Pardon me?

“I believe in the family with my ever loving wife beside me But she don’t know about my girlfriend or the man I met last night Do you believe in God, ‘cos that’s what I’m selling And if you wanna go to heaven, I’ll see you right You won’t ever have to leave your house (oohoh) Or get out of your chair (oohoh) You don’t even have to touch that dial (oohoh), ‘cos I’m everywhere”

He might want to check his references.

The New Ones:

Americana: Radio4′s weekly observations from Absurdistan the USA. Very funny and very insightful.

The Infinite Monkey Cage: Professor Brian Cox and Robin Ince discovering the lighter side of science, accompanied by an ever changing panel full of weirdos. Brillant.

Material World: Quentin Cooper, creator of the worst puns in science broadcasting reports on the week’s most important science stories.

More or Less: The best program about the abuse of statistics. Full stop.

The Naked Scientists: Cambridge Virologist Chris Smith and his merry band of PhDs get only the best interviewees and manage to explain even the weirdest concepts to bonkheads like me.

Quackcast: Mark Crislips, the world’s most ascerbic microbiologist, on everything that is bad about ‘alternative and holistic’ medicine.

The Science Show: Australia’s flagship science program. I have no idea how long Robin Williams has been doing this, but he is bloody good at it.

Star Stuff: I have no idea who Stuart Gary thinks he is chanelling, but that voice and that delivery is more appropriate for an erotica show, but the actual reports are brillant. If he could just tone that voice down.

Thinking Allowed: Laurie Taylor, god of sociology, delivers the weirdest papers from the journals.

Radiolab: The best produced podcast. Ever.

What’s going:

Living on Earth: While a great ecological program, their relentless focus on American issues only makes it a bit tedious. Shame.

The Film Programme: Filmstars are very boring people.

NPR Technology/Environment: Good reporting, but again, the U.S. focus is a bit annoying.

The ones I’ll keep: Radio 4′s In our time/From our own correspondent/Friday Night Comedy. Radio New Zealand’s Sunday Morning, This Way Up and Our Changing World and The Planetary Society’s podcast. All bloody brillant.

So, make sure you subscribe to these goldmines of fun and facts and feed your brain those flawless, fabulous, fantastic, flabbergasting fodcasts.

Via the lovely people from reddit comes this amazing picture of the Mars Rover “Curiosity” which completely bowled me over.  If they really manage to land this thing on Mars, I’ll eat a whole steak. All by myself.

Medium rare!

Now one has resigned from his post at the trust that incorporates the Royal London Hospital and St Bartholomews’ Hospital with a surprisingly elaborate and thoughtful email, blaming the management of the trust for worsening outcomes for patients under his care. Some of his comments are strong stuff:

“We are regularly out of kit, out of nurses, out of ODPs [operating department practitioners, who plan care] and always out of beds. We have become so used to the situation, it is no longer seen as a crisis, it is the norm.”

“I did an operation last week on a calcaneal [heel bone] fracture that kept getting bumped by more urgent cases. It was three weeks down the line, and had healed in a bad position. There was nothing I could do about him.

“I fixed a compound tibia [leg bone] that was going to get a second look at 48 hours after the initial debridement; she got to theatre six days later,”

If this is even remotely true, managerial personnel should prepare themselves what I would carefully call a shitstorm, as this looks like patients’ outcomes were worsened by lack of resources. It’s bad enough when you problems in patients’ outcomes due to a rogue doctor, but if you have a systemic failure that forces a whole department to underperform then the time has come to have a long and hard look at the resources they habe been given to work with.

The BLT trust doesn’t have a particularly reputation for managerial excellence anyway, but this will be resulting in loads of patients to be voting with their feet to avoid non-urgent surgery at this particular department, much to the delight of the surrounding trusts.

Watch this space.

Funny thing, pets.

The first time you cast your eye on the little fuzzballs your heart melts and and the inevitable ‘awwwww’ slips out. You spend every living minute with them, neglect your human partner for some atavistic fuzzy therapy, produce 500 pictures per day and pretty much behave like the parent of a newborn human.

Then come the teenage years, with some significant arguments about chewed MacBook cables, holes in the carpet, arguments about bedtime and general complaints that ones rabbit spends far more time having sex with their mate and somehow they start blending into the house like the furniture: you hardly notice them at all and take them for granted.

But then the times comes when they are getting older and less sprightly, and one day a little messages arrives via the ether that the little fuzzball that you carried around with you is no more and has joined the great rabbit orgy in the sky. And bugger me, it hits you harder than you would have ever expected.

Karlchen was the first and last of our little rabbit tribe. Joining us as a bloke in 2005 (and having a rapid conversion to femalehood after 2 unexpected litters) she spend hours and hours with us, racing around our little house, jumping off sofas, falling asleep on the furniture and for some weird reason always wanting to play on the laptop keyboard. A dominant little fuzzball, she made life for her more docile partner a constant annoyance (all he wanted was really lie down and sleep).

After leaving Kiwiana (not before exploring Singapore Airlines policy of taking pets on intercontinental travel) we were fortunate to have her adopted by friends with an enormous garden and two more rabbitts for her to bully, and the last time I saw her she was gregarious as ever, even though she was hitting pension age.

So today I heard that she has finally succumbed to old age. 7 years is pretty good innings for a rabbit and I couldn’t thank my friends more for looking after her.

But: Why would you ever want to buy another pet when you have to go the heartbreak of losing the little buggers every few years.

Oh well.

…and you wonder why the Express is becoming more and more irrelevant.

Picture by NZPA

Congrats All Blacks!

So when I meet people from Kent, Sussex, Surrey, or the other counties bordering greater London who snigger about my proletarian choice of living, I pray to the great teapot in the sky that they haven’t decided to clutter my countryside.

Oh, ok, you rumbled me. I look like a retired All Black with a weight problem. Without the cauliflower ears, the sports car or the gambling habit, but at least I lived in North Otago for 6 years, and I know the sister of an All Black.

But today I feel like an All Black. Because today the All Blacks played one of their best games ever (with abysmal kicking, but what can you do) and I watched it on an Ipad, in bed, with the best ever girl friend cuddled up to me, hurtling abuse at Australians (her, not me).

So today I am an All Black. Me and the other million exiled Kiwis in London.

The gentlemen from the dealership that sold me my new car had a similar response: seconds after I abandoned Ivor (that was the Lada’s name) on their courtyard a gaggle of mechanics gathered around it, popped the bonnet and made excited sounds.

What did I get? Well, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, I wanted the car to be a 5 door hatch and it was supposed to be as frugal as possible. Enter the Suzuki Alto, a small, reasonably priced hatchback that had moderately good reviews all over the web. It’s made in India by Maruti but nevertheless has a good track record for built quality. The price was definitely competitive: 6800 pounds for the whole shebang, including the more expensive paint job.

So, what do you get for the money? Well, its build quality is inferior to the Kia Picanto (our last hatch), but then the new Picanto is 1500 pounds more expensive. The doors and the rear hatch certainly lack that ‘heavy’ quality feel that the KIA (yes, I know, it’s funny) and the interior seems smaller and certainly doesn’t have the finesse of the Picanto, but:

the drive is fun, it’s quick of the mark, it certainly is great on country roads (where it will mostly reside), the stereo is excellent and it looks quite cute. The best girlfriend ever is certainly happy to pass the Jimny over to me (not quick enough, she says) and I’m happy that I have a small and reliable 4WD to take me to the station in the morning.

But I will miss my Lada.