Crackling? As in the crunchy outer layer of roast pork?
Presumably not in the US of A?
A joke lost in the mid-Atlantic, it would seem. Ah well, one lives and learns.
I was told today that the first thing a medic should do with a suspected case of swine flu is listen very carefully to the patient's lungs...
... for crackling...
(yes, this is a joke, no I'm not making fun of the sick, just the wingnuts)
Coming late to this - Kevin* re Yseult, congratulations to one and all - and don't fret about nomenclature determinism. I'm a Juliet who'll be celebrating her 20th wedding anniversary this year. It don't necessarily follow!
*It's late and for the life of me, I cannot work out how to do the accent thingy...
Serge @ 154 - indeed, oriental siren to cattle baroness is quite a change of pace :)
Still, I bet the footwear was more comfortable, and these things matter as one approaches one's more mature years, I find...
Apropos Asian Americans, the story of Winnifred Eaton, aka Onoto Watanna, is fascinating.Winnifred Eaton was the daughter of an English merchant, Edward Eaton, who met her Chinese mother while on a business trip to Shanghai, China. Her mother was Grace "Lotus Blossom" Trefusis, the adopted daughter of English missionaries.And after that, her life continues to be even more interesting, ending up in Hollywood as a screenwriter!
In the early 1870s, the Eaton family left England to live in Hudson, New York but stayed there only a short time before relocating to Montreal, where Winnifred was born. Her father struggled to make a living and the large family went through difficult times. Nonetheless, the children were raised in an intellectually stimulating environment that saw Winnifred's elder sister, Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) become a journalist and an author of stories about the struggles of impoverished Chinese immigrants, under the pen name Sui Sin Far.Winnifred Eaton was only fourteen years old when one of her stories was accepted for publication by a Montreal newspaper that had already published pieces by her sister. Before long she also had articles published in several popular magazines in the United States, notably the Ladies' Home Journal.
She left home at the age of seventeen to take a job as a stenographer for a Canadian newspaper in Kingston, Jamaica. She remained there for a year, then moved to Chicago, Illinois where for a time she worked as a typist while continuing to write short stories. Eventually, her compositions were accepted by the prestigious Saturday Evening Post as well as by other popular periodicals. She moved from this to writing novels, capitalizing on her mixed ancestry to pass herself off as a Japanese American* by the name of "Onoto Watanna" (which sounds Japanese but is not Japanese at all). Under this pseudonym she published romance novels and short stories that were widely read throughout the United States.
I have her biography, written by her granddaughter Diana Birchall, who is a very interesting person in her own right, judging by the talk I went to hear her give about her grandma.
*Because before WWII, Japanese = mysterious oriental allure whereas Chinese = despised coolie.
After WWII, she reinvented herself as a Canadian cattle rancher/oilman's wife.
I was entertained over one holiday season to receive several messages, helpfully already flagged by my internet security software, so that they read "Spam: The Ideal Christmas Gift!"
Cue visions of festivally-wrapped tins of luncheon meat.
Oh bother, this isn't going to improve matters.
Thousands of doses of the meningitis C vaccine have been withdrawn by the manufacturer Novartis following fears of contamination.
Nancy Lebovitz@385, exactly as per Pendrift@396, it's the rapid cell-division aspect that makes childhood cancers so aggressive, according to the nice doctors. Apologies for unintentional lack of clarity.
As to the-older-you-get-the-weaker-immunity explanation, doubtless there are subtleties the nice doctors didn't share with me.
They had realised I was one of those fairly clued-up relatives who would deal better with sensible information as opposed to a pat on the head and there-there-don't-fret. On the other hand, I was already several weeks into nursing very sick children and running on adrenaline fumes. I imagine they gave me the edited highlights/Cliff Notes version :)
Back upthread, someone was wondering why 'childhood' diseases are so much worse in adults.
This was explained to me thusly, by the nice doctors in the infectious diseases unit who were making sure chicken pox didn't kill my husband.
As a rule, a child's immune system is extraordinarily robust, since nature expects them to be exposed to all sorts of new infections, fight them off, generate antibodies etc, with all that speedy cell-division going on, what with growing and such.
This capacity decreases as one gets older, which isn't usually too much of a problem because the adult generally meets fewer infections that they haven't encountered before* and got a level of immunity against. Apparently this is why the older you get, the fewer common colds# you get.
Hence germs a kid could fight off landing adults in a hospital bed.
Hence childhood cancers, especially leukemia, often being so horrendously aggressive.
*This system doesn't work so well these days what with air travel exposing folk to whole new sets of germs.
#colds, not flu. These doctors were all for flu vaccine for the elderly and anyone at increased risk.
apropos James D. Macdonald @165,
I read somewhere, somewhile back, a very soundly-reasoned newspaper piece on how the prevalence of big money lotteries has made the average person's bad-at-figuring-odds a whole lot worse in a rather unexpected fashion.
In that when people come to believe they really do stand a chance winning that one-in-however-millions huge wodge of cash that will solve all their problems, buy all the ponies they want etc, they will believe far more readily that these other outcomes - like adverse reactions to medications - actually could happen to them. Regardless of logic.
