Lotus Elan Therapy
Since my wife died in 2007, I have needed solace and perhaps some therapy. But I have developed my own. It is called elanism. This therapy is unique in that it treats both the body and mind in many different ways. The various methods are described in alphabetical order.
Better Sleep
Getting out in your Elan and driving round the lanes is a relaxing business. You will certainly sleep better that night with a smile on your face.
Cancer Risk Reduction
It is well known that good vitamin D levels may reduce cancer. Read this on Cancer Research UK. What you need is casual exposure to the sun and Lotus Elans make this very easy, as you can raise and lower the hood much faster than those modern cars with automatic electric hoods. So you need to get out of the car, but then this exercise is good for you.
Drive every day for thirty minutes with the hood down and you might reduce your chance of getting cancer.
Colour Therapy
This is another complete load of bollocks. Buy an Elan in yellow, red, blue or whatever takes your fancy. It’ll give you more fun. If you have a serious problem, buy two or even three!
Enhanced Self Esteem
Lotus Elans are in a very small group of cars, that can be taken anywhere and get total respect. We parked our first Elan at Deauville Racehorse Sales next to a Ferrari Testarossa. All the French kids were looking at the Lotus, as they thought the Ferrari was a complete show off and the property of a total tosser. They were right.
Elans are also the only affordable car, with the possible exception of a mint Morris Minor, that you can turn up in at a three-star Michelin restaurant and will get you total respect. Even if it is totally filthy.
Feel Younger
Ask someone who doesn’t know about cars how old your Elan is and they will say that it is perhaps five or six years old. As you might have owned the car for a lot longer this means you feel younger if you do his maths rather than those you know are correct.
G-Force Massage
G-Force massage is a form of passive massage, that has many of the benefits of traditional massage but without the expence of using a practioner or therapist. You just need to find a suitable road like the A68 or some of those in the Fens and drive the car fast round corners and up and down hills. Note that the latter is difficult in the Fens, but they have lots of wonderful and dangerous corners. Note that you should avoid the Fens if you can’t swim.
G-Force massage has been shown to increase blood flow and adrenaline levels, which contribute to general well-being. It may also reduce blood pressure, as mine was higher a few years ago and has now reduced to a respectable 120/70.
Improved Eye Sight
Driving an Elan fast means that you have to look out for the Fuzz! So your eye-sight has to get better!
Improved Sex Life
It is a well-known fact that people and it’s not just women, are turned on by being driven fast in an open-top car. This effect is also enhanced in Lotus Elans, where the superb aerodynamic design means that you don’t get your hair in a mess. This advantage is not of course enjoyed by the follically challenged.
Lotus Elans have one problem though. Sex is almost impossible in an Elan. On the other hand, the rear spoiler is an ideal hand-hold for position 36.
Increased Muscular Coordination
As we get older, you tend to lose muscular coordination. Lotus Elans are the ideal vehicle for keeping your motor skills up to date.
Make People Smile
Drive past someone in the street in an Elan and you get looked at. People smile. It is our duty to make as many other people happy every day as we can. It’s easy in an Elan.
New Friends
Elans tend to congregate in friendly groups. So you make new friends, which helps the lonely. There is a slight problem with this in that you can sometimes suffer from elanborism. But hopefully others into elanism will help you guard against this.
Reduce Environmental Guilt
Many people these days suffer from environmental guilt, brought about by feelings that you are not doing enough to save the planet. Lotus Elans reduce this feeling, as they last forever, give very good fuel economy for their performance and over their lifetime probably create less carbon dioxide than a modern car.
Conclusion
This is just a start and if you have any other benefits of elanism, please post.
Is this Real or a Spoof?
An old friend sent me this link.
I have read it and think it’s about using pieces of the Berlin Wall in a homeopathic remedy. But I can’t be sure, as the English is obtuse and needs to be read several times. I have better things to do with my time.
So is it real or a spoof written by someone a lot cleverer than me?
Covent Garden Risotto
I bought one a Covent Garden Risotto in Waitrose last week. They seem to be gluten-free.
I had it for lunch today.
