A Luce Affiliation

I saw the Bill Cunningham documentary last night and it made me FULL OF HAPPY!! "I'm not interested in celebrities and their free dresses ! I'm interested in clothes!" says Bill. This earnest 80 year old rides around New York on his bicycle snapping photos of street fashion for the New York Times. He still uses film that he develops at a corner shop. He wears a bright blue workman's coat that he bought from a hardware store, the same coat that the garbage collectors used to wear, and when his plastic poncho tears he tapes it together gleefully with gaffer tape. He chains his bicycle to a pole before entering the Museum of Natural History to photograph a high-society gala dinner. Now that's my kind of guy.

This week I read a coroner's report from the UK regarding a man who died under anaesthesia: The man was having an operation to repair an injury to his little finger, for which he requested a general anaesthetic. A general anaesthetic is not entirely necessary for a finger operation, however perhaps the patient didn't understood the other options. The anaesthetist taking care of him had difficulty intubating him (putting an endotracheal 'breathing' tube through his throat into his lungs), possibly because he weighed 124kg. After trying several different strategies the doctors ended up putting a Cook catheter in- a narrow, pointy tube, which can deliver small amounts of oxygen. The endotracheal tube can be threaded over the narrow Cook catheter. That's when things really started to go wrong. The Cook catheter wasn't held in place properly, and it slipped down through his lungs and ended up in his chest wall. At the same time, the nurse was asked to connect the o

After leaving our house in Fitzroy, Pen, Stu and I moved across Smith St to Collingwood, and a much dingier abode. Pen and Stu still live there but I moved out of 'Grey Gardens' in 2007. The only entrance to Grey Gardens is through an alleyway off Easey street. The alleyway usually smells of piss and on weekends there are often piles of empty shoeboxes and clothing tags, presumably belonging to goods stolen from a Smith st Factory outlet. When I lived there the light switch in the main living room was broken so the only way to turn the light on and off was to remove or insert the light bulb. I kept special leather gloves for this purpose as the bulb was hard to remove when it was hot. However, it wasn't all doom and gloom: Grey Gardens has a lovely backyard with a lemon tree and my room had a glorious golden glow with the mid-afternoon sun. The most memorable occurrence during my time in the house was The Gun Siege. I got out of the shower one evening and walked to my

Ghita and I went to see Jonathon Safran Foer speak at the Wheeler Centre yesterday. Before I left, I told Jason that it wasn't too late for me to ask JSF to marry me instead. However Jason needn't have worried (and I'm sure he didn't), because it was not as great as I had hoped. Mr Safran Foer seemed terribly serious, expounding seriously about Parenting, and Meat-Eating. He seemed to be hiding his incredible imagination quite well. He also reproduced verbatim lengthy answers and anecdotes that I'd read before in print. Though perhaps the interviewer should be blamed for this one. At the end, as usual, one lady in the audience asked quite a lengthy question about trans-generational trauma. There was a titter in the audience as she entered the third part of her question. I'm sure we all thought, "Who does she think she is?" Surprisingly, Jonathon replied with, "Well that was an *excellent* question." Ghita felt that this was an example of