Mother's Little Helpers (or: "doctor please, some more of these")

The text reads:

ANOTHER STRIKING TRIBUTE TO PHOSFERINE TONIC WINE

"I take Phosferine Tonic Wine at 11 a.m. and at 3 p.m., also as a nightcap, and believe me, I derive from it wonderful nights of sleep. I get up very fresh in the morning, having lost that tired feeling and after taking a couple of bottles I am now a different woman. Phosferine Tonic Wine stimulates, energizes and tones the whole system, and is a wonderful nightcap."

(Signed) Mrs. D. Islwyn Lewis

(I note in the fine print that this woman hails from Swansea,Wales, Dylan Thomas' home town. That explains a lot.)

And how about this. . .

Yes, for superior vacuuming skills, it's DEXIES!


"BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!"

Text reads: 35, single and psychoneurotic. The purser on her cruise ship took the last snapshot of Jan. You probably see many such Jans in your practice. The unmarrieds with low self-esteem. Jan never found a man to measure up to her father. Now she realizes she's in a losing pattern - and that she may never marry.

Valium (diazepam) can be a useful adjunct in the therapy of the tense, over-anxious patient who has a neurotic sense of failure, guilt or loss. Over the years, Valium has proven its value in the relief of psychoneurotic states - anxiety, apprehension, agitation, alone or with depressive symptoms.

Valium 10 mg. tablets help relieve the emotional "storms" of psychoneurotic tension and the depressive symptoms that can go hand-in-hand with it. Valium 2-mg. or 5-mg. tablets are usually sufficient for milder tension and anxiety states. An h. s. dose added to the t. i. d. dose often facilitates a good night's rest.

Oh how I wish I could see those photos more clearly, as I think they demonstrate the sad downward spiral of Jan's life as she dates men who are lower and lower on the social totem pole. At the end, she's taking handfuls of Valium with some drunken and probably gay purser. But hey, if it helps her sleep. . .

Yes, I can just make out some of the captions: Jan and Dad, 1955. Tom, Jan, Ruth and Steve, 1957. Joey, 1959. Jan and Ted, 1961. Jan and Dad, 1962. Jan and Charlie, 19(?). Jan and Danny/Benny, 1966. Jan and Dad, 1969. Jan, 1970.

Whoawww now! This is saying even more than I thought it was! This is a little girl who is hung up on her Daddy. So obviously she needs to be chock full 'o Valium in order to cope, if not survive. Yes, there was a time when her life looked hopeful, when she had lots of friends and even boy friends, but say, didn't she seem to go through an awful LOT of boy friends? Did this mean she was a raving slut, or a pussy-zippered prude? The ad implies that none of these nice young fellers was quite good enough for her - shame on her for being so picky, or could it be - could it be there is actually "something wrong" with Jan, something so awful we dare not speak its name?

I'm just thinking, TEN milligrams? I've been told that drugs that end in "pam" are all in the same family and do more-or-less the same thing. If you were swallowing tens regularly, it wouldn't be long until you were an emotional zombie. I have to take clonazepam for leg cramps at night, and the prescription is HALF A MILLIGRAM. That's right. I have never taken more than that because it wouldn't do me any earthly good, and because I don't want to feel groggy and out-of-it in the morning. I WANT my emotional storms, thank you very much.

But just think of all the women who were addicted, who were lost. It hasn't changed enough to suit me. Women in the psychiatric system are still patronized and treated with more disdain and disrespectfulness than men with similar disorders. They're wrongly or over-medicated, with a cookie cutter approach: just throw this at her, or that. Seroquel seems popular now, but you wait, it'll be another flavor in a year or so.

And nowhere does it mention the possibility that real relief of her "symptoms" will only come by breaking through to a more courageous, more authentic life. Which generally means telling the doctors to go piss up a rope. Because they don't know anything about us anyway, do they?

For more absolutely insane ads that patronize women and paint them as screamimg meemies with no legitimate cause to complain, just click on the magic link, below!

http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/fem.html

(And sorry about that Mornidine. It's another name for Thalidomide.)

I am an apple. An APPLE!

