How Karaoke Saves Lives

Tracy wrote the other day that her daughter is a budding karaoke queen. At the time my view was that this wasn't a particularly ambitious career aspiration, but on the Emilia Show tonight was a report about a Thai Medical School.

They are using karaoke to teach their students about cardiac medicine with such hits as "Heart Failure". Apparently the catchy lyrics make it easier for them to memorise all the gory details.

"Baby, You're breaking my heart...
with your cold, sharp scalpel"

It's not an ideal solution. You can just imagine the scene in the operating theatre when someone forgets exactly where on the left ventricle they need to make the incision, or do some defragging, or whatever. So all of the medics break out into song. Of course, they can't remember which song the vital piece of information was in, so they have to treat the (fortunately anaesthetised) patient to their entire reportoire...

This idea is not new. For decades, orthopaedic surgeons have been singing "Dem Bones" when they need to remember what they should reattach the hip bone to.

"The Knee bone's connected to the Neck bone"

So I think that Tracy ought to think about all the lives that'll be saved if she gets a karaoke machine for Emma, who is clearly a budding heart surgeon. Then all she'll need to do is learn to speak Thai...

Planes, Keys, Phones, Automobiles and Radioactive Burgers

Ill Omens

I thought I'd tell you about my day. Friday, to be precise. I'm not superstitious, but if I was, I'd say that people are wrong about Friday 13th. It's the 11th you have to watch out for.

Promising Start

Things seemed to start okay. It was my last day in Scotland. I packed my stuff and checked out. At this point, I had already made my first mistake of the day.

I got to the airport in plenty of time to catch the flight, which was due to leave around 7pm. I checked my bags in and went through security and an x-ray. The x-ray machine didn't go off. More about this later.

Oops.

At around this time I realised about my first mistake, which was leaving my mobile phone charging in the hotel room. I'd not recommend doing this, by the way.

Getting Nowhere Slowly

When it came time to check in, there were only two of us at the gate, and no staff. All mention of our flight had vanished from the information screens. There had been no announcement, but the flight had been cancelled.

So we had to go back out, and get our bags from the carousel. Except that there were no bags on the carousel. We were told to wait and they would appear. As if by magic, they didn't.

[Source]

We went to the luggage place. They were busy saying they'd phone someone to check when my colleague noticed his case in their office. "Oh yes," they said, "we took some cases off the carousel earlier because no one claimed them."

Then it was time to check in the bags (again), and get booked onto the 9pm flight. Which was delayed by an hour.

At some point around this time I made my second mistake of the day.

Something I Ate?

I went through the x-ray machine. This time it went off, but they couldn't find any guns or bombs, so I can only guess that it must have been the burger I had just eaten. Which was strange, because it tasted okay.

[Original]

Finally we got on a crowded plane, and 45 minutes later was at our destination back in England. The plane then sat on a taxi-way (or whatever the technical term is) for about 20 minutes until it could get clearance to trundle near enough to the airport for a bus to take us to the terminal, but under the circumstances that was a mere detail.

Oh, Shit...

We finally got home at around 1am, rather than the planned 9pm. In the taxi home I realised about my second mistake - losing my keys.

Since I was given a house key as a teenager I have never ever lost my keys. Well, until yesterday, that is. My keys, like my wallet, are always with me. So I was homeless at 1am in the morning.

Nice People

My colleague very kindly offered to let me stay in his spare room for the night, thus saving me the time and expense of trying to find a hotel, and I finally got home at 11pm on Saturday, thanks to the nice people at the letting agency. The nice people at the hotel are sending my phone to me, and all I have to do now, apart from have a much-needed shower, is to work out how to get into the locked garage that contains my car (there was no spare garage key)...

The End

Which I think means that I can officially declare Friday 11th over, and start enjoying my weekend.

I hope your day was better...

Wordy Wednesday

Olympia

When I was looking for a picture of Manet's "dejeuner sur l'herbe" to add pearls to for my mosquito post, I discovered that the model, Victorine Meurent, was the same one in loads of Manet's pictures. I've always liked Manet, but I'd never noticed that it was the same woman all over the place. I suppose I wouldn't make much of an art critic.

At the weekend I went round a museum here and saw two of Manet's pastels for real. One of them was "The Beer Drinkers".

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Abroad

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I'm writing this from Scotland, which isn't actually a different Nation (I'm typing this quietly so that they don't hear me), but they do speak differently. They say things like "Och, yool nae be wahn'ing tae gae oot in thus weather." Luckily, I spent some of my childhood here - I even used to talk like that - so I don't need an interpreter.

