to stop using heroin, there is

only one answer: got to a

hospital or clinic for addiction

treatment.

If you cannot get into an in-patient

program today, get on a waiting list.

If you do not know where to go,

look online for "Christian drug

rehab."

What program you go to is not

as important as the fact that you

go and get counseling somewhere.

Go for it!!

REMEMBER, just because you are on the waiting list does not mean you will be guaranteed a place in the tournament.  If you are the first person on the waiting list and one person doesn't show up to check-in, well then, you get to play.  If you're the fifth person on the waiting list and only two people don't show up for check-in, sorry, you won't be playing that day. 

Sign-ups for October's tournament will begin after the September tournament.  Be on the look-out for that sign up sheet so you can guarantee yourself a spot on the October roster!

-kelly

Now, as stupid as it is, I could possibly understand spending $300 on a Bag.  I could even maybe understand $500.  Or $700.  But anything over $1000, unless it's crusted over, twice, with diamonds, is just out of my price range, and frankly, Ridic-U-Lous.

You know how you bypass the Waiting List of Five Years? (Yes, you read correctly, I said five years.)  You spend tens of thousands of dollars at Hermés.  That'll get you your Bag alright.

I would just like to know: who has $20,000 to spend at Hermés?  How about they throw some of that green my way?  I've got college to pay for.

But it's all about the Birkins baby.

So last Friday I began filming on a feature film named "The Waiting List". I filmed both Friday and Saturday evenings which made for some late nights.  It's a funny script and we are shooting in a small charter school.  I happen to play a woman who is 7 months pregnant.  I have to say it is a bit fun and surreal to have to wear a fake belly.  It is also pretty funny to have my own "belly fluffer"....who also happens to be the director, Mike Vogel.

Sunday I began shooting another feature film "Crackin' the Code".  We started shooting the last scene in the movie.  It takes place in a bowling alley and it was a really cool retro alley.
The crew was so nice and extras were awesome to hang around most of the day.

Here is a glimpse of me as "Polly" in the Code film:

We were also able to come up with a couple different movie posters for the film Crackin' the Code.  Here is what we got from the photo shoot:

Some out takes:

Just got back from a driving lesson and was told that my practical test can be booked as soon as I pass my theory (my theory is booked for 1st Augest). Anyway there is a 2 - 3 month waiting list to get the practical test sat.

Todays Picture from iPhone:

I cant book my practical test until I pass my theory, so basiclay I wont be driving for another few months (properly) which really does suck. I was hoping to pass just before summer ends. Man WTF is that about.

Better news; I purchased wizzkid.me to make it a little more personal rather than wizzkid.wordpress.com. I think wizzkid.me looks kinda cool, short and sweet URL. What do you guys think?

We moved now from the normal waiting list to a waiting list for urgency cases. For one of my 6 responses we are standing on number 1. So let's hope that this one works out. For the others we are numbers 3, 4, 4, 4 and 5...

It would be nice if it did, cause it's a nice location and enough room for the 3 of us and maybe in time number 4 :D It would also take a big amount of stress out of our lives.

- Xenocrates

his one is dedicated to all the guys out there who will never break a woman's heart; the guys who will always be a friend when she needs one, will always be her comforting shoulder when her boyfriend goes postal, will always offer their shoulder for them to cry on - and despite all of this, for some reason, still inexplicably find themselves STUCK IN THE FRIEND ZONE. Gentlemen, I salute you. I feel your pain. Even though you have been the ultimate guy in waiting, you find that the woman you constantly adore, the one for whom you offer yourself as a bridge over a puddle of mud - will never love you back. Why are women so duplicitous in their intentions towards men who are not jerks? Over the last month, I've sampled some fine female selections from the gene pool and I've come to realise why. Brace yourselves gentlemen. This one is going to hurt.

The Fundamental Difference between Men & Women 

Take careful note of small children in a play pen. The little boys are always more loud, abrasive and obnoxious than the little girls. Males are driven to be very forward and aggressive. It's our genetic imperative to be like that. We pride ourselves in competition, conquest, aggression and machoism. It shows even in our competitive nature as adults and our unwavering love for sports. Men are agressive. Growing up, men are always raw and brutal with each other - even as friends, we play rough.

But not women.

