Remote blog editor

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I've used remote blog editors for years. Ecto, Marsedit and finally ScribeFire. I've just updated to the latest version and I'm very impressed. It now includes image uploading directly to my SquareSpace CMS as well as integration with Flickr and YouTube.

If you are still logging in and using you blogware interface I suggest you give Scribe Fire a try. It sits in your browser ready to pop up whenever you need to post. Everything is done in a single window (unlike Ecto and Marsedit) and when you're done it hides away out of view. You can blog directly from whatever page you are in by simply selecting the text clicking the 'Blog This' button. You can even post to your Tumblr sites with it. Here is a good review at Bub.blicio.us

I've used it to post to this blog well over 2,500 times which is a pretty good recommendation, I think :)

Fire up your blogging: ScribeFire


Going private

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AA Gill's hernia
Why is it that private hospitals are convinced that their role models should be provincial businessmen’s hotels? As if these were the institutions that inspired a national sense of trust, care and expertise. Imagine saying, “I’ve just had my hips replaced on a Radisson International Discount Break.” Or, “My varicose veins were killing me, until my night with tea and coffee facilities,ensuite and spa access”; “I get all my collagen and nipple-lifting needs at Holiday Inn.”

As you check in, everyone asks how you are, which is an annoyingly asinine question in a hospital. You tell me, mate. I signed in and left my credit card for its own private liposuction. Instead of a porter, you get a management trainee, a lad with a dreadful suit, a corporate tie and either a surfeit of gel or afterbirth in his hair. Somebody really should open a private hospital that looks like a hospital, a proper great monumental Victorian temple to hypochondria, with nurses in starched wimples, doctors with beards, the smell of carbolic, polished brass, ladies with lamps and Salvation Army choirs. That’s what you want when you’re dying, a sense of drama and occasion, not some quietly seedy, partitioned, pastel, middle-management knocking shop.


Poor and white in the USA

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Why the Left doesn’t get it By William Bowles

Book Review: ‘Deer Hunting With Jesus - Dispatches from America’s Class War’ By Joe Bageant
We meet a ‘self-made’ property millionaire as thick as two short planks (and illiterate to boot) who nevertheless is looked up to by the very people he rents his clapped out clapboard houses out to simply because he’s ‘succeeded’ where they have failed. ‘Failure’ in America is very, very personal, that is to say, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough. Yet, as Bageant points out, even the very poorest who receive government assistance work at least six months of the year. ‘Workfare’ supports, if that’s the right word, only those who fought very hard to get it and are loathe to see it spread even more thinly than it is already.

It explains a lot about the psyche of working class Americans and why they can be manipulated, apparently so easily by the rapacious pirates in power. Simply put, there is no sense of the collective whatsoever, a view borne out by my own conversations with working class people when I lived in NYC and hung out in a scuzzy bar in East Harlem, where, during one evening of drinking, I got into a conversation with a young Puerto Rican guy who worked in Mount Sinai hospital and he told me, with desperation, “This has got to be the best of all possible worlds.”

And it’s a view that’s not lightly challenged, and with good reason, after all, if you think life consists of nothing but you against the rest of the world, then in challenging that perspective, you are inevitably questioning something that is fundamental to every American, the possibility of Success (the Capitalist version). To challenge the notion that the US is the best of all possible worlds is simply a step too far and in my opinion, explains much about why Americans consistently vote in a government that screws them up the yazoo, big time, every time.



Can't we get anything right in this god-forsaken island?

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Britain shamed as Iraqi interpreters are resettled in squalid tower blocks
The first Iraqi interpreters to be offered refuge in Britain are living in fear in squalid tower blocks in Glasgow, The Times has learnt. They complained of living among drunks and drug addicts, being abused and spat at, and of feeling isolated and unable to work. One girl of 9 had had her hijab torn off by one of her new neighbours. Abdul, 71, one of three Iraqis who risked their lives working for British troops in Basra and were resettled in April with 15 dependents, advised others in a similar position to stay in Iraq.


All change or no change?

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Barack Obama the political chameleon
On June 3 Barack Obama claimed the greatest prize the Democratic Party can offer, namely his nomination as its candidate for the presidency. The very next day the salesman of 'change' raced from Minnesota back to Washington and publicly abased himself at the feet of an organisation whose prime mission is to ensure that change unpalatable to the state of Israel will never be pressed by the United States government.

The terms of Obama's surrender before the American Israel Public Committee exploded like rhetorical cluster bombs across the Middle East. To Israel and its Arab neighbours it surely signalled that, whoever moves into the White House next January, there will be no swerve from Bush's role as guarantor of Israeli intransigence.


What a great life he had

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Nat Temple: saxophone and clarinet player turned bandleader
In a career that stretched from 1929 to 2003, Nat Temple successfully straddled two aspects of professional music-making. Firstly, in the prewar period, he was one of Britain’s most outstanding instrumental soloists, playing the alto saxophone and clarinet in the bands of Harry and Syd Roy, Ambrose, and Geraldo.

Secondly, after a chance meeting with the Canadian-born comedian Bernard Braden, he became one of the leading postwar bandleaders for radio and television, providing music for everything from the children’s show Crackerjack to the mainstream entertainment of Russell Harty and Noel Edmonds.

Other obits: Telegraph and Guardian