at9

I would recommend Lynn Payer's book "Medicine and CUlture" for those who wish to understand the US, UK, French and German healthcare systems. http://www.amazon.co...r/dp/0805048030 I would also recommend Ben Goldacre's books "Bad Science" and "Bad Pharma". I have just started to read the latter and it's more than slightly scary.

Living in the US without adequate health insurance seems pretty scary to me. In the UK we count it as part of being a civilised society that young and old, poor and rich, sensible and stupid, all have access to a decent healthcare system. It's not perfect, some of it is frankly poor, but it's there when we need it without worrying about being able to pay

PS: If you think things are bad with conventional medicine I ought to add that most if not all "alternative" therapies have hardly been properly tested in any way that gives respectable evidence for their efficacy and side effects. This article isn't really about medicine but serves as an example of how belief can influence health: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628850.200-the-sickening-truth-about-wind-farm-syndrome.html

Not to inject politics into this ...

You just have. Do you really believe what you have just said about our NHS? Do you really believe that tabloid comments like this actually represent anything remotely like UK health policy? The NHS has plenty of problems but refusal to treat some patients because they have contributed to their own problems is not one of them.

As for stories about people wearing shoes that are a bit too high for them. When you put somebody in shoes like this, that they have never tried before, It's hardly surprising if they have trouble staying upright. Either a bit of fun or typical tabloid "newspaper" material depending on your point of view.

Gina, I'm not so sure I get the meaning of your last post. What was it about? Did you have a bad experience with them?

Some time ago (months?) Gina reported some very severe problems with those companies who I think she was using to supply her retail business. Not sure if she lost a lot of money too. Hardly surprising that she's p*****d off at the mere mention of their names. Remember that while Gina's English is excellent, it's not her native language and the exact meaning has got a little lost in translation. Her feelings come over clearly enough regardless of exact meaning.

The minuscule amount of computing power on the LM and command module is astonishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer Even the total amount of computing power at mission control wasn't in the modern PC class. I could be wrong, but ISTR that the designers deliberately had the astronauts enter a lot of stuff manually that could have been sent automatically. This was to give them a measure of control and minimise the "spam in a can" attitude that sometimes affected early spaceflight. Armstrong demonstrated the true worth of a top class human pilot on that first lunar landing. Apollo 11 only carried a monochrome TV camera. Subsequent Apollos carried a colour camera which used a rotating colour wheel and a single tube. Similar in concept to the CBS colour system of 1948. Not many people had colour TV in the UK in 1969. It had been introduced in 1967 (first country n Europe, US started its NTSC colour service in 1954))

He's a very different guy to the late lamented Carlo Curley. CC's showmanship certainly brought the organ to a wider audience though they could hardly be more different in every other way. Don't think you would ever have seen CC's ample frame perched on high heels.

In the first Youtube clip shown in this forum the American organist Cameron Carpenter is giving a virtuoso performance on the organ while wearing heels.

http://orgue-libre.b...-trinity-church

Other clips also show the same heels as does a photo part way down the page.

At the bottom of the page there's a photo, presumably of him, wearing very high heels though I suspect they would not be ideal for playing the organ

Those of us who are old enough will have witnessed the moon landings with awe and wonder. Many years later nobody has been back nor are there any real plans to do so again. http://xkcd.com/893/ We all know that the motivation for Kennedy's vision was largely cold war based and it cost a vast amount of money but the results transcended all that. Let us also remember Grisson, Chaffee and White who died in a launchpad fire that could have easily scuppered the whole Apollo programme. RIP Neil Armstrong.

You meant "avoir du poids" or does "avios du pois" mean anything else ?

Usually "avoirdupois" in English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois Literally: "having weight"

ETA: The inability to display threads in RCO is particularly problematic for longer threads, such as the 960+ post threads like the one kneehighs did.

i prefer last post at the top but fortunately there forum software has a feature that is possibly even better than this. Clicking the dot or star to the left of the thread title takes you to the most recent unread post in that thread.

Would it be possible for one of the mods to sensitively tweak titles with particularly bad howlers? It would give you something to do lol. I honestly don't feel it matters too much in the posts, which are written colloquially anyway, but the titles are our public face.

I like sensible titles. The universal "Help please" is about as unhelpful as you can get. At one level it's self policing. Threads with badly worded titles will get less attention and die out sooner. Another way is to rely on the reporting system so that members can flag unhelpful titles. It's essential that they suggest a better title in the report. This shares the burden.between members and the team.