Women prefer to use their mind, not their muscle (which is understandable since women aren't gifted in the physical strength department). Even when they fight among themselves, it's usually borne out of psychological warfare. Even as little girls, females are more inclined to verbal assault - rarely ever turning to physical violence. Women prefer brains over brawn, and it shows in their everyday lifestyle. However, when it comes to dealing with men, this preference for brains over brawn can become rather - shall we say... annoying.

Why Girls Ignore Nice Guys

As we've touched on before, women generally respond more positively to men who are more aggressive. It doesn't matter whether those men are good for them or not. Agressive men get sorted to the top of their preference list most of the time. The agression in men is sexually attractive to women. You see this manifested during intercourse with the woman usually assuming the passive role, deriving pleasure from being dominated. Therefore men whose approach is more assertive, bold, cocky, confident, perhaps even with a dash of humor (most women love to laugh) will usually get more positive results from a woman. Men whose approach is more timid, indecisive, unsure, shy, relies too much on banter or uses more subterfuge to woo a woman, tend to get ignored or treated less seriously. Nice guys tend to fall into the latter category.

With that said, there is a collective of men who are good for any woman that usually get sorted down in the list all the time, since those men tend to use the more subtle approach described earlier. Those men are usually not immediately very desirable to them, because their approach is not particularly masculine. Let's face it guys, you wouldn't approach a woman who wasn't behaving particularly feminine would you? EXACTLY. This is why you have poor luck with women. The timid approach will cause her to think of you as one of the girls. The problem with this is that these women know at the back of their minds that these men have value - they just don't feel sexual chemistry with them from the get go because of the approach. What happens in a woman's mind at this point is that:

1. She doesn't dislike you enough to turn you away, but;
2. She doesn't like you enough to want you the way you want her to.

The end result is that women attempt to convert these 'nice' guys into friends - kind of like how a tourist keeps souvenirs from their vacation. The issue which I am attempting to elucidate is this:

Women are more inclined to turn less desirable men into friends (thus effectively castrating such men) instead of just flatly turning them away - usually for sentimental reasons.$0D|�A
This is the single most annoying thing that a number of genuinely "nice" single men face from women of all kinds. Men don't like gray areas. We work best in zones that are conclusively black or white. When a woman says "well, maybe" or "I need some time to think" it's like she's saying "No, you can't bone me - but I don't want you to go away - yet." Ever had that happen to you? Well here's the bad news:  

You've been put on a waiting list.

The Waiting List

For those of you men who're too dumb to know what it means to be on a woman's waiting list, here's the gist of it:

1. Women need to feel an instant 'click' with a man she meets.
2. Click = Chemistry. Men don't need chemistry as much as women do.
3. Men whose 'click' doesn't match the woman's standards are wait listed.
4. If the 'click' doesn't occur instantaneously, you are also wait listed.
5. A woman's wait list ranks men according to the 'click' strength.
6. The list is sorted in descending order, from strongest to weakest.
7. As she meets more men, they are automatically sorted on the list.
8. The man with the highest click strength gets the most attention.
9. Men who don't click at all are instantly turned away.
10. Her waitlist operates on the POP principle; meaning that only the man at the top of the list can be disqualified. If that happens, then next man below him on the list is automatically promoted, and so on, until the list is either exhausted, or until she finds a suitable mate.

Some of you may know this as "ladder theory". But unlike ladder theory, I'm not encouraging the treatment of women as raw meat (although to be brutally honest, a lot of them ask for it). The main difference here is that I'm explicitly encouring you to GET OFF HER WAITING LIST. Why you ask? There are two main reasons:

1. You're Her Backup Plan 

Being wait listed means that you're her backup plan, her plan 'B'. Well, technically, it could actually mean that you're quite possibly her plan 'J' or even plan 'X', depending on how far down her list you are. There may be quite a number of other men ranked above you. If that doesn't bruise your ego, then you should also note that you could be waitlisted indefinitely. Let me tell you how this happens:

You meet this girl. You express interest, she says "well, let me think about it" or "Let's be friends for now." and foolishly, you agree. However, in her mind, you didn't generate enough chemistry with her to get to the goods. So what happens is that your click strength is quantified and you are added to her wait list (as it wasn't strong enough for her to want to open her legs for you in the first place). You are then sorted in descending order among the other men that she knows. If she continues to meet other men (and subsequently bump off men from the top of her list), your position on her list may either rise or fall as she meets other men with more (or less) chemistry than you. As such:

So long as she continues to meet other men and you were not instantly sorted to the top of the list, you will continue to remain her backup plan, most likely indefinitely.

