Friday, July 07, 2006

Somebody pressed the Unsynchronize button

It seems that the news I read in the papers everyday gets weirder and weirder. These are mostly passing thoughts but lately I have not much time to put them here, as some of you may have noticed my disappearance from MSN (its not really disappear, but rather the lack of appearance at an opportune time). But I'm around, and still doing what I do. I'm still having trouble typing, I have to learn how to type with ten fingers again although I still get a slight buzzing feeling when I use the forefinger. But its healing fine and I think it'd be barely noticeable.

Last month, the headline in the papers read 'HIV Blood donors to face jail term'. Now of course as you know our National Blood Centre is always looking out for donors to do the right thing, to donate, bla-de-bla, but then I think unlike other countries that may offer cash compensation for blood, ours don't. Sure, some freeloaders will do it for the free cookies but then who, I ask, that knowingly has HIV would still donate blood? Of course there are certain malicious people who would do such a thing but I think that's where blood screening comes in.

Blood samples received by the centre has to be rightfully screened for diseases and what not first before placing it into the bank, so it becomes the responsibility of the centre in the event that someone who uses blood supplied by the centre is tainted, isn't it? But of course in the age of cost cutting and lack of detail perhaps someone just got lazy and thus even though it is a low probability event that the blood sample was not checked, and is tainted, and was supplied, it could happen, and I'm not saying it hasn't happened before.

So now why the big headline in the newspaper? First, it is probably a shock technique to scare off the aforementioned malicious people, which according to them, 70% of HIV positive people are drug addicts, but that does not come with its consequences. For one, when you announce something as insensitive as that you are merely segregating HIV positive people from society, which is against the global HIV/AIDS movement whose goals are for people who have it to be able to live and maintain a normal life without prejudice. And second that becomes instantly accusational that if you are HIV positive, there's a 70% chance you're a drug addict. Might as well put up a huge poster that says that besides the similarly useless 'Tak Nak' poster that millions of taxpayers dollars went into.

Secondly, I would say that most consenting adults are sexually active, you can't ignore it, the bars, clubs, and nightlife accelerates the fact that some men are out to 'score', as they put it. Of course that is a concern as you never know what can happen, and its something even the CDC can't do anything about it. But that's the thing, if I give a rough estimate that say, 70% of consenting adults are sexually active, irregardless of one or several partners, or several over time, which is normal, and the fact that not everyone is concerned about taking a HIV test every single time, then imposing a jail term merely removes a large 70% of healthy blood donors who have thought about donating but since they are *also* sexually active, would prefer not to since they don't know if they have it or not. I doubt people who don't have the decency to get some rubbers would feel the same about getting an HIV test.

Now it's also come to my attention that a lot of younger consenting students are doing it too, and of course they can't be bothered about rubbers because they have other things to buy with their monthly allowance, probably. Which creates a very scary image of the level of mentality that we have here. Over time I feel there'd be less and less donors, and if something isn't done, or at least done right, then we'd all be merely cancelling each other out for the sake of convenience.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

UHT ants

Hello everybody. My name is Elby, and today I'd like to tell everyone that I have an ant problem. Yes, my home is infested with ants. They're everywhere, and I've became initiated an ant holocaust of some sort...seek and destroy, that kind of thing.

It started not too long ago when the black ones started showing up in my room. I mean these are your regular garden variety ants. I figured that they probably lost their way and found themselves into my room via the window. But when more of them started to appear, I began to realize that these ants without directions (because they seem to not follow a pattern, they're just constantly roaming around randomly), which eventually began to annoy me. I mean, if you're after something sweet, at least I know where you're going, but if there isn't then they're just doing hanging around without a purpose.

The last straw was when they appeared in my bed. I mean...there's absolutely no food in my room and yet they're present. So I called the pest control people, who came and fumigated place. But then 2 days later they showed up again, apparently resilient to the chemicals. I've resorted to using my own methods of capture in the form of masking tape. You see, they don't respond to squishing, especially the little red ones. So taping them is the only way to stop them. Only recently did I realize that they're still alive when I tape them, so I used my cigar lighter which emits a turbocharged burst of blue flame to finish them off in little poofs of smoke. Is it fun? Well, no...I admit I feel evil, with my diabolical plan of total elimination of the species, but I really don't see a better way to deal with intruders, do you?