You boy! You've been abusing apostrophes again! Write out one hundred times: "I must not abuse apostrophe's" [sic] I still tend towards Shaw on the subject. Complete abolition, even for greengrocer's [sic]. I know you can contrive sentences where the apostrophe is critical to the meaning but its [sic] not hard to avoid problems in practice. i seem to be a bit [sic] this morning.

Thank you both, I like to be taught..I'd thought it might be an acronym, like WASP, and I puzzled for ages.

As to the origin of "spic" the explanation I've heard is that it's how a native spanish speaker would say "speak". As in: "I spic no english". Another possibility is a sort of rhyming slang: "spic and span".

Not sure what happened to my previous post. I was having trouble posting and part of it seems to have been repeated. (Edit by Dr. Shoe: The post in question has no been corrected!)

Pugilism isn't my style, but if anyone wants to go toe to toe with me on lingistics I'll see them outside LOL. I may be little, but I'm tough!

OK big girl, I'm up for it. Semicolons at dawn! And keep your filthy participles off my gerund. http://childrensbook...it-in-one-of-my

Back to capitalisation. First Direct are an excellent bank but surely spelling their own name without capitals is false modesty: http://www2.firstdir....com/1/2/��Does CaMeLcASe give you the hump?

However, it is quite correct to use an apostrophe to pluralise nouns of foriegn origin. Therefore banana's is quite correct! (source: Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss)

I don't have a copy of ES&L to hand but I would find it very strange to use an apostrophe in any plural. I try to avoid them even in plurals of acronyms etc. I agree that they are hard to avoid in expressions like: "Dotting of i's" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Use_in_forming_certain_plurals

The good doctor is certainly right to say that usages have changed and evolved. It would now be considered very old fashioned to put dots between the letters of (say) BBC or UNESCO. Commas at the ends of lines of addresses now also look archaic.

Somewhere between pedantry* and sloppiness have we not lost the soul (sole?) of this discussion? *From the Uxbridge Enlish Dictionary.... Pedantry: The art of fiiting footware to the Formicidae family

There is a good cobbler NE London. I......

You might mean Achilles at "The Craftsman" in HAckney. http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/directory/1247/98409.php

Dear doctor, on titles I think we are agreed. In other forums (fora?) unhelpful thread titles like "help please" or even worse "HeLp PlEaSe!!!!!!!!!!!!!" usually lead me to ignore the thread altogether. Do you realise how painful it was to type that abomination. To a large extent I reckon it's self policing. Unhelpful titles mean that many will ignore the thread so it will die early. As for smilies, I'll use them sparingly. Forum language isn't the formal prose of a book or even a newspaper. Few of us when posting have the leisure to choose our words with the same care that we might use in a piece of written work. Nor does forun language carry the fine nuances of the spoken word. Smilies are a shorthand for expressing emotions, can indicate a tone of voice and can even be a partial replacement for body language. Now I'm starting to sound like a teacher! I am not now, and never have been, a member of the............teaching profession. Americans and Tom Lehrer fans will understand that remark

I fully agree with Meganiwish, the good Dr and Tacchi Alti about good English. I enjoy reading it and attempt to write it. But let's not forget that this is a High Heels Forum, not an English Language Forum (deliberate use of capitals). There are also members for whom English is a foreign language, some may be dyslexic and others may be less able to write good English. My own pet hates are ALL CAPITALS and walls of text.

Web page doesn't have an english version - - Never took french - -

Google translate does a fair attempt: http://translate.goo...3/05/easy-boys/

There's quite a lot of colloquial french in there which I really don't understand and doesn't translate well in google

Thank you. I've just deleted loads of stuff. I was still getting messages from people, but maybe that was because they were replying to ones I'd sent, so I assumed the computer just tucked the excess ones away somewhere, down the back of the sofa or in an old biscuit tin (cookie jar?). I can be a bit dim sometimes.

Down your way I believe the excess messages are culled by Norman invaders spearing them in the eye

Havn't watched it for years. Surely many a platform boot fetish was started by Abba :-)

I have done in the past. I've got children out in the world and I hope if they need it someone will. They're going to be walking around New York shouting 'I Like Kicks', aren't they?

Just over a year ago I met somebody who had just about run out of options about where to stay. Ended up in my spare room for a week or two. That break was enough for them to find their way back to some semblance of normality.

What people injure themselves with their own clothes and then sue someone?

Americans.

I have this style of Doc Martens clogs in both black and brown. Very comfortable, have worn them outside many times. Unfortunately no longer available.