Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Civil Liberties versus Living

I got called out on a search tonight for a poor old chap with alzheimers who'd gone missing. We get quite a few of these - old folks (and some young ones) who are not quite 'with it' get out from under the watchful eye of their family or carers and go for a wander. Fortunately this old guy was found alive and well, 8 hours after he'd gone missing; others have not been so lucky. Winter here is hardly severe - the temperature can drop to freezing in winter but usually stops a few degrees short of it - but for an inappropriately dressed (i.e. indoor wear) elderly person a few hours out in it at night can mean suffering from exposure; a lot of these people have medication they have to take once a day and the consequences can be dire if they miss it; and pretty much all of them are suffering from dementia or alzheimers or the like and are easily confused and lost. We often have a 12-hour time frame to find them before they start to deteriorate from the above (let alone just crossing the road!); after that we start to expect to find a body.

With this in mind, I often wonder why we don't use some sort of GPS-traceable tagging system, to be activated only when they go missing. This would increase our chances of finding a live and healthy person considerably. Detractors throw around the phrases "Brave New World" and "Big Brother", but if you consider parents can already issue their offspring with traceable mobile phones (so they know where they are at all times!), isn't this a more worthy, life-saving use of technology? Yes, the elderly and infirm have rights and pride - but if they were sane enough to make the choice, I think they'd choose being found alive, quickly.

We did a search a while back for an elderly person with dementia. The search ran for days and we found nothing. Three weeks later they found the body entangled in a fence, mostly submerged in a creek. Squishy. Not a lot of rights and pride left there anymore...

Monday, July 30, 2007

The tattoo...


Yes, it's real. No, it didn't hurt. No, I'm not from New Zealand. It doesn't have any particular religious or spiritual significance, but it DOES keep me honest (!). And it detracts from the wrinkles...

Yes, I do like the 'thermal' setting for photos - it's pretty :-)

Pedestrians in Armour of God

"SPEED limits in some Brisbane CBD streets could be lowered to 40km/h after a spate of pedestrian accidents.

Brisbane City Council's civic cabinet as early as today will discuss changing speed limits after a report found more than 300 pedestrians were hit by cars between 2001 and June last year."

And I'm willing to bet that a fair percentage of those 300 pedestrians had the same attitude as a lot of the pedestrians out here in suburbia - they can walk where they like because nobody will deliberately run into them, and because if they are hit there's likely to be a juicy big lawsuit involved. It's the drivers' responsibility to look out for them, on roads, in carparks; or the driver could be financially ruined by a combination of greedy pedestrian and greedier legal system. Make the buggers go back to school and learn the "look right, look left, look right again - and cross only when it's safe" mantra that we had to. If you think that you can blithely walk out in front of my car and I will stop for you because I am full of the milk of human kindness, or scared you'll sue me penniless - you're wrong. I stop because you'd make a fugly hood ornament...

...O gods I'm feeling old...


My youngest (twins) had their 18th birthday this last weekend, a raucous affair complete with cake, a bowl of increasingly alcoholic punch (the legal drinking age here is 18) and many, many glowsticks. For the price of a barely drinkable bottle of wine, we procured a couple of dozen glowsticks about the size of a pencil and they provided hours of entertainment: personal decoration (as per the picture), sport (4 of them in a balloon tossd back and forth in the dark) and finally battle, in the back yard, at night, tossing them back and forth... Okay, maybe I don't feel THAT old!