Month: October 2018

My preferred search engine is Duck Duck Go, but I don’t like it when I’m looking for images so sometimes I still have to use Google.  So I was on Google image search looking for clip art for “family”.  It plays a little game of word association across the top of the page…

If you want to further refine your search, you have different options for family, cartoon, cute, mixed race etc., ending in the option “trump”.  I couldn’t figure out what that was doing there, and it didn’t have an icon to give me a clue, so I clicked on it to see, and it took me to pictures of one president (who presumably hasn’t been photographed enough for Google to have an icon in their library).  Then you can play the game again, so on the Google image page featuring Trump and his family, if you slide your gaze to the right, the (presumably negatively) associated options are “black” and “lion”…

Sadly I didn’t have time to play any more, but who knows where this might end.

Meanwhile in our own small, but sometimes equally strange corner…

Joni, expressing a true Argentinean’s confusion at the British habit of putting apple into savoury dishes (pork casserole, nothing the matter with that says the cook): “There I was enjoying a nice meal, when suddenly I came across a fruit salad…”

Danny educating me on trucks that transform into robots:  “Girls don’t like trucks”.  To which I said “But I’m a girl and I like trucks”.  “No,” he asserts confidently, “Girls like pretty things, not cool things…”

I went to get my Pap test done like a responsible woman (that´s the Smear if you´re English, Pap in the rest of the world, based on the work of one Greek doctor George Papanicolaou (1883–1962)).

The gynacologist said “How long has your neck been like that?”  So I said “like what?” And she sent me to the endocrynologist.

The endocrynologist said “Enlarged tyroid” and sent me for ultrasounding and a bunch of other tests.

The urine test showed up as having an infection, and I said “oh yes that´s happened before” so they sent me to the urologist.

The urologist sent me for more ultrasounding and a further bunch of tests and diagnosed a prolapsed bladder.  (I didn´t enjoy that second pregnancy).

He said, “it´s a minor op” and sent me for a yet another bunch of pre-op tests.

The cardiologist performed an ECG and said “this isn´t right” and hooked me up to a thing with a lot of wires that I had to wear for 24 hours.

The cardiologist said “You have a minor insufficiency, but it´s practically normal in human beings.  It doesn´t need treatment, come back in a year” and sent me back to the urologist.

Meanwhile, the endocrinologist sent me away for six months.  The bloods show that the tyroid is functioning normally.  There is a big cyst attached to the outside but there don´t appear to be any indicators that it needs operating on.

Yesterday the urologist put my bladder back in its place and attached it with barbed wire (or that´s what it feels like today anyway).

On Saturday and on Sunday they do no work at all, so it was on a Monday morning that the gas man came to call…. Flanders and Swann

The moral of the story:- Beware of the Pap….  It came back just fine by the way.