What I Learnt Today

We must have watched a lot of television growing up, as I have thousands of episodes of hundreds of TV series stuck in my head..

Hogans Heroes, Petticoat Junction, The Goodies, Gigantor, The Brady Bunch, Wacky Races, Gilligan’s Island, Scooby Doo, The Partridge Family, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Rocky and Bullwinkle, F Troop, Bewitched, The Flying Nun, Mission Impossible, The Time Tunnel, Happy Days, Land of the Giants, Family Affair, Superman, Spiderman, Green Acres, The Flintstones…………

All quality viewing.

(Cathy grew up in the country where they only had ‘Kimba the White Lion’, ‘Adventure Island’, ‘The Magic Roundabout’,and ‘Mr Squiggle’. This must be why she has so much more room left in her brain to put things in.)

If your head is also full of old TV shows (Fitzgerald), can you imagine a cross between Thunderbirds, Get Smart, Bat Man, James Bond, Phantom Agents and The Young Ones?

That show is Danger 5,  currently screening on SBS on Monday nights at 9.30, and is available on SBS Catch Up TV.

Danger 5 is an elite group of international agents. Under the command of the mysterious eagle-headed Colonel, they are send from their secret exotic headquarters on various missions to thwart Hitler and his plans of world domination (in the 1960s!).

(The initial prologue episode ‘The Diamond Girls‘ screened only on YouTube as a series of five clips – which makes the episode numbering confusing.) 

Adelaide filmakers Dario Russo and David Ashby are the team behind Danger 5.

They must have also had a similarly misspent youth. Their first production, The Italian Spiderman, started as a Year 12 HSC project. They had an internet hit with this YouTube series. It attracted the attention of someone at SBS (as well as 4 million other viewers), and the Danger 5 project was funded.

Russo, 25, is quoted as saying that history was their starting point for most of Danger 5’s plotline.

“It’s all completely historically accurate of course, we didn’t have to make up anything at all,” he joked. “There are some scary historical truths in just about every one of these bizarre stories.”

Russo is convinced SBS is the perfect home for the new show.

“We figured two of SBS’s favourite things are boobs and Hitler; so we thought we’d put both in the same show and we’d be on to a winner,” he said.

PS Happy St Patrick’s Day

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They say that an Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.

Around here we seem to be having an unseasonable epidemic of good health.

Over the last couple of weeks, the number of acutely sick people presenting each day in our practice is about half our normal number.

 Being an optimist, I thought that maybe our proactive approach to lifestyle modification was finally demonstrating its benefits.

Being a realist, I also checked that we hadn’t had a negative report in the Northern Star, or on http://ratemds.com.

Butt it appears this outbreak of health is a regional phenomenon. Tumbleweeds are blowing down some of the wards at the hopsital, which are usually packed to the rafters.

If you want to get sick, now would be a good time to miss the usual queues.

However, if you want to stay healthy, you need to be active and eat well.

To help, Hans Blom of the Vale Medical Clinic has compiled a  Guide to Useful Medical Internet Sites. This great resource has hundreds of sites for clinicians and patients, divided into categories. Need the Australian Herpes Health Information Site (http://herpes.com.au)? How about the Australian Sports Drug Medical Advisory Committee. (http://asdmac.gov.au)?

 Many of the sites that Hans has chosen provide healthy living advice.

You may like to have a look at :

Go For 2 and 5

Recipes on how to Incorporate 2 servings of fruit and 5 of vegetables in your diet each day.

Get Healthy NSW

Information on healthy eating and being active

Measure Up

Good overview of methods to achieve healthy eating and exercise

Activate Mind and Body

Excellent resource for people with mental illness to improve their physical and oral health

Dieticians Association of Australia

Comprehensive A-Z nutritional guides and self assessment tools.

Thanks Hans for sharing this resource. The earliest recorded use of the ‘apple a day’ phrase is an old Pembrokeshire proverb.

Eat an apple on going to bed, And you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.

Too much of this healthy eating and daily exercise by our patients and we’ll have nothing left to do.

I was glad to see that Hans didn’t include Dr Rudi’s advice on healthy eating.

(Dr Rudi was the resident GP on SBS’s Life Support. His advice was usually in the worst possible taste. Therefore I do not recommend you watch this video)

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(Hat Tip – Mulk)
They don’t make them like they used to.

Once upon a time, Rugby training on Sydney University Oval would still be on despite wind or sleet or snow or hail.

Now, a little bit of rain, and training is cancelled.

And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You’re right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o’ cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an’ all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you happiness, son”.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, ‘e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, ‘e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, ‘alf the floor was missing, and we were all ‘uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t’ corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would ha’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our ‘ole in the ground; we ‘ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
ALL:
They won’t!

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Overnight, Apple launched the new iPad 3.

Should you get one?

Some points of interest

The new iPad looks the same as the iPad 2. It is the same size, except that it is 0.6mm thicker. A man on a galloping horse wouldn’t know the difference.

It has a higher resolution ‘retina display’ screen – movies and photos and print all look clearer, and it is easier to read (I don’t think my real retinae will be able to tell the difference, however)

The new iPad has a much faster processor, so will be more responsive. It will leave the original iPad for dead – increasingly new Apps won’t run well on the original version. (being used to the iPad 2, it is already annoying to use an iPad 1)

The back-facing camera is of much higher quality (5 megapixel compared to about 2). It has other features that improve the quality of photographs, including in-built face recognition. It is able to shoot high definition video. The front facing camera (for video calls) is the same. Tthe iPad 1 has no camera. But have you ever found a use for the iPad 2 camera?

The iPad 3 does not have Siri, but does have a new Voice Dictate feature that allows you to dictate your emails and notes. There is an Australian version available. If that actually works, you won’t need a keyboard.

The iPad 3 has 3G and 4G, so will be faster in areas where 4G is available. Currently, this is only on the Telstra network and only in the middle of the city. – Correction – the 4G function d

The new iPad starts at $539 for the 16Gb Wifi model, and $679 for the 16Gb 4G Model. The top of the range is the 64Gb 4G Model at $899. This is a decrease in what the iPad 2 cost last week.

The iPad2 16Gb model will remain for sale at $429 for the Wifi version and $569 for the 3G version.

Well, should you get one?

If you don’t own an iPad – yes, definitely. Using an iPad changes the way you think about web browsing, email, movies and books.

If you own the original iPad – yes, and hand your current model on to your kids.

If you own an iPad 2 – no, unless work will buy you a new one, or you have someone else in your family who needs one and who would be happy to have your hand-me-down

Here’s what Apple would need to clinch an upgrade for iPad 2 owners –  full width retina display, magnets, near field recoginition and 3D user controlled holograms – like this.

The imaginary ‘concept version’ in the video may have to wait till the iPad 4.

A comparison of the iPad2 and the real iPad3 is on the Apple Store.

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