeva, a photographer who grew up in the Arctic town of Tiksi, spent two extended stays with Korotki. “The world of cities is foreign to him—he doesn’t accept it,” she says. “I came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. He doesn’t get lonely at all. He kind of disappears into tundra, into the snowstorms. He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.”

These images are dark, atmospheric and gloomy, as one might expect for the far North. But it’s not always that way. Arbugaeva’s work Tiksi, in which she photographs a family in a dying Arctic town, bucks the trend by employing bright colours against the cold, white snow, cleverly painting a wholly different picture of an otherwise depressing scene and situation.

It’s amazing what subliminal messages can be shared with just simple light and colour.

Test Drive

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I test drove our new hob yesterday.

And wow. What an amazing difference from the old model.

The old model was in here when we moved in several (or more) years ago now. The old model shouldn’t have been in here when we moved in, because it fails the gas certificate of compliance even at the most basic level. But, as longer-term readers might remember, there was an awful lot that failed the CoCs on this house, because the certificates were issued by knobheads by friends of the previous owner.

Dodgy as.

Still, that’s all water under the bridge now (which was probably due to another pipe that needed replacing).

The new hob is bigger than the last hob, and the gas is more controllable, thanks to Bosch’s new FlameSelect™ function. It’s still not anything professional, but I’m not exactly a professional cook either, so the match is good. But that extra 150mm and the ability to have a very low flame without the danger of blowing the place up, make a massive difference, and last night’s curry really benefitted from me being able to leave it to simmer without concern.

We’re slowly becoming a bit of a Bosch household. Not because we have any particular affinity to the brand, but just because they’re stuff is good value, good quality and it just works. German engineering, made in China. But then, isn’t everything?

Anyway. One of those purchases that needed making, but has had a huge positive effect already.

If you’re looking for a sign to make one of those “I’ve got to get one at some point” buys, then consider this it.

The more you ignore me

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It’s been a while since I put some music up on here. And this one is nothing new. Just an earworm I picked up and I can’t get rid of. And the more I ignore it… well… you know.

Incidentally, I think I picked this up from the Amy Lamé Superfans show, which is a great listen if you know how.

The Smiths (yes, I know, I know) episode featured one woman who gave up her job to attend all of the dates on their 1986 British tour. Next level stuff, and certainly fulfilling the name of the show.

Whatever next – flying 23,000km for a concert at the other end of the planet?

My carbon footprint never looked so good.