I was sitting in the waiting room of my ENT doctor’s office, and I heard the regular music broadcast interupted with a boil order followed by the cancellation of all the Charlottetown area schools.
Looks like boiled-water sponge baths and hair dippings for the next week or so. Unless you want to attempt the whole javex-in-the-tub suggestion for killing e-coli.
Speaking of lobsters, a couple of months ago my great uncle (age 80) got beat up by a guy (age 24) who was selling him lobsters. Last week the guy got five years in prison for the assault plus two more for various other misdeeds.
This happened in Yarmouth.
What the hell?
What’s with this guy?
The woman who was stabbed to death (stabbed 40-odd times) not more than a block from my father’s house a few years ago was killed by (James?)Aylward.
At least I’m pretty sure that was his name. I knew him by “JR”. He was the kid who lived two houses away from my mom’s place in Tracadie. We played baseball together, in a field between our houses, a few times a week during the summers he lived there.
We played baseball because the one time we played street hockey, he hit me in the mouth with the stick on a slapshot and knocked my front teeth through my lip and out the other side. We played baseball because I was better than he was, and I liked to win. And if it turned into a fight at the end – and occasionally it did – his step-mother would yell from the front screen door of the house. We would pick ourselves up off the ground. In a couple days, he would forget what a poor winner I was, and I what a poor loser he was, and we’d play ball again.
He looked a decade older on TV in the orange jumpsuit. He looked like a murderer on TV.
um. anyhow.
Living under a boil order is very interesting. I am totally spoiled by life in affluent North America. I have a hard time waking up if I can’t have a shower every morning (I know, I know, you can have a shower – you just can’t enjoy it).
Water is pretty important and I miss it.
Check out this gem taken two days ago. When someone dies, this will be on the cover of MacLean’s.
This poison-water issue raises an interesting issue. I present you with a hypothetical situation (using a hypothetical person, who I will call ‘Isaac’):
Good question Rob. I found myself last night after having handled some fine cuts of pork having animal-stuff all over my hands. I was faced with the choice between salmonela (sp?) and e-coli.
BTW, I don’t think Isaac pees on his hands.
Returning from having a whiz, i load up AOV, and find a example using a hypothetical me taking a whiz.
I’m not sure whether or not to feel violated or honored.
And yes, i did wash my hands – and no, i did not get caught in the stream.
Did anybody else notice the premiers (is that supposed to be capitalized) clenched fist in the picture? He looks like a man who just “got caught in the stream”
Dude.. he looks like he is about to deck good ol Chester… Or maybe he has to piss and is mulling over the same question as hypothetical Isaac…?
Water is pretty important and I miss it.
Well, I do.
mmmmmmm….
Nice refreshing well water…
Of course it hasn’t been tested for as long as I’ve been alive so it’s probably e-colitious. But I don’t know that it is so mmmmmm . . .
Nice refreshing well water
Another note.
Go to Dairy Queen while the boil order is on.
Order some Root Beer.
Wonder why it tastes like those little pink mint candies.
There is a hog farm next to officers pond, thats where charlottetown main water sourse is, and thats the main problem for the bad water…
All this is just fair warning that when the really big bugs get into the water supply, only the homebrewers will survive.
…and when was the last time H20 made you a funnier…a better dancer?
Hey Al, how do you know you aren’t manufacturing poison ale, complete with drunken parasites?
and, welcome to aov.
well, you all missed your chance. Dairy Queen disposed of their “mystery” pop at 11:45 today.
Beer making as now only practiced in homebrewing has provided humanity with safe potable water and safe carbohydrate storgage for thousands of years. Low alcohol “small” beers have always been around cleaning the bugs out for folks of all ages. Bugs can’t live in beer because it is boiled and then sterilized by the presence of alcohol. Where the sterilization fails, the beer becomes quickly foul and undrinkable. Tea does the same thing except it provides no food value. Tea and coffee production also have a terrible human rights track record. Hop and malt producers are much more democratically acceptable.
