This is hilarious: Tories would love to force an election, but their law forbids it.

Basically, the Tories want an election. But they passed a law early on mandating fixed election dates. So they can't dissolve parliament. Only a non-confidence vote can call an early election.

So instead, they're holding parliamentary committees at a standstill. And generally making life difficult on Parliament Hill. Because they need an excuse, or to try to goad the Liberals into calling an election for them.

In essence, then, one of the most powerful political tools in federal politics -- the power to choose the timing of an election -- has been willingly handed over to the official opposition.

Happy Birthday, Matty.

ha ha
Happy Birthday!

Oh, Beck, you scamp.
Happy birthday, bud.

BWHAHAHA!!

That's funny Beck!

But really...

Happy Birthday Beck!

Happy Birthday Beck!

In my ongoing effort to make this site your key source of Venture Brothers news, I bring you this item: Jackson Publick says the new season starts June 1.

right now I am building across the street from those commercial buildings. right now the HSBC and I think the walmart or home depot is being built. I was under the impression that is was supposed to be a self contained communty for all of the windermere developments. A sort of large strip mall. (possibly to keep traffic down) It is deffinatly walking distance for the ambelside on windermere residents, but the other two (north, and upper windermere) are on the other side of terwilliger drive, which is having another two lanes added, bringing the total up to 4 lanes of 70 km/h traffic. not very pedestrian freindly in my opinion. It'll be an interesting setup once everything is done. There will be the bungalows I'm bulding going for 700 grand I'm told through lower income high density housing right down the street. any and everyone will be living there. i wonder if everyone will get along.... It'll be a busy place this summer for sure for builders if nothing else.

To answer your question directly, tay, no, I've never seen it used. I have seen automatic tourniquets used to flood an entire are with local anaesthetic -- a really interesting technique that leads to some very bizarre sensations for the patient -- but never as a means to assess waking paralysis.

It's interesting that you bring it up now, though; our case-of-the-week this week is anaesthesia-related, and I'm responsible for exploring the ins and outs of balanced anaesthesia -- the roles of various IV and inhaled drugs in pain control, sedation, amnesia and muscle relaxation. So I'm doing the research right now anyway.

Frankly, the anaesthetists I work with don't put a lot of stock into fears of waking paralysis; when you consider a stat like 1 in 600, and couple it with the likelihood of someone with an amnestic drug like sevoflurane or midazolam on board remembering that it happened, the number of patients who are affected by waking paralysis seems like it would exceedingly small. (None of the anaesthetists here have ever had a patient describe it to them.)

(As an aside, it may seem to trivialize things to say that not remember a traumatic incident will mitigate its impact -- a fair and intuitive assessment -- nevertheless we do use drugs like midazolam for just such a purpose. It's routinely used in endoscopy -- colonoscopes and that kind of thing -- and really does mitigate the otherwise obviously traumatic impact of having a camera inserted into one's colon.)

A quick search on MD Consult finds a study that examined close to 12000 patients, of which 18 had recall after 7-14 days post-op. Another study found the rate of awareness in non-obstetric, non-cardiac surgery to be 0.2%. To be fair, the rate is far higher in trauma surgery (11-43%), but generally it appears to be pretty low.

There is a mention of isolated forearm as a technique in Miller`s Anaesthesia, but:

Although the incidence of purposeful movement in the isolated arm was high, the incidence of actual intraoperative recall was low (only one subject).

Other investigators have not been able to correlate other clinical signs of light anesthesia or postoperative recall to the isolated arm movement response.[59][60][61] Moreover, the effects of ischemia from prolonged inflation of the tourniquet at pressures higher than arterial blood pressure on this methodology are unknown.

...

The foregoing studies suggest that the occurrence of purposeful movement in an isolated extremity is not a good predictor of intraoperative recall.

Something I heard about a few years ago, and finally found some info on:

Currents Windermere

When I first heard about the concept, it sounded like a very cool mini-town development (almost a European combination of commercial and residential) . On paper though... it looks like a mini South Edmonton Common with lots of parking lots and some houses a few blocks away.