There are certain "issues" - and why anyone calls them that is beyond me, because they're usually much more painful and aggravating than that mild word suggests - that keep popping up again and again in my life.

Though I know I'm not the only one who experiences these things, I often FEEL like the only one.

And do you want to know why?

OK then. . .

I'll just grab a mundane example, though there are thousands of these incidents. I go into the grocery store to buy nuts, pecans specifically, for some kind of baking project. Anyone who has baked knows how much they cost.

I go to the bulk section to try to catch a price break, but they're still over $5.00, highway robbery! Then I get them home and notice something.

They smell bad.

They taste even worse.

The nuts are rancid and should never have been for sale.

So I trundle back to the store and stand in line and finally get to the front and the clerk says, "You'll have to go to the Customer Service Desk."

So I go and stand in another line of people returning ghastly Christmas presents, and wait some more.

When I finally get to the Customer Service Desk and point out that the nuts aren't fresh, the clerk says, "The stock is rotated regularly so that they're always fresh."

"But they're not fresh, they smell rancid."

"They have to be fresh, they came in yesterday to rotate the bins."

"But - "

(And here it comes, the home plate of frustration):

"Nobody has ever complained about this before."

Just what exactly does this little statement mean?

Take it apart. Look at it.

"Nobody has ever complained about this before." This implies that there can't be anything wrong with the product because you're the only one who has ever complained (and note the use of "complain", a sort of whiny, hypochondriac word).

Because nobody else has complained about it, you must be wrong. You must be a chronic nuisance who goes around trying to get refunds for NO REASON.

You have no credibility because there's no one else to back you up.

Your  lone complaint simply doesn't matter to us. So we're dismissing you by trying to make you feel alone and ashamed to have said anything.

It's as if there's a quota or something: 27 people have to "complain" about rancid pecans before anything is done about it. THEN the store management might begin to pay attention.

Nuts to you!

Oh, I run into this all over the place. It's the kind of cockeyed logic that passes for truth/fact in our culture. People begin to fall into the trench of believing it without even questioning it or knowing they're doing it.

But there's a much more sinister application to this thing: have you ever noticed when a major sexual abuse scandal hits the headlines, it always comes out that the abuse went on for decades before anything was done about it?

And you can't tell me "they didn't know". "They" did, and "they" covered it up. Usually the perpetrator is an authority figure like a priest, teacher or coach, or even a Big Brother (with all the awful implications that term implies).

When something is finally done about it, probably because someone in a position of power blew the whistle, there is at first a trickle, then a flood of victims coming forward with their own accusations.

At this point the "alleged" perpetrator is well lawyered-up, and there will be all sorts of claims that these so-called victims are only trying to extort money from the poor innocent client and ruin his good name.

But what's really happening is a particularly awful form of that ingrained dynamic of "nobody has ever complained about this before".

One case will just be dismissed. Maybe two. Or the second one won't come forward at all, because he will have committed suicide.

The rest hide out and cripple along with their lives and are treated, basically, like fuckups for not being able to hold it together. Seeing the example of one victim being dismissed, they keep their mouths shut, perhaps not wanting to be dragged through the court system telling everyone exactly what this man did to them.

Twenty or thirty years later, people are starting to realize that the "nobody has ever complained" law is finally falling apart. Somebody HAS complained, and this time it stuck. The dam has been breached.

There is a quota, however. The more people step forward, the more credible the case becomes. But why shouldn't ONE accusation be credible? Why is it okay for someone to demolish "only" one life?

It isn't. But that's the way things seem to work.

People are herd animals, though few will admit it. They're conventional and prefer to run with the pack, even if the pack is going in an insane direction.  Let's not upset the applecart, especially not that well-nailed-down applecart of patriarchy. In the deep past women and children were property to be bought, sold and traded, and no doubt abused with no thought for the consequences (because there were none).

But what amazes and appalls me is how that dynamic lives on, the rotten core of a society that pretends everything is equal and the vulnerable are always protected.

The reversals that go on make my head spin: suddenly the accuser is the perpetrator, spreading poisonous lies about a man who is obviously above reproach. He was a wonderful priest! He did such good works! His coaching was legendary! How could a man who lived such a benevolent life be anything but a blessing to the young people he worked with?

