Is it strange to read Churchill speeches?

It’s cool to read old Churchill speeches, right? Of course it is! Why do I even ask?

I discovered something interesting while perusing Churchill’s famous, “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. The entire text can be found here (though most of it is pretty dull).

Now this speech was made about a week after the British troops, after having been driven across France by the Germans, were successfully evacuated from Dunkirk back to Britain. So this was the about lowest point of the war for the Brits.

Now the part of the speech that got my attention was the very end, and it goes as such,

 

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

 

WHAT!?! Are you kidding me? What kind of leader announces that there are plans to flee your homeland and hide overseas? He basically says that they can’t win on their own, that they need (at the time, neutral) American aid! Boy I’ll bet Brits everywhere felt pretty optimistic the next day, huh? That may very well be the least uplifting thing I’ve ever heard. Crazy drunk!

 

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Videos anyone?

 

An couple of awesome up close videos of a solar flare. Super trippy.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

 

Since I’ve been making a few Dylan references recently I figure another wouldn’t be out of place. This is a parody of D. A. Pennebaker’s 1960-something Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back. Clever, and frankly, very true to the original.

No Direction, Period

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Yes, We’s Engaged

Yep we did it, we got engaged. We are very happy about it all. We are very grateful for everyone’s very kind words. Yes we are. Yes we are.

My fiancee and I are of like minds on this whole marriage thing. It is good and we are pleased. We are expecting good times ahead, yes we are.

We like rainbows, and sunrises, and sunsets of course. We like puppies and bunnies and smiley faces, yes we do.

We look forward to tandem bike rides, and two person inner tubing, and that two person shoulder sitting pool fighting thing.

 

Aaaaaaaand CUT!!!

 

Whew! There you go onlookers, the one and only example of Buzz and I being “those people”. WE will remain the two of us, thanks.

Anyway, I gotta say I’m really looking forward to this whole thing. The closer it got to actually asking Elizabeth (I knew I was gonna due it on our anniversary for several months) the more excited I got. Its funny, after years of really feeling kinda negative about the whole marriage thing, I sure feel good about it now that its set in motion. Gosh, maybe I shoulda asked years ago. Huh.

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On a completely unrelated note. A great couple of comics.

Xkcd – “Wikipedian Protester”

Mac Hall – “Martha Who?”

Better to burn out or fade away?

So I happened to come across the Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World video for Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (better known as Bruddah Iz). Basically Bruddah Iz was a powerful musical force in Hawaii (or Hawai’i?) starting about 15 years ago. He was a mix of traditional and general ukulele goodness. Now I have to admit when I first heard the guy after mom moved to the islands I was a bit dismissive (you know A BIT), but I’ve kinda come around to the guy.

Now Iz died in 1997 of what can only be called morbid obesity, he was over 700 pounds at one point. When he died at 38 he was only the third person to be laid in state in Hawaii, and the only non-politician ever. Over 10,000 people attended his funeral, and his ashes were spread over the ocean.

So here we have a guy who died at what can only be considered a very young age, but his impact in a very short period was enormous. He helped reinvigorate a sense of pride in his culture, not to mention put out some jammin’ songs.

So was it necessary? Did he have to die young to have the impact that he did? Did Kurt Cobain? Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison? Were their deaths necessary to leave their works as tours-de-force?

I remember dad saying once that had Dylan died in that motorcycle accident in mid-1966 he would have been propelled to the level of musical godhood. I can’t say I disagree, he’d just put out Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and then gone on a European tour and played ELECTRIC rock and roll! This culminated in the famous scene at the Royal Albert Hall, per Wikipedia:

‘At the climax of the concert, one fan, angry with Dylan’s electric sound, shouted:

“Judas!” and Dylan responded, “I don’t believe you… You’re a liar!”