This issue also highlights dependence on institutional products. We should no more buy into the “security” of water than we should buy absolutely into the security of the internet or the safety of mass transportation or the benefit of the hydrogenated oil used for mass produced french fries or the regime of the clocked work week.
This is not because the very good folk who work very hard to make water as safe as possible are not doing their best but because the dream of the pristine mountain stream flowing into the urban landscape and out of your tap is a tenuous technical marvel. Occasional failures should be expected especially where a broad approach to water safety is not followed. CBC radio last year ran a very extensive report on water security and pointed out that the wakertons and north battlefords, like PEI, are zones of intensive agricultural activity. An approach to water safety that “balances” the interests will by definition compromise both sides of the balance. When one side of the balance compromise is the urban water supply, there will be occasional errors resulting in serious health risk. I will be interested in following the PEI government water safety initiative to see how it addresses the inherent vulnerability of the system.
Ultimately – IMHO – personal consideration of the institutional sources of elemental necessities is important to assist in the creation of awareness about the actual circumstances in which we biologically exist. Do we need an institutional sources for each thing we need? When you create for yourself often risk is minimized – to garden, homebrew and snooze away hours is to gain not just autonomy but to become more consciously ourselves.
Al
Some good points Al. For those you don’t know, Al enjoys a beautiful view of the New Glasgow River from his garden and home-brewery. His is one of a few homes in this beautiful part of the Island (135Kb JPG).
Al, your post got me wondering about reliance on government for things like health care and safe water (journalistic disclosure: I’ve been sick for a week). Is it so backwards (if not necessary) to centralize and institutionalize these types of things. Why should I spend my time worrying and practicing what I’m sure would be mostly superstition practices to ensure my water safety when there is a dude in a lab coat (and I do trust the good Dr. Lamont Sweet, our Chief Health Officer). Why don’t I let them worry about that (and pay them well) while I use my now free faculties to persue the meaning of life.
Specialization does have it’s benefits. Still, Al’s comments about doing-it-yourself raise an important point. While the good engineers at GE and Whirlpool have freed me from having to wash my clothes by hand, what do I do with that new time? It’s a classic myth that many of us strive for: I’ll work until I don’t have to anymore, then, then I’ll do what I want. Doesn’t some of the best art come from the shittiest situations?
I have some kind of point, I think. I guess I’m wondering if Al is right (let me know if I’m putitng words in your mouth Al). Are the benefits we get from technology and specialization measured improperly. Like Ford measuring wrongful-death lawsuits againsts safety improvements? Are we measuring only convenience since it’s all we can empirically grasp? Maybe. I don’t know. It sure difficult to change when you can only see the benefits from the other side.
There is always the danger of giving ourselves (humanity, that is) too much credit. I know I’m very frustrated when my doctor can’t tell me what’s wrong. If he doesn’t know, nobody does. It’s disconcerting.
It reminds me of an experience I had when I was a teenager, one that I expect is quite common. As a child, I understood that adults are in charge. They know what’s going on. As I got older, it became more and more obvious that no one knows what the hell they are doing any more that I do. This scared the hell out of me – and still does.
My non-conclusive conclusion: My neighbours spray their lawns with poison for purely cosmetic purposes, at least that pig farm up the road from Al’s house is good for something!
Blame Ivan Illych and William Blake. I.I. wrote an entire book-essay
on H20 which I have upstairs tracing the perception of water from holy
water to a Houston water treatment facility which had artistically
designed fields of spraying spouts of sewage to be viewed from the
highway as you pass. [So much of the west is there to be viewed as you
drive by on the highway. That’s how I saw the Somme in 1986 – pathetic now that I think of it.] We perceive water now as something that it really is not – a neutral scientifically pristine liquid.
I think that technologies such as water purification plants often provides a good but perhaps it takes maybe 100 years to find out how much of a good. Canned food got much better after they stopped using lead for the soldering. Ask the boys on the Franklin Expedition about having too much canned food in the 1840s. Often the down side is the unexpected and quietly catastrophic. This is your basic McLuhan but it is quite valid. We get great things from having light bulbs but then we also get unnatural sleep patterns, stressed out families and early exists from this mortal veil of tears for those of us burdened with middle management careers. Buy fully into the technology once the ramifications are known. Until then take the good of it but do so sceptically. [Hence my Pentium 75!]
