Comments closed. Moving on to other things...
09 December 2019
Cityscape, Gdansk
Via the Europe subreddit, where I found this observation:
"Parts of the historic old city of Gdańsk, which had suffered large-scale destruction during the war, were rebuilt during the 1950s and 1960s. The reconstruction was not tied to the city's pre-war appearance, but instead was politically motivated as a means of culturally cleansing and destroying all traces of German influence from the city. Any traces of German tradition were ignored, suppressed, or regarded as "Prussian barbarism" only worthy of demolition, while Flemish/Dutch, Italian and French influences were used to replace the historically accurate Germanic architecture which the city was built upon since the 14th century."And btw, why is it called a citySCAPE?
Abstracted from landscape, the suffix representing Middle Dutch -schap (“-ship”), from Old Dutch -skap (“-ship”), from Proto-Germanic *-skapiz (“-ship”), from *skapaz (“shape, form”). Cognate with Modern Dutch -schap (“-ship”), German -schaft (“-ship”), Swedish -skap (“-ship”), Old English -sceap, -scipe (“-ship”).The root words similar to those for shape.
Rethinking the "map of life"
From an interesting article in the Washington Post:
It’s time to get serious about a major redesign of life. Thirty years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century, and rather than imagine the scores of ways we could use these years to improve quality of life, we tacked them all on at the end. Only old age got longer.
As a result, most people are anxious about the prospect of living for a century. Asked about aspirations for living to 100, typical responses are “I hope I don’t outlive my money” or “I hope I don’t get dementia.”..
Long lives are not the problem. The problem is living in cultures designed for lives half as long as the ones we have.
Retirements that span four decades are unattainable for most individuals and governments; education that ends in the early 20s is ill-suited for longer working lives; and social norms that dictate intergenerational responsibilities between parents and young children fail to address families that include four or five living generations...We agreed that longevity demands rethinking of all stages of life, not just old age. To thrive in an age of rapid knowledge transfer, children not only need reading, math and computer literacy, but they also need to learn to think creatively and not hold on to “facts” too tightly. They’ll need to find joy in unlearning and relearning. Teens could take breaks from high school and take internships in workplaces that intrigue them. Education wouldn’t end in youth but rather be ever-present and take many forms outside of classrooms, from micro-degrees to traveling the world...Financing longevity requires major rethinking. Rather than saving ever-larger pots of money for the end of life, we could pool risks in new ways.
No answers at the link, but some thought-provoking observations. It's too late for me. Save yourself.
Recycling Christmas cards
Before my elderly mother developed dementia, she lived for 25 years in an apartment complex for active seniors. Among the amenities available was a "crafts" room typically used by a group of ladies creating quilts. Before and after the winter holiday season however, the tables and shelves were used to recycle Christmas cards.
There are two images embedded above. The top one is a scan of the back and front of a recycled card; the one below shows the inside. Immediately apparent is the absence of any commercial greeting or any manufacturer's name, because the cards were created by cutting the front from a used card and gluing it to a piece of medium-weight construction paper. Blank envelopes were purchased commercially using proceeds from the sale of the recycled cards (IIRC, about 10-25c per card).
I always viewed this as a beautiful win-win-win situation. Residents of the facility reluctant to dispose of family cards as waste were not shy about offering them a second life. The residents were generally on fixed incomes (most of which was used to afford living there) so they benefited from having inexpensive cards to purchase, and the blank inside not only avoided the mindless drivel often printed there, but also allowed users more space to write meaningful messages to family and friends. And finally the activity of creating cards and selling them was an inducement for solitary elderly people to get out of their units and interact with other residents.
This sort of thing should be done more often.
06 December 2019
How to tease your dog
Very few videos on the web cause me to literally "laugh out loud." This one did. With a hat tip for the via to Miss Cellania at Neatorama.
Addendum: I just reviewed some of TYWKIWDBI's statistics and found that this video I posted back in 2011 has had the most views of all 16,000+ posts on the blog. So I think it's worth a repost...
The "Up" series - updated
(2012 post): I'm surprised I haven't blogged this subject before, because it's a truly remarkable series of movies, but today I happened across a comment that 56 Up will soon be released. For those unfamiliar with the movies, here is the Wikipedia entry:
56 Up is expected to have its broadcast premier (presumably on BBC or ITV) in mid-May. If you are a newbie and are interested, I would suggest getting Seven Up and perhaps one of the others (maybe 49 Up) from the library to view as background material.
If you've watched the series, feel free to offer your own thoughts in the Comments.
Update: Reposted from last month to add a link to a Telegraph photo gallery showing the participants in the movie series, as for example shown here:
Reposted from 2012 to add the trailer for 63 Up:
I have found the films individually to be of varying quality; when I first viewed Seven Up, I rated it 2+ (scale 0-4), but by the time I got to 49 Up, I rated it 3.5. One difficulty with viewing the series in a short period of time is that they were designed to be viewed 7 years apart, so each one spends significant time reviewing the past history of each character, which makes viewing a bit tedious if you've just seen the other movies.The Up Series is a series of documentary films produced by Granada Television that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The documentary has had seven episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years) and the documentary has been broadcast on both ITV and BBC... The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child's social class predetermines their future...
The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man", which is based on a quotation by Ignatius Loyola...
The series has received extraordinary praise over the years, the epitome of which may be Roger Ebert's comments that it is "an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium", that the films "penetrate to the central mystery of life", and that the series is among his top ten films of all time. Attempts have been made to repeat the series with subjects in the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and South Africa. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, 28 Up was placed 26th. The series has also been satirised; The Simpsons' 2007 episode "Springfield Up" is narrated by an Apted-like filmmaker who depicts the past and current lives of a group of Springfield residents he has revisited every eight years.
