On the NATO Channel

Via The Helmand Blog, three films on Afghan women in business:

More video from the warmongering western imperialists: Women of Hope, and A Clinic Called Maryam.

Whiteman gets crowned

Grasping for coherence after a number of nights filled with fever dreams left my mind as fragmented as the scattered shards of a HE shell, I was much comforted by this Cartoon Brew post and its appended comments, all of which achieved a major reassemblage of human knowledge on matters of music and life, built on the basis of barely three minutes of ancient two-colour cartoon animation on the subject of the controversial crowning of band leader Paul Whiteman as ‘the King of Jazz’.

The portrait of Mr Whiteman at top is a detail from my illustration for a CD titled The Chesterfield Arrangements, featuring recordings by The Metropole Orchestra of arrangements of Raymond Scott tunes. These arrangements were originally created for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra.

Another detail from the art posted earlier here.

Uh-oh

This business where I’m sitting at my desk,

working it’s called, and I get the shivers,

and my hands turn blue,

is it normal?

I’ll get back to you.

Dublin-Munich-Thessaloniki-Athens

From Dorothy Ann Walsh:

My visit to Greece started in a train in Munich. The roofs of the sleeping carriages belonging to the Greek railways were covered in ice which hung in thick, compact garlands down the sides and coated the windows. It was the last day of February 1988.

Inside, the carriage was dirty and the whole train was overheated by a system which could not be operated manually. Luckily, departure was delayed as I was late due to heavy, snowbound traffic. In our journey south, we did not leave the heavy snows until southern Austria and even then saw snow-powdered fields on our way through Yugoslavia.

There was no food or water available on the train - The Acropolis Express to Athens - and nothing available at most stations where the water taps were also frozen.

A couple, mother and son, joined me in the compartment at Villach, Austria, who were on their way to Israel. The woman asked me if the compartment had been so dirty in Munich. I, the sole occupant, answered yes, only slowly working out the implications of an answer in the negative.

She was a very bossy lady which had its positive side in that she kept the swarms of people who joined the train at every stop in Yugoslavia from entering the compartment, got us extra supplies of thin blankets for the night and requisitioned a cup of coffee for us from the conductor in the morning.

At around 6 a.m. we were standing at some remote place in Yugoslavia where nothing was visible except the station. I was woken by the sound of stones rustling as if we were at a beach where the pebbles were being moved to and fro by the tide. When I looked outside there was no beach in sight, we were obviously inland; the sound was being made by children who ran up and down the railway line crunching the rockfill underfoot as they begged for food from the passengers. They were poorly clad in a motley assortment of clothes and shivered from the early morning cold.

After Skopje wild flowers started to appear, then trees in blossom, and people planted what looked like lettuce plants in the fields. A teddy bear was hoisted over a vineyard, stick in hand to ward off invaders.

We crossed the border into Greece after Georgelija. The air had become warmer, the fields now seemed bigger and the clutches of houses did not seem to be as noticably crumbling as heretofore. We arrived at Thessaloniki at 3.00 p.m. and I put on my pack and went room searching.

I found a room with mice for the night and the next day took the bus to Pella. I was the only visitor on the site. The day was sunny but a cold wind swept down from the mountains in the north west. The museum across the road from the site was officially closed but the keeper let me in. There was not much to see as they were in the process of packing the exhibits for removal to Thessaloniki - why I don’t know. However the floor mosaics from the site were still intact on display on the walls: the Staghunt and the Dionysos mosaic.

The next day I visited the Archaeological Museum in Thessaloniki and saw the treasures from Derveni, Vergina and Stavrolis (4th century B.C.) and Sindos (6th and 5th centuries B.C.) besides Roman portraiture sculpture from 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. The Museum also gave me a wonderful introduction to Macedonian tomb architecture of the 4th century B.C., notably from Aghia Paraskevi, Potidaea and the most elaborate example from Lefkadia. Unfortunately the section on Greek sculpture was closed due to staff shortage I was told and I only got to see some 4th century B.C. models from the doorway. I took slides of these for reference. In the basement of the museum there was a wealth of Etruscan ware. Here, amongst others, there was a krater S60, showing a Greek killing a Persian in a composition similar to that of Achilles killing the Queen of the Amazons.

In Thessaloniki itself of course there was the Arch of Galerius (3rd century A.D.), the Roman Agora and Markets to be seen besides a number of other sites including the many Byzantine churches and sites.

The next day I left for Athens leaving the mice in sole control of the room. The train was of a lovely old well-polished type of wood and metal and probably plastic-covered seating which was called an express. As far as I could see during our journey this meant that the train didn’t stop at all the little towns and villages, it stopped between them. The other notable thing about the journey was the wealth of sites and places one was passing without seeing. However passing and seeing Mount Olympus with Dion nestling at its foot was a thrill.