He turned to the band and, just within earshot of the microphone, said “Play it fucking loud!”‘

 

So would Dylan have a different musical legacy had he died then? Would the world be better off without “God what garbage Bob” of the late sixties? Would we be better off without “Christian Bob” of the late seventies and early eighties? Sure he’s putting out good stuff now, but it can only be good if has the heart of ‘64-’66. Would he have remained forever young like the rest had he died in 1966?

So is it worth it? Is a short influential life preferential to a long uninspiring one? Was Iz’s short unhealthy 38 years better than 80 healthy years with children and grandchildren?

Maybe it all depends on who you talk to. I imagine there are thousands of Hawaiians (and not) who have been truly moved to be better, and try harder by Bruddah Iz’s lyrics and politics, and for them, maybe the trade off was worth it. But was it for him or his wife? Would they have given it all up for another year?

I found myself pondering all this, realizing that its always time to appreciate, not so much what, but who you have. Because there’s nothing more important than friends and family, unless maybe you speak to thousands, and then I guess they’re family too.

Ow! My Heart Strings!

Well, hello again. It’s been so long since I checked in I was afraid you may have wandered off by now. But a real pleasure to see you as always.

Explanations for my absence? Only work I’m afraid. It feels like I’ve been living at that hospital recently. I’ve been really sucking up the overtime, so my days off tend to be singular and isolated, which of course means all I do is sleep the day away. This actually is my first three day off stretch in a while, so with a solid 14 hours of sleep behind me, I figured I’d be able to sit down and really focus on this thing.

I gotta say the last couple weeks have been some real trying ones at Union Memorial Hospital. Sometimes you’re lucky, and you have a weeks long stretch of patients who are getting better, or at least not getting worse. Spirits of the staff lift, and we’re all smiling a bit more. People call in sick less, and even the ever present fussiness among the older nurses seems to slacken. You get that reminder of why you do what you do for a living.

But of course, as the saying goes, once it does start raining, look out! And what I’ve been pour I’ve weathering recently. Its just been one heart breaker after another. My unit has been open only periodically over the last couple of weeks due to a wildly fluctuating hospital census. So I’ve been everywhere. Oncology? Check. Cardiac, ICU, MedSurg, Rehab, Pediatrics, Geriatrics? Check, check, check, check, check, check. Man I’ve seen the hospital top to bottom, and I still can’t remember half the nurses names!

“Hey…umm…nurse for 303 bed 1!” or my personal favorite

“WHO HAS 511?”

And everywhere I went (my own floor included) it sucked! It was grim and depressing everywhere. Just plain awful.

Moving up the elevator:

• Half a dozen infectious Alzheimers patients who simply wailed and cried ALL night long, regardless of who went near them or what we said to try and calm them down.

• A man who was so determined to get his intubation tube out that he stabbed a nurse with her scissors.

• I spent an hour helping a surgeon with a patient on Friday and the both of us came out with blood up to our elbows and massive puddles on the floor and bed (wish I’d had a gown on!). This same patient then informed us that he didn’t care how low his pressure dropped from fluid loss, we could “Damn well leave him alone until the morning!”

• A 16 year old asthmatic in an oxygen tent who even with our best efforts we could barely keep from completely desaturating.

• A woman who hit a nurse in the head when he tried to give her CPR after her heart stopped (actually that was kinda funny).

And back down on 6ES, my very own unit:

• A suicidal alcoholic who tried to kill himself by wrapping the IV’s power cord around his neck, then when we took it away from him, he wrapped a coat hanger around his neck. He then proceeded to break the leather restraints (!!) we put on him, and ripped the sink out of the wall. The only solution ended up being doping him into a coma and putting him on a heart monitor.

• The nicest 25 year old I’ve met in a long time, but the poor girl had uncontrolled high blood pressure and cholesterol (even with medication), and was with us because of the onset of diabetes that after 48 hours in the hospital was still at dangerous levels.