The great thing about Scotland is that this is where they make whisky, so it's impossible to find a bar without a selection of malts. The bad thing is that the weather's not so good. As I type this it's rather wet and miserable. Which I suppose is why they like their whisky so much.

Another thing I'm not keen on is the bagpipes, which someone had wailing in the shopping centre. I'm sure that when the natives were all guerilla warriors fighting the English, they had to improvise with things like musical instruments, but there's not really any excuse in this day and age...

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Brewed From Girders

[License]

Scotland is the home of "Irn Bru", in the same way that America is the home of "Coca Cola". You won't find much Irn Bru in the US, since it's banned. Apparently one of the ingredients causes cancer in Americans.

It says on the bottles "Bru'd in Scotland to a secret recipe for over 100 years". Which is true, since it first came out in 1901. They used to claim that it was "Bru'd from Girders" - I'm not sure if that's true, since I've just drunk loads of the stuff but haven't suddenly become superhero strong. Oh well...

Parasites are a Girl's Best Friend

I'm not sure if I believe this story, as I couldn't find many sources for it. (Here's the Greek version, just for reference).

Apparently a businessman from Shanghai was trying to think of ways to increase sales at his online jewelery shop. Perhaps all sorts of ideas were floating around in his mind -

• "Win a Holiday to Shanghai!"

• "Getting Married? Get a Great Trade-in Price for your old Wedding Ring!"

• "Something Special for the Woman in your Life? Discretion Guaranteed (we won't tell the wife)"

• "Free fake Rolex with every purchase!"

• "Get your Dead Mosquitos here!"

That's not a misprint. I did say "Dead Mosquitos". Whilst he was thinking up brilliant marketing schemes, he swatted a mosquito and decided that this was a sign. So he started advertising "hand killed" mosquitos. Ideal for scientific research or decoration.

The story says that he got 250,000 hits on his website, and 100,000 orders were placed for this unique product.

I think that if I was Nin Nan (that's the guy's name), I'd be rather depressed at this. After all, people would rather buy a dead insect for decoration than one of his baubles.

The other problem that he's now got is where to find 100,000 dead mosquitos, before he gets sued by angry customers demanding their goods within 28 days. There are good reasons why no-one has tried this particular publicity stunt before.

If it was me, I'd have gone for something like this:

"I'd Feel Naked Without My Pearls"

Much more tasteful than dead insects, if less original...

What Happened Next

This is your Captain speaking. We welcome you on board flight D 00 M. Please make yourselves comfortable. The cabin crew will shortly be dispensing drinks, but we do ask you in the meantime to familiarise yourself with the supplied incomprehensible safety card. This gives helpful suggestions about ways you might like to spend your last seconds desperately but vainly trying to survive a crash. Not that anything bad is going to happen.

Thankyou, and enjoy the rest of your journey.

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This is your Captain speaking. We shall be landing shortly, so please fasten your seatbelts... (To copilot) No! Not that lever! ...

Meanwhile the passengers all spill their cocktails.

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Modern aircraft are designed for every emergency. The passengers can be thankful that their seatbelts and the aircraft's robust engineering have protected them from too much injury.

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Well, okay, perhaps I spoke too soon.

Wordy Wednesday

Questions:

1. When you're in a queue at an airport check-in, why is one of the only two check-in people always sitting for ages with their head down apparently busy?

2. What are they actually doing?

3. Why do they have to do it in front of everyone instead of going into an office or something?

4. Is it really to torment the people who are queuing up?

5. When you do get to the checkin desk, why do they have to press so many buttons on their computers? Surely identifying one of a handful of flights, one of the few hundred passengers, and their seating preference doesn't constitute more than 3 or 4 operations?

7. Why don't the air stewardesses doing the safety stuff stand at the emergency exits to show people where they are, instead of those weird hand gestures that don't really help?

8. Why do they tell you where the lifejackets are even on internal inland flights?

9. Where is Wordless Wednesday?

Answers on a postcard please...

Lost in the Post

I rarely get spam, because my email service generally detects it. It all goes into a "Spam" inbox, which, since I don't usually look at my email on the web, I rarely see. After a month it gets deleted.

So today, being away from home and using webmail, I checked my spam. In there were loads of email notifications of blog comment posts, which explains why I went for about a week without seeing any. Why it thought that your words of wit and wisdom (and mine!) were spam, I don't know. I also found a 3-week old email from a friend who probably thought that I was ignoring him.

Talking of spam, most of the subject lines are fairly innocuous. Some even appeared to be offering special offers on meals out ("Get Extra Meat"), but "Blast her womb with your huge cannon"??? Perhaps a new surgical instrument for gynaecologists? I'm glad I don't look through that inbox very often...

Drive her wild with all that meat!
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