At 4 p.m. that evening we reached the capital. Athens was superb. The weather was pleasant for excursions and the rich abundance of sites and artefacts gave tremendous satisfaction.

Finding my way round was greatly facilitated by meeting Rev. Prof. Gerry Watson of Maynooth at the Gennadion who introduced me to Prof. George Huxley of the American Library and to Mr. Guy Sanders of the British School. Through the recommendation of Prof.Watson, the kind assistance of Prof. Mitchell at Trinity and the helpfulness of the staff at the British School, I became a member and moved into the School, where I made my base for archaeological excursions for visual documentation in Athens and was delighted to make use of the wonderful, unrestricted library facilities in my chosen research of figures of Aphrodite in the round in Greek sculpture of the 4th century B.C. The Director of the School Sir Hector Catling was most kind with helpful advice, and open in his invitation that I should use the facilities in the future.

My trip to Greece was curtailed when I fell on the site at Corinth on the first day of my tour of the Peleponnese, pulling the ligaments in my foot. I did get some more, helpful library work done, but my movement was too restricted for museum or site visits and therefore I returned to Germany for treatment for my foot.

The trip, which was aided by the Stanford Travelling Scholarship, was a worthwhile extension to my study at the Institute of Classical Archaeology in Munich for both library and visual work and I am grateful to Trinity for having given me the opportunity to enjoy the experience of a worthwhile and rewarding visit to Greece.

As a postscript I might add that before I moved into the British School, I stayed at a small, clean, comfortable and very reasonable hotel in Plaka named Hotel Ideal, Odos Eolu & Voreou 2, Athens, Tel. 32 13 195, which I would recommend to any student or visitor.

Dor Walsh, Limerick, Autumn 1988.

Indigestions of a summer night: Fish

Fish of the Mediterranean, its guts silted with debris, filth and poison.

Seven years ago, a large portion of the extended family made an expedition to a large old house on a mountainside in northwest Majorca. The first night there, our sixteen month old son began to burn up with scarlet fever. Family members ran from room to room, across upstairs wooden floors, up and down the wide staircase, across the polished stone floor of the grand hall below, with wet flannels, medicines, and expert medical knowledge.

Outside, loud frogs retching around the rockery poolside.

And the fish from earlier that evening, eaten on the terrace surrounded by passion flowers, hummingbirds, and beautiful mountains, (all very much like one of Martin Johnson Heade’s South American paintings,) that same fish began to stir inside me. The poison from its gut taking a hold of my gut now. Amid the wails of the lad and the worrying of his mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncle, cousins, through the pitching and rolling household I staggered, over wood, stone, tiles. Into the bathroom, wretched. A hideous sound. Again. And even when I was quite empty, again. My entire body convulsing. Quite an echo. The frogs were shamed.

Our son’s fever carried on through our stay. For days and nights we took turns by his bedside. As he slept, radiating. I stood on the dark balcony outside his room, under a clear sky of stars. A glow came from the terrace below, from where the lazy after dinner conversation was sounding loud and clear. Up here, apart, with my son, growing smaller with the fever, sleeping away the holiday, counting away the days.

Away from that narrow table.

_

And another holiday memory, of overheard night time conversation on a Mediterranean paradise isle: English voices, familiar anti-American noises, one of them comparing the death toll of September 11th with the death toll of Bhopal.

The relevance of such a comparison

left uncontested.

Indigestible.

The long wait

We made it back. Wet. Bites all over. Food poisoning didn’t last more than a day. Pilot was near blind in one eye, but recovered following medical treatment. Some maps put away now, others to be studied anew. Notes to be written up. Much work waiting.

The photo is from the film of the St Ex novel Night Flight. The film is unavailable I believe. I’ve never seen it. The book is very good. About some less lucky in their return journey.

Checklist

From Life magazine, 21 December 1936, a second one of Boeing's new prototype YB-17 bombers crashes. A crash of the same type the previous year killed two crew members.

An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash had been due to “pilot error,” the report said. Substantially more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane required the pilot to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing gear, new wing flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at different airspeeds, and constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be regulated with hydraulic controls, among other features. While doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls. The Boeing model was deemed, as a newspaper put it, “too much airplane for one man to fly.”

That account is in a New Yorker article from last year by Dr Atul Gawande. He goes on to tell of how these accidents led to the introduction of the checklist as an essential tool to fly complex aircraft safely. Dr Gawande argues that modern medicine has entered its B-17 phase.

Substantial parts of what hospitals do—most notably, intensive care—are now too complex for clinicians to carry them out reliably from memory alone. I.C.U. life support has become too much medicine for one person to fly.

So could checklists do for medicine what they had done for aviation? It wasn't certain, medicine is even more complex than aviation.

In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. He didn’t attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check. These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.

Read the whole New Yorker article here.

There's a shorter follow-up piece for The New York Times here.