Legal Torture

I have a pretty balanced family.

No, no, no...not balanced emotionally. We're as screwed up as anyone else.

I mean the traits the we share.

I mean, first, 2 females and 2 males...

Two with a sense of humour (my son and I) and two without (ladies?). He and I will watch Monty Python, and they will leave the room. Sometimes, if we're lucky, the house.

Two lefties (my daughter and I) and two of the lesser kind.

And two athletes (wife and son) and two spectators (daughter and I).

As an aside, I frequently tell my wife, as she urges me to try some damned fool physical activity like tae kwondo or roller skating, that if it weren't for us spectators there would be no sport. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that we're more important than they are!

Anyway, I digress, as I tend to do.

The two athletes, as athletes do, get injured from time to time. Some, more than they should. (Actually, sonny boy has stretched at least two inches taller in the past 6 weeks and I'm sure that's contributing to the strains on his frame.)

In the past couple of months the young feller has...

1) Cracked a knee-cap (it's actually a congenital thing -- his kneecap bones didn't fully fuse. It's a case of bipartite patella. Not a big deal for most people unless you were to...say fall on your knee. Hurts like a sonuvabitch, but that's about it.

2) Then, during a game of indoor football (it was pouring out) he dislocated his collarbone.

3) A week later he pulled his hammy. Hamstring strains take a little while to heal -- three weeks in his case) .

4) And just as that cleared up he pulled his groin.

Oh, get your fricken minds out of the gutter.

The adductor muscles on the left side strained, probably due to the extra bone length (watch it!) stretching the muscle beyond what he's used to.

Hips are notoriously bad in football players, so we had it x-rayed and MRI'd (MRI images are massively cool!) and they were clear, so off to the physio.

Trained, I'm convinced, by Joseph Mengele.

Now my young lad has a very high pain threshold.

That dislocated collarbone I mentioned? He was doing full training a week later.

I saw him take a football in the face from about 10 feet , hit the ground like a sack of rice, get up, dust himself off and continue with the game.

He sliced the pads of both big toes open on oyster shells when he got out of a kayak at school -- slicing though to the meat -- on a Wednesday and the NEXT DAY did full training at football.

Like I said -- high pain threshold.

So when the physio is digging into his hip flexors and he's turning red in the face saying "Dad. It really hurts." you gotta know it really hurts. And yet he's still grinning.

Full credit to the masters of pain though. The physio that he goes to (enough times that we are now on their newsletter mailing list) is top class. She (a tiny little masochist named Trudi) sorted out his iliotibial ligament after last year's Feb growth spurt, fixed up his calves after the August growth spurt and seem to have a handle on his groin problem.

As it were.

And a thought occurred to me.

Obama released those torture memos, and frankly, from what I've read, it ain't that scary. I can see where knowing in advance what is coming would take the sting out it. I think I could take whatever they were legally allowed to dish out, and I'm a card carrying wimp.

Rendition is such a dirty word. It's the alleged transport of folks who don't buckle under the legal interrogation techniques to some other country that isn't so concerned with human rights.

So, say, if Durka Durka Mohamed Ali won't talk, he gets sent to, say, Egypt where toenail removal is allowed.

I say enough of this.

Rendit (is that a word?) them to Australia and let the physios at them. They'll be babbling before the first session is over.