Baggas’ Blog

Finally got our copy of The West Wing Season 4 from Amazon UK yesterday, which was pretty impressive considering the release date was only the 27th of September. I pre-ordered it a month or two ago.

Coincidentally I got a comment from Tim yesterday on the same issue. No news yet on when season 5 is going to be screened but at least the delay means we’ll have season 4 finished by the time season 5 starts here, sometime in the summer.

I have to admit that for a change I actually kind of like one of Mark Latham’s policies (with some reservations). This “Medicare Gold” package essentially seems to be a version of the long standing veterans gold card for all over 75’s, enabling them to have free treatment in private hospitals (as long as the hospitals and specialists involved agree to the conditions set by the government, whatever they turn out to be..)
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Looks like the traditional churches have weighed into the election campaign, criticizing Mark Latham’s educations policy (see The Australian : Churches savage Latham) Now even though I don’t like Latham’s policy either, it seems to me to be unfortunate that the Catholic and Angilcan churches (who still in the eyes of many are the main representatives of the ‘chcurch’ in our society) have chosen this particular issue to make their comment on. Why? Because this makes the churches seem like they are only looking to selfishly protect their own interests (ie private schools) and the reason they give for their arguments makes them seem petty - ie. we don’t like this policy because it might create division/conflict bewteen Catholics and Anglicans. Would have been much better if they have have picked a more altruistic social bandwagon to jump on.

Guitar players be prepared to turn green with envy. I got my new toy yesterday - an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Black Beauty guitar. It was delivered to my work after being shipped from Melbourne on Thursday, a pretty impressive turnaround time. It’s such a sexy looking guitar, and had all the girls at my surgery gathered around within minutes (single guitarists take note…)

And it sounds even better than it looks! I couldn’t believe how the difference between this and my old Ibanez strat copy. It’s phenomenal. Makes even me sound good. Its got such a rich fat lead tone with incredible sustain. The rhythm tone is a lot brighter than I’m used to in the neck position - took a little getting used to to start with but already I prefer it. Certainly one of the best things I’ve ever purchased.

Here’s a new word that you may not know : Mondegreen - this a word for a word, phrase, line of poetry or song lyric that you hear incorrectly.

There’s many examples of this from the world of popular music, or which one of the most famous comes from one of my favourite artists, Jimi Hendrix. A line from his classic song “Purple Haze” is quite commonly heard as “’scuse me, while I kiss this guy” when in fact the true lyric is ” scuse me, while I kiss the sky”

Here’s a great site with many more examples of this sort of thing : kissthisguy.com - some of the examples there are quite funny, some are just plain dumb. You can also submit your own there if you want (or just comment here and let me know if you have any good ones)

Kids are especially good at this sort of thing. My 3 year old son Owen quite regularly goes around the house singing the church song “One Way - Jesus!” at the top of his lungs, but his slightly blasphemous version goes “Wrong way! Jesus” which he persists with despite many attempts at correcting it. Another song he likes to sing is the “Bob the Builder” theme, in which the line “working together to get the job done” comes out sounding more like “welcome to the ghetto - get the job done”

Why is it that the last patient of the day always seems to be running late? It’s so frustrating when I stay on track well and even make up time, and then have to wait around for 20 minutes at the end of the day and end up going home late because people aren’t on time.

I’m realising more and more that one of my pet worries is punctuality. I hate being late myself, and it bugs me in others as well. Being hard on myself is fine, but I guess I need to be more patient with other people. Anyway she’s finally here so I’d better stop blogging.

“Pray especially for rulers and their governments to rule well so we can be quietly about our business of living simply, in humble contemplation.”
~ 1 Timothy 2:2 (The Message)

This passage is often quoted with an exhortation that we should pray for our government leaders, even if we disagree with them, so that we will be governed wisely. And certainly this is true, and I should pray for whoever gets voted in as our next leader, even if it’s not the man I would have chosen.

