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Bird videos

August 14, 2007 by bobleckridge

If you like nature programmes, or enjoy bird-watching, this site – birdcinema.com will be a treat for you.

It’s kind of a Youtube for videos of and about birds!

Posted in education, from the viewing room, science, video | Leave a Comment »

Drug-based preventitive treatments

August 14, 2007 by bobleckridge

The BMJ published a study today which has been reported across at ScienceDaily. This is an incredibly thoughtful article which questions the prescribing of lipid-lowering drugs (statins) to the elderly. Whilst there is good evidence that lowering lipid levels in younger patients reduces their risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases, there is not good evidence that the same benefits can be achieved with the elderly. However, doctors are being encouraged to treat the elderly with the same assumptions as they make when treating younger patients. Worryingly, one of the studies conducted in the over-70s who take statins shows that while there did seem to be a reduction in death from cardiovascular diseases, the overall mortality remained the same. In other words they died from something else. In this particular study there was an increase in deaths from cancer. The authors of this paper ask a question which I’m astonished has not been asked before.

Is it possible, they ask, that by introducing preventive treatments in the elderly aimed at reducing the risk of a particular cause of death, we are simply changing the cause of death without the patient’s informed consent?

Too often drugs are presented to the public and the medical profession in terms of “saving lives”. Drugs don’t save lives. However, they do alter the experience of dying, and, of course, therefore, the experience of living. But when coerced into taking medication to “prevent” future diseases, patients are not being told exactly what not dying from this particular disease might mean for them. What are they more likely to die from if they don’t die from heart disease for example? This is not a question that should only be asked when treating the elderly. It’s time we had some decent research on how medication changes the experience of living and dying, not just research which only focusses on single diseases. Only then can doctors and their patients make truly informed decisions.

However, the issue of treating the elderly as if you can expect they will receive the same benefit from a treatment as a younger person is also something we need to think about. It doesn’t make sense. People are different and “evidence” from drug trials conducted on younger people may well not be at all useful “evidence” when making a prescribing decision for an elderly person. To be useful, evidence has to be relevant to the individual patient who is being persuaded to take medication.

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health | 2 Comments »

What do you think this is? (no.2)

August 13, 2007 by bobleckridge

green, originally uploaded by bobsee.

If you enjoyed doing the previous “What is this?”, here’s another one.
You’ll have to look very carefully

Posted in from the dark room, photography | 3 Comments »

An Ideal Husband

August 13, 2007 by bobleckridge

I used to struggle to get a VHS recorder to record a movie using the timer. Oh, I won’t go into the details. It was just often a pain. When I got a dvd recorder with my new big screen I thought it’d be better. Well it was. But only kind of. Still quite a pain. So I swapped it for a hard disk recorder. Oh joy! It’s so EASY! In fact it’s so easy, there are now lots of movies on there that I haven’t watched yet! But that in its own way can be such a serendipitous delight. Came home from work today and browsed the hard drive. Pressed play when I got to An Ideal Husband. What a treat!

This is such a great movie. It delighted me. I loved the humour, I loved the wit, and I loved the acting. Great cast. I don’t think I’ve seen Minnie Driver do anything better (well, at least as good as her role in Good Will Hunting) Julianne Moore is tremendous in it but Rupert Everett is just the best!

There are so many great lines. Here’s a couple of my favourites

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

**********************************************************************************

To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing, and one does not see anything until one sees its beauty

**********************************************************************************

Lord Arthur Goring: I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some advice.

Laura: Oh pray, don’t. One should never give a woman something that she can’t wear in the evening.

This is one of those movies that lifts your heart. You know, sometimes we need a movie like that does that. But more than that this a movie where, due to the brilliance of Oscar Wilde, portrays rich and complex characters. There’s nobody two-dimensional here. Even the characters which seem like caricatures at first meeting are revealed to be much more complex than they first appear. I like that. It reminds me why it’s important not to judge – everyone who rushes to judgement in this story discovers how wrong they’ve been once they see a little more. There is a great little video trailer of the movie here

Posted in from the viewing room, movies, video | Leave a Comment »

Need a little cheering up?

August 12, 2007 by bobleckridge

This is quite the funniest and most original and creative video I’ve ever seen on youtube.

If you’re feeling in need of a good laugh, watch this…….

Posted in creativity, from the viewing room, video | 2 Comments »

Dazlious

August 11, 2007 by bobleckridge

Just watched Snowcake. Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman both acting superbly. She plays a high-functioning autistic adult, Linda, whose daughter has been killed in the car the Alan Rickman character, Alex, was driving. He’s a damaged soul himself having lost his son in a car crash and gone to jail for murdering someone. I won’t tell you the rest of the plot. Get the dvd and watch it.

Here’s what I like about it more than anything else. This is a story about difference. How we are all different, and in the more extreme expressions of our difference other people find us hard to accept. This is a story about acceptance of difference. There are so many unique, non-conforming, not “normal” people in this movie. So many unique and strange characters who manage to fit together……certainly not seemlessly, but well. These are people often connected only through chance happenings, with echoes of their pasts resonating in the present.

