How clean is your hospital? Quite clean but not spotless according to last night’s ‘When Kim and Aggie went to hospital …’ on channel 4. The show followed Kim Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie, the nation’s favourite … erm … scrubbers … as they tried to assess the cleaniness of Ealing hospital over a three month period.
They didn’t find any of the dreaded MRSA but they did find a few poo encrusted toilet brushes, Medical Waste bags that had been left lying around for hours and a doctors’ lounge that was pretty filthy.
To be fair though, it isn’t just an issue of keeping the hospital clean. Microbiologists believe that by simply using an antimicrobial alcohol hand gel when people enter and leave a ward could cut infection rates by 50 per cent at a stroke. And the show revealed that people weren’t doing this nearly enough!
There’s going to be a free festival this Saturday over in Ancoats New Islington. There will be music, arts, fireworks and Herbie the Treehead Dinosaur, apparently. Click here for more info.
“My small breasts and I” was a programme on BBC 3 last night which was part of their Body Image season. It followed three woman; Sharon Tan, Laura Taylor and Kate Bailey who were unhappy were their busts and showed the steps that they took to overcome this.
Laura Taylor had wanted a boob job since she was 14 but she couldn’t afford it. Whilst surfing the web she discovered a website called “My Free Implants” where men would help towards the cost of silicon implants in return for photos and emails. So she went to meet one of the few women who had sucessfully used the site. It looked a bit dodgy to me. She also visited a doctor to explore her implant options, and sat in on an operation where a new found friend was expanded to a D cup.
Kate Bailey was the worst affected of the three women in the show. She had a very negative image of herself and found it difficult to go out because she thought everyone would be looking at her. Even shopping for clothes was a major trauma. In spite of this, she managed to fly over to New York to see a photographer called Ellen Fisher Turk who provided a treatment called phototherapy. This basically involved having pictures taken of herself to improve her body image.
Sharon Tan was using a bizarre suction cup device that looked like a mini milking machine and needed to be worn twelve hours a day. Her boyfriend was pretty supportive about it even though it meant no “cuddles” for weeks. I am not entirely sure he should have been encouraging her though. The breast pumps started causing soreness after a few weeks but rather than being put off Sharon imaginatively came up some padding for the … erm … suckers.
Thankfully over the course of the show, both Laura Taylor and Kate Bailey changed their minds about their figures. Laura, having talked to a surgeon (and spent a couple of hours walking round her home town with two stockings full of rice down her bra, dealing with the unwanted attention from lorry drivers) decided a boob job wasn’t at the top of her priorities after all. Kate looked at the black and white photos of herself taken by the phototherapist and realised she is quite pretty after all, and her boobs seem pretty normal when viewed from the outside. She discovered a new-found confidence in herself, which is enough to let her take her two daughters to the swimming pool.
Sadly, Sharon Tan was left a little deflated as a consultant told her that there was very little evidence to support the claim that the suction pumps had any long term effects of boob size.
Manchizzle is organising the First Manchester Blog Awards as part of the brand new Manchester Literature Festival.
So I’m here, at long last, to tell you all about the first annual Manchester Blog Awards. Why have Manchester blog awards? Well, simply because the city’s fast-growing collection of bloggers are doing some really great writing and photography, and it’s high time for them to get some recognition for it. The brand-new Manchester Literature Festival, which has the intersection of literature and technology as one of its main programming themes, is keen to encourage the city’s DIY online talent. MLF has agreed to support and host the awards, which we hope will become an annual event.
This week, (S)Heat magazine features an exclusive interview with Big Brother winner Pete Benett and Big Brother Reject Pwincess Nikki Grahame. The article claims that Pete and Nikki’s on screen romance is real.
The beeb have set up a blog for and about Manchester and Manchester Bloggers.
As we mentioned in the first post, we’re hoping to build relationships between BBC Manchester and people who are using, or want to use, the internet to create and publish some great content about Manchester. We reckon the best way to find potential participants is to open our eyes and ears to what’s already online.
Our first stop was Britblog, a blog aggregator that lists UK based blogs according to their location, has 109 blogs listed for Manchester. Whilst, at first glance, it looks like some of those are spam blogs and others are long ago forgotten efforts, there are some promising looking blogs here. We’ve bookmarked the page and will start working our way through them over the coming days and weeks.
We’re also using technorati to search for mentions of Manchester – which, rather dauntingly, there were over 1000 of yesterday – as well as mentions of any of Greater Manchester’s nine boroughs.
That’s a lot of potential blogs to look at already so we’re using an RSS aggregator to subscribe to feeds from any blogs we decide to keep a better eye on.
I’ve also been looking around the photo sharing site flickr and have come across some excellent local photographers, for example Jane, whose photostream is full of beautiful shots, often taken in hazy light conditions, of South Manchester as well as other areas in and around Greater Manchester. If you have photos on flickr that you’d like us to see you can either email us with a URL to your photo stream or tag your photos with “bbcmanchesterblog” and we’ll find them.
In future, we’ll also be looking at other photosharing, podcasting and video sharing sites.
You can help us find good Manchester related content – blogs, photos, videos, podcasts, whatever – by posting links in the comments below or emailing us. Those links can be to content you’ve created, stuff you’ve enjoyed finding yourself, or ideas for content you’d like to create and publish online if you had the chance to learn how to do so. We’re looking forward to your tips!
This should hopefully help some manchester bloggers to get some traffic and promotion out of the BBC.
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant agreed to produce some internal Microsoft training videos a few years back on the condition that they never be released. Oops! Some how they have escaped into the wilds of the interweb, the videos that is, not Ricky and Stephen. So you can now see them for yourself. Microsoft isn’t happy, apparently!
The company has launched an investigation into how the video clips appeared on the Web. Though no doubt obligated by the terms of their contract to show the proper public outrage, this is a fine bit of PR for Microsoft. The videos, which feature Gervais being interviewed by “Microsoft employee” Merchant, show the company in a human and humorous light, and are simply good fun. As expected, Gervais offers his Microsoft viewers some management advice that reads like it’s from the textbook, What Never to Do in Business, and he delivers it with a straight face.