But what’s the role of prayer in a democratic election? Is it valid to pray that the candidate you favour wins? This is something that bears thought as we are approaching crucial elections in both Australia and the USA. Like the many other selfish prayers I offer up, I’m tempted to pray that the leader I favour is elected as PM, especially since I really can’t stomach the thought of the other guy winning. I’ll pray for the other guy if he wins, sure, but I’d rather not have to. I’d be really interested to hear what other people think about this. Is praying to influence the result of an election a valid thing to do, and does it make a difference anyway? Or do we just get who the voters (or God?) have chosen for us irrespective.

What do you think??

PS - the second half of that verse almost sounds like an argument in favour of ’small government’. I wonder how much of Eugene Petersen’s political leanings are infiltrating there.

Our little baby Luke turns 1 today. It’s hard to believe that this first year has gone so quickly. It seems like only yesterday that he was born, yet already it’s hard to remember him as being any smaller than he is now. The same goes for his big brother Owen - he’s over 3 already and going to kindy next year, yet I can hardly remember the different stages he’s been through. It’s all a good reason to take plenty of photos and videos as the kids grow up, because the memories seem to disappear so fast.

So with this in mind, here’s some pictures from Luke’s birthday party, which we had on Saturday, in the middle of a very hectic weekend. A party in which young Luke got his first ever piece of cake to eat on his own…

Hard to get all 4 of us in the one photo, but this is a pretty good effort. We all enjoyed unwrapping Lukey’s presents together…

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One of my favourite recording artists that I’ve discovered in recent years is Ben Harper. He has the coolest, bluesy sound, with the occaisional foray into reggae. His “Live From Mars” is one of the best live albums in my music collection and last year’s “Diamonds on The Inside” is a wonderfully well rounded album.

Ben’s newest effort is “There Will Be A Light.”

On this album he joins forces with the ‘Blind Boys of Alabama‘ to produce an album of stripped back gospel style songs, though not without healthy dashings of Harper’s trademark slide and funk guitar. Although strongly rooted in the southern gospel tradition, most of these tracks would be at home on any of Ben Harper’s previous albums. Some of the standout songs include ‘Take My Hand’, ‘Pictures of Jesus’, and the title track. To have a read through some of the lyrics, go check them out at The Alternative Hymnal, where Darren has gone to the trouble of typing them all in.

I posted yesterday about having to break some bad news to a patient. It’s never a pleasant experience, but it went as well as could be expected yesterday.

To lighten things up a little, here’s a comic I read in one of my medical magazines this week :

We got to practise a whole lot of things on real patients in medical school, but I can assure you, we never did it like that. In fact I can’t even remember ever being taught anything about breaking bad news. I guess it’s something you learn and become more comfortable with as you go on. I hope I never get too comfortable doing it though…

I got the Star Wars DVD box set yesterday containing the three original movies in the series (episodes IV-VI) I haven’t had a chance to watch any yet but it looks pretty cool. There have been a few new changes introduced to the movies, even following the 1997 special editions. My brother emailed me these links today which detail the changes :
The Digital Bits
CNN

Many of the changes are subtle but this is the most blaringly obvious one - at the end of “Return of The Jedi” they’ve substituted Hayden Christiansen as Anakin Skywalker’s ghost for the original actor Sebastian Shaw in the final scene…. [and yes I’ve checked and this actually is on the DVD]


It makes sense but once again I don’t know how to feel about this. Now I’m not one of those die-hard “original trilogy” only nerds and I do think George Lucas has the right to make some changes, but I’m not sure if this is taking things a bit too far or not…

“Mary Smith please” - I called the patient’s name and a middle aged woman got up from her chair and followed me to my room, her husband and daughter trailing behind.
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I walked through the doors of the music shop and the man behind the counter said “hi” - I replied “hi” back and walked into the shop, intending to have a look at some guitars. I was not prepared for what came next…

“you can leave your backpack at the door there mate.”