This is where another bizarre idea comes in: "would never". Such a fine man would never do that to a little boy. Daddy would never touch you like that, so shut the hell up.

I want to say to them: OK, if he really "would never" do such a thing, why all the fuss about it? Why so much energy and so many dollars required to dig him out of the hole he's in? If "would never" is really true, it ought to be easy for him to prove his innocence.


And in some cases (did somebody say Michael Jackson?), this actually happens.

But "would never" is one of the more irrational underpinnings of  nobody has ever complained about this before. What does it mean, anyway? That we can't even entertain the possibility that Daddy has no moral sense at all, that he can dissociate the abuse from the rest of his life and carry on as a pillar of society?


"Would never" has a nasty little sister that I like to call "minimizing", and it seems completely benevolent, even positive. People say, "oh, but the huge majority of priests don't behave that way and have exemplary records." This may well be true, but why do people say it?


They say it because they are uncomfortable with the notion that a crack has formed in that "exemplary" vessel. They say it to whittle down the abuse to something minor and even insignificant. They say it because one little case out of thousands really doesn't mean very much once it's "put in perspective". Throw out that rotten apple, and forget about it.

For every case that finally emerges into the light like some foul cellar jacked open, there must be dozens or hundreds more that never surface at all.  And though someone has to be first, I suspect that it's usually someone who has similarly lawyered-up and built a pretty solid case. See, if you have legal protection behind you, you're not the only one any more.

So someone might actually listen to you, instead of sending you home with a bag of spoiled goods.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Three's Company: Polygamy Pushes the Envelope

(An excerpt from an actual Christian web site devoted to "building the family").

Been watching TLC's 'Sister Wives'?

Have you been surprised how loving, and normal, they seem? Would you be surprised to learn there are many non-Mormon Christians who have felt God prompting them to live this way? Maybe you are curious and trying to figure out if this lifestyle truly can work. Or maybe you are a believer in Christ and you are witnessing all of the practical benefits but still trying to figure out how to make sense of this in light of the Bible. But you are asking yourself “Does the Bible, and it's Author, accept this?" Read on.

In the show Kody Brown makes this statement: “Love is to be multiplied not divided.” The idea of marriage, or a union with a male and female, transcends all religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. People from every nation or sphere of the world join together and partner with one another in order to build a family. More than 80% of cultures throughout history have also practiced some level of polygamy.

What does God say?

But the real question is: does Jesus Christ, the Lord of the universe, approve of this type of family where one man joins with more than one woman? We at Biblical Families, an evangelical organization dedicated to historical Christianity, see that the Bible teaches and approves of this type of idea of love multiplying. Both the OT and NT teach that God is honored by this type of lifestyle.

Throughout the OT many of God’s holy men lived a lifestyle where they multiplied God’s love. Men like Moses the writer of the first five books of the Bible had two women at the same time in a union, Abraham, who had at least two and maybe three at the same time, Jacob who had four in a union, and numerous others like Gideon, King David, and King Solomon. Likewise, in one place in the OT God even presents himself as in a union with two wives (Ezekiel 23:1-5,7,11).


The NT never alters this idea of love. The theme of love is carried forth by Jesus Christ whose teachings along with the apostles verified this lifestyle as holy, normal, and to be accepted. The God-Man, Jesus Christ, even represents the three types of lifestyles in the Bible. He lived for awhile in a celibate condition, he then died, arose again, and then joined himself to the first church ever birthed in history, the Jerusalem church, which represents a monogamous relationship, and then as other church bodies were birthed he joined or united with them thus displaying a love relationship or union with those multiple members that make up his one body, or family (see 1 Cor. 12:-20,27; Eph. 5:25; 1 Cor. 11:2).

How can this work?

So how can one family have multiple wives in it and there be peace, harmony, joy,
satisfaction, and the blessings of the Lord in that family?

Here at Biblical Families we are teaching and sharing with people how this is possible. In the Christian faith this is not only possible but a very real testimony of the power of grace and the Holy Spirit working in the lives of those that believe. As the Bible says, where the Spirit of the Lord is there will be the fruit of the Spirit which is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law (Gal. 5:22).