Some men are wait listed so long, that they are in waiting until she becomes old and desperate. That's where you will instantly get promoted to the top of the list, since all the other guys above you will no longer desire her now that she's pushing 30, still single, growing miserable, childless and fat. Additionally, women at this stage in their lives are no longer interested in casual dating. They want to get married - NOW - which instantly disqualifies her from most single men's interests. Since you're the only guy she knows that would have loved her irrespective of what she looked like (hence why you were wait listed in the first place), you now become her priority numero uno. All the other guys have gotten a chance to bone her and have long since moved on. You get to be stuck with their "legacy" - a used vagina looking for a permanent buyer. By this, so many jerks have plugged her, that she's like a used car on a car lot that only sells new cars. Think about that for a second. Let it soak into your brain for a few minutes...

Now do you see why you need to get off the waiting list? If that wasn't harsh enough for you, then read on. I said that there are two main reaons why you need to get off the list. Let's get to the second, and more severe reason:

2. You're being wait listed to be heart broken

If you're not her number 1 from the get go, chances are that even if you were to change some characteristic about yourself that would cause you to be promoted instantaneously to her number 1, you HAVE to maintain that characteristic (which I imagine will not be who you really are) in order to keep her interested. If you fail to do so, she will most likely loose interest and thus, break your heart. Remember, only men at the top of the list are disqualified. So you get one chance to either shine or die.

If that doesn't happen, then she'll most likely break your heart another way: You could be wait listed until some guy she meets very recently gets instantly promoted above you. She may even end up marrying him and not you. This one will hurt 10x more than if you were wait listed indefinitely. This is because this girl will have already:

1. Given you hope that you and her were a 'possibility'.
2. Known you for a much longer time than the dude she's now with.
3. Taken your money and other favours (investment!)
4. Been on dates with you and shared pseudo-intimate moments.
5. Kept you as a close confidant and friend (again, building up your hopes)
6. Shared many of your secrets (and vice versa)
7. Been the object of your unrequited affection
8. Cried on your shoulders every time her other boyfriend treats her badly.
9. Repeatedly chosen to invest her love in assholes, ignoring you.
10. Have absorbed a great deal of your time that you could've invested in other possible love interests.

...only to shaft you in the end. Yes sir, it will hurt. It will hurt like a mother. It will hurt so bad that one of two things will happen to you:

1. You become a cold, callous, heartless, skirt chasing, womanizing PLAYA - a jerk, just like the ones she constantly rejects you for... OR:
2. You become wise and GET OFF THE LIST!

Women Don't know how to be Straight 

You have to understand: women are really nice people. They're so nice, that many of them can't even be straight and blunt when they need to turn down a guy who they prefer to have as a friend. This is particularly true when a woman knows she's not attracted to a particular guy, but she doesn't dislike him enough to just flatly reject him. This is why nice guys tend to finish last. But it doesn't have to be their lot in life. What women fail to understand is that a man who approaches a woman doesn't want to be "just friends" (irrespective of the strength of his approach). It's all or nothing. Men can't be friends with women unless:

1. He's a homosexual.
2. He's not interested.
3. He's very happily married.
4. He's related to her.

It is unnatural for single men to want to 'befriend' attractive single women. The very idea is preposterous - unless he's desperate for any kind of attention he can get from her. Women are not our equals - they serve a wholly different purpose. Women were created to propagate the human species. Hence why Adam was cloned and given a women, and right brain preference so that he could love his clone in order to make babies. Thus it is inherently impractical for such friendships to exist while interests persist without somebody getting hurt.

If you're a woman reading this: Be straight from the outset. If you're not interested at the beginning, chances are you won't be interested later. Just say 'no' and spare him the misery. If he really was your friend, then you wouldn't let him suffer.

If you're a man reading this: 'Maybe' means that she's not interested. She's only hoping that your chemistry with her will grow over time. If she's not interested now, odds are that she's not going to be interested tomorrow. Don't get attached. You will hurt later. You have been warned.

How does a man get off the list?

Here's the fundamental underlying principle:

Only pursue women for whom you become the number 1 from day 1 (or close enough thereto). If you're not numero uno, move along - even if she clings to you and begs you to stay.

