THE MAN WITH THE HOLE IN HIS ARM Well I finally got my first shot of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine yesterday. I think I mentioned that I booked in for the Astra* one months ago, but with all the talk in the media about younger people dying from blood clots caused by that* it seemed a bit silly to take the risk given that I don't mix with people enough to catch so much as a cold anyway. Plus it was eradicated again back then, but has returned worse than ever now, only because the government couldn't figure out a decent quarantine system in over a year. So I waited it out until the Pfizer one was available to people in their 20s and booked in again at the doctor's the morning after it was announced. As before the nearest booking was over a month away, and as it turns out they're making it compulsory to get one in a few weeks if you work in one of the essential occupations. So if I'd booked just a little later after hearing about Pfizer opening up to my age group, I'd probably miss the deadline. Seems like that would make it tough for some people. Of course the state government only thinks about Melbourne where they've got their big vacccination "hubs" set up, but those seem to be sparsely and almost randomly distributed between rural towns. So people like me who avoid going into the cities have to wait for the vaccines to trickle down to the country doctors who clearly were the last in line to get them, yet we have the same deadline to get the jab. Anyway the card they gave me says on the back "this is not evidence of vaccination" or something like that, without explaining where you're supposed to pull "evidence" from. Of course as I'm self-employed I only have to confirm to myself that I got vaccinated anyway, so I guess I won't need too much convincing. As far as the vaccine itself goes, I seem to have survived alright. Instead of blood clots, this one's nasty rare side effect in younger people is apparantly swelling up the heart muscle. I didn't bother looking into the stats for that one like I did before cancelling the Astra jab, clearly you end up rolling the dice whatever you do. My arm felt alright a couple of hours after the injection and I didn't feel ill at all, but I didn't have a great night's sleep, and I did actually feel a slight bit of chest pain when my heart rate raised in the morning (too much info: when I got an errection - had to cancel my morning wank!). Today my arm's been feeling much more sore when I strain it a little, but though it was a busy day all my tasks were pretty physically light. I probably would have been able to tough it out otherwise anyway, though I think my evening push-ups routine will be skipped for the second night in a row. Well that's enough about all that, most other people have had it by now anyway - everyone walking up to the desk at the doctors while I was waiting seemed to be there for their second shot (they were older). I'll finish with a quick remark about westerns (the title of this post if supposed to sound like a dodgy western, by the way). SBS World Movies (Australian TV channel) has been showing westerns this week, though only two I hadn't seen an I missed one of them. But I notice that the modern westerns fit this style where it's all focused on deep family inter-relationships, personal struggles of fragile people, emotional interactions, and ethical statements. Tonight I watched my tape of Chisum, one of John Wayne's last movies. Now I know it's each to their own, but jeeze the old westerns with their strong leading figures and plots unfolding through fight scenes are a lot more fun to watch. The modern ones do always retain the big shoot-out at the end in one form or another, but you wind your way through an hour and a half of suppressed masculinity just to work up to 10 minutes at the end when the enivitable finally happens. They just won't allow any fun in the middle. Mind you my favourite western is probably A Fistfull of Dollars, which of course goes the other way and just turns the fights up to eleven and almost ignores everything else. But I find you ideally need to watch it after seeing way too many old John Wayne type westerns, to the point where you're just about sick of them, then wack on Sergio Leone and you see the joke that it's meant to make. In fact perhaps the best way to go through westerns is to start with the modern stuff they've been showing on TV: Slow West, Gone Are the Days, Never Grow Old. Then back through the old Wayne and like westerns: Chisum, The man who shot Liberty Valance, Tall in the Saddle, (not to mention all the corny John Wayne ones from the 30s which had names with hardly anything to do with the actual plot), then onto the spaghetti westerns with A Fistfull of Dollars and finish up with the completely silly stuff like My Name is Nobody (I need to find more Spaghetti Westerns actually). Oh and when you reach the point where you just couldn't stand another quick-draw hero, you can always ease your way back to more serious viewing with a screening of Midnight Cowboy. Thinking this much about movies makes me think I should be thinking about something more productive. Mind you, I've then gone on to think of my own movie plotlines and it's not like anything's going to come out of that either. I have been considering sharing some here though. No westerns mind you, in fact one's really got all the emotional inter-relationship stuff that I was complaining about, but I guess it's mainly just when they wrap that up as a western that it annoys me. - The Free Thinker. * The media went all silent about this once cases started spreading here again. I see that they don't want to discourage people from getting vaccinated, but switching from "NEWSFLASH: Another Young Man Dies From Astra Jab" to nothing at all surely has to fuel the distrust a bit. I can only assume that as the vaccination rates have increased many-fold, the deaths must be happening much more often now as well, especially with the government encouraging younger people to get Astra* rather than wait for Pfizer to be available.