Covent Garden Risotto
It tasted one hell of a lot better, than it looked. I’ll try one of the other varieties next time.
A Period Mobile Phone
Is my Elan, one of the few with an original early-1990’s analogue mobile phone?
A Period Panasonic Mobile Phone
Note the Sony radio, which is the only non-original equipment in the car. As I’ve still got the original Binatone from the car, perhaps if someone wants an early 1990’s original Elan for a film, then this is the car.
The Mobile Phone Aerial
The mobile phone aerial is just a little spike on the windscreen. It is actually glued on both sides, so there is no hole in the windscreen.
Scrubbing Up the Elan
Yesterday, I got the Jaguar cleaned at the hand car wash at the corner of Huntingdon and Histon Roads in Cambridge. They did a good job, so this morning I took the Elan there to remove all of the winter dirt.
Washing the Lotus Elan
At least now I can see backwards in the mirrors! They even put the headlights up and cleaned them too! All for eight quid!
The Elan Back Home
I doubt it will stay this clean for long, as I’m off to Brands Hatch tomorrow and hopefully on to the Continent for a few days later in the week. At least I’ll start clean!
Eat Breakfast, Lose Weight
I had my B12 injection on Friday. The nurse took my blood pressure and it was 120/70, which I’m told is good for a man of my age. This chart says that I’m in the right area. But she also said that I looked thin and when she weighed me, I had lost a couple of kilos since August.
Strangely, I am not eating less, but I have changed what I eat. I used to skip breakfast and now I usually eat the same mixture of gluten-free Eat Natural for Breakfast, with yoghurt and two teaspoonfuls of clear honey. I prefer the raisins, almonds, mixed seeds and crispy rice version of Eat Natural.
Eat Natural for Breakfast
Perhaps what they say is right. Eat breakfast and you lose weight. I may be snacking less.
Fraud in Medical Research
Whilst thinking about homeopathy in the last post, the story of Andrew Wakefield was also in the news. If you type “Andrew Wakefield fraud” into Google, you get this story from Science-Based Medicine. Here is the first paragraph.
Pity poor Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity at all. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound science. If that were the case, then Wakefield’s work would have been very important and would have correctly cast doubt on the safety of the MMR. Unfortunately, they were not, and, indeed, most of the authors of the 1998 Lancet paper later withdrew their names from it.
Over the next decade, aided and abetted by useful idiots in the media, by British newspapers and other media that sensationalized the story, and the antivaccine movement, which hailed Wakefield as a hero, Wakefield managed to drive MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. below the level of herd immunity, from 93% to 75% (and as low as 50% in some parts of London). As a result Wakefield has been frequently sarcastically “thanked” for his leadership role in bringing the measles back to the U.K. to the point where, fourteen years after measles had been declared under control in the U.K., it was in 2008 declared endemic again.
David Gorski then goes on to show how badly Wakefield conducted his research. Read the whole article and the comments that follow it.
I am of an age, where it seemed in every class at school, there was a someone who had suffered the effects of polio. So to all of these antivaccine Fascists, I ask if they want to go back to those times. I also have friends and relatives, who were damaged by measles and/or mumps, who would have been saved by the MMR vaccine.
Wakefield’s badly conducted research and the fact that it was not properly checked before publishing in the Lancet has left a terrible legacy.
But there are two troubles with medical research!
Suppose, a doctor notices a link between symptom A and disease B, which is outside the normal scheme of things. If he publishes honestly, saying that this might be correct and can anybody shed light on what he has seen, many sufferers will accept what he says has gospel. Tabloid headlines will proclaim a new cure for cancer, when the doctor was just postulating something that might be useful. We see this all the time.
On the other hand, suppose this link goes totally against the established thinking. His research may well destroy the reputations of the great and good in the field. Would they allow his research to be published? Of course not. Horizon, made a programme about the messenger of the body, which turned out to be completely different to established thinking, some years ago. A lot of the programme was taken up discussing the problems of the researcher getting his ideas published.
