The Nurse adores scientists. They’re so creative.

This week’s science news includes an experiment to find out why so many dinosaur fossils display the same strange, curved death pose.

first the scientists ‘placed plucked chickens on a bed of sand for three months to see if dessication would lead to muscle contractions‘.

Apparently the chickens decayed without contorting. So the scientists tried placing seven dead chickens in cool, fresh water instead to see what happened. Almost immediately the birds’ necks and backs arched and they took on the odd position typical of so many dinosaur fossils.

Ergo, many dinosaurs died in cool, fresh water, which is what gives so many fossils their agonised-looking shape.

Crikey, The Nurse can imagine how foul (pun intended) the stench was. Really bad. Respect to gangsta scientists. Make pongs, not war.

It was proposed that members of the illustrious and highly exclusive Sussex Amateur Brain Surgery club should take part in the forthcoming Brighton naked bike ride. I was appalled at the very suggestion. On June 13^th over 1000 cyclists will ride through the city with body parts flapping in the breeze, ostensibly to raise awareness of the vulnerability of cyclists. My fellow club member’s reasoning was that since many of us are riders of bikes we would want to support this worthy effort.

Not me! And my views were shared by all of my fellow club members, except two. The chap who made the proposal and another who spends a lot of time on Brighton’s nudist beach. They will be taking part, exposing themselves to the elements and the shoppers in Brighton’s busy city centre.

Now I don’t consider myself a prude. But I first unwittingly encountered the naked bike ride when I was in the city shopping for some car accessories during the 2008 event. I recall spotting a young lady cycling topless and wondered if she might be drunk. Then I noticed a group of naked elderly gentlemen on bicycles behind her and I realised there was something going on.

I spent some time wondering what it was that I found so disagreeable about the event. While I’ve heard it described as sleazy, immoral and indecent I don’t actually agree with any of these. I just find it unpleasant to behold. I think it’s absolutely fine for people who enjoy being naked, outdoors in the company of others to indulge their whims, but I think that imposing their naked bodies on people who don’t want to see them is simply unacceptable.

So, this year I have set a reminder to tell me not to visit the city on the 13^th of June. The last thing I want to see is a couple of my colleagues from the  Amateur Brain Surgery club exposing their purple mushrooms while riding bicycles.

The Nurse, not usually shockable, is shocked speechless by today’s revelations about the goings on at Stafford hospital.

Everyone’s busy blaming the Government, the healthcare Trust, the NHS’s regulatory bodies, bureaucracy, budgets… but nobody has mentioned the role hospital staff played. 

Did the Government neglect, bully and starve all those poor, poor people? Nope. The nurses and hospital staff did. And the ones that didn’t join in stuck their fingers in their cowardly ears and pretended nothing was happening.  

Was it the NHS regulators’ job to keep the wards clean and free from dried blood, needles and disgusting medical waste? Nope, it was the cleaners’ job, and they obviously fucked it up beyond all redemption.  

The Nurse places almost all the blame squarely with Stafford hospital employees. They must be a rotten, cruel, thoughtless, mean, evil, nasty, lazy, shiftless lot of arseholes. 

Let’s hope they’ve all been sacked. Although it’s hard to tell… everyone’s so busy blaming Gordon Brown that Stafford’s nurses and support staff seem to have got away with it scott free. Without so much as a telling off. The bastards. 

Perhaps the NHS should pay more and attract better people. Or just stop employing sociopaths.

The Nurse thought she was a nasty piece of work but this lot make her look like Florence bloody Nightingale…

The Nurse thinks it is a good idea to give Nick Griffin and his spiritually bereft BNP henchmen the oxygen of publicity at every opportunity.

Why? Because every time the man opens his nasty mouth he makes himself look even more of a wanker.  

We can’t go round banning schools of thought, theories, attitudes or political parties. That makes us just as fascist as Nick Griffin and co. If not more so. Move in that direction and we’ll be burning books before you know it… if you were outside the BBC protesting last night, stick that up your silly politically correct arse and swivel on it.   

Having heard clips of Nick Griffin’s contribution to Question Time this morning on Radio 4, The Nurse is celebrating (any excuse). As she’d expected Griffin appears to have shot himself in the foot quite spectacularly, a number of times. Wonderful stuff. Keep it up, Nick.

If we prevent the likes of the BNP from expressing themselves openly and legally they’ll only go underground. Then they’d benefit significantly from the mystery and dubious glamour than underground stuff tends to engender, especially in the rebellious, young and stupid.   

On the other hand give them enough rope, let them loose on the media and the arseholes’ll soon hang themselves all on their own. 

The BNP’s arguments don’t stand up to intelligent scrutiny. Hate and intolerance shine through like a beacon whenever they’re given the opportunity to expound their ugly theories. 

Last night Griffin exposed himself as an ignorant, cruel buffoon. When Questions Time airs, millions of people will be able to see and hear him make a complete arse of himself and his party.  Brilliant job. Well done BBC.

His views were accurately described as outrageous by Nobel Prize Winner, Sir Richard Roberts. It was felt that Michael Reiss’s naïve comments could easily have been interpreted as a green light for teaching creationism as if it were science. This led the Royal Society to issue a statement in which they said that the comments damaged the society’s reputation.

The Royal Society went on to say that “creationism has no scientific basis and should not be part of the science curriculum. However, if a young person raises creationism in a science class, teachers should be in a position to explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism is not, in any way, scientific.”

