This past week, Ricky Gervais offended an awful lot of people with a joke about a “mong face” on Twitter. “Mong”, for those who still don’t know, originally meant someone with Down’s syndrome, back when the term for the condition was “Mongolism”, which people from Mongolia took some umbrage to (or perhaps people realised that it kept getting shortened to “mong” which came to be used as a general term of abuse, particularly for any disabled people). He was taken to task about this by a number of people, notably Richard Herring who eventually wrote this blog article after receiving hundreds of hateful tweets from Gervais’s fans; disability rights campaigner Nicky Clark wrote this piece for the Guardian, and eventually had an exchange of tweets with Gervais himself, recorded on her blog here, in which Ricky seems to have wised up to the fact that he got it wrong (having previously claimed that those who were against him were just envious of his success). I’m not sure how convinced I am by his apology, because he has done this in the past.
I recently received my copy of the conference DVDs from Invest in ME, which had its 
My favourite radio station is BBC London. I’ve been listening to it for years, and while there are a fair few presenters I don’t like, there are some highly interesting programmes about local issues and local interest, like Robert Elms’s show on weekday afternoons, which have kept me listening for a number of years, particularly during the time I’ve spent driving for a living in London. A recent proposal by the BBC’s trust, which is aimed solely at saving money as the licence fee is to remain at £145.40 for the next five years, to pay for the Welsh language broadcaster S4C as well as the World Service as well as its current responsibilities, would see localised programming ended for much of the schedule, and would no doubt see a number of much-liked programmes disappear for good.
So, Steve Jobs, the man who invented the Mac, the NeXT box and then merged the two together, is dead. Actually I’m sure a few people helped Jobs on the way, like actual programmers and graphic designers and, well, you get it, but the tributes I heard on the radio today were beyond ridiculous: there was a guy called Geoffrey Robertson, I think, interviewed by Jeremy Vine on Radio 2, who claimed that what Jesus was to Christianity, Steve Jobs was to “tomorrow”; a letter-writer to the same programme opined that vintage Macs can be found in design museums but vintage PCs can only be found in skips; and finally, the line that three apples have changed the world: the one Eve ate, the one that fell on Isaac Newton’s head, and the one Steve Jobs invented.
Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of British schools, has been in the news twice this week, the first occasion when he proposed that the 
While I’ve been following the case of Ayn Van Dyk, the autistic girl seized from her father for ridiculous reasons in British Columbia in June and still in care (see 
Many years ago, there lived a scholar who asked an old rabbi what could be learned from the Talmud. The rabbi told him of two men who fell down a chimney. One arrived at the bottom dirty, while the other arrived clean. “Is that the lesson of the Talmud?” the scholar asked. “No,” replied the rabbi, “listen to me: the dirty man looked at the clean man and thought himself clean.” “Is that the lesson of the Talmud?” asked the scholar. “No,” replied the rabbi, “for the dirtied man looked at his own hands and on seeing them sooty knew he’d been dirtied.” “This then is the lesson of the Talmud?” asked the scholar. “No,” said the rabbi. “Then what am I to learn from the Talmud?” asked the scholar. The rabbi told him: “You will learn nothing from the Talmud if you start by believing that two men can fall down a chimney and not both be dirtied.”
Last week, the University of Bristol published a study partly funded by Action for ME which highlighted the economic cost of ME and “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” (more accurately, the cost of illness to service users at NHS ME and chronic fatigue services). The abstract is 
On Thursday it was announced that the rules governing who can give blood in the UK was changed; previously, any man who had ever had sex with a man was permanently excluded; 