This is different from being a luddite who (following a Mr. Lud, I presume) around 1720’s (?) attacked the agricultural machines – I think the Levellers did the same thing around 1660 – they were pissed that the new widget was making them starve as long as they remained in their current jobs… and, well, there were no other jobs going for anyone other than a steam engine. [and, sure, they foresaw the 200 plus years until the rise of the welfare state which reset the balance… but that’s a detail now, right].
That being said, there are basic elements to society that are just technologies which we assume now are absolutes and do so at our risk. Look at the clock, water and sewage, transportation, education and medicine. Ivan I. would argue that health makes us sicker, education makes us dumber and transportation makes us slower. You mentioned medicine. If your doctor doesn’t know, good chance you can find out yourself given a little time and objectivity. [Too many of my pals parties with me during their med school years for me to give them absolute call over my health, especially as I watch them now self-diagnose, slip behind the construct of a modern “priesthood” and support nutty concepts like professional sleep deprivation.] Most medicine is not rocket science and they get a healthy percentage wrong due to the volume of information they must process. For now its may be the better option for the community but not necessarily the best for each member.
If the benefits of each technology are to be properly measured, there is always a debit side to the ledger. Don’t be scared of this fact. It is, as I told you once before, just that your generation is the first of the post-cold warrior. Live with Brezhnev, punk, the Smiths and semi-annual recessions for the first twenty years of your post puberty life and you won’t expect so much security.
Al, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you on the topic of medicine. We all diagnose ourselves with “Cold”, “Bad Cold”, “Flu”, “Nasty Flu”, because we’ve all had them before. Last summer I objectivally diagnosed myself with food poisoning and ended up much sicker than I thought I could ever be.
I didn’t really care if my doctors were crazy in thier medschool years, even when one Doctor told me I’d like this shot because it was a party drug, as long as they know what they’re doing and they do it well I would feel comfortable.
I have no complaints about any of the doctors who helped me out, and I often hear stories about Doctors who work themselves to heart attacks, maybe if they did peg themselves ‘professionally sleep deprived’ they would have had a few more years.
I understand your statements were not blanket statements about all medical professionals, but I’d like to point out that a very great many of them do fine jobs and that should be recognized. I would have agreed with you until last August.
Pertinent but without source, perhaps someone can help me remember who said this:
Our good friend Douglas Adams.
Yea, Rob, I didn’t mean doctors were particularly bad but only that they were no more infallable than anyone else. My pals are great doctors but they are still guys. They were just my example of the profession as a technology and how belief in a profession is no more profound than belief in a toaster. [“Belief” being the assertion of reliance on something we acknowledge we do not really understand for reasons of which we are unsure.]
To be clear, if a doctor tells me he doesn’t know what is wrong, it does not mean it is unknowable. Maybe when 16 say it is unknowable, it might be. Having an appendix blow which was diagnosed as gas and having a two year old we were assured we would lose in mid-pregnancy cured me of that. Whatever the profession or technology, if you are told you have “X” or need “X” and you don’t think so, don’t buy it. Get other advice from all sources including others who have had problems getting such info. Medical science and other professions obviously can be greatly helpful but it can also be problematic when treated with blind obedience. Like our obedience to TV, cola and the need to have 1000 identical tomatoes from which to pick out the two we buy a week. We obediently spend much more on media attuned illness than much more pervasive ones. A few heart transplants could clear up poor water and sewage sanitation in a large part of Canada’s northern prarie population. Why do we do this?
I see that professionals are just human though the infrastructure does not like us thinking about that – any more than the transportation infrastructure would like us to think that the 401 is not populated with caffine and benny wired grade ten drop-outs hauling industrial scrap at 87 mph on worn out tires. It is not good to think of such things when passing one truck and being passed on the left be another. Should you think about it before you get on the 401? Probably.
Steven is right that there is no safety in the sense we want as a child. In what else are we falsely secure? In what can we be?
Al