Wu Wei

Happy New Year to all my readers

I started this blog in the early spring of 2004 when I had not much else to do. At the beginning of this year, it seemed to be going nowhere, and I almost gave up. Then in the summer, it took off again and I seem to have many more readers. Neoworx is counting 102 countries, and 5600 visitors over the last year.

So to all of you out there, wherever you are, thanks for the support and encouragement. One of my friends in Kosovo sent this New Year message to all his international friends, and I thought it just about covered what I wanted to say, so (thanks to Blerim).

I would like to send you my warmest greetings and honest wishes for all of you in the New 2007 Year. I wish your plans and desires be fulfilled and all the blessings for you and your dearest ones.

Happy New Year to you all!

Christmas books

We survived a family Christmas, not really as bad as it sounds. As Bee says, if we have outsiders visiting, the three of us are on our best behaviour to each other.  Now I am reduced to absolute slobbery. Way behind with the reading never mind the reviews and the latest tag from ViolainVilnius. 

And of course I got more books for Christmas, even the same one from both daughters, plus two other duplicates of books I have read. Not even had time to change them yet.

At this time of year gloom and lethargy always descends after New Year.  But at least I finally got all my reports done so at least I am a free woman. 

Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance

In line with Lotus reads' suggestions that we ought to finish our "Books we have been meaning to read" pile before getting new ones, here is one I have finished.

Blood, sweat and tea is a blog book.  I've never read a blog book before, but I have read this blog, called Random Acts of Reality, for the last 18 months or so, so I was interested to see how it turned out.  It's a bestseller, which is good for Tom Reynolds who writes the blog.  Subtitled Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance, it chronicles the interesting bits of his life on the ambulance as he goes out at night in the (rough) East End of London.  Containing a mixture of medical stuff, comments on the obnoxious and unhelpful people he has to deal with (he claims to hate everyone, without any discrimination) and compassion for both patient and relatives, it is gripping reading on the blog. It has a large following of commenters.  The interesting debates about medical ethics and the state of the British health service mean that part of the appeal  is the variety of comments each post draws. 

The book begins with Tom having to an AIDS test because blood and vomit from an HIV-positive patient landed on his face.  As a result, he had to take a cocktail  of drugs until the test was clear.  He blogged despite the side-effects of the drugs "messing with his mind".

From the book I learnt that right now in the UK, one in four women loses a baby during pregnancy or birth. In fact losing a baby is so common that he fears that hospital staff have lost sympathy for individual mothers, because to them, this is so "normal". 

The book covers people being found dead at home, found dying at home, being rushed to hospital to be "saved" then dying, and being dead on arrival despite all the crew's efforts.  He ponders each case, wondering how to preserve people's dignity, trying to protect and support the relatives, and hardly ever loses his empathy with his patients.  When he does, they are usually drunk and/or undeserving, having called an ambulance unnecessarily. 

There are descriptions of road races to get to the patient, and the frustration of just having got some food when a call comes in, as well as the relief of a cup of tea back at the station.  Somewhere in there, there is also some commentary on the London bombings, though they weren't in his area.  He also has given advice on how to blog on your work and not be sacked.  The London Amublance Brigade seem to be supportive of his blogging (done under a pseudonym, but soon outed at work). 

I enjoyed reading all the posts again.  Most of the posts in the book have a note after them (and some a note before them) where Tom reflects on the background to the post and the comments he received, but somehow it's not the same as the blog.

So I would recommend you to buy the book (usually with a special deal on Amazon) but afterwards read the blog.

 

Technorati tags: blogs, Random Acts of Reality, blogging at work

Interesting

On Digg the most popular World News/Business post over the last year was:

Rumsfeld resigns 5713 diggs

beating even:

Saddam Hussein sentenced to death by hanging 4400 diggs

That's quite a margin.

Divine answers

Snowsquare reports here that Moscow is likely to have no snow for New Year, an unheard of event.

Do you think that the warm winter throughout Eastern Europe could possibly be Someone's response to Lukashenka's prayers about Gazprom's bullying over gas price rises?  He doesn't seem to have many alternatives.

Or the result of Gazprom's prayers in case it can't meet domestic demand and EU exports in the case of a severe winter (predicted here for 2010).  

Technorati tags: Gazprom, gas, Lukashenka

Revolting in Moscow?

Don't you think there seem to be a lot of demonstrations recently in Moscow?

First there was the anti-Putin demonstration on 16 December which attracted 2,500 people and 8,500 police.  Some Press agency sources listed here. Other blogs have called it the Dissenters' March or even the Misanthropes' March, see here

Then the rather more scary one of (claimed) 70,000 of Nashi (dressed as Ded Moroz and Snegurochka, not sure I understand why) to celebrate the defeat of the Nazis at the Battle of Moscow, see photos here.  Number  of police not mentioned.  Nashi are usually described as thugs (especially when threatening the British Ambassador in Moscow as here (BBC) and here (Mosnews)).

