barry burton
the Little Green Gloves
Hospitals seem to have them everywhere. These boxes of little green latex-y gloves in convenient wall mounted dispensers by the door to each room. The nurses and the junior nurses (which are actually called PCAs but everyone assures me that it isn’t an acronym but I don’t believe them) use these gloves anytime they have touch gross things. Or some medicines, which I guess are chemically and thus gross in a different way. I can understand wanting to protect the cracks and crevices of ones’ hand from various bacterium. Get the bacterium on the glove and not the hand, then throw the glove away. Makes perfect sense. But once said green glove is tainted by touching whatever nastiness or booboo (their word, not mine), then isn’t it sort of medically stupid to touch anything else, like say me? Or even worse, the patient? Or worst of all, the medicine being administered orally to the patient? Shouldn’t this be taught to nurses somewhere along the line? I feel sure that it should.
Another observation from the hospital, which has elevators. More often than not (I would say like three-quarters of the time, really), when people walk on to an elevator already bound for their destination floor, they press the button for that floor. Now, these are normal, modern, button lights up after it has been pressed sorts of elevators. So why? Do they have poor vision and can’t tell the difference between a lit and unlit button? Do they simply not trust to elevator to really go to that floor unless they themselves press the button? More stupendously, albeit less frequently, I have seen a single individual board the elevator, press a floor, and remain standing by the control panel. When another individual enters the elevator on another floor and asks for the same destination as the first individual, the first still presses the button again, even thought it was they who pressed the button the first time. Bizarre. And entertaining. So yeah I should really get out more. :)
Unwed Sailor finally put out some new music. A full length called The White Ox and an unrelated (in the sense of not containing any of the same songs) EP called Circles. Both are really good. In typical Jonathan Ford fashion, they sound completely different from all previous Unwed Sailor music, and yet it still sounds like Unwed Sailor. I think maybe a bigger, more grandiose sound than previous stuff, but still more grounded and rock and roll than other bands’ really ambient instrumental stuff.
