Would you hang up on the Queen?

It's been all over the news this week, the prank call by two Australian DJs to King Edward the 7th hospital where the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge was being treated.
The DJs are defending themselves saying that they didn't think they'd get put through, as a result of their stupid, childish prank the nurse who took the phone call took her own life less than a day later.
Some say the nurse was too gullible but would you have reacted
any differently? We are all instilled with a need to be helpful
(read the art of deception by Kevin Mitnick) and would your first
reaction be a) oh my god I'm talking to the actual queen or
b) why isn't she using William's mobile number this must be a hoax.
This was social engineering and a woman is dead because
of it. Public opinion should take these two idiots off the air.
I would've done the same as the nurse.

Why can't we cure the common cold?

First of all, common cold? Are there posh colds? Bear with me, all I've been doing for the past couple of days is reading, pondering sleeping and coughing. Stupid little asides like that keep popping into my overheated brain. Today, thanks to some meds for a 'severe' cold (I wouldn't call it severe but then it wasn't 'common' either)I'm vertical instead of horizontal.

However the question remains, our scientists can put a man into orbit, they can cure certain genetic diseases, what's a pesky little viral infection to science? And a cold is a virus which is why antibiotics won't help because antibiotics treat bacterial infections.

I prefer a natural approach but sometimes you have to wheel out the big guns so when two days of steaming, hot honey lemon and ginger and salt gargles didn't help, I went the drugs route. Of course I went roaming around the internet before writing any of this. I came across several interesting sites, links are below. I also came across the reason (I think) that I caught whatever it was. My smartphone use has gone through the roof.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/729866/how_to_heal_a_cough__does_anything_really_work/ http://purehealthguide.com/2012/04/honey-diy-beauty-tips-home-remedies/ http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cold-remedies/ID00036 http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/chicken_soup_and_recipes_for_cold http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2222538/A-breeding-ground-flu-diarrhoea-eye-infections-Is-smartphone-making-sick.html

Why are we wasting all this natural talent?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he declares that 10,000 hours is the time it takes to perfect your talent. I don’t 100% agree with that because I think we all have something we gravitate towards, we’ve all heard of child prodigies. The one that springs to mind is Ruth Lawrence, who was accepted to Oxford to study maths at 12 years of age. But your experience is more likely to be the star athlete who blew by you at every race or the kids who absorbed languages like a sponge while you were still struggling with your German vocabulary tests.

Another one is much closer to home, my brother. A gifted musician, he won a scholarship to RCM in London. He’s the only one in our family with a degree, a 2.1 but not in music. He went into engineering.

In England the school system isn’t set up to nurture natural talent, you have to choose what you want to study at an age where you shouldn’t be making decisions like that. The saving grace is that if you choose not to pursue higher education, you will still be able to get a job based on experience gained through doing other jobs.

The US is a completely different animal, here the paper is everything, a degree is the goal, saving for a college a family obligation. There are multiple advantages to having an education centric society but here’s the thing.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed two battlefield medics, newly returned from Afghanistan for a school nurse position. The man and woman told how they patched up casualties and got them back on the battlefield, these people saved lives, every damn day. You would think, based on their front line experience that any ER in the country would be honoured to have them. You would be wrong, no BSc, no ER and definitely no school nurse position. They have to retrain for years before they can do a job like that, one they could probably do in their sleep.

A friend’s wife, had her pay cut because she didn’t have the correct qualification, note she’s been doing her job for nearly 10 years, flown lifeflight, taught others, and it’s not like she suddenly got dumber overnight, no paper, less money.

One final example, a friend and colleague who went off to teach for a year, she came back because they told her she’d have to get qualified to take it further, the kids loved her, she was an excellent teacher, but no paper, no inspirational teacher.

I'm sure you can come up with plenty of examples of your own, or come see me in the shop and we'll talk...

Is there such a thing as too many managers?

Corporate America, thinks not. The function of a manager should be to manage a group of workers, to make sure they have the finance and resources and knowhow to get the job done. I know a group of workers who have just suffered their semi-annual cull (12 workers-this time), they are all a talented bunch, on whose shoulders the technical reputation of their company rests. Of course layoffs happen, but how many managers do you think got laid off? Go on, have a guess?

One? Two? perhaps three?

Nope it was zero, zip, zilch.

This is a big, big company with a worldwide reputation, and multiple layers of managers who seem to do nothing but manage thin air. The only thing these people seem to be good at is

a)panicking when deadlines they haven’t told anyone else about are a week away

b)having meetings, sometimes even meetings about meetings

c)collecting pay cheques and bonuses (for apparently managing said thin air)

I am not against all managers, there are some good ones out there, however when your ratio is 7 managers to 1 worker something is clearly wrong.

Is it just me?

Or is social media becoming less of a communication tool and more of a nosy parker? I have been on Facebook for several years now, mainly to keep up with friends in faraway places, we get little snapshots of each others lives and that was fun. Now more and more I'm being told what I should like.

The rot started when FB went public, they need advertising revenue to keep the shareholders happy, I get that. I also understand that FB deems that my friends and I should have similar interests right? Wrong!

We aren't drones, my friends have wildly different opinions to me, and I don't care about that. I'm not going to stop being friends with someone because our political views don't match up or if they like Justin Bieber and I don't, or they love 50 shades of grey (and I don't). Our differences are the things that make us interesting. But I'm getting off topic here.

I have FB on my phone (or should I say had because I just deleted the app) and this morning in my news feed was a post about real estate from someone who is not a friend and which I am encouraged to 'like'. It was actually cathartic to delete the FB app. It still lurks on my computer but that doesn't issue a siren song of clicks beeps and pings. Mobile FB I'm not going to miss you at all.

Political Ads, why believe anything they say?

Let’s get this out of the way upfront, my political views don’t count. American politics is a closed book to me. Not because I want nothing to do with it, but because for a legal alien like me it is an offence to vote or attempt to register to vote in a federal election punishable by deportation.

Non-U.S. citizens, including permanent residents (green card holders), who vote, or register to vote, in a federal election also can be denied naturalization and/or removed (deported) from the United States.

That comes directly from uscis.gov. I checked my facts before writing this post in case anything had changed.

Apparently the people who put political ads together, especially the new breed of attack ads don’t. I’ll give you an example, a democractic candidate was redistricted out of his seat by the republicans (we’re in Utah they bleed red). He is now running against a republican for a senate seat and this is where it gets dirty. In his ad he says he voted against the stimulus and voted to repeal Obamacare. In the attack ad the republicans say he voted for those measures. Someone’s lying, and seeing as it’s on the democrat’s website I’m say it’s not him.

So that’s local politics what about the highest office in the land? Policiticans are slippery creatures, there’s that old joke ‘how can you tell if a politician’s lying?’ the answer being ‘his lips are moving’. Which you could apply to pundits on CNN and Fox News but let’s not go there. And this being Utah if we get onto church and state we’ll be here all day.

Pretty speeches are one thing but in my view actions don’t speak louder than words. Words are powerful, words are also recorded and it’s amazing how often you can get a candidate to argue with themselves because they held the opposing viewpoint when their party was in power. Once a flip-flopper… Name a president who hasn’t made more than one mistake during their terms. It’s not the mistakes it’s how the CIC reacts to them, but we’re getting off topic here.

Political ads, superpac ads, attack ads just use the mute button and go to FactCheck.org you can even ask questions about specific statements made by democrats or republicans.

As I said at the top of this post, my vote doesn’t count, but here’s something to make you think. Cos you’re thinking that back home, where I could vote, I voted labour (democrat) right? Wrong! In England my voting record was 100% conservative (republican) but english republicans are nothing like the ones they breed in the US.

The whole grain elephant in the room?

Were you watching 60 minutes last night? Sugar is bad, sugar is toxic, sugar can give you cancer, okay I’m paraphrasing here but the segment was on after the one about the space program and with a hook like that who wouldn’t put down the chocolate and pay attention. The scientist, Dr Robert Lustig has been researching the sweet stuff and his findings are alarming. I’ve posted the link below.

However there is another staple that you’ve probably had some of this morning or will be eating some of today that needs to be cut back as well. Wheat. Working in a bookstore I get to read the back of plenty of books when I’m shelving them, but one, Wheat Belly by Dr William Davis really caught my attention so much so that I bought it. Davis’s opening remarks about constant exercise and lack of weight loss struck a chord with me. I’m not exactly fat but I have to work out every day to maintain my weight well I did but we’ll get to that in a moment.

The next thing that got my attention was that the wheat we eat isn’t what my parents and grandparents used to eat, the grain was cross-bred with other varieties to make it smaller, more resistant to disease, double yield and stave off famine in developing countries. The only thing they didn’t do to it was test the effect it had on humans.

Then I got to the bit where wheat messes with your brain chemistry and I very nearly put the book down. Oh come on! I thought, this was all going so well and then you have to go all junk science on me. So I put Dr Davis to the test, substituting my normal cereal for one of his recipes and didn’t feel the need to snack, had lunch (again wheat free) and then dinner. I didn’t feel the need to eat anything extra and all the usual temptations were there I just didn’t want them. I’m not completely wheat free because my husband insists on pizza Saturday nights and I don’t want to eliminate wheat completely because accidental ingestion can cause some pretty bad reactions. So Saturday night bad things get eaten but for the rest of the week I have my willpower and that’s not all.

Eight weeks in and I’m down one dress size, I exercise twice a week instead of every day (I think if I kept up the seven day a week thing I could drop another dress size but I don’t need to) and my energy level is through the roof. I still eat plenty of meat, fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, chocolate etc just no wheat. Links to both the CBS article and a link to the book itself are below. I never recommend something without first trying it. I highly recommend this.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407294/is-sugar-toxic/?tag=pop;stories

http://www.kingsenglish.com/book/9781609611545

Gullible US?

My family has a saying never discuss religion or politics with people you want to stay friends with.

Politics in the US wears its heart on its sleeve, I knew that when I moved here. As those of you who’ve read this blog before know I don’t exactly give a flying fig for it. In the UK it’s easy to ignore-sure I voted back home and if you know me well you might be surprised who I voted for but that’s not the issue here. Because right, left or independent should never be the basis for liking someone, and should never ever be hurled as an insult. Yet in the US it never fails to be and this election campaign is one of the bitterest insult-ridden yet. You can blame technology for a lot of it, citizen journalism, one click and your facebook comment or tweet can go around the world if it is controversial enough. Negative attack politics is rife. Now I know that honest politician is an oxymoron but we didn’t come out of the womb with a political party symbol tattooed on our butts we choose our political affiliation or lack of it, the same as we choose our best friends, our lovers, our jobs, the food we eat, or how we use our brains. Here’s my favourite trick, don’t listen to the words, use the mute button and look at the body language every politician has a ‘tell’ when they’re lying or flip-flopping the trick is spotting it and that's a lot easier when you can't hear the spin.

NB

In the UK Monster Raving Looney party candidates stand quite often for local government-and they’re a joke. In the US tea party candidates stand for election and Americans take them seriously even voting some into office.

http://www.loonyparty.com/

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/felkins2.html

What’s so dangerous about daytime running lights?

I used to think DRLs were a necessary evil, they come on when I turn the key, I have no say in the matter unless I want to hack my car (and I don’t) When it’s dark or overcast as a matter of habit I put my main ‘dipped’ headlights on. Most people in the US seem to rely on DRL and according to various websites DRLs have reduced front and side impact crashes by 5% or 0% depending upon which data set you look at. The word you should pay attention to here is front-not back. At the back DRLs don’t operate the tail lights which is fine in clear visibility but drive in rain, spray, fog or snow and unless you put the main lights on no one can see the back of your car, until you either brake and your brake lights come on, you indicate to pull out, or they run into the back of you. Brake lights and tail lights are not the same thing. Driving back down I15 yesterday from NV to UT in snow and heavy spray, I saw multiple cars with their DRLs on and nothing else. There were also some drivers who didn’t have DRL but hadn’t turned their lights on. Don’t take my word for it, have a friend check the back of your car and see what comes on when you have only DRL. On one of the sites I visited (lightsout.org) they equate DRLs to stone age technology when sensors could be installed that would turn the lights on automatically or better yet, improve the driver training programs and stop relying on safety devices that don’t make us safer.

http://www.iihs.org/research/qanda/drl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp

http://www.lightsout.org/story.html#ourcase

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/car-life/auto-therapy/spotlight-on-daytime-running-lights/article2191954/?service=mobile