farmdoc's blog post number 678

Here’s this week’s compendium. This week…

1. Torah Bright won Australia’s first gold medal at the Vancouver Winter Olympics [1]. Funny that – I thought Torah Bright was an evangelical Jewish sect.

2. talking of Olympic medals, the Vancouver Winter Olympics is the first Olympics whose medals contain recycled materials, i.e. gold, silver and copper from recycled e-waste [2]. Well done, Canada.

3. a mere month before the event, Qantas was announced as the naming rights sponsor for the 2010 Australian F1 Grand Prix [3]. Where the bloody hell have you been until now, Qantas?

4. I read that cat food has been successfully used to control cane toads – by attracting carnivorous meat ants that eat and kill baby toads [4]. Will the ants follow the toads – which themselves were originally introduced as a biological control – and become a major environmental scourge?

5. I came across this fascinating article about how love improves health [5]. I’ve been in love with Sweetheart Vivienne for over 45 years; and I’m healthy for my age. QED.

6. this paper describes methods of muscle cramp prevention [6]. It says quinine’s effective but unsafe; and vitamin B may be the best bet. It doesn’t mention corks in the bed.

7. I read this report of the promising early results of using paracetamol to help prevent heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and some cancers [7]. It may be the next wonder drug, but the article cautions that paracetamol is now Australia’s commonest cause of liver failure, having passed hepatitis and alcohol.

8. Darling Indigo, on her blog, offered ‘Indi’s random giveaway’. Coco the wombat [8a, 8b] hopes she'll win.

Finally, I wish you, dear Farmdoc’s Blog readers, a wonderful week.

farmdoc's blog post number 573

As I write these words, I’m in Melbourne. Not only am I away from my own computer that I left at home in Mole Creek, but I feel like I’m on holiday. Which I am, in a sense, because I’m not doing my farm chores and my medical work. So please forgive me if I don’t do my usual Saturday compendium post for you today. Speaking of this week, 9-15 November is National Recycling Week. What I wrote about its 2008 incarnation still applies. I recycle. And I feel ambivalent about it. On one hand it’s better to recycle than to add to landfill. (Each of the half million Tasmanians adds to landfill by an average of a tonne annually. Someone must be adding much more because I add much less.) On the other hand I’d rather not recycle at all – because I’d rather buy items sans packaging, or with biodegradable packaging e.g. paper. But Western societies aren’t geared up for this, to my chagrin. Maybe it’ll happen one day, but by then it’ll be too late. Speaking of happening, I’m not even sure that the items I leave in the bins at my local tip – sorry, waste transfer station [WTS] – are recycled, even if they’re taken away by trucks owned by recycling companies. And speaking of bins, I don’t know if any WTSs have bins marked with the numbers inside the triangles on recyclable items. But mine doesn’t. I wish it did. Ho hum.

P.S. Normal compendium programming will resume on Farmdoc’s Blog next Saturday.

farmdoc's blog post number 208

I do it. I’ve done it for years. Recycling, that is. A big wooden box I made sits in the pantry, and all the recycling goes in to it: paper, metal, plastic, glass. Every 2-3 months, when the box gets full, I take its contents to the tip – sorry, waste transfer station – where I decant each item into the appropriate bin. No doubt doing all this makes me feel virtuous. But I don’t know how much actually gets recycled. And hypothetically if all of it was recycled, it’d be only scratching the surface of our planet’s massive environmental problems. All of which is, for me, the backdrop to National Recycling Week which runs from last Monday to next Sunday. Judging from the website, it’s full of activities and educational opportunities, all coming to us care of commercial interests which profit from recycling. Thomas L Friedman, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, labels events such as National Recycling Week, Walk Against Warming, and Earth Hour, as environmental parties – whereas what is really needed, what is essential and critical and vital, he says, is an environmental revolution. As I wrote yesterday, this overdue and inevitable revolution is the responsibility of governments. In the meantime, the parties are okay as long as they’re seen for what they are. Will I continue recycling? Yes. I’m too obsessive not to.

farmdoc's blog post number 3

Last Monday evening, on my way home from the Launceston airport, I collected the mail. And among the work documents and the bills – and, I’m pleased to add, the cheques – were three glossy offerings: Travel + Leisure Australia, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians News, and the Medical Journal of Australia. These periodicals reminded me of the Dutch footballer’s wife in the TV series The Book Group who memorably exclaimed, ‘That is so not my journey’. Well I don’t really know what my journey is, or perhaps more correctly which direction it’s headed in, but I do know that it doesn’t pass through the waystations of upmarket travel (and adjunctive carbon-generating indulgences), and institutionalised and corporatised and managerialised medicine. Just think of all the trees that are cut down, and all the pollutants that are manufactured, just to create publications that people don’t ask for, don’t want and don’t need. I’ve tried to be taken off the mailing list for Travel + Leisure Australia – which comes to me courtesy of American Express – but without success. I recycle this paper, but I think that recycling – like carbon trading – is just a feel-good environmental copout.