A Bit Of This, A Bit Of That

[poliphilo]

Ailz had steroid injections in her hips yesterday afternoon. Her father drove us to the clinic and waited in the car for us to be finished. He's a very generous man. I sat at the far side of the room and read a book while the nice young doctor stuck in the needles. I know the media keeps telling us that the NHS- along with the rest of Britain- is broken- but I've never seen the evidence.

But then the media only ever talks about the brokenness and never about the mending. For instance it was headline news for weeks when Manchester gangsters were shooting one another, but way down the agenda when the leaders of the Gooch gang- who were responsible for most of that shooting- got jailed the other day. There hasn't been a fatal, gang-related shooting in Manchester for over a year now. Who knew?

Ailz has spent today in bed- to let the steroids settle. I wrote an impassioned rant about the media- of which fragments remain in the previous paragraph. I binned the bulk of it because I was forcing the anger. Bush and Blair exhausted my political rage. These days I don't get angry about public things. Or at least not honestly so.

Ooo! Our adopted daughter just showed up. All by herself. No husband, no baby. We'd been waiting for her all afternoon. She's going away for a week- and  wanted to say "goodbye" before she left. She's brought us an easter egg.  

Comments

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

They stole my rage as well, and left me with a bit of lingering hate, like what uranium makes when it decays through it's half-life.

My best to Aliz on her recovery.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

"Bush and Blair exhausted my political rage."

I sadly fear that by the time some folks have recovered from this phenomenon they will have discovered that "the new boss, same as the old boss yada yada" is every bit as pernicious and has had an opportunity to wreak some serious havoc while they were still hating Bush et al.

But it's okay. I have enough rage for both of us, although I'll target mine toward folks on this side of the Atlantic. I never thought I'd take to the streets again, but I'm getting ready to.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to get behind the Angry People, because a lot of them tend to be ones who, screwed over due to mindless extravagance and narrow-minded selfishness on their own part during the years of plenty, now react with a sense of outraged entitlement as they lose the toys that were never worth what they paid for them in the first place.

Unfortunately these people tend to proliferate in the government and the media also.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Agreed, good news is no news. I had a bit of a rant about that myself on these pages a while back. There are various good news sites around. There's one on LJ which I think is called happy_news, but the one I used to watch only seemed to have stories of little fluffy animals being resuced from impossible circumstances. Necessary, but not sufficient, to restore one's faith in humanity.

Happy Easter.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your good wishes.

The last ten years taught me the futility of political anger. Bush and Blair did what they chose to do in spite of the opposition of most of the world- and now they're gone anyway.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm agnostic about Obama. I suspect we'll get out of the current mess- or not (as the case may be) irrespective of what our political leaders do.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think we had this recession coming. It's nobody's fault- and everybody's.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't want happy news, so much as news that helps me understand the bigger picture- and that doesn't edit and clip stories into formulaic, cliche-ridden packages.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Don't know where we get that. It's not just the Daily Mail that twists stories up, these days.