Failure to mow...

The weather has not been ideal and I've been travelling which, combined with occasional sun breaks and moist weather the grass and hedges have gone friggin' wild.

So today I called in the professionals.  In this case Abel who does gardens around here and turns up with his truck full of whirling blades of hedge trimming death.

He also cuts a mean lawn edge.

I'm really rather happy to have caught him today as he's got a petrol mower that works in the rain versus my electric one.

So now we have short grass and a trimmed hedge.  Super.

Unintended consequences...

Sodium Chloride gets a bad press.  It can be a trigger for elevated blood pressure and it generally gets a bad rap for pre-packaged problems.

However, a guilty pleasure of mine is Restaurant Impossible where the improbably small headed Robert Irvine tries to fix broken restaurants.  The last few have had chefs saying, but what about people who can't eat salt!

So...  just to be clear.  There is a difference between a few grammes of salt in every serving of you cornflakes, or a slice of bread and having a fraction of that amount seasoning the food you eat.  You can't cook without at least a little salt and pepper - honestly, I watch my salt content - in fact, I rarely use salt for anything.  But a sprinkle of salt into a meal you're making or on meat makes the difference between something that you can eat and you can't.

That doesn't mean that you're like my dad who, literally, wanted a teaspoon of salt on his dinner.

But for crying out loud people.  You have to have the stuff to live.  Like all things in life, use in moderation.

Good Grief. Spain. WTF?

That was an extraordinary display of Football...  gotta be favourites for 2014...

A healthcare rant...

I've been thinking more about the healthcare stuff in the US.  Aided, in part, by a discussion with a few people over on Scalzi's Blog.  The 'anti' arguments seem to break down into the following patterns:

1. Look at this (insert horror story of somebody waiting X or Y months for a procedure) - I don't want that to happen to me!

2. I don't want to pay for some lazy feckless oaf to get treated!

3. WAHHHH Taxes!  WAHHHHH!

4. Government's can't be trusted!

5. Not only can't governments be trusted, but even if they could, we just couldn't do it!  Look at the DMV!

These are all, actually, daft arguments, but I did want to address them because I want to get this particular rant out of my system.

Item 1: Horror Stories

Either this has somebody saying something like, 'this guy waited 4 months for a hearing aid!' or 'can you imagine waiting 6 months for a hip replacement'... they're all the same pattern.

My first reply is always the same: better waiting 4 months or 6 months than a) dying, b) NOT getting it at all or c) getting it but then losing your home.

My second is more nuanced.  I have no personal, moral or other objection to people paying for something if they can't get it instantly as part of their taxes.  I have paid to jump lines for all sorts of things, from theme park access to getting onto aeroplanes.  I accept that not everybody wants to nor can spend their money that way, but as long as they're getting into the park or onto the plane then I have no issue.

Now I know some people don't think we should have two tier systems, or that they are unfair.  Well, yes, they are.  So is life.  I have as much truck with that as an objection as I do with the other position.

2. The Feckless

Newsflash: You're paying for them anyway.  Just in the most barkingly mad, inefficient, expensive way imaginable.  call yourself a conservative? Bah!

3. I don't wanna pay taxes...

Fuck you then.  Seriously.  Fuck off.  Go somewhere without taxes.  Oh there isn't anywhere nice to live which doesn't charge taxes?  Go figure.  There is a fucking surprise.  I wonder if there's a correlation of those facts.  Wow!  Do you think that places that have higher taxes and social support systems might be, generally, nicer to live in that those that don't? Who'd have thought that could be.

4. Government can't be trusted

The daftest variation on this one I've heard went something like; "Well, Universal Healthcare would be great but imagine if Santorum had one and he was in charge of healthcare."

Well, imagine, for a moment, that we had these people who trained for almost a decade to cure diseases - let's call them... say Doctors.  That's a cool word.  And maybe it would be good if they worked in places where they had all the equipment to cure illness, let's call them Hospitals.  And how about, now here is a thing.  We let them decide on what makes the most clinical sense.

Maybe there could be some public oversight of that?  But let's have a range of randomly picked Doctor's involved?  Good?  Excellent.

5. The government is crap...

I refuse to believe that the root of all problems is that unique to the industrial world, the USA is incapable of managing to deliver and run government services.  

They seem, and here's the thing, to do a bloody good job with defence... so maybe, just maybe they're not shit?