. . . And so on, and so on, blah blah blah blah blah. I've included the juiciest part of what appears to be a bona fide Christian "family" web site, not only endorsing but encouraging the creepy practice of taking more than one wife with whom you're expected to have multiple children. This article goes on for hundreds of words, quoting the Bible ever more feverishly with each paragraph.

First I've heard of it, myself.

It seems the alarming traditions of fundamentalist Mormons are starting to overflow the container into "Christian" practice. TV shows like Sister Wives (and even Big Love, a satiric comedy/drama) seem to be giving lots of people ideas.

It was a long time ago that the "jiggle show" Three's Company was wildly popular. Not sure if it spawned a host of real-life imitaters or not, but it was, after all, only a sitcom (and those were more conservative times).

I know there is a movement called polyamory. This means any number of consenting adults can live together, with sexual sparks flying in every direction. Let's hope their offspring don't get together, or we'll have a genetic catastrophe. Polyamory is illegal, but every time the polygamy issue comes up, so do they, creeping out most of us to the point of disgust. 

I haven't looked at any polyamory sites, can't bring myself to do it. Once in a fit of madness I googled "marry your pet", and found an actual web site which was, I suppose, tongue-in-cheek (or maybe that's the wrong way to put it).

Some years ago, we had the spectre of a woman marrying herself. Not a bad idea: think what the sex would be like! Contraception guaranteed. It has a lot to say for it, but what happens when it's time for a divorce?

I do wonder sometimes just what's going on here. To be perfectly frank, this strikes me as license for a man to screw a whole bunch of women and still maintain his "faith". I cannot imagine that this practice would allow polyandry, i. e. a woman marrying more than one man, a subject which occasionally crops up on Sister Wives (and which Kody once pronounced "vulgar": a pretty good word to sum up the whole show).

I know I harp on this, it's an obsession and a fascination. In the recent season ender, Robyn had her much-anticipated baby (named Solomon!) at home, moaning in a way that seemed creepily sexual, then popping out ten pounds of Brown baby. One wonders how many more will follow, especially since Robyn has promised Meri to be her surrogate (ANOTHER Brown baby? When will it stop, particularly since the Browns have no discernable source of income?)

Other things crept out. Christine, who seems wholesome and matter-of-fact, isn't. She has probably suffered more than any of the others. A few episodes ago she admitted to marital problems with Kody that she couldn't resolve. In her presence, Meri more or less told her to shape up, that she'd had marital problems too and worked them out on her own, and that's what she was expected to do. Christine had no response to this.

Last week she said she'd been having anxiety attacks and was taking antidepressants. On the Robyn-giving-birth episode she made the baby a cute little sampler which she called a "peace offering" to Robyn: she felt guilty about treating her so badly. Treating her so badly? It made me wonder just what they edit out in these things. At any rate, it helped explain the marital friction and the antidepressants. Sister wives, when faced with towering problems like this, must put up or shut up.

Meanwhile, back at the polygamist Vegas ranch (which brings to mind Spinal Tap's Sex Farm),  Meri and Robyn have peeled off by themselves into the kind of tee-hee-whispering-nasty-rumours giggle-fest you see in Grade Five. Quite a bond they have there. Dynamics like this completely fly in the face of so-called true polygamy, lopsiding the energy and affection between the women, which already seems shockingly unevenly distributed. At one point Meri even mistily says she has the kind of bond with Robyn that she never had with any of the other sisters. Oh, that's going to go down real well with them, I can tell.

But this was the kicker. I've heard it before, so it may even be true (though I admit this comes from Perez Hilton):

OMG! One Of The Sister Wives Was Married To One Of The Other Wives' Brother!

Just when you thought Sister Wives couldn't get any more disturbing, here comes the INCEST!


Star Magazine reports that polygamist and reality show stars, The Brown Family, are more about keeping things within the family than we all thought. In a shocking twist, it was revealed that Kody Brown's second wife, Janelle, was brought in as his wife shortly after she divorced her first husband - Kody's first wife's brother!


What the what?


