A sixteen year old boy was killed in broad daylight. Apparently he was involved in a fight between two gangs of youths; there are a lot of gangs in Newham and as far as I can tell they are fairly nebulous things. Having had my ambulance kicked and punched by a gang (luckily while I wasn't in it) I can easily see how the violence had escalated. Sympathies to the family; how do you keep your teenage sons inside during daylight hours?
When I next work out of Newham, I'll no doubt hear the full story, I suspect the police won't have many witnesses to the murder itself.

Baghdad Burning tells us that the Governing Council of Iraq (you know...the people who are all trying to carve out their own little piece of the country) are to introduce Shari'a (Islamic) law. This wouldn't be so bad if the men who run the religion could agree on the issues. Islam has always been for womens rights, yet it is the interpretation of the Quran, by men, that leads to oppression.
While Iraq had a secular government women had equal rights...now it looks like it's all going to change for the worse. Go read the link, and see how the Americans have "freed" the Iraqi people.

Newham General (the hospital I tend to find myself at most often) is to undergo improvements under a new Private Finance Initiative (PFI). The article says that the A+E has undergone improvement...but in my eyes it is still too small for the number of patients that it sees. The department was designed with 14 cubicles, but they have had to split each cubicle in two by using curtains in order to have enough trolleys to cater for patients. These cubicles are designed for one patient, yet are now holding two, which obviously has a detrimental effect on patient privacy, dignity and confidentiality. It also makes it a bugger to get a patient off my ambo trolley onto a hospital trolley.

Also they are selling St Andrews at Bromley by bow in order to pay for the shiny new Newham hospital. I suspect that there will be a further fall in the services for the mentally ill. No surprise there then...

Two posts back I told you that I had to study for an exam...well I have since passed the exam -sigh of relief- and am now bound into my work as an EMT. The exam itself is one of those things that you tink "Hell, I've been living the job, it'll be easy" until you turn over the page and the first question is "What is the minimum distance you should be able to read a license plate, in order to have the required eyesight to drive?"
I'm sure that its important to have decent eyesight, but I think the first "da Firm" would know about any failing vision would be by the trail of destroyed ambulances you leave behind.
Still, I managed to see some collegues who I hadn't seen for over a year and catch up on some of the gossip. I found out that the new computer MDT dispatch that my sector has been using for the past six months went "live" in North-East sector yesterday, so if you live there, the confused looks on ambo-crews faces are nothing to be worried about.

Now I'm just gearing up for a week of night-shifts by laying in bed until 14:00 (that's 2pm for normal people) and staying awake watching the Discovery channel until 04:00 (erm...4am...)

Should have something interesting ambo based for you on Sunday.

Gary Turner has had one of his genius synthesis moments, and now considers the SETI project a mission of intergalatic spam.

You may have seen this elsewhere...but I have an exam tomorrow so original thought isn't going to win today. I particularly like the male mind "humming"...

Taken from Here

WE'VE GOT THE DIRT ON GUYS' BRAINS

by Dave Barry

I like to think that I am a modest person. (I also like to think that I look like Brad Pitt naked, but that is not the issue here.) There comes a time, however, when a person must toot his own personal horn and for me, that time is now. A new book has confirmed a theory that I first proposed in 1987, in a column explaining why men are physically unqualified to do housework. The problem, I argued, is that men -- because of a tragic genetic flaw -- cannot see dirt until there is enough of it to support agriculture. This puts men at a huge disadvantage against women, who can detect a single dirt molecule 20 feet away. This is why a man and a woman can both be looking at the same bathroom commode, and the man -- hindered by Male Genetic Dirt Blindness (MGDB) -- will perceive the commode surface as being clean enough for heart surgery or even meat slicing; whereas the woman can't even see the commode, only a teeming, commode-shaped swarm of bacteria.

A woman can spend two hours cleaning a toothbrush holder and still not be totally satisfied; whereas if you ask a man to clean the entire New York City subway system, he'll go down there with a bottle of Windex and a single paper towel, then emerge 25 minutes later, weary but satisfied with a job well done.

When I wrote about Male Genetic Dirt Blindness, many irate readers complained that I was engaging in sexist stereotyping, as well as making lame excuses for the fact that men are lazy pigs. All of these irate readers belonged to a gender that I will not identify here, other than to say: Guess what, ladies? There is now scientific proof that I was right.

This proof appears in a new book titled What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works. I have not personally read this book, because, as a journalist, I am too busy writing about it. But according to an article by Reuters, the book states that a man's brain ''takes in less sensory detail than a woman's, so he doesn't see or even feel the dust and household mess in the same way.'' Got that? We can't see or feel the mess! We're like: ``What snow tires in the dining room? Oh, those snow tires in the dining room.''

And this is only one of the differences between men's and women's brains. Another difference involves a brain part called the ''cingulate gyrus,'' which is the sector where emotions are located. The Reuters article does not describe the cingulate gyrus, but presumably in women it is a structure the size of a mature cantaloupe, containing a vast quantity of complex, endlessly recalibrated emotional data involving hundreds, perhaps thousands of human relationships; whereas in men it is basically a cashew filled with NFL highlights.

