That kidney thing

Health
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If you’re a longtime reader of this blog and still bothering to keep up with us though it is more or less moribund, you may have wondered where Palau has been this past year. Perhaps you’ve also wandered over to Wis[s]e Words and read my posts there about what’s been going on, but I’ve never really explained here what’s been happening. To keep a long story short, Palau always had had problems with her kidneys, due to a bout with cancer years ago, but had managed to keep them functioning on a high enough level not to need dialysis. Last year this was no longer possible and she had to go to dialysis treatment three times a week. We had already decided that if necessary and possible I would donate a kidney to her (having two of them it is actually possible to do this as a live donor). At the time we thought we had to wait for a kidney swap, me donating it to somebody else and their donor giving their kidney to Palau, but luckily we turned out to be compatible and didn’t need to wait for anybody else. It took roughly a year of tests and exercise on my part to get my weight down to get ready, but in December last year, five days before Christmas, we had the operation. For my side of the process, I can’t do much better than the comic cartoonist Jana Christy did about her donation.

page from the Kidney Thing comic

Unfortunately in our case the aftermath didn’t go so well. Again, I won’t bore you with everything we went through but Palau has been in and out of hospital ever since, suffering from side effects of the anti-rejection drugs, various opportunistic infections and so on. The last time she was home was in June and she’s been in hospital again since early July (heck, we even got married in hospital). It’s getting her down, especially with her birthday coming up this Wednesday. If y’all would like to do something to cheer her up, why not send a card to:

Palau
Room 18 Ward 4B
VU Medisch Centrum
De Boelelaan 1117
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

The hospital has been great on the medical side of things, but Palau is missing some of the camaraderie of an English hospital and would be cheered up no end by a nice card from a blog reader. As for myself, I try and keep this blog more uptodate than I have been doing.

Your Happening World (18)

Media, Tories, UK politics
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Nadine Dorrie, vicious cow. Should a member of parliament really spent her time harassing a disabled woman for being active on Twitter?

Andrew Marr, silly ass. “BBC presenter tells Cheltenham Literary Festival that citizen journalists will never replace real news” — perhaps not, but sycophantic power worshipers like yourself should worry. How much do we really need a muppet like Marr to stand outside Downing Street and tell us everything the nice news lady already said in her introduction? And shouldn’t we be more worried about “anonymous sources in the coalition government” or “an anonymous high ranking Labour insider” whispering in Marr’s shell likes than in what some anonymous (or rather, pseudonymous) blogger puts on their site?

The truth about the UK’s national debt. Take a look at that last chart, showing interest payments in percentage of GDP were actually higher in the eighties and nineties under the Tories than they are now, when they’re supposedly unsustainable…

More news as updates warrant.

That buslane on the M4

Tories, UK politics
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If you’ve ever watched Top Gear yopu know that buslane on the M4 is one of their bugbears, prime evidence of Labour’s war on the motorist and like Boris did with the bendy buses, the new ConDem(ned) government listens Top Gear and now wants to remove the lane. Stable and Principled shows why this is a bad idea. The money quote:

What was the result of the bus lane’s introduction? Well, the TRL report [PDF] on the scheme showed precisely what you’d expect – off peak journey times (unconstrained by the capacity problems of the elevated section) increased as a result of the speed limit, while peak journey times decreased by an average three minutes due to the removal of the merge – at peak times the traffic rarely gets near 60mph, so the reduced speed limit has no effect. At weekends the lower traffic volumes result in the speed limit becoming the limiting factor again, resulting in slower journey times. Overall, the peak hour reliability improvement more than cancels this out, however.

What, then, is the effect of removal? Well, unless they increase the speed limit, weekend and offpeak journeys will be the same as at present, while with the merge restored to the Piccadilly Line bridge, the peak journey times will extend and become less reliable as the road won’t be able to cope as well with perturbations due to the loss of capacity at this point. This, in fact, is precisely what you’d do if you wanted to declare war on the motorist and make my life more miserable.

Ideology trumps reality once again. Because The Sun and Top Gear hate the M4 buslane as a piece of motorist hating nannystate-ism, the Tories treat it as such, evidence be damned. So much for any hope that this new government would not be ruled by the tabloids.

Tax Cake

UK politics, Video
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Marcus Brigstoke, with the “help” of the Now Show team, explains how tax should work.

Top Ten anti-gay activists forced out of the closet

GLBT rights, Grand Old Paedophilia Party
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It’s not true that every homophobe is just repressed about their own desires to suck cock, so to speak, but the odds increase drastically when they’re professional, paid homophobes, especially of a religious bent. And the more famous and agressively anti-gay they become, the more hilarious it is when they’re caught, as this top ten list of anti gay activists caught at it makes clear. My favourite:

Glenn Murphy Jr., former head of the Young Republicans and one of the (former) leading Republicans of Indiana, always advocated “straight” family values and straight forward sexual orientation views.

He was caught (finally, the second time he did it) performing fellatio on another Young Republican while that man slept, without that man’s consent.

He was later jailed in 2008 and as of March of 2010, has been forced to register as a sex offender.

It’s not that these people turn out to be more queer than a nine bob note, it’s that they almost always turn out to be rapist, sexual predators or people who have to pay for their sex….