Electrolux

This is a wonderful website if you like Electrolux vacuum cleaners (or even if you don't).

http://www.137.com/lux/luxnow.html

This guy really loves Electrolux! He has all the models dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Mine is either a Marquis or an Ultralux (from 1987-88). Great machine. I got it used for $40 – what a bargain!

So much for the "can't be a marriage cause they can't make babies" argument

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article2444462.ece

Quoting from the article:

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.

Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Ry Cooder is the bomb

Hi-frickin-larious and wonderful CD I just discovered:

http://www.amazon.com/My-Name-Buddy-Ry-Cooder/dp/B000MDH8E6/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1199434-5164968?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1176488407&sr=8-1

Non-cat persons need not apply.

Speaking of the Bush administration...

A poem by Nobel prizewinner Wislawa Szymborska:

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.

Today's lesson, class

It's a freak 80-degree day in Seattle. Who says global warming ain't real?

Now don't this just beat all:
(Baby chicks dyed for Easter)
I was going to put a link to a video here but decided not to subject you to the ads at the beginning.

The dyed chick debate was raging when I was a 5-year-old, and I hate to admit that was 45 years ago. How is it possible that we still do this to animals? And how, by the way, is it possible that animals are sold to people planning to give them to children? Or that animals are sold in the first place?

Oy, what a world.