In one BOMBSHELL of a secret, it was uncovered that Janelle was married to Adam Barber in 1988. Adam is Meri, Kody's first (and only legal) wife's brother. The two divorced only after two years of marriage and three years after that, Janelle joined Kody's polygamist fam.


A family insider reveals:

"I know she was originally very upset over Janelle dumping her brother. I think there has been a lot of unspoken tension between her, Janelle and Kody all these years."

I'd say.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Breast cancer: don't worry your pretty little head!

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care says self-examination of the breasts is of little utility. Photo credit: ©2011 Thinkstock

Breast-screening guidelines fuel firestorm


New guidelines for breast cancer screening that recommend women avoid routine mammography until age 50 are based on faulty methodology and will result in an "untold number of lives lost" if implemented across Canada, the Canadian Association of Radiologists charges.

The guidelines, released Monday by the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, recommend against routine mammography screening for most women age 40 to 49, arguing the "harms and costs of false-positive results, overdiagnosis and overtreatment" outweigh any "significant reductions in the relative risk of death from breast cancer".

Aimed at settling more than a decade of contentious debate over the recommended frequency and value of breast cancer screening, the guidelines also say that clinical breast exams and self-exams have no benefit and should never be undertaken, and urge that women over 50 only have mammograms every two to three years, instead every one or two.

But critics say the data on which the guidelines are based is dated.

The recommendation against routine screening of women under the age of 50 who are at average risk of developing breast cancer risk is self-admittedly "weak," and based on "essentially antiquated" and "unbalanced" evidence, argues Dr. Nancy Wadden, chair of the Canadian Association of Radiologist’s Mammography Accreditation Program and medical director of the breast screening program for Newfoundland and Labrador. "The task force looked at studies that were over 25 years old [involving] equipment that is outdated and not even available anymore. There's been enormous changes in breast imaging since that time, [and] in addition radiologists' interpretation skills have improved tremendously."

Part of the problem is that randomized control trials have only been conducted on analog mammography, "because digital hasn't been around long enough," adds Dr. Christine Wilson, medical director of the Screening Mammography Program at the British Columbia Cancer Agency.

Wadden contends that more recent observational and community studies indicate that there are "definite benefits" to screening younger women using digital mammography.

This is the kind of news report that makes my blood boil, triggering a sickened, terrified feeling that bubbles up from deep within.


The powers-that-be have once more muddied the waters in the realm of women's health care and disease prevention. Oh, and it won't be the first time! I'm old enough to remember the time - and this went on for years and years - when medical studies "proved" that hormone replacement therapy protected women from heart disease. In many cases it was prescribed to middle-aged and older women for that reason alone.


People listened to this without questioning it, doctors adopted it as policy, and all went merrily along, with uncounted women dropping dead from heart attacks due to "unknown" factors. Maybe heredity? Inability to handle stress? If doctors even looked at the fact that these women had been on estrogen for ten or fifteen years, they simply did not see it, demonstrating the bizarre blindness all too common in what passes for women's health care.

Then someone bothered to do a study. But it had to be halted in a hurry, because the women taking the estrogen were dying of heart disease at an alarming rate.



Yes, that's right. Dying.


Can a task force be wrong? Can studies be flawed? You bet they can. Already charges have been levelled that the data in this ludicrous study came from dinosaur technology, analog equipment that is now obsolete. We don't even watch TV like that any more, so why is it OK to do life-or-death studies the same way?

But what sets my brain on fire is the insistence that women should not go to their doctors for a routine breast exam at regular intervals unless there is raging breast cancer in their immediate families. And it gets worse. The breast self-exams that I've been told to do every month - yes, every month, not every two or three years - are now strongly discouraged on the grounds that it may lead to that horrific possibility, a "false positive".


This, the study insists, will only lead to unnecessary anxiety about nothing. We'll just worry our pretty little heads. We'll get all upset about losing a breast, like women do. If we think we feel a little lump, or for that matter a big one, we might (silly things!) become afraid we have cancer and be dead in a few months, then rush off to our doctors to get a professional opinion.


The answer? Don't do the self-exams.

