So it turns out that at least one US marine unit in Afghanistan has been using the lightning runes of the Waffen SS on their flag. Intentional or not, trust Americans not to learn anything from history, but they at least should’ve paid attention to what Mitchell and Webb were trying to tell them:
As the number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children grows in the US, so does the number of pediatricians who refuse to treat them. Over at the inevitable comment thread at Metafilter, one pediatrician explains the realities of vaccination and the risk your children run if they’re not vaccinated:
Sometimes I work with families for whom the reality of the morbidity and mortality of these diseases is extremely limited. In my education, I do focus on morbidity because families will not hear that they are putting their children at risk to die. The injuries from these diseases are often more concrete, even minor injuries like the significant scarring of varicella, or persistent airway disease from pertussis. Refusing MMR exposes male children to infertility risk, all children to acquired heart defects. Refusing HiB, even if your child does not die from meningitis, will surely result in acquired neurological, cognitive, vascular, and extremity injury once heroic efforts have saved the child from meningitis death. In the case of HiB, many currently practicing providers lived through the complete horror of internship and residency in children’s hospitals’ meningitis wards where babies were dying all around them that could not be saved. My current attending talks about the weeks when HiB vaccine was, then, introduced and the wards closed up, one by one. And he gets freaking teary-eyed about it, even now. Refusing pneumococcal vaccines like Prevnar opens all of us up for more of the same–the current Prevnar 13, for example, covers for 48% of invasive meningitis.
Families do not believe they are accountable to their own children–that they answer for their scars and acquired disabilities. But they do. Injury from actual vaccine is an incredibly small and fully reported risk. Any parent can go to the CDC site, at any time, and monitor vaccine injury. But the risk of acquiring a preventable childhood disease by refusing to vaccinate is nearly certain in that child’s lifetime. It’s as if a family made the decision to let their infant lay across the backseat, unbuckled, without a carseat, because they decided they would simply just drive very carefully.
My sympathies all lie with the doctors, though I can spare some pity for those parents who, genuinely wanting the best for their children, are taken in by one of the bullshit merchants preying on their fears and insecurities, their greed masqueraded as concern. But vaccination is not new, not controversial and has been used for a long long time, has slain some of the greatest childhood killers: smallpox is gone completely, polio almost, measles in rich countries is an inconvenient childhood disease, nothing to be worried about. That very same success ironically now makes continuing vaccination programmes vulnerable to indifference as parents wonder what the point is, if these disease are gone or under control. But they are still necessary and not vaccinating doesn’t only put your own child at risk, but other people’s children too…
As I said last year, that old Bob Marley song kept going round and round my head during the darkest days of Sandra’s illness. What I didn’t say then was how it came into my head, which also why it’s back now. I hate to admit it, but it’s all Ajax’s fault.
I’m not an Ajax fan even if I live in Amsterdam, as I long ago gave my loyalty to Feijenoord, though for most part this has been academic, as I never followed football all that much other than during European or World championships. But when Sandra got ill and kept being ill, football was one of the things I fled into, something that I could absorb myself in, something that in the long run doesn’t really matter, but which can get me worked up enough not to think too much about what could happen; perhaps most importantly, football was and is something that doesn’t remind me of Sandra, something I don’t associate with her. And so I found myself watching games I never would’ve in normal times, including Ajax playing European matches. Which meant, as in the video above, hearing Ajax supporters singing their songs, of which “Three Little Birds” is a particulate favourite of theirs and it burned itself in my mind, damn them.
Then of course it was a song that embodied a sort of slightly cynical optimism to me; now it just reminds me of better times and I can’t help but get a bit choked up hearing it. So much for finding escape in football…
The British Science Fiction Association (BSFA for short) has just announced the shortlist for its 2011 awards. And amongst the nominees for best non-fiction is a website I’ve contributed too, Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks blog. Ian set the blog up last year as part of his attempts to get more coverage of female science fiction writers, inspired by the discussions about the gender imbalance in science fiction in general and British sf publishing in special. For the same reasons last year I had my own reading project, to correct the gender imbalance in my own reading.
The SF Mistressworks blog is intended as a showcase for all sorts of science fiction written by women, to demonstrate that,
as Ian puts it:
a) women have been writing science fiction since the genre’s beginnings,
b) many of their books should qualify as classics, and
c) many of their books are, in fact, better than “classics” by their male counterparts, and have at least aged better.
Such a showcase being necessary because more so than their male counterparts, female sf writers run the risk of being written out of the genre’s history, even when they were incredibly popular. For instance, around the time that Ann McCaffrey passed away, I remember reading a rant by somebody annoyed that a high profile review of Christopher Paolin’ Eregon books talked about the influence of Tolkien on them, but said nothing about the obvious Pern influences[1]. For various reasons, it’s much easier to construct male orientated histories of the genre, to talk about Verne-Heinlein-Niven-Egan-Stross, not so much to talk about Shelley-Moore-Le Guin-Cadigan-Williams.
I’ve contributed several reviews to the site, reprinted from my own booklog, for books I considered fitted in well with its aims[2]. As such I can’t help but be proud to see Sf Mistressworks recognised for its contributions, though obviously its success is mainly due to Ian Sale’s hard work and dedication. It’s a great initiative and I hope this recognition will help it continue its good work.
[1] If anybody recognises this article, let me know, as could I find it today? Could I buggery.
[2] E.g. The Sign of the Labrys, Ammonite, The Sword of Rhiannon and The Female Man.
So yeah, one of the ways in which I miss Sandra this Valentine, apart from the obvious ones, is in sharing music. Between the two of us, I was always the obsessive compulsive High Fidelity gotta catch them all collecting nerd, while she was more the cool saw Blondie in Plymouth back before anybody in Europe knew who they were, used to dance at the Wigan Casino, used to have a shedload of hard to find imports when finding music was still difficult, but it’s all gone now type. She was into funk and soul, hip-hop, good, intelligent pop music, punk and jaz and everything else as long as it was mellifluous, I was more into metal and prog rock — still am, but she influenced me a lot. Not that I didn’t listen to some soul or funk or whatever before she came along, but it was she who pointed me to a lot of the artists that I couldn’t live without now.
And I’m still discovering “new” bands and artists that she knew long ago and probably saw live. Like Heatwave, that British-Swiss-American group whose greatest hit you surely recognise:
Somewhat more obscure: Brick, an Atlanta band she must’ve heard or seen when she lived there in the early eighties, but it’s too late to ask her now. They play disco-jazz, or Dazz, as seen below:
Here’s another well known song from a fairly obscure band: Lakeside, who do deserve to be better known than just for this fantastic slab of early eighties funk:
Let’s end with an old favourite of the two of us I knew she really liked a lot: Strawberry Letter 23 by the Brothers Johnson.