Apropos chicken pox, as it was explained to me by the nice doctors treating my husband as @46, it's one of those viruses that comes as a spectrum, from very mild forms, like my two-pox godson had, to the very severe, which was at epidemic* levels round here when husband caught it.
This is how folk can catch it twice or more - being exposed to a sufficiently different variant that their existing antibodies don't clobber.
And why the NHS don't vaccinate apparently - the cost/complexity of immunisation against all the likely variants would be prohibitive.
*as in, the local authorities were considering closing schools. It was bad. You couldn't put a finger on any of my family and not touch a spot. Large areas of junior son were raw coz there was no unaffected skin between spots. They had it in their ears, their eyes, under toe and fingernails, palms of hands, soles of feet...
Thankfully I'd had a medium-severe case as a kid and didn't succumb a second time. Collapsed with exhaustion and flu* after ten weeks of intensive nursing them all through that and the subsequent complications, mind you.
*the real can't-get-out-of-bed, delirious-with-fever kind.
By which I mean, our kids have had the full set of jabs.
Reading that back, I see that's not as clear as it might be. Apologies.
Chicken pox is definitely worse the older you get. Husband spent his 40th birthday in isolation on intravenous acyclovir in our local infectious diseases hospital after picking it up from our young children. He was going rapidly down the same route as Tracey@28 (Sympathies!)
He caught almost nothing as a kid - only rubella and scarlatina. His brother and cousins had the full set up to and including measles - so our doctor reckoned he would have had sub-clinical exposure sufficient to generate antibodies. Not in the case of that chicken pox.
We're setting about getting him an MMR vaccination coz measles/mumps in his 50s doesn't bear thinking about.
Our kids have had the full set of everything - even bearing in mind my own medical history does raise the possibilities of genuine* complications for them. We looked into all the numbers and details with our GP and concluded the risks of vaccination were still definitely less than the risks of the diseases.
*I'm another huge fan of Ben Goldacre, and want to see Andrew Wakefield prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Seeing AW in a pillory being pelted with good old medieval midden refuse would suit me too.
No idea if this is UK specific law but I figure it's worth mentioning so folk can go check if it might apply to them.
If husband and I were to die in the same car crash/asteroid strike/whatever, he would be deemed to have died first because he is older than I am.
Thus, before we made our wills/had children, all his property would have instantly become mine and then instantly gone to my mother.
Our families are pretty civilised but don't really know each other and the potential strife at a time of bereavement that could cause doesn't really bear thinking about.
On the same basis, when we did make our wills, once we had children, the solicitor also advised on a clause in the event all four of us go down in the same plane. Families don't need vagueness at a time like that.
I look on all this as a form of preventative magic. With every conceivable disaster covered, none of them are going to happen!
Being an at-home mum with two toddlers, reading an eminently forgettable formula-fantasy from the library - because I'd already read everything half-way decent on their shelves.
Deciding I wasn't actually going to finish it - and heck, if the Library Police caught up with me, I'd argue my case.
Saying to my husband as I set it down, 'huh, I could write something better than this.'
Him saying, 'go on then.' And really meaning it.
After a couple of years, after a lot of concentrated hard work and learning stuff, my first book was published. '09 sees my tenth hitting the bookstores!
Can't offer much beyond sympathies and hopes that this too will pass.
However, on the 'contributing to the problem yourself', I would suggest we are all entitled to work to live, not live to work.
Also, by way of general observation, back when I was a student, and later as a personnel officer, every so often I encountered folk in danger of meltdown/burnout due to a sustained surge in work/not enough time available to give 100% to everything/diligent personality combination.
An effective strategy that I saw senior tutors/managers apply was to insist that the potentially overwhelmed person for eg, took their full lunchbreak entitlement, getting out of the building if possible, even if only for a walk. Or mentally escaping by reading a book - for pleasure NOT work. That they allocated definite blocks of time after work and at weekends for hobbies, family, friends. The overall reduction in stress meant their time actually spent on work was soon markedly more productive.
What folk in this bind were advised to cut back on was volunteer-type activities, committee work, PTA etc where there were actually other capable people in those organisations who were just not pulling their weight.
Mez@118, sorry, I don't have any specific details and concentrated googling turns up nothing useful.
Next time I see them performing hereabouts, I shall make a point of getting more info.
This thread cheers me enormously, after the Beeb news report irritated me immensely.
Not least because the term 'morris side' was entirely absent in the TV piece. Which did at least incline me to take the entire story with a substantial helping of salt. If they can't get that detail right...
We have an exuberant women's morris side hereabouts (Cotswolds, UK) who are all breast-cancer survivors, dress and dance entirely in pink and do a lot of good raising funds and awareness.
If the computer-related alphabet is nearing completion, how about a domestic/familial one?
Since the established response in this household, when one or other of the teenage sons balks at their allocated share of hoovering/washing-up/emptying bins/whatever, is to remind them that M is for Mother, not Maid.
Every so often I do have occasion to remind my husband that W is for Wife, not Waitress.
And when necessary, we are united vs the sons on the basis that P is for Parent, not Pushover.
(unless this has already been done somewhere, in which case I'm guessing someone here will know)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2009 | 19 |
| 2008 | 24 |
| 2007 | 27 |
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2005 | 2 |
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