Memo from Terra

Name …………………………. Terra

Status ………………………… Planet

Location …………………….  Solar system on rim of Galaxy (Via Lactia) – North/West Quadrant

Mass ………………………….  5.974 x 1027 g

Volume ……………………..  259,875,300,000m3

Equatorial diameter …  7,926,381m

Polar diameter …………  7,899,806m

Age …………………………..  c 4,500,000,000 years

Surface gravity ………..  980 cm/s2

Escape velocity ……….  11.18 km/s2

Planet year ……………..  365.256 days

Core temperature …..  4500 degrees C (est.)

Water:land ratio …….  71%:29% (est.)

Report from Terra early 21^st century CE 

Dem/S.Europe/Micro/Institution/old people/recruitment/subsection 3K.

To:               The General Council of the ISF (Intergalactic Space Federation)

From:          Agent 47sq – code name <Thomas> (N/W quadrant inspectorate)

Subject:      Care-home Recruitment Policy

Date:          20.09.2012  CE – LPT (Local Planet Time)

Your Excellencies:

The policy in an Old Peoples Home (such as this one) of recruiting all the staff from the same village has many advantages:

• The Institution becomes the biggest employer and provides work in an otherwise inert and non-dynamic local socio-economic environment.
• The carers, from top management to the cooks, together with the old people they care for, largely share the same socio-topographical background.

• Thus the management is able to make value-judgement-based policy/decisions.

• Many of carers and inmates are nearly or distantly related to each other thus a family atmosphere is engendered.

However there is a downside to the situation:

• The policy of recruitment based purely on topography as opposed to a merit-based criterion (as is more usual) can sometimes lead to inappropriate staff/workers being recruited.
•  It appears that in this particular area there is a culture of inter-communication by speaking loudly or shouting.  It seems to me that in sometimes treating the old people as recalcitrant or stubborn family members who are answerable to the norms of logic and correct social behaviour, the workers are drifting away from their core function which is the client/service-provider contract; moreover a few of them seem woefully lacking in what one would have thought a basic tool of their trade – an understanding of and empathy for the various types of senile behaviour/dementia.

CODE NAME THOMAS oil painting by THOMAS MILNER

(To be continued)

Isn’t it a pity?

Isn’t it a pity?

Now isn’t it a shame?

How we broke each other’s hearts

And each caused each other pain.

George Harrison  (All things must pass)

Crisis, what crisis?

The Domino Effect

 

Back in 2010, the euro-zone members and the International Monetary Fund agreed to a 100 billion euro bailout package to help Greece.  In return for this, the Greek government planned tax increases and deep cuts in pensions and public service pay.  It is reported that Greece has not implemented the planned changes. Therefore, the need for obligatory terms is under greater demand.

Because of the falling euro and as a result of the financial crisis the other weak members of the euro-zone were faced with the inability to repay their debts.  In November of 2010, the EU and IMF agreed to an 85 billion euro bailout package to the Republic of Ireland, followed by a May 2011 bailout of 78 billion to Portugal.  In July of 2011, a second bailout package of 109 billion euros was agreed to for Greece.

Due to increased fear that any of these countries could default on their public debts, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain were been given the unfortunate acronym of PIIGS.

Oh crumbs

Oh crickey

Oh cripes

That crisis!

Don’t you just hate it when

Don’t you just hate it

When that cheeky

Chirpy little guest

Uninvited but tolerated

Lodging in your attic

Weaving his nest

Hibernating the winter

Harmlessly slumbering

Unobtrusive

Unassuming

Unnoticed

Suddenly awakes!

 

Morphed into a

Lumbering bully

He moves down

A floor wedging His bulk

Back to the bone  

Nudging and pressing

The complex software

The control pilot

The precious jelly

Of my brain.

 

And now the tender thoughts

The subtle arguments

Will be from my skull

Untimely ripped

And the interloper

Plucked out

Leaving blunted edges

And blurred prospects.

 

And don’t you just hate it

When the breakfast cereals

Go soggy

In your

Painted

Bowl.

ART-WORK by THOMAS MILNER

For Mitt

In 1500 BC the first record of formal composition-writing appeared: a collection of sacred Hindu hymns in Sanskrit – verses known as Vedas.

Nearly three and a half thousand years later, the great Indian philosopher and Father of the nation, Mahatma Ghandi was being interviewed by an American magazine:

when asked what he thought about Western Civilisation, Ghandi replied: I think it would be a good idea.

BUTTERFLY – PAINTING by THOMAS MILNER

Extraction at dawn

Now listen up Mister

Bad news

We’re going to have to send in

Another extraction team

Midwinter spring

Early at dawn

We land on the beach

Two teams

One to crack open the cliff

And the other

Search & destroy squad

Enter and locate and extract

That goddam cell

Any questions Mister?

