Affentitten

Serving in X theatres is kind of a meaningless claim anyway. The implication is that you were somehow involved in firece and courageous stuff all over the world. My great uncle qualified for the Africa Star because he arrived in Tunisia 2 days before the campaign medal cut-off date. He spent the next couple of months playing football and doing gun drills before eventually heading off to earn his Italian Star and a fatal encounter with a Nebelwerfer.

You could go by something like campaign medals too. So the Brits themselves recognise Africa as being distinct from Italy, plus add Burma, Atlantic and Pacific onto the Western Europe medals. Even the Americans distinguish between North Africa TO (oiginally under Eisenhower) and then Mediterranean TO under Wilson and then Alexander.

Diesel the other difference is that nobody ever got better taking smack or coke. But prescription drugs do have a beneficial function. The problem with our medical system is how much they are prescribed. It's very easy, for example, to get Valium for a bad back. Hard to prove the back isn't sore and so much easier for the doc to write a precription to get you out of his surgery and onto the next patient.

Patriots and Traitors Interesting little doco here on the guys who served with Australian forces in Iraq as interpreters. Apparently it had all the drawbacks of being in Iraq with very little of the security. Not a good recipe for longevity when you have to walk home from the base at the end of your shift instead of retiring to the sergeant's mess nestled behind a blast wall.

I remember reading a translation of the Kamikaze instruction manual. It was all about how to select targets, what to aim for, the right spirit etc. But one thing that really caught my eye was the admonishment to take off gently so as not to risk damage to the landing gear. THAT is risk management.

No because #7 was sub-titled "Pledge Week Initiation"

I thought Sorority Sluts #15 had a decent enough plot line.

The last one I read was Rainbow 6. Basically all the English characters called each other "Old Boy". Then when they got to Sydney, the extent of the research was obviously to buy a map from somewhere in DC. You had Australian characters describing road routes according to the road number (which appears on maps) but we don't do that. We use the proper name of the road, like "Pacific Highway" or "Parramatta Road". We'd never say "Take the 13 till you get to the F3 on-ramp."

Tom Clancy is not one of us

I don't quite get the point of the garbled quotation with the links dropped in. Are they just trying to get click throughs and that's it? Why not use a proper paragraph?

And then CUT to impacts....

Perhaps you need to think less about ballistics and more about video editing.

What surpised me was the idiocy of firing an explosive projectile at something a few metres away.

Looks like it may have been a false alarm anyway.

Seems like the leader of the Taliban has now been killed. Amazing how quickly two dominos seem to have fallen. Maybe the Pakistanis are starting to play ball.

Surprised she wasn't more interested in a 16 hour stint in the dining car.

It's a story from a few monthsago. Hasn't happened yet. And I don't know if you realise, but Iran doesn't actually have any nuclear weapons.

I think colleges/universities must contribute greatly to the "retarded injuries" statistics. I saw a guy break some ribs once on the theory that launching himself off a roof would assist in him breaking the slip 'n slide distance record. Needless to say that the beer involved in coming up wth the idea didn't allow him to calculate his vectors appropriately.

I don't get much choice. I have size 13 feet (14/15 US) and most companies only make up to 11! I buy what I can get.

Personally I've never heard of them. I did see this site but not sure about shipping to the US. If it's the slip-on type of boots you want you might also try http://www.blundstone.com/ for a similar product.

At uni once after hurting my back playing 2nd row and stressing a disc, the doctor said to me "...and if you're shagging in the next few days try and go her doggy style and keep your back straight." Not your usual medical advice.

I remember a friend at college who ran out onto a wet basketball court. He did the splits, tearing much of the gear in his groin, landed fully on his nuts and his sack pretty quickly swelled up to be about the size of a grapefruit. Not one to impress the ladies with!

So it appears that I have sustained damage to the collateral ligaments in my right knee. This occured not through a glorious last-minute, game -saving tackle in a rugby game, but through my labrador crashing full tilt into the side of my leg at the local park. Collapsed the knee and dumped me on my back in a pile of mud, much to the amusement of several children. Anybody else got some completely inglorious injuries to relate?

The PBS people I think do a pretty good job because you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get on it and where pharma companies really are dubious is when they try and get onto the list mulitple times with the same drug. For example, a company has a drug which has been developed to treat breast cancer and the clinical trials prove it's a good thing. They get on the PBS no problems. But then they try and take the same drug and show that it is also good for prostate, bowel, lung, bone etc etc cancers, trying to get a PBS indication each time and effectively double dipping. The PBS is pretty hardline about this though. In a sense, they are not really stifling competiton by only having the one or two drugs on the list, they're just saying "best solution only".

And as a result of things like that, the medical marketing side of things is now very tightly controlled and fines/prosecutions have been handed out. You and others seem to have the impresison that medical companies make their money from having doctors prescribe their products. It's not really the case. In countries with socialised medicine, drug companies make their money by getting their (own, innovated) products accepted onto what we in Australia call the PBS, but which is essentially the list of medicines that the government has agreed to subsidise. Usually, this list is very limited. There won't be 15 types of medication for each condition on the list, but just a couple, and possibly even only one in the high end sort of treatments. That means that if you have a certain condition, your doctor / specialist won't really have much choice about what they prescribe you anyway, unless you're happy to pay the full retail price. And of course in general terms, you would trust that your doctor is prescribing you exactly what is right for you anyway. The sort of drugs handed out by GPs by the ton, like amoxycillin, paroxetine, diazepan and so on are long out of patent and mostly supplied by generic companies. That's where your pharmacist can come in. In Australia, if your doctor has written you a prescription for, say, Valium*, your chemist will ask if you are OK with a generic brand. But where the chemist himself sources this stuff from is up to him. So your generic diazepan might come from AlphaPharm, Apotex....any one of a dozen or so generic manufacturers. You'll save some bucks but won't be able to choose which company provides it. (No point anyway, because the compositions are identical and often from the same factories.) * Which he won't these days if there are alternative versions of the same molecule. the only time he would name a drug by brand name would be if there is no alternative.