There are over 6 billion people on the planet. Less than half of that number are women; we're talking roughly 3 billion women here! A good 1.5 billion of those will fit some demographic (race, language, culture, religion, income, etc.) that is suitable to you. That's roughly 800 million females in your general quadrant of the planet. Narrow those down to within 60 miles of your immediate vicinity and we're talking about roughly 50,000 female possibilities at the very least. Why should a man then sully his dignity for a woman who isn't sure if she wants him?

If every man realised that he has a good 50,000 women at his disposal to sift through at all times (even considering probable variance), no man would become hung up on just one woman who said "maybe". Even if 10,000 of those women said "maybe", you still have a good 40,000 to breeze through. It is thus mathematically improbable to not find more than enough willing souls to partake of your affection from this pool. There are simply too many good women in the world who are more than ready to settle with a decent, loving man like yourself, without pre-judging you based on their personal shallow hang ups, for you to become fixated on that one girl that flared your fancy. It is a stupid thing to do wasting time waiting on a girl that said 'maybe'. You are not getting any younger!

Some women grow so fond of the men on their waiting list that when those men try to extract themselves from that list, they panic and start respond like they're breaking up with a boyfriend - even though there was no romantic development in the first place. It's absolutely ridiculous! These women give you the same bad vibes as though you were their lover, even though you're not. So it's like having all of superman's weaknesses with none of his powers. What's the point of having deal with all the negative effects of having girlfriend, if you're not going to be able to sample the positive effects also? Listen buddy, Get off the damn waiting list and continue your search.

Conclusion

If you're one of those people who believes that chemistry between two people is not paramount to the success of a relationship, then that is the stuff of fairy tales. Two people can only become lovers once chemistry exists. Anything less is a one night stand. It has to be the right amount and it has to be potent enough to get the gears of love turning. If it didn't exist at the outset, it probably won't exist later on. I say this because of a simple ubiquitous facet of human nature:

People never really change. They just become better or worse at who they really are.

To all the nice guys out there: You don't have to finish last. You don't have to become her intellectual whore. You don't have to freely offer your shoulder to cry on without just reward. You are not required siphon your positive evergy to a fancy woman who will never love you. You're not obligated to 'fix' a broken woman. Just because you're nice, doesn't mean that you have to be stupid. Just like those other jerks out there who lay women for sport, there are women out there who will drain your positive energy for sport. It goes both ways. Nice girls are suckered in by bad boys, and parasitic women are drawn to nice guys. BREAK THE CYCLE. Get off her waiting list. Be a man. Let every love interest you pursue know that it is all or nothing. That testosterone driven decisiveness makes you more attractive. Don't settle for less just because you think you think you can't do any better. YOU CAN.

Don't let your desperation for love cause you to latch on to the first woman who is willing to smile at you. Do not sacrifice your dignity or your self respect because you feel lonely. Love is conditional. It goes both ways. If you love and are not loved in return, stop calling her. Stop nagging her. Stop leaving messages on her phone. Stop stalking her. Stop getting so insecure about every other dude out there who grabs her ass. Respect yourself and you will be respected.

Ever heard of sleep apnoea? The most common form of this is known as obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). It is a chronic condition which causes poor quality sleep and results in excessive tiredness during waking hours. OSA can affect people of any age and of either sex, but it is most common in middle-aged, somewhat overweight men, especially those who use alcohol. During inhalation, the airway will collapse causing pauses in breathing for about 30 seconds, then the person usually startles awake with a loud snort and begins to breathe again, gradually falling back to sleep. OSA has the potential to have serious negative effects on a person's quality of life and many people go undiagnosed. In order to confirm the diagnosis, it usually requires an overnight stay in a specialized sleep laboratory where sleep is monitored and measurements are taken while the person sleeps.

In Dublin, there is only one sleep apnoea clinic available to patients in the public hospital system and this is based in St. Vincent's Hospital. There is a delay of at least two years for an appointment to see a specialist in this clinic and if sleep apnoea is suspected, the patient is referred on to the specialized sleep laboratory at the hospital to be monitored overnight. Again there is a long waiting list for an overnight bed in this unit. At present the sleep apnoea unit in St. Vincent's Hospital is undergoing renovation and the old casualty unit at the hospital is being used as a temporary sleep laboratory.

A recent radio programme exposed major flaws in this temporary accommodation. The conditions sound horrendous. Firstly, the one toilet in the unit, is filthy and unfit for purpose. The unit is used as a pain management clinic during the day and by evening time, it's unsuitable as a sleep environment. The windows cannot be opened due to noise outside in the corridor and patients complain that they cannot get to sleep due to the heat and lack of air. It is a shared unit for men and women, with little or no privacy. It makes no sense whatsoever to call it a sleep laboratory if the conditions are so bad that patients cannot sleep. And remember, these are patients who have been waiting for years to be monitored. Frankly, this is sleep deprivation of a different kind and it could even be called obstructive.

Just another example of bureaucracy gone mad, while patients continue to suffer.

You can listen to a podcast of the programme by using the link below.

www.rte.ie/podcasts/2008/pc/pod-v-130508-27m42s-liveline.mp3

The nude photos was a lie, sorry.

Also, there is a small waiting list on per diem work. I am in the process of getting those complete.

For voice, piano, sax, double bass, cello and composition there are just a few positions left.

Eva's dad recently pointed me in the direction of the following article: Infants in the Pool - A Dive Into Controversy. I don't really see what the controversy is all about. However, it reminds me that I do need to look into finding a pool to start swimming lessons soon. La Petite Baleen looks great, but is a little far, and a 1,000 person waiting list is a little long. We probably should have signed her up at the first thought of conceiving. Some concerns I have when finding a pool include: temperature and chemicals used. At least she will look adorable in her little bathing suit doing the butterfly.

Below:  Eva, in mid bounce, looking more like a doll than a baby, at 2 months.

I listened with interest to Prof John Crown on the Late Late show last night as he outlined the failings within our health service. John Crown is a leading consultant oncologist working in the front line of the Irish health service and he doesn't mince his words. He believes that the consultant's contract as currently presented by the HSE, is a fiasco. He described it as an apartheid contract for an apartheid system of healthcare. Today, I heard that the Irish Hospital Consultant's Association (IHCA) has accepted the HSE's proposals and will be recommending the contract to it's members in a ballot later this month. Meanwhile, the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) is still refusing to come on board and has today requested third party mediation to resolve the problems. On one side, we have a government that insists on perpetuating a 2-tier system of healthcare despite the consensus of opinion which believes that a single tier health service is the way forward. On the other side, we have doctors who don't like being put under the thumb by administrators who will decide their working hours. This contract has already been four years under discussion and I have to agree with Prof Crown, it has the potential to be a fiasco.

We have a health service in Ireland that offers a high standard of care but the care is not optimal. According to John Crown, this is due to 'mal' funding rather than underfunding. When the allocation of money from the HSE runs out, services are cutback at the expense of patient care. Treating patients costs money but It costs the system nothing to have patients on waiting lists. We have a health service run by civil servants instead of having a medical leadership structure in place. The policy of co-located hospitals as proposed by the Progressive Democrat (PD) health policy, is set to cause an even wider divide between the public and private systems. Each system will be differently funded, further adding to the complications. The concept of co-location ultimately means that services are duplicated in the one location. This is neither efficient nor cost effective . The co-located private hospitals already in existence, tend to be small and have sub-optimal expertise in place. As a holder of private health insurance, I can personally testify to this having once faced the decision of having to choose between standard of accommodation and standard of medical care. I was very unwell in A&E at the time and required admission for investigation. As I was known to be infected with MRSA , I required isolation facilities in order to be admitted to the hospital. There were single rooms available in the co-located private hospital but the physician under whose care I was to be admitted, worked only in the public hospital where no isolation facilities were available at that time. This dilemma typifies all that is wrong with the plans for co-location and the divisive nature of the consultant's contract. I had no problem choosing medical expertise over comfort but I should never have had to make that choice. Why does healthcare have to so divisive? If you're sick and in need of hospitalization, the type of care you receive shouldn't be dictated by your ability to pay.

John Crown is in no doubt that the way forward for our health service is a single-tier, not for profit system of healthcare based on a universal system of social insurance. He makes no apology for speaking out about the deficiencies within our health service. As long as there continues to be vested interests and a burgeoning bureaucracy in control of our health service, the system is doomed to fail. The future of the consultant's contract remains in the balance.

So that's it! My grumble of last week has already become a reality. The HSE cutbacks are in full swing. One large ward at the public nursing home where my parents reside, has now officially been closed down. Once enough beds have been freed-up (which only occurs when another resident dies) to accommodate the residents from this ward, there will be 20 less long stay beds in the system. As well as this, all further placements for long term care at the nursing home, have been suspended until further notice.

It's inevitable that this action will cause a negative knock-on effect on public health in the area served by this nursing home. People who are struggling to cope at home with a relative suffering from dementia (who needs round the clock care), are now going to have to wait even longer for help to arrive. The HSE has just cruelly lengthened the queue for long-term beds. If you have an elderly relative in hospital who's ready to be discharged to a step-down bed in a local nursing home, then their wait in hospital has just got longer. These patients are often unfairly referred to as bed-blockers because of the log jam caused when acute hospital beds are used for long term care. This blockage of acute beds impacts on A&E services where waiting times on trolleys will inevitably increase thereby causing further chaos in emergency departments. Waiting lists for elective surgery will also get longer and operations will be cancelled because of the pressure put on bed allocation.

These delays are all a direct result of the HSE's decision to restrict funding to one nursing home. Once again, we have no joined-up thinking coming from the HSE. If this action is replicated around the country which no doubt is the plan, then I fear the consequences. Morale in the health service has already been eroded by cutbacks across the service. This latest action from the HSE is enough to make anyone despair.

Help! I think I feel another health crisis coming on.

Longest Indian Waits

Ketan Tanna on how we are a nation that has got used to standing in eternal queues Apart from the dark blue passport, the endorsement of Indian citizenship comes from the inescapable anthem — You Are In Queue.

Indians are so many and human activities so few that most ventures in this country consign you to the dreaded waiting line. This is the story of some poignant Indian waits. School Admission In urban India, the birth of a child drives parents to the best schools to register their ward for admissions that are four to five years away. Meera Isaacs, Principal of Mumbai’s The Cathedral & John Connon School, says, “Yes, we are taking applications from the parents of a year-old child so that he or she can join the kindergarten when the child is five years old. We stop taking applications when the number of registrations reaches 500. Unlike other schools, we do not want parents to line up overnight outside schools or stand in a long queue.”

In Ahmedabad, Manish Mehta has been waiting for two years to get his son admitted into the Delhi Public School (DPS). The boy is now in the eighth standard in a local school and he has been looking forward to a better school since he passed the sixth. He has been taking the entrance tests and interviews for DPS but has been unlucky. The school turns away at least five students a day at the peak of the admissions season.

Club Membership

Even if one is willing to pay huge amounts for the membership of an elite club, the waiting period runs into several years. That is if there is a benevolent waiting period in the first place. Bombay Gymkhana, for instance, has stopped accepting applications for the life, permanent and ordinary memberships. Corporate memberships are open though. A manager at the Gymkhana, who did not want to be identified, said that life membership was last opened in 1998 and closed within a couple of months. According to him, ordinary memberships had opened in 1979-80 and every time memberships open, there are thousands who want to get in. The Delhi Gymkhana has a waiting list that runs into several years while getting a membership in the India Habitat Centre too can take more than a decade. The Karnavati Club in Ahmedabad started with a membership fee of Rs 5,000 for ordinary members which then went up to a lakh about five years ago. Now the figure is Rs 7 lakh but there are so many on the waiting list that the club has stopped taking in new members.

Justice, of course

 As of February 2006, 33,635 cases were pending in the Supreme Court, 3.34 lakh cases in high courts, and 2.5 crore cases in subordinate courts. The Bombay bomb blasts trial that went on for 14 years is among the faster cases. It is not uncommon for justice in this land to take decades. Thousands of farmers were forced to give up their land in Akola, Vidarbha, so that the government could establish the Panjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth in 1969-70. In return, the government had promised a government job to a member of every family whose land had been acquired. Some 38 years later, the farmers are still fighting for what was promised to them. Trademark People who have applied for the grant of trademarks over a decade ago are still in wait. A lawyer who did not want to named said that one of the trademarks he applied for took 18 years to come, and another took 11. In 2004, he says, there were around 2,50,000 pending trademark applications. On an average it takes anywhere between 18 to 36 months for a trademark to be granted. The average for some categories of trademark is close to four years.

Salvation

Even if one were to get fed up of the materialistic world and hope to seek salvation, there is a waiting period. At the Tirupathi temple, between mid-April and mid-May this year, the temple saw 22 lakh pilgrims, a 30% increase over the same period last year. On some days, over 80,000 have thronged the temple. As a consequence, the waiting period for an economical Rs 50 darshan of Lord Venkateswara stretches to close to three days. If you decide today to do the Rs 50,000 Udayastamana pooja at the Guruvayurappan temple in Kerala, you will be able to do it only after 2050. “We are not accepting any new applications. The new managing committee will take a decision about the next round of applications,” says a temple official. A few years ago, when the then chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha, wanted to give a baby elephant as an offering to the temple following an election victory, she was told that she would have to wait for 38 years.

Art Galleries

If you apply today, the earliest you can hold an exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery is in 2012. The gallery’s secretary, Mrs K G Menon says that it can play host to only four artists in a week. “Every year, we get 1000 applications and I can accommodate only 250.” The gallery has acquired two new places on the first floor and the waiting list is expected to come down. The mushrooming of private galleries has helped ease the pressure on Jehangir but even private galleries these days are beginning to have a long waiting period. TNN (With inputs from Vasundhara Vyas in Ahmedabad and Abhinav Bindra from New Delhi)

www.rte.ie/podcasts/2008/pc/pod-v-040308-5m15s-drivetime.mp3

You see Olivia has private health insurance which allows her to skip the queue in order to get a quick diagnosis, while public patients must wait. She is uncomfortable with this fact, she knows it's wrong but given the dangers of hanging around on a public waiting list, she feels she doesn't have any other choice. She describes the Irish health service as being like a great big vat of porridge - a squidgy bureaucratic mass in which our Minister for Health is floundering around, desperately looking for something to hold on to.

I was disgusted yesterday to listen to Mary Harney and Brendan Drumm apologising to the women involved in the breast cancer misdiagnosis scandal of last year. Of course those women have my sympathy but this was obviously just a publicity stunt to distract from the appalling deficiencies within the HSE, as shown in the recently published reports. The apologies were so insincere as to be nauseating. Where are the apologies for the thousands of Irish patients who have been let down by our health service? Nobody has ever apologised to me for the fact that my life was turned upside down as a result of contracting an MRSA infection from the Irish health service. And of course nobody has been blamed for any of the failures in the service, we're told that it's a 'system' failure. It's a whitewash - there is no accountability within the HSE.

Poor Goldilocks. I can't ever see a time when her porridge will be 'just right'.

I've been waiting such a long time,
looking out for you
But you're not here
What's another year?

I've been praying such a long time
It's the only way to hide the fear
What's another year?

I've been crying such a long time
With such a lot of pain in every tear

What's another year? What's another Y-E-A-R?

Susie Long sadly wasn't able to wait another year. Her premature death from bowel cancer last October, was directly attributable to a long delay on a waiting list. By the time her diagnosis was made, it was already too late. Susie bravely used her own plight to highlight the inadequacies in the public health system. She succeeded in mobilising the country into thinking about where we are going as a society. I still feel outraged for the way our health service failed her. Yesterday should have been Susie's 42nd birthday.

We've waited for long enough. It's time for our Minister for Health to get off the stage. She gets "Nil Pointe" from me. And by the way, Dustin gets my vote for Taoiseach!

As an aside, the waiting list helps Outback track the night's business activity, plan ahead, smooth the flow and manage their shifts (labor). At the check-in desk, we found Outback Steakhouse business cards that say, "No worries. Call Ahead Seating." They invite guests to call the host ahead of time to add their name to the waiting list. By calling ahead, you can join the waiting list at that time instead of starting fresh when you arrive. Super customer service. Superb idea.

This simple big idea is like a flexible reservations list and enhances the customer experience and encourages repeat purchases. In the restaurant, beauty salon and medical fields appointments and reservations are relatively common.

Why not apply this great technique in Your field; especially if this gem is little known and unused. Then you'll really stand out! What can you do in your business to improve the customer experience, increase repeat business and convert new customers into regular customers? Then your new revenue will soar.

Tune in soon for the next Outback Steakhouse post. And soon, we'll be presenting our blog post 17 Ways to Use Business Cards to Grow Your Business. Until then,

Eric Gelb, The Revenue Miner

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