Sir, no Sir

Are we reading from the same page Mister?

Sir, yes Sir.

The Village Idiot

My brother and I like trading etymologies.

Glamour comes from grammar;

Silly from holy 

He always held that the word idiot originally meant non-conformist. I thought before going further with that one I should check it out on good old Wiki and sure enough learn that the word idiot does indeed come from the ancient Greek idiotes, which refers to a person disinterested in participating in democracy and public life.

Such people were viewed as selfish, contemptible and stupid as they were more concerned with their daily personal affairs than they were of the good of the society.

Later in the middle-ages the word took on additional connotations associated with being stupid or mentally incapable.

 

 

Mark Twain.  Suppose you were an idiot.

And suppose you were a member of Congress.

But I repeat myself.

Blackadder and Baldrick

Baldrick: I nearly won the village-idiot-of-Wimbledon contest but I was disqualified at the last minute.

Blackadder: Really? What happened?

Baldrick: I showed up

Me: I won the village-idiot-of-Maceda contest.

Waiting for the results

Outwardly calm

Inward misgivings

Crawl up my spine

Coil round my neck

Worms of doubt.

 

Should be alright

Worse things

Happen at sea

Business as usual

Time waits for no man

 

But oh what joy

To freeze-frame the moment

And let the results go hang

At the edge of a dream

Waiting for ever.

 

The last Tasmanian

Certain great crimes stain the pages of history – the Slave Trade and the Holocaust are two that spring to mind – while others fade with time and are downgraded to mere footnotes in nation-building. Such a case is the systematic genocide of the aborigines of a small island first called by the Europeans Van Dieman´s Land and later Tasmania off the south-west coast of Australia.

Never before had a race of men been utterly destroyed within seventy-five years.

Destroyed not only by a different manner of life and imported disease but also by sheer hostility and ill-will of the usurpers of the race’s land – colonial home-steaders, stockmen and ex-convicts backed by a sanctimonious Christianity.

At one point they organised themselves to form a human chain from the north coast to the south, armed with guns and knives, and walked from the top to the bottom of the island flushing out the natives (who had inhabited those forests since time immemorial) and slaughtering them. With no defences but cunning and the most primitive weapons, the natives had little chance and by 1876 the last of them was dead.

So perished a whole people.

QUEEN TRUGANINI – THE LAST TASMANIAN

On May 7, 1876, Truganini, the last full-blood Black person in Tasmania, died at seventy-three years of age.

Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European.

Her sister was kidnapped by Europeans.

Her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her.

It might be accurately said that Truganini’s numerous personal sufferings typify the tragedy of the Black people of Tasmania as a whole.

She was the very last. Don’t let them cut me up, she begged the doctor as she lay dying. After her burial, Truganini’s body was exhumed, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum and remained on display until 1947.

Finally, in 1976–the centenary year of Truganini’s death–despite the museum’s objections, her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.

The Municipal Goddess

Starting the day with a swim is highly recommended.

So I enrolled at my local Municipal Baths at Feira. These were modern, strategically located facilities with a 25-metre pool (half-Olympic size) and a circular shallow heated pool for children and for hydro-therapy for the physically-disadvantaged (such as I am now).

I opted for the free regime three times a week during the dead middle-of-the-week morning and started building it into my routine.

I must confess at this point that I am not a very good swimmer.

I was simply never taught how.

When I was at my Prep school the sadistic gym-teacher would herd us 9 year-old, white and shivering boys down to the deep-end of the pool and, one by one, we had to jump in … sauve qui peut … in a water-gulping splashing panic most of us managed make it to the side of the pool which we gripped, gasping for air. (One poor little wretch, doubtless assuming that all was up with him, refused to move his limbs and sank like a stone to bottom of the pool, so that the gym-master had to spoil his fancy track-suit by diving in and fishing him out).

I never learned how to breathe correctly, for example, so I ended up with a limited repertoire of only two strokes – the breast-stroke and the back-stroke. Nevertheless I read somewhere that swimming exercised more muscles of the body then any sport.

So I would slowly churn (or ripple) my solitary furrow along the watery lane towards the future.

Sometimes there was a swimming class for a group of middle-aged women who used to cluster at one end of the pool and exercise the only part of their bodies that didn’t really need it – their mouths.

From time to time a white-skinned girl, a Municipal Goddess, with the wide shoulders and streamlined hips of the professional swimmer would dive in and cover 20 lengths of the pool in an unbelievably short time, cutting through the water efficiently with her lazy powerful strokes and her flashy racing turns. Then she would unhurriedly climb of the pool and stalk gracefully from the hall (leaving us, the doggy-paddle brigade, feeling somewhat rueful and chastened).

THE MUNICIPAL GODDESS

Yes, there’s nothing better than a good swim to start the day.