To return to Wakefield. He definitely was helped by the bandwagon that developed after his research was published. But supposing he had been refused the publication, as his results were against established thinking. I’m with him there as I really hate censorship. But then his research was flawed and shouldn’t have been published.
Was it fraud?
Probably not in the established sense, but I feel Wakefield might have suffered from a fault very common in doctors. They have a theory and try and prove it. I am an engineer and if have a problem then I try and solve it. So if he was guilty of anything, I suspect it was not being honest with himself, his patients and his research. But we’ve all done that. I know I’ve made mistakes by using information in the wrong way. But my research hasn’t been nearly so important.
If fraud was just an isolated event in medical research, we should not be seriously worried, provided that research is properly reviewed and published.
But I have written a piece of software called Daisy.
One of the things it can do is to check the integrity of a set of numbers. A medical professor, showed me how to check a set of observations were consistent. All you do is look at the last digit and plot them as a simple histogram. If they are genuine numbers they will have one pattern and if they are some that have been made up, then they will have a different one.
The professor showed me some research where it was obvious that the numbers had been made to fit the theory.
Another isolated case?
No! A relative of someone I know was struck off for doing something similar.
So it goes on.
To avoid other cases like Wakefield, we need to make sure that all papers, and not just in the medical field, are thoroughly reviewed before publishing. This alone would make sure that researchers used the best methods and the most exacting standards. We should also have a system in place, that would not allow the suppressing of controversial research that would upset the status quo.
Homeopathy Protests Outside Boots
It would appear that today there are to be protests outside Boots because of their stocking of homeopathic remedies. I like the fact that the protest is being organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society.
The protest will take the form of a mass overdose on homeopathic remedies. As they contain nothing but sugar and water, the only result might be a small amount of weight gain.
Clare Balding on Radio 5 then talked about arnica to a jockey. Now arnica is not a homeopathic remedy but a natural one. I have given it to horses in the past and it helps stop bruising during castration. But it is only diluted to the same sort of levels as a cough syrup, not to the parts per billion billions that you get with homeopathy. As I said in an e-mail to Clare.
Arnica, of which the active ingredient is helenalin, is a natural remedy, which is partially understood scientifically. Aspirin and many other drugs, have similar natural roots. These have absolutely nothing to do with homeopathy. Natural remedies are valid treatments and work, the others are beloved of snake-oil salesmen and are just to relieve fools of their money.
One has to question Boots decision to sell these quack cures, especially as they admitted to the House of Commons that there is no evidence that they work.
But anybody who has investigated them properly knows that too. But think how many snake-oil salesmen would be put out of business, if this was the general belief.
Squeezing the Moderates
When I hear the words Northern Ireland or Ulster on television or radio, I reach for the off button. All my adult life we have had the Irish problem. I should say that all my adult life in my mind, there has been one obvious solution, give Ulster to Eire.
I don’t make this decision on political grounds, but through strict economic grounds. I have been to Ulster a few times and it is an expensive place to live and to run a business. Energy is expensive for a start. So everything needs to be subsidised. I know it is the same in other far-flung parts of the UK, like the Highlands of Scotland and Cornwall, but they don’t spit the bile about everybody who disagrees with them, that many Ulster politicians do. I don’t ever remember them trying to bomb and kill their way to get their aims.
I know that the Protestants would bleat about the reunification of Ireland, but because of population dynamics with an increasing and younger Catholic population, that they will be in the minority in a few years anyway. How will the the Catholics vote?
I have just heard Ken Maginnis on Radio 5, eloquently complaining about how New Labour has played the extreme card and cut out the moderate Unionists and the SDLP in favour of Sinn Fein and the DUP. He has a point, especially, as his party was not at the current talks.
I read once that subsidies to help Northern Ireland cost about £3-4 billion a year. (If anybody has an up-to-date figure then please let me know!) But to move control of justice and policing to the province would have cost £800 million. If it was a subsidiary of a company it would have been declared bust many years ago.
Surely, this amount of money means that on the one hand a long term solution to Ulster must be found and that on our part, we put a proper, rather than a part-time minister into the province to make a deal that is fair for all stick.
The Anonymous Widower 