Here is a link to an American newspaper report.

Interesting story. The couple are the same age as my wife and I. I’m not sure about writing a book on the subject though. It seems to rather cheapen the intimacy.

And I don’t really want to think about what their definition of “sex” was during Annie’s periods. Read the book, is their commercial answer, I guess.

That was the second time in a fortnight (separate alarms).

Why do smoke alarm battery warnings only start beeping at 3am? Why can’t they make that irritating sound in the afternoon?

In the dream I was in Mount Gambier sometime in the past. I needed to go to the hospital. I can’t recall why, either to visit someone or because I worked there.

The hospital wasn’t easy to get to. I had to climb a steep hill (in the rain); there were no cars. What stuck in my mind though was the image of the hospital.

It was like a cross between a cathedral and a castle — a long stone building with arches and turrets.

When I woke up I dismissed the dream as fanciful. Mount Gambier has a modern hospital that’s not on a steep hill. The old hospital looks nothing like the image I saw in my dream.

On Tuesday I met the chief executive of the health service in his office at the new hospital.

In the waiting room I inspected some prints of the original Mount Gambier Hospital, and it looked exactly like what I saw in my dream!

Apparently it was knocked down to build a larger hospital, which can still be seen today.

Today there is a story online, which is far more realistic, headlined West Sydney ground zero.

It talks about building a broad-based supporter base from scratch for a new team. This paragraph is nestled in the story:

Less than a week after it was reported that the league was considering a proposal to create an Irish-aligned club — known as the Celtics — that idea has been effectively abandoned.

Last Saturday’s “exclusive” front page was a massive beat-up then. I don’t blame Caroline Wilson for writing it, that’s her job.

But the editor’s job is to sift through the copy and make an informed judgment about whether the story has legs and whether it deserves to be on the front page.

Reading back through the original report (sorry, no link) there is little of substance, just confirmed speculation.

“It’s been put to us and while it’s not without its issues it’s something we’ll explore,” AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick said.

AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou was actually quoted saying: “To call this embryonic is an understatement.”

I think it was probably something tossed around in a brainstorming session, or over a few beers after work on a Friday night.

The concept was never at a serious stage of development and was never likely to work.

The “great brain drain” it’s known as around the world. The United Kingdom, United States and other affluent nations also recruit third world doctors.

In Australia, more than 10 percent of the medical workforce is made up of foreign-trained doctors, most of them from Asia.

The countries these doctors come from are some of the poorest in the world with some of the sickest people.

I don’t blame the doctors for wanting a better life, but moral and ethical questions about removing them from their home environment have to be asked.

Is it anyone’s fault except our own that we don’t have enough doctors? I don’t think so.

While a few of the demographic trends may have surprised some people, most of them could have been anticipated, especially the rising population and a drift to coastal areas.

Perhaps the changing lifestyle expectations of many new doctors could not as easily been predicted, but it’s a reality than many GPs don’t want to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Many young female doctors only want to work part time.

The best solution is that Australia should train more doctors, more surgeons, more psychiatrists and more specialists.

If that means lowering the university entry score or introducing a more diversified selection procedure, so be it.

Some year 12 students who didn’t finish in the top five percent of their classes might make excellent doctors.

Why not introduce a shortened training course for experienced nurses to become general practitioners?

I sense the medical establishment has been somewhat stuffy and insular, also slow to recognise the problems developing around them.

Things probably don’t look so bad from a window in East Melbourne or with a view of Sydney Harbour.

We need to be innovative in how we train the doctors of tomorrow.

It’s a short-term answer to pluck doctors out of the world’s poorest countries to work in our remote rural areas and depressed outer suburbs.

It also undermines the nation-building efforts of other countries.

Solomon’s penalty is the harshest for an AFL player since Carlton’s Greg Williams was suspended for nine weeks after pushing an umpire in 1997.

Big Bad Barry Hall only copped seven weeks for striking West Coast’s Brent Staker.

Solomon pleaded guilty. More importantly, he showed obvious remorse, including an immediate apology to Ling after the game.