For years and years (and years!), I felt infuriated about being badgered to DO the exams after every cycle.  Like most women, I felt tremendous guilt about forgetting to do them. The message seemed to be that the onus for early detection was on us. If we missed a lump, if one somehow turned up at our yearly checkup, well then. . .


The implication was that we could have done something about it much, much sooner if we'd only had the sense to know our own bodies.


That was back in the golden days of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and the seizing of women's health care back from the patriarchy. But now I don't know what the hell is happening. It's as if I am being told NOT to know what is going on in my own body, in my own breast tissue, so I can tell what's normal and what isn't.


Why? The answer seems to be, it's better not to know. It only upsets us. We fret. We trot off to doctors. We even insist on mammograms, which have vague negative side effects that no one ever spells out.


Want to know the real reason?


Dollars.  It costs the medical system to give us those tests.

Never mind how much it costs us (though having a cancerous lump slowly and insidiously grow from barely perceptible to Stage 4 without our awareness might just cost us a little.) It costs the system to deal with these pesky little "false positives". I don't know how much; I don't have figures. But since this so-called study appears to be deeply flawed, yet is STILL being pushed at us as gospel, I feel a hidden agenda at work.



I've had bullshit statistics rammed down my throat for too long. Whenever the conclusions on women's health care suddenly lurch into reverse, I notice there is never an apology for the confusion and dismay and anger it causes. We're simply updating what "we" know.


Save me from this "we". It doesn't exist. "We" is Orwellian, a herd thinking that is always extremely dangerous because it is so often based on bias, not to mention bullshit. I honestly don't know how "statistics" like this can even be released, let alone  followed. Would you walk into Future Shop and try to buy an analog TV? Isn't breast cancer just a little more serious than that?

My worst fear is that next time a woman tries to book a mammogram, she won't be allowed to because she's considered too young, or not enough time has elapsed since the last one. Or perhaps doctors will begin to say, "No, I won't do a breast exam on you until you're over 50," leaving us to cope with that pea-sized lump we weren't even supposed to detect.



A breast exam at a doctor's office takes about a minute, maybe two. How much does that cost the system? If there's a "false positive" and the patient has to go for a mammogram and finds out there's nothing there, the result for her is immense relief. Why would the system want to take that away that peace of mind?


Ludicrous! The whole thng is ludicrous. And to me, it smacks of a not-so-subtle wrenching of control away from women and back to a medical system that has let us down time, after time, after time. Why does this bother us so much?  Why do we get all anxious and whiny and trot around doing "unnecessary" things to protect ourselves?



Because women die, that's why. They die. And we don't want to.

How often have I heard that most women find cancerous breast lumps themselves? I don`t have statistics rattling around in my head, but I`ve been hearing it for decades, quoted as an unassailable fact. If it`s true, and I believe it still is, how on earth can any study, anywhere, be so primitive, so flawed, so horribly disrespectful to women's wisdom and women's right to manage their own health care? Worse than that, how can the medical community blandly swallow it as accepted procedure?


I want an answer to one more question.

If all this disrespectful garbage becomes policy, which it may well do, how many small lumps will go undetected because we're really not supposed to touch ourselves there?



How many significant lumps won't be detected because our doctors will politely tell us they don't do breast exams any more until we are well past menopause?


How many deadly lumps will go undetected because our mammogram clinic will suddenly refuse our request for a screening test?  

To conclude, I can`t help but make the inevitable analogy to men's health care. My husband had a possible cancer scare a couple of years ago. Now, every six months, he goes in to see a specialist who does an uncomfortable manual test on him, just to make sure everything is still OK.


Applying the rules of this new study, he should not be going in because the exam might lead to a false positive, which could cause him "unnecessary anxiety" (read: which could take up the doctor's precious time). Instead, he's given the exam, mostly for his own peace of mind.

I hate this stuff, I really hate it. It stirs up fury in me. Fury because women are going to die from this, to actually die.  Even one death is too many, but my intuition (and haven't we been told for years to listen to our intuition?) tells me there will be many. It's the health care system instructing a woman to stick her head in the sand, because it's really better for everybody if she doesn't know.


But there are certain advantages to being dead, aren't there? The best one is, you can't complain.


http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm