Monthly Archives: April 2011

IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A CAT

0
Posted on by

I have to confess some skepticism for the scientific and technocratic professions, and a cautionary tale told to me yesterday has re-inforced this.

A kindly lady of my acquaintance took in a stray cat during the winter cold spell, and decided the animal could do with a check-up at her local vets. The vet told her that the cat was a female between ten and twelve months old and advised her to have it spayed. However, when “opened up” the vet discovered that the animal had already “been done”, and then informed the lady that the cat was more likely to be ten to twelve years old.

I do wonder whether some vets – and indeed other medical practitioners – can tell one end of an animal from another, never mind profess healing abilities !

It may, therefore, be wise to take some “CRAFT” – charm, amulet, fetish, talisman or other apotropaic* device – with you when dealing with the scientific and technocratic professions, to help determine whether what they propose to do is likely to be beneficial or necessary at all.

*capable of averting evil: a very interesting presentation on this subject is available on Worcestershire County Council’s website – www.worcestershire.gov.uk/…/Dayschool%202010%20Averting%20Evil.pdf 

ON THE DARKER SIDE OF MOTORWAY LIFE

0
Posted on by

Having lightened up for the weekend, it’s time to visit the darker side of life again today and return to the theme of transport planning, as well as the subject of “Chiroptera” or bats.

The fantastic images of bats shown above are taken from “Art Forms of Nature” by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel: for more details please go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

In a post of March 2009, I drew attention to the following quotation from a 1972 transport plan for the West Midlands conurbation, centred on Birmingham :

“2.3  Highest car usage in Britain

No conurbation in Britain has as high a proportion of commuters who travel to work by car as the West Midlands.  The combination of the M5 and M6 motorways provides a local as well as long-distance motorway system. Thus the area provides the nearest British approach to the car dominance reached in, say,  Los Angeles….” !

In fairness, planners in Birmingham and the West Midlands conurbation, and indeed those of Los Angeles, have made some effort to reverse the disastrous planning of the second part of the twentieth century with investment in rail-based public transport.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Worcestershire where the County Council’s approach to transport planning seems to have by-passed the more sustainable practice adopted by progressive authorities, as evidenced in proposals for a new Worcester technology park near M5 Junction 6 (of which more in my next post – yes, I will finally get there !).

I would, therefore, like to draw the attention of the Council’s Motorway Men to an article in the science section of the Weekend Financial Times magazine entitled: “Traffic pollution may cause brain damage”.

According to research conducted in the Los Angeles area prolonged exposure to traffic pollution caused”  “significant damage” in “learning and memory” function, whilst “the brain showed signs of inflammation associated with premature aging and Alzheimer’s disease…”.

Thus my recommendation is that the proposed Worcester technology park should look for another site in order that further sub-regional brain retardation, along with regressive transport planning, may be avoided.

Finally, to return to the subject of “Chiroptera”,  the proposed  Tibberton Lane site is also an important bat habitat. Now bats, according to the same FT magazine science section, “perform services worth $23 billion a year to US agriculture”, so I would suggest that Worcestershire’s M5 corridor – shown below as it happens – is best left to genuinely sustainable development.