Category: Uncategorized

Dr Hairy mopping coffee.

Dr Hairy with shoe:

and Dr Hairy pontificating about antibiotics:

Rhizome are hosting an exhibition entitled ‘Poetry as Practice’ – ‘ In this online exhibition, six poets approach internet language as a bodily, social, and material process. ‘

I don’t really know what that means, but the first entry is one of the nicer pieces of new media poetry I’ve seen for a while – ‘Better Homes & Gardens Revisited’ by Alex Turgeon – artfully simple-looking graphics combined with cleverly-animated texts. Well worth checking out.

An impression of Dr Hairy by my friend Michael Szpakowski. It’s subtitled ‘Size Ten Rant’ and I think it captures something about Dr Hairy when he’s in full flow, telling it like it is, or like it seems to be if you’re ever so slightly bonkers. This is one of a set of images based on participants in the NetArtizens debate (mentioned in a previous post): you can see the full set at https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/sets/72157651122579216 .

Part 5 of Dr Hairy’s Casebook is now available online, featuring fictional cases on the following subjects:

• Digestive health
• Care of people who misuse drugs and alcohol

Care of people with ENT oral and facial problems

Dr Hairy’s Casebook is an attempt to bring the RCGP’s GP Curriculum to life, by illustrating each chapter with one or more fictional but true-to-life case. To find out more, click here .

The Furtherfield organisation is currently running a project called NetArtizens, about what it means to be an artist and a citizen of the Net. There are lots of interesting posts about this on the NetBehaviour discussion-list, and one of the most striking contributions so far is a set of images by Paul Hertz called Isla Del Hierro Virtual . He describes them as

‘a series of glitched images of the Island of Hierro in the Canary Islands, captured form Google Street View. I lived on that island for a while in the 1970s, when the only way to get there was by boat four times a week. International communication was by a special phone in the Central Telefónica. It was really far away. Now it is so close by I can visit it by internet any time I want.’

For ‘glitched’ read ‘corrupted, either accidentally or deliberately’.

For more about Dr Hairy’s Research Summaries, visit http://www.drhairy.org/concrete5/index.php/research-summaries/ . Subjects covered this time:

Margaret McCartney: Don’t be bullied into prescribing Tamiflu

BMJ 2015;350:h417

The General Medical Council and doctors’ financial interests

BMJ 2015;350:h474

Weight change and risk of fracture in postmenopausal women

BMJ 2015;350:h60

The drooling child

BMJ 2015;350:h38

Margaret McCartney: Industry’s interest in diagnosing more dementia

BMJ 2014;349:g7480

Is it a stroke?

BMJ 2015;350:h56

Long working hours are linked to risky alcohol consumption

BMJ 2015;350:g7800

How much is too much breast screening?

BMJ 2015;350:h139

Type 2 diabetes and risk of cancer

BMJ 2015;350:g7707

Quantifying and monitoring overdiagnosis in cancer screening: a systematic review of methods

BMJ 2015;350:g7773

Should doctors encourage patients to record consultations?

BMJ 2015;350:g7645

Dr Hairy’s cup of coffee:

Dr Hairy’s office:

I went to see my Mum yesterday. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can calibrate the extent of her muddle-headedness by the number of clips she’s got in her hair. She never used to wear any, or not of the plainly-visible silvery variety anyway, but in the last couple of years they’ve started to appear, and it’s noticeable that when she’s in a state of confusion she forgets to wash or brush her hair, and tries to make up for it by putting hairclips in. If she gets up to five or six hairclips, she’s in a bad way. Unless I’m getting it the wrong way round, of course, and it’s actually the hairclips that are causing the confusion.  Anyway, she only had the one clip in yesterday: not too bad, but the occasional long struggle to find the right word. I found her making some stewed apple for her lunch, and she told me that I could make the tea, because she didn’t want to take her eyes off the pan of simmering apple-slices, which she kept poking with the point of a little black-handled knife to see whether they were getting tender or not. Later on she confessed to me that she’d got to buy two new saucepans, because she’d left a couple of other things cooking on the hob and forgotten all about them, so two of her old saucepans now needed replacing. “Would you like some spare lids?” she said, only half-joking. She can’t bring herself to throw anything as useful-looking as a saucepan-lid away, but on the other hand she doesn’t want an orphaned saucepan-lid cluttering up her house without its parent saucepan, so the best solution she can think of is to try to give the spare lid to me; and if I’d engaged her in conversation about it, she would have started inventing all sorts of reasons why it would be a good idea for me to take it, each reason more far-fetched than the last but each one backed up by a stronger force of insistence. Luckily I managed to change the subject before she got started. My sister’s coming to stay with her next weekend, and I got the impression that she thought she’d better get her new saucepans in place before the visit began, so as to cover her tracks.