56 Up is expected to have its broadcast premier (presumably on BBC or ITV) in mid-May. If you are a newbie and are interested, I would suggest getting Seven Up and perhaps one of the others (maybe 49 Up) from the library to view as background material.
If you've watched the series, feel free to offer your own thoughts in the Comments.
Update: Reposted from last month to add a link to a Telegraph photo gallery showing the participants in the movie series, as for example shown here:
1. Neil HughesThe others are at the link.
District councillor
In 1964 he was an enchanting Liverpool boy who wanted to be an astronaut. Tragically, in 28 Up Neil was found homeless and in a bad mental state. Yet he surprised viewers when he reappeared as a Liberal Democrat councillor in Hackney in 42 Up. In a heart-rending twist, Bruce Balden, another Up participant, had helped Neil on his road to recovery.
Reposted from 2012 to add the trailer for 63 Up:
Unrecognized esophageal intubations
I couldn't begin to count how many hundreds of intubations I performed in 30+ years. Anyone who attempts tracheal intubation understands that inadvertent intubation of the esophagus can occur - but it should never remain unrecognized. An article in ProPublica provides some distressing information in that regard:
In the summer of 2018, Dr. Nick Asselin was doing research on cardiac arrests in Rhode Island when he made a horrifying discovery. Hospital records showed patients had been arriving by ambulance with misplaced breathing tubes, sending air into their stomachs instead of their lungs, essentially suffocating them. At first, he said, there were four cases, then seven. More trickled in.By the time Asselin presented his findings to a state panel in mid-March, he’d identified 11 patients with so-called esophageal intubations that had gone unrecognized by EMS providers over the previous 2 ½ years. All 11 had died.
Jason M. Rhodes, the state Health Department’s EMS chief, recommended a way to tackle the problem that aligned with national standards: restricting the practice of placing those tubes to paramedics, the most highly trained EMS providers. To Asselin and his colleagues at Brown University’s Department of Emergency Medicine, that approach made sense. Rhode Island is the only state in New England, and among a minority nationally, that allows non-paramedics to intubate patients.But a coalition of Rhode Island’s EMS practitioners, municipal fire chiefs and a city mayor pushed back. They said the “ET tube,” as it’s known, saves lives. Taking it away, as one fire chief put it, “would be a sin.” A lobbyist for the firefighters union lambasted the doctors for not consulting more of its members before proposing such changes, saying, “We’re the experts ... not the doctors!”
The article is a discouraging longread detailing how the arguments over deciding best practice deteriorated into a turf battle.
Photo credit Kayana Szymczak for ProPublica.
Bottles on the seashore: deathtraps for hermit crabs
It seems one can't browse the 'net these days without finding yet another way that humans are devastating the natural world. When a hermit crab climbs into a bottle, the surface may be too slippery for it to climb back out. This report from the Washington Post:
Many of the bottles, cans and containers were not empty. Scores of hermit crabs, mostly dead, were trapped inside... They estimate 570,000 of the crabs have been killed on Cocos, which is composed of 27 islands, and that 61,000 more have died in a similar fashion on Henderson Island, located more than 8,000 miles away...
When a hermit crab dies, it emits a chemical signal to let others know that a potential shell has become available, Bond explained. Thus, a crab that dies after trying to make a home out of plastic sets off an insidious chain reaction: The smell attracts another who dies, and so on, generating an ultra-strong signal that leads even more of the crabs to an almost-certain demise.
Your choice: train horns or rubber chickens
Via Neatorama, where there are links to the source(s).
There is also a rubber chicken cover of Toto's Africa, and of course of BoRhap.
05 December 2019
"... here in the middle of this Olive Garden."
School shootings, impeachment news, environmental degradation... TYWKIWDBI doesn't want to bury its head in the sand, but there are days when after browsing the 'net one wants a good laugh. Herewith, from an AskReddit thread, are some of the responses to the question "Which quotation is most improved by adding 'here in the middle of this Olive Garden' on the end?"
“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them, here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
"Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side here, in the middle of this Olive Garden."
"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die here, in the middle of this Olive Garden!"
"You come to me here, and you ask me for a favor, on this; the day of my daughter's wedding here in the middle of this Olive Garden?"
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky..here, in the middle of this Olive Garden."
“As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them, here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
"Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side here, in the middle of this Olive Garden."
"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die here, in the middle of this Olive Garden!"
"You come to me here, and you ask me for a favor, on this; the day of my daughter's wedding here in the middle of this Olive Garden?"
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky..here, in the middle of this Olive Garden."
“As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.”
04 December 2019
Word for the day: "chunter"
"In fact, it is perfectly possible to hold both views: Johnson did deliver numerous untruths, and they were allowed to lie there like fish out of their bowl, flapping on the floor until they died. Also, Marr was pretty rude; “You’re chuntering,” he said at one point, which he never would have said to Theresa May, who chuntered constantly. I suspect a bit of professional pride, Marr smarting that he is seen as softer than Neil (he is). I also think Marr did well – and maybe it is right to be rude to a prime minister who has done so much to corrode civility and trust in such a short time."Totally new to me, and I couldn't even guess the meaning, so I turned to Wiktionary:
Etymology
(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)Verb
chunter (third-person singular simple present chunters, present participle chuntering, simple past and past participle chuntered)So I had to go to my OED, where there are citations back to the 1600s, and some slight variations on the meaning ("to express discontent about trifles" and "to be sulky with impertinence.")
Clever mashup of 150+ movie titles
Reposted from 2014 because it's so clever and deserves a second viewing.
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