How any sane, intelligent, informed, thinking person living today could even begin to entertain the notion that mankind, life and the Earth was somehow manufactured by some deity is simply baffling. It is entirely inappropriate for a person in such a responsible and influential position, as that held by Mr Reiss, to appear to condone or support such prehistoric, superstitious views.

We should be celebrating and promoting our enlightenment. Our knowledge of the planets, our world, life and its origins is a magnificent culmination of investigation, experimentation and discovery. We are all privileged to be humans, blessed with intellectual skills, living at a time when this knowledge is so freely accessible. This is what should be promoted, celebrated and enjoyed. Not creationist nonsense.

The Nurse does. But her home is no picture postcard… she often wonders, in her more cynical moments, who on earth dreamed up the idea of listing a prison. But then again, maybe it isn’t that much of a surprise. The UK’s listed buildings regulations contravene common sense and logic in many interesting ways.

It might seem hard to believe, but The Nurse has a Mum. Even psychopathic monsters have mums.  The Nurse’s Mum lives in a pretty 17th century Grade 2 listed cottage. A lovely house, but the listing is causing The Nurse’s Mum all sorts of grief.   

If there’s one thing that makes The Nurse furious, it is a lack of common sense. Here are two of the finest examples she’s come across for a very long time:

1. You are not allowed to fit double glazing in a listed building. This means that The Nurse’s Mum, against all logic, is prevented by law from insulating her home properly. In effect, she’s not allowed to be green. Or warm… her heating bills are unneccessarily high as a result, which is stressful for a seventy year old lady.

2. You can be forced to install aesthetically inappropriate windows! The Nurse’s Mum installed expensive, beautiful 17th century style windows during restoration, before finding out that the building was listed. Now she is being forced by law to replace them with Victorian-style sash windows… in a 17th century cottage?! Where’s the aesthetic sense in that?  It’s wrong, wrong, so wrong. 

Ooooh! If you could actually see how cross The Nurse feels about this daft situation, and you worked for English Heritage, you’d be fucking scared out of your wits. And rightly so. They’re a disgrace.

Sometimes even The Nurse herself acknowledges that she’s probably better off here, at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, rather than loose-cannoning around in the world at large putting things right like some horrifying version of Robin Hood…

So, a lifelong atheist, The Nurse has followed the US’s acrimonious intelligent design / creationism vs. evolution / Darwinism debate with mounting alarm. Those who control US educators are engaged in a fierce battle about whether or not intelligent design should be taught in schools as a viable alternative to evolution. And in some states, the god squad’s winning. At the same time, science funding in the US is being cut willy-nilly.

Baffled and infuriated by the endless, tedious twists and turns the debate is taking, The Nurse was delighted to discover a beautifully simple expression of the entire argument. A few sentences that encapsulate the fundamental and unarguable truth. 

Heartfelt thanks and admiration, therefore, go to Ken Ligar of Chester, Connecticut, for writing this letter to New Scientist (issue 2660, 14th June 2008):

“While I am not a believer in the theory of intelligent design, I see no reason why it cannot be taught in schools alongside the theory of evolution – as long as it is kept neutral to any specific religion. The entire lesson can be summed up quite easily and will not burden the students with difficult concepts or homework. Here is a sample lesson text that can be used by any teacher: ‘The theory of intelligent design states that an omnipotent being created the universe and everything in it for reasons that we cannot, and are not meant to, comprehend. There is no quantifiable evidence to support this theory, there are no hypotheses that can be proven or disproven using this theory, and it offers no predictive ability for any past, present or future events. OK, now let’s move on to the theory of evolution.”

Now, that’s not to say that The Nurse has no soul. In fact she enjoys a lively and fulfilling spiritual life. The Nurse has invented her own religion, where deities are irrelevant. And, despite being imprisoned in this hell-hole with all these effing nutters for so many years, she isn’t a bad person. Just ‘troubled’. 

Come on folks… be sensible. Teach religion if you must. But PLEASE don’t teach it as an alternative to evolution! That’s just mad.

My neighbours keep pedigree pigs. They have a sheep farm but they keep about a dozen porkers, roaming in free range happiness until they reach optimum size and maturity at which point they are slaughtered and sold. The animals are often bought for large outdoor occasions that require a pig for a hog roast.

My neighbour’s children like to name the new piglets that come along each year but the children don’t appear to develop overly sentimental attachments to the animals. I remember being highly amused at a Sunday lunch at their house. My partner and I were treated to some of the best roast pork we’d ever enjoyed but the family were continuing to refer to the meat as ‘Apple Sauce’, which had been the name given to the pig when it was just a piglet.

Back in 2005 or maybe 2006, just after the controversy over cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, my neighbours had a new litter of piglets to name. Not surprisingly, since the name had been in the news so much, the children chose to name one of these pedigree porkers Mohammed. This was the source of much amusement in the village pub and Mohammed the pig has gone on to become something of a local celebrity with appearances at local fetes and agricultural shows.

The reasons I am reporting this story are these: Were my neighbours children wrong in naming their pig ‘Mohammed’ without thinking about any offence that may be caused? Since they are aged only five and eight I don’t think so. Were their parents wrong in allowing the pig to be named Mohammed? Of course not. In this country it is not an offence, although some may find it offensive. Should we pander to the sensitivities of those who would have us all living in fear? Of course we shouldn’t. Was Gillian Gibbons wrong or insensitive to have allowed her class of youngsters to choose the name Muhammad for their teddy bear? Of course not!

What we do need is more irreverence and more pigs named Mohammed, Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, God, Vishnu, the Pope….

Thanks to my old friend and colleague at tonetek for allowing me to voice my opinions without restraint.