Quote of the week

Is this the way the world will end, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a
tweet?

~ Mark Mardell, US BBC Editor, article:  A market-moving fake tweet and Twitter’s trust issue

‘Erasing Death’

Dr Sam Parnia is director of Resuscitation Research at Stony Brook University in New York, as more people recover from dying minutes or even hours after they would traditionally have revived he is re-evaluating what death means to individuals and society:

Contrary to popular belief, death is not a moment in time, such as when the heart stops beating, respiration ceases, or the brain stops functioning. Death, rather, is a process—a process that can be interrupted well after it has begun.

For people lucky enough to have cardiac arrest at a facility with specialist staff and protocols, prompt and continuous CPR and cooling therapy can lead to full recovery. However in the UK and the US such treatment is not routine:

The painful reality is that even though most of us are not aware of it, many living on our own doorsteps, even in industrialized countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere, even areas with many of the best medical care centers in the world, may still not receive optimized care.

~ Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries
Between Life and Death, Sam Parnia MD and Josh Young

Margaret Thatcher 1925-2013

Margaret Thatcher was the most socially divisive British politician ever. Those of us who grew up in Britain in the seventies or eighties found ourselves fortunately- or less so- on either side of a realm in which poor people get worse off versus richer people benefit.

It would be dishonest even in sympathy to her own later circumstances and grieving relatives to say anything else of a politician who openly blamed and vilified people for their own situations whilst changing their way of life with drastic political policies.

She was no champion or role model for feminism or equality. She was ousted for unfairness. Here democracy prevailed.

Ronnie and Margaret were political soul mates, committed to freedom and resolved
to end Communism.

~ Nancy Reagan

There was no communism to fight in Britain ( was there any in the US? )

Taking care of people in need and making ordinary people’s work worthwhile financially isn’t communism. It’s Christianity. It’s humanity.

Maybe her greatest legacy will be her coping with dementia illness: but I doubt it.

Who cares about that?

She didn’t. We should.

WHO

Most dementia patients won’t end their ‘care in the community’ days in The Ritz.

Chinua Achebe 1930-2013

Nigerian author and former Biafran politician Chinua Achebe died yesterday in a Boston hospital. His novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ is the most widely translated and best-selling book of African literature. From 2009 to his death Achebe was Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

Honour killing

No such thing.

‘All that is earth has once been sky’

A day after 46 people were hospitalised when a meteorite fell in the Chelyabinsk district of Russia’s Ural Mountains, today a giant meteor passed within 17 500 miles of earth’s orbit. The two events are not thought by scientists to be connected.

*

The Meteorite

Among the hills a meteorite

Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,

And wind and rain with touches light

Made soft, the contours of the stone.

Thus easily can Earth digest

A cinder of sidereal fire,

And make her translunary guest

The native of an English shire.

Nor is it strange these wanderers

Find in her lap their fitting place,

For every particle that’s hers

Came at the first from outer space.

All that is Earth has once been sky;

Down from the sun of old she came,

Or from some star that travelled by

Too close to his entangling flame.

Hence, if belated drops yet fall

From heaven, on these her plastic power

Still works as once it worked on all

The glad rush of the golden shower.

~ C.S. Lewis

Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football

A village-wide game of football has traditionally been played for centuries in Ashbourne, Derbyshire in England on Shrove Tuesday, also Ash Wednesday, with the following rules :

• You must not intentionally cause harm to others.
• No tresspassing on other peoples property.
• The ball must not go into the churchyards, Memorial gardens or building sites.
• The ball must not be hidden from view in bags or rucksacks.
• The ball must not be transported in a motorised vehicle.
• A ball is goaled when it is tapped three times onto one of the stone plinths. If it is goaled before 5pm then another ball may be thrown up.
• Play ends at 10pm and the ball is returned to the Green Man public house.