Enable Scotland launched an interesting fundraising campaign today. From the BBC report:

A charity for children and adults with learning disabilities has launched a campaign highlighting the greater donations given to animal charities.

Enable Scotland said animal charities received nearly twice as much funding as disability ones.

Its new campaign features posters of adults with learning disabilities alongside straplines like “If I ate out of a dog bowl would you like me more?”.

I reckon they should be applauded for being brave enough to highlight the fact that many people would rather donate money to aid animals rather than humans, but I worry that the campaign will be counter-productive—the posters could easily be read as anti-animal charity, rather than pro-human charity.

You can donate to Enable Scotland here.

Despite my tendency to sneeze photically whenever I so much as think of the sun, I really like the photographs submitted to the Solar Max group on Flickr:

A good rule of thumb, though not absolute: If it hurts your eyes to look at your subject, or through the viewfinder, chances are you’ve got a good Solar Max canidate.

Using strong-arm tactics that a Mafioso would recognise well, the group contacted Maggie’s Centres to suggest that accepting a donation from the Springer cast and crew would offend Christian patients and potential donors, and that if Maggie’s were to accept the donation, Christian Voice activists would picket their offices and care centres.

Stephen Green, the outfit’s National Director, appeared on the Today Programme this morning, and was brazen, constantly repeating the claim that Christian Voice had ‘saved [Maggie’s] from a public relations disaster’, with an audible smirk in his voice as he sought to imply that his organisation had done the charity a service by helping them avoid accepting ‘tainted’ funds, knowing all the while that any ‘public relations disaster’ would have been down to the flying God-pickets drafted in to disturb recovering, and dying, cancer patients and their families. (Listen to the Today item.)

Fucking scum.

I really can’t think of many things less Christian than denying cancer patients respite, taking advantage of their situation to publicise a cause, and bullying a charity which provides much-needed care and support.

If you’ve not heard of Maggie’s Centres, you can read about their commitment to providing beautiful places where stress management and emotional support programmes combine to foster Maggie’s aim to help folk make a ‘healthy adjustment to the impact of cancer’ in their lives.

By way of contrast, Christian Voice gleefully compare abortion to the Holocaust, berate the Police for their belated inclusive policies towards gay officers, and state as an article of faith the need to replace democracy with theocracy, favouring a government devoted to ‘the maintenance of freedom and justice solely in accordance with Biblical principles.’ Their one contribution to ‘medical’ matters? A link to Living Waters, a ministry which seeks to repair what they call the ‘sexual brokenness’ of being gay.

On the plus side, these bleating, thoroughly un-Christian reactionaries may well end up doing Maggie’s a favour - just as their anti-Springer protest boosted the ratings for the musical’s screening, this horrible bullying episode will hopefully lead to a massive boost in donations to the charity.

You can donate here.

Update: I couldn’t find online references to the news when I wrote the above, but now Maggie’s condemn Christian Voice’s publicity-hungry tactics in The Scotsman, the Daily Record have a misleading headline in place, and The Independent (registration required) lambast Christian voice, while the BBC report on the story. See also, this Guardian profile of Green. I also started this MetaFilter thread, which will probably focus on how dreadful Christians are in general, but might nudge a few folk to donate.

When I last had a spell in hospital, the thing I noticed most, aside from the agonising pain and sweet, sweet relief provided by morphine on demand, was the flow of patients between departments, which was far from smooth. For example, I needed at least one chest X-Ray a day, and this involved a painful transfer from bed to wheelchair (top tip: don’t get your chest tube caught on the bed rail) followed by a wait for a porter, followed by another, usually lengthy, wait to see the radiographer, with many fellow patients, most in worse nick than I was, followed by another lengthy wait for a porter to return me to the ward. This is not good - keeping patients with serious conditions in a waiting room is dangerous, compared to the safety a bed, surrounded by lovely nursing staff and handy life-saving equipment.

