Off of my death bed and in to Henley

Because summer in England is such a precious thing, people go to festivals, boat races, operas, picnics in parks and on and on. We have to have something to remember when the cold weather sets in and the evenings start at 3:30pm.

So this year I'm over-booked with events to attend. But I don't want to miss a thing. Today even though I was worried I had swine flu (I don't, I checked) I still have to go out tonight to the Henley Festival. It's a annual party on the Thames after the Henley Regatta is over. There's a big stage that floats on the Thames and boats come behind it to moor and listen to the concerts. I have to go in 10 minutes to a picnic then we go into the festival. I don't know if I'll make it, but I'm going to try.

Flu without the fever

I've been ill this week with body aches and other problems. Of course, hypochondriac that I am, I worried that I have swine flu. I've heard that it can be very mild. Then this morning I noticed I didn't have fever. That made my husband and me conclude that I couldn't have flu without a fever. But then I read this. I'm posting it so you'll know in case you feel ill and worry that it's swine flu:

"Many people suffering from swine influenza, even those who are severely ill, do not have fever, an odd feature of the new virus that could increase the difficulty of controlling the epidemic, said a leading American infectious-disease expert who examined cases in Mexico last week.

Fever is a hallmark of influenza, often rising abruptly to 104 degrees at the onset of illness. Because many infectious-disease experts consider fever the most important sign of the disease, the presence of fever is a critical part of screening patients.

But about a third of the patients at two hospitals in Mexico City where the American expert, Dr. Richard P. Wenzel, consulted for four days last week had no fever when screened, he said.

“It surprised me and my Mexican colleagues, because the textbooks say that in an influenza outbreak the predictive value of fever and cough is 90 percent,” Dr. Wenzel said by telephone from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he is chairman of the department of internal medicine."

from the New York Times

Reader comments on my quote of the day

Thanks to the reader who sent this in today:

"The quote of the day is from Ken Follett on your blog today - and we used to live just down the road from him at our last house, I would see him all the time in his red ferrari, acting the hotshot, when we all know what those books are like.

And now he's giving literary quotes? how rich. :-)"

Amusing businesses I have noticed while driving to work

I was behind a van this morning while driving to work that said it was a Trolleywise van. I didn't know you could make a business out of rescuing stolen or abandoned shopping carts but these people do. Have you seen any amusing businesses lately?

Here's a photo from their website. This must be a scary vandal stealing a cart from a supermarket.


Info from their site:

Every year in the UK over 300,000 shopping trolleys are removed from stores and retail car parks and abandoned in the local community.

Quite apart from the loss of the asset, trolleys are often left in roads, on walkways and in parks where they are an unsightly hazard to the general public.

Trolleywise also works to provide trolley retention solutions to minimise the root cause of trolley loss - the unauthorised removal of the trolley from their lawful premises.

If God wants to reward the faithful with material possessions, why are so many believers in foreclosure?

This is an important question to ask. Many Christian speakers on TV tell their audience that if they believe, God will reward them a hundred-fold, and by that they mean with stuff like a nice house. It's part of the reward scheme that you don't have to wait until you die for. But why are so many believers hurting in the recession?

"In times of record-high foreclosures and Treasury Department scrambling to shore up loan-refinancing initiatives, the Prosperity Gospel can sound as if it comes from preachers who live under rocks, not in mansions: "God wants to give you your own house," big-cheese pitchman Joel Osteen announced in 2007's Your Best Life Now, which he penned in an economic Indian summer of a bull market and excited homebuyers. "'How could that ever happen to me?' you ask. 'I don't make enough money.' Perhaps not, but our God is well able."

Osteen is everywhere these days. You see his coiffed pate smiling on Good Morning America, at the new Yankee Stadium for its first nonbaseball event, on the cover of Texas Monthly's ideas issue—all in one week. Yet he artfully disappears for housing crisis questions like "Why, if God wants to reward the faithful with material possessions, are so many believers in foreclosure?"

These high rates in particular have made some Doubting Thomases of Prosperity's controversial centerpiece: the belief in "positive confession," or the idea that the faithful can "name it and claim it"—even Waikiki timeshares or Rolls-Royces with corn-silk leather trim—and God will provide it. Prosperity nomenclature is varied (Word of Faith, the "law of reciprocity," Christianity Lite), but the movement owes as much to New Thought metaphysics and Norman Vincent Peale's "positive thinking" as it does to early proselytizers like Kenneth Hagin. In many ways, it is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Christianity's face-lift, whisking away specters of hellfire and brimstone with a message of self-empowerment. Preachers don't belabor sin if they mention it at all. "It's not my job to try to straighten everybody out," Osteen famously told Larry King in 2005, adding, "My message is a message of hope."

But reality, in the form of a housing-crisis fallout, is full of victims who ought to be a clarion call for Prosperity's out-of-touch-ness. Its territory—locus of the lower-middle-class and minority neighborhoods from which most followers are culled, like modest exurban areas in California's Southland and the edges of greater Atlanta has some particularly high foreclosure rates."

from Slate.com

Gelotophia

Interesting article in the Times today. I had never heard of gelotophobia but I think I have it. Do you? When I hear someone laugh close by I think it must be me they are laughing at. I immediately check my shoes to see if toilet paper is stuck on it.

"The British may pride themselves on their sense of humour but they are really an oversensitive, paranoid nation prone to gelotophobia — a condition in which sufferers always believe the joke is on them.

That, at least, is the punchline to one of the ideas presented at the International Symposium on Humour and Laughter; a six-day “humour summer school” hosted in Granada by a US-based group of psychologists, sociologists and linguists.

A typical gelotophobe hears a stranger’s laugh and believes he or she is the butt of the joke. In extreme cases this can induce sweating, palpitations, trembling or simply freezing up."

Jesus sandals with socks

Wearing Jesus sandals with socks is a fashion faux pas often committed in chilly England. Luckily there is a website where you can turn in offenders.

Sandals and socks

A guy I work with has just appeared on this site. I told him that he wasn't so bad as he is wearing blue socks, instead of the usual white ones, so I think he felt better. Here he is. Take a look at some of the others on the site and take a pic of anyone who is offending you in this way and turn them in. Maybe together we can do something about this scourge.