Venom

Tonight's 'Little Mosque on the Prairie' managed to be completely itself and yet to be a Christmas edition. And it was brilliant. Proper reminded me of Eid/Christmas at Mayhem it did.
The writing on that show just gets better and better.

So, how bizarre is this? The blood service isn't accepting blood donations from anyone who doesn't speak one of the two official languages. But in spite of my speaking both of them, which I can see affects the quality of my blood, they still wouldn't be having mine, because they won't accept donations from anyone who has had malaria.

More bizarreness. A man in the nearby city of Surrey, may lose a finger because he was bitten by his pet cobra. This has prompted him to 'call for a change in medical policy so antivenin is readily available'. I'm sorry, what?
Sure in the BC interior, where there are indigenous rattlesnakes, although not as dangerous as some of the US rattlers. But in this part of the province, there are no native poisonous snakes. So this plonker wants the health service to keep expensive and short shelf-life antivenin so that morons like him can keep dangerous pets. And not only that, but there was no venom released in the bite that has caused his arm to swell up and his fingers to go black. If he lived in Vancouver, he wouldn't be allowed to keep that snake.

Meanwhile, down the road, a woman was found dead in an alley. The article has to slip in somewhere that the woman was white. But this is not meaningless. Since I have been here there has been a series of killings of Indian women by their own menfolk. In one internationally famous case, a young woman was killed by contract from her own mother, when she was in India and in love with someone the family didn't pick.

I was desperately sad to hear that one of my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. At some point, this will be a terrible loss to the literary world as was Iris Murdoch, although in her case, it was a loss to the academic world as well.