With a full patient-, and, for that matter, staff-location system, combined with software tracking the status of each department, the time a patient spends away from the safety of the ward could be minimised: is there a backlog in the X-ray dept? Then don’t move patient X off the ward, and move patient Y back to their bed. Is the surgeon’s RFID tag still on the golf course? Then stop pumping anaesthetic into the arm of patient Z, summon up the nearest RFID-tagged porter pusing an empty RFID-tagged trolley-bed, and pop her back to the ward.

Spending money on technology like this certainly seems a better idea than, say, pushing it out of the NHS and into the hands of private sector.

(Just after posting the above, I spotted a more frivolous health-related use of RFID, at RFID In Japan, surely the geekiest feed I read. It’s a talking doll that aims to foster a caring mentality in children by occasionally coughing and sneezing, then responding to treatment with RFID-tagged syringes, sweets and medicine.)

5 people die of AIDS every minute.

- World Aids Day

Brian has cancer, currently in remission, and as a result of his treatment developed epilepsy. Finding conventional medicine was ineffective in controlling his fits, he started to grow cannabis, exclusively for his own medical use.

After being arrested and charged, the Legal Aid solicitor assigned to him failed him miserably (I hope no one sues me for saying so, but to my eyes, the incompetent handling of the case verges on negligence) and Brian ended up with a two-year sentence. To make matters worse, in a bizarrely wrong-headed move, Brian was at one point placed in solitary confinement as he was believed to be suffering from depression (presumably worsened by the fact that he was placed on the grim ‘beast wing’ usually reserved for sex offenders.)

Initially released after 20 days, awaiting an appeal, Brian’s lawyer cocked up again, and he was registered as a fugitive while visiting his mother in England, after the appeal failed. As a result, he’s back in Porterfield prison, Inverness, serving the longest sentence for cannabis cultivation of any prisoner there charged with the same crime, despite being caught with less weed than any other inmate.

Whatever your views on legalising cannabis, it’s hard to see why a man with cancer and epilepsy, who was quietly growing plants that eased his suffering because he didn’t want to get mixed up with dealers, should be separated from his family and have his health put at risk.

There’s a petition underway - please sign up if you feel Brian’s case is a miscarriage of justice, and, if you live in Scotland and have a minute, a quick letter to your MSP or the Scottish Executive Justice Department can’t hurt Brian’s chances of a reprieve.

Brian is also keeping a Prison Diary, which you can read on the website devoted to securing his freedom, which has more details on the case.

Thanks to Google and my bad habit of thinking that spontæneous ought really to have that ligature in it, regardless of the late Latin root, has become a place for people to exchange stories about their own spontaneous pnemothoraxes, apical blebs, pleurodesis operations and other fun stuff like that.

It’s quite a sad thread, really:

I live in fear on a daily basis that my lungs could collapse again… I have gone into a deep depression over this and do not know where to go from here. — Todd

I have no insurance. Has anyone had any problems with just ignoring an sp? I know I shouldn’t, but I seriously can’t afford another hospital visit. — Carrie

It is painful, devastating, scary. I wish someone could find a cure for this, because I am tired of hurting. — Anna

Today, happily, reader Marianne pointed to the Spontaneous Pneumothorax Patient Network, a repository of up-to-date information on the condition, with forums providing support for sufferers.

Fingers, toes, and any other crossable parts crossed, I won’t suffer another collapsed lung - it sucks, literally - but if you have, or are worried about someone who has, you could do worse than visit the SPPN.

It is, of course, my friend Donna’s birthday today, too. Happy Birthday! Our new tradition of eating vegan food on the 25th of March is a good one.

It certainly beats that other tradition - one that thankfully never caught on - the collapsed lung. This was such a nasty way to turn 25 that for the last two years I’ve had pre-anniversary pneumothorax superstition nightmares that would put David Cronenburg to shame.

Anyway, back to the grindstone for me. A profile of Gospel queen and disco diva Gwen McCrae beckons, with a little bluesy piece on the excellent Fat Possum artist Model T. Ford, and Andre Williams, to follow.

Did I say grindstone? Sorry, I meant funstone.