Stunned for a split second I didn’t know what to say, so I just dumped my bag there at the door. But as I walked around the shop I got more and more irritated. Did he think I was going to try and steal something? Treating me like I looked like some kind of teenage delinquent. Even if I was going to steal something I don’t think I could’ve fitted a guitar or anything of value into my small backpack. I was tempted to say something to him, like “I probably earn three times what you do mate, I’m not gonna steal your crappy stuff” but I wisely held my tongue and left the store, unable to comfortably browse, but from what I could see they didn’t have the guitar I was looking for. Neither did the other store I went to, although they were much nicer, letting me walk around with my backpack, and test out a couple of their guitars through this monster 4 channel amp. They told me it would take 4-6 weeks to get the guitar in I wanted so I didn’t go with them either.
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There’s nothing quite like the first day back at work after some time off. It always seems to take a while for my brain to start working again, to clear out the cobwebs and get the cogs turning again.
Fortunately I had an easy start to the day and didn’t have to exercise my brain too much - just cutting a melanoma off a guy’s leg and stitching up the hole. Since then I’ve see sore knees, ear infections, a corneal abrasion, vaccinations, hay fever, schizophrenia, a drivers license checkup, and a guy with narcolepsy whom I started on the new wonder-drug Modafinil - new for him and new for me - I haven’t prescribed it before. If you haven’t heard of this drug already keep an eye on the media as I’m sure it will become more famous as time goes on. It’s a drug which basically helps people stay awake for extended periods of time, maintaining their alertness and being free from fatigue or the side effects of stimulant medications like amphetamines. And when you want to go to sleep you still can. At the moment it’s only licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy, but expect it to be used for many other things eg. truck drivers, pilots, doctors, soldiers and for other people who want to burn the candle at both ends or just party-on! It’ll be interesting to see how it works for my patient.

I’ve spoken to a lot of pregnant women over the last few years, and next year will probably spend the majority of my time talking to them once I start obstetric practice, but I’ve never heard of cravings quite as weird as these ones, which were reported in a survey by a British baby food company (from Reuters) :

Raw lemons sprinkled with salt and pepper, gingerbread men soaked in fizzy lemon drink and mustard with chips were among some of the unusual cravings.

Here’s another weird article from ivillage on the same subject - among other things, this woman had cravings for : “vanilla ice cream, chocolate and macaroni cheese smothered in salad dressing, gherkins submerged in chocolate cake, toothbrushes, black shoe polish, and the dust on the unsurfaced road near her mother’s house!” Yet another mysterious woman thing which us mere men will never truly understand…

Just read an interesting editorial at Buzzle.com about some research that was recently done surveying residents of other countries to see how they would vote in the upcoming US Presidential elections. Not surprisingly, the results were overwhelmingly in favour of Kerry. I like the reasons given in the article for why that might have been - Kerry’s outstanding characteristics were his “wonderful not-George-Bush quality“, his “un-Dubya-ness” and the “il n’est pas George Bush” aspect of his personality. In truth that’s about the most positive thing I can see about him also.

Mark Latham’s been doing his best to emulate Dr Suess again, in response to a criticism of his policies by Nationals leader John Anderson - see News.com.au | “I Do Not Like That Ando Guy”. Along similar lines, I just discovered a cartoon which attempts to distil Labor’s policies into Suess style phrasings :
Click here to see it.

Arguably the biggest event this week (this year, perhaps?) will come on Wednesday, September 22, with the release of the ‘original’ Star Wars Trilogy (episodes IV-VI) on DVD. This is certainly the most long awaited movie release since the advent of DVD and although some will complain that these are not the exact unaltered original versions of the movies, I’ll make the bold prediction that this box set will still sell hundreds of millions of copies and perhaps become the highest selling DVD release ever. I know I’ll be heading down to the shops on Wednesday (or maybe Thursday) and securing my copy.

Anyway I’ve just been reading an indepth review of the DVD set over at Michael DVD, one of my favourite DVD web sites. Check it out.

It’s that time of the year again - September 19 is famous for two reasons
(1) It’s our wedding anniversary - 6 years this year!
(2) It’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day

This year, the pirate guys have their very own blog so ye’d better be makin sail on over thar smartly to see what’s blowin’, me hearties. Before ye can say “Pieces of Eight” ye lubbers can be speakin’ pirate-like with the best corairs in the seven seas. Yo-ho-ho! Arrrrr!

It seems to be an almost universal thing amongst hairdressers - the gift of the gab. I wonder if they have a module in Hairdressing college entitled “Small Talk 101″ or something similar. It must get pretty tiring to have to maintain an endless stream of conversation with a succesion of clients all day long. In my job I have to talk to people all day, but it’s generally pretty focussed discussion on their health problems so it usually takes care of itself.

In case you were wondering what prompted this, I had my long overdue haircut today, the last weekday of my mini holiday. The conversation ranged from the weather, my hairdresser’s cousin’s legal education and mental health problems, her best friend’s health problems, her menstrual cycle and what contraceptive pill she’s on, tax and tax deductions, and the usual “so what are you doing this weekend?” I was pretty tired out by the end of it, and all I had to do was mostly just sit there and listen - she has to keep on like this all day long (hopefully minus the gynaecological elements for the rest of her clients.) So I tip my hat off to her and other hairdressers - there’s much more to that job than just cutting, combing, and blowdrying.

Today on the drive to Perth and back I had the pleasure of listening to The Streets‘ new album “A grand don’t come for free” which was an incredible experience. For those who aren’t familiar with The Streets I’m reluctant to categorize them, but I guess the genre of British cockney garage rap would be the closest. I’m not usually a big fan of rap music (this is the first “rap” album I’ve bought since Vanilla Ice back in 1991 I think - how embarassing is that!) but this album is a different matter entirely. It’s more of a concept album, along the lines of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in some ways, and it immerses you so entirely in the narrative and the various scenes that it almost feels more like a movie than a music album.

More than music, this is the urban poetry of the 21st century. It touches on broad themes like relationships, trust, infidelity, friendships, drugs, money, gambling and more, yet also vividly portrays the little things peculiar to the times we live in - taking a DVD back on time, mobile phones (text messages, poor reception, flat batteries, lost phones), a broken TV, fast food, ATMs, and much much more. As the story progresses the scenes in which it takes place are so real it’s almost like you’re there - running down the road to a video shop, a nightclub, couch at girlfriend’s house, a queue at McDonald’s, a mate’s kitchen table.

Picking my favourite track feels kinda inappropriate, like trying to say what chapter I liked best in a novel, but I would probably choose the penultimate song “Dry Your Eyes” which would have to be one of the most sensitive ‘tear jerker’ songs every written from a male point of view. The final climactic song ‘Empty Cans’ is also very effective, complete with 2 alternate endings for the saga.

I can’t guarantee that this album will be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you want to listen to something that will possibly stretch you and take you on an emotional journey I’d encourage you to give this a try.

I’ve got the week off work this week and today Owen was in day care, so Jenni and I and baby Luke took the opportunity to take a drive up to the new Koorong bookshop in Mount Lawley. I should have been warned of what I was in store for when Jen picked up a shopping baskest at the entrance to the shop, but I was blindly ignorant to my fate. The penny dropped an hour or so later after pushing Luke’s pram around the shop and picking up a couple of books for myself I met Jen at the new in-store cafe for lunch. That little shopping basket was full to the brim with about 15 or so books! She sure does love to read, does my wifey! Anyway after progressively eliminating a bunch of books from the basket and sending them back to the shelves (kind of like a version of Survivor for books) she managed to whittle the pile down to about six of her picks, making room in the basket for my three. We then had lunch, and the food was really good. All up we were pretty impressed with the new store, very modern, spacious and well organised with a great cafe and areas for the kids to play in. It’s fairly easy to get to as well - just a couple of minutes after exiting the Graeme Farmer Freeway. Just be careful you don’t miss it and drive halfway back towards Perth lookng for it like I did.

I’ve always found news reports about the crazy things people sell on eBay quite amusing. The IT columnist in the West Australian writes these kind of reports quite often, and I think I might now know where he sources his information - it’s a website which catalogues are rates this sort of thing - Funny Auctions. Check it out. At the moment a lot of them are political Bush v Kerry type things, but there’s a few good ones on there - among other things you can purchase a kite flown in a hurricane, P Diddy’s toothpick, a 1964 model wife, someone’s left breast, an air guitar, a handshake, and a prayer for £1. This site is worth a regular look I’d say.

Still no news on the alleged Australian hostages held captive by the so called “Horror Brigades” - you’ve gotta admit it’s a catchy name though. Hopefully it will all turn out to be untrue - no news is good news in this case. On the local front, after pledges not to politicize the issue by both parties, Mark Latham is now doing exactly that, with a big whinge session about the fact that he’s not involved in the management of the situation, and the decisions to send in Federal Police Negotiators and SAS special forces troops, as a contingency plan. Why should he be involved? He’s still opposition leader, not the PM or foreign minister. For the time being at least he is not the person we elected to deal with this sort of issue, and I wonder at his capability to do so should he be elected next time. For the full story read the SMH : We were kept in the dark on hostages: Latham.

Came across this article yesterday, about how some Christians have taken out a restraining order against the Los Angeles county changing to a new seal which omits the small cross present on the old one. Maybe it’s just me, but I get annoyed ever time I hear this sort of story, which quite commonly emmanate from the US, and occaisionally from here in Australia too. These people claiming “anti-Christian” persecution and lamenting the decline of their “Christian nation”. In many ways I think it’s the perception of western nations as being Christian that has contributed to complacency and apathy within the church. If we woke up and looked around we would see that the vast majority of people in our countries are not Christian, and we would see this as a challenge, not as something to complain about.

Fighting lawsuits about county seals and courthouse statues and pledges etc is a serious waste of energies, and in fact of money. Wouldn’t it be better to spend the amount of money they’re spending on lawsuits on the poor, or on missions programs, or even send it to people overseas? No one who is not already Christian will be in the slightest bit impressed by these lawsuits - they will not turn anyone towards God and will in fact perhaps drive people in the opposite direction. On the other hand, how many people are going to turn against God, or decide not to be Christians just because there is no cross on the LA county shield?
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Here’s a great story from news.com.au - Oprah gives entire audience cars. She gave everyone in the audience a free car valued at US$28,000 each. Don’t you wish you could be in the audience for something like that. The closest I ever came was when we visited Hillsong Church in 1999 they gave washing machines to a bunch of needy people in the audience on the spur of the moment - sadly for us we’d just bought a new washing machine, and I doubt they would have shipped it back to Perth for us anyway. Still it was nice to see them helping people in need.

I don’t normally buy into the whole evolution vs creation debate, mainly because I am neither a scientist nor a theologist and don’t claim to know what the right answer is. The only point I do believe without doubt is that there is a Creator, who designed and created everything in the universe. This belief has only been strengthened through my own studies in the biological sciences - the evidence of God’s handiwork is self-evident to me. How exactly he accomplished it I don’t claim know for sure.

Anyway Phil Baker has posted some interesting articles today over at his blog on the response of the science community to a scientific paper on Intelligent design, and also on St Augustine’s interpretation of the Genesis account. Very interesting reading which I’m sure will evoke a heated discussion.

I awoke this morning to see the news that 2 Australians have possibly been taken hostage in Iraq (see news.com and The Age) addng yet another twist to this convoluted election campaign, if indeed it is true. This could really go wither way, politically. People could blame the Howard government’s involvement in Iraq and lean towards Latham who promises to bring the troops out. Or this could raise the anger of the public about being threatened by terrorists and strengthen the resolve to stick it out in Iraq. It’s a difficult one to call, but my initial gut feeling is that this may aid Latham more than Howard, particularly if the hostages are killed. The public will want someone to blame (as they always do) and it’s easier to put the blame on someone closer like the Howard government, than it is to remain angry at some faceless terrorists who may well never be brought to justice. It’s scary times we live in, where murderous thugs in other parts of the world are trying to influence the democratic process here in Australia.

I haven’t seen it yet but Spielberg’s new movie ‘The Terminal’ looks like it might be quite interesting. Anyway here’s a fascinating article from the Guardian Unlimited about the real life character who inpsired the film - Merhan Karimi Nasseri (also known as ‘Sir Alfred’) who spent 16 years living in Charles de Gaulle airport in France. It’s an amazing story - well worth a read.