• And worst of all, a 22 year old guy with obvious full blown AIDS (no immune system at all) who refused to even get tested for it. He’s in an airborne isolation room while we rule out TB and as soon as he leaves it, he’s gonna catch some little bug that’s gonna be life threatening, all because he won’t get tested so we can put him on the drugs.

And yet I walked out of that room and out of that hospital, and it was a beautiful morning. So I guess I don’t know what to make about that.

 

 

It seemed almost fitting that I found this quote this week, it seemed to capture my disposition of the last couple of weeks. It’s written by Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz who is famous for writing about the what the Jews did in the camps as opposed to what was done to them. He tells about a small child who was paralyzed from the waist down and was unable to speak.

• “Hurbinek [the name the prisoners called the child] , who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm–even his–bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.”

Man, it’s been a rough couple of weeks.

 

 

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But here I am with three whole days off! Unfortunately Elizabeth bailed on me and went home for the holiday weekend, so I am forced to fend for myself. Thank goodness the cats remind me when they get hungry, because if they were fish they would totally starve while she’s gone.

I’m kinda looking forward to doing nothing for a few days. I mean I’ve got several computers cluttering our living room that need work done, but thats just plain cathartic. A friend of mine just dropped her computer off for me to de-virus and this particular Dell is the only computer I’ve ever seen that you can’t open the case. Fortunately I don’t need to, but out of curiosity I searched the web for how to get around the bolts on the back. The most common suggestion is (honest to god) “jimmy the case with a can opener”! Nice product.

So about my music picks. I know I promised it like two weeks ago but, well, I’m not done yet. So the hope is I bang it out this weekend what with time on my hands. We’ll see.

A couple of links:

Bob Dylan…Weird Man?

A guy having a metaphysical discussion with his dog

 

Ciao!

 

 

 

 

 

Other people are so funny!

Weeeee post number 2 of the day!

Let’s be guided by the hilarity of others (so I don’t have to use my brain).

I just discovered (as in the last 12 hours) this web comic.

Three Panel Soul

Now the strip is fairly new and the guy actually has a day job (or did until a couple of days ago) so there’s only so many of these made so far. Still I’m gonna link to my four favorite:

God bless any archaic Bob Dylan related lore.

Sad one.

But right back on the horse!

And of course…any excuse to play with (I mean utilize) firearms.

And here we have a kitschy little joke post about the original Star Trek’s famously hilarious “Trouble with Tribbles” episode. I was in tears halway though this thing!

LOLTrek

So on an interesting blog note, my recent post about nurses having off color senses of humor got a whole bunch of links from of all things, humor websites. Basically these sites just scrape large blog collectives (WordPress, Blogger, etc.) and then return any results that match certain keywords. For example nurse, humor, laugh, and the like.

And voila, they picked up my little old blog. I ended up under the workplace humor section of all of them, which is at least a little ironic considering my subject. Anyway the funny thing is that the links still haven’t been removed, in fact another site just found me yesterday. I guess there is no actual person double checking the automated software. I mean what if this was a porn site that happened to have the same keywords? Man that is lazy.

 

 

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.“

-Kurt Vonnegut

Big Group Project!

So the you may remember a couple of months ago I linked to South By Southwest’s collection of music.

The original post is:
Ha! Commie Pigs in Space! (and music)

So basically this thing was 738 songs (only one per artist) that covered every single performer at the festival. Now its been taking me a while to work my way through this thing, and I’m just now finishing up the “P’s”, but for those of you out there who downloaded this 3GB monstrosity and have worked you way though it, I’ve got a challenge.

I want everyone to put together a 12 song best of album! Winnow down this huge thing to a short little collection of your personal favorites, so the rest of us don’t have to wade through the whole thing time and time again. And I’m making no requests to “branch out” or “go for something different”, I just want what you like best.

Now I know that just about everyone has a blog or website or something. So if you want to post the list to your own site and then just drop the link as a comment here, that’s fine by me. I realize that this may take a while to put together, since at least a cursory re-listen is probably required, so take your time. I’ll try to have mine put together by next Sunday or Monday, and then I’ll either put up a download link for the songs or be lazy and just list them as a comment.