In any event, it turns out that women's brains secrete more of the chemicals ''oxytocin'' and ''serotonin,'' which, according to biologists, cause humans to feel they have an inadequate supply of shoes. No, seriously, these chemicals cause humans to want to bond with other humans, which is why women like to share their feelings. Some women (and here I am referring to my wife) can share as many as three days' worth of feelings about an event that took eight seconds to actually happen. We men, on the other hand, are reluctant to share our feelings, in large part because we often don't have any. Really. Ask any guy: A lot of the time, when we look like we're thinking, we just have this low-level humming sound in our brains. That's why, in male-female conversations, the male part often consists entirely of him going ''hmmmm.'' This frustrates the woman, who wants to know what he's really thinking. In fact, what he's thinking is, literally, ``hmmmm.''

So anyway, according to the Reuters article, when a man, instead of sharing feelings with his mate, chooses to lie on the sofa, holding the remote control and monitoring 750 television programs simultaneously by changing the channel every one-half second (pausing slightly longer for programs that feature touchdowns, fighting, shooting, car crashes or bosoms) his mate should not come to the mistaken conclusion that he is an insensitive jerk. In fact, he is responding to scientific biological brain chemicals that require him to behave this way for scientific reasons, as detailed in the scientific book What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works which I frankly cannot recommend highly enough.

In conclusion, no way was that pass interference.

(c) Dave Barry, Miami Herald

Occasionally you get a job that makes you laugh, normally because the person who you are picking up is an idiot. We got called to a chip shop in one of the main roads in Newham, unfortunately there are about 20 chip shops on this road, but we managed to find it by looking for the shiny white police car parked outside. The call had been given as an "assault" which can mean anything from a slap on the face to a fatal stabbing.
In this instance it was a young lad, the spitting image of "Ali G", who was complaining that he had been hit on the nose, needless to say there wasn't a mark on him, and it turned out that he had been hit by his girlfriend. The police wanted to take statements, but he wasn't interested and when I tried to look at him he told me that I wasn't needed as "I'm St John's innit, and a security guard". This fella wouldn't scare a kid just out of Primary school, so I suspect he was telling a little bit of a lie. As he wasn't hurt and "refused aid" my crew-mate and I retreated to a safe distance to do our paperwork...
In the course of the night we found ourselves at the local hospital (dropping off some ill person or something) when who should walk in with another crew from my station, but our earlier "Ali G" lookalike. I asked him why he decided to call an ambulance when he'd already sent us packing, and it turned out that another woman had hit him...
...The prostitute he'd hired after his girlfriend had slapped him. Turns out she had hit him and then robbed him of his "bling", and he couldn't have put up much of a fight because he only had one scratch on him.

It's wallies like these we have to put up with...and call "sir"...

Bless their little cotton socks - They are changing the Comment system back to something even more reasonable.  You've got to appreciate anyone who notes that their users don't like the new feature - and actually change things for the better.

Do you think Microsoft would do such a thing?

It looks like a cheaper version of the Segway will be making its way to the UK in the next couple of months.
What this means is that there will just be more ways for people to injure themselves - even if it is allowed on the pavement, the streets around here require four-wheel off-road capability. I have visions of people falling off at 10mph wearing no safety equipment.
...Pardon me while I have a little giggle...

Blogware have changed the commenting system for their Blog system, (You know...the one I use because I love it so).  Now you have to open the post entry to leave a comment.  I don't think that anyone has had a nice thing to say about it.  Although I don't get comments left on this page, (nobody loves me...sniff) it would be nice, that should the urge take you, that it be fairly easy to leave your comment.

Here is hoping that they change it back.

Much like Michael Honey I have too many books and not enough time to read them.  At the moment I'm trying to get enough peace and quiet to sit down and really enjoy Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver"; it's one of those books that I'd love to spend a day or two just enjoying.  Unfortunately I have to read books in fits and starts, just because I'm too damn busy.  M, (Hi M!) keeps threatening to lend me books, but I have too many things on my plate.

There are however books that I can read in the quiet moments at work.  It only really happens with non-fiction, as my memory is so bad, I very quickly lose track of the plot of fiction books.  The book I'm reading at present is "London - The Biography"; very well written with each chapter taking on a topic rather that a period of time.  It is a huge book, but can easily be put down and picked up again (using my Underground ticket as a bookmark).  Diamond Geezer already reviewed it, and I've already got the other books in his Christmas present list.  It goes to show that "great minds think alike".

The 2001 Census has been used to show why I am so busy. According to National Statistic Online, Asians consider themselves to have the worst health with Bangladeshi men three times more likely to visit their GP than the "general population". Couple this with Newham having a 32.5% Asian population (compared to 4.6% nationwide); is it no wonder that we are run off our feet dealing with GP case-work. Couple this with the fact that Asians are 46-51% more likely to suffer from heart disease than the general population, and I can see why I never have time for a cup of tea on station.
Still, if I wanted a quiet life I'd work in Suffolk.

Although I often moan about the idiocy of other peoples driving when faced with a big white van with blue flashing lights on top; I am sometimes pleasantly surprised at the lengths some people will go to in order to get out of the way.  For example, yesterday we had people nearly grounding their cars on roundabouts and roadside verges, squeezing into parking spots I wouldn't be able to fit a mini cooper in and swearing at other drivers who wouldn't move out of the way.  I've had workmen stand in the middle of the road and stop traffic, lollypop ladies fence off crossings with their "lollypops" and van drivers who I have 'clipped' while squeezing past them wave me on and tell me, "don't worry about a little damage".

Yesterday we had all the above on one call (except hitting a van driver), it was like the Red sea parting before us.  It was a beautiful thing to behold; it left us in awe and wonder.

Shame we were going to two year old with a cough.