Journal

Thursday, January 16, 2003
Just lost the first post in ages... ah well. Let's see... I'd learned about http://www.resonancefm.com/, the Resonance FM radio station, from a Guardian article:One of the most interesting, and strangely charming shows on the station is Taking a Life for a Walk, on which musician Caroline Kraabel walks around the streets near her London home, pushing the pram containing her 18-month-old son Clement with one hand and holding a saxophone with the other. As she goes about her daily business - visiting the post office, taking Clement to the swings - she improvises with her environment on the sax, the resulting music being broadcast live from the mobile phone attached to her head. "We wanted to get a complicated satellite link-up that would have cost the same as a month's running of the station," says Baxter. "But in the end we had to make do with Caroline's Nokia."

And ran across an article in the Telegraph about a Doctor who has been summoned to a formal hearing over his refusal to put a 34-year-old male patient on the list for screening for cervical cancer.
As the article explains,He first wanted a cervical examination and was refused because he did not have a cervix. He then asked to be put on the list for regular screening.

Appropriate responses all seem to be from Life of Brian.

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Finally finished reading Eva Ibbotsen's Journey to the River Sea to Maddy tonight. It's exciting enough, and educational, and has heart and narrative drive and is solidly plotted and had plenty of opportunities for doing voices and such, but it never quite caught fire for us, which is, I think, why it took so long to read.

When I get back from France I'll read her Terry Pratchett's next book for young readers, The Wee Free Men.

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Yes, I'm pleased that the Supreme Court upheld the copyright extension stuff. It doesn't bother me personally whether my own work goes into the public domain 50 years or 70 after I die, but a world in which stuff went into the public domain in the USA 20 years before the rest of the world (which has a 70 year expiration) would have been deeply problematic for authors and their estates.