There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...

I don't know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die?
Well, sorry to put a pessimistic and realistic spin of this, but of course she's going to die. Whether it's down to the presence of a fly in her digestive tract being the trigger that sets off all sorts of underlying conditions (such as her stomach lining is sensitive to bluebottles), or that she goes on with her life and dies like a normal person, doing normal things. Like crossing a road or being shanked by an unpleasant individual who coveted her purse. Dying is a fact of life. This lady is seriously not well if she has lived to  be old and still thinks that there is some alternative  method at the end of it all. Or maybe she'll just stay alive for eternity?
Or maybe what the author meant was that perhaps she will die as an immediate consequence of consuming a fly which she doesn't. That makes more sense.

Well, she certainly had enough life in her to consume a spider. In this western world, I don't really see many septuagenarians (or octo- or nonogenarians for that matter) jumping up and down with excitement at the thought of consciously consuming a spider. Especially if it's going to wriggle and tickle inside you, which sounds like a truly unpleasant experience.Of course, everyone eats spiders in their sleep, but that's by accident.
Turns out that this old lady ate a spider in order to catch the fly that was inside her. WHAT DID SHE THINK THAT THE FLY WAS DOING INSIDE HER? BUZZING AROUND? She obviously had no concept whatsoever of what the human internal anatomy resembled. If I remember rightly from the book, she thought there was just a big hole inside her that the fly could buzz around and become a nuisance. Maybe she heard the buzzing ringing in her ears. If you told her that the total surface area of all your internal organs was the size of something large and several football pitches-sized, she wouldn't believe you at all. There couldn't possibly be stuff inside people could there? Of course not, we're hollow.

Little does she know that these poor critters that have unfortunately found their way into her digestive tract, are suffering immense agony and are dead.

Old lady having just swallowed
a horse.

The whole book carries on in this way, with the old lady continuing to eat more ridiculous and equally infeasible organisms in order to "catch" the one that she ate before. This is purely ludicrous. How can a woman swallow an entire horse in one gulp, especially when she has a donkey and a cow and a dog and a cat and probably a couple of other things already in there. Maybe some werthers originals.
I won't spoil the ending, but I must say that it was disappointingly predictable.

I guess that this is a work of fiction, but I hope that the author has reduced his consumption of crack recently. I couldn't think of any other way of coming up with such a bizarre tale.

Procrastination-Land/Ranting corner.

A frequently-participated activity by yours truly.

Just typical. Once again, setting up to write a blog in hopes that it shall be some sort of escape from the nasty soul-draining assignments that have to be done. Oh it's alright, I have another week left to complete them, and they're already half-finished anyway. It's merely the fact that it has to be presented and constructed in such a banal, regurgitated manner that destroys my soul and makes me look for something else to do.

Like write something on here. I would tidy my room, but I've already done that. It's the most habitable looking it's been in weeks, and all to get out of assignments. If they were interesting and about something that I didn't already know, I would be more than happy to get them done. However, seeing as one of them is writing up an experiment about the density of milk, it loses its appeal to me.

Not loving it.

That aside, and I know I say this a lot, but I really really hate winter. In fact these days, I hate it so much that I would very happily get rid of it as a season and replace it with something warmer. Fuck Christmas, no one really remembers the meaning of it anyway. But the annoying thing about winter and the approaching months is the amount of bugs and viruses and illnesses and other nasty things that are flying around, and are prone to leave one feeling quite under the weather.

Lemsip: Paracetomol 650mg,
Phenylepherine: Pointless.

I am currently in the midst of suffering from a bad cold. It's that bad, that to a man it would be more than man flu. Probably death or something equally melodramatic. However, I have been through the worst (hopefully), so full recovery should soon be within my sights. The only thing about this cold though, was the fact that I was bedridden for a day. Yes. Actually rendered BEDRIDDEN with the bloody thing. Normally I'm not the one for "pulling a sicky", in fact, quite the opposite. The only time I would really take off work is if I've lost a limb, or lost my voice, or lost consciousness. Hangovers, headaches, aches and pains... normally I'd be in there, soldiering through it all. However, on that fateful day where the cold really took its grasp upon me, I couldn't even move my head, let alone go to college, the pain was that excruciating. All of my sinuses, inflamed and screaming pushed against my skull, caused the worst cold headache ever to wake up from, coupled with an aching throat as well. Needless to say, I reluctantly called in and took the day off, and then out of the next 24 hours, I can assure you that I was awake for merely 3.

The most annoying thing about a cold though, after the initial horror show that comes with catching one in the first place, is trying to shift it. With the first phase you can batter it with anything you like.

Nectar of gods.

Painkillers? Paracetomol, Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Lemsip, Sudafed, Buttercup syrup... Pseudoephedrine, phenylepherine, ascorbic acid... All big names in this constant battle against the common cold. Very effective in the first phase, yet not really great for the long term after-effects of the cold that leave you annoyed and still slightly groggy a fortnight after you thought you got rid of the thing. Symptoms include: that constant runny nose, nearly-disappeared sore throat or that chesty cough that is still struggling... Bleh. Not useful if you're like me and have lots of things to do. Sometimes you just have to carry on regardless, but if it's really that bad, your body will tell you to stop anyway.

What I also don't like is this flu jab vaccine. Whoever really feels the need to have a flu vaccination (save I guess, patients suffering from an auto-immune condition) should really man up and take the cold like the rest of us. Personally, I have never suffered from flu (well, never been diagnosed with it anyway), but I put it down to my immune system being tip-top and prepared for winter and happy to destroy any unknown pathogens that happen to enter my bloodstream. But people who have to artificially insert some of the disease in order to build up an immunity to it, due to the fact that their immune system couldn't cope with a real thing? I don't think they really deserve to live here if their bodies aren't up to it!

Someone who wouldn't make it without
the flu vaccine...

I am aware that most of them are elderly or somewhat aged, but in my defence they'd probably state that they'd had a similar winter in their day (most probably a colder, more harsh one), and they were able to cope without the vaccine back then. And also, horrible as it sounds, the population of this country is on average, getting older and older, as well as the whole size of it becoming larger and larger as the same number of babies are being born, but not as many old people are dying. Withdraw flu vaccine and let nature take its course, seeing as it's not natural for us humans to live that long. It's quite easy to tell, seeing as you practically start to fall apart past 45 or 50, getting all sorts of diseases from just being about too long.

This could easily spiral into an even greater pool of controversial topics, yet I think that I may have to rein it in now.
All in all, I hate colds. I'm sick of this constant achey feeling, blocked nose, inflamed sinuses, headache, sore throat, you name it... please can someone make it go away for me?! :(

....and someone who would.