Blah Cliath: Seymour Hersh

Here’s a link to the video webcast of an Amnesty International Lecture in Dublin, given by Seymour Hersh recently.

Slan to Brendan

Sad news today for weather intrigued folks the great Irish meteorologist Brendan McWilliams has died after a short illness. His ruminations and knowledge will be missed.

More prosthetics: International Red Cross link

In my quest for information on prosthetics and Iraq I came across a whole bunch of articles on the International Red Cross website who continue to help civilians in Iraq.

You can also donate directly to their Iraq projects here  you just have to select the area of the world that you want to donate to. So many NGO’s have been forced to withdraw from Iraq because of the violence that it’s critical we support the ones who remain.

 $240 bucks will  provide prosthetic materials so that four landmine victims can walk again, while $25 can provide first aid care for a war wounded assisted in a first aid post. If you’re lucky enough to be flush then donate $8,000 to  provide surgery and hospital care for 100 war wounded patients until their discharge

Alternatively, if you wish to make an immediate difference to someone by tomorrow morning then support the Rapid Prototyping for Baghdad project (RP4Baghdad)

• Donate 250$ and help us treat a patient with a head injury.
• Donate 750$ and help us treat a patient in need of a leg prosthesis. This includes mould making, model making, transport and model fitting.

There’s full disclosure on their financials on the website, this extraordinary organisation have an annual budget of $32,000 dollars and I am very struck by the immediacy of the work they’re doing, as they can help a patient in a week from obtaining a three-dimensional CT scan of the patient in Baghdad then having models made elsewhere that are sent back to Baghdad swiftly and the patient is operated on.

This a very unique and intelligent project delivering essential humanitarian medical support Applaud it by helping finance it. It feels to me that only tangible form of protest against the unbelievable civilian suffering right now is to provide relief.

Raise

Now and again, usually infrequently, you come across something that’s so intelligent and progressive that it’s difficult not to slap your head repeatedly and wonder why oh why can’t governments come up with and support such promising and necessary possibilities.

I give you the Open Prosthetics Project. A gang of inventor/industrial designer dudes (Tackle Design) from North Carolina joined forces to collaborate and establish this. Bloody brilliant.

The Open Prosthetics Project is producing useful innovations in the field of prosthetics and giving the designs away for free.

Another interesting project is RP4 Baghdad

Rapid Prototyping for Baghdad supports severely injured people in Iraq by providing Iraqi surgeons with surgery equipment, prosthetic limb sockets and tangible 3D models.

The situation for amputees in Iraq from what I can gather is supremely shite. It’s very difficult to obtain information, so it must be ridiculously difficult for Iraqis to actually get access to prosthetics.

These assertions are supported by the following recent articles:

Interview and slides from photojournalist Farah Nosh: Iraq’s Brutally Wounded

Demand for prosthetic limbs by amputees outpaces supply in Baghdad

If anyone knows anything further about the prosthetics situation in Iraq please comment or email with more links or info.

We, outside Iraq, on central heated sofas, despite our vehement (and unsuccessful) anti war protests need to urgently take this kind of suffering a lot more personally.

Autumn weather and brains

It’s Autumn so necessary to nest with my two Autumnal obsession the weather and the brain.

 And how we’ve been tantalized by prospects of windy weather that has not actually landed. Tropical storm Ling ling’s leftovers joined us yesterday. It was like the dumping of a giant melting icecube. Seemingly we’re going to experience La Nina weather cycle this year. Last year’s big storm prompts the reoccuring image of trees falling straight through houses. 

 And on the brain, of which we truly know so little, two fine BBC Radio 4 program links:

 This one is all about the science of acquiring and learning languages

 Image Of A Troubled Mind

Brain scanning is perhaps the most extraordinary and powerful technique scientists have for exploring how people’s brains work. Dr Mark Lythgoe, a neuroscientist at London’s University College, investigates whether it will ever help those who have mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.