And the one by 200 journalists to remember the 250 journalists killed violently since the fall of the Soviet Union mentioned here. Number of police: "hundreds". 

Is it the unseasonable warm weather brings people out onto the streets?  Or just after Litvinenko we are all watching Russia? 

Admittedly they are all covered by the same website, so I googled to check what else I could find:

The Turkish Invasion reports on 24th November

Today, there was a different kind of demonstration in Moscow (not like the ones we see every week in Pushkinskaya where everyone starts cursing and yelling from their loudspeakers and you can only understand their case by the banners they are carrying).

Two leaders of youth political movements, 23-year-old Ilya Yashin and 24-year-old Maria Gaidar, flew this banner from a bridge in the heart of Moscow for an hour and a half, all the while suspending themselves from ropes at each side of it. The banner is 10 meters long, so aligned as to face the nearby Kremlin, and says, “GIVE PEOPLE BACK THE ELECTIONS, BASTARDS!”

Christmas Carols

Now we are living in Oxford, it seemed a good time to redo English traditional Christmas things like public Carol Services in churches.  I have already built the Pandora holiday music radio station, starting with Kings College, Cambridge and Vaughan Williams and editing out any Bing Crosby etc which creeps in.

Last year Sloph and I were too disorganised to do anything but go to midnight mass (or whatever it is called in the Anglican Church) on Christmas Eve. This year we tried harder.  I was a bit surprised that Sloph wanted to come, but glad to have someone to share it with.  She said she was dragged (aged 11 or 12) to King's College Cambridge by her father, and spent most of the time grumbling, until suddenly she "got it" (about the music).  Bee still hasn't got it, although she is the singer.  Neither have had the solid religious upbringing I had (church every Sunday morning, Sunday school in the afternoon). For them, it was supposedly compensated for by two years school Religious Education at 15-16 years old,  which English schools provide.  But Sloph and I agreed that we like the traditional music and the high quality singing in good acoustics.  Neither of them has managed the seven years school choir I did, with rather ambitious music teaching, which gives me a large repertoire of Christmas music to recall and enjoy.

On Thursday we went to Christchurch College for their Christmas Carol Service.  This is supposed to be the musical event to rival Cambridge, but we were disappointed.  Partly because the choir's singing seemed ragged (unforgiveable) and the accompaniment was a rather "tinkly" piano.  Partly because there was only one reading from the Bible, read in rather a rushed way.  And partly because there were too many innovations in the readings or non-traditional variants of "our" carols.  We were amused (by the story, but not by the pretend dialect) of the Yorkshire yokel who gave a down to earth explanation about the Messiah: "they said it was going to rain forever and ever, and kept going on about lost sheep". But since when did  Roald Dahl's Cinderella have anything to do with Christmas?   Or a reading of children's letters to Father Christmas, when the selection seemed to be mostly about quantity (one child simply asked for one of "everything Santa had"). We spend the interval whingeing, and the bus ride home. 

So we are packing in some more carol services in Oxford in an attempt to get our fix of traditional stuff as we like it.

Yesterday we went to the Festival of Nine Lessons at the University Church of St Mary's. The church was packed, we sat in the gallery.  This was much better: accompaniment by the organ, solos for "In the bleak mid-winter" and more known music, plus proper readings. The  charity in whose aid the service was performed, explained their aims but neither of us were much wiser, as the explanation was so politically correct.

Winter Challenge

After my "book I have been meaning to read" list turned out to be longer than I thought, (found some more this morning) I was pleased to find I was not alone.

Lotus reads directs us to Overdue books' winter challenge

According to Michelle from Overdue Books, this is how the challenge will work:

For this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.

The bonus would be that we would finally get to some of those titles (you know you picked them for a reason!) and we wouldn't be spending any extra money over the holidays.

The time frame would be Nov. 1st until Jan. 30 and there will be some small, fun prizes awarded to random participants and/or those with clever review posts. There will be one random drawing for a prize to those who submit their list of books in the comment section by Nov. 15th but feel free to join any time. There will be another random drawing for those who submit five reviews by Jan. 30 for a small gift certificate to Amazon.

Unfortunately I already got lured by the bookstore pretending I was buying presents for someone else. For me Christmas and New Year holidays are not a good time for reading. What's the winter equivalent of lying on a beach, which is conducive to reading? Lying on the sofa in front of a good log fire, knowing it is too cold outside to go out? Global warming seems to be removing that pleasure this winter.

The end of the old?

An end of year assessment of EU-Russian energy relations here from the Jamestown Foundation.

And the New Year Resolutions should be? Lots of EU energy policy changes in the spring?

Some questions that have probably been keeping you awake at night

Is cat litter radioactive?

How come that Russian spy still had eyebrows?

 

Technorati tags:

 polonium-210, radioactivity, Litvinenko