The last few days I’ve been listening to the new album from Missy Higgins, a young Australian singer-songwriter who won the Triple J unearthed competition a few years back.
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Sunday was a perfect spring day here in Perth, so we took the boys down to one of the best parks in the area in the afternoon and had a great time. Here’s some on what we got up to :

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Ok now things really are back together with this blog. I’ve adpated a script to re-import the old entries from the archived html files and it seems to work fairly well so I’ve got started on getting them all back. Lost all the comments though as it was prving a bit too fiddly to get them back as well.

Also the comments/subscription email feature seems to have miraculously healed itself and started working again so give it a go - let me know if there’s any problems.

For a while now I’ve been contemplating post-modernism. What is the developing framework for society in the 21st century? How does it differ from that of the 20th century and the modern era. I’m far from having a handle on it. I doubt anyone truly does. But today part of it became much more clear to me. The only constant thing we can count on in this new world is change.
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Here’s my (admittedly biased) commentary on the “Great Debate” between Mark Latham and John Howard.
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Strange things going on tonight.
After my horrible experience with losing my entire blog a couple of weeks ago, this evening everything stopped working and came up with a bunch of errors, no matter what I did. Then, just as I was about to email support at my web host to ask if they’d changed anything, I went to load my script again so I could copy and paste the error message, and suddenly it worked again. Go figure.

So this is really just a test message to make sure it’s working properly. If nothing else this experience has reinforced the need to do regular backups.

Also I’m not sure the subscription feature is working properly on my blog for some reason. It all looks like it’s working but I never receive any emails when I test it out. So I apologise for that and will endeavour to try and get it working soon.

Every Saturday I ritually open my new TV guide and turn to Tuesday night to see what’s on Channel 9, looking for the promised return of The West Wing, and every Saturday I end up being disappointed.

The last we heard, it was supposed to be coming on after the Olympics, but they’ve been and gone, and still no sign of The West Wing.

So I did a Google yet again and found this thread, which is a long discussion on the topic. The short answer is that it’s now looking like it’ll be summer before it hits our screens again. I’m not too perturbed about this though, because at least that gives me time for Season 4 to arrive from Amazon UK and get it watched before the new season starts.

On the same topic, I read an interesting perspective on The West Wing in today’s paper which described The West Wing as being the “Clinton/Gore administration in exile”. That’s actually a kind of apt way of looking at it, with the show being so deeply drenched with Democrat values, in comparison with the extreme Republicanism of the current government.

Here’s that song I mentioned earlier. It’s a very clever edit of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” with George W Bush providing the vocals - download the mp3 from here.

Thanks to Beth from the U2 sermons blog for being so quick off the mark to provide me with that link. If you’re into U2 then I’d definitely suggest you check out her site, and her book too.

It’s amazing how one event can change the world. Today’s date is now the most well known date in our calendar, aside from perhaps December 25, whereas 4 years ago Sepetember 11 was just another random day in spring. Not only that but this day is the only major anniversary/holiday where the date is the actual name which we use to refer to it. We don’t refer to it as the “World Trade Center attack” or any other descriptive term, the day and the events are simply referred to by all as “September Eleven” or “9/11″ if you want to use the backwards American form of dating. I guess if nothing else this will ensure that in the study of history this date will be remembered by all. I doubt too many people could quote you other significant dates like the date of Germany invading Poland, Pearl harbour, Hiroshima, JFKs assassination, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon etc etc, but this date will not be forgotten.

Three years along and the world is more insecure than ever, as the events in Indonesia and Russia have graphically demonstrated. Has the “war on terror” made any real difference, other than ramping up the level of fear and xenophobia in society, and elevating anti-Western tension in the Islamic world to new heights? I’m not sure that it has, but then I’m not altogether sure what could have been done differently. Would the world have fared any better with Al Gore in power? Who can say? I doubt the Bin Ladens of the world would have behaved any differently. And I doubt the outcome of the current elections here and in America will make much difference either - this cycle of terror will continue no matter who is in power. It’s often remarked upon how the world is shrinking, as a result of technology and communications and travel - this is usually seen as a positive thing. But perhaps this also means that the who world is going to be sucked into the virulent cycle of conflict that was previously confined to local problems (like Palestine or Northern Ireland) - a conflict where the prospect of a solution seems incredibly remote.