The tribunal may have taken into account Ling’s injury, which will see him out of the game for about six weeks.

Ling has a depressed fracture of the cheekbone that required surgery.

In mitigation, a lot of respected players and Kevin Sheedy said Solomon’s action was out of character. Nobody was saying that about Barry Hall.

There is some inconsistency here. If Hall’s blow was worth seven weeks (as it was), Solomon’s hit did not deserve a bigger penalty.

I got this to work, but the styling was non-existent and I’m not smart enough with CSS to code it myself, so I might have to wait until it comes up as an issue with the theme designer.

In the meantime, I discovered the Image Caption plugin which does the job, transforming “alt” tags into captions.

You can use “title” tags to create the captions if you prefer.

One minor issue I came across immediately was that my “alt” tags over the years have been functional, rather than creative.

Captions should be snappy and interesting. My original “alt” tag on the previous post about cows producing methane gas was “Cow farting” … now updated to show “Cow gas is potentially an explosive issue”.

It was easy enough to go back and update the most recent dozen captions, but I’m not likely to go through all 1245 posts to change the text. So, if you come across something a little strange, that’s the explanation.

There’s a nice teaser on the front page of the Herald-Sun today. Beside a picture of the Queen is text: “Victoria’s royal request: Hand back our PJs, Ma’am.”

Intrigued, I turned to page seven and found it was somewhat misleading, but in a non-offensive way. The story was a beat-up but funny.

The City of Ballarat presented embroidered silk pyjamas to the Prince of Wales (late Edward VIII) in 1920.

Five female hundred employees of a local garment factory each put a stitch into the royal present.

Edward, who was something of a ladies man, might well have claimed to have slept with 500 sheilas in Ballarat.

A group of the city’s historians want the jammies back to put on public display. They wrote to Buckingham Palace humbly petitioning Her Majesty in that regard.

The bemused Royal Archivist wrote back saying they couldn’t find the sleepwear. She thought Edward might have taken them with him when he abdicated and shot through to France.

“They are no longer in royal custody,” Pamela Clark advised.

“Millions of mobile owners who pay upfront for their service allow call credits to expire,” the paper says.

Pre-paid phones make up more than half the national mobile phone market.

We bought pre-paid phones for the kids and encountered this problem. Kathleen uses all her credit (quickly) but Michael doesn’t come close. Most of the plans expire in 30 or 60 days, which simply isn’t enough time.

The rip-off extends beyond pre-paid plans though. So-called member plans are just as bad.

I had one for years at a minimum of $30 per month which included $30 or thereabouts of calls. I paid that amount whether I made the calls or not.

Most months I didn’t make $30 worth of calls.

If the $1 billion pre-paid windfall for telcos is an accurate figure, add that much again I reckon for cream on member plans.

There must be millions more generated from people who commit to handset deals only to upgrade before the plan expires.

All this makes the mobile phone sector highly profitable. That’s a bit sad really, in my opinion.

Landlines have historically been an essential communications tool and the internet has made the world a global village.

I suppose I could do without a landline if I had wireless internet and a mobile phone, but in essence the mobile phone is a luxury item. Most of us could carry on our lives without one.

Huge profits are being generated from people sending mindless text messages to each other and committing to phone plans they don’t need and don’t fully utilise.

That turned out to be the case. Whether it’s true, or whether release numbers were deliberately restricted, I can’t be sure.

There were none for sale in Mount Gambier, apparently. In Melbourne, only selected stores were stocking them. Some people queued for hours to get one.

Reports today said some people were unhappy with number porting delays from Telstra to Optus. they had an iPhone, but they couldn’t use it.

I’m an early adopter of gadgets and take an interest in new ones when they come out.

I’ve got no interest in buying an iPhone though. I’m still happy with the JasJam, even though it’s a little clunky. It synchronises nicely with my Outlook contacts and calendar at work, gives me email access on the road and has Microsoft programs should I ever need to use them while mobile.

I was burnt buying a previous phone for its camera capability. It had some amazing number of megapixels, zoom and flash, but wasn’t intuitive to use in terms of focus, zoom and saving copies.

The iPhone fad will pass.