Spot The Difference

Here's a series of recent tweets from excellent pop-sci writer and academic ninja Ben Goldacre, on those infuriating "charity muggers" who stop you in the street and ask you to set up a direct debit to a charity, of which their company gets a cut:

charity muggers mean your experience of walking down the street is defined by having to say "no" all the time. this is really corrosive.

also, when i'm walking down the street, i'm thinking, and it's really important time to me. someone is paid to ruin it, for a margin.

RT @Natt: Realised the other day that I had developed a semi-permanent street-scowl to discourage them. And to put me in a bad mood.

how can this be healthy for a community? not sort of thing you'd make illegal, but massive, collective censure, surely?

okay, i want an idea for collective action, that any individual approached can use, to eradicate charity mugging. t-shirt+glory to best.

RT @WHOMcD: Eckhart saw this coming. Forced facial expressions drive mood. Charities may be materially increasing the crime rate!

OK: you're minding your own business, and someone interrupts your train of thought, impinges on your time, asks you intrusive questions, persists when you say no politely and gets tetchy when you say no directly. Remind you of anything?

The difference between this and the kind of street harassment women put up with all. the. fucking. time. is that chuggers aren't actually frightening and probably won't outright swear or spit at you or try to follow you home. And I'm none-too-foxy, but I still get catcalled more often than I get approached by a chugger.

Ben's started a #chuggerstop tag. It has a few people defending chuggers by saying they raise a lot for charidee. Strangely, however, there's been no "can't you just take three seconds to be polite" and no "they think you look wealthy and generous, so you should be flattered!" and no "just ignore it" and no "well you should expect that to happen if you go to the shopping centre at that time of day" and certainly no "don't get so angry, haven't you anything important to worry about?"
I can't think of a witty closing sentence, so I'll just beat my head against this handy wall.

THUNK.
THONK.
THOP.

Just Ask A Brit! and then delete her answer

I happened across this post attempting to scare fat Americans with bogeystories about fat people being denied medical treatment under "socialised healthcare". (I gather similar scare stories are being told to old Americans, along the lines of "The gubmint will come round on your 65th birthday and SHOOT YOU".)

Anyway, said post contained the line If you think it can’t happen, ask someone who lives in the United Kingdom or elsewhere. They’ll set you straight on that, and quickly.

So I commented saying yes, please do ask someone who lives in the UK! I'm one! And what d'you know, it seems they deleted my comment. It's possible it's some kind of auto-mod, although the comment showed up earlier and had no links or swearies in. Their blog, their rules an'all that, so I thought I might as well put what I can remember of my answer here, with extra ranting:


Contrary to popular American belief, NHS hospitals do not look like this.

I can tell you dozens of stories of fat friendsandrelations (and myself - I think I'm currently "overweight" by BMI) getting excellent, prompt treatment on the NHS. I've never known anyone be denied treatment on the basis of weight, although I've heard about it on the news occasionally regarding knee replacements. (Of course, US insurance companies often deny treatment to fat people too. And I'm sure there's as much prejudice here as anywhere.)

I've lived in the US (with good insurance), so I know both systems a bit. I've never known anyone who's lived under both systems who prefers the US one - an impression borne out by the comments here.
And to those of us who grew up outside the US, your system with its 22000 preventable deaths a year and its bankruptcies and its get-cancer-lose-your-house and its I've-spilt-a-chip-pan-down-myself-but-I-can't-afford-to-go-to-the-hospital and its "you're a biologist, do you think my kidney pain might be something serious?" looks utterly, criminally insane.

Well, you did ask.

Change at Baker Street

Has it been ten weeks? Urk. I blame Twitter for letting off too much blogsteam.



Youse should all go and see Robin's play Broken Holmes on the Edinburgh Fringe.
It's got witty metafictional gubbins, knob jokes, angst, murder and poisonous snakes. And the cast are brilliant. I went to a preview in a pub in that there London, and had to leave my beer undrunk during the performance for fear of laughing it up my nose. You can, and should, buy tickets here.