Hey, one great song out of every 60 shouldn’t be too tough right? This is gonna be fun.

Oh god…horrible…but I laughed anyway

Anyone out there know a nurse or two? Well guess what? Nurses have the worst sense of humor known. Not “bad” in the not funny sense, but bad in the “Oh my god I can’t believe you said that!” sense.

And the worst part, I’m starting to become one of them. True, most of us manage to keep the jokes within our little health care family, thus not allowing the general public to become aware, but still, Damn!

I mean we’re talking about “ha ha cancer”, “ha ha car crash” and “ha ha amputation” kinds of jokes. Don’t even get me started on the drug addicts that constitute fully 25-30% of our patients, although how anyone can be so jittery about IV’s when you spend every day sticking needles in your arm is beyond me (see, it’s infecting me too!).

I suppose its just an extension of general workplace gossip/stories, you know, like “so and so are totally hooking up”, or “our manager totally did such and such the other day”. But in a hospital it tends to cross whatever lines you can think of. Trust me, all you patients out there, we talk about you. It’s not always bad, in fact sometimes its very positive, but you’re gonna get talked about nonetheless. And if you’ve got something really gross, or something rare, or you’re a really crazy MoFo, you’re gonna get talked about for a really long time (oh, and if you have any connections with maggots, you may be talked about forever).

Just remember, most of us have been burned before. We’ve all been very sympathetic to someone in pain only to find out that they’re just in for a “morphine vacation”. We’ve all had a perfectly nice junkie start screaming at us once they can’t have anymore cookies because they’ve eaten all of them. We’ve all had some little old person throw something at us because they can’t remember where they are. We’ve all had to dodge punches from an enraged psychotic (the things they don’t tell you about sleeping pills).

So maybe that’s why we tell these horrible jokes. Maybe it keeps us from throwing up our hands with the whole mess. Some how the terrible diseases and out of control patients seem a bit less terrible and out of control if you can sit down as a group and laugh at them.

Still, any joke that starts…

“So we had this bariatric patient starting chemo…”

…is never gonna end well.

 

 

 

 

Pic of the post:

Mother nature at her finest.

 

Music Edition Number Something

I was chatting with Elizabeth’s friend Laurii yesterday trying to get Qnext working, with disappointing results. It reminded me, as we were swapping songs (one by one unfortunately), that I have found a couple of bands/sites that are full of musicliciousness.

So the first comes from the Brian Jonestown Massacre website. I didn’t really get into this band until I saw the movie Dig!, a documentary about the early careers of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. Great movie. The lead singer of Brian Jonestown Massacre comes as as being a crazy fella, though obviously a musical genious.

So here is the Brian Jonestown Massacre music site.

You can download every one of their albums in mp3 format. Great great music.

One of my most recent CD purchases was “Boys and Girls in America” by the Hold Steady. I have got to say, this album is just plain Awesome! The whole thing has a very live feel to it. Even though it’s a studio album, it’s just a roar of the crowd away from being a concert.

Here’s the song “Chips Ahoy”.

Definitely my Album of the Year at the moment (It being only April of course).

I got an album by The Comfies with a magazine subscription recently. We’ll call it good overall, with a couple of great songs. They just put out there first album which is only an EP. I’m really only mentioning this because they are from Nashville, and they’ve got a lot of potential, so go check ‘em out Nashvillians. You’ll notice that I’m linking to their own site which is lousy. From there you can go to the record company site (which I recommend) or their MySpace site. I won’t link directly to any MySpace sites due to the large number of viruses and exploits running around there, and I don’t want to feel responsible for sending someone to a site that might be infected.

Good luck with all that. I am lucky enough to have the next three days off, and am gearing up for a royal bout of lazy. Go me.

Your pic of the post, Mars in true color: