Last night BBC1’s Holby City aired a quite ridiculous storyline in which a 16-year-old girl with the skin condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) received a bone-marrow transplant from her sister, which is supposed to cure the condition. I had always thought EB was incurable (and if it could be cured this way, the EB charity Debra would say this on their website as there would be a great deal of interest), so I tweeted a friend who has the condition, and she told me the storyline was nonsense, that the treatment on display had killed babies with EB in the USA, and that she was refusing to watch it. Debra has a page about the storyline here:
Has BMT been carried out in patients with EB before?
Yes, two clinical trials of bone marrow transplants from healthy donors without EB into children with severe EB are currently ongoing in the US. Early results from the trial indicate that, in some patients, there may be some benefit derived from bone marrow transplants.
However, overall results are mixed and, sadly, there is a significant risk of death. Consequently, such trials are not planned currently in the UK.
Last Tuesday, BBC 5 Live’s morning discussion presenter 
The other day I finally got round to changing my T-Mobile tariff from a £25/mo tariff which covers the cost of a phone, to a £10/mo SIM-only tariff (which was reduced to half that for the first nine months, which I really need now that work is getting less and less). I changed my tariff because I have a decent enough phone (a Samsung Galaxy S) and they didn’t have a better phone which I could have for the same money or less. They called me as I was on my way into London about a month ago, and they did that just as the train I was on was leaving Earlsfield station, and I knew that I would get cut off, and told the guy to call me back in ten minutes. He never did, which I consider really poor customer service.
As I think I’ve said before, my main present (from my parents) this past Christmas was a Mac. I laid out my reasons for wanting a Mac in 
There is a scene in Orwell’s Animal Farm in which the pigs (who had become the ruling class of the post-revolutionary farm once Farmer Jones had been thrown out) and the other animals argue over who gets the apples. Snowball (later ousted violently) tells the other animals that, although he personally doesn’t like apples, pigs are brain-workers and need the apples to keep their brains working, otherwise the farm will cease working properly and Jones would come back — and if there was one thing on which everyone was agreed, it was that they did not want Jones to come back. This comes to mind pretty much every time there is an election in which the purported ‘left’ are defending their position, despite having betrayed those who voted for them.
