Dangers of an Idle Mind

This piece was one of two pieces originally published in 2009 at The Spartan Opinion as 'Benny “down” Hill all the way' In the late eighties I was a support guy working from a narrow closet. It was just wide enough for a desk and chair and long enough for the desk and 4 or 5 floor standing computer systems which kept the room very warm. The building did have high ceilings and at one end of support room was a slender but tall, window that looked out over Teddington High Street. Teddington is an average, small suburban London town, ten miles west of the city along the River Thames. The High street had the usual assortment of pubs, small supermarkets, fast food shops and banks. Our building was next to the Barclays Bank The sun arced from morning through noon and onto dusk. People, buses and cars all passed by the tall window and the changing leaves on the trees across the road marked the seasons passing. Not much happened day to day in Teddington but there were little distra...

Although by ten O’clock the late August sun was already high and warm in a spotless blue sky, the nights had been getting cooler; it wouldn’t be long until the harvest. I stopped the old tractor and killed the engine; silence washed into the vacuum left by the rusty motor’s noise. From the driver’s saddle I could look down across the shallow valley at our three large fields of corn. I found myself wondering again how the crop could wash and ripple across the fields even on perfectly still days like this. It can be mesmerizing and the ocean is only broken by the straight narrow strip of the road to St. Martenne. The highway may be a normal two lane road but at this point in the summer the corn crowds to its edges giving the impression of a narrow avenue. Looking to far end of the road I saw the blue convertible appear. Since the middle of July it had passed by every morning at this time. It is why I too, was here again. The car sped between our fields, parting the golden sea. The faw...

Spud and Moochy arrive Saturday for a visit. It reminded me of an unfinished blog piece from about six months ago. That was in the middle of the longest time we had ever gone without seeing each other. I found the piece and here it is: The four Rolls Royce engines on the Virgin Airbus A340 decrease in pitch and the plane noticeably slows. Beneath the wings the blue waters of Lake Michigan give way to the flat grid of the north suburbs; a buzz of excitement passes through the cabin as the aircraft banks right to start it’s loop into the airport. Two thousand feet below, on the back-step of a rented suburban family house, sits a solitary man enjoying the contrast between the warm early May sun on his face with the cool glass of the French doors on his back. He is strumming ‘Kingston Town’ on an old worn guitar. It is not unusual to find him there while the daily Virgin Airbus from London turns over St Charles and follows the broad line of Lake Street into O’Hare. By the time the airliner...

On December 6th 2008 the BBC reported that Sunny von Bulow had passed away after 28 years in a coma. A lot of people, like me, were probably surprised to hear she was not already dead. Sunny von Bulow was of course the wife of Claus von Bulow who was first convicted and later cleared on appeal, of putting her in her coma. The appeal case is quite famously recounted in Alan Dershowitz’s 1986 book Reversal of Fortune or the subsequent film of the same name that had Glenn Close as Sunny and perennial baddy, Jeremy Irons, as Claus. I have always been intrigued by this case and the issues around it. In stark contrast to the cold atmosphere of the film Reversal of Fortune, the film High Society is a warm, jolly, song filled romp and also features in my top five films. Who can resist Sinatra and Louis Armstrong pretty much playing themselves? Add to that Crosby who, despite being in his 50s by then, playing a playboy protagonist in the marriage of beautiful Grace Kelly. Finally to cap it all ...

It might be illegal but this morning, using my phone, I snapped this shot of the three X-rays of my wife's ankle. The doctor wasn’t around at the time. The X-rays clearly show the plate and various screws needed to get her ankle back together again. In image one and two the plate and seven screws holding together the fibula are obvious. Apparently the damage was somewhat greater than the original X-ray showed and so a further screw had to be added between screws 3 & 4 of the plate (counting from the top). That screw is holding the bone together horizontally. Lastly, all of the images show the two large screws keeping the pieces of the tibia together. This all stays in place forever now - so wish us luck when we next get to go through an airport. <Enter stunningly witty and clever tagline here> Bazza

The ankle is a joint where the foot meets the leg. It consists of the bones of the leg - the fibula and its larger neighbour the tibia - and the top foot bone part called the talus. The fibula and tibia run between the knee and the ankle. If you were to cause a fracture to the one of these bones anywhere from the knee to about three quarters down, you would be considered as having broken a leg. If the break, in either or both of these fine bones, happens in the general area of the top of the foot then you have broken your ankle. To break either the fibula or tibia is bad, to break both is worse. This is a picture of a clearly broken fibula and, less obviously broken tibia (it is two images of the same foot). The bones in the X-ray belong to my wife and that is why I now know more about the bone structure of the lower extremities than I did last Friday morning. Those same bones are also the reason I did not post a blog last week. We were attending the wedding of some good friends out at...

We have dog years (about 7 human years), we have cat years (about 5.5 human years) and now we have Connecticut years (5 Connecticut years equals 100 human years) I’ll explain. About a month after we arrived in Connecticut a huge storm, referred to as a Nor’easter , swept through. With it came 12 hours of incredibly heavy rain. The intensity of the rain was equivalent to the short sharp tropical downbursts that happen in Florida but whereas they typically last an hour this lasted half a day and was pretty cold too. The local rivers all flooded and there was a great concern over the high tide, which coincided with the storms height as well. When all was over many, many properties were damaged or flooded and lakes existed where previously there had just been meadows. Luckily we escaped without any bad things happening to our house and we were greatly relieved, when walking around the housing complex we live in, to notice no significant ill effects for anyone (even Speedy and Sparky surv...

We have subscribed to the Shelton Gazette, It recently reached a milestone; its first story using just words. The 'What’s On' section is interesting – it is a white sheet of paper with ‘NOTHING’ written on it. We do enjoy the readers letters though; this week it was “D for Dog” Finally we also enjoy the Gazette's weekly Crossword. Last week was a great one; it was "damn!" In a lot of English villages at some point in the summer there is a weekend where every proud gardener in the village throws open their garden gates for all to admire their tireless horticultural prowess. In Shelton we have the same thing, one Saturday afternoon a year any rusting car enthusiast can tour hundreds of gardens looking at the tireless GMCs and Pontiacs. <Enter stunningly witty and clever tagline here> Bazza