Thankfully…

Amid all the nuclear hype and Cheney driven hysterics: Someone in Brighton is reaching out to Iran:

She has also given away £300,000 of the £1.5m from selling her Brighton house, before she bought her elegant flat, a block from the sea. “It gives me a high like a drug rush to write cheques,” though her accountant says she has to stop. Her first was for £1,500, to a man she read about in the local paper who couldn’t afford to get his dog out of a pound in Iran.

From The Independent: Julie Burchill interview

Great way not to make a living

Sean O’Brien, one of Britain’s most celebrated poets, said last night that he regarded his work more as an “affliction” than a career and would not recommend it to anyone, as he won the prestigious £10,000 Forward Poetry Prize for the third time.

Ra, ra, ra to Mr O’B for disclosing the realities of the moronic times we are living in and how impossible it has become for artists to make a basic living.  The extraordinary thing is how any book ever is written if you consider that it’s so damn difficult a thing to do, even on a technical level, and that’s before you address the matter of your stomach welding to your back like a set of bellows if you don’t feed it.

It’s really a savage process. Being an artist is akin to being devout you need to maintain a certain degree of delusion or suspended disbelief to keep going. 

 Emerging voices are the ones most at risk; there’s so little mentorship and possibility for them to become better writers.  Mr O’B has some advice:

He also urged younger poets to resist the modern- day urge to publish before their work had matured. “I don’t think people necessarily need to rush into print. It might be a good idea to really learn the craft than think about publishing. Because of the way we live, people want instant results but poetry doesn’t perform in that way,” he said.

It’s not just poetry, sometimes people will tell you a story doesn’t quite “work”, but they’ll rarely tell you how you might fix it. The only route to acquire such knowledge these days would appear to be staring at the thing til some kind of divine intervention intercedes with a refusal to budge from it and the damn thing improves. 

 My next question is has it always been this bad? 

 Rest of the newspaper piece on Mr Poet  here

Bouger Maria

A story in William Trevor’s new collection Cheating at Canasta bought me back to the summer of the moving statues. I can remember the discussions “There’s too many has seen it now for it be anything other than truth”.   Anyway, I, 14 at the time, believed in them, but I was fairly misguided on most fronts, including it would now seem basic facts about the shape of the planet and the possibility of marrying Boy George.

 For those who want to relive it here’s a radio documentary 20 years on.

 Here’s a link to the review I wrote of William Trevor’s new short story collection in The Globe and Mail

1=4

This month being Breast Cancer Awareness Month I was asked in the supermarket checkout by a charming, chubby faced male in a pink wig and tutu if I’d like to donate. I agree. He offers a plastic pen or a pin in return. It struck me that whomever had the task of manufacturing the pen or pin was likely exposed to the possibility of four other cancers in the process of making it and likely lives in a country where access to cancer treatment is limited.

Our dust vs leaves friend I hope will be able to dutifully inform us what the various toxins are.

 The pink wig insisted there were 26 pen factories in our Province. I loved his precision and would happily ingest whatever it is he’s taking that creates such worthy delusions esp if it’s available at Safeway. Their stance on fish farms causes a pause for prayer and wonderment also. How exactly are we supposed to get the omega 3 blah blah if the lice are nibbling the bejesus out of the wild salmon we’re supposed to eat to prevent cancer. Suddenly the pink balloon doth not fly so deft.

Here is a great blog on the experience of breast cancer: http://cancerfuckingsucks.blogspot.com/

c’est vous qui decide

An average Ridgways Organic Earl Grey retrieved from the compost on an average windy afternoon, not unfortunately at 4pm when such things should be reflected upon.

Looks a bit bulky to be mere dust.

Generally N America could use a little help on her average grade teabags. Hence the lean for Ridgways. My french could use an equal rescue.

4pm

Things a man could consider doing at 4pm.

Making a cup of tea

Putting more milk into the tea.

Opening a window

Milking a goat

Listening to a language he doesn’t understand. (http://www.rte.ie/rnag/ for starters)

Nothing.

Read a book ideally Guernica and Total War by Ian Patterson

Open a book and pretend to read it.

Close the book and rest his elbows on it.

Break open the old teabag and count the leaves in it.