Snowflakes are all unique of course. Despite being made of the same stuff, they’re all completely different and that’s in no small part responsible for their beauty.

Here is one of my favourite scenes. The two main characters playing a game of scrabble with the rules having been made up by the autistic Linda. The rules include being able to include made-up words as long as you can demonstrate their use in a sentence. Listen to this dialogue and listen to Linda’s story of “dazlious”

Posted in from the viewing room, movies | Leave a Comment »

What is this?

August 11, 2007 by bobleckridge

What is this?, originally uploaded by bobsee.

What do you think this is?
I took this photo recently and when I uploaded it to my computer I thought…..what on earth is that??!!
I remember now.
But what do you think?
Can you figure it out?

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography | 9 Comments »

Golden sunburst

August 11, 2007 by bobleckridge

Golden sunburst, originally uploaded by bobsee.

We’ve had a lot of rain in Scotland this summer.
But sometimes the sun bursts through the clouds.
Just like this.
And it makes me gasp.

Posted in from the dark room, photography | 1 Comment »

“I’m happy basically. But before my stroke, I wasn’t really” Edwyn Collins

August 11, 2007 by bobleckridge

Last weekend’s Sunday Herald carried an article about Edwyn Collins. The headline spread over two pages was “I’m happy basically….but before my stroke, I wasn’t really”. Well, as you might imagine, that caught my attention.

Edwyn Collins is a singer. You maybe remember his 1994 hit “A girl like you”

Just over couple of years ago, aged 44, he suffered a stroke. A serious stroke, paralysing his right side and taking away his speech. But here’s a man who doesn’t give up. Through determined rehab with incredible loving support from his wife he’s not only singing again but is about to release a new album. Although right handed he’s also taught himself how to draw again using his left hand! It’s an amazing interview.

I have a stroke to deal with. But I’m feeling positive. And feeling relaxed, and generally focussed on things. I’m relaxed and dreaming all the time. So my life is happy at the moment. I feel connected. I feel alive again.

His wife adds

I think you’re a better tempered person. You cope. And you have patience. And you’re not self-pitying at all. You’re not even depressed………We’ve got so much to feel…….

and Edwyn finishes her sentence

…..to feel grateful for.

Well, what do you think? Health and the absence of disease are not the same. It’s wrong of us to write people off who have a chronic illness or disability. You can experience “health” in both the absence and the presence of disease.

This is a story of someone who believes their life got better through the experience of recovery from illness (same kind of story Lance Armstrong tells in his autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike). Notice the elements of Edwyn’s story. All of these were involved, sorry, are involved in his recovery –

  • hope
  • loving relationships
  • determination
  • patience
  • an absence of self-pity
  • a capacity to cope
  • creativity
  • music
  • drawing
  • slowing down
  • reflection
  • dreaming
  • gratitude

Worth thinking about?

Finally, when I searched for him on youtube I first found A Girl Like You but then I found this – I’m sorry I can’t show that video clip here, the person who posted it to youtube has disabled embedding but please follow that link and listen to the lyrics. “Make Me Feel Again” was recorded in 1993. Don’t you think that’s amazing?

Posted in creativity, from the music room, from the reading room, health, life, video | 2 Comments »

A life less ordinary

August 10, 2007 by bobleckridge

I have a habit of buying the Guardian on a Thursday. It’s the Technology section that attracts me but I usually enjoy the whole paper. Do you ever read obituaries? I don’t often but I really should make a point of doing so more often. Reading an obituary of Hans Georg Gadamer in the Japan Times a few years ago completely changed my understanding of health and opened the doors for me to a mysterious and previously unexplored (by me) section of the bookstores – philosophy.

Today I read the obituary of Norman Cohn. No, I’d never heard of him either. He died aged 92 and this phrase was the first one in the obituary to catch my eye –

as a lecturer in French at Glasgow University (1946-51), he embarked on the studies that would make his reputation, despite having no formal training as an historian. Indeed, his very unorthodoxy may account for the originality of his insights.

Isn’t that such a great insight? How often does “formal training” and orthodoxy crush innovation and originality? The subject of his studies and publications was the recurrent myths which continue to underpin the demonisation and destruction of whole groups of people.

As Cohn himself pointed out, all his work was fundamentally concerned with the study of the same phenomenon: “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil”.

This statement by writer, Richard Webster, really grabbed my attention –

The key to his extraordinary achievement perhaps lay in the fact that in his own life the personal and political were never severed, and matters of the heart were as important to him as matters of the head

Here was a man who obviously lived in a holistic passionate and highly individualistic way. His first wife, Vera, who he married in 1941, was

daughter of Menshevik revolutionaries, who had previously lived in a ménage à trois with Raoul Hausmann, one of the founders of Dada.

She died aged 96 and he subsequently married for a second time. Richard Webster, writes –

When I last met him in December 2004, he was genial, hospitable, radiant with his recent marriage to her and looking forward to a late honeymoon in Provence during which he would celebrate his 90th birthday.

And concludes

His greatness will always reside in the manner he combined deep scholarship with a passionate zest for life.

Wow! Is this an inspirational life, or what?

Posted in from the reading room, life | Leave a Comment »

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