The Singh thing: law being an ass

Disclaimery bobbins: I kno o about law. This post is my opinion based on a bit of cursory reading and if you want 100% reliable truefacts the legal bloggers are a much better place to look.

The blogs are all over this story, but it's not in the papers yet. Physicist Simon Singh followed up his successful pop-sci book Fermat's Last Theorem with a new one called Trick or Treatment? on alternative medicine. In it, he called out* the British Chiropractic Association for promoting bogus treatments. The BCA, as is usual for a pore ole downtrodden group of penniless but well-meaning practitioners who just want a chance to debate the evidence, sent in the legal team.

The libel court's preliminary ruling, which lawblogger Jack of Kent describes as astonishing, was that to defend himself, Singh will have to prove that the BCA are deliberately and knowingly lying to patients. This is going to be almost impossible, because they are probably not doing so, which is why Singh never said they were in the first place. He was saying the treatments don't work, which they don't, and that the BCA promotes them, which it does.

I wish Simon all the best with the case and will for deffo buy his book now.

*In the present-day American meaning of "publicly challenged them", not the Regency "slapped them in the face with a glove, dashed a glass of Burgundy over their small-clothes and demanded single combat." Although that would be much cooler.

I fear change

but I signed up for one of them there twitter accounts anyway. I used my real name, so if you know it, you can find out what I had for lunch without all that tedious mucking about with blogs. Interweb friends who don't know my real name are welcome to email me and ask!

Also, sorry I didn't join in Blog Against Disablism Day like I said I would. Blogger wouldn't let me post because some lagging mongrel of a 'bot thought it was spam. It's true: my blog ate my homework.

Good.

Commons defeats are nearly always good news.
Gurkha soldiers, who have for many years done the UK's most dangerous dirty work for a pittance, have now earned the right to come and live here if they so wish. Immigration minister Phil Woolas is wailing that up to 100,000 Nepalese will immediately swarm over to enjoy our renowned cuisine, fine weather and welcoming disposition, but as Monty Python so elegantly put it, this statement is quite meaningless as the phrase 'up to' clearly includes the number 'nought'.

I suppose I should grudgingly thank my otherwise fuckwitted MP for supporting the Gurkhas. It's also nice to see the Lib Dems getting off their arses for once, although it'll take a few more examples before I forgive them for being such a pathetic bunch of milquetoasts over the Iraq war.

I bin to London Zoo again

However, this here potto is from Quebec zoo.


Nocturnal House Triolet
If I only had a potto!
They're my favourite sort of lorid.
I would keep it in a grotto,
if I only had a potto,
and I'd feed it on risotto -
all those grubs and gum sound horrid.
If I only had a potto!
They're my favourite sort of lorid.

Addendum
A potoroo
Could live there too,
Inside the potto grotto zoo.

HOOOOOOO!

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

How many did you get right?

Tuesday Evo-Psych Bollocks from the Institute of Pissing About

I think I'll make this a regular feature. Everyone else does.


When cave-ladies ground up roots and seeds to make pies for their cave-husbands, a white colour indicated the food was free of toxic contaminants. Cave-ladies accordingly evolved to value white above all other colours, which is why women today all long for a white wedding dress!
However, cave-ladies also needed to be able to tell when their cave-pie was cooked to a delicious golden brown. Women's visual systems therefore make a far more acute distinction between white and brown than those of men, who in our evolutionary past only saw the pies in their cooked state. For this reason, men can't see dirt and should never do laundry.

Thanks to Pandagon and Physioprof for inspiration.

MMM PIE #2

Behold our Sunday lunch! Cromagnon did the steak and mushroom filling, and I made flaky pastry using the recipe from Huge Furry-Witteringfool's MEAT cookbook. The result was even more yumscrumpshytastic than Pie #1 (a hot water crust pork pie), and all the rolling and folding of the pastry was jolly good fun in a playing-with-plasticene sort of a way.

It makes me want to rap about the pie.