alexist

Hopefully (flights still available, but I have to book them) Aliza and I will be flying out on the 20th. This is going to be tight. :( I really do have to go that week, though, because it's my mother's 60th birthday that weekend.

Plan for this week: Clear out the bedrooms. The movers will do all the packing (thank Dog) but I need everything, or as much as possible, cleared and sorted before we go. Once Neil gets his passport back, book the movers and cleaners (we're responsible for having the flat professionally cleaned before moving out).

Next week I'll tackle kitchen and lounge. Ugh. Especially since I'll have to move all the books off the shelves so people can have them! (We have one set of landlord-provided shelves in the living room, so I can stack all the books there.)

Great Sell-Off will commence this week, after some family dibs are taken...

I need a letter from Neil so I can take Aliza without any trouble (single parent on one way ticket is a red flag for kidnapping!)

Luckily it seems that notaries in England work quite similarly to how they do in the US when it comes to witnessing signatures (one notary even lists "permission to take children out of the country" under services). Or at least, they're the people to see; they might have a standard form used. The difference is that in the US, a notary public is basically just a professional witness. In the UK, they're all lawyers (and consequently there are far fewer of them--in the US, my old pharmacist was a notary public!)

it starts with this awful interview with Dr. Jay Gordon (a pediatrician with a lot of famous patients:

http://www.cookiemag.com/entertainment/2008/07/vaccine_experts?currentPage=2

(So many errors on it, I don't even know where to start--and the interviewer let him off easy. Picked up on Paul Offitt's conflicts of interest, but not Gordon's.)

Then Orac picks up on it:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/07/dr_jay_gordon_pediatrician_to_the_stars.php

Dr. Jay comes in to defend himself. It's great. Top Orac quote: "The stupid, it sears. It burns thermonuclear. No, it flames supernova. Yeah, that's right, Dr. Gordon. Breast feeding and keeping cheese out of the diet will prevent the spread of infectious diseases better than vaccines."

(Although Dr. Gordon didn't say "stop the spread of disease", he said "save lives", but still. Especially since the science behind obesity and disease isn't 100%; read Junk Food Science sometime.)

The best is that someone finds this link on Dr. Jay's site:
http://www.drjaygordon.com/development/alternative/hiv.asp

Why is this even more mindblowing than it looks (which is bad enough)? Dr. Gordon was one of the doctors who treated Eliza Jane Scovill, the HIV+ daughter of an AIDS denialist, shortly before her death. Gordon has admitted that he made major errors in Eliza's care, and says he would not do the